Nusrat missed nearly an hour of school, every day, for four continuous years.

She didn’t lose this education because of poor punctuality and she certainly wasn’t truanting.

Nusrat* was late every day because “the immigrants bus”, as her head teacher referred to it, would drop her off in the morning after school had already begun.

Then, in the afternoon, it would come back half an hour before classes ended to take Nusrat and a group of other British Pakistani children back from schools in an almost exclusively white working class suburb of Bradford to their homes in a more mixed area on the other side of the city.

“We always used to miss the last 25 minutes of lessons,” she remembers. “We would see the bus when it arrived and would just pack up our books and go.”

Their daily journeys took place because of a policy known as “bussing” which ran in just 11 education authorities including Bradford, Southall, Bristol, Leicester and Huddersfield during the 60s and 70s. The councils were acting on a 1965 central government circular which recommended that no more than a third of pupils in a school or class should be from immigrant families.

Bussing proved to be the last serious attempt by authorities anywhere in England to enforce an integrated intake for schools in multi-ethnic areas. But now, more than half a century later, the issue of racial integration in schools in cities like Bradford - or rather the lack of it - has not gone away. Far from it.

Latest figures from the 2017 schools census show that, of the 33 state secondaries across the Bradford district, 14 have less than 6 per cent “white British” pupils. And in another nine, the tables are turned and white British are in large majority, making up at least two thirds of the intake.

Last week the government unveiled its own attempt to tackle the issue, publishing an Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper. The document unveils five pilot “integration areas” - Blackburn, Peterborough, Walsall, Waltham Forest in east London, and Bradford - where new strategies aimed at ensuring that schools “are more representative of their wider area”, among other goals, will be trialed.

But is there hope that it will be anymore successful in an era where parental expectations of choice over which school their child attends have become so firmly embedded? And can any lessons be learned from the past?

Crude intervention

In Bradford, bussing was introduced in the 1960s just as the first children of Pakistani men, who had arrived to work the nightshift in the city’s woollen mills, began to go to school. In hindsight it might appear a far-sighted attempt to achieve social integration in a city that was on the threshold of a dramatic demographic change, still rippling out through the area decades later.

But the reality for the individuals who were uprooted from their local neighbourhoods and friends every day as a part of this crude intervention could be much less positive.

“We were bussed from one end of Bradford to the other,” Nusrat says, recalling her enforced spell in a largely white middle school in the 1970s.

“We never got involved in the assemblies. We couldn’t take part in Christmas plays or Christmas parties and we weren’t in any rounders teams or football teams simply because we had to get on that bus and go.”

Being bussed meant she missed out at home as well.  “I had no local friends where I lived because I went to a school that was not nearby. So when it came to six-week holidays it was basically all family because I didn’t know the local area that well.”

Nusrat remembers confusion rather than hostility or racism from her mainly white class mates, who struggled to understand why these Asian interlopers had not attended their local schools.

“We had friends in school who were not Asian,” she says.  “But we couldn’t see those afterwards because they never came into our area and we didn’t go into their area. In those days not everybody had cars.”

Other bussing veterans have reported even more negative experiences, describing how they sent to schools where they felt like an “alien” as the only Asian pupil in their class, or were subjected to bullying and harassment.

And it is these stories, and the fact that the policy was ruled illegal, that help to explain why it was abandoned in Bradford in the ‘80s. Today it is largely remembered as discriminating against Asian pupils - as they tended to be the ones being bussed out of their local areas.

But it wasn’t always that way. Rosemary Harris attended a middle school in the inner city area of Manningham in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, where she was part of a small African-Caribbean community. The school was just beginning to take in Asian pupils, but still had a large number of local white pupils.

Harris says around 15 children were bussed into the school every day - from an outlying area of Bradford - who were also white. Local pupils referred to them as the “posh kids” and they tended to be in the top sets.

“At first it was strange having them bussed to our school,” Harris remembers. “But the school integrated and they got accepted practically straight away. I think we just got on.

“That bit was a success. But I remember when more Asians came in they were segregated because they went to a separate Portacabin to learn English. That integration didn’t go well - it just didn’t go, that bit, because the Asian pupils who couldn’t speak English just got left out.”  

Polarised

In the decades since bussing was dropped, the problem the policy was supposed to tackle has grown enormously.  Bradford has gradually but steadily become a much more polarised and divided place as the Pakistani community has expanded and a sizeable proportion of the white population has moved to outlying areas.

A look back at the rationale for bussing only underlines the change. The mere idea of a school that had more than a third of pupils from an ethnic minority in the ‘60s and ‘70s raised official fears that these children would not integrate with the white majority.

