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A school has sparked fury after putting limits on the number of ethnic minority students allowed in its classes after numbers surged to more than 80%.

In three of seven first year groups at Langkaer upper secondary school in Denmark, half of those attending will be Danish.

In the remaining sets all students will be from a migrant background.

But the school’s headmaster Yago Bundgaard admitted that the ethnic minority pupils were actually chosen based on the sound of their names as he described it as the “least bad solution”.

He told broadcaster DR: "For real integration to take place in a class there has to be sufficient numbers from both groups for it to happen.”

(Image: Getty)

The number of ethnic minority students in first year at the school had risen from 25% in 2007 to 80% this year.

The announcement has been strongly criticised, with a Turkish-born Danish politician threatening to report the school to Denmark’s equality board.

Ozlem Cekic said: “When a headmaster isolates the brown children from the white in an upper secondary school, he is part of sending a signal that the whites must be protected from the brown.”

(Image: Getty)

And human rights lawyer Nanna Krusaa told broadcaster TV2 such a scheme would be “illegal”.

Danish education minister Ellen Trane Norby said she had ordered the school to produce a report in a bid to make sure the law is being upheld.

She wrote on Facebook: "The fundamental problem is that we in Denmark have... schools with a too high ratio of students with a different ethnic background than Danish.”