ABSTRACT
Immigration has been the subject of intense debate in the UK raising particular concerns about segregated communities and schools, the exclusion of immigrant families from access to services and opportunities and the broader societal implications of ethnically segregated communities for integration and social cohesion. The study was undertaken as a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with parents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent living in a South Asian community in the South East of England. All the families in the study lived in ‘Highfields’, a large social housing estate on the outskirts of ‘Oakington’, a town with a population of 135,000 residents in the South East of England. A lack of school translation services meant that conversations with staff had become confined to the stiff formality of academic reporting at the Parent Teacher evening, and the spontaneity of informal support offered by casual encounters with teaching staff was lost.
