Would you start attending church to get your child into a C of E secondary?

I’d do many things to ensure the best for my child. That’s an easy one to do. Have your child’s back as no-one else will.

Our area is like this - decent (if super strict) CofE option or a parade of terrible alternatives. Personally we are relocating rather than doing the church attendance thing, but I appreciate that we’re in a privileged position to have this option. Failing that, pragmatically, I probably would, and judging by how oversubscribed the school is (against a backdrop of falling rolls) and the high turnover of congregants at our local church, cynical church attendance is very much the done thing here.

@AbsentosaurusRex At some, the religious activities are fairly minimal. Most dc just join in without belief.

@FenceBooksCycle

Children from church families do not get two bites of the cherry

They often do, just as children from families who can afford private do. If the local indie options are better than the local state options, those who can afford it can take that choice, those who cannot, can not. If the local faith options are better than the local non-faith options, those who qualify on faith grounds can take that option, those who don't, often can not. The difference is that I'm not paying for wealthier children to have more options than mine, whereas I am paying for faith children to have more options.

Absolutely nothing prevents a currently non-church family from doing what it takes to qualify under the church criteria but they are not faith criteria

As has already been noted, around London many oversubscribed faith schools, both RC and CofE, don't make it past the "Baptised Catholic children..." and "Baptised children..." categories. I don't know if it's still the case, but some RC schools use to prioritize early baptism as well, e.g., before 6 months or before 2 years old.

Yeah sure why not. It’s all bollocks anyway, so if you gain a decent education for your child out of it, why not. That’s of course assuming that it is a decent education. Is there no other school they can go to? Remember at this one the kids will have enforced religious activities.

Absolutely nothing prevents a currently non-church family from doing what it takes to qualify under the church criteria but they are not faith criteria

Apart from the fact that it discriminates against children who come from families with social problems or those whose jobs make church attendance difficult.

If your mother is a single parent holding down 3 jobs and struggling to manage life in general, how easy is it to tick all the boxes required?

Yet the system makes it very easy for someone like me who despises all religious equally to trot along on a Sunday morning for the requisite number of years and hold my nose for a desirable school place. We all know in-demand church schools do better due to selection by the back door rather than any kind of moral virtue.

@FenceBooksCycle Your comment on FPI is flawed, as @stoopy already explained.

Children from church families do not get two bites of the cherry, each child gets 1 education.

Wrong. Religious families have more cherries to choose from, even if all the cherries are funded by everyone's taxes. Even when certain cherries (schools) are supposedly open to non-religious families, the religious ones still have more chances.

Absolutely nothing prevents a currently non-church family from doing what it takes to qualify under the church criteria but they are not faith criteria

Wrong again. Many faith schools require baptism. Maybe all Catholic ones do but few CofE do, of that I'm not sure.

Ah, and let's not forget that, before a fight in court, the criteria were much worse. The London Oratory used to request baptism certificates from child and parents, and used to rank families on their contributions to the church - ridiculed as the flower arranging criterion, it meant prioritising those who donated money to the Church. It took a legal battle, but that was ruled discriminatory and illegal. Let the children come to me. But only the rich ones, the plebs can ##@@ off.

@OhCrumbsWhereNow I found it pretty revolting that we were ineligible for 5/6 of our nearest primaries on faith grounds, yet are expected to fund them.

Exactly! We would never accept this with any other kind of state-funded service. Can you imagine hospitals discriminating based on faith??

100%

You also only have to attend church - you don't have to actually participate or believe. You can sit on the back pew and read the paper if you want to.

DH is Jewish and we are both atheists.

DD did go to a CofE school for a while. I crossed out everything in the contract that said I would support anything to do with faith. Didn't go as far as withdrawing her from anything religious, but I would have done if we were allocated a faith school against our preferences.

I found it pretty revolting that we were ineligible for 5/6 of our nearest primaries on faith grounds, yet are expected to fund them.

@FenceBooksCycle Not all faith schools have great results at all! Plenty get into RI or inadequate. Plus parents who take dc to school get the places - the better off parents. Faith selects on money and finding faith. Hardly fair to all and essentially exclusive.

"The Government owns or leases most school buildings."

By which I mean local government or national government, depending on the school type.

"The church contributes the capital cost of the building, generally millions of pounds worth, without which the school's budget would be overwhelmed with PFI payments for the buildings. It varies from school to school how much the church contributes to building maintenance etc, but the "running costs" of a school go far beyond the teachers' salary bill, which is what the state pays."

@FenceBooksCycle It's certainly true that if church schools became non-faith then the Government would need to compensate the Church because they own the buildings.

However most non-church schools don't make "PFI payments", only a relatively small number that had capital work done under PFI initiatives in the past. The Government owns or leases most school buildings.

The Government pays 100% of the running costs and most of the Capital Maintenance costs of faith schools. Some faith schools are "voluntary aided" which means they contribute 10% to Capital Maintenance. However, many of them are now converting to academy status so they no longer need to make that contribution. There are also "Voluntary Controlled" faith schools that never did have to contribute the 10%.

