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‘It can’t be a good thing for London to be sleepwalking towards Johannesburg’, conference warned London’s schools are “sleepwalking” into segregation, with classrooms in some parts of the capital teaching almost exclusively black or Asian pupils, a leading headteacher has warned. David Levin, vice-chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) – an association of 250 public schools and leading private schools – said he was alarmed at the way the capital was dividing into ghettoes and “becoming a silo society”. Levin, who grew up in South Africa under apartheid, said his school, City of London school for boys, collaborated with one school, Stepney Green in east London, where 97% of pupils were of Bangladeshi heritage. Other schools, in south London, took an “overwhelmingly” high proportion of pupils of west African descent, he said. Speaking at the beginning of the HMC annual conference in St Andrews, Scotland, Levin said it “can’t be a good thing for London to be sleepwalking towards Johannesburg”. He added: “They aren’t mixing with people from different faiths and backgrounds. I have lived pre- and post-apartheid and one of the things I have learnt is that your imagination is stronger than the reality. If you know people who are different to you, you don’t fear them.” He said education could bring children together. His school, where fees are £4,350 a term, holds private tutoring sessions for boys from Stepney Green in physics, chemistry, maths and English once a week. He said the state school would “enjoy having pupils from different backgrounds and races”. Meanwhile, Kenneth Durham, chair of the HMC and head of University College school in north London, urged the public to “take the independent sector seriously” and not to dismiss the schools as a “special interest group”. He said: “It is time that, as a nation, we stopped regarding the independent education sector as some peculiar historical aberration, as a repository of outdated social privilege, a sort of irrelevant and slightly embarrassing annex to our national education system and recognised it is something very different to that.” Durham said a quarter of pupils at private schools were from ethnic minorities and 40% of parents had not themselves been privately educated. Race in education Schools Secondary schools Race issues London Jessica Shepherd guardian.co.uk