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The integrated school that could teach adivided town to live togetherCan you solve conflicts between ethnic groups by forcing them to interact? A remarkableexperiment is taking place at Waterhead academy in Oldham – and the results could change howwe fight prejudice

David Edmonds

Thursday 5 November 2015 06.00 GMT

R adiyah and Olivia live in Oldham and are best friends. They are 12 years old and meton transition day, when primary school students are introduced for the first time totheir secondary school. They have been inseparable ever since. Olivia says one thing

that binds them together is that they both love the colour purple. She thinks Radiyah iscrazy and Radiyah thinks Olivia is crazy. “When she sees my brother at school shealways says, ‘Hi brother,’” Radiyah says. “She never says, ‘Hi Radiya’s brother’. It’scrazy.” Olivia accepts that it is a bit crazy.

They help each other with homework. Radiyah excels at science and English. Olivia issolid at maths.

Olivia does not attend church, but Radiyah, like almost every Asian student in theschool, goes to mosque. What does Olivia think of Radiyah’s culture? “They work sohard for what they believe in. They pray five times a day, they fast. I admire that.”

For her part, Radiyah confesses to some envy that white people are so “chilled out”.“Sometimes, if I’m in the middle of something, and I have to go and pray, it’s annoying.”

Last Ramadan, Olivia attempted to fast in solidarity with her best friend, but shesurvived about 15 minutes. “Maybe less,” Radiyah scoffs.

“Well, I can’t go for long without water,” Olivia explains. “But I try not to eat and drinkin front of Radiyah during Ramadan because it’s unfair on her.”

Radiyah laughs. “I don’t know if I’d do that for her.”

Radiyah and Olivia’s friendship is the happy result of an experiment, although that is nota word anyone is prepared to use. You could say that it is an experiment in racialintegration. But it is also a test for one of the most important theories about how tocombat bigotry – and the results could change the way politicians in Britain tackle theproblem of prejudice.

* * *

We all have an idea of some of the causes of bias and bigotry: divisions between racial

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and ethnic groups, geographic segregation and economic marginalisation, competitionfor resources between rival groups. And most people, at least today, probably share anessentially optimistic intuition about how to reduce racism and ethnic conflict, based onthe belief that as people and communities get to know one another better – to interact asneighbours and co-workers and friends – their prejudices will melt away. This is a happystory, but is it true? After all, some of the longest and most violent conflicts in the worldinvolve groups who know one another all too well – whose proximity, in fact, seems onlyto exacerbate ethnic tension.

Among the psychologists who study bigotry and ethnic conflict, this optimistic theory isknown as the “contact hypothesis”. It was introduced by the Harvard psychologistGordon W Allport, who published a book titled The Nature of Prejudice in 1954 – thesame year that the US supreme court issued its landmark decision, Brown v Board ofEducation, which forced the desegregation of American schools. Allport believed thatprejudice flowed from ignorance: people made generalisations about an entire groupbecause they lacked information about that group. Contact with members of the othergroup could correct mistaken perceptions, improve empathy and diminish prejudice.

The theory has a beautiful simplicity and an instant feel‑good appeal. But it has alsobeen also backed up over the years by well over 500 studies, of varying degrees ofscientific rigour. Allport himself believed that contact would only help if it occurredunder various conditions – for example, the groups had to pursue common rather thanopposing goals. Nowadays, however, psychologists believe that almost all contactimproves relations between groups, provided that it does not take place in anenvironment of intense anxiety or fear.

Allport’s hypothesis concerned how existing prejudice could be reduced. But otheracademics wanted to discover what the origins of prejudice were. Before the 1970s, theconventional wisdom was that it had two causes. One was competition: teamscompeting at football, families squabbling over land, nations fighting wars. The secondwas personality. Some people, the theory went, were more inclined to discriminate thanothers; prejudice was linked to traits such as authoritarianism, associated with a highlysubservient attitude towards authority figures and an authoritarian attitude towardslower-status minorities.

However, in the 1970s, a social psychologist named Henri Tajfel began a series ofexperiments in Britain that would revolutionise how we understand the origins of groupbias. He showed that neither of the two causes – competition and personality – wasrequired for prejudice to emerge. All that was required was for people to be organisedinto groups in the first place.

