to think that schools admissions aren't fair

[picklepud]

This is different from saying that I wouldn't go through the system if my child's local school had religious criteria, but I am feeling a bit sad and up in arms for a friend today. Same old story, her local school (primary) is c of E VA. She's not, and chose not to get baptised or go to church twice monthly. So now she will have to drive to her allocated school. So incidentally will many of the people who got in on religious grounds from way away. I really really would go to church for my dd to get into my local school, so I'm not criticising those who do, but I just don't think it should be necessary. Or that religious commitment should give you priority in a state school. And particularly that the vicar should not pretend for a minute that he (as he said in a newspapaper article) say that this is a school in the heart of the community serving all the children of the community.
I know, I know, some people might genuinely change through exposure to the church but I don't think it's the way for a church to expand its membership. sorry. and sorry it's so long.

Imgonna - my point was more that it is absurd to base school selection criteria on their parents' belief systems. The theoretical 'atheist' school was not popular because it was an atheist school, it was popular because to most people, it was perceived to be the better of the two choices. Once it is generally perceived as 'the better choice', that effect has a tendency to snowball.

If you wish to educate your child in your own belief system, it is surely perfectly possible to do that at home and in the community? Why does it have to be at school too?

It's the fault of a system which is able to be exploited by parents who take an active role in their children's education, and discriminates against children from unstable backgrounds. No matter how you look at it, admissions policies will always have this skew when parents who care about their children's education have a say in who goes where (by the process of applying for the school, moving to a 'good' catchment area or faking a religion), and the children of parents who can't be bothered just let their kids go wherever's left.

I can't see a solution to the problem in the real world, unfortunately, because no group of people is honest enough for a catchment system to work as it should. SENs are an added complication, because many aren't identified until the child is actually at primary school, so you couldn't easily filter those most in need to schools with the extra funding to help them - and nor should they feel excluded from the word go.

In this mire, however, there does on the surface appear to be one extra layer fraught with dubious practices and unfair advantages which 'simple' legislation can fix, and that's faith-based entry. Fixing the percentage of religious-criteria students to the level of contribution from the religious body in question would be one way to level things a little. I'm sorry, but in a society where many children are getting an abysmal education in schools swamped with 'problem' children, allowing parents to be picky enough that they get their child a religious education on top of everything else seems a bit rich, especially when you consider how much the state pours into these schools. That's why private schools are private. Faith schools are state schools in terms of funding at least - the land they hold would be worthless to them without the state's money. While I don't particularly agree with faith schools, I could tolerate them if they didn't in many cases directly worsen other children's eduacative experiences. But that's not the case right now. Children are still attending 'failing' schools and failing to achieve because of it. Against that backdrop, having a cushy religious criteria which is simply open to exploitation seems rather like a joke.

wubbly, I really sympathise with your situation. If they're the only school in the area then they should definitely prioritise local children, and then there would still be lots of space left for genuine believers. Round here there are loads of schools and it's just loads of people wanting the top one. BTW, even tho I am a Christian I am not guaranteed a place cos I'm not CoE. As a worshipper at a "local church of a different denomination" I still come in lower than the people who've lied and gone along to the linked CoE church a year before child starts school. So I am still negatively affected by the people doing this, I'm just still a couple of points up on the admission from simply local catchment

Given that faith schools are still bound by the national curriculum and that all schools are supposed to have a daily act of collective worship i'm not sure how much difference there is to the education of a child purely as a result of attending a faith school. I can see there is massive advantage to attending a better school and I can see that better schools often have a more middle class financially advantaged intake. If you abolish the faith label then i would expect another clique to evolve - as it already does via house prices etc for some non faith schools.

my family are all church goers and my dc go/went to the school attached to our church - which is probably also our nearest and is ofsted outstanding. out of these 3 factors, it was only the last 2 the mattered and proximity was easily the most important.

my year 6 dd commented the other week that out of her class, who will all have had to get church commitment forms signed, only 3 of them go to church. Incidentally our church is also full of 3 and 4 year olds but numbers dwindle rapidly from school age onwards.

we have church secondary schools as well, that are equally near for most people, but they are not good schools so there's no pressure to keep your children attending for the year 6 church commitment form.

of my year 6 dd's class, 3 have moved to be close to their desired secondary school - all into rented accommodation. None of them is renting out their current house and one family can't since the parents have had to split so that they can register one child close to the primary and one close to the secondary school having had the lack of foresight to plan conception adequately. And these are all parents who wanted church places to provide a moral and ethical education to support their family values.

