It requires tremendous knowledge and compromise — not just an understanding of different cuisines
It’s fair to say that supporters of Cameron-era education reforms are on the defensive at the moment. And rightly so; Bridget Philpson’s doltish and spiteful attempt to stamp out the autonomy of England’s academies is an example of the kind of Shinwell-esque score settling that represents the very worst of the Labour tradition.
The success of the Cameron-Gove education reforms comes as an almost jarring reminder that there was a time in the not-so-distant past when the Tories just did things. Their legacy, and the schools that they allowed to flourish have already diverted countless thousands of lives from the hopelessness of semi-illiteracy and innumeracy. Their defenders point to market-style mechanisms which allow schools to experiment with different approaches to see what works — but surely much of the benefit must have accrued simply from freeing dynamic and entrepreneurial school leaders from the dead hand of Local Education Authorities.
The most outspoken defender of the Cameron-Gove reforms is Katherine Birbalsingh who has made two outings in the media this week — on Fraser Myers’ Spiked! Podcast, and in the Spectator. In her interview with Myers, she returned to familiar themes around the freedom that her school has enjoyed to set its own standards. These have enabled it to create order and serenity in place of chaos, which in turn has allowed the Michaela School to reliably churn out results that rival some of the best fee-paying schools in the country. In her analysis of how her school has been able to create a safe, orderly learning and working environment in a community made up of a hugely diverse range of ethnicities and religions, Birbalsingh has established herself as one of the few British commentators and public sector leaders who appears truly to understand what multiculturalism actually means in practice.
Birbalsingh speaks of the sacrifices that individuals, and individual faith and cultural groups have to make for the benefit of the whole. She explains how her school canteen serves only vegetarian food, so that the entire school can eat together as a family, notwithstanding certain religious groups’ vegetarianism or prohibitions on certain types of meat. Whilst scaling a functional multiculturalism from a school to a whole city or a whole country will not require communal eating, it’s a handy metaphor for the ways in which we will all be expected to avoid stepping on one another’s toes in order to get along — even if it means giving up on familiar traditions or observances. Crucially, Birbalsingh is among the few voices in the British mainstream who is adamant that this will also mean minority groups making such sacrifices, including observant Muslims.
It’s beyond her remit to make a compelling argument for why this should appeal to us
Making a success of multiculturalism will mean a far greater degree of discipline and conformity than much of Britain’s liberal establishment has yet realised, or than it currently seems likely to be willing to countenance. However, while Katherine Birbalsingh is for the moment the only mainstream messenger trying to deliver that corrective, she is clearly not Britain’s Lee Kuan Yew in waiting. For Birbalsingh, a multiethnic, multi-faith society is the raw material she is given from her school catchment area — it isn’t something that she has ever needed to make a case for from first principles. She explains how sacrifices must be made in the name of cohesion, but it’s beyond her remit to make a compelling argument for why this should appeal to us. Singapore’s great prime minister could always point to larger rivals, ready to bury the young island nation if they got bogged down in ethnic squabbles, whereas for Britain, the transition toward ethnic and religious diversity is much more of an unforced choice. For those of us who are sceptical about the case for multiculturalism, many of her observations can simply be reposted without comment.
In her article in the Spectator, Birbalsingh defended the appointment of another pioneer of the educational reform era, Sir Hamid Patel, as interim chair of the Ofsted, on whose board he has served for five years. Patel founded Star Academies shortly after the Tories first came to power in 2010, and over the subsequent decades the organisation expanded from its initial focus on schools with an Islamic religious character into a network of 36 academies, which included secular and Christian schools. The chain has been invited to partner with Eton College, and Patel has been knighted in recognition of his services. Sir Hamid’s record spoke for itself, Birbalsingh stated, and much of the criticism of his appointment had been grounded in naked prejudice due to his ethnicity and faith.
In addition to his work in education, Sir Hamid Patel is also a Mufti; a scholar and authority on Islamic scripture. By virtue of this office, he wears an understated Imamah-style white turban. He sports an impressive but well-kept Sunnah beard (i.e. with the upper lip cleanly shaved) and is usually seen in white Ihram clothing. This style is by no means obligatory for a Mufti; there are plenty who appear in public in suits and ties, or in the vernacular dress of their country of residence. However, neither is it an uncommon way of dressing for a devout Sunni religious figure, depending on their tradition within the belief system.
