By Mursi Sad El-Din I have just finished reading a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Britain which reveals inequality in the British school system. The report has caused great concern and a number of critical comments in the British press. The Observer, for example, published an article with the headline "Revealed: a devastating portrait of inequality in British Schools." The article claims that despite decades of reform by successive governments, fault lines in the British education system are still leading to huge inequalities. Commenting on the report Anushka Asthana, the policy editor of the Observer, writes that in this, the most comprehensive study into fairness in UK classes, race and gender remain crucial factors in determining how British boys and girls succeed at school and beyond. According to the report, statistics show that boys are slipping behind girls in 11 out of 13 learning categories by the age of five; children from the poorest families are half as likely to achieve good GCSES; black pupils of Caribbean descent are three times more likely to be excluded; four out of five young people with special needs are being bullied; between a quarter and a third of Muslim women have no qualifications. The report reveals evidence of boys "in their early years slipping behind in problem solving and reasoning and then in social and emotional development." To quote the report, "A lot of boys do not fit into the way education is now. An educational psychologist blames the system, not the children. She argues that schools placed too much emphasis on skills that boys often struggle with that are nonetheless not necessarily relevant in adulthood. She mentions handwriting as an example. Girls have more beautiful handwriting than boys." The report claims that the underachievement of boys is an international phenomenon that has emerged in recent years. I believe that this applies to the situation in Egypt where girls are usually at the head of certificate results. According to the report, bullying is rife in the classrooms, corridors and playgrounds of British schools. Two thirds of young people claimed to have been bullied at some point between 2004 and 2006. Bullying, claims the report, permeates children's school achievements as well. According to the report children who have been bullied do worse in GCSES, scoring an average of 15 percent lower than those who have not. They are also twice as likely to end up out of education and without a job. The report quotes policy makers as saying that poverty is another reason for underachievement. Pupils from the poorest families are half as likely to get good results and twice as likely to be permanently excluded. The Minister of Education says, "We have a moral duty to eradicate the unacceptable inequalities that still exist in our society, to narrow the gap between rich and poor, and between different ethnic groups, to work as hard as we can to make our society fairer." The General Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers argued that inequalities emerged well before children reached the school gates, adding, "Schools are not adding to the problem -- they are part of the solution." The report discusses racial discrimination in detail: "Pupils from non-white British background were as likely in 2008/9 to be permanently excluded as pupils overall. The lowest permanent exclusion rate were among the Asian community, with five out of every 10,000 pupils being excluded, followed by children with one white and one Asian parent. Those closer to the average of 10 permanent exclusions per 10,000 were black African, Irish and mixed white black African children. The highest rates of exclusion were found among gypsy/Roma children who were more than three times more likely to be excluded, followed by black Caribbean pupils."