My observations are therefore that this issue is not primarily about faith schools (since there is an undersubscribed secondary that these "church attending" parents won't touch with a bargepole) but all about getting the best school possible for you child.

This is completely understandable and something i suspect we would all do for our child - we wouldn't all lie though.

cider, you're right. If there were no faith schools then I would do just that. But given that faith schools do exist, I think it's fair to give some priority to those who want the school for its ethos and not its results.

Maybe we could agree on this - what if faith schools did what a lot of schools with specialist status do (like "science college/sports academy type schools) Offer say 30% of places to people of faith and the rest on catchment.

Here are a few of the people who tend not to get into an oversubscribed faith school
a) very recent immigrants
b) asylum seekers
c) those from chaotic or dysfunctional families

Not to generalise but these children may often be harder to reach/teach. I have absolutely not issue with my children being taught with them. I do have a problem with the fact that in a non-faith school in an area dominated by faith schools, they will be taught with a disproportionately large amount of these children instead of these being fairly spread out amongh all schools.

It is not that faith schools are better and "banning" them will mean that there are less good schools, just that the schools will be more even. According to research, the fairer a society is the better off everyone is, rich as well as poor.

Mind you, the most flagrant abuse of admissions I've ever heard of is a VA non faith school which managed to maneovre out the one Muslim (and apparently not well behaved child) in reception and replace him with a celebrity's child. This despite the fact that celebrity only rented in the area for 6 months while their house miles away was being done up...

Absolutely, pollyparanoia.

I agree too. But genuine practicing believers who regularly attend church (before they start applying for schools) make up only about 7% of the population. Plenty of room for immigrants/asylum seekers/gypsies/etc given the number of faith schools about. Unless of course lots of people lie about their religion...

Hello again,
Just reading through this morning' posts and welcome to new voices. Imgonna you raise some religious points. The one I am most interested in and hasn't been raised previously is the one about how people could easily change their faith as opposed to their race. I'm not sure that it is that simple. Not for me anyway. I don't think people of genuine faith could "switch off" their faith as easily as all that. I tried when I dated a Jewish boy and it didn't work. There are genuine conversions, some which people welcome and some which take people by surprise. However I can never see how a genuine conversion would come about by someone saying "I want my child to go to X school". So to fulfil a faith criterion you either have to be of that faith or to pretend. I don't believe in attendance being the "soft" option either. Further back on the thread the content of Anglican services was discussed and most if not all involve some recitation of a creed (et of common beliefs). And hymns often involve statements of faith too.
It sticks well to this mostly, but however the discussion proceeds, over which I don't expect or have any right to have control, please remember that the OP is not about faith schools themselves but the honesty and fairness of their selection procedures.

Also, I would like to check up the specialist college argument. I'm not sure (by which I mean I really don't know) My good friend teaches at one so I will look into it. Selecting by gender and academic or other aptitude are also two very different additional criteria and I am not sure they are part of the current discussion.

Yes, imgonna. The provision of places in faith schools vastly outnumbers the number of children in practicing christian families. The statistics are even worse when you consider the average age of your typical CofE church (unless it has a popular school, of course).

So, in my area nearly all the village schools are CofE or RC despite a tiny fraction of the population really believing in either. And as my village happens to have one of the better ones. So, lots of mummy bums on seats in our parish church, leaving me with the choice in the state sector of hypocritically doing likewise if I want DD to be able to walk to school or not doing so and being allocated a school a drive down the lanes which was still a faith school which I don't believe in. Bonkers or what?

YA so so so NBU.

I agree emphatically -- everyone should be free to educate their children in their faith, on their own time and with their own money.

I can't move, there is no school nearby for my faith, and the three closest (all RC/CoE) schools won't touch my sons. The LA schools are jammed and I am not in a catchment area so I go to the bottom of everyone's lists. That sound fair to anyone?

