Introduction

Diversity is increasingly the order of the day in several major centres of population across the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world. Communities that currently lack such diversity will also change in the coming years as people of different nationalities, languages, and religions move in among them. What does this mean for public services, especially education, which is the focus of this book? Within liberal democracies, it is often assumed that public needs are equally catered for. The reality is often different. This is so because we do not have one public but many publics, each with their own needs, circumstances, starting position, resources, capabilities, and representation. Newton (1976) spoke of the challenge for services (such as education), arguing that not all publics are equally catered for. ‘In the competition for scarce resources, some publics are more capable of making their case with more powerful sanctions and greater organisation and cohesion than others; the end result is that the system responds differentially (emphasis added) to different interests according to the strength with which they can press their case’ (ibid., p. 236). Consequently, the needs of those who do not forcefully press their interests ‘tend to be neglected, overlooked, ignored, or denied’ (ibid., p. 236). This is likely to be the case for the education of Muslims, whose needs are likely to be poorly represented and, therefore, likely to be misunderstood and neglected by policymakers and certainly is for the largest of the Muslim groups, the Pakistanis, whose ‘case has not been properly articulated’ (Iqbal, 2019, p. 14). The challenge is clear and clearly stated; how should liberal society and those responsible for employment and decision-making provide equality, not just of opportunity but of outcome, for every individual regardless of which community s/he belongs to and regardless of whether their community is politically organised.