The fact that Dartford Grammar School for Girls has reportedly gone from 52% of pupils classified as White British to just 7% in a single decade is truly staggering.And this is Dartford. In Kent. In England.

We need to have the courage to discuss what figures like these actually mean. When we talk about integration, we tend to concentrate on language, education, employment and individual behaviour. What we rarely discuss is the demographic transformation taking place in some communities — or the possibility that this transformation itself can affect integration.

There is also the phenomenon commonly described as “white flight”. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people are fleeing because they dislike their neighbours. It can simply mean that families who would once have sent their children to a particular local school decide to move somewhere else because they want their children to grow up in a different social and demographic environment.

And “white flight” doesn’t necessarily stop at the English Channel.

I have actually met people who provide a remarkable example of this. More than twenty years ago, a British family I came to know moved from the Dartford area to an Italian mountain village. They told me quite openly that they no longer considered Dartford a suitable environment in which to bring up their children.

What happened to those children is fascinating.

They didn’t retreat into a British enclave in Italy. Quite the opposite. They became thoroughly integrated into Italian life. They speak Italian perfectly and have made a real success of their lives here. In fact, they sometimes laugh at their mother because, despite living in Italy for years, she still speaks Italian with a strong foreign accent while her children speak it completely naturally.

That, to me, is genuine integration.

And it makes me wonder what might have happened had that family stayed in Dartford. Perhaps the children would have done just as well. Perhaps they would have become equally successful. We simply don’t know.

But that isn’t really the point.

The point is that we should be able to look honestly at what has happened to places like Dartford without immediately being accused of prejudice. A change from 52% White British to 7% in one decade is not a small statistical adjustment. It represents an extraordinary transformation in the composition of a school.

And if families who would previously have formed part of that school population are leaving — whether for another part of Britain or, as in the example I know, even for another country — then the statistics may be telling us more than simply how many immigrant-background children are entering a school. They may also be telling us something about who is leaving.

That matters because integration is supposed to work in both directions. The aim surely cannot be to create separate communities which increasingly have little contact with one another. A school should be a place where children from different backgrounds meet, learn together and become part of the society around them.

If a school becomes so demographically concentrated that it effectively becomes a self-contained community, then we have to ask whether we are still talking about integration at all.

And this is where the Italian approach is interesting. Italy has restrictions intended to prevent excessive concentrations of newly arrived, non-Italian-speaking pupils in particular classes and schools. The underlying principle is simple: if integration is the objective, there needs to be enough mixing for integration actually to happen.

I don’t believe that children should be blamed for their backgrounds, nor that immigrant families should be excluded from British society. Quite the contrary. I believe strongly in integration.

But genuine integration requires people to live, learn and work together.

We should therefore be able to discuss demographic change, school composition and the possibility of white flight without pretending that these things aren’t happening.

Because when a school changes from 52% White British to 7% in ten years, something very substantial has happened.

The question is not whether we are allowed to notice it.

The question is whether we are brave enough to ask what it means.

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