The Big Gypsy Challenge New Wales

The traditional ways of Gypsy life and traditional ways of education

have been at odds for hundreds of years.

I want my children to go to school. They have got to get an education and go to school,

but we should be allowed to have our culture the way we used to live it.

When my grandparents were little, travelling for work,

get the income in for the family, school was unrealistic for Travellers.

For centuries,

Gypsy traditions have been stigmatised and criminalised.

The Gypsy sites remind you of an Indian reservation.

Catch them and put them in one place and leave them there.

The children of Welsh Gypsies and Travellers are more likely

to encounter racist abuse in school than any other minority group.

There was one girl and she was calling us like, you Gypsy rat.

How is that a privileged situation? They're pulled out of a class because of their race.

Welsh Gypsy traditions are at risk.

Formal education may help or hinder its survival.

Have you ever been to school before?

How about you, tucked away in the back there?

The children of Welsh Gypsies and Travellers

have historically had the lowest performance in reading

and writing skills of any minority group monitored by school authorities.

A proud tradition of travelling has a downside.

A child's formal education is disrupted at best,

or bypassed altogether.

At the moment, we don't know nothing. Just run and play.

A past government initiative used a caravan to bring education

to Gypsy children who had never been to school.

Close to 50 years on from this black and white film,

just how far have things come?

Some Welsh Romany Gypsy families

in South Wales have left the travelling tradition behind

for the sake of their children's education.

I want my children to have the best education they can.

An education that I never had.

I used to like travelling, I'd like to do that now,

to be honest with you, but I don't.

Because I want my children to have their education and go to school.

Leighton Price is a Welsh Romany Gypsy living in Llanelli.

Behind Leighton, his wife Rebecca and their children,

is the pile of bricks and mortar they now call home.

Travelling these days is mostly the school run.

It is a pretty good school, to be honest with you.

The people are really friendly.

And all my children's cousins are in here. People that they play with.

I never had the opportunity to go to somewhere like this.

I've never been to school.

I've always wondered what could have happened,

what sort of qualification I would have had if I'd been to school.

But, like I said, I never had that opportunity. So we'll never know.

Leighton Jr and his sister, Amber,

attend Bryn Teg primary school in Llanelli.

According to the Prices,

their kids and the non-Gypsy kids all get along.

Fresh Gypsy cake remains a Price family tradition.

Leighton's dad, Nelson, is over for a visit.

That's what we used to do.

Go away for a month and then come back, you see.

That's me and Leighton on a tractor, doing the hops.

When young Leighton was helping his dad to harvest hops

when he should have been at school, it wasn't truancy,

it was a matter of family survival.

It was rearing the children up in a different environment.

I'd like them reared up the way we was.

The children are not free these days.

I won't let them outside to play for too long without I'm there.

Leighton's dad is the family historian

when it comes to memories of a past way of life on the road.

And he takes every opportunity to remind his grandchildren

of their heritage.

Now see by there, in them scrambles by there,

say about 30, 40 feet from here,

that's where the horses and wagons was pulled.

Right by there. That's where we used to stay.

And live. Five months, ten months, 12 months.

Well, the last time I was here,

on this piece of ground, was that time,

when I was ten years old and I'm 67 now.

That's me and my brother and my sister and my mother and father.

My mother could read. My father couldn't.

I think Linda could read but out of all of them,

it's only my mother that could read and write. We never went to school.

And that was the wagon.

This wagon is a show wagon, that's a barrel top.

We had horses and everything to pull them about.

And that was our lifestyle. People can't understand it.

It was the most brilliant life. Couldn't ask for no better. We didn't want to go anywhere.

-Are they still here today?

-Yeah.

-No, I mean them.

Oh. They're gone, years ago.

But it's not only grandparents that have caravan memories.

Shannon Treharne is a 16-year-old Welsh Romany Gypsy.

She also grew up on a caravan site in Llanelli,

and attended the same primary school as the Price children,

while living in a caravan.

I'm performing tonight.

Hopefully!

It'll be one of the scariest nights in Shannon's life.

She's rehearsing with her school choir

from Coed Cae Comprehensive in Llanelli,

and will sing a solo at tonight's performance.

Shannon is about to finish secondary school

and will go on to a college for performing arts.

She'll be going further in her education

than any of her Gypsy ancestors over the past 250 years.

Shannon has defied the odds.

While most Gypsy and Traveller children now start school,

in Wales, up to 75% of Gypsy and Traveller pupils do not go on to secondary school.

At 11 months old, I moved into a Gypsy site,

made especially for my family.

My family's lived in Llanelli for like 250 years.