Today a school with, say, a 40/60 split of ethnic minority to white British pupils would be viewed as positive boon in a city where mono-cultural schools that are either predominantly Asian or predominantly white have increasingly become the norm.

Does this matter? The answer for anyone who has lived somewhere like Bradford will be a resounding yes. This proud but economically wounded city is not a big place. Its two dominant ethnic communities may often choose to live in separate residential areas but there is no way they can really escape each in other.

If you live or work in Bradford you will constantly be coming into contact with the other community. On the roads, in shops, at petrol stations - everywhere. So they will be superficially familiar. But that does not necessarily mean you will really know or understand these other people. As Ted Cantle pointed out in his government commissioned report into the riots that erupted in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in the summer of 2001, they had become communities living separate, “parallel lives”.

All too often, that lack of meaningful interaction creates fear. In the days after those devastating Bradford riots - the worst in mainland Britain for two decades - a colleague on the Yorkshire Post, where I then worked, went to a council estate in the city where another much smaller disturbance had just occurred.

He found that people in this run down white area - not far from the middle school that Nusrat was bussed to - were genuinely scared because they thought the same Asian youths who had rioted in the city centre would be running across Bradford and coming for them next.

The mere idea was a ludicrous one for anyone with any knowledge of the main Bradford riots that summer. They may have been sparked by a threatened far right march. But they were not really Asian vs white “race riots”, more an extended violent confrontation between one ethnic community and the police. The fact that people could so completely misconstrue what had just taken place in their own city, was further evidence of just how divided Bradford had become.

The obvious solution is of course education. Not teaching people about different communities, but learning about them first hand by actually going to school with them, sitting in the same lessons and sometimes becoming their friends. In Bradford, that had continued to happen for a good decade or so after bussing ended. In many, though not all parts of the city, schools achieved genuinely mixed intakes without the need for any official intervention.

Consumer choice

But as the ‘90s got underway, things began to change. It is hard to pin point the exact cause but there were two significant and simultaneous shifts. Firstly, the idea that the school your child attended should be a consumer choice, dependent on quality, was being promoted by successive governments that believed this would give schools more incentive to improve. Aspirant parents who wanted the best for their children eagerly took it up. Ofsted reports and league tables were taken as signals of quality, and school intakes everywhere began to shift as a result.

Established school pecking orders could be upset as the middle classes abandoned schools that were losing their reputations and flocked to others seen as being on the up. In Bradford, these fluctuations meant that ethnic balances that achieved some stability could be quickly lost.

At the same time, the residential ethnic map of Bradford was rapidly changing and polarising. An Asian population with a higher birth rate was expanding outwards from its traditional inner city areas. Meanwhile white residents began to move out of the city of Bradford into suburbs and towns and villages in the surrounding district.

Whole areas of the city, which had once been white, became predominantly Asian within a remarkably short space of time. And that had a big knock-on effect for education. Other things being equal, people generally like to, and often have to, send their children to a local school. So when housing in the area became polarised between different racial groups, naturally the schools did too.

These worrying developments seemed to go unnoticed by ministers who were intent on continuing down the road of giving schools - and nominally parents - more freedoms over admissions, not less. Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair pursued a policy of expanding faith school numbers which threatened to make the mono-cultural problem even worse.

The drive was no doubt based on the kind of church school that Mr Blair sent his own children to. But having offered more state schools to one religion, it could hardly be denied to others. And so, in 2001, Bradford’s Feversham College became the country’s first state-funded Muslim secondary school, raising the prospect of a new wave of state schools in the city that were almost guaranteed to be monocultural.

When riots engulfed Burnley, Oldham and Bradford in that same year and the Ouseley Report, released in the aftermath, warned of “educational apartheid” in the city, the authorities were finally forced to take notice of a problem they had previously seemed happy to exacerbate.

However, as far as education was concerned, the results of the brief moments of clarity prompted by the Ouseley and Cantle reports were underwhelming. A school linking network allowing pupils from ethnicities to meet each other was funded and is still running in Bradford today. But little attempt was made to tackle the underlying issue, or even really admit that it was a problem.

Monocultural

By 2007, David Ward, then the Lib-Dems education spokesman on Bradford Council, estimated that almost half of the district’s 28 secondaries had become “monocultural” with about 90 per cent of pupils coming from one race; and that was without a major expansion of faith schools.