In Tajfel’s most famous experiment, he asked a group of teenage boys to rate variousabstract paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Tajfel then placed the boys intotwo groups: “Klee” and “Kandinsky” – and told them they had been grouped accordingto which artist they preferred. (In fact, they were sorted into groups randomly.) Theywere then given some notional money and told to distribute it among the participants inthe experiment. They could not see or talk to the potential beneficiaries, who wereidentified only on paper by a number and by their group identity – Klee or Kandinsky.

The result was startling. The children showed a consistent pattern of bias. Although

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there was no competition between the two groups, the boys donated more money toindividuals who were members of their own group. Thus, a member of the Kandinskygroup was likely to give more money to other Kandinsky group members than to themembers of the Klee group. Tajfel had demonstrated that group bias will occur under themost minimal of conditions – mere categorisation. This result has been replicated manytimes since Tajfel’s first experiment. The implications are profoundly unsettling. Itshows how easy it is to switch on discrimination: our belonging to social groups isfundamental to our social identity and we like to see “us” as better than “them”.

Tajfel taught psychology for many years at Bristol University. In the 1970s one of hisundergraduate students was Miles Hewstone, who went on to become a professor atOxford University. Hewstone is a kindly, cheerful, bespectacled, slightly disorganisedprofessor who is always running late and usually one wardrobe malfunction short ofdebonair. When I met him earlier this autumn, he was wearing odd cufflinks because hehad not had time to find a matching pair.

Miles Hewstone is the intellectual offspring of Henri Tajfel and Gordon Allport. UnderTajfel’s tutelage, Hewstone learned how quickly individuals from one group could cometo scorn those in another. But, by temperament, Hewstone is much closer to Allport: heis an optimist. Hewstone is less interested in how rapidly groups can make enemies thanhow enemies can be turned into friends – or, more modestly, how former enemies canlearn to tolerate one another. Over the past three decades, his work has taken him to theplaces where group conflict has seemed most intractable: South Africa, Cyprus, NorthernIreland, Bosnia, Serbia.

As an undergraduate, Hewstone had come across the contact hypothesis as a core part ofhis psychology degree. He liked the optimism of the theory, but felt that it was flawed. Ithad little to say about the importance of groups in the construction of our social identity.In the mid-1980s, Hewstone gave the contact hypothesis a Tajfelian twist, one bestillustrated with an example adapted from research he conducted with a collaborator,Rupert Brown.

Britons hold various stereotypes about Germans. As we all know, Germans are hard-working, earnest, technically proficient and that at precisely 6am they ruthlesslycommandeer all the deck chairs on the nearest beach. Plus, they are humourless: aGerman joke is no laughing matter, as Mark Twain put it. Hewstone wanted to knowwhether he could break down these stereotypes. He had seen how easy it was to turn onprejudice; now he wanted to see how to turn it off. (His wife Claudia, born in the BlackForest region of southern Germany, had a personal interest in her husband’s study.)

Student subjects were split into two groups. They were told that there was a Germanbehind a screen, whom they were not allowed to see but about whom they were givencertain details. Half the subjects were presented with a German with stereotypicalcharacteristics – he was called Heinrich, he was an engineer – and half had a Germancalled Anthony, who had “unexpected” characteristics, such as studying Chineseliterature.

Participants carried out cooperative tasks with the invisible “German” – and were thenasked about their attitudes to Germans and Germany. It turned out that those who hadcooperated with Heinrich were more positive about Germans in general than those who



had worked with Anthony. Heinrich was so obviously German that constructive contactwith him influenced attitudes to Germans in general. Anthony, on the other hand, didnot positively influence attitudes towards Germans since he seemed so clearlyexceptional – he was, in the jargon, a sub-type.

The result might seem counterintuitive. Indeed, Hewstone told me, other academicexperts thought their conclusions were “bonkers”. But as a disciple of Tajfel, Hewstonehad always recognised the centrality of group membership to identity. These days, hisfindings are widely accepted: for group prejudice to be eroded, group identity has to bemaintained. In other words, contact itself is not enough.

Positive contact between members of antagonistic groups will improve how members ofthese groups generally see each other only if the people involved are seen asrepresentative of their group. For contact to work, one does not want to put individualsthrough some kind of identity blender, to produce a homogeneous group. The aim is thatpeople can see other people precisely as “other” and then realise that other isn’t bad.