Until the 1960s, they mostly lived in wagons.

Then after that, then, they moved on to modern caravans or trailers.

Shannon's family moved out of the Gypsy site

and into a conventional house when she started comprehensive.

I loved living on the site.

It's like you see all your family there, you can go over for a chat.

The animals surrounded us on the site.

Every family had five or six horses. Three or four dogs. Birds.

A musical streak among Shannon's Welsh Gypsy ancestors

has inspired her career dreams.

My family did go busking.

My family would have a go at anything.

Spoons.

Violin.

Accordion.

Every type of instrument, they'll have a go at.

I learned from my family the love of music,

from the age of three until now.

But I wanted to do something with my life

and my love of music is the top priority.

The schools offer more than the family will

because the school's got more equipment to progress through life.

I'm the first one in the family to actually read music.

Shannon has made the transition to being a house dweller,

from living in a caravan.

'Up and down Wales, councils were faced with angry demonstrations,

'particularly in Clwyd and West Glamorgan.'

In spite of a legacy of hostility from settled communities

across Wales, not all Welsh Romany Gypsies have given up travelling.

A caravan site near Builth Wells accommodates dozens of Gypsy

and Traveller families on their annual pilgrimage

to Mid Wales to take in the Royal Welsh Show.

For about a week each year,

the site is like a home to one large extended family.

When you're moving about like we are doing here now, you don't know

whether it's going to be a week, two weeks, then the bailiffs come and move you straight on.

But as it is now, when we go back to the sites,

we can stay there as long as we want.

Henry Price, his wife Rosie and their 14 children have been

travelling to the Royal Welsh Show all their lives.

They are very distant relations of the Price family in Llanelli.

When not travelling, this Price family is based at a caravan site in Cardiff.

Official sites are an historic compromise.

Gypsy and Traveller families escape constant harassment,

but retain only a semblance of their traditional, nomadic way of life.

They're settled down in one place, they go to school every day,

they've got running hot water, electric, they've got everything

what they've never had when they were on the roads.

The children of Mr Price and other Gypsy children

are more likely to attend local schools

and have a better chance of getting an uninterrupted education.

They learn to read and write, that's the most important thing.

Most of us can't read and write. But our kids can today.

And that's a big help.

In a Gypsy culture that traditionally survived

by its wits, higher education was either unobtainable or considered less relevant.

You've got to show kids how to survive.

When we were growing up, we had to be put to work. We were workers.

We had to work for our living.

We were never in one place long enough to go to school.

The question of education has become all the more critical

as the traditional means of Gypsy survival disappear.

Horse breeding,

seasonal jobs in agriculture, are replaced by machines,

and even scrap metal has become scarce, as metal prices soar.

Our family have come from West Wales, Pembrokeshire.

They used to pick potatoes in the summer,

a bit of scrap metal around the houses

in the winter, but that's how we was reared up.

And that's how it goes from there.

This is our currant pudding now going in for our tea for tonight.

There it goes in.

And that's it.

We show them the life that we had.

If they want to go to high school, perhaps they will go to high school,

but when they get old enough then, they'll perhaps find a job.

It's up to them.

This metal tripod, called a chitty, with its crafted horses on top

has been in the Price family for close to 200 years.

To us, that's our microwave.

That's the modern microwave today,

that's the way we used to cook food like that.

All we got, rabbit, anything we could get our hands on,

would go in that pot to feed these children.

This chitty has seen a lot of cooked rabbits

and a lot of Gypsy currant puddings.

Learning to read and write may be a milestone for some Gypsy families,

but in today's high-tech culture it may no longer

be sufficient to ensure economic survival.

Shannon Evans is an 18-year-old Welsh Romany Gypsy.

She is a cousin of the Price family

and a regular at this Royal Welsh Show caravan site.

Like Shannon Treharne of Llanelli, she's defied the odds.

She completed secondary school and took courses at college

and she has experience on her CV, dealing with bailiffs.

When they come to move us, the they will give us a week or a few days.

Some will give us hours. They say, "Get off, we'll get the bailiffs."

Then we've got to pack everything down and get away within that hour, really.

You'd live in your house and that would be your home.

This is our home, but we're just not permanently living in one place.

Our home is wherever this caravan is.

And it is hard. But, yeah, it is something we've got to do, really.

This is the bedroom.

This is the bathroom.

This is the kitchen where we produce all the lovely,

lovely, wonderful meals.

I'd want my children to go to school.

They have got to get an education, they've got to go to school.

But we should be allowed to have our culture the way we used to live it.

Gypsies and Travellers still encounter bailiffs

and prejudice in Wales.

