Great British School Swap sees Birmingham school children switch ethnic groups

Last night saw The Great British School Swap debut on Channel 4 - and it features kids from Birmingham and Tamworth.

The eye-opening documentary, set to air weekly on Tuesday evenings at 9pm, featured saw a predominantly white school and a mainly Asian school swap pupils in an experiment.

This week, white pupils from the town of Tamworth get a shock when they arrive in Saltley, central Birmingham, and become the racial minority.

A transgender pupil is paired with a devout Muslim girl, a white mother overcomes her prejudices to go for dinner in an Asian house for the first time, and tensions rise when the students find out what they really think about each other.

“Now is not the time to be building fences, now is the time to be knocking them down,” says the head teacher of Tamworth Enterprise College, Staffordshire, whose 95 per cent white secondary school is about to embark on an exchange with Saltley Academy, Birmingham, which is less than one per cent white British.

Headteacher at Tamworth Enterprise College Simon Turney says: "Now is not the time to be building fences, now’s the time to be knocking them down.

"I think our students are going to be really challenged by the differences in cultures, they would never have been so far out of their comfort zone in their 13/14 years of life."

When the 12 pupils from Tamworth arrive at Saltley Academy, some of them are genuinely scared when the school bus drives through Bordesley Green, where three quarters of the population are Muslim.

Now the white British children are in the minority.

Looking out of the window onto the busy Alam Rock Road, one Tamworth pupil says: "Right now I'm petrified and nervous."

Another says: "It's really different. I've seen a Gregg's though."

At the beginning of the episode, the first of three, pupils are asked whether they've ever seen an Asian person.

"No", two boys reply.

When asked what is Islam, one pupil says: "I don't know. Is it a country?"

Arriving at the school all of the students are nervous as they sit in their segregated groups in the classroom.

Their teacher starts the lesson by showing the pupils a powerpoint presentation - it's the answers the pupils wrote down to a questionnaire before the swap.

They were asked to write down what they thought about their respective cultures.

For many of the Saltley Academy pupils, they view their white peers as 'bacon-loving, lazy, fat poshos'.

And they even believed all white people enjoy nudist holidays.

The class erupts into laughter.

When the tables are turned, the Tamworth students said their new classmates 'only shop at Primark and eat curry'.

These are some of the less offensive prejudices the groups had of one another.

The students also discuss racist language, with many of the Tamworth students not believing 'half-cast' and 'Paki' to be classed as racist until they talk about it in the lesson.

To break up the two groups, they're put into pairs and this is when the students soon learn they're not so different after all.

One pupil says after getting to her new friend: "I thought they were going to be posh but they were normal human beings. We’re so close together but it’s like completely different countries."

It's evident the kids get their attitudes from their parents and in one scene, a white mother overcomes her prejudices when she goes to dinner in an Asian house for the first time.

"That was lovely," she says. "They have a skybox, the house was clean. It wasn't at all what I thought it'd be like."

Tensions do rise between some of the pupils, particularly for a transgender student who faces difficult questions from his new classmates.

But many of the students begin to form strong friendships that will last for life.