The response to Patel’s appointment is not merely small-minded British prejudice and xenophobia
Nevertheless, such is the link in many people’s minds between outward expressions of Sunni Islamic piety and extremism or terrorism that his appearance caused alarm when coupled with the news of his appointment. A lot of this alarm was straightforwardly and performatively derogatory, but at least some of it was genuine. Given Sir Hamid’s extraordinary contribution to British education, this seemed to be an immense disservice, and it was right for Patel’s individual work, and his commitment to pluralism, to be highlighted.
But the response to Patel’s appointment is not merely small-minded British prejudice and xenophobia. In many countries with far more established Islamic traditions than Britain, Sir Hamid’s cultivated image would see him blocked from public office by institutional and legal mechanisms designed to keep out religious radicals. Whilst a Mufti may be highly respected and consulted on scriptural questions, people wearing Imamah turbans are not invited to chair public bodies with responsibility for temporal affairs in most Muslim majority countries. Some countries take this further than others — Turkey endured a chronic constitutional crisis because former President Abdullah Gul’s wife occasionally wore a headscarf in public. Most Muslim countries do not take laïcité anywhere near as far as Turkey, but one can well imagine the hand-wringing articles in the Economist about the retreat of secularism should somebody with a turban and the wrong sort of beard be given a senior educational job in Indonesia.
There’s a temptation to congratulate ourselves on being more enlightened and easy going than these other countries, until one stops to think about that proposition for a single moment. Britain of course maintains a comprehensive and sophisticated plethora of systems designed to exclude people from positions of responsibility if they hold views that are deemed “unsafe”; especially in the education sector. These systems have no interest in whether an individual is competent or otherwise of good character. Some of them are formal, such as HR departments monitoring online speech or public pronouncements. But much of what goes on is informal and cultural; the characterisation of certain viewpoints as inherently cranky, and the characterisation of people who seem too sincere or dogmatic in their political or religious views as being weird. Such people are typically isolated from the networks that one needs to cultivate in order to advance from junior ranks.
Particularly, this is the case for signs of fundamentalist or literalist approaches to religious scripture. Young Earth Creationism in itself is a harmless eccentricity, but we instinctively understand that a word-for-word belief in the Old Testament includes things that are at odds with modern society, and with contemporary liberal shibboleths. Had Sir Hamid Patel been a Christian lay preacher or a Rabbi displaying identifiers equivalent to a Sunnah beard or day-to-day wearing of Ihram clothing, it seems very unlikely that he would ever have had the opportunity to have built his schools in the first place. Without that, there would have been no knighthood, and no seat on Ofsted’s board.
Perhaps there is an element here of Muslims not getting the scrutiny that might be applied to other religious groups for fear of accusations of bigotry, but it is just as likely to have been a simple inability of the powers that be to interpret the visual signifiers Patel was consciously sending out. Some of the defences of Patel’s appointment have come very close to suggesting that the beard and the turban are built-in features and that’s just what a Muslim man looks like. Personally, I would be happy to see learned people who have absorbed themselves in meditation on the meaning of scripture play a greater role in public life than they currently do, but our institutions would need to make themselves as familiar with other religions as they are with the domestic traditions of Christianity if they were to manage that process evenly and with integrity.
This is absolutely not limited to Islam, or to education, or even to people in senior positions of executive responsibility or oversight. Just one example is the endemic belief in witchcraft and demonic possession across parts of West Africa which we are now using as a recruiting ground for our health and social care system. Are leaders and HR people in the health system prepared to acknowledge and issue guidance for managers about how to handle that? How are supervisors supposed to identify the signs that might help them discern the difference between a harmless identification with folk wisdom passed down from a grandmother, and somebody who could potentially do a patient harm.
Making the transition from a homogeneous to a multicultural society will require developing a similar cultural feel for the contours of exotic belief systems as we have for endogenous ones. This is something that is exceptionally difficult to legislate for or to direct from the top down, especially as it will need institutions to acknowledge how much of what they do is the result of cultural instinct on the part of individual decision-makers, rather than due process. When we speak of the “interpersonal skills” that are so valued in the senior public sector, what we are really talking about is cultural sensitivity and the ability to read signals from the people around them and to respond appropriately. The kindest thing to say about the British public sector elite’s approach to this so far is that they haven’t yet really thought about whether such skills are locally specific or universal, and whether throwing a dozen or so unfamiliar new cultures into the mix in the space of a single generation is likely to affect what they do in any way.
