Ensuring the right to education for Roma children : an Anglo-Swedish perspective

Access to public education systems has tended to be below normative levels where Roma children are concerned. Various long-standing social, cultural, and institutional factors lie behind the lower levels of engagement and achievement of Roma children in education, relative to many others, which is reflective of the general lack of integration of their families in mainstream society. The risks to Roma children’s educational interests are well recognized internationally, particularly at the European level. They have prompted a range of policy initiatives and legal instruments to protect rights and promote equality and inclusion, on top of the framework of international human rights and minority protections. Nevertheless, states’ autonomy in tailoring educational arrangements to their budgets and national policy agendas has contributed to considerable international variation in specific provision for Roma children. As this article discusses, even between two socially liberal countries, the UK and Sweden, with their well-advanced welfare states and public systems of social support, there is a divergence in protection, one which underlines the need for a more consistent and positive approach to upholding the education rights and interests of children in this most marginalized and often discriminated against minority group

Mid-term review- UK Roma national integration strategy: Roma at the intersection of ethnic-inclusive, post-racial and hyper-ethnic policies

Rather than developing a specific strategy to promote Roma integration, the UK government decided to use mainstream legislation. However, the complex mechanisms of UK policy-making, means that responsibility for integration is defused. Because of the devolved governmental systems and the localisation agenda, Gypsy, Traveller and Roma (GTR) populations often find that they are subject to different forms of inclusion and exclusion depending on their specific geopolitical location. In this paper, the authors suggest that in addition to experiencing the impact of devolution, ‘mainstreaming’ approaches to Roma integration are failing because GTR communities find themselves located at the intersection of three different policy ideologies in the UK: ‘ethnic inclusive policies’ (that seek to promote Roma inclusion), ‘post racial policies’ (that obscure-specific forms of structural inequalities) and ‘hyper-ethnic’ policies, (targeted in a discriminatory manner towards certain communities). With the British about to exit from the European Union, concerns are also being raised about the future of Roma communities and the commitment to their inclusion

Quasi-Federalism and the Administration of Equality and Human Rights: Recent Developments and Future Prospects – A Preliminary Analysis from the UK's Devolution Programme

Following the UK's move to quasi-federalism in the 1990s, the Parliament and Assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland gained powers over the promotion of equality of opportunity in the exercise of devolved functions. Constitutional law also placed human rights obligations on the regional administrations. Analysis reveals that the first years of devolution have seen a rapid growth and territorialization of regulatory bodies, such as commissioners, inspectorates, ombudsmen – whose remit includes these cross-cutting issues. Given the rise of distinctive sub-state ‘equalities infrastructures’ in the devolved nations, a key question is whether the dynamics of self-reinforcing feedback processes predicted by historical institutionalism offer the potential for more effective equality and human rights practice at the meso-level. While the discussion reveals a significant increase in the state's capacity to monitor and regulate, examples of innovation and policy transfer – and a cautious, yet generally positive, assessment by policy actors – a number of issues and shortcomings are also identified. These include limited government oversight and a lack of inter-agency coordination. Overall, the emerging evidence suggests that, from a functional institutionalist perspective, devolution has made advances in embedding the regulation of equality and human rights in the regional state; however, historical institutionalism indicates that, while devolution may be viewed as a ‘critical juncture’, notions of ‘path dependency’ towards more effective equalities practice are, as yet, unfounded and significant challenges remain