24.01.2014 Rroma and education policy in Great Britain

Le Bas (2014) takes a critical look at the education policies in Great Britain and the integration of Rroma into public educational institutions. He notes that the Rroma are strongly under-represented in public schools: „The mental age of an average adult Gypsy is thought to be about that of a child of 10, said the 1959 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14 years after the end of the Nazi genocide of Romany Gypsies. This week new analysis of the 2011 census has been released by the Office for National Statistics. It revealed that of the 58,000 people who identified themselves as being of Gypsy/Traveller ethnicity, 60% had no formal qualifications whatsoever.” However, the equation of Rroma and travellers as an ethnic group is wrong. Most English travellers can be traced back to Irish travellers who have their own origins. Le Bas continues on the question of what factors lead to low school enrolment rates among Rroma. In addition to obvious factors such as discrimination, he also deals with sensitive cultural explanations, but he immediately qualifies these to the benefit of individual experiences: As among other ethnic groups, there are some Rroma families who value education more than others. The crucial question remains how to integrate the Rroma successfully into society as a whole.