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McLoughlin, S (1998) ‘A Part of the community'? The politics of representation and a ‐
Muslim school's application for state funding. Innovation: the European Journal of Social
Sciences, 11 (4). pp. 451-470. ISSN 1351-1610
https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.1998.9968582
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1
‘A - part of the community’?
The politics of representation and a Muslim school’s application for state funding
1
Innovation: the European Journal of the Social Sciences
11 (4), pp. 451-470
1998
Seán McLoughlin
Introduction:
This paper is a case study of how Feversham College, an independent Muslim girls’
school managed by the Muslim Association of Bradford, set about representing itself to
the authorities in an effort to gain state funding in 1994.
2
Formerly known as Bradford
Muslim Girls’ Community School (BMGCS), the school was established in 1984 to
provide an education for Muslim girls whose parents were opposed to their daughters
attending co-educational state schools. Like the twenty-five other independent Muslim
schools in Britain (Parker-Jenkins: 1995: 12), Feversham College is in near continuous
financial crisis as it struggles to survive on a limited income from parents’ fees which are
supplemented by donations from local and national Muslim benefactors. In May 1994 it
submitted an application to the Secretary of State for Education in an attempt to
become the country’s first Voluntary-Aided (VA) Muslim school.
3
Had the bid been
successful, Bradford Local Education Authority (LEA), which backed the application,
would have covered all of the college’s running costs and 85% of its capital costs.
At present, around one-third of state schools have VA status (Parker-Jenkins: 1995:
11). The vast majority of these are Church of England and Roman Catholic schools but
there are also a growing number that are Jewish.
4
Given that these other faith groups
have their own schools, Feversham College’s application, like the submission from
Islamia school in Brent before it,
5
can be seen as a test-case of the state’s willingness
to accommodate the parallel concerns of a new, much maligned and structurally
deprived minority.
6
However Feversham College’s application proved unsuccessful. On
16 February 1995 its submission was rejected by the Secretary of State for Education.
This prompted a great deal of concern and speculation in the Muslim press about
Islamophobia
7
in the government. It also reinforced a widespread Muslim perception
that they are routinely imagined as a constituency set apart from, and not an equal part
of, the British nation (Q-News: 24.02.95).
This study of Feversham College’s VA status application begins with an examination of
the different ways in which the prospect of state funded Muslim schools has been
received in Britain. Among other things, I note that proposals for such schools have
provided a key focus for contemporary debates about the maintenance and
reproduction of both majority and minority cultures in pluralist Britain. My ethnography
starts with a short account of the early history of what was then BMGCS, illustrating how
at this early stage in the school’s development there were important discrepancies
between what parents and the state represented as a ‘good’ education. I then move on
2
to an assessment of how and why by 1994, Feversham College was able to mobilise
the local state and civil society in support of its application. I consider two factors in
particular. First, I establish that the acceptability of the application has to be understood
in the context of political developments in Bradford itself. Notably, it was the importance
of Muslims as a political constituency in the city, combined with specific difficulties
relating to educational provision there, which prompted the local state to support
Feversham College’s submission. Secondly, I show that the governors’ approach to
representing their institution to civil society also played a crucial role in establishing a
consensus about the school’s application. Above all, they quite deliberately set out to
contest dominant constructions of Muslim schools as necessarily ‘separatist’ in
intention, and in so doing, attempted to bring Feversham College into line with Bradford
LEA’s expectations about the need for all schools to reflect the cultural pluralism of
wider society. Hence a political moment emerged when all were able to agree that the
school was a part of, not apart from, what was represented as ‘the local community’ of
Bradford.
Finally, I draw my paper to a close with some brief reflections on the rejection of
Feversham College’s application, enquiring why it was that such a strong local
accommodation between the school and the local authority failed to deliver success. In
so doing, I underline the extent to which the decision to refuse funding was made by a
national government whose political interests and educational agendas differed strongly
from those of Bradford Council. In short, I conclude that the erosion of local democracy
in Britain over the last decade or so has had important implications for the efficacy of
Muslims’ representational strategies and, moreover, given the failure of Feversham
College’s reformist representations, that Muslim leaders may choose to adopt more
radical approaches to their petitioning of the British state on the matter of VA schools.
‘Separate’ schools? hegemonic and contested representations of British national
culture
Education has been shown to be a key arena within which powerful majorities seek to
reproduce their own dominant versions of national culture (Bourdieu and Passeron:
1977). Similarly, education has also been seen as a terrain of contestation on which the
marginalised in society seek to resist the imposition of such hegemonies (Willis: 1977).
In recent years Muslims’ applications for state funding have more than adequately
illuminated these two theoretical postulations, for although the 1944 Education Act quite
clearly enshrines the right of religious minorities to apply for VA status for their schools,
arguments about the desirability of such schools and about their continued failure to
materialise, have not focused simply on educational issues per se. Rather they have
been a focal point for broader debates about what it means to be British.
8
A dominant representation of Muslims’ demands for VA schools which emerges
especially in the popular press, produces ‘them’ as a ‘problem minority’ that demands
special treatment and yet is reluctant to integrate with the so-called ‘norms’ of British
society (Dwyer: 1991). The implication of these representations is that Muslims want to
be ‘separate’ because they insist on being different and that they are illegitimately
challenging the integrity of the established order. Proponents of Muslim VA schools
3
have responded by arguing that the mainstream system of education is eurocentric and
that it does not adequately address Muslim parents’ concerns about such issues as
single-sex schooling, religious, moral and cultural development, racism or academic
‘underachievement’ (CRE: 1990). Nevertheless as Dwyer and Meyer (1995: 48) have
shown recently, some Muslims maintain that such schools would actively promote
integration and produce “confident individuals secure in their cultural and religious
backgrounds in a truly multi-cultural society”. These discrepant representations of the
Muslim schools debate serve to illuminate the different ways in which both majority and
minority groups struggle over ideological representations of the British nation.