Btw, I worked it out once about 10 years ago, based on some published data that, nationally, the 10% contribution amounted to about £30 per child per year which neatly correlated with what my kids' VA primary requested from parents as an annual 'voluntary' contribution.

It's disingenuous and mistaken to describe that the church's contribution to church schools is so low. The church contributes the capital cost of the building, generally millions of pounds worth, without which the school's budget would be overwhelmed with PFI payments for the buildings. It varies from school to school how much the church contributes to building maintenance etc, but the "running costs" of a school go far beyond the teachers' salary bill, which is what the state pays.

Children from church families do not get two bites of the cherry, each child gets 1 education. The higher performance of many church schools is because the additional effort needed to go there means that there's a higher proportion on average of children who are brought up with the right kind of attitude to benefit from their education. Absolutely nothing prevents a currently non-church family from doing what it takes to qualify under the church criteria but they are not faith criteria - faith cannot be objectively observed or measured. If the education offered by the faith school is the one you want then all it takes is the right real physical actions to meet those criteria. The beliefs in your mind are not assessed. If a faith-filled education isn't right for your child but they are bright and interested in education, it won't matter in the long run whether they are part of the 53% with good GCSEs from the faith school or part of the 48% with good GCSEs from the non-faith school. Each child in a cohort of 240 students represents less than half a percent of those performance stats and each child's experiences and chances are not greatly affected by what everyone else in their yeargroup achieved.

Or perhaps allow them to qualify as specialist schools, where they could award up to 10% of their places to students who demonstrate the most faith ability. As 10% is more than a church typically contributes to a school's budget, that would be showing the Christian value of generosity🤔

Failing limits like that, I wouldn't mind school applicants splitting themselves into "faith" and "non-faith", where those ticking the "faith" box would be eligible for preference into faith schools but placed at the back of the queue at "non-faith" schools, and vice-versa. Note: a child from a religious family wouldn't be penalized at a non-faith school so long as they didn't tick the "faith" box in order to gain preference at a faith school as well. My issue is that we're all paying the same taxes but some children are allowed two bites at the cherry.

Two are, two aren't.

House prices in the village where the secondary school is located, are slightly higher than the local town, but not shockingly so. But considering that the surrounding villages are equally lovely, and within catchment, they aren't particularly expensive

I was talking to one of the local vicars about this. She says they essentially encourage it - after two years it might stick for some and become a habit. And even for those who don't, it boosts church attendance and the number of children attending church. She said that from both a ministry perspective and a pragmatic perspective she saw it as net positive.

That's really interesting, as most of the CofE schools here put

Are the feeders themselves CofE schools?

I do think the admissions impact is greater in primary than secondary - the proportion of faith primary places is greater and PANs are of course much smaller. All the local CofEs here follow the 50% rule - so after LAC and other statutory obligations, up to 50% can be allocated by faith - first the linked church, then other CofE churches, and some will also prioritise other Christian denominations. So only after that is it on distance.

I'm pretty sure there was research done on the impact of faith selection on house prices and catchment sizes for nearby non-faith schools - essentially wherever you have a larger number of parents competing for a smaller number of places, the better off win. So if some of an area's school places are being taken up by churchgoing kids from further away, the pressure on local school places increases.

I think the whole admission system needs changing tbh, not just with regards to faith. Distance is also problematic, but the impacts on the socioeconomic character of schools is less pronounced with distance alone than with faith schools (a desirable faith school has two ways to filter out kids from the most challenging backgrounds as they can apply faith and then a smaller number of places are allocated by distance, their distance-based catchments are likely to be a lot smaller than a community school of the same size.)

This obviously only applies to oversubscribed schools - the socioeconomic difference and "better performance" of faith schools both disappear as soon as they are forced to take any child that applies to them.

The whole system needs a shake up and much better clarity and standardisation, as well as fairness. It won't happen because the system is too arcane with too many vested interests propping up different bits of it.

I'm wouldn't be totally against it.

Traditionally in this country, attendance at a 'place of worship' was the norm, or at least a norm, much or most of it by people who weren't at all devout but who valued the community aspect, the chance to do a bit of singing, maybe get involved with the odd outing, etc, letting the kids play together. It still is the norm within, e.g. Muslim communities. I definitely don't totally disdain this motive, being part of a religious community genuinely can be a good, very affordable, way to meet people and do something together as a family. I've done a little bit of this kind of attendance myself with my own kids over the years.

I suppose I'd be fairly dismissive of a family who started attendance and then dropped it suddenly once school offers were out, but I'm not really sure that this is as common as all that.

I spent some time looking at the admissions policy for the secondary CofE local to me.

Their pupil admission number is 145, with other local schools having a PAN of 240 or more.

As mentioned before, the catchment area for this school covers several small villages; geographically the catchment area is huge. In population terms, with the four primary schools feeding into this secondary (all of which are at or beyond PAN) that leaves 25 places per year for admission based on LAC, prior connections and then religious affiliation.

I appreciate this is one school amongst many, but in this particular case religious affiliation is not the main driver for admission - catchment area is.

