To say religious state schools shouldn’t exist?

[Mushroo]

This is probably controversial but interested in opinions on both sides!

I attended a catholic primary and secondary school and had a lovely education (my parents are actually quite religious). However, given how increasingly secular the UK is it seems quite antiquated and divisive to segregate schools based on religion?

Where I live, our closest primary school as the crow flies is religious (c of e) and as a now atheist we wouldn’t get a place as we sit at the very bottom of the admissions criteria (other religions are given priority over atheist). This means we’d have to walk past it to get to the non-religious school further away.

This leads to many people ‘finding god’ in the nursery years to get a place which I refuse to do.

I don’t see the benefit of religious schools, surely if you are a religious family, you can learn about religion at your place of worship / Sunday school or equivalent.

I think state school should be secular and teach all religions equally (including atheism as an option) and places shouldn’t be offered based on religion. State school places should be based on particular needs (e.g. adopted children, siblings and then distance only).

Genuinely interested in thoughts, AIBU?

Secular schools exclude the religious same as religious schools exclude the secular.

Secular schools exclude the religious same as religious schools exclude the secular.

No. 'Secular' means no religious privilege or discrimination. There are no schools which deprioritise the children of religious parents in our country.

How?

First - there are no 'secular schools'.

Second, 'secular' is not the same as 'atheist'.

Third, schools without faith admissions don't exclude anyone. They have no admissions criteria that exclude based on religion or lack thereof. A Catholic child, a Muslim child, an atheist child, a Sikh child are all treated equally in the admissions criteria.

I completely agree with you, OP. I honestly can't wrap my head around why the state is continuing to fund religious schools and to allow those schools to discriminate against children in their admissions requirements on the basis of what their parents believe or claim to believe. It's mind boggling!

And yes, I would scrap state grammar schools too!

Parents who are religious don’t want to send their children to a secular school or a school of another religion nor should they be forced to do so. Religious schools are open to all - the very maximum you have to do is practice that religion (many are not so selective). Parents who want their children to learn about their religion (especially if it is a minority religion as mine is) cannot and would not send their kids to a secular school.

a variety of schools to suit a variety of people is best. I think it’s intolerant that some can’t bear for schools to suit people who are not like them. Secular schools do not suit everyone.

The best way to get rid of private/grammar/religious schools is to make the other schools so good that parents would rather send their children to them instead of the private/grammar/religious schools.

As soon as there is any selection criterion which parents can manipulate then you will get stratification as already described.

It's absolutely fine for religious parents to send their children to religious schools if they so wish. Personally, I think they're very misguided but that's just my opinion.

The question is not whether or not religious schools should exist, but rather who should pay for them. If parents and/or religious organisations wish to fund religious institutions in which to indoctrinate their children, then that's entirely fair enough. What isn't fair is that the taxpayer should pay for it. Why on earth should religious families have access to a wider choice of schools than non-religious families?

Religion is a private matter. It has no place in the state education system, other than as a subject to be taught in the RE curriculum.

This is absurd. You do realise there is often little choice and that children are allocated by councils, also that it isn't always easy to travel further afield to a non-faith school?

How are you going to find the millions it's going to cost to buy the land and buildings (and fully maintain them without the church and trustee contributions) for the state?

Religious people would be effectively excluded from those schools (especially in my case where you have a minority religion). Our school offers suitable food for our dietary requirements, holidays at the time of our religious holidays and teaches our children about our religion from an insider’s perspective (they would not get this in a non denominational school). They are also free from discrimination that they might suffer on the ground of their religion elsewhere. If we didn’t have state religious schools most of us would go private and many would home school.

There is no point treating (for example) Sikh children equally with other children for admission to a Sikh school. The school is a school which teaches particularly about sikhism. It’s most suitable for Sikhs and it’s not unreasonable that that is a factor for entry.

as I said- people with no religion imo need to be more tolerant of those with religion. There is no harm in having a variety of schools. Everyone has access to a non denominational school so you try to abolish religious schools because you would prefer to send your children there (usually because the particular school gets good marks) but are not of that religion is intolerant. Send your children to the non denominational school and work to make it better rather than trying to abolish minority schools.