Despite all these arguments, the fact remains that the vast majority of Muslim children
still attend state schools. In his discussion of the emergence of educational provision for
minorities in Bradford, Halstead (1988: 47) describes how the local authority’s policies
there have gone through three stages of ‘multi-culturalism’ since the 1960s:
integrationism, accommodationism and separatism. He typifies policies during the
‘integrationist’ phase as promoting the idea that ‘the public good’ could be best served
by treating all children in school equally regardless of cultural or religious differences. In
this model the school was represented as the primary arena of social integration, where
all children would learn how to participate in the British nation by acquiring its language
and culture. Hence the dispersal or ‘bussing’ of minority children among the LEA’s
schools was begun in 1964, in the hope that increased contact with white children living
elsewhere in the city would generate a ‘mutual tolerance’ that would translate into social
harmony in wider society. Policies during the integrationist stage then, clearly placed the
burden of adaptation upon minorities themselves and entailed no challenge to the
majority’s settled mono-cultural representations of what it meant to be British.
The move to more accommodationist educational provision in Bradford during the
1980s is described by Halstead (1988) in terms of a shift to more explicitly plural
representations of the good society in Britain. “A new concept of integration emerged”
which maintained that “so far as it is compatible with individual needs, the provision of
services will at all times respect the strength and variety of each community’s cultural
values” (Halstead: 1988: 49). Within such a framework it follows that each segment of
the ‘community’ in Bradford had as much right to reproduce and maintain its culture and
identity as did the majority. It was in this context that the Bradford Council for Mosques
(BCM) was established by the local authority in September 1981, first as a council-
funded, and then as a Manpower Services Commission-sponsored, attempt at instituting
a forum for the representation of Muslim concerns in the city (Lewis: 1994). Education
was a major arena for BCM activity and as a result the local authority made a number of
‘concessions’ to Muslims’ concerns during the 1980s; these included provision for a
multi-cultural curriculum, halal meat and alternative dress codes. However the
emergence of these more accommodationist strategies can not be seen as an act of
sheer altruism by the local council. Rather, widespread uprisings by disaffected and
increasingly assertive ‘black’ minorities in the inner-cities of London, Bristol, Liverpool,
Manchester and Leeds during 1981, reinforced a fear that without a change of policy,
such uprisings might also occur in Bradford.
4
One of the issues over which the LEA and BCM effectively consummated their new
accommodation was the issue of Muslim VA schools. In January 1983 an organisation
called the Muslim Parents’ Association applied to the LEA to have five state schools -
two first schools, two middle schools and a single-sex girls’ Upper school - assume VA
status (Khan-Cheema: 1985). One of the parents prominent in the organisation was
Riaz Shahid who in 1973 had responded to the LEA’s refusal to admit his daughter to a
single-sex school by temporarily leaving the country. In 1983 he represented his
reasons for making the submission in the local press: “Muslim children are being
systematically transformed and indoctrinated into a British way of life, and are losing
their identity” (The Yorkshire Post, 10.05.83). However the BCM took a rather different
view, as their role in undermining the MPA’s proposal illustrates. By voting not to
support the initiative - although it was made quite clear that this was not a rejection of
the desirability of Muslim VA schools in general - the BCM called into question the
legitimacy of the MPA’s claim to represent the concerns of Muslims in Bradford. In
return for re-establishing the consensus, the BCM demanded that the LEA delivered on
its promised commitment to multi-cultural ‘concessions’ including the retention of single-
sex schooling in the city (Lewis: 1994: 148). Yet although the main plank of Bradford
LEA’s refusal to support the submission in September 1983 was that the MPA did not
have popular support in Bradford, this also had a major strategic benefit. It allowed
officials to avoid all mention of a key factor in constructions of the issue elsewhere: the
dangers of minority separatism. It was such a fear that lay behind the representations of
teachers at Belle Vue Girls school - the single-sex girls’ Upper school named in the
application - who asserted that they would rather resign their posts than teach in a
Muslim VA school (Halstead: 1988: 241).
In his assessment of these events, Halstead concludes that the council was unwilling to
denounce the MPA’s project as ‘separatist’ because of a reluctance to alienate Muslim
political opinion in Bradford. However he also observes that in reality the council was
doing little to arrest a gradual slippage into a policy of de facto separatism itself. This
presages the third phase of Halstead’s typology: namely the fact that many of
Bradford’s inner-city state schools had effectively become ‘black’, ‘Asian’ or ‘Muslim’ as
a result of the numerical predominance of such pupils. Halstead considers that as a
result, the council had effectively recognised that there could be no one, inclusive, and
uncontested definition of shared values in British society, or indeed what it meant to be
British, the very assumptions that had so powerfully underpinned the first phase of
integrationism. Even so, he also emphasises that a formal institutionalisation of this
emerging separatism would be regarded as politically unacceptable by the white
majority: “For many people, it appears that the call for the establishment of Muslim
voluntary-aided schools marks the limit of what can be tolerated in a multi-cultural
society” (1988: 45).
Certainly Halstead’s assessment of the possibility of Muslim schools being given VA
status in Britain would seem to be a fair reflection on the Swann Report’s (1985)
argument that so-called ‘separate’ schools would necessarily contradict the cultural-
pluralist ideal of “Education for All”. Hence while Swann began from an
accommodationist position, contending that calls for VA schools would diminish if overall
multi-cultural provision was more comprehensively and determinedly implemented in