It is often the case that such segregation is involuntary – people from a particular group do not seek to live separate lives but are forced to do so because of circumstances outside their control. For example, as one study highlighted, Muslims in New Delhi (India), as the city’s minority group, find it almost impossible to rent houses from Hindu landlords, the city’s majority group (Field et al., 2008). Consequently, they are obliged to live in Muslim areas where their landlords are fellow Muslims, with the result that New Delhi is segregated into Muslim and Hindu areas. Segregation in education is often a concomitant of housing segregation as children go to neighbourhood schools so that all the pupils in a particular school are from a specific group (or groups) without any representation from other groups. Involuntary segregation is different from forced segregation but essentially results in people living parallel lives.

Historically, ‘apartheid schooling’, has been associated with laws which have forbidden the mixing of races – whether through the apartheid laws in South Africa or through ‘Jim Crow’ laws in the southern states of the United States which, from 1865 until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, proscribed most forms of association between blacks and whites.¹ The ruling by the US Supreme court in 1954 on Brown v Board of Education of Topeka that school segregation was illegal, and its concomitant order that school districts must desegregate, swept away the legal basis for blacks and whites being educated separately in the US’s southern states. These laws required the separate use of most public facilities (toilets, restaurants, buses, schools) under the spurious justification that equal facilities would be supplied separately. In handing down the Court’s judgement, Chief Justice Earl Warren poured scorn on the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine which justified Jim Crow laws by writing ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal’. However, it was not the inferior school resources of black schools that underpinned the Court’s judgement: as the Court pointed out, many southern states, in order to forestall integration, had invested heavily in closing the gap in standards between black and white schools. Rather it was that, in Chief Justice Warren’s words, ‘we must look instead to the effects of segregation itself’. To separate black children ‘from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way that is unlikely ever to be undone’ (Smithsonian American History, 2014).

The experience of Indian society, with its caste divide between its (formerly ‘untouchable’) ‘Scheduled Castes’ (Dalit) and its upper castes (non-Dalits) shows that non-segregated schooling doesn’t always lead to parity of treatment between the ‘have-nots’ and the ‘haves’ within a school.² Nambissan (2010: 282) in her study of the experiences of Dalit children in schools in Jaipur district in the state of Rajasthan concluded that ‘social relations and the pedagogic processes fail to ensure full participation of Dalit children and they are subject to discriminatory and unequal treatment in relation to their peers’. The result is that, thrown in as a minority group with children from the higher social groups, Dalit students face discrimination, exclusion, and humiliation. If there is force to this argument, then one solution to Dalit educational underachievement lies in creating a social and cultural environment in schools whereby they cease to be unwelcoming and frightening places for Dalit children. This would require teachers to be trained to respect the caste sensitivities of ‘depressed minorities’ in much the same way that teachers in Western countries are trained to be sensitive to racial and religious diversity (see also Akerlof and Kranton (2010) on this point).

The fact that students from different groups are treated differently within the same school is not confined to India. The most frequently cited explanation for ethnic gaps in educational attainment relates to the substantial differences in socio-economic status between, say, Black and White groups. However, differences in socio-economic status cannot explain more than one-third of the black-white gap in scores for six year olds (Phillips et al., 1998). Consequently, as Strand (2011: 199) suggests, ‘variables such as parents’ educational aspirations for their children, provision of educational resources, and involvement with school are also important in understanding attainment’ in addition to teachers’ expectations of pupils, institutional racism, and cultural differences. As a result, there is the perception that ‘institutional racism’ in schools in England leads teachers to have low expectations of Afro-Caribbean pupils relative to their White counterparts. This means, for example, that, all other things being equal, for every three white British pupils entered for the higher tiers, only two black Caribbean pupils are entered (Strand, 2011). However, not all commentators are convinced by the ‘institutional racism’ argument. The Guardian newspaper quotes Tony Sewell (Curtis, 2008: 10), an education consultant, as saying that there is ‘a link between behaviour and academic outcomes. It doesn’t mean that’s evidence of institutional racism. It’s evidence that we need to address properly the complex reasons why black Caribbean pupils behave badly. We can’t just say it’s white racist teachers.’

