Gypsies at the margin of English life
14th May 2011

In a trailer park on the edge of Exeter I meet Kenny; small, sly, seven years old. He has a permanent squint that our grandparents may have called a 'wall eye', and half a dozen very white elongated teeth that protrude at odd angles from his mouth. Kenny offers to show me his most prized possession, a slow-worm – a kind of small grass snake. “I got 'im down the back,” is the limit of his response to my questions. He grins and sidles away to where his big sister is talking with Liz, the lady from the Education Department.

Kenny is a gypsy, which is to say he falls within the category known in England as Travellers, only he doesn't travel. This trailer park of about 15 sites lies in an industrial park within the rumble of the M5 motorway. It is an official gypsy campsite provided by the Devon County Council and most of the residents have been here since the 1960s. They have fenced their sites, laid out small gardens with outdoor furniture, sheds and garden gnomes. There is a children's playground and a car park.

Gypsies have lived in Great Britain for 500 years - a proud, independent and wilfully marginalised community. For much of their history they were the caravanning fortune tellers and tinkers, the field labourers and horse breeders of these islands. Their dark skin and decoration made them slightly exotic and, therefore, not to be trusted.

In the past 50 years the network of traditional camp sites has been swallowed up by expanding towns or buried beneath motorways. Seasonal labour that sustained a traveling life has dried up or gone to new subclasses of Poles, Bulgarians and Chinese. Many gypsies, like Kenny's family, have been corralled into Council sites on the urban fringes. Others have bought small plots of rural land and retreated to them, sparring with local authorities for planning permission to erect buildings and instal services. Others remain obdurately itinerant, parking illegally on strips of private land or public byways, in a constant round of evictions and community malice.

But even when settled gypsies remain marginalised. Like Jews in the ghettoes of Russia and Poland they draw their culture and traditions tightly around them like a coat, a shield. They remain almost invisible to mainstream society.

Invisible also to the education system. Liz, from the Devon Traveller Education Service, has played a 20 year game of cat and mouse with gypsy families; coaxing, couching and corralling them into a way of learning – and a way of life – they recoil from. In every one of the 5 or 6 campsites we have visited today we have met school-age children. All the families know Liz and accept her with varying degrees of warmth. Me they regard with outright suspicion. At every site they trot out well-rehearsed reasons for their children's truancy; “his shoes got wet,” “we been at the doctor's,” or, the clincher, “we been travelling.”

Liz's job is not helped by the reluctance of many schools to accept gypsy children. In New Zealand a school cannot refuse entry to any child within its catchment area. In England schools work to maximum rolls and can reasonably claim to be full when new children turn up. Sadly, many schools are 'full' to gypsy children but not to others.

Their unenthusiasm for gypsies is not just prejudice. Gypsy students have high absentee rates. Schools in England have strict attendance targets which a failure to meet brings down the wrath of government inspectors and a thrashing in the local press. One secondary school principal who wants to do well for gypsies says he restricts his efforts to include them because he can't afford his school to become a magnet for high needs and low performing students.

Liz believes the situation is improving. Younger parents are beginning to value education as the way forward for their children. A few gypsy students are completing secondary education and a handful progress to university. Most however remain like Kenny, with wet shoes, a crooked smile and a slow-worm.