to believe Faith schools should be privately funded ?

[Peetle]

I should explain my interest. The nearest primary school to my house is about 250 yards away and involves crossing two not very busy roads. It is a faith school. The next nearest is about 300 yards away, across a major road and in the middle of a council estate. It's ofsted report full of phrases like "higher than average English as a second language", "higher than average free school meals", etc, etc. Other local schools are over a mile away and we're likely to be out of their catchment area.

To get into the faith school families have to attend our local place of worship regularly for two years, know the officials and prove regular financial donations to the establishment. Of course, once these families have got their first child into the school they stop attending and donating. I also know of families of different and even contradictory faiths attending purely to get their children into the school. And I frequently see people picking up their children in cars, suggesting they live considerably further from it than we do.

We have no hope of getting into this school, not being hypocrites and not wishing to give our children the idea that it's alright to be dishonest about something if you want it badly enough.

My point is that I don't mind people wanting to give their children an education in their chosen faith, but I object to my taxes funding a school I can't use and which encourages parents to profess a religious belief they don't hold purely for the purposes of entry.

YANBU.
Why do you even need to have faith schools? And if so, why should the government fund it.

What's wrong with going to church and learning about faith from within the home and family unit if it's that important to you.

Rockbird, the point being is that other taxpyers, who live near the school who don't follow that faith, are automatially precluded from even applying since they won't get into.

How about their right to an education too? Why should they have to trek half way across town or attend a school not of their choosing just because they haven't found god.

Anyway, Peetle

what of the phrases "higher than average English as a second language", "higher than average free school meals", etc, etc

What did the school get overall?

I think yabu- I want to send my child to a religrous school as we are religeous. I like the fact that the church is such a large part of our community. If everybody did the right thing and sent their child to the non religeous schools if they were not practasing the religeon surley the non religeous schools would do better. I also really dont aggree with the 'donations' having a part to play in selection- this in my eyes is just wrong.

However- I do think the number of religeous/non religeous schoolsshould reflect the number of worshipers in the area.

Then there would be more choice. I was actually dissapointed that our local school (which has a great ofstead is non religeous)

boiledegg1 - what's your argument? That churches should be held responsible for people pretending to be believers so as to get their children into a school? Do you want them to issue a questionnaire to everyone who attends Mass? The schools DO believe that they are providing a blessing to the whole community - by running a school in accordance with the principles of their faith. It's not their fault if the school becomes over-subscribed. If they have to make a choice about who they take, then they're going to choose those children who are more committed to the faith - which I think is better than choosing them based on academic ability or parent's wealth.

It's the LEAs who aren't providing sufficient alternatives who are at fault, not the churches or their schools.

The statutory obligation for collective worship is incredibly broad - "collective worship is of a broadly Christian character if it reflects the broad traditions of Christian belief without being distinctive of any particular Christian denomination" and doesn't necessarily require 'prayer'.

This - www.cofe.anglican.org/info/education/collectiveworshippaper.doc - is a good document on the broad benefits to any and all of collective worship, regardless of belief or non-belief. We do live in a society of a culturally Judeao-Christian nature.

Only primary schools 'do' collective worship, it seems. Most seconday schools assemble once a week possibly and unless a faith-secondary, I have heard of none that included 'worship' as part of their morning assembly.

MrsVidic - Fine, but why should the state pay for it?

boiledegg1 - The state just needs to mandate that Churchs can continue to run schools if they like. Just with no religous content, as that should be out of the scope of state funded eduication. The church schools can then go private or sell their land and facilities to the state.

Here is my plan of genius:

The state should fund faith schools in proportion to the % of the population eligible to attend.

eg you have a CofE school that requires attendance at church twice a month to get your kids in.

7% (approx) of the population attend a CofE service twice a month or more

Therefore the taxpayer funds 7% of the school's running costs.

See? Simple, effective, fair. Vote for me!

YANBU.

My parents lied so that I could go to Catholic school. They applied the first time around being completely honest about the fact that I had not been baptised in the faith and we did not attend church. Of course, it being oversubscribed, I was rejected. So they launched an appeal, booked me in at the church and told the committee I was to be baptised the next weekend. I didn't wan't to be baptised, but nor did I want to go to the alternative (horrible) school. So what choice did I have? I got baptised that weekend and a few days later we got a letter saying that my appeal had been successful.

It was a good school and I was happy there, but it really opened my eyes to the fact that these schools are essentially inaccessible to most people; my parents spent weeks obssessing over the admissions, and even then they were lucky to get me a place. It just seems unfair that the taxpayer pays for a system that essentially asks you to justify your child's right to a good quality education, instead of providing it universally in the first place.

Am in NI, not going to open an even bigger can of worms re schooling!! Tbh most of primary faith schools in our area do have a high level of free school meals, children of migrant workers etc but are still very good schools. Although we still have versions of 11+, was supposed to be phased out but most parents wanted to keep it so differing versions of it!!

Faith schools are not "better" because they are faith schools. They are "better" because parents have to jump through a hoop to get theri child into them. This automatically excludes the children of parents who don't or can't care, or who find it so hard to understand the system that they don't consider sending their children there.

