I don't get it. I thought Gove was pro faith schools, and getting parents to run them?

[PurplyBlue]

Has he changed his mind?

But to answer your question Purply - the DfE seems to want schools doing their own thing, parents involved and lots of faith input - but only if it's the RIGHT sort of thing, the RIGHT sort of parents and the RIGHT sort of faith ;-)

Yes, I imagine he had in mind an army of liberal, non-contentious folks who would work for free (putting the 'free' into free schools). That may well bite him on the arse.

humanism.org.uk/2013/10/10/bha-expresses-alarm-two-state-schools-challenge-teaching-evolution/

It's not just one type of school that has this kind of problem.

I strongly believe that religion (worship rather than multi faith philosophical education) has no place in our state education system. If you want religious education then either pay for a private school or out of school hours teaching.

No school whether state or indi should be able to opt out of the parts of curriculum they find offensive or in direct opposition to their religious teaching, ie sex ed/evolution etc... or multi faith education.

I heard a Birmingham Head Teacher being interviewed on Radio 4 last night. She was complaining that a few parents at her school were asking for their children to be treated differently - not allowed to go to mixed sex swimming lessons, not allowed to take part in art lessons. These are absolutely standard requests from Muslims, yet she seemed to see it as an unacceptable attempt to distort the curriculum. I suspect that the Trojan Horse letter, which is now believed to be a scam, was a very successful attempt by non-Muslim teachers or parents to cause trouble for non-Extremist Muslim parents. Have we seen evidence of actual extremism, rather than commonly held Muslim beliefs?

totally agree cerealmom!! all schools should be non-religious.

personally I would even go as far as saying RE should be scrapped in schools, if you want your child to learn about religion, pay for classes outside school. I think there is far more important things they could be doing rather than 1/2hrs a week on RE, ie PE, literacy/numeracy etc

What should a Muslim parent or child do about lessons that conflict with their beliefs? Eg, what should a Muslim child do if they are required to attend art lessons and to draw a self-portrait? My DD has a Muslim friend and her approach was to attend lessons but ask my DD to do the drawing for her. I can't see a whole class of Muslim children getting away with that approach though.

see Im not at all rasist, whatsoever, but if the English school system doesn't fit religious beliefs they have, I think the parents should either move to the country that supports their religious beliefs or home-school their children. what on earth is the problem with doing art??!?

we cannot accommodate every possible religion, it would become utterly unworkable, therefor why should we make special provisions for the muslim faith?? (genuine Q)

I don't think the problem was with faith schools as such, more with stuff like discouraging girls from participating in extra-curricular activities, making girls sit at the back of the class, removing all art and music from the curriculum for some years, narrowing the syllabus for some subjects to meet rigid religious criteria and - above all - doing all this within the guise of a secular mainstream school.

Happily we have freedom and tolerance in this country and people are free to start bonkers religious schools if they want to and can find enough pupils. What's not OK is taking over a normal school, full of kids with normal parents who want a normal mainstream education for their kids, and turning it into a bonkers religious school on the sly.

I don't see that it is difficult to accommodate reasonable requests, there is surely no need for self-portraits in art lessons, for example, a simple choice of something else to draw could be offered?

Some things may be more difficult of course, but these must be issues which are being addressed every day in schools up and down the country.

And I think comparing the Birmingham schools to mainstream state-funded faith schools is a totally false equivalence, no matter how virtuously super-liberal it makes you feel to say it.

Most state-funded faith schools happily take children of all creeds and work hard to promote interfaith tolerance and respect. They don't get Al Quaeda-supporting nutjobs to come and address the assembly, and tell the kids that Western women are 'white prostitutes', and work hard to ensure that the pupils have limited or no awareness of religions other than the one promoted by the school.

It's a lot more than just not wanting to do draw a self-portrait though isn't it? You only have to read the Ofsted reports to shudder at what was found by the inspectors.

I think people should only be free to start bonkers schools if they are entirely self-funded.

And actually, these would need to be kept an eye on too - if the Scientologists, for example, or rabid American Christian Evangelists wanted to start opening chains of schools here (as I'm sure they could afford to) then the Government should be able to say no.