Now, following last year’s terrorist attacks, a central government has again been forced to make it look like something is being done on integration. But once again the administration of the day appears to have a faith schools policy that flies in the face of such a goal. One of Damian Hinds’ first commitments as education secretary has been to scrap a ban that has prevented new faith schools from taking in more than half of their pupils on the basis of their religion.

There is in fact little in the Integration Green Paper on education that looks like it will amount to much more than fine words. The document is however - possibly unintentionally -  very revealing about government thinking on the issue.

The opening page of the chapter on schools notes that, as of January 2017, 60 per cent of ethnic minority pupils were in schools where ethnic minority pupils were in the majority. An accompanying map of England sets out authority by authority the “percentage of non-white British people that would need to move school within the local authority to achieve the same spread as white British”. Bradford is top of the list, with more than 70 per cent.

So just as it was mainly Asian pupils who were uprooted from their local areas when bussing was in force in the 70s, the suggestion from government today is that it would be their “non-white” descendants who would move schools to achieve more mixed intakes.

But why should that be the case? And how can it be fair? It is surely wrong to suggest that the residential segregation in a city like Bradford is anymore the fault of one community than it is another.

Asian people didn’t force white residents to leave their homes and move to the suburbs. “White flight” came about as the result of individual voluntary decisions, often taken by people who deliberately chose not to live in a more mixed area. It must be hard not to be an “insular” immigrant community if the host community moves away every time you come close to it.

Punches pulled

Unsurprisingly, the Green Paper doesn’t follow through the implications of its map and actually recommend that people should move schools. Nor does it go beyond a very brief, and massively understated, acknowledgement that not all faith schools have diverse ethnic backgrounds. Again, less than surprising, as Hinds is about to go out of his way to make new faith schools even less diverse.

As is so often the case with government documents on such sensitive issues, the Green Paper pulls its punches wherever possible. It does pledge that the government “will work with local admission authorities in the Integration Areas [of which Bradford is one] to help ensure the intake of schools are more representative of the wider area”. But it provides little clue as how this can work in practice beyond the vague promise to “develop a range of model admissions arrangements, including ones based on varied catchment areas that include diverse residential areas”.

So what about an updated form of “bussing”? The massively changed demographics of Bradford since the ‘60s would ensure that any such policy would have to operate very differently today. It could no longer be about dispersing a relatively small group of ethnic minority pupils among largely white schools.

Tes conducted an analysis of latest - 2011 - census figures, in order to provide a demographic breakdown of the actual city of Bradford without it being skewed by very different prosperous white towns in the wider metropolitan district. The results reveal that the integration in Bradford is barely an issue about ethnic minorities anymore.

The figures show that 54 per cent of the population is white and 39 per cent Asian - the vast majority of whom are British Pakistani. So Bradford has become a city of two large and separate ethnic communities rapidly heading towards being equal in size. Therefore, any new attempt to even out school intakes would surely have to involve some disruption to both communities rather than just one of them. And if that was the case, any potential problem about bussing amounting to unlawful racial discrimination could disappear.

But that doesn’t mean the policy would be any more palatable to the Bradfordians who would have to take part in it. “I wouldn’t put my children on the bus,” Nusrat says firmly.

Rosemary Harris also answers with little hesitation when asked whether she thinks a new version of the bussing policy would work in Bradford today.

“No, I don’t. I think it could make things worse. When I used to go, school [intakes] used to be local and now it’s all across the district. I think local was a lot better because once you came out of school you would play with the same kids and it was all local community.”

Legislation ‘the only answer’

Harris’s views are based on the experiences of her children as well as her own. She sent them to Dixons City Academy. The Bradford school was one of the original city technology colleges opened under the Conservatives in the 80s, which became forerunners of the academies programme, and it has always taken pupils from right across the city.

“When my kids went there, kids came from all over Bradford because it had a good reputation, so once they came out of school they didn’t mix. There wasn’t much of a community apart from online - they didn’t see each other apart from when they were in school.” She fears more bussing would only exacerbate that lack of community.

Today Dixons is at the centre of a chain of nine academies - all but one in Bradford. The trust features as case study in the Integration Green Paper, which highlights its use of a lottery admissions system “to attract a diverse mix of students”. In fact, latest figures from 2017 show that 61 per cent of pupils Dixons’ flagship City Academy are Pakistani. And the chain’s four other Bradford secondaries are even less diverse with figures of 72, 77, 77 and 84 per cent, respectively.

That is perhaps why, in July, Dixons’ executive principal Sir Nick Weller  said that introducing a new law was the “only answer” to prevent children being segregated along ethnic lines and the dominance of one ethnic group at a school.

