Baptised to get in to a school?

[mummy21boy]

So there is a very good catholic school in our catchment area but to be in with a good chance of getting in you’d need to be a baptised catholic. Dh was brought up catholic but isn’t religious so we haven’t had ds baptised but dh thinks we should now to get him into this school.. aibu to think this is morally wrong?

Not in my parish. That said we are a long way from civilization

Jassy...what?

@JassyRadlett get your facts right first, you're making yourself look really stupid!

@JassyRadlett get your facts right first, you're making yourself look really stupid!

Elaborate? That the vast majority of funding for faith schools in the state system comes from the exchequer, or that faith selection disproportionately benefits children from better-off families, or that it separates children by faith where it is used as a selection criteria?

None of those are particularly controversial; all are based on evidence.

I was being (obviously) sarcastic in my suggestion about faith children going to the back of the queue at non-faith schools to demonstrate how ridiculous the argument is that the children of churchgoers should get preferential treatment at schools almost entirely funded by the state because their parents happen to believe in the ‘right’ god.

Which facts has JassyRadlett got wrong?

I don't think it's wrong op. But make sure you know just how Catholic a school it is. DSs school was pretty full on with 5 prayers a day, regular masses etc.

Some parents who weren't catholic were somewhat surprised by just how much religion there was.

But I disagree that it brainwashed them. DS decided for himself he didn't believe, and chose to attend a non catholic secondary and has also chosen not to be confirmed.

Which facts has JassyRadlett got wrong?

Yeah I’m confused about this too.

Honestly, getting into a good school is really important for a child’s future so you should do everything you can to make it happen.

youknowme, Jassy is right. These days the vast majority of the costs of running church schools are covered by the taxpayers.

There is a simple way to sort this. If you want to apply to a faith school, you should not be allowed to apply to any other sort of schol in the first round. . If you don’t get into the school of your choice, then you go on the waiting lists for whatever’s left.

Bertrand that would be harsh on those of us who apply to a faith school because it is our local catchment school. We applied this year for DC1 and our first choice was a Christian school. We are not Christian. However, it is our local school, within walking distance and we applied on distance (non-faith) criteria.

Why should that mean we can’t apply to any other school?

I think Bertrand’s model works if you’re applying for a faith school under the faith criteria. (Or under the sibling criteria If the elder child was admitted under the faith criteria - which is how the faith schools often appear to have places for children outside the faith but then don’t really.)

So basically if you’re saying a faith education is this important to you that you think you should get preferential access to a certain school over children for whom it is a much more local school, then you should not get preferential access based on eg distance to non-faith schools.

littlecaf

And it was mostly naice middle class families who sent their kids there as they didn’t want them to go to the crap comprehensive!

This is honestly not the case at the school my DC go to. There are many new arrivals from Romania, Latvia, Albania, Italy, Spain, Poland. Some arrive with little to no English. The traveller community attend Catholic schools. Where we live the 'naice middle class' children go to other schools.

The Catholic school is the most diverse but gets by far the best results. It's not the intake, it's the ethos of the school that achieves this. In fact the 'naice middle class' schools in the town are under-performing. Maybe the non faith schools need to buy into the model of the faith schools. Look at what they do to achieve the good results.

Yes I can see how that might work Jassy. It was Bertrand’s unqualified statement that I take issue with.

@JassyRadlett The current system actively discriminates against four year olds based on religion (and class, based on stats not anecdote - churchgoers are disproportionately better-off than their surrounding communities), and segregates Christian children from non-Christian children.

This is just rubbish! Catholic schools are generally favoured by the travelling community who fit the criteria of being practising catholic's.

As a whole (individual school anecdotes notwithstanding), faith schools as a group only outperform non-faith schools are when they are oversubscribed - and thus able to select their intake based on faith criteria. In common with all schools who are able to do a degree of sociodemographic sifting, they do better.

