To think faith schools are great and it’s only the admission cheats that make them unfair?

[Wondermule]

My second controversial post in a few days. I don’t need a hard hat at this point, I need a bunker and full ghillie suit. But here goes.

Inspired by a thread, where a poster happily shared that they lied about going to church to get their kids into a Catholic school, before denouncing the admission system as deeply unfair...

I would like to put to the good people of mumsnet that actually, admission by religion is a really good idea. And it is only the people that cheat the admission system that keep it unfair for others.

Religion is a great criteria for school admissions. It doesn’t indicate intelligence; it isn’t an indicator of wealth; it would keep sibling groups together; and the ethos and PSHE would be generally in keeping with the parents’ beliefs.

The reason why faith schools are ‘better’ are because of non-religious people with intelligent kids cheating the system to get their kids a place. This then perpetuates the cycle - the kids perform well, the school becomes more desirable, so more people cheat to get their kids in.

So aside from depriving genuine applicants of school places, they are contributing to a system that they denounce as unfair. Whereas if they stopped playing the system, schools would actually be more mixed in terms of demographics, more equal, and there wouldn’t a stampede for just a few of them.

Phew! Thoughts please?!

Religion is a great criteria for school admissions. It doesn’t indicate intelligence; it isn’t an indicator of wealth; it would keep sibling groups together; and the ethos and PSHE would be generally in keeping with the parents’ beliefs.

I think parental pushiness and willingness to game the religious criteria may will be postively correlated with wealth. The siblings thing is a non-issue, is is absolutely normal for schools to explicitly give preference to siblings.

I'm in favour of parental beliefs being diluted rather than reinforced. One of my local schools is where Shamima Begum attended. The less certain pupils are of the rightness of their beliefs the better, and that would be enhanced by greater mixing with people with different beliefs.

My children are in a Catholic school, because our catchment schools are CofE X2 or Catholic and we could walk to the Catholic one. They are massively unfair to no faith children! Children taking holy communions get special afternoon teas and taken out of classes for extras, children have to partake in all of the ceremonies- because "that's the choice their parents took" I was called in because my son expressed that he didn't want to be marked by the ashes because he had to go to the front and be touched by a stranger and was told he had to do this. (It didn't happen) I have conversations with my children regarding being respectful but absolutely make it clear that that is all that is required from them. Also when sex education consists of "don't do it!" and nothing on contraception and geography consists of "God created the Alps" I have to conclude it's unfair even to practicing Catholics for their future prospects...
In the UK today most people don't have the luxury of moving homes just for a better option of school for their DC. My other option would be driving to the next town (8 miles away) for a non religious option. Our LA probably wouldn't even allow that due to catchment areas! Their RE policies are also quite damning. They touch on Jewish faith and Islam once a month but that really is it, and it is touching on briefly.

Catholic schools do have a greater ethnic mix. This will not be solely a Catholic intake. Easter European children are a growing demographic ( Orthodox generally). We had many children from the smaller African churches.
Lots of secular inner city schools have hardly any ethnic mix due to catchment areas.
Lots of people are commenting who have no experience of contemporary faith schools. That’s fine but I find it odd that people are so keen to take away choice from others. I think partly it comes down to class divide. Religious belief and class do align to some extent. There is also fierce loyalty to some of the faith schools as they have been effective in providing better outcomes for children.
To reiterate, there is no indoctrination in Catholic schools these days. The R.E syllabus is also not comparable in any way to RE as taught in secular schools. There is quality, quantity and depth to the syllabus.

Make that 100s of millions. Without faith aided schools the government would see a gigantic gap between the cost of education and what they currently pay.

Almost the whole cost of education is teacher salaries, which are 100% paid for out of taxes, as far as I know. The value of land and buildings supplied by churches usually works out in the vicinity of 10% of the cost of education, in the schools where it is relevant.

@MaddeningtheUnhelpful
That just sounds like a terrible school, Catholic or not.
Is it primary? If it is they would fail their RE. inspection.

I come from Spain, where faith schools are either private (a few) or semi-private (the vast majority).

The majority of faith schools are part-funded by the state, who pays the teachers’ salaries. All the extras - building maintenance, school lunches, activities and some non-essential subjects (including RE and extra foreign languages for example) have to be sourced by the school.

The average monthly contribution per child is between €50-100. The standard of education is very similar to a private school, but much more affordable. I went to a semi-private school and it cost €60 a month per child, with a 10% discount for siblings, €25 a month if you wanted to eat a packed lunch or €100 for school dinners. Going home for lunch is quite common in Spain.
So no more than €160 a month for a 8:30am-5:30pm school day, including 2h of after school activities (sports clubs, languages, gardening, coding) that happen during lunchtime, and a private school standard of teaching and behaviour.

