Content area
Full Text
Oldham was just another unprepos-sessing northern mill town until the warm May evening six years ago when it acquired the label that has stuck to this day. After several days of crackling racial tension - including clashes between white and Asian pupils outside the gates of the predominantly Pakistani Breeze Hill school - the town burned, in Britain's worst race riots for a generation.
Theories about the causes abound, but a profound sense of the decades of mutual suspicion between whites and British Asians is provided by Nadeem (not his real name), a former pupil, now a senior teacher at Grange School. He was among four bright Asian pupils who came top in a science exam in the early 1980s. He remembers a teacher saying at the time: "Guess what? They've managed to get in the top five places." He says: "If that's the teacher's outlook, you can imagine the rest."
The staffrooms of Oldham are more enlightened these days, but the town's schools still reflect the separate worlds occupied by whites and by those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi extraction who make up a quarter of the town's 250,000 population.
A mighty 98.5 per cent of Grange's pupils come from the Bangladeshi community. That contrasts with the early 1980s, when it was only 10 per cent Asian, but the segregation is there just the same. "It means there is as little contact with white children today as ever," says Nadeem, who arrived in the town in 1976, a year after his father. "In fact there is probably less, and that is ominous. There will be a time in any young British Muslim's life when, if he wants a job that's meaningful, he will have to work with someone who is not from the same ethnic group."
Grange, which used to be 50 per cent white in the late 1980s, aspires to something different. Its main building is adorned with a mural depicting children of all ethnic groups, and it has undertaken many twinning projects. A group of 20 Grange pupils have just finished working with children at the predominantly white Bluecoat school on a project for Holocaust Day. But Grange's head, Graeme Hollinshead, says this is not enough to tackle the entrenched segregation that...