Why do church schools perform so well academically?

[coffeeandsleep]

I’ve been looking at primary school options for my child and weighing up state, faith and private/independent.

Looking at published academics of the schools in my area, the faith church schools are at the top.

I wondered why this is - what in particular are they doing to achieve these results?

Thanks everyone. It seems that it less about the school offering and more about the commitment and circumstances of parents who send their children there. Even if there is nothing extra special the school is offering, I guess it’s a good thing to be among committed invested parents.

I'm sure that some church schools require effort by parents to attend church as that is one of the criteria, with the results PPs are mentioning. But it's not every CoE school.

I just googled the admissions criteria and oversubscription criteria of a couple of CofE primary schools local to me (inc the one in the expensive area) and neither says anything about going to church. The only religious reference in the criteria is that there is one that says priority is given to children living in the parish of xyz church. Just to give a balanced picture. This may not be the case for the OP but other people read these threads too :)

i believe many are quiet open about the limited ability to cater to sen.

@clary there may be a bit of a north-south divide on this too?

(I could be wrong but I've a feeling I recognise your name as one of the ones I've clocked as living near me - is one of your mentioned schools St Margaret's? and oversubscription isn't much of an issue for a lot of them )

The school I taught at had SEN pupils who hed been transferred from a particular faith school.

And to be fair - our faith school takes a lot of SEN pupils from two neighbouring community ones. It's not a straightforward faith schools are like thus, community schools are like this divide.

Agree with the invested parents thing, but also the children are sometimes more school-ready

You've got kids at faith schools who, if they have been brought up in church then for at least a couple of years, then they have been used to sitting quietly for prayers, listening to stories, learning songs, being taught various rules on respect & kindness - 'love thy neighbour' and interacting with lots of other people of various ages, backgrounds etc.

This is all excellent grounding for good behaviour at school

What? All of those negative traits that you use to describe those people who are non church attending, non religious people, absolutely can also be applied to church attending, religious people, in that in any community there are all sorts of people, with good and bad traits, good and behaviours. Blimey, what a judgement..

It becomes self fulfilling if a school is thought to be better

For example the one I know about has people paying higher prices for houses and moving to get close enough

No, you misunderstand. Obviously people who go to church aren’t ’better’ than anyone else.

It would work the same if they’d consistently managed Parkrun. Or Scouts.

Being able to reliably get somewhere for a sustained period of time by definition means the family aren’t likely to be chaotic, struggling with substance dependence etc.

In any group, if you select a subsection for consistent attendance anywhere on a Sunday morning you’ll get an higher proportion of stable organised people and fewer people with chaotic lifestyles. More people who do well at school will be in the first group.

I did think my second paragraph made that clear.

@merryhouse I live in the East Mids – neither north nor south haha!

The point I was (laboriously) trying to make is that while some CofE schools do have a religious criterion (in the same way that IME most catholic schools do), many do not, as they are simply the village school that, historically, was connected to the parish church. You absolutely do not have to be of any faith to get a place at these schools, as long as you live near enough or satisfy other criteria such as sibling. A friend’s DC attended one such and they are truly godless.

That was all – happy to accept that some schools have faith criteria and thus parents are more invested and kids do better. I doubt if it is a north/south thing tbh but happy to be corrected.

It really depends on the school/circumstances .

What they MIGHT have "extra" :

• better facilities, funded by an involved and extensive PTA or the yearly voluntary school funds.

• involved, active parents

• a strict ethos /behaviour policy

-less SEN kids

• high academic expectations

-less staff turnover (this is from experience, not statistics, so possibly specific to just one school).

This all probably seems great, but there are downsides too. The level of commitment (financial and time wise ) is high. The pressure is high. If your kid is academic, very well behaved etc. they'll probably fly through, but if they aren't, the odds of proper support are slim. Again, the pressure is very high on the kids too.

I agree that a large number of church schools are just the local village school and the admission criteria is mostly around catchment. The village school my children went to had very high SEN numbers and used to take kids that bigger schools could not cope with. Our current local primary is a small village church school and we were told on Sunday that a third of the pupils have SEN and there is a lot of poverty. Our church has a Pastoral Care find that gets used a lot. We are giving quite a few families money to buy Christmas gifts for their kids.

It’s parents who are engaged with their kids education. Many will only have gone to church to get points to meet admission criteria. Many other parents wouldn’t have bothered. Also parents who’ve researched the best options for their children and not just sent them to the nearest comp. Research shows that parental engagement leads to better outcomes, not just choice of school but also home encouragement to do homework, behave, revise, etc.

Not always the case, our local Catholic high school is poor performing and the building has been underinvested in over the years, so facilities are poor.

