A changing Britain needs to ask: what kind of country do we want to be?

After Christchurch, I found myself thinking about East London. Not because I was wondering if it could happen here because, frankly, of course it could but because what’s happening in East London is going to change Britain and, because of that, is going to have to change the way we think about this country.

Consider a pair of pioneering schools in East London. Last year pupils at Brampton Manor academy, most of them from ethnic minorities, received 41 offers from Oxford and Cambridge. Another Newham school, the London Academy of Excellence has a claim to be the best-performing sixth form college in England. While selective, around half its places are filled with pupils from one of London’s poorest boroughs. The school’s academic record is exemplary and, indeed, inspirational. The children and grand-children of immigrants there, as elsewhere, are achieving results that might have seemed inconceivable 30 years ago.

In time —  not quickly enough for some, too rapidly for others — their alumni are going to transform our idea of Britain.