Why do faith schools dominate the league tables?

[benetint]

I looked at the league tables for primary schools in my area (nottingham) and I was surprised to see the top few were not schools in affluent areas bur were all catholic schools. Many of them are actually in quite deprived areas. So what is it catholic schools are doing to get such excellent results? Is it that they can be more selective about who they take? Are they just exam factories? Ate they stricter with their kids? Or are they just better in general than secular states?

The unwritten ethos is to keep the RC children away from non RC children and hope when they get old enough they will marry each other and have many little RC children.

That would have led to lots of lesbianism at my school, then.

@germy this is true however their basis for selection is comsiderably less exclusive than most catchment area schools, which select on grounds of depth of pockets.

This is not what I have found from my perusal of the 2011 GCSE results figures. I have checked a few schools, either in places I have lived or which have been in the public eye for some reason.

I have found that the percentages of lower, middle and higher ability children on intake for Cardinal Vaughan and the Oratory to be 3, 18 and 79, and 1, 28 and 71 respectively. The best I could come up with for a school with an exclusive catchment was Fortismere in Muswell Hill where the percentages are 8, 27 and 65. I obviously haven't checked for all the exclusive areas in the UK, so am open to further suggestions.

@cecily Do you not realise that ability is not necessarily linked to the depth of your parents' pockets?

.

But there is not clear cut picture that indicates "selectivity" on a national basis. That is why I think you need to look at (for these religions) what Christianity brings to the ethos of a school that benefits it so much.

No, there is no selectivity on a national basis - it varies from school to school. Only oversubscribed schools can select. Undersubscribed faith schools will take anyone - though these tend not to be the schools that dominate the league tables.

All faith schools will take anyone who practices the faith. There are some faith schools, especially inLondon, which do operate distance criteria and I think that's a terrible shame. Most don't, though. Catchment areas are a more pernicious barrier to equality in education than private schools.

@cecily Do you not realise that ability is not necessarily linked to the depth of your parents' pockets?

I am pretty sure I neither said or even implied that it was. It was you who said, 'their basis for selection is comsiderably less exclusive than most catchment area schools, which select on grounds of depth of pockets', by which I thought you meant exclusion of the less academic rather than exclusion of the less wealthy. Of course no league tables show how wealthy the families of pupils are - only those who are very poor by way of FSM.

If we want to go to church it's 3 miles, if we were catholic it would be 5 or 8 miles.

My chaotic neighbours can't keep a job because they haven't a working car.
Ensuring a better school is another world.

The faith schools that 'dominate the league table are all over subscribed. The faith schools that are undersubscribed don't do any better than any other school. The Christian ethos is a complete red herring,

All faith schools will take anyone who practices the faith.

I suppose their exclusivity hinges on the word, 'practices'. There will be plenty of members of that faith who will be excluded because their practice is less rigourous than that of others.

There are some faith schools, especially inLondon, which do operate distance criteria and I think that's a terrible shame.

I am not sure why that is a shame. Why does it have to be such a competition? Why do children have to travel past several other faith schools to get into the most desirable one, while children who are of that faith who live very near to the school are refused a place.

This is funny (peculiar) because in Scotland, with less complicated admissions, very few of the top schools are religious (eg, pp.include-digital.com/table/state-secondary-schools-scotland).

I personally put it down to the parents/families- if you jump through hoops to get your child into the 'best' school, you'll jump through hoops to get them top exam grades. And then it turns into a circle.

I personally put it down to the parents/families- if you jump through hoops to get your child into the 'best' school, you'll jump through hoops to get them top exam grades. And then it turns into a circle.

That's what I thought until I saw the 2011 league tables. It now seems that these 'best schools' take so many top-performing children that they will get top exam grades regardless.

@starball Are your neighbours catholic? If they were, someone from the parish would probably be happy to give them a lift to mass on Sundays. Our parish is pretty large covering rural areas as well as part of the city. We have a 'lifts' rota. There are quite a lot of people on it, and there's a minibus too.

DS went to a Catholic school, briefly. It was full of Poles.

Don't understand Cecily.

What don't you undersand, seeker?

Or even understand.

Agree with Seeker (and thought I'd previously misunderstood your stance on this subject).

We only have one faith-based secondary school in our entire area (say 30 miles radius). It is Catholic and gets the worse results in the area. That is because it has a bad reputation for behaviour; so parents self-select away from going there, so it gets bad results, so people avoid it - it's a vicious cycle. Nobody would pretend to be religious to go there.

Following on from KitKatGirl's post, one thing I have wondered, is whether parents who put the top-performing faith schools as their top choices, actually put faith schools for all their (possibly up to 6) choices.

In our area
They are highly selective, basically
And that is why they do well

@kitkat As I said upthread: It's probably also worth reminding people that while in many areas catholic schools are at the top of the performance tables, in many areas (sometimes the very same areas, sometimes not) they are also right at the bottom, particularly in deprived or inner city areas. This is mainly because they do not in fact select on anything other than religious committment.

Catholic schools are no better and no worse than other types of school. Some are great some are middling some are poor. People make a fuss about the high performing ones either because they object to being prevented from buying their way in through the catchment process or because they are bigoted against Catholics (especially poor working class Catholics) taking 'their' school places.

@cecilyP it will be a rare place that has 6 catholic schools to chose from. There are no catholic secondary schools where I live. None.

No, we don't here either, Matabilis3. I was thinking more in terms of London in general, and west London in particular, where this would indeed be a possibility but I am not sure if it is a probability.

They do better because parents actively choose them.
( just to put right a mistake from early on, England doesn't have any secular state schools)

In the very near future many poor and working class catholics/jews/sikhs/muslims will be priced out of the faith schools (and grammar schools) unless they live within walking distance. The local authorities are stopping transport to school, unless that is the closest of any school, for new starters from this september unless family income is extremely low.

The faith schools will then end up becoming selective on income grounds as well as faith.

or, of course, selective on living nearby, to be fair.