By Abdul Diriye
Despite constant attention from educational practitioners and policy makers, the underachievement of many ethnic minority pupils in British schools persists. There are countless studies relating to the academic achievement of ethnic minority students in general, however, it seems that the pupils of Somali origin have received less attention. This piece of writing examines the validity of the purported underachievement of Somali pupils in British schools. It also tries to explore the barriers facing the Somali pupils and the possible solutions.
The United Kingdom has a large Somali community who struggle to overcome various barriers. The most detrimental, perhaps, is the educational underachievement of their children. Many of these children came to UK and had to join other children who have been studying for a number of years. This puts them in a relatively disadvantaged position and increases their chances of underachievement. Their parents find it difficult to understand how the school system works. These and other obstacles hinder the progress of the children in their studies and prevent them from making the most oftheir potential.
It is argued that Somalis in the UK are ‘invisible’ and relatively ignored. The invisibility is attributable to the belief that many Somalis think that they will not live in this country permanently and they will move back to their homes when the circumstances allow. For that reason, they do not struggle enough to establish themselves as a cohesive community with political voice and permanent community centres. How does such attitude affect the achievements of Somali pupils? Before we discuss the issue of underachievement, I think it is worthy to set the scene by looking back into the background of the Somali community in the United Kingdom and the circumstances that brought them to this country.
The Somalis were known in the UK for over a century when the British colonial powers in Aden started to employ young Somali men as seamen. The first of those seamen who came to England landed in the ports of Liverpool, London, Cardiff and Bristol but many of them never wanted to settle down in the UK, their greatest ambition was to accumulate as much wealth as possible and return to their nomadic communities to start family life there. While some of them fulfilled their ambitions, many others didn’t get the opportunity to earn enough to leave their work and return to their homeland. The majority of those who later decided to settle down in England frequently travelled back to Somalia either to invest their money or to establish families. A concern to help their relatives back home was another contributing factor to their frequent travels.
Since the first comers were almost all men craving for work, going to school or college was not a particularly established tradition among the community. They were all able to make use of their manual skills to work in the mines and onboard the ships and to communicate using whatever words they picked up from their English-speaking employers and co-workers.
With that said, little is known about the size of the Somali population in the United Kingdom, their problems or needs. They remained largely ignored and their needs neglected by the local and national policy-makers, largely because of the failure to recognise Somali as a distinct ethnic group in the ethnic monitoring system.
Ironically though, they were one of the first black or Muslim communities who settled in England. In fact the first Muslim buried in the city of Bradford in 1904 was a Somali woman named Halima Abdi Batel who came form the British Somaliland to take part in a cultural exhibition. Bradford has now one of the largest Muslim communities in the UK.
Historically, Somalis have travelled and migrated from their dwellings in the eastern horn of Africa for many years. The demographics of the horn of Africa illustrate how Somalis are scattered throughout the east and north east of Africa while the other ‘races’ gather themselves in a relatively closer areas.
It is however important to mention that the trigger for the mass migration was the civil war that started in Somalia in the late 1980s followed by the collapse of the central government in January 1991. These events forced many people to flee to the neighbouring countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya and from there they further migrated to Europe, USA and Australia. The UK has arguably the highest population of Somali immigrants in Europe.
The circumstances that brought the first Somalis who settled in England did not permit them to advance their academic education. However, the new immigrants who arrived after the civil war received part of their formal education in Somalia, and in addition to that, most of them came with their families and children, and they were therefore able to ensure free education for their children.
Nevertheless, their arrival and settlement process was far from a smooth one. Many children spent number of years in refugee camps in the neighbouring countries namely Kenya and Ethiopia and during that time some of them went to provisional schools in the camps. There are also others who have never attended any type of school and therefore needed to learn the basics of learning such as holding the pen.
Normally, when a child comes to the UK they are placed with their age group. Their classmates are generally in a situation more favourable to their learning because the laying of their educational foundations started several years before these of the new arrivals. They also write and speak English, while some of the new arrivals have never written any alphabet of any language. It is against this background that we need to consider the ‘notion’ of underachievement.
Many reports generated by local councils around the country mention that the children of Somali origin in particular, are underachieving. Although some of these reports are based on research, a common deficiency is that none of these reports give details of how its writers came to that conclusion. Furthermore, the reports hardly give guidelines on how the achievements could be improved.
The Guardian, Muslim burial honoured, June 23, 2004.
United Nations, Office for the Coordination of humanitarian Affairs, 2003, Gap in Their Hearts, the Experience of Separated Somali Children, Nairobi, IRIN.
Malim, T and Birch, A, (1998), Introductory Psychology, Basingstoke, Palgrave.
Donnerstain and Wilson (1976) in Malim, T and Birch, A, (1998), Introductory Psychology, Basingstoke, Palgrave
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