The Salisbury Review - Honeyford Affair

Honeyford Affair

A controversy involving Ray Honeyford, headmaster of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, Yorkshire, gave The Salisbury Review much publicity in 1984. According to Scruton: "This episode was our first great success, and led to the 600 subscriptions that we needed."

An article written by Honeyford for the Review in 1984 discussed themes on ethnicity, culture and assimilation, and educational performance. He had already made public his views in two letters in 1982, to the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and a local Bradford paper, and then in an extended article in the TES in November 1982. In that, he rehearsed a number of points, in particular on where the onus for integration and the limiting factors for educational performance lie in the home family environment in immigrant families. He attacked what he saw as the misplaced use of multiculturalism in schools, and 'political correctness' in the form of scrutiny of textbook material.

The 1984 Salisbury Review article "Education and Race — an Alternative View" covered similar ground, but caused a national outcry. Honeyford had already been in discussion with his Local Education Authority after the 1982 TES article, in the context of Bradford Council guidelines on educational aims issued in that year, but had not been disciplined. After the second article he was disciplined, and was also the target of a campaign for his dismissal. He was sacked, reinstated and then took early retirement, about two years after The Salisbury Review article was published.

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