Having travelled around the world testing his contact hypothesis, a few years ago a rareopportunity to assess it again presented itself to Hewstone. This conflict zone was closerto home – a mere three-hour car journey north of Oxford. He heard about plans for a newschool that would bring together two communities in the heart of one of Britain’s mostracially segregated towns. For an academic in his field, it presented a uniqueopportunity.

* * *

Oldham is a town of 200,000 people, a few miles north-east of Manchester. In the 19thcentury, it was the world’s biggest producer of cotton textiles, but the industry began todecline after the first world war – and from the 1950s, its collapse became inevitable.Today, Oldham is one of the most deprived towns in Britain, and one of the mostsegregated. These are conditions in which the contact hypothesis predicts trouble.

Oldham’s two largest minority communities are Pakistani and Bangladeshi – togetherthey make up around 20% of the population. Immigrants from Pakistan arrived first, inthe 1950s and 60s, and those from Bangladesh began to arrive in the 1970s. Many camefrom rural areas; some were illiterate, and many others spoke little to no English. Theymostly worked night shifts, which were introduced in the 1960s, as the mills struggledto remain profitable. As the number of immigrants increased, and the night shift becamethe almost exclusive preserve of the minority community, contact between white peopleand Asians in the mills diminished.

The new arrivals settled into areas such as Glodwick, which is now mainly Pakistani.There is a well-studied phenomenon of tipping points in housing markets, in whichindividual tolerances for a certain racial mix – say, a white resident who does not mindliving in a neighbourhood with a 20% minority population, but balks at one where 30%of his neighbours are non-white – can result in an area rapidly shifting from one ethnicityto another. That is what happened in Glodwick and other parts of Oldham. It is true thatthere were racist landlords and some evidence of official discrimination in social housingallocation, but there was no engineered separation. In Oldham, segregation was theresult of tens of thousands of individual decisions.



And segregation was not only about housing. With the decline of the textile industries,jobs were scarce. From the 1990s onwards, many Asians who found work became mini-cab drivers or entered the restaurant business. Contact with white people wassuperficial, and sometimes hostile – as when Asian drivers took home drunk passengerson a Saturday night. The Asians played cricket in their own areas, went to their localmosques and socialised with fellow immigrants. The schools reinforced the segregation:if anything, schools were more segregated than neighbourhoods.

Still, few could have anticipated the violence that erupted on 26 May 2001. That day, awhite teenager threw a brick at two Asian boys aged 11 and 14, who had been walkingalong a street that divided the white neighbourhood of Roundthorn from Glodwick. Oneof the Asian boys, along with his brother, gave chase. The white boy found refuge in anearby home – and the Asian boys began to kick at the door. The white woman who livedthere shouted racial abuse at them. She phoned her brother to tell him:“Some Pakis havekicked the door in.”

It was an unpleasant episode, but hardly exceptional. Yet it ignited a conflagration: bythe evening, hundreds of Asian men had gathered in Glodwick, where they put upbarricades and threw stones and petrol bombs at the police, who were now in full riotgear. The crowd attacked a number of buildings, including the office of the OldhamEvening Chronicle, a newspaper that some South Asians felt had cynically stoked racialtension.

The unrest continued for three nights. Britain had not witnessed race riots on a similarscale for 15 years. Radio and television bulletins all led on Oldham: Glodwick and otherneighbourhoods were invaded by journalists. The town became known as “the race-hatecapital” of Britain.

In hindsight, the seeds of the trouble should have been clear. The far-right NationalFront and the British National party had been agitating in Oldham for a year, havingidentified the town as fertile territory for recruiting. There had been reports that manywhite people had been victims of racially motivated abuse and violence. A few weeksbefore the riots, a war veteran in his mid-70s named Walter Chamberlain had beenbeaten by a 14-year-old Asian teenager. Chamberlain’s battered face appeared on thefront pages of national newspapers, with hysterical headlines such as “Whites beware”(Mail on Sunday) and “Beaten for being white” (the Mirror) – despite the fact thatChamberlain’s own family insisted the attack had not been racially motivated. The BNPcirculated leaflets alleging that parts of Oldham had become “no-go areas” for whites.The Asian community, meanwhile, felt it had been left unprotected by the police.

