Mr Cameron’s new language initiative for Muslim women: lessons in policy implementation

As the government announces a programme to teach Muslim women to speak English, this article examines how such a policy can be implemented successfully, arguing that lessons that can be drawn from both academic research, especially that carried out with Muslim women themselves, and from successful policy application in the past. It focuses on two projects carried out in the recent past for the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and Jobcentre Plus, and outlines the key factors that led to their success. The LSC project involved one of the largest in-depth surveys of Muslim women’s attitudes towards work, and their views on life in Britain, that has ever been undertaken. The Jobcentre Plus project was a highly successful and innovative employment training initiative for ethnic minority women piloted in Sheffield, the very kind of ‘targeted’ approach that Mr Cameron has claimed his government’s new language initiative will be.