Parents can choose to give their kids an education in line with their own beliefs, but it’s not completely free. The admissions system also allows children of other faiths to get in - my school’s certainly did. Of a maximum of 25 points awarded by the different entrance criteria, only 3 could be given for church membership. The rest was the usual - siblings, cared for children, distance, children of staff...

The state has an obligation to fund basic education for all children. Anything further should be funded by the specific schools. Parents are free to choose a certain religion for their children, but the money for that shouldn’t come from the taxpayer.

@blackberrycream they are actually one of the best schools according to Ofsted They bullying policies are also laughable, my son went through 2 years of hell with one particular bully and each time staff were completely gaslighting everything and making out my son has caused the violence inflicted on him. It took a very serious incident resulting in my son having panic attacks for anything to be done. His behaviour at home was appalling, when I complained re the bullying they phoned SS on me! That bit them in the arse though and a the social worker raised a safeguarding over what had happened in school. It is primary and junior school. It's very odd. It sounds petty but they also seem to favour faith families. Silly things like regular lateness, unkempt children lacking proper school clothing etc, allowing some families to use the private carpark because the poor souls have 7 children. It is odd, but we're nearly onto non religious secondary now

@MaddeningtheUnhelpful
We had an awful experience at our nearest secular, state school. There was hardly any ethnic mix. There was bullying ( my son came home with poo smeared on his head one day) and abysmally low expectations. They were also outstanding There was a lot more but I get riled up just thinking of it.
I think the point might be there are good and bad schools of all types and it would be more useful to look at what is working and isn’t in a more nuanced way.

At my DDs' non-catchment school, the oversubscription criteria gives priority to students eligible for Pupil Premium just after looked after children and those with medical/social reasons for the school. I personally think that fits the Christian ethos they espouse (CoE academy group though not technically a faith school as faith is not in the admissions process or anything like that) far better and does more for equality than needing to attend church. It's recognizing those likely to be most in need (especially in our area where catchment schools have left some black hole areas of abysmal results) rather who is going to think like them in a particular area, possibly.

Having been raised with a lot of family members who work for churches, I'm going to have to disagree that regular church attendance to a specific church in a specific area has nothing to do with wealth. The church's location in relation to public transport or certain housing, when services are in relation to different types of employment in an area, how people of different economic status are treated within the church, it all has an effect. Even within the same denomination, those leading the church can definitely make it a place that reaching out to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds or allows barriers to grow to keep itself apart (before getting into intentionally doing so). That's part of the issue with religion as criteria for admissions - the faithful can be fucked over by those within a religious institution way before any "cheat" get involved.

WE GET IT OP. YOU JUST AREN’T CORRECT. You keep repeating yourself while getting ruder and ruder but you just ignore the many posters who have pointed out that requiring proof of religious activity is not random ! It favor of two parent families who don’t work on weekends, have reliable transportation and some degree of organization. This doesn’t necessarily reflect how devout

Also — do you truly believe that anyone who doesn’t regularly practice one of a handful of organized religions is automatically an atheist ? That alone makes it not worth the time to even engage.

Organized religion is biased towards middle class families. It isnt fair, and I think its bizarre to mix education and religion.
I prefer grammar schools to religious schools and I'm not very keen on those, so that's saying something.

People shouldn’t be segregated by religions, that is only going to lead to more problems and intolerance of others.

I am Christian, I made the choice not to send Ds to a c of e primary school because personally I wasn’t comfy with the level of religious expectations because in my view it is for the child to decide what they believe. Ds is 11 now and is very firm in his choice that he doesn’t believe and that is fine, he also knows how to respect others views.

What you fail to understand OP is that there is that practically speaking there is simply no way to ensure any school will be an exact mixture of all different ability levels, ethnicities and circumstances. Postcode lottery won’t do it and certainly religious observance won’t either. (I say observance instead of religion because you could have the most devout family in town but their circumstances make it difficult to display the type of attendance that is used to determine school admissions.)

People tend to live in proximity to others who are similar to them. Even faith schools are a postcode lottery anyway because you have different faiths represented and varying levels of school ethos and quality depending on where you live. Even if there were no catchments a religious family with little money is not likely to have the wherewithal to transport their children far from home.

The absolute only way to improve equality of access to education is to bring all schools up to a high-level standard, knowing that different schools will require different types of support to get there. It’s complicated and expensive but that’s what we should be going for.

Religion has no place in schools, even if it was a useful proxy for randomness, which it is not.

I disagree that it's "cheating" to follow the set criteria. I did exactly that to get my DD into a decent primary school. The key afterwards was that it feeds into the much more decent senior school.
If the criteria is there then people will use it to their advantage.
Same as I don't see it cheating that people rent in catchment for 6 months.

In the place of faith criteria (or any of the other existing criteria that is currently used) I can't see a fair way to do it. A lottery is probably the only true way, but I suspect that even has its limitations.

