Lessons from swapping schools

Jane and I have just finished catching up with Channel 4’s The Great British School Swap. If you’ve not seen it, the series is definitely worth a watch. You’ve just over a fortnight on catch-up. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-great-british-school-swap. Clearly there’s some artificiality about the whole project. You sense the film-makers wanting to find (or create) storylines. You realise that a fortnight’s schooling being condensed into three 45-minute programmes leaves a lot of room for creative editing. However one senses that two school headteachers involved are genuinely invested in the scheme.

Having acknowledged that, I still believe there are lessons to be learned from these stimulating programmes. I gather that the show was commissioned after a 2017 report revealed more than a quarter of primary and four in ten secondary schools are ethnically divided. The show was filmed in two Midlands schools which are just 15 miles apart: Tamworth Enterprise Academy in Staffordshire and Saltley Academy in Birmingham, the one almost exclusively white, the other equally Muslim. We saw 12 students from Tamworth being bused to spend a week in Saltley and the reverse happening a week later. It was clear that all the parents had agreed and all the students had volunteered to take part in the swap.

The programmes began with their preconceptions of the other community. For many of the Saltley Academy pupils, they view their white peers as "bacon-loving, lazy, fat poshos", who enjoyed nudist beaches. The Tamworth view was that their Muslim peers were burqa-wearing “Pakis” who were not nice, or even terrorists, and they’d be afraid to walk in an immigrant area for fear of being set upon.

Photo from Birmingham Mail

Many of the prejudices of course are inherited from parents. And the schools go out of their way to involve the parents in the process, and so we see four families exchanging meals – with touching results. The final programme sees the final celebration of the swap, a sort of graduation, and then a carefully planned party, negotiated between the liberal laissez-faire modern style and the stricter traditional Muslim code. The tensions have been honestly faced and a solution which satisfies all found. The final comments of both students and parents about the whole experiment are all positive. Some lasting friendships across the barriers seem to have been forged – in a fortnight!

As the head of Tamworth, Simon Turvey, says at the start, “Now is not the time to be building fences; now is the time for knocking them down.” In our country some popular politicians are the cheerleading fence-builders. They should be ashamed, and resisted. The Great British School Swap demonstrates that not only is this divisive, it is also counter-productive. One of the most telling incidents is when the students have a shared careers lesson. The aspirations of the conventionally poorly achieving white working-class boys are raised to a higher level by their immigrant counterparts. Not only is integration possible, it is enriching for all the community. It is a pernicious myth that immigration and integration harm a country; in fact they enhance it. One thing is needed: and that is inspiring leaders (or teachers in the programme) who believe in the benefits and will hold their nerve when things don’t go smoothly. Nothing worthwhile is achieved without difficulties. The series is, for once, aptly titled The Great British School Swap.

(By the way, a long time ago I taught in an ethnically mixed school, and I think nothing but good came from the mutual understanding which that brought.)