I think we're in 'you couldn't make it up' territory.
Critics hail English-only lessons
Education campaigners have welcomed a school's decision to scrap a disputed bilingual teaching scheme.
Turkish pupils at the north London secondary school were being taught GCSE science in their native tongue.
But the new head of White Hart Lane school in Tottenham said pupils must focus on learning English.
Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education, said: "I fully support this move back to all English lessons and would think it is very overdue."
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Remember Ray Honeyford, a man ahead of his time?
Teacher who challenged multiculturalism had to sacrifice his job
Telegraph
14/07/2005
The discovery that the four London bombers were British Muslims has ensured that one of the great social debates of the next few years will be on the sensitive issues of racial ghettos, integration in schools and multiculturalism.Fear of being labelled racist has helped to ensure that few have dared to put their heads above the parapet and challenge the orthodoxy that Britain is a multicultural nation and must behave like one.
Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster, was one of the first and most significant critics to challenge publicly multiculturalism's central tenet that all cultures in Britain are equally valid and no single tradition should be dominant.
As the head of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, where 90 per cent of pupils were Asian, Mr Honeyford was concerned about the consequences of encouraging children to cling to their own ethnic group rather than integrate.
In a series of articles published in the Right-wing Salisbury Review in the early 1980s, he criticised Bradford city council's policy of educating ethnic minority children according to their own culture, predicting that the move would create divisions between white and Asian communities.
At school, where languages such as Urdu, Gujurati and Hindi predominated over English, Mr Honeyford tried to introduce a uniform but he was opposed by the local council, which judged that such a move could be racist. Concerned that "we were getting nine-year-olds who had never sat in the same class as a white child", Mr Honeyford wanted to impose racial integration - if need be, by busing in white pupils from across the city.
His views provoked an outcry among the anti-racism lobby. Some picketed the school and Mr Honeyford was subjected to personal abuse and accused of racial prejudice - leading to his early retirement in December 1985 to save his family from further harassment. He wrote later that he was told he had been forced out because his attitudes were "racist" and his insistence on integrating Asian children was "dangerous and damaging".
Although Mr Honeyford remained a pariah for the education establishment, ironically, many of his views were later echoed by Herman Ouseley, one of the country's leading anti-racism campaigners. Lord Ouseley was a former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, which had been one of Mr Honeyford's main critics.
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