‘Nothing about us without us’: the role of inclusive community development in school desegregation for Roma communities

Abstract

This article was presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, September 2012 Cadiz, Spain. The article argues that community dialogue and participation is a vital dynamic in desegregation and explores the centrality of forms of empowerment which can be described as ‘inclusive community development’ (ICD). The segregation of Roma children is taking place despite the growing body of legal statutes and policy directives aimed at creating integrated education which has been formally reaffirmed in a number of cases at the European Court of Human Rights. It is posited that ICD is essential to make a reality of legal and policy directives which support desegregation. It is argued that such a dialogic exercise can overcome institutional opposition to inclusion but has transformative potential by promoting inclusive education, interculturalism and setting communities along a path leading to wider structural change. The article draws upon a large pan-European project which involved the authors.

Keywords:

• inclusive education
• Roma
• inclusive community development
• desegregation
• ethnicity
• interculturalism

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Dr Marion Bowl Birmingham University, Dr Sarah Cemlyn University of Bristol and Angus McCabe Third Sector Research Centre for reading drafts of this article and giving feedback and finally to the Roma Education Fund whose support made the publication of ‘Ten Years After’ possible.

Notes

1. The term political race is defined as a process that begins from the ground up, starting with race in all its complexity, and then proceeds to develop cross-racial relationships through race and with race to issues of class and gender (intersectionality).

2. The illegality of educational segregation for Roma children has been demonstrated in the European Court of Human Rights Court’s groundbreaking judgments in D.H. and others vs the Czech Republic (2007) and Sampanis v. Greece (2008), which rejected the segregation of Romani students into special schools for children with mental disabilities or within mainstream schools on the basis of ethnicity. A ruling that was bolstered by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights decision on Orsus and Others v. Croatia (2010)\ that decreed that the segregation of Romani children into separate classes based on language is unlawful discrimination. The European Court has decided two other cases of segregation. One is Sampanis and others vs Greece (2012) for the failure of the Greek Government to take measures to integrate Roma children in mainstream education following the case in 2008 (see above) and Horvath and Kis vs Hungary (2013) in which the ECtHR condemned Hungary for misdiagnosing Roma children and placing them in special schools.

3. ‘An educationally inclusive school is one in which the teaching and learning, achievements, attitudes and well-being of every young person matter. Effective schools are educationally inclusive schools. This shows, not only in their performance, but also in their ethos and their willingness to offer new opportunities to pupils who may have experienced previous difficulties. This does not mean treating all pupils in the same way. Rather it involves taking account of pupils’ varied life experiences and needs. The most effective schools do not take educational inclusion for granted. They constantly monitor and evaluate the progress each pupil makes’ (Ofsted, 7 2000).

4. To date much of the focus on school segregation for Roma has been on Central and Eastern Europe but there is evidence which demonstrates this phenomena also exists in the West of Europe (Santiago and Ostalinda 2012).

5. The term ‘special schools’ refers to schools which educate children with mild and mild-to-moderate learning disabilities according to the classification of the degrees of learning disabilities provided by the International Classification of Diseases.

6. The slogan was adopted by activists at the outset of the Decade for Roma inclusion 2005–2015. Originally the slogan was used by a range of groups in the 1990s, most notably disability groups, to communicate the idea that no policy should be decided by any representative without the full and direct participation of members of the group(s) affected by that policy.

7. The project ‘Ten Years After: A History of Roma School Desegregation in Central and Eastern Europe’ (Rostas 2012) which this article draws upon can be described as a broad community profile being written by a number of Roma and non Roma desegregation campaigners who have worked at a community level. The publication maps segregation in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

8. The points raised in this paragraph are based on the direct observations of the authors as well as conversations with other practitioners and researchers. Where genuine engagement takes place between home and school these negative practices can be limited.

9. Continuing after the first pilot project in Vidin, similar projects were extended to more than 2500 children in eight cities across Bulgaria. According to the Community Planning Website participants showed marked improvements over children remaining in segregated education. Similar observations have been made elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe concerning Roma desegregation. For example, Kézdi and Surányi (2009) provide a comprehensive evaluation of a school integration programme in Hungary. Their study compared 30 schools participating in the Hungarian voluntary desegregation programme with 30 control schools. The findings indicate that both Roma and non-Roma students in programme schools achieve higher grades, gain better reading skills and are more inclined to enter into further education than pupils in control schools.

10. In Bulgaria only six Bulgarian cities initiated projects like the one in Vidin and these were supported by private foundations (Rostas 2012). This note of caution reveals that although community participation and mobilisation in desegregation and involvement in dialogic initiatives is of tremendous value such action will be limited in its progress without the support of a range of decision makers at a local and national level. In the next section of the article the obstacles to desegregation and community mobilisation are explored in more detail.

11. The subject of attitudes towards mainstream integration is a complex one in one case study (Melgar et al. 2011) Roma parents in Spain were not willing to allow their children to attend secondary schools because they were outside the Roma neighbourhood. The solution came through a form of ICD in which the Roma proposed that secondary education be offered at one of the primary schools within the Roma neighbourhood. This could be classified as self segregation and was born out of the fact that these parents were somehow ill at ease with more mainstream schools. Although this scenario derived from ICD, it presents a major challenge to notions of inclusive and intercultural education, a tension which in some cases ICD may need to carefully navigate.