The riots in Oldham sparked similar scenes in the nearby towns of Bradford and Burnley.The government and local authorities immediately commissioned reports on what laybehind this unrest. The reports, which were delivered before the end of the year,highlighted the role that segregation had played in fostering animosity between whiteand Asian citizens. The Cantle report, commissioned by the home secretary, found thatwhite and Asian communities were living “parallel” and “polarised” lives. (Ted Cantle,the sociologist and local government official who led the inquiry, had said that he wasvery familiar with the contact hypothesis from his undergraduate studies.) The Ritchiereport, which focused on Oldham specifically, concluded that “the major issue inOldham town is the segregated nature of society”. Amongst the report’s

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recommendations was that “wherever possible, the rebuild of schools should create theopportunity for further integration of pupils”.

The reports were published three months after the 11 September terror attacks, at a timewhen politicians were becoming increasingly anxious about segregation and Islamicextremism. But tackling racial segregation is no easy process. For one thing, it is anotoriously complex phenomenon. In the social sciences, it is hard to think of a morecontested arena – geographers and political scientists cannot even agree on how toquantify the extent of segregation. One difficulty is deciding where to draw thedemographic dividing lines: changing the boundaries of a given area even slightly canresult in a highly segregated area being reclassified as a mixed one, and vice versa. Whenyou drill down into the figures, the complexities multiply.

That debate aside, even if towns such as Oldham are segregated, some might say: “Sowhat? Isn’t it natural for people of similar cultural background – whether whites orAsians – to want to live and socialise with one another? Shouldn’t we be more relaxedabout this?” After all, there is evidence that residential clustering can foster a sense ofbelonging and security. Charlie Parker, who was chief executive of Oldham council from2008 until 2013, told the writer David Goodhart that segregation was a sign of peoplefeeling comfortable with their identities.

But after the 2001 riots that position no longer seemed tenable. The received wisdom, atleast among policy makers, was that segregation did exist – and that it was a disaster. Sothey took action – and that is how Radiyah and Olivia came to meet.

* * *

Until a few years ago, OL4 3NY was the postcode for an abandoned and derelict cottonmill. Now, in its place, stands an impressive red brick and glass structure. The corridorsand reception areas are generously laid out, the classrooms pristine, the facilities first-rate. Welcome to Waterhead academy. Ted Cantle calls it “a unique school”. MilesHewstone likened it to mixing a pint of milk and a pint of Guinness in a quart pot.

The idea for Waterhead goes back to 2007. It was designed to take advantage of theBuilding Schools for the Future programme, introduced in the last term of the Labourgovernment, which set aside money to construct new buildings for Britain’s secondaryschools. For most of the schools that received this funding, the new building or schoolwas intended to symbolise a new educational start. But for Waterhead, it symbolisedsomething more: the academy was created at least in part to bring communitiestogether.

Waterhead was born from two turbulent parents. Breeze Hill was an almost entirelyAsian school, Counthill almost entirely white. They both drew from working-classcommunities. They both had what educationists call “challenges”. Attainment levelswere low. Aspirations were low. Both schools had serious disciplinary and drug issues.The idea was that Breeze Hill and Counthill would shut and their students be relocatedto the brand new Waterhead academy.

Before Breeze Hill and Counthill were closed in 2010, there was a consultation period.The proposal to create one large school of 1,400 pupils had caused consternation. Someof that was understandable resistance to change, but some Asian parents and teachers

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from Breeze Hill were nervous that their kids would be subject to racist abuse. Localwhites in the lower-middle-class neighbourhood of Waterhead demonstrated against themerger. They said they were worried about the disruption that a big school would causein the area. There was also an element of dog-whistle politics: one senior figure inOldham’s educational establishment told me that many white parents in the area wouldrather send their kids to a failing monocultural school than a thriving mixed one. Ateacher at Waterhead sheepishly admitted that his mother and brother had joined theplacard-waving protestors: his brother, who was caught up in the 2001 riots, is a BNPsympathiser. (There was also a separate political strain of opposition to Waterhead:some of the placards said: “No to academies”.)

When Miles Hewstone heard about Waterhead, he was eager to see how it went: aperfect test of his contact hypothesis. Waterhead is what Hewstone calls “a naturalexperiment” – one that he, along with his two post-doctoral researchers, KatharinaSchmid and Ananthi Al Ramiah, was granted access to study.