Can we all please be honest for once and admit what we all know -- this is a middle-class segregationist wheeze that the churches like because it fills the pews, and the politicians don't dare touch. It's not exactly conducive to social mobility, or cross-community tolerance or equality of opportunity, is it?

Should we have faith hospitals too? Should believers get first priority in hospitals that were originally built with church funds?

Religion is a matter of personal conviction and should be totally private. No one should have to pass any faith tests, nor comply with any demands on their private, family time, to get access to a public service.
We must all be able to access public services on an equal basis, and it is especially pernicious to deny children admission because of their parents' choices. How Christian is that?

But then the bible does teach us that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons ...

Religion is a matter of personal conviction and should be totally private. No one should have to pass any faith tests, nor comply with any demands on their private, family time, to get access to a public service.<

Totally agree.

I agree with most of the posts here saying that the admission criteria for faith schools aren't generally fair (or cause a lot of unfairness), and that in case-by-case situations we all know people whose lives have been made much more difficult because of the school situation. But I just can't put my head around a faith school that would pro-actively take on non-faith children. Let's say my closest school was a muslim school. Would I send my children there? no, we are not muslims and don't accept the teachings of Muhammad (PBUH). If I wasn't a Christian, would I send my children to a Christian school? no, I wouldn't. However, I know many Christians who have decided to send their children to non-faith schools because of various reasons, mostly because they believe that faith schools are causing unfairness, and other reasons that have been stated here (such as wanting more diversity- we are in London).

Gochagocha. You are so right. It is a form of racism (and of course I know there are many black Christians, foreign Catholics etc, I just don't happen to come across any Christian Muslims, Hindus or Jews, that's all). I have a friend who's just moved to an area where the two "middle-class" schools are CofE and RC. His surname is Levin. Seems odd that it's considered acceptable to bar his child from the two best performing schools in the neighbourhood because of that, doesn't it?

I just don't happen to come across any Christian Muslims, Hindus or Jews, that's all)

well, yes, that would be difficult - did you mean Christian arabs/pakistanis/malaysians (etc), Indians or Israelis maybe?

While there are some such, they are certainly rare. Of course religion parallels cultural and racial groups.

Polly, I should perhaps been a bit clearer about 'segregationist'. Wasn't primarily thinking about race.

I meant exclusion of all those with the social markers of deprivation. Free school meals, SEN statements and the like are all less common in faith schools than in their surrounding communities.

Then again, I have always wondered why my friends' Filipina housekeeper, pious as the day is long, could not get any of her three daughters into the superb RC secondary school at the corner of her street, but all were sent miles across the borough to another.

I could go on with more contentious examples but you get my drift.

Makes you go ...

Although faith businesses perhaps could have faith only policies because they're not using public money? Even then it seems slightly at odds with Christianity. Granted you might not want to work at a missionary organisation if you weren't Christian but then that outlines the point of a faith school that is offering the National Curriculum being selective on religious grounds. People who didn't want a faith education would still be able not to have one.

There's a thing called bearing witness in Christianity that all Christians have a duty to do. It means (I believe) showing your faith in practical ways by the way you live your life, as opposed to actually expicitly telling people what you believe. In fact our local Baptist Church's toddler group is a perfect example of this. They provide a wonderful play environment, are exuding warmth and love to the parents and children. They are pretty unapologetic about there being a Bible story at story time and one religious song at singing time. I guess they're partially externally funded by the small charge for attending. (the biscuits are so good I shouldn't think it even covers them) but the church funds the rest. It is unashamedly a faith organisation, and yet open to all. And people of all faith and none crowd it every week. I see a parallel with faith schools here. If they are good enough then being open to all would not damage any reputation they might have.

Their numbers would not go down. And children of the Christian faith would still be educated in the faith (with thepart of the school's programme of study equivalent of the bible story and song.)So unless the Christians sending their children to faith schools are worried about something else I don't understand the problem.

Now it's still entirely valid to argue against faith schools completely but that isn't the original purpose of the thread. What have good faith schools got to worry about exactly? That people might feel more comfortable with the application process because they haven't got to pretend anything?

