Identity

Haq Ismail: Trying to Fit In


Haq was born in 1970 in Pakistan. His family moved to Luton, England when Haq was eight months old. Haq attended his local primary school until he acquired a visual impairment at the age of eleven. He was then sent to a residential special school in Worcester and from there went on to university.

Here Haq describes the public school culture at his school.

https://howwasschool.allfie.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Trying-to-fit-in.mp3

Transcript

I didn’t know it at the time, but thinking back, yeah it was very much of a sort of public school type education and a kid coming from a working class background. A lot of the kids there had wealthy parents and my parents were not. And also I was pretty much one of the only Asian kids, there was a few black kids but the majority were white so I was working class, Asian, you know, Muslim, trying to fit into this public school, wealthy, you know, aristocracy kind of school.

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