Rising to the challenge

Just down the road from the BMW car dealership, razed in last summer's race riots, optimism and hope are getting a rare airing at the launch of a brand new Bradford secondary school. Challenge College, all atrium-enhanced light, white open space and clean architectural lines, is opening in Manningham, the predominantly Asian neighbourhood where local youths clashed so violently with police. The school's name and the launch date are telling. For Challenge is opening exactly a year after the riots engulfed the now infamous northern trio of Bradford, Oldham and Burnley.

It isn't easy fighting back from the damning reports from Lord Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, and Ted Cantle, the former chief executive of Nottingham City Council, which concluded that racial division in the three places is now so entrenched that Asians and whites seem to occupy parallel universes. Ouseley warned that Bradford was fragmenting. He spoke of growing intolerance, harassment and abuse, and described white flight from the city into the surrounding suburbs that left behind a poor and often unemployed Asian underclass.

Ouseley also highlighted the virtual apartheid in Bradford schools – with many either predominantly Asian or entirely white – and, like Cantle, concluded that schools would be crucial in any attempt to close a rift that had opened up over more than three decades. But it is far easier to describe Bradford's shattered society than to gather up the bits and glue them back together. That is obvious even in Bradford's hi-tech, showcase school.

The first stop on a tour of the school – a flapjack-making cookery class – provides a neat illustration of the difficulty. Yes, 20 13-year-olds are sharing the room. But it is a qualified kind of sharing, for the white teenagers are gathered at the far end of the room, while, at the other end, the Asian girls have congregated in one corner and Asian boys in another.

Challenge's headteacher, Gareth Dawkins, smiles when I mention this later. He is working hard to create a new, cohesive community. It is central to his social and educational philosophy. But Dawkins says the pupils come up from primary schools with friendship groups already formed. And there is nothing of the Benetton ad about them. With many primaries now monocultural, and pupils going home to predominantly white or Asian estates, there are few opportunities for mixing.

Another sharp reminder: Bradford's fragmentation is Challenge's racial mix – 85 per cent Pakistani or Bangladeshi, 15 per cent white. What is startling is that this is a healthy mix by Bradford standards. Cantle argued that school catchment areas be changed to ensure no culture had more than 75 per cent of a school's places. There were also reports last month that race quotas for schools were being considered by Bradford Council. But officials insist they have no plans to bus kids around the city or begin a major redrawing of catchment areas.

Some of those who watched the North catch fire last summer might consider anything less than drastic action complacent. But David Mallen, the chairman of the recently formed Education Policy Partnership, which is spearheading Bradford's quest for racial harmony, insists quotas and heavy-handed social engineering would only worsen the situation. "Apart from being illegal, forcing one group of youngsters in with another group will create alienation rather than overcome it," says Mallen. He says Cantle, unlike Ouseley, failed to take the law into account. "Cantle suggested solutions were easier than they are," he says.

The Education Policy Partnership's approach is softer. Its first aim is to encourage children and adults to mix together – through a range of projects – and persuade them of the strengths of diversity in Bradford. Its second is to address educational underachievement and so reverse the socio-economic decline that has plagued the city since the demise of its wool mills. Neither target will be easy to achieve but the latter will be especially demanding. Bradford schools were judged so poor by Ofsted that a private contractor, Education Bradford, had to be called in last summer to take them out of local authority hands.

Dawkins seems to share Mallen's view that mixing can be encouraged but never forced. He is worried, however, that without outside intervention, Challenge will lose what little racial and gender mix it has and eventually become a mainly Asian boys' school. Girls' schools are popular in Bradford – particularly with Asian parents – and boys already outnumber girls at Challenge by two to one.

"There are more white families making Challenge their first preference," says Dawkins. However, white families from nearby Frizinghall – once a predominantly white neighbourhood – have found that they do not live quite close enough to get their children into the school. The whites on Frizinghall's front line with Manningham would have qualified but they have long since fled. What may hearten Bradford about Challenge is that it seems that if a school is highly regarded, there are a surprising number of white parents willing to have their kids taught alongside Asians.

Equally encouraging are the claims by Asian pupils that race – and fear of racism – played no part in their parents' decision to send them to Challenge. They came to Challenge because their parents thought the new school would provide a superior education. Sehrish Iqbal, 12, thinks she is "the luckiest girl in Bradford" to be at Challenge. She says that her dad wants her to become not just a teacher but – she is so precise, I suspect it is, at least, a shared ambition – "head of Year Seven". The problem is that Bradford cannot afford to build brand new schools all over the city.

Dawkins puzzles over how to prevent Challenge becoming an Asian boys secondary. "If we redefined admissions that would have an impact on other schools," he says. "But if boys outnumber girls by two to one next year, we will have to look at changing admissions policy for girls." While major redrawing of catchments has been ruled out, Tony Thornley, Education Bradford's director of strategy, admits that a very "delicate" consultation process is under way to see if school federations can be formed which would effectively blur existing catchment boundaries.

Post 16, there is an argument that a wide curriculum cannot be achieved in Bradford unless secondary schools with very different racial complexions pull their resources together, creating more multiculturalism. Dawkins is taken with the idea – also in the early consultation stages – of federations of feeder primaries and particular secondary schools.

There are many primary schools within a reasonable distance of Challenge, and Dawkins might enjoy the freedom to decide which of those feeder schools will form a special connection with Challenge. Including predominantly white primaries in his federation would address the problem of Challenge's drifting racial and gender mix. It may sound like social engineering, albeit of a milder kind, but that is not how it is being presented in Bradford.

"You cannot engineer the composition of a school through admissions," insists Thornley. "Parental preference drives the process." At the same time, he says small alterations to catchments, permissible under existing law, could have significant effects on the racial composition of schools, without alienating pupils and parents.

There needs to be greater engagement between predominantly white and Asian schools, Thornley believes. Involvement must be frequent and focused on the curriculum, he says, not just a one-off, let's-have-a-look visit. And Ouseley's idea of promoting a sense of common citizenship – already known as "Bradfordisation" – among pupils, which might just be boosted by Bradford's campaign to become City of Culture 2008, is a good one. Schools are crucial to increased racial harmony, according to Thornley, but the city's wider socio-economic problems ought not to be forgotten. Improving attainment is crucial if Bradford is to thrive again, says Mallen. Both men admit there is impatience that change is not happening faster.

At Belle Vue Boys' School, in nearby Heaton, the headteacher Bruce Berry, an employee of the school for 33 years and before that one of its pupils, can remember the Bradford of the late Sixties, when Asians first arrived to work at the mills. Back then, Asian and white boys sat side by side and played football together, he says. His school is now almost entirely Asian, because local whites "send their kids to whiter schools". Berry supports the slow, gentle Partnership approach because "you cannot manufacture a false situation". Even if you could get people to send their children across the city to distant schools, it would not solve the problem of monocultural residential areas, he says.

Belle Vue recently earned a favourable Ofsted report and Berry thinks he can already detect more interest in the school from local white families. That fits neatly with Mallen's hope that increased attainment will lead to more integration. But Berry's historical perspective is interesting. It took Bradford a long time to get to where it is today. However frustrating, it is unreasonable to expect that its escape from the mess will be swift or easy.

education@independent.co.uk