Benefit or Burden? How English Schools Responded to the Duty to Promote Community Cohesion

This paper discusses results from a small scale qualitative study of howprimary and secondary schools in three English local authorities respondedto the introduction and subsequent inspection of a legal duty to promotecommunity cohesion, following a series of ‘race’ riots in 2001 and theLondon bombings of 2005. The policy itself is seen as reflecting widerdiscourse and is shown as shifting in focus during the period it wasofficially inspected between 2008 and 2011. Schools respondeddifferentially to the duty and its inspection, with those in more multiculturalareas responding with higher degrees of confidence than those inmono-ethnic areas. Some policy ‘slippage’ is seen to occur in the wayschools re-framed the duty. Over time, most schools came to identify thecurriculum and the school’s ethos as the most important weapons in theirarmoury. Teachers embraced the new duty with different degrees ofenthusiasm – for some it confirmed the importance of holistic approachesto education which they felt had been sidelined in recent years, whilst othershowed various forms of resistance. Teachers encountered some subtle andchallenging professional dilemmas in the course of discharging the duty.Overall, the respondents in this study felt that the imposition of the dutyand its inspection had been more of a benefit than a burden.