The national pupil database puts children at risk of racial profiling
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Version 0 of 1. With all the speculation about whether our prime minister will preside over a “soft” Brexit or one that is “hard”, the obsession with foreigners and who can get a better handle on how to get rid of them hasn’t, sadly, dissipated. At the Tories’ conference last week Theresa May declared that many Britons “find themselves out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration”. Amber Rudd, in a speech that reminded LBC host James O’Brien of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, proposed forcing firms to reveal the numbers of foreigners on staff – later abandoned after widespread condemnation. But in one section of her speech she moved from a long-term goal of “reducing the number of [migrants] that come from Europe” to “in the short term taking action to help communities affected by high levels of immigration, and stopping people coming here that threaten our security” – all in less than 50 words. Dog-whistle politics donning the garb of commonsense home truths are lethal when delivered in Rudd’s no-nonsense manner. This is the level of discourse that has made the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance claim that the Brexit vote “seems to have lead to a further rise in ‘anti-foreigner’ sentiment”. Quite. Last week, as part of the Early Years and School Census, the Department of Education (DfE) for the first time collected information about the country of birth and nationality of eight million children. Once gathered, the data remains on the national pupil database, where it can be shared with third parties such as thinktanks, data management consultancies and journalists. For the government this is apparently about limiting “education tourism” and better allocating resources for children with English as an additional language (EAL). Yet against a backdrop of Brexit, rising Islamophobia and antisemitism, this is also a not-so-subtle reminder that migrants are unwelcome. Indeed, Tim Colbourne, former deputy chief of staff to Nick Clegg, tweeted that he had seen, while working in government, “the genesis of this [and that it is] part of a Home Office push to create a ‘hostile environment’ for immigration”. Passports were devised as the means by which we could cross borders. Now you need them to go to school, to rent a flat or be seen by a doctor. In light of this fact, it is disingenuous to claim, as the DfE recently attempted to do, that this is not about immigration control. Since April 2012, the Home Office has already granted 18 of the 20 requests it made to access information on the national pupil database. Function creep is a clear reality. In a speech to the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange in 2012, then home secretary Theresa May had this to say about EAL: “You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary schoolchildren speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn’t fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can’t even speak the same language?” As others pointed out, there is a vast difference between not being able to utter a word of English and having parents who speak another language – but that’s by the by. The issues raised go to the heart of the fears around immigrants: that they drain stretched resources and, in their difference, are a threat. It is a message schoolchildren will readily accept. Migrants, in the high-stakes world of school life, are soft targets. Last year the National Union of Teachers passed a motion calling for the government’s Prevent strategy to be withdrawn, so concerned were they that it would encourage racial profiling. The DfE’s nationality and country of birth data does exactly that. The education paper Schools Week reports how one school assumed its white pupils didn’t need to provide evidence of country of birth and nationality, while those whose ethnicity is not white did. It’s all so predictable. “No child is illegal,” says the campaign group ABC Schools, which has mobilised against the DfE’s data collection. It’s a sad reminder of the current climate that this should need saying. But this is a time when children are once again being detained in prison-style immigration facilities run by the likes of G4S. And here is the real damage of the government’s move: every child whose face does not fit will, inevitably, face the old hurdle, “Where are you from?” It is a question premised on a far less benign sentiment: “You are not from here; you do not belong.” |