At school, they are the most likely students to encounter racist abuse.

When we was going to high school and we were all there, and there

was this one girl, and she was calling us, like, you gypsy rat.

It's very hurtful when someone is saying, you gypsy rat.

And they calling you like Pikey. Why would you say that?

You're on this earth for a reason and that's not to be called names

and it's not to be called spiteful and hurtful sayings.

Cos it do hurt.

But in spite of racism,

Shannon finished school with her dreams intact.

I went on then to do a course in college for hair and beauty.

I did it for two years and got all the qualifications that I needed.

From there, I just got married

and then I haven't had an education since.

I always wanted to get married. I found the right boy.

And I thought, the timing was right, and I just done it.

I was 16 when I started going out with him

and I was 17 when I married him, and I'm 18 now.

It is common to get married at a young age

and to give up all your dreams, whatever you want to do in life.

For some Welsh Romany Gypsy women,

strictly-defined gender roles also contribute to leaving school early.

Chantelle, Leona and Montana Price have been travelling

to the Builth Wells caravan site all their lives.

They are nieces of Henry Price.

This one's name is called Trigger.

He is five years old. And he's a stallion.

I'm a gypsy, so I don't believe in going to high school.

No-one's ever did, so I'm not going to start now.

I left school when I was 14.

I left school at the age of 11.

I left school when I was about 16.

Then I wanted to come home and do the cleaning.

Cleaning. Just clean, clean, clean, clean.

For Gypsy women, maintaining strict cleanliness is a tradition of some Romany families.

Some parents don't want their kids to go on and get educated.

They just want them to be housewives really.

Wait for the husband, to cook and clean.

Distrust of the non-Gypsy culture is another factor

why some do not go on to secondary school.

In the Romany language, a Gorja is a non-traveller, a non-Gypsy.

The schools are like seen as supervised by the parents.

They want their children out at an early age,

so they don't pick up so much of the Gorja culture.

Parents don't want their children to grow up so fast, as in,

14, 15, have a boyfriend, have a child at 16-year-old.

Compared to 50 years ago,

more Welsh Gypsy children go to primary school than ever before.

But they are also the most likely to drop out early.

Back in Llanelli, Leighton Price is joined by his sister, Tracey,

also a former traveller.

You have seen a photograph of me as a baby, have you?

Would you like to see a photo of me as a baby?

Their main concern isn't about school attendance,

but that as Gypsy children, they be treated equally to all the others.

Now this is my little brother, Leighton.

Three of Tracey's kids also attend Bryn Teg Primary School in Llanelli

with two of Leighton's kids.

Tracey's kids came home one day with some unexpected news.

I love that school.

Leighton and Tracey discovered that for brief periods

during the week, their kids were being taken out of their regular

class and placed in a special reading and writing workshop.

It happens to be a workshop intended for Gypsy pupils,

who are assessed to need additional support.

When you start the school, they'll ask you what culture, and I put down Gypsies.

We hadn't heard nothing about this until Tracy's children come back and told us.

They'd been pulled out of class because their Gypsy children.

-Why do we have to go to that reading and writing class?

-Oh, my God!

Cos were flippin' Gypsies, duh! I said that just now.

She had a book, she made us read, and made us right.

And she said, "I only work with Gypsies."

We had to go to a different session.

Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon.

I was expecting the teacher to say that basically the children had it wrong,

which I thought they did, to be honest.

When we went in, she said, "Yeah, we got a course

"going for the Gypsy children because of Traveller illiteracy."

They keep saying constantly that our children is in a privileged situation.

How is that a privileged situation? They're being pulled out of a class because of their race.

Leighton's view of having his kids put into a class

solely for Gypsy children, even when intended to provide extra help,

stoked a deep-seated fear they might be stigmatised.

We didn't want to be taken from our friends.

And if they take us away from our friends,

we won't have any left.

You know, they see them getting pulled out of class

because they're Gypsies.

Some of the children's going to make fun of them. How does that make that child feel?

We've been here all our lives.

That's exactly what we don't want our children.

The Price family children have been in continuous education

since they were three.

The special support was historically motivated for Gypsy children

whose education was disrupted by being on the road.

The Welsh Assembly and local authorities established the criteria

by which Gypsy children are assessed for this extra support,

based on attainment.

Back at the Builth Wells caravan site,

are Gypsy elders with first-hand experience of fragmented education.

When we had to move from the one camp to the other, they'd have to go to a fresh school and start over again.

I couldn't see how you could ever learn.

Whatever you learned going to school for about two or three months,

it was six months before you got into another school, maybe 12 months.