In turn, it is 'oversubscribed' but numbers made up by non Catholics. The school is surrounded by 4 grammar schools and 2 additional Catholic grammars, so the super invested parents target those instead.

In our area the opposite is true. Any of the schools linked to churches perform markedly more poorly than the others in the area.

I completely agree with this. Organised lives, less chaotic home lives and weekly attendance of something together builds a very strong community. Also want to add: friendships are made, where children know each others parents (and vice versa) and all the parents know each other very well from church based activities and celebrations over many years. You absolutely cannot misbehave under such circumstances as the entire community will hear about it. Teachers therefore get a cohort in class that are engaged, get along well both in and outside school, with expectations reinforced by the entire community, not just individual families. Regular schools don't have this much community engagement and opportunities for relationship building outside of school. An odd PTA event now and then won't create this much community cohesiveness.

I'm atheist, so faith based schools aren't possible for our family. I do respect and admire the community and "village" created by our local faith school though, that most of our neighbours attend. The children do so well in a calm purposeful environment at school. The relationships make that happen.

@LetItGo99

Regular schools don't have this much community engagement and opportunities for relationship building outside of school. An odd PTA event now and then won't create this much community cohesiveness.

This also applies to leavers and families of leavers who stay in close contact with the school once they've left. I.e. some parents continue on the PTA and/or remain involved with events etc. Ex leavers often return to the school to give career talks or get their employers involved in careers fairs, etc. Some schools have active "old pupil" organisations doing annual events, regular leavers reunions etc. That kind of thing is very common among faith, private and grammar schools, but relatively rare among comps. Not only does it provide extra "bodies" to organise out of school activities, it also brings in funds via the school's "charitable" arm, again, common among faith, grammar and private schools, but relatively rare among comps.

At the comp I went to, there was literally nothing going on outside school, I don't even think there was a PTA. I don't recall a single event where parents were invited other than parent's evenings. And once you left, you were basically forgotten, no "body" to keep in touch or encourage you to return to give career talks, or attend any events (not that there were any), and not a single old pupil reunion over the decades since I left.

My brother went to a faith school, and the difference was stark. A very active PTA, almost monthly out of school events for parents and ex pupils raising huge sums of money, parents of current pupils and ex-pupils all encouraged to pay monthly donations to their charity arm (Friends of XYZ school). Yearly reunions. The funds raised were huge, which was ploughed back into the school to buy equipment, sports equipment and kits, minibus and other transport costs, etc.

Yes, it's that sense of community. In the faith school, all that was done by volunteers - the school admin staff didn't get involved, all done by parents, parents of leavers, and ex-pupils but very professionally. Obviously, most involvement was parents of current pupils, but there was also longer term continuity from a few ex pupils and parents of ex-pupils, some of whom remained involved for decades. At every new intake, the "friends" group were in attendance at open days, acclimatisation days, and first day of new term, with stalls selling refreshments, stationery, second hand uniform, etc., and handing out flyers explaining what they do, how parents can help, donation forms, etc., to get the parents of the new cohorts involved from day 1 (or at least aware of them!).

Most comps don't seem to be able to nurture that kind of involvement, which is hardly surprising when they'll usually have a very diverse cohort of pupils and parents with nothing in common besides their kids being at the same school.

You must just be lucky in your area OP...it's not 'a thing'. I've taught for 30 years now, all at primary level, and the vast majority of the schools I've worked in have been church schools (CofE in my case). None of these schools had any real connection to the church (other than the name, eg St Matthew's C of E Primary School) and the very occasional boring assembly delivered by a vicar who clearly did not want to be there. I think it's different for catholic schools, who do appear to have closer connections to their church.

So, other than the name, the odd reluctant visit by the vicar, and a ridiculous 'Ofsted type' inspection
from SIAMS (which my current school hasn't had since 2017 🤷‍♀️) there's literally nothing different.

We are also an academy school so we've changed our name...kept the C of E bit but added 'Academy' instead of 'Prjmary School'. It's this that drives most school performances (the relentless pressure by academy bosses and their cronies to justify their enormous salaries) plus Ofsted, not whether they are a church school or not.

To add...in my class of 32 Year 3 children, 60% are Muslim, the rest are 'no faith' (and yes I do know this as it's stated in their pupil files) ie not a single family have any links whatsoever to the C of E church that we are (supposedly!) affiliated with.

It's beyond time that education was not affiliated at all with any religious organisation. It certainly has no bearing at all on outcomes.

It varies massively.

Rural here, so pretty much all the infants/juniors are CofE and they are generally pretty good. There is Catholic primary in the next village which gets poor results, but this is due to having very poor attendance, especially in