Any school that has a "hoop" to jump through, whatever it is, is likely to have better results than a school which doesn't. Requiring all parents to be able to juggle would produce the same effect. One of our local schools has significantly better results than all the others. Its hoop? It is beyond walking distance for the majority of families so you have to put your child on a bus.

TheHeathen - I agree that no more places should be provided in faith schools than proportion of the population that are regular worshippers. But if the taxpayer only provided 7% of funds to any one school, it would effectively have to be a private school - so providing education only to the wealthy. One of the strengths of faith schools is that they do provide a good education to many people for whom a private education would be unaffordable. And RC schools at least (I can't comment on other faiths) tend to have quite a socially mixed intake. So your plan would not increase fairness and I doubt it would be simple. 'Effective' depends on what you're trying to achieve.......

If the proportion of regular worshippers is 7% in the population as a whole, then maybe it should be that no more than 7% of school places should be in faith schools. This would force LEAs to start providing more alternatives.

I could talk for hours and bore you all the death on this subject.

YANBU.

There should be a CLEAR segregatiion between church and state, and ALL schooling should be secular.

I would not send my child to a catholic school if you paid me. She could have got into one which is (by GCSE results) better than the comp she goes to now. But no. I am not having her being taught within such a narrow viewpoint. No matter how 'good' the school.

re junior schools - they will all have a religious affiliation of some sort.

It makes a mockery of the word 'choice'.

Schooling in France is cimpletely secular, yet a lot of French are strongly catholic. So i really fail to see the point of religious schooling as a necessity.

As some others have said, a lot of school buildings are owned by denominations, mainly CofE and Catholic.
The Chaplain at my son's CofE school explained it rather simplistically like this:
At a particular time (not sure when) the Government needed to expand the number of school places. At the same time the Churches were finding it difficult to maintain all the schools they had, so a deal was done- CofE admits children, Government provides funds. To reverse this now would be nigh on impossible.
In this largely rural county there is a high proportion of CofE schools (mostly primary). Most of them are non selective and most of them are only satisfactory in Ofsted speak.
If governemnt funding was removed a huge proportion of the County would be without a viable Primary school.

But the "hoop" isn't that you all have to attend a church//synagogue etc, principally it's that you're in the catchment. Faith-attending catchment children first, fair enough if it is a faith school. Then catchment children - that's everyone who lives nearby - whether they're well to do or not. Our local faith school is located within and takes a lot of its intake from a council estate where some of the snobbier parents wouldn't dream of buying a house, and its ethos and values and excellence as a school (not just in results) are proven with Outstanding in All Areas for its Ofsted.

As always I agree with seeker on this subject, she always puts the argument forward in a more articulate way than I do.

It makes my blood boil, to be honest.

The argument that 'faith school parents pay taxes' is utterly spurious. Everyone pays taxes; people with no kids or who send their kids private, have to pay exactly the same taxes as someone using state schools.

And we all pay for education from our taxes because it is good for society for the next generation to be literate, socialised, etc.
But we are free (or ought to be free) to debate how best to set up said system for the widest benefit. Segregating kids according to the religion of their parents is not in the benefit of society at all IMO - does anyone genuinely believe it is?

seeker - not every parent has to jump through a hoop to get their child into a faith school. Mine didn't. Some people genuinely are worshippers, and don't think twice about which school to send their child to. Nor do they have any problems getting in.

I don't know enough about different types of schools to say why faith schools get better results. And that's probably not consistent across areas - some non-faith schools perform better than some faith schools. All the leading state schools are non-faith.

Seeker - LSE Research
Full paper

Sorry, they are bloody pdfs.

YANBU!! Why should we, the taxpayer, pay for any religion to indoctrinate children? Families can get their religious succour from worshipping as they please. Why should schools be involved, unless of course it is all about control and division?

TheHeathen - nobody said 'faith school parents pay taxes'. We all pay taxes and we all deserve a decent education for our children. Whether the parents are worshippers or not shouldn't be relevant.

YABU - making all faith schools private is a bad idea, although perhaps a compromise should be that all state faith schools should have to take a % of no faith.

FWIW my kids are at a faith state school. We are religious and we still had to jump through hoops to get a place.

I personally wouldn't have a problem with non faith children at the school but I am not sure what they would do in the 40% of the time during faith based studies, or whether the non faith parents would be happy to pay for these studies (the state doesn't pay).

If the school was forced to become private then the poorest families would be forced to leave. Not sure how this would help???

YA so NBU. It's a mystery to me why faith schools have a place in state education at all.

If anyone can't open the pdf's the conclusion is that where Faith schools do better it's entirely due to selection, if you look at the outcomes for children from the same postcode (full postcode - so only a few houses in each, and likely to be socially homogenous) the results are the same whether or not they go to a faith school.

MumNWLondon - Either the poorer parents could move to a secular school or the church could subsidise them.

What are the faith based studies the state doesn't pay for? The state pays 90% of the costs of faith schools.