And BlueberryPancake it would be your choice not to send your child to a Muslim school. However some parents, Christian or not might decide that it was okay to send their children to a Muslim school because they believed in the majority of the ethos and thought it was their definition of a good school (a very personal matter as I've stated before, not necessarily to do with results and Ofsted. And it being a largely state funded organisation then I believe they would be entitled to without prejudice. I am going to throw something into the pot here. Is there any difference between a school that has been set up in addition to the schools that already exist in an area as opposed to the historically present faith schools that present the only or one of limited options.

I might be naive and relatively practical here, but what would you tell your child when he/she would get home and tell you about Jesus and God? would you say - well that's what they teach you at school but we don't think it's true? We don't believe it and your teacher is talking rubbish? What about when they ask you questions about heaven, would you lie to them and say yep, heaven exists if you don't actually believe it? What about when your children would want to pray?

DS asked me the other day - 'is God with me when I'm in the bath?' What would your answer have been - well, hon, we don't actually believe that God exists?

Blueberry, I think about that sort of question a fair bit. I may be a non believer, but I'm happy for my son to reach his own conclusions as he grows and learns.

I think the only way to answer it is honestly, so I'd say something along the lines of 'some people believe x, some believe Y and some believe z.

If DS wanted to pray, I'd be fine with that.

I totally understand the geographical issue, the fact that many faith schools have better environment/better results, and that it's a pain for many many families that have no choice but to drive miles away to a non-faith school. And I agree, it's not fair. They are part-state funded schools. But is it really because of the ethos that parents 'fake' religion? or is it because of the quality, the size, the warm feeling inside knowing that your child is in a caring environment (I'm not saying that this feeling doesn't happen in non-faith schools...), the feeling that the staff truly respects both you and your child, the location of the school?

As for your second point, I would assume that most of the older faith schools are of Christian religion and more recent ones are of other faith, so it would be unfair to compare both. I would however say that if a new school opens in an area where it is needed, it should be a non-faith school.

No I wouldn't lie, although I am a Christian so the particular questions you pose would not be problematic to me, and I guess you are asking more generally what would someone sending their child to a school that is not of their faith. I imagine one could take the line I have taken when teaching about faith in RE lessons in school. One could say some people believe and that's what many of the teachers and children at your school believe. It's not what mummy/daddy believe. What do you believe? Rather as one might have to if one were meeting with friends of other faiths, in fact much as I imagine I will do when dd comes across people of other faith or none at various points in her life, in and out of school. It's the dilemma you face when facing the call to be "In the world but not of it" The questions you pose would be far more challenging to answer with integrity if one had had to attend church and profess faith as an entry requirement for the school you had chosen for your child than if you had merely chosen it and been allocated a place by another system.

Blueberry, I know what you mean. But we are on to this question: are the criteria fair? Does anyone think they are?

The big problem with the unfairness of it all is that these rules demean faith and make hypocrites of everyone. That is not a good thing to be teaching our kids.

The major faiths that organise these schools do not come out of the Great School Place Race looking very good to me. They are turning their backs on those who most need the kind of strong guiding hand they claim offer -- those who don't get it from their parents.

They appear to be rewarding hypocrisy a lot of the time, and playing along with a divisive game. It's not that they like it but they do regardless, instead of addressing the question of what they are doing and why they are losing adherents. They must know that people would be a lot less interested in them, and their schools, if they weren't providing the sought-after service of weeding out the harder-to-teach.

Parents are put in an impossible situation in many areas, but we all have to look into our hearts and ask whether it's right to do it. Why is queue jumping 'bad' when you pay for private medical care, but not when you use church adherence, real or feigned, to get to the top of the list for a popular school? It's a case of give me social inclusion, but not yet -- wait for my kids to get into uni first.

The State is a party to this game and politicians are not being honest, when they know that it undermines their loudly stated goals of inclusion, social mobility, and tolerance of other faiths and communities. But then we would not listen to them if they changed the system -- we'd hound them out of office.

Why are we so afraid of saying faith schools can still have public funds, but they can't pick and choose, but must take kids on the same basis as LA schools?

Because the faith thing is a red herring waved about by everyone involved. It's the ability to select that holds it all together. Take that away, and no one will bother about faith any more.

Posted too fast last sentence should have said no-one will bother about the issue of whether faith, taught in school is as good as 'faith schools'.