As long as there are spaces for those of a different or not faith, I am happy for faith schools to be in place. Those who fake their faith and then lose it the moment that their children leave school are in my opinion doing something akin to obtaining services by deception. Not that I can think of any way to easily stop this.

We are discussing whether using it for the purposes of admissions is fairer than the current system. Very, very few people on this thread have grasped that.

I haven’t seen anyone on this thread who hasn’t grasped that. It’s YOU that hasn’t grasped the very simple truth that, even if you base school admissions on faith rather than catchment area, you still can’t physically move schools. The C of E school in a well-heeled area will still be full of children being brought up in said area - they will just be Christian children. No one is going to wave a magic diversity wand on this basis.

Wandermule,
My village school was oversubscribed on my sons birth year. I was 0.8 miles from the school. There were people that were closer that didn’t get in that didn’t go to church.
The church was filled with families who were clearly going to get their child in. They also put church attendance ahead of siblings at the time. If it was purely on distance we probably would have got in. It’s just there were so many from further afield that went to church to get it so we had no choice but to do the same. Our next nearest school was catholic so had we not got in we would have been travelling to our third closest school via a busy bypass. So I would never hav had the experience of walking my children to school. So I don’t feel one bit guilty about “cheating” as you call it. Because the system is wrong.
As it happens my husband is actually religious so he went most of the time. I would have overruled him if we had needed to get into a catholic school though as it’s me that does the school run every day not him.

Religion isn't a random factor. Whilst in theory almost any person could be almost any religion, in practice, most tend to at least nominally follow the same as their parents, so particular religions do tend to be associated with particular ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Where I live, the Roman Catholic population is largely made up of descendants of Irish immigrants who came over as they were starving during the potato famine. The Catholic schools are, unsurprisingly, not in the most upmarket areas of town as they are where that very deprived population first settled. Selecting on religious grounds certainly doesn't promote diversity here.
Ultimately, wealth is often the deciding factor on who gets into the better schools, either directly (what you can pay) or indirectly (where you can afford to live) and using religion as an admission criteria doesn't change that. The independent boys' Catholic school in a leafy suburb that my DH attended has far more in common with its non denominational equivalent on the same road than it does with the state Catholic secondary schools in the inner city, even though they have similar religious requirements.
Nobody is trying to cheat the system to get into the inner city schools but they are not bastions of equality and diversity as would be the case if the OP's theory were right.
Whatever the system, there will be parents willing to do whatever it takes to get their children into better performing schools. You could make the criteria and hoops that the parents have to jump through more or less anything - what supermarket they shop at, Parkrun attendance, what newspaper they read or tv programmes they watch and there would still be socioeconomic bias. Families with more resources will tend to be willing and able to do whatever is required to a greater degree than less well resourced families.
Changing admissions criteria is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Far more fundamental changes would be needed to reduce the inequalities in society and level the educational playing field.

@Spidey66
That's awful,I'm very sorry
I know it's off topic but my child would go to an RC school over my dead body.
@MaddeningtheUnhelpful
That is truly horrific but I'm not surprised at all.

@Tal45

But why not just have all state schools no religion? Then that doesn’t indicate intelligence; it isn’t an indicator of wealth and it would keep sibling groups together. The ethos and PSHE shouldn't be in keeping with the parents’ beliefs, it should be in the best interests of the children IMO.

100%

@DynamoKev

How would you allocate school spaces in a fair way?

I don't have an issue with the ethos but I do when they teach unpalatable sex Ed material. Only today I read an article about a school in Herefordshire who is teaching that gay marriage is wrong, contraception is wrong, that men should take the lead in relationships ... so backward! All children (even home ed ones) should be able to access unbiased medical and current law base sex ed whatever their parents faith

[quote Wondermule]@DynamoKev

How would you allocate school spaces in a fair way?[/quote]
Unlikely we can ever achieve total fairness but as my response to Tal45's post indicated, I oppose State-Funded religious schools.

Our dc's faith school have changed their admissions criteria so that faith now goes ahead of sibling priority. Siblings are now number four on the priority list. To me, this is neither family friendly nor a particularly Christian way to operate. A child out of parish could now get priority over a sibling of a child already in the school. I don't agree with this and we're a Christian family.

Faith schools are a waste of funding! Students do well in them because the students who get in are from.families who value education highly (but don't understand it). Those students would, most likely, perform well in any school. The faith schools thus are not providing any 'added value' and are possibly lower performing than other schools.

BUT because they get good results they get good students and more money to send the way of the church etc.

I am against faith schools as well because I want my children to learn in a rational non judgemental environment. I've read through a lot of the "values" of faith schools and they are alarming. It's a cunning means by the church in particular to inflate co generations, donations and secure government money by not doing anything. Religions are just like any other money making scam. They offer something they can't actually provide.