IRR News Team
Below we interview members of a new campaign, Schools Against Borders for Children (ABC), set up to resist the encroachment of border controls in schools.
What is the Schools ABC campaign? What were the concerns that led you to set it up?
The Against Borders for Children campaign started with two aims – to stop the Department for Education collecting country-of-birth and nationality data on 8 million school pupils aged between 2 and 19; and to encourage and assist tens of thousands of parents, teachers and schools to boycott the government data collection scheme.
We came together as a group of concerned individuals in response to the announcement of the new questions and the open admission that the policy was designed to assess the impact of immigration on the schools sector, in the wake of a review into ‘education tourism’ called by Nicky Morgan, Justine Greening’s predecessor as secretary of state for education. The policy was announced before the EU referendum took place, but many of us, especially after the result, were concerned about the implications that it might have for immigration enforcement. In July, one campaign member was contacted by a parent who had received a letter from their school asking for nationality data by the end of term. That parent also disclosed that they knew other parents who would take their children out of school due to fear of deportation. It was this fear, plus the immediate increase in racist and xenophobic attacks following the referendum result, that spurred us into action.
Tasking schools with the collection of such sensitive data, and in such a public way with no regard to the welfare or safety of the children involved, felt like a new low in banal state racism. It was as if the government was saying ‘just another form, just another box to tick, and then we will separate you into natives and foreigners and keep that data, insecurely and with identifying features, forever.’ The campaign was formed to tell people what was happening and to persuade them that these dull bureaucratic processes are dangerous. It marks the beginning of the government saying that even children are foreigners first, and children second.
Do you see the changes to the school census as part of the hostile environment strategy against undocumented migrants launched by Theresa May when she was home secretary?
Unfortunately the logic of the ‘hostile environment for irregular migrants’ hasn’t had any sustained parliamentary opposition, leading to a range of policies that make life difficult for migrants with and without regular status, and minority ethnic Britons too. Of course, part of the unpleasantness is the requirement to prove constantly that one has the right to be here. We have no doubt that the school census is being used as an additional chilling device, designed to make the most vulnerable more scared. It is little surprise that due to lack of guidance from the DfE, the outcome has been various schools devising their own forms of ethnic profiling for the census, ranging from asking for passports, to entering ‘British’ for white children, while demanding additional information from all children of colour. Our point is that this chaotic on-the-hoof racism is intentional: farming out the tasks of immigration enforcement to schools without guidance or safeguards was bound to lead to some schools falling back on long-held racisms to guide their actions.
Continue reading “Institute of Race Relations: Back to Schools Against Borders for Children”
