Bussing out

Blackburn, Bradford, Bristol, Ealing, Halifax, Hounslow, Huddersfield, Leicester, Luton, Walsall, West Bromwich.

A policy active from 1965 to 1976, ‘bussing out’ was mandated by the Department of Education and Science in the name of helping non-anglophone and migrant South Asian, African and West Indian schoolchildren to integrate into British society. This policy of school dispersal was officially termed the Education of Immigrant Circular 7/65. It came about after the Conservative Minister of Education and MP Edward Boyle visited Beaconsfield Primary School in Southall on 15 October 1963. Shortly after talking to white parents who were voicing their disapproval of the number of immigrant children in their children’s schools, Boyle announced in the House of Commons that Beaconsfield had become an ‘irretrievably immigrant school’, leading to the development of the policy that each school should have no more than 30 per cent immigrant children on roll.

The local authorities of Ealing and Bradford, each with relatively high racialized minority populations, introduced ‘bussing out’, transporting primary schoolchildren from minoritized backgrounds out of their local schools and to more rural, white-majority suburban schools. ‘Bussing out’ continued under Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964 and by 1965 was adopted by eleven local authorities nationwide, including Blackburn, Bristol, Halifax, Hounslow, Huddersfield, Leicester, Luton, Walsall and West Bromwich.

While the policy was veiled by the aims of cultural integration, assimilation and English-language learning for children who had migrated, the schoolchildren being bussed out were solely those of Black and South Asian heritage, who were adversely impacted by educational discrimination and made vulnerable to ostracization and racism in their new schools. Shabina Aslam, the artist and scholar behind the 2023 immersive installation Bussing Out in Bradford, recalls how buses were explicitly marked out with coloured signs for the racialized minority children being bussed out, and describes feeling more segregated as a result. After moving to Bradford from Kenya – a former British colony – at 7 years old, she and her brother were bussed out of their local area and put into the special educational needs department at their new school, despite their fluency in English and being native speakers of Punjabi and Swahili. Hers is one among many oral histories in her Bradford project that detail the experience of being bussed out.

The Borough of Ealing’s bussing system was deemed legally discriminatory in 1975 under the 1968 Race Relations Act, and the Race Relations Board enforced its termination. In 1980 Bradford was the last city in the UK to end the practice of ‘bussing out’.