No matter which way you cut the sociodemographics of the populations who satisfy those criteria, they disproportionately exclude the most deprived. The children whose parents are organised enough and together enough to go to Mass/church once a fortnight for two years, who don’t work minimum wage weekend shifts (or have family who can take the children to church if they do), who are interested enough and committed enough to their kids’ education to navigate the minimum criteria and letters from vicars and the rest of the admissions system. And who have the social capital associated with being part of a wider church community.

Those kids already have a leg up. They are likely to do better wherever they go.

The kids who don’t have those advantages are then disproportionately represented in non-selective schools (and even more so when house price selection is taken into account), meaning those schools start from a more challenging position.

A poster talks about ‘ethos’. To me, the ethos seems less the school’s, and more the parents’.

This is just rubbish! Catholic schools are generally favoured by the travelling community who fit the criteria of being practising catholic's.

There are 825,840 pupils being educated in Catholic schools. There are fewer than 70,000 travellers (both Irish and Romani communities) in total in GB. This is going to tip the overall socioeconomic balance of churchgoers, even if you assume that all the children in that community are educated within the Catholic system (which is a stretch and plenty of actual evidence to the contrary) and that the traveller community population is underestimated.

jassy the majority of people sending their kids to Catholic schools do so because they want them to have a Catholic upbringing. It's not a way of socially climbing.
Many of the people who send their kids to these schools don't intentionally set out to play the system & try to bag their child a place.
I don't believe that deprived children aren't Catholic. What about traveller children? The EAL children who come over and parents are working minimum wage jobs and trying to send cash home?
Some Catholic schools are really diverse places.

I just looked at secondary school data for Bristol where I live and the Catholic Schools DON'T out perform the non faith schools.

www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/compare-schools?for=secondary

I just looked at data for Bristol where I live and the Catholic Schools don't out perform the non faith schools.

www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/compare-schools?for=secondary

what’s morally wrong is putting a bias on education based on religion. It’s an outdated system that should be abolished.

That.

We live in a first world country with lots of money why can't we educate all the children regardless of their parents belief in invisible deities.

converseandjeans

Yep huge diversity.

Massively discriminating against anyone who isn’t Catholic. Or whatever religion. It doesn’t matter.

littlecaf I just don't understand why it's an issue - just let people who want to have a faith send their children to those schools. Then send your kids to a non faith school. Problem solved. Everyone is happy.

Everything that Jassy has already said. And.
Any school which selects will do better in league table related terms than schools which don’t. It doesn’t matter what the selection criterion is- a past poster on here suggested juggling. This is born out by the fact that undersubscribed faith schools do no better than any other comparable school in the catchment. It is selection not faith that makes them “better”.

the majority of people sending their kids to Catholic schools do so because they want them to have a Catholic upbringing. It's not a way of socially climbing.

I didn’t say it was. I said that church communities are disproportionately (not absolutely) less deprived (Catholic communities less so than CofE but there is still a gap); schools able to select on faith because of oversubscription are selecting from a less deprived pool and tacitly excluding children from the most chaotic backgrounds.

Many of the people who send their kids to these schools don't intentionally set out to play the system & try to bag their child a place.

Again, I didn’t say they were. However they have the commitment and wherewithal to be able to attend church regularly and navigate the admissions system.

I don't believe that deprived children aren't Catholic. What about traveller children? The EAL children who come over and parents are working minimum wage jobs and trying to send cash home?

Statistics have outliers. No one said that no deprived children are Catholic. Why misrepresent?

Some Catholic schools are really diverse places.

Except for the lack of non-Catholics if they’re able to select by faith.

I just don't understand why it's an issue - just let people who want to have a faith send their children to those schools. Then send your kids to a non faith school. Problem solved. Everyone is happy.

Are you really this naive?

My nearest three schools are faith schools. We can’t get into any of the more distant non-faith schools because the catchments are so messed up by the faith schools and the children coming a considerable distance, some from out of borough, to attend them. Where can my kids go, please?

(As it happens, we got into a local CofE school that had had a poor Ofsted and parents previously committed to faith education suddenly found it wasn’t quite so important to them. The howls and formal complaints when the new ‘good’ Ofsted report was published shortly after primary admissions closed were very enjoyable to observe.)