Whatever bits you learned, it was gone.

It was like one stupid move after another.

The Welsh Assembly has set aside £900,000 to improve the reading

and writing skills of the children of Travellers.

A programme which exists with the best of intentions appears

to have backfired, specifically in the case of the Price family.

-Don't like being split up.

-Give me some of this, OK?

And any special programmes targeting the needs of specific groups

of Welsh schoolchildren must be handled with care.

# I want to be a good teacher. #

At the Adamsdown Primary School in Cardiff,

not the school attended by the Price children in Llanelli, there is

a special two-day workshop intended only for its Romany Gypsy children.

The headteacher is keenly aware of the potential hazards

of separating the Romany children from the rest of the students.

These are Czech Romany Gypsies.

I was a little bit like,

"I don't know, really take them out on their own?

"Is that going to actually help?"

Why don't we do a Somali day? Why don't we do an Arabic day?

Why don't we do a Bengali day?

And why would we do that when our actual vision for our school

is that everybody should be integrated together?

When we actually worked on the whole workshop together, the two days,

the Czech children came together very strongly as a group on the first day.

They create something and then that is their something to give back

to the other group of children and to the rest of the school.

For these Gypsy children, English is not their first language.

And the workshop is also intended to improve their writing skills,

but they would not be in this separate class if their parents

had not explicitly given the school their permission,

which for the Price family is a big issue.

The school said it was due to hold meetings yesterday with concerned parents to discuss the issue.

If the papers printed that, we've obviously spoken to the school.

We want them to have the best they can possibly have.

And if they need help, we're more than happy for them to have it.

But they don't just get help because they're Gypsies.

Leighton and Rebecca's kitchen has become a campaign command post,

which may end up challenging national policies.

Everything that we've got here, we've had to find out for ourselves

because we can't get no help from anybody.

The solicitors we speak to, they keep putting us over to somebody else.

They want more information about a reading improvement programme

they feel can do more harm than good.

And possibly to challenge it.

They have taken their children out of the special programme.

They want the school to formally apologise.

And their research revealed the scale of Welsh Assembly funding.

There's £900,000 in a pot. And they're getting money

for doing this with the children. But still, we could have said no.

We never got asked that question.

You have to have parental permission for that. You get offered it.

You ask the parents, would they like it,

and if the parents say yes, then you provide it.

If the parents say no, but I've never had a parent say no.

They've always said, "Yes, please. We'd like some extra lessons."

We did ask the teacher why she never asked us

about the children going into this class.

We weren't aware of anything going on.

To try and get answers, and in search of an ally,

they visit Llanelli Assembly Member Keith Davies.

If extra support is available, I think,

parents should take advantage of it.

If you're not a Gypsy or a Traveller, you don't get this extra support.

There are Gypsy children who need that support because they have interrupted education.

-And it should be given to them.

-And that's fair.

-We want that.

There's been a grant, right, I don't know how long it's been,

15 months, more than that,

but they're normally for Travellers' children who travel. Right?

And that's the reason the grants have been given so that when

they move from school to school, they can have the additional support because obviously, when you are

starting a new school, you are almost starting from scratch again.

The Government's made sure of it that we cannot go travelling any more.

If I went into like a caravan park and I go there with my children,

I think I was doing something wrong, by pulling in there.

Even when we do something right, we feel we're doing wrong,

when we're doing right. We don't know where to go. They keep saying we are in a privileged situation.

These children are not in a privileged situation.

They're took out of class, they're being segregated in that way.

And you should be given the opportunity of saying, we don't want it done.

Guidelines, which accompany this Gypsy and Traveller initiative,

stress the importance of involving Gypsy parents beforehand

and point out the hazards of any perception of segregation.

We feel like we're getting fobbed off. We want answers.

We want these LEAs to explain about what they have done and why this have happened in this school.

And this money is not for our children

because our children haven't had any sort of interrupted schooling.

We're on our own again. We need to stand alone.

We need to do more research and we need to contact people ourselves.

Carmarthenshire local authority has stated that the children...

APPLAUSE

# Tell me it's not true... #

I had wanted to have a job but you do something else.

You go with your head instead of your heart.

A lot of Gypsies do that. They don't follow their heart.

They should just follow their heart, really.

# Tell me it's not true... #

Perhaps the next generation now, the next 50 years,

God knows how they'll be. Perhaps there might be a Prime Minister!

# Say it's just a dream

# Say it's just a scene... #

When I'm older, I would love to move back onto the site.

My family may not have. But I want to go back to my roots.

# Oh!

# Oh. #

APPLAUSE

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