News

This post is reblogged from Migrants’ Rights Network with permission.

Gracie Bradley, Project Manager at MRN, talks about the hat that she wears when she isn’t running the Route To Your Rights project – coordinator of the Against Borders for Children campaign.

The collection of nationality and country of birth data in schools and nurseries was a change in policy announced without much fanfare last spring. The government intended to link this new data to other information such as address and ethnicity that is held in the National Pupil Database (NPD). The NPD contains the records of around 20 million people. The data is never deleted, and identifiable information on individual pupils is accessible to the Home Office, the police, and third parties such as researchers and the press.

Bleak

In 2013, ministers and civil servants discussed excluding children with irregular migration status from schools. Next, in 2015, the then-education secretary Nicky Morgan announced a review of ‘education tourism’. This policy on ‘foreign children lists’ was introduced in May. As recently as October, just after Amber Rudd was forced into a climbdown on her proposals for foreign worker lists, a parliamentary question revealed that the Home Office has requested the data of thousands of children from the DfE in the last 15 months alone, including for immigration enforcement purposes.

Whatever justification the DfE might give for the new data collection, the wider context of the “hostile environment” cannot be ignored. The last few years have seen successive pieces of legislation decimate migrants’ access to justice while turning employers, banks, the DVLA, landlords, and health workers into border guards. This was no time to sit back and watch teachers be added to that list. Schools should be a safe place for all children, not potential collaborators with immigration enforcement.

Strength in numbers

When the campaign started in September, we took the fight straight to government, and wrote a letter to Justine Greening calling on her to scrap the data collection. A wide range of human rights groups signed in solidarity with us; from Privacy International and the Open Rights Group, to Liberty and the Refugee Council. That was enough to get us press coverage in almost all of the national papers. At the same time, we launched a social media campaign to get the word out to as many schools and parents as possible: you do not have to answer the new questions on nationality and country of birth, and refusing to do so protects migrant children and sends a strong signal to government about the kind of society we want to live in.

And then the stories from schools and parents began to pour in: children being asked for passports, contrary to official guidance; schools targeting only foreign pupils for the new information in a clearly discriminatory way; schools wrongly telling parents that the new questions were mandatory; migrant children singled out and embarrassed in front of their classmates.

#BoycottSchoolCensus trended on Twitter, and well-placed FOI requests submitted by our brilliant sister campaign defenddigitalme kept the issue high on the political agenda. The House of Lords passed a motion regretting the new data collection on 31 October, with one peer remarking that it has “all the hallmarks of racism”. And long overdue scrutiny in the House of Commons is expected in the coming weeks, thanks to a motion tabled by Jeremy Corbyn.

Concessions

The first signs that the policy was crumbling came just before the debate in the House of Lords, when Lord Nash reportedly wrote to peers to say that the new data will not be held in the NPD due to its sensitivity. Then, the day after we met with civil servants at the Department for Education last week, the government announced another U-turn: it will not attempt to collect nationality or country of birth data on toddlers through the Early Years Census this January. Credit is due to the civil servants at the DfE who took the time to listen to the stories of the migrant families at the heart of all this: of the parents scared to send their children to school; and the migrant children told to “go home” by their classmates.

The fight continues

Now that the government is on the back foot it’s crucial that we keep the pressure up. We might have spared the pre-schoolers, but the nationality and country of birth questions are set to remain in the next School Census, due on 19 January. But if the data is unusable, the DfE won’t be able to justify its continued collection.

That’s why we’re encouraging all parents to answer ‘refused’ to the new nationality and country of birth questions. There’s no sanction for doing so, and absent a change of heart from government, or more concerted parliamentary opposition, this may be the only way to get this risky and divisive policy scrapped for good.

We have a long way yet to go, but the successes of the campaign so far show us just how much we can achieve when we work in solidarity against forces that initially seem much bigger and more powerful than we are: a note of quiet encouragement for these troubled times.

​On Sunday 20th November, about 20 children and adults came together for the first ever Kids Against Raids and Borders meeting. There were wide ranging discussions about the ways that racist violence is carried out through government agencies and individual actions.

Young people talked about their experiences of racism and everyone talked about developing strategies to avoid or stop harm creates by racists.

One 14 year old suggested using Snapchat to share resources about what Immigration Enforcement vans look like and what to do when you see an immigration raid or if a family member is questioned by an immigration officer (don’t talk as you can refuse to answer their questions). The group discussed how to raise awareness among their peers about the school census and what immigration controls actually involve, and ideas included making comics, leaflets and zines.

Young people also broke out into their own space to discuss ideas without adults dominating their conversation. Using memes like the Mannequin Challenge was an idea that KARB will look into producing.

Kojo from Against Borders for Children did a presentation and Q & A on the Government’s Foreign Children Database and the ongoing boycott of nationality questions on the school census. The campaign recently won a concession which now means pre-school children are now exempt from the nationality questions but 5 – 19 year olds will still be targeted in January.

We also watched a video of a Shutdown Yarls Wood demonstration by Sin Fronteras and they talked about how to make links with those in detention.

The next meeting will be set in the New Year. All are welcome to attend so contact us for more information and to keep updated.

When we urged a boycott of nationality and country of birth data collection in schools, we feared the School Census would be used for third party purposes, including immigration enforcement. We didn’t know then that it already was.