The merger between Breeze Hill and Counthill was handled with caution. Between 2010and 2012, the schools continued to operate on separate sites, and the children werebrought together for particular classes or activities. The new building was opened forbusiness in September 2012. Like many of her colleagues, one former Breeze Hill scienceteacher, Faizal Ahmed, who now teaches at Waterhead, was afraid that “there weregoing to be clashes every single day, there was going to be uproar; we were going to be inthe papers.”

The newly merged school had to carefully navigate various multicultural sensitivities:boys and girls play sport separately, there is a modest uniform code, and assembliesdraw from a number of religious traditions. Halal meat is available, but so are baconsandwiches. All these issues seemed more prickly in anticipation than in practice. Andremember that according to Hewstone’s version of the contact hypothesis, contactworks best when British white children see British Asian pupils as being in some sensetypical of their culture, and vice versa.

Radiyah was one of the students who were apprehensive about Waterhead. The schoolhad not been her parents’ first choice. There were lots of menacing rumours, Radiyahsaid. “I thought, because I’m a different skin colour, people might say things to me –racist things. But, first day, second day, everything was perfect. The rumours weren’ttrue.”

* * *

Radiyah’s friend Olivia also loves the school. Their friendship offers anecdotal evidencethat, in terms of social cohesion, Waterhead has been a resounding success. ButHewstone does not believe in drawing conclusions from anecdotes. He is a socialscientist, and he likes to stress the second half of his job title. He collects data andsubjects it to rigorous analysis.

Over the past three and a half years, he and his team of half a dozen post graduates haveamassed an enormous amount of data. As well as surveys tracking changes in attitudesand values, Christina Floe, a doctoral student working with Hewstone, has painstakinglygathered statistics on friendship networks at the school. She asked every student inseveral year-groups to list up to 10 of their closest friends, and monitored how their



social groups evolved over a two-year period. The data Floe gathered was then uploadedonto a computer program, which turned the information into diagrams that look likethey have been drawn by an inebriated spider.

Floe also studied friendship groups in Waterhead’s cafeteria. Her aim was to chart whosat next to whom at lunch. It was important that the pupils did not know what she waschecking for, so she needed a cover. Floe approached the students in the canteen tohand out food-satisfaction surveys. Underneath the surveys on Floe’s clipboard she hada map of the room, with all the tables and seats marked up, and as the forms were filledout she quickly scribbled the appropriate acronym for the relevant seat – AF (Asianfemale), AM, WF or WM.

Depending on your viewpoint, the results of some of these studies are either positive orpositively depressing. The observational data from the cafeteria shows that whites andAsians overwhelmingly eat in their own ethnic groups. As for the network study, shortlyafter the pupils first arrived at school, only 2.5% of the close friends of white studentswere Asians. Even by the end of that year, close friendships remained almost entirelysegregated – Asians accounted for just 7.5% of the friends of white children. Still, there issome cause for hope: Hewstone’s team has found that each year is slightly moreintegrated than the one below it.

But the survey data – which begins from the period just before the schools physicallymerged in 2012, and is based on following up the same sample of hundreds of studentsyear on year – is much more impressive. The aim was to investigate attitudes towardsmembers of the rival ethnic group over time.

It asked the children, for example: “When you meet white British/Asian British boys doyou feel nervous?” And the children rated their answer on a scale of one (not at all) tofive (very). Another question, on the same scale, was: “How much do you trust whiteBritish/Asian British pupils?”

Hewstone says that he is completely “blown away” by the results. The findings showthat each and every year the positive variables – trust and liking – improve. And each andevery year, even more dramatically, the negative variables – anxiety and nervousnessabout the other group – decrease.

So, on the one-to-five scale, the negative attitude of Asians to whites from 2012 to 2015dropped from 3.078 to 2.583. For the white group the drop is from 3.572 to 3.183.Maarten van Zalk, another member of the team, who performed the data analysis onthese statistics, says this was “much better than expected”. And it looks like theimprovement just continues with time. He is excited to see the next set of figures in June2016.

Hewstone is very upbeat, even about the less than spectacular friendship stats. As hepoints out, the context in Oldham was not auspicious, which led countless people topredict disaster for Waterhead. Had there been no school merger, then chances are that11-year-old white students, rather than having a few Asian friends, would have hadnone at all.

