Professor Ted Cantle CBE
Professor Ted Cantle CBE, Chair of the iCoCo Foundation and a leading national expert on community cohesion and intercultural relations, has joined the Accord Coalition.
Professor Cantle set up the Institute of Community Cohesion at the University of Coventry, and wrote the ‘The Cantle Report’, which was commissioned by the Home Office and published in 2001 after race riots in Bradford, Leeds, Oldham and Burnley that year. The report, which popularised the term community cohesion, argued that the fragmentation of communities along religious and ethnic lines and the lack of contact between those communities reinforced disadvantage and discrimination, and was an underlying cause of the unrest. The report described communities as living ‘parallel lives’.
Explaining his decision to join the Accord Coalition, Professor Cantle said, “We still have an alarming number of young people growing up in ignorance of ‘others’ and with little or no chance to dispel stereotypes and prejudices. Faith schools add to these divisions and the prospect of their expansion to all minority faiths, which cannot be denied to them, will create an even more balkanised community. The only solution is for a new open and mixed school system.”
Chair of the Accord Coalition, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain MBE said ’Professor Cantle has made an enormous contribution to the debate about the effect that schools may have upon cohesion and inter-cultural relations. His support further strengthens Accord’s voice and we are delighted to welcome him as a Distinguished Supporter’.
Professor Cantle joins Accord’s growing list of Distinguished Supporters, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds. The list includes:
- Baroness Tessa Blackstone, Labour Peeress, Minister for Education (1997-2001) and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich
- Rt Rev Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh
- Naomi Long MP, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland’s first MP elected to the House of Commons; Northern Ireland’s largest non-sectarian party
- Dr Caroline Lucas MP, former leader of the Green Party of England and Wales
- Lord Glentoran, Conservative Peer and Olympic gold medallist
- Philip Pullman, author
- The Rev Professor Christopher Rowland, theologian at the University of Oxford
- Polly Toynbee, journalist and writer
Notes
Professor Cantle’s website can be found at http://tedcantle.co.uk/.