The wider literature on conflict and peace building offers some insights into the segregated society of Northern Ireland. Oberschall (2007), for example, in a comparative study of the peace-building processes in Bosnia, Israel–Palestine and Northern Ireland argues that peace settlements leave many loose ends on key issues in the conflict to be dealt with during the implementation process. He supports the need for social transformation or reconstruction policies that encourage identities other than ethnicity, and provide inducements for inter-ethnic cooperation where there are non-partisan public symbols and shared institutions. This eschewing of segregation and avoidance is the converse of the principle of ‘good fences making good ethnics and good citizens’. He concludes that ‘the reason that sharing is preferable to separation and avoidance is that recent history has repeatedly shown how “live and let live” separatism rapidly descends into ethnic warfare in a crisis as in the Balkans’ (Oberschall, 2007: 237).

The international literature on peace building endorses these two approaches albeit with some limitations and refinements (see Moaz’s study [2011] on reconciliation work between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the past 20 years). Wolff (2011), for example, argues that establishing consociational/power-sharing institutions offers significant opportunities for building democratic states after conflict in divided societies. Hoogenboom and Vieille’s study (2010) on Bosnia stresses the importance of fostering reconciliation and recreating social trust as necessary elements for ensuring lasting peace. O’Brien’s comparative study (2007) of South Africa and Northern Ireland emphasises the need for people’s participation through a community development approach as a way of sustaining peace and reconciliation in post-settlement contexts.

Those who support the behavioural approach are more likely to emphasise the contact hypothesis, communication and cross-community dialogue and the need to tackle sectarianism at both the individual and group levels (Knox and Quirk, 2000; Lederach, 1997, 2005). At its most simple, the contact hypothesis argues that contact (under the right conditions) between members of different racial or ethnic groups leads to a reduction in prejudice, and an increase in tolerance and mutual understanding between the groups (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1971; Hewstone and Brown, 1986; Hughes et al., 2007). The alternative model is a structural perspective which holds that Northern Ireland comprises two rival ideologies that are separate and represent ‘antithetical identities which cannot be integrated but must be recognised and accommodated through political mechanisms such as consociationalism’ (Cochrane, 2001: 151).

Connolly (2000) provides a useful summary of the competing theories. The contact hypothesis attributes the nature and causes of ethnic division to individual ignorance and misunderstanding. Sustained contact challenges pre-existing prejudices and stereotypes and, over time, will translate into positive attitudes towards the ‘other’ ethnic group. This ignores however the broader social processes, institutions, and structures that help to create and sustain ethnic tensions. Contact work is endorsed by government because it reduces its role to one of encouraging cross-community contact rather than rebuilding structural relations. Connolly (2000: 171) argues for a twin track approach: there is ‘certainly a need to maintain a clear focus on the central role played by the broader social structures and institutions, but it is also important that the more micro and interpersonal processes and practice which help to sustain and reproduce racial and ethnic divisions are not overlooked’.

The Cantle report also made the point, however, that ethnic segregation was also an issue in non-faith schools. These claims of self-segregation have been robustly challenged by Finney and Simpson (2009) who disagreed that the extent of separation by religious affiliation or ethnic identity in Britain amounted to parallel lives. They argued that this presupposed unwillingness on the part of minorities to integrate which encouraged cultural conflict, yet their research evidence disproved this assertion. They challenged the Commission for Racial Equality’s assertion (Phillips, 2005) that Britain is ‘sleepwalking to segregation’ (young people from ethnic minorities were twice as likely to have a circle of friends exclusively from their own community) as ‘alarmist language and false claim to scientific rigour to create a striking message about friendship groups, unsupported by the evidence, of dangerous inward-looking communities, harbingers of a bleak future for the UK’ (Finney and Simpson, 2009: 99). In a critique of their work Cantle argued that trends in segregation cannot be definitively concluded because the 2001 Census data were out of date and other recent research is too limited to draw conclusions.

The parallel lives quotation (above) could apply in equal measure to Northern Ireland today where segregation is the norm. Shirlow and Murtagh (2006) describe a number of social factors ...