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Terrorism and Community Relations

: I think there are two ways to do that. One way is to do painstaking and time-consuming local work to build relationships of trust between organisations and individuals from different communities. The other is to enable people from the minority communities to have the confidence, particularly in respect of language, where that is a problem, to take advantage of the opportunities that life in this country offers. When they are able to do that, there will also be fewer reasons for people from the majority white community to think that they must move their children out of an area because they do not want them to mix with children from another group whom they feel are very different. Sometimes white families feel that because English is not always the home language of some children, they will absorb disproportionate amounts of time and resources at school. That is what produces the phenomenon of white flight—of white parents saying they want to move their kids out. Some of those families might have unattractive motives but others have a genuine fear that their children might be held back because too much of a teacher's time will be absorbed in trying to help children who have trouble with the basics of the English language to start with. This problem is not susceptible to a quick answer. It requires a great deal of work by policy makers at all levels.