There are several surprises and nuances in the data. You might assume that the most



popular children would be the most outgoing ones, and that they would be most likely tomake friends across the racial divide. In fact the reverse is the case. The popular kidshave the fewest number of cross-racial friendships. (A plausible explanation is thathumans can only cope with a few close friends, and the friendship quota for popular kidsis more rapidly filled; having many friends makes people less inclined to seek new ones.)

How long the beneficial impact of contact lasts is open to debate. Once their education isover, many pupils will return to segregated neighbourhoods and their separate lives. ButHewstone likes to quote Thomas Paine: “The mind once enlightened cannot againbecome dark.” He argues that a dose of integration acts as a kind of inoculation for life –a permanent booster of tolerance and understanding.

There is a fly in the ointment, however. None of the more extravagant fears of racialconflict at Waterhead has come to pass. But, ultimately, for the school to succeed it hasto improve academically. The latest Ofsted report, following an inspection in November2014, makes demoralising reading: “Leadership and management – Inadequate”;“Behaviour and safety of pupils – Inadequate”; “Quality of teaching – Inadequate”;“Achievement of pupils – Inadequate”. In December 2014, the school was placed underspecial measures. That means Ofsted will make regular inspections and if the poorperformance continues the school may even be closed.

In September 2014, Colette Macklin, a new head with a no‑nonsense reputation, wasappointed, and the governors are convinced that they now have the right processes inplace to turn Waterhead around. Headteachers at Waterhead, however, do not seem tosurvive very long. Macklin is the third in five years. And this year, Waterhead ranked inthe bottom 200 schools in the country for GCSE results. It would be naive to expect toodramatic an improvement in results, given the social and economic context in which theschool operates. Almost half of the children at Waterhead qualify for pupil-premiumfunding – additional money to help schools cope with the most disadvantaged children.

All the problems aside, an extraordinary fact remains. In the year since Macklin becamehead of this extremely deprived school, in a town with a long history of segregation andtension, there has not been a single racist incident among her pupils.

* * *

In July, the prime minister made a speech on extremism that ended with a call for actionto tackle ethnic segregation: “It cannot be right … that people can grow up and go toschool and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from otherbackgrounds and faiths.” He mentioned two cities where segregation was particularlymarked. The first was Bradford, the second was Oldham. Cameron was careful not to laythe blame on any one community. Housing was an issue, he said, as was education.

The speech tackled sensitive issues around segregation and extremism, but in onerespect it was gutless. Faith schools tend to exacerbate segregation – but Camerondefended them. Challenging the power of the faith schools and their (often middle-class)admirers was clearly an electoral risk too far. Still, taking the contact hypothesis theoryseriously would require confronting the faith-school lobby.

More broadly, taking the contact hypothesis seriously demands directing resources – in away that does not create a backlash – towards bringing segregated groups together,



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whether this be in education, housing or leisure. It means helping people becomeproficient in the English language and making public spaces attractive to allcommunities.

Back in Oldham, Radiyah and Olivia could serve as poster girls for Cameron’s integrationagenda. At school their cultural differences – of which they are aware – seem smallcompared to what they have in common. Olivia is joking about Radiyah’s purple pencilcase, and her obsession with all things purple. Their rapport has an infectious quality.Even so, it is more complex than appears at first sight. They have never visited eachother’s homes – they do not even know where the other lives, though they regularly talkon Skype after school. That is not unusual for cross-racial friendships at Waterhead – thefriendship checks in and then checks out again at the school gate. As they stream out ofschool at 3pm, the Asian and white kids go home to separate neighbourhoods. Radiyahand Olivia live less than two miles apart – though the psychological distance betweentheir two neighbourhoods is substantially greater.

This, then, is a slow, incremental evolution, not an overnight revolution – and onesusceptible to setbacks. As for the two girls, will they be best friends for ever? Oliviathinks so, but Radiyah is less convinced. “Maybe not forever, because sometimes she’sreally annoying.” Olivia looks momentarily pained. “But I like it that she’s a bitannoying, because I don’t want boring friends.” And with that, they are off down thecorridor, nudging each other and giggling.

David Edmonds is a senior research associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. HisRadio 4 documentary Will They Always Hate Us? will air on Monday evening.

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