I agree with you Purply but let's be honest - there seems to be more and more bonkers schools under the name of Islam in parts of the UK and you have to wonder what's going on in these places.

As a parent I put a lot of thought into my dc schools. I chose non religious schools for all of them. My dc have visited mosques, cathedrals,churches and can talk to you about aspects of other religions as well.

Given that the final school allocation is done by the local authority and my decisions were based on prospectuses and visits, I would not neccessarily have been aware of the religious ethos creeping in when I chose/was allocated our schools.

I would not be happy to find that my dc was attending a school with religious rules dictating the ethos when I thought it was multi cultural.

I have no issues with religious schools as I believe that they do have a place in our society. I think that if this group of parents want an Islamic school, and perhaps, given whats happened there is a need for it, then an Islamic school could be set up along the lines of free schools?

Smelly - as I understand it, drawing a picture of an animal or human would be seen as blasphemous.

We have a lot of Muslims in my DD's school. From what I see there, run of the mill Muslim people are way way stricter in their religion than anything we ever see among Christians. They take these things very seriously. Eg refusing sweets that might contain gelatine.

Most state-funded faith schools happily take children of all creeds and work hard to promote interfaith tolerance and respect. They don't get Al Quaeda-supporting nutjobs to come and address the assembly, and tell the kids that Western women are 'white prostitutes', and work hard to ensure that the pupils have limited or no awareness of religions other than the one promoted by the school.

Many faith schools HAVE to take children of other faiths because there aren't enough children of the 'right' faith that want to go there.

And actually, if you go back even less than 100 years, Christian schoolgirls and boys were routinely separated, and the ethos was very dogmatically determined by religion. British faith schools of old were not liberal institutions AT ALL. That's just what we've got away from in recent years.

I don't think you'd need to go back very far at all in Ireland...

I'm totally against misogynistic practices in Islamic schools or anywhere else.

I just don't think the answer is to integration difficulties is to form separate Islamic schools, especially ones that are not constrained by the national curriculum etc. That will just make the problem worse.

Swannery - no indeed, and in many other places too. The 'hangover' is still very much there.

All this stuff about girls being discriminated in these schools is complete illogical rubbish.

There are lots of single sex schools, both in the state sector and the independent sector. Nobody has EVER previously suggested that it is a "British value" (WTHTM) that boys and girls must be educated together. If it is then a vast chunk of the independent sector and a significant chunk of the state sector needs immediate reform.

In classes teachers often put the kids who behave worst at the front where they can see them. More of these are boys than are girls. Usually girls want to sit beside girls and boys beside boys. In my mixed secondary school almost always at two seat tables it was two boys or two girls and the girls and boys certainly weren't evenly distributed around the class.

If a teacher uniformly made girls and boys sit separately and put girls at the back and boys at the front then that's not right, but none of the evidence that I've seen suggests that.

retro There's plenty of evidence though that (for example) girls were discouraged from taking part in extracurricular activities, some women were referred to by teachers to the children as 'white prostitutes'. That's pretty solid evidence of some unpleasant religion-flavoured gender discrimination/misogyny and hardly comparable to boys and girls being educated separately.

purply I'm not talking about faith schools 100 years ago. I'm talking about faith schools now What on earth do the activities of a school a century ago have to do with modern values, generally well upheld in faith schools, such as promoting diversity and inclusivity - which is after all what the problem was with Park View?

Exactly OTheHuge. Why do people try and justify problems now by pointing out what was done wrong donkeys years ago? Aren't we supposed to be trying to make this a better world? We should be identifying and addressing concerns of today.

retrorobot - single sex schools is not the same at all as forbidding boys and girls at the same school to sit together, or even near each other, because it is 'improper'.

And yes of course girls and boys will usually choose to sit together when they are a bit older, again that has nothing to do with it.

Aren't we supposed to be trying to make this a better world? We should be identifying and addressing concerns of today.

Yes, and getting away from the unworkable, unfair, archaic faith school system is a good start. IMO, obviously.