It turned out that children’s names, home addresses and school details are handed out regularly to the Home Office, which has requested information on almost 2,500 individuals in the last 15 months.

How can anyone trust the Department for Education’s (DfE) assurances that that these new ‘foreign children lists’ will be used to support children’s education, and will not be given to the Home Office, when the National Pupil Database is already being used to target children?

Growing opposition to the policy now includes politicians across party lines in the House of Commons, following a successful motion of regret in the House of Lords. The National Union of Teachers has also felt compelled to remind the government that “schools are not part of policing immigration”.

In September we wrote to Justine Greening and asked her to scrap this risky and divisive policy. But the DfE plans to press ahead with it in January, when nationality and country of birth data will be collected from every child in state-funded education in England.

All schools and parents can respond ‘not yet obtained’ or ‘refused’ to these questions without fear of sanction.

We urge all politicians to speak up for the rights of migrant children and families, and to say no to foreign children lists.

Signed

Against Borders for Children

BARAC UK

defenddigitalme

Institute of Race Relations

Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants

Latin American Women’s Rights Service

Liberty

Migrants’ Rights Network

National Union of Students – Black Students’ Campaign

Open Rights Group

Privacy International

Refugee Council

Right to Remain

Southall Black Sisters

An interview with Swadhin from KARB.

• What is KARB?

KARB is kids against raids and borders –  a new kid’s campaign.

• Why did you want to set up this group?

Because I think there is space for one and there is a need for one. We need one. There is no real kid’s campaign in any of the movements now. There is nothing to get kids genuinely interested. Raids and borders are more of a metaphor for the state’s oppression itself in a way. Another reason is that raids and borders affect children most out of what the government does to oppress people.

• Why raids and borders?

By raids I mean immigration raids – raids are when someone knocks on your door or stops you somewhere and asks you questions or tries to force you into a van or puts you in handcuffs or arrests you in some other way with no charge and no crime committed. This is purely about the government interest in getting rid of migrants.

Borders is because the government are making everything a border, schools, hospitals, policing (that has always been a border). All public service now have become a way to subject the many to more oppression.

• Why do you think young people should get involved in groups like KARB?

Because not only are young people affected as much as adults but also our movement is pointless without a succession and children will most likely be the succession to campaign.

But also kids should participate in campaigns because we don’t get together enough  and it is also just a way of talking to each other about what’s on our minds and what school’s like and human interaction really.

The first meeting of KARB will be at The Field, 385 Queens Road, New Cross on Sunday 20^th November from 3.30pm to 6.30pm. There will be activities for younger children and space and a meeting space for older children and teenagers to make materials for the campaign and plan future activities.

Last weekend, ABC met with a group of young women and girls from Sin Fronteras – a youth project that is part of the Latin American Womens Rights Service – to talk to them about the campaign, and the upcoming debate in the House of Lords.  The talk came during a workshop in which the group were creating a zine on equal rights in education, including information to raise awareness of the new DfE policy.

Members of the group spoke about their experiences with the new country of birth and nationality data collection, with some being shocked when they discovered they actually had the right to refuse this information.

“I got a letter from school asking for my nationality and country of birth – it didn’t say that we can refuse, we thought it was obligatory”.

All expressed their dismay at the data collection and its link to immigration, particularly given that the Home Office and the police have been granted access to the National Pupil Database (NPD) on numerous occasions over the past 4 years.  They voiced anxiety at what the policy could mean for those whose families are undocumented, and also at how this data collection might link to Brexit, for those with non-British passports.  Even with the assurance that their families would face no sanctions if they refused to provide this data, group members worried that such refusal could in itself mark them out from their British counterparts:

“If we say ‘refused’ on the form, could they not use that to know we are undocumented?”.

This is why we called on British parents and children to also support the boycott –  no group should be singled out by their rejection of this policy, nor should the fight against it fall only on the shoulders of those it most directly affects.

It is difficult to offer sufficient reassurances with such a discriminatory policy causing real fear and anxiety for young people and their families.  The first School census day (6th October) to include this data happened in the same week the Home Secretary announced the policy for companies to report the number of foreign national employees.  While the government have since declared that these lists will not be made public, they will still be constructed, and secretly held by the government for future planning.  

It was also revealed today that in the last 14 months, the Home Office has asked the Department for Education for access to the school records of almost 2500 children, including for immigration enforcement purposes. Such a hostile environment makes it easily apparent that we must do all we can to have this policy repealed.  The group expressed determination to fight for the rejection of this policy, and persuade others around them to do the same.

“Now we are conscious that we, as migrant youth, can refuse to give this information and oppose this legislation that will affect the opportunity we have to educate ourselves freely. As young Latin Americans living in London, we believe that we have the same right to education and that it shouldn’t be a privilege of citizenship or migrant status.”

The group urged everyone to contact members of the House of Lords ahead of the debate on 31 October, writing to a Lord they already know; the Lord Watson, Labour’s Education Spokesperson in the House, or even on Twitter at @LabourLordsUK & @LibDemLords using #EducationNotDeportation and #BoycottSchoolCensus.  

The debate will be a chance for Peers to vote to show that they want the policy to be scrapped. Having them understand the depth of worry over the policy can help to persuade them to make this happen.  So many have expressed their outrage and disbelief at this policy, and by expressing yours, you still have time to make a tangible difference.