I actually agree with @BunfightBetty on this one. I know multiple families who have moved house to get into catchment for their preferred school (in the leafiest area of Liverpool).
And yes, catchment has one of the biggest impacts on day to day life in a school. That's inevitable.
In general, popular faith schools are not full of low income families though. They are probably more mixed than popular schools in expensive locations, but by siphoning engaged parents out of other local schools, they make those schools significantly worse.
I don't know how you address this. I heard a rumour our local leafy school is considering reintroducing feeder schools, because they'd actually prefer a more diverse intake. Catchments designed to cover a variety of areas would be helpful. But of course, any system is gameable by determined parents. (Except perhaps lotteries, which have their own problems).
I do agree the actual solution is reducing inequality, investing in poverty reduction and education, particularly SEN (both for children with emotional/behavioural problems and children with learning difficulties). But good luck with that.

House prices - it’s the opposite. No school way ahead of the others because supportive parents are spread out in all the schools, not just the hot spot faith ones. It’s all about scarcity of housing and where the upmarket areas are.

Where I live, the sought after faith school doesn’t push up prices much. As it’s got a tiny catchment area you would think it would, but people prefer the grammars (if possible!!) ) and for them you can live anywhere in the LA and get allocated to one. All are fantastic. No faith required! Otherwise people do find faith and travel miles whilst still maintaining a home in a better location. Our old house was very close to the faith secondary but where we live now, houses are nearly double the price! It’s just better and has a good secondary but just not quite as good as the faith one. However most church dc don’t want the journey to the faith one. Overall people want to live where the school is good enough but there’s more to house prices than schools. A lot more. Mostly here it’s scarcity due to AONB and green belt. Little to do with education but if a school becomes inadequate parents want a good one but not necessarily a faith one.

Yes, your position aligns with the status quo - that makes you lucky, but it doesn't make some of the assertions you've been making correct.

Faith selection exacerbates the impact of house price selection - by reducing the number of non-faith places available at local schools, you increase the other drivers of selection - house prices being the main one.

It's also quite blithely arrogant to talk about the fact that anyone can go to church without acknowledging any of the factors that make it less likely for children from the poorest or most chaotic homes to have parents who attend church regularly - from mental or physical illness and disability to literacy levels that mean they can't even properly engage with understanding the hoops they'd need to jump through let alone jump through the hoops, to alcoholism and drug use.

Then you've got the kids of parents who don't understand the system and don't know they would have had to engage with it years in advance.

All of those kids deserve an equal chance to a local education as the children of (disproportionately better-off as a group) churchgoers. And right now too many of them are being squeezed out by reserved faith places, and then house prices playing a more extreme role in driving competition for the fewer non-reserved places on offer locally.

It’s not unfortunate for me at all that you have a different opinion to me. As it happens, the status quo broadly aligns with my position, so happy days for me.

There’s lots wrong with our school system in general, and nobody has perfect choice, other than those who are wealthy enough to be able to afford the top private schools. It sucks. But taking away the faith school criteria won’t change that. All that would happen is the issue of being able to afford the inflated house prices near to good schools would get even worse. These would not be the only sought-after schools. A narrower field with fiercer competition, that would favour the well-off middle classes even more. The ultimate segregation by economics.

At least with religious criteria you are not actually barring lower income people from qualifying. You can be totally without a pot to piss in and attend church. Not so if the only means to get your child into a good school is to buy your way into living on the right street.

The underlying issue is the problems found in schools whose intakes draw from lower economic circumstances. No matter how you slice or dice it, there’s the rub. Until you solve that problem at root, nothing else is going to make a material difference.

Failing a system where there were reserved faith places in direct proportion to the church's contribution to the school's running and capital costs, it would be interesting to see the reaction to a system where those who don't practise a faith got preferential admissions to non-faith schools.

Ok, let's take a case study. Outer London borough. Three closest schools are faith schools. The closest non-faith schools have tiny catchments as a result because of the number of kids coming from further schools for the "desirable" schools.

When a child fails to get into any local schools, the one they're offered is a 30 minute drive away (as opposed to a short walk). Ironically, it's also a CofE school. So where's the choice?

("Fortunately" in our case, one of the local CofE schools had a less-than-stellar Ofsted and suddenly a lot of people who were dead set on faith education suddenly found they had other priorities, so there were places available.)

On to your wider point: I can hold two positions in my head at once. I can believe that the state should not fund faith schools, and also believe that if the state is going to fund faith schools (as it does), then state money should not be used to discriminate in school admissions and that all children should be treated equally in the question of access to state schools.

As you've said, plenty of under-subscribed faith schools don't use any selection criteria or filter as they don't have enough applicants.

Segregation by religion is a fact - particularly in Catholic schools where up to 100% of the intake can be selectively Roman Catholic children - what else do you call it when a school is entirely of one faith, regardless of the religious makeup of the community they live in?

This is less so for most CofE schools where the 50% rule applies. But any schools that apply selective criteria, including on faith, are ensuring a school population that is of a higher socioeconomic status overall than its surrounding community. So we're segregating by wealth.

Your posts demonstrate that you are arguing from a position of feeling rather than fact. It's unfortunate for you that the facts about the education system don't support the position your feelings think they should.