He suggested there was a “tipping point” of when one community took from 70 to 80 per cent of places in a school, and others were deterred from sending their children there.

“I think it’s unhealthy in a city like Bradford for two communities to live separate lives, which by and large they do,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“You could say Bradford is almost two communities: the Muslim community and the white community.”

“Families will ignore the school that is nearest them because it is predominantly of one - the wrong ethnic group - and they will send them a little bit further down the road to a school where they feel more comfortable.”

Squeamish

But the Green Paper offers little hope of legislation to reverse that drift towards segregation, stating that the government would “continue to support the principle of parental preference for schools”.

Any solution, in Bradford or anywhere else, is likely to have to be a locally worked out one. But will local politicians ever have the courage to address such a sensitive issue?

The initial response from Bradford Council when Tes asked for the ethnic breakdown of school intakes in the city, does not bode well. At first no such data was provided, merely a statement saying that: “Each school’s demographic reflects the community that it serves.”

That squeamishness about confronting ethnic segregation in schools is nothing new. After the warnings in the Ouseley and Cantle reports, Bradford Council indicated it would be “looking creatively” at how intakes could be more balanced. The latter Home Office-commissioned report called for at least 25 per cent of admissions to all schools to reflect different cultures and ethnic groups.

But when an in-house school admissions review for Bradford was published not long afterwards in 2002 no mention was made of segregation at all. “You cannot socially engineer in admissions it is discriminatory in both sex and race,” the review’s author stated.

Efforts elsewhere have shown that admissions can be engineered. In Oldham, just 30 miles away, which suffered its own riots in 2001, two secondaries - one predominantly white and one predominantly Asian were closed and replaced by a new school, deliberately aimed at bringing the two communities together.

The resulting Waterhead Academy opened in 2010, without the racial unrest that some predicted. And research has shown that while the new school has not produced large numbers of close friendships across the racial divide, it has had a noticeable impact in reducing the mutual nervousness and fear the two communities felt about each other.

But Waterhead is a single school and the experiment was only possible because of the capital investment in new schools provided through the Building Schools for the Future programme. Such opportunities are unlikely to be repeated in today’s much tighter funding climate.

Bradford poured more than £170m into its own huge and troubled schools re-organisation  at the turn of the millenium when the district converted from a three tier, first, middle and upper school system to a two tier primary and secondary system. But little attempt was made to use the upheaval to reduce racial segregation, which only increased in the years that followed. And, with hindsight, the one notable exception only served as an example of how difficult that can be.

Geography an obstacle

The first head teacher of the brand new Challenge College, the late Gareth Dawkins, was determined that the local authority secondary, opened in 2000 on the edge of Bradford’s largely Asian Manningham area, should not be mono-cultural and would also attract white parents from neighbouring areas.

The reality was that the school’s initial popularity with Asian families in its immediate neighbourhood meant that white parents who were interested in the school often fell outside the catchment area. So, despite the best intentions of those founding it, the school quickly ended up 85 per cent Asian. Today the latest, 2017, figures for Oasis Lister Park Academy, as it is now known, show that just three of its 934 pupils are white British.

The Challenge College experience highlights the just what anyone who seriously wants to tackle “educational apartheid” in places like Bradford is up against. This is not just a problem created by parental preference for schools - it runs deeper than that and is dictated to a large extent by where people live.

Nusrat believes a relaxation of catchment areas could be the solution. “I know lots of Asian families who would prefer a school that’s in a predominantly Caucasian area - it doesn’t matter to them that there’s all white children in there,” she says.

“If they were allowed to mix around like that, integration would be a lot easier for people. But if you live in a certain area you can be lumbered with a particular school that you may not want to send you children to because it’s 99 per cent Asian and you may want them to integrate with others.

“I do know people who went to schools that were totally Asian - primary school, middle school, secondary school. They are very comfortable in their own little circle but they do have a barrier about how to mix with a different community.”

And she is right that in a system where physical proximity to a school can often determine your chances of getting a place, geography has become a serious obstacle to racial integration.

Tes analysis shows that of the 17 council wards making up the actual city of Bradford, six have Asian people in a clear majority with between 58-80 per cent of the population. In another nine wards the position is reversed, with white people making between 66-94 per cent. In only two of the wards is there anything approaching an even balance between the cities’ two main ethnicities.

The figures - revealing the kind of physical divisions that you might expect in Northern Ireland - are a stark reminder not only of how difficult it could be to achieve genuinely mixed schools in places like Bradford, but also of how crucial that goal has become.

*Not her real name