PLANS to set up a high-profile committee to look at community relations in Blackburn have been scrapped.

Council bosses had been expected to form a single ‘steering group’ in response to a report that said the town was one of the most ethnically divided in the country.

But they were unable to find a suitable person to head the committee. Instead, they will set up a number of smaller groups looking at specific aspects of life in the borough.

Council leader Michael Lee said: “We wanted someone with a high profile who would have a positive effect on what we wanted to do. There were two or three people we approached as possibles but they were unavailable.”

But Labour group leader Kate Hollern said a number of ‘small talking shops won’t work’. She said: “We need something high profile. They have burried their heads in the sand over this for three years now.”

The first committee to be formed will look at education and will try to come up with ways of bringing children from different communities together.

In May, the report by Government community relations expert Ted Cantle delivered a stark verdict on the town after a six-month study.

It said communities were becoming increasingly divided and called for an urgent ‘step change’ in the way the authorities handled the issue.

The education ‘task force’ will be chaired by Robin Campbell, head of Pleckgate High School, and St Mary’s College principal Kevin McMahon.

It also includes representatives from the multi-million-pound Building Schools for the Future programme and Tauheedul Islam Girls High School.

Other areas to come under the microscope over the next few months include housing and the economy.

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Under Building Schools for the Future, every school in the borough will be rebuilt or renovated.

Witton Park and Pleckgate High Schools will be totally rebuilt, and a new East Lancashire Community School will be built to replace Blakewater College.

Beardwood High will close and its 1,000-plus students will move to other schools in the borough.

The Beardwood site will become the new home of Tauheedul Islam Girls’ High school which will double in student numbers to 600.

The council claims the super schools will encourage cohesion by making the schools centres for the whole community.

They say the proposals, although not merging traditional white and Muslim schools as has been done in Burnley, will contribute to cohesion by providing a strong school in every community.

But critics say the changes will not help children from different cultures to mix, and could perpetuate the ‘parallel lives’ problem highlighted in Ted Cantle’s report.

Mr Cantle said faith schools were ‘automatically a source of division which have to be overcome’.

The borough’s schools were more segregated than the communities they represented, he said, with half of pupils being selected on the grounds of faith.