Ray Honeyford

Raymond Honeyford (24 February 1934, in Manchester – 5 February 2012) was a British headteacher, writer, and critic of the failures of multiculturalism, which he witnessed throughout his profession life. As a result of the observations he made Honeyford was targeted in a racist hate campaign.

In the early 1980s, when he was headmaster of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, Yorkshire, he wrote an article critical of multiculturalism and its effect on British education: this was published in January 1984, in The Salisbury Review, a conservative magazine edited by the philosopher Roger Scruton. Honeyford was suspended after being accused of racism, then regained his job after an appeal to the High Court. However, faced with a hostile campaign, he subsequently decided to take an early retirement from teaching.

Life Honeyford was born into a large working-class family, and grew up in very poor conditions. His father was an unskilled labourer who, after being wounded in the First World War, could work only intermittently. Honeyford's mother was the daughter of Irish parents.

Of his 10 siblings, six died in childhood. The small house which the family occupied in Manchester did not contain a single book. Honeyford failed his eleven plus exam and went to Manchester Technical School. At 15 he started work in an office to support his family. At the same time he attended evening classes to train as a teacher. In later years he took an MA in Linguistics at Lancaster University.

Before becoming headmaster of Drummond Middle School in 1981, Honeyford taught at various secondary schools in the Manchester area, including Lostock School.

Press controversy An article written by Honeyford for the Salisbury Review in 1984 discussed ethnicity, culture and assimilation, and educational performance. He had already publicised his views in two letters in 1982, sent to the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and a local Bradford paper, and then in an extended article in the TES in November 1982. and protests were held outside his school.

Posthumous assessment Mohammed Ajeeb, in an interview with the BBC published after Honeyford's death in 2012, defended his action against Honeyford: "His job was not to wander into race politics. His comments were taken up by racist people who made him a hero. I received hate mail saying I should go. [...] It's not the substance of what he said that was so offensive. It's how he said it and the right-wing journal in which he chose to say it." The latter riot resulted in the Ouseley Report, which noted that Bradford had become deeply divided by segregated schooling, resulting in children leaving full-time education with little knowledge of the lives of other communities.

The journalist and author Robert Winder said that Honeyford made "a serious point" when he argued that the kind of multiculturalism "which encouraged [pupils] to work within their own cultures and languages...was cumbersome, inefficient and divisive". However, Winder said, Honeyford had made his case "intemperately", and as "Bradford had an Asian mayor, and over two hundred Asian community organisations", his dismissal was inevitable.