I totally agree with you OP. I find it bizarre that we have religious state schools. Sure, teach RE to put religion in its historical and social context but don't indoctrinate kids. If the parents want to do that, that's their choice but it shouldn't be part of state education.

what’s absurd? We don’t all have the choice we might like but there is a secular (or non denominational) school available for everyone. Not so with many religious schools.

Abolishing schools for a big chunk of the population is hardly a reasonable request because you might have to travel slightly further than otherwise.

I agree with the OP, feel strongly about it due to horrifying experiences when my C of E primary school was taken over by evangelists who preached about the devil and made the children sing hymns until they learned to praise the teachers' deity with smiles on their faces.

Just musing, though, it would be interesting if there were more schools based on belief systems. I come from an anarchist family and wanted an anarchist school, but I think only a few exist (Summerhill in Suffolk perhaps and the home-ed place in Sussex?) and they're private so inaccessible to those of us without lots of money.

I pay my taxes. Why should I not have a suitable school to send my children? Why should schools only suit you?

There aren't enough places at secular schools in my area. Christians make up a small proportion of the UK population, but a lot of UK schools are C of E or Catholic. There isn't room for all the non-Christians in non-Christian schools.

It's normal in London.

I'm not asking for them to suit me - I'm not asking them to indoctrinate my child in any particular belief system. A secular school is not an atheist school, it caters to all.

It simply is not possible to provide state funded schools in every community for every single faith, so if you allow religious schools at all, then there will always be some taxpayers whose needs are not met. The fairest approach is therefore to provide a secular school that doesn't cater for any one group.

This is not true in many areas. Often, there are no options for non-Christian schools, so atheists and people of other faiths have no other choice but to use these schools.

In any case, there are no truly secular schools in the UK at the moment. If we are going to keep religious schools with their discriminatory admissions requirements, can we at least covert all of the non-denominational schools into atheist/humanist schools and give priority in admissions to children whose parents are not religious in any way?

It seems absurd at the moment that Christian families in my town have the choice of twice as many schools as non-Christians!

Not everyone is rich enough to buy a house, nor in a position to choose where to live, nor necessarily to travel far to schools. In fact, those things seem pretty rare and highly privileged in my experience.

Our village had a C of E primary and I was a church governor. The criteria was mainly catchment. No advantage for church kids. I think it depends how they are funded and most church schools are d of e funded and follow normal rules

My DC are at the local CofE primary. We're in a small city and about a third of the primaries are CofE. There's no religion-based entry criteria at the DC's school nor for the other CofE primaries. The one Catholic school does require the parents to be practicing. Based on my DCs' friendship groups, their CofE school intake includes children from Muslim and Hindu families.

I'd say the school wears it religion quite lightly, but maybe that's more typical of CofE schools. There's a daily act of worship (I think that's a requirement for all schools still?), which is usually a prayer and signing a hymn and the local vicar takes an assembly occasionally. The curriculum includes religious studies, but this covers learning about a range of faiths, as it would for non-religious schools. Mostly the religious elements seem very similar to my experience of attending a non-religious junior school in the late '80s!

The CofE schools - for whatever reason - have better results in our area, we're in the catchment and the school isn't pushing a heavily religious agenda, so that's where we sent the DC without really thinking about it too much. I'd assumed most CofE primaries don't have entry requirements, but clearly based on this thread some do. If there were religion-based entry requirements and I'd had to send my kids to the non-CofE primary that's currently in special measures I would be pissed off too OP!

I don’t agree with religious state schooling, if you want religious schooling for your child you should have to pay to attend a religious public school. I find a lot of people who are heavilg pro religious schools are the ones who shield their children from every non-religious as they actually have very little confidence that their child will be religious, so they have to almost prevent them from accessing the non-religious world.

But the vast majority of children, including Sikh children, Jewish children, Muslim children don't have a nearby school that caters to their religion, and they attend non-faith schools. Just as they do in countries where state-funded faith schools aren't a thing.

Everyone has access to a non denominational school

Utter rubbish. In some areas, the faith schools are all there is. In areas like ours, the faith school intakes have so distorted the catchments that the community schools have tiny catchments and so some 'lucky' kids (like mine) will get non-faith-priority places at a church school, others get allocated an unpopular school a long distance away.

All state faith schools have all their running costs and most or all of their capital costs paid for by the government.

I posted above the proportion of faith schools in England that have at least a proportion of their admissions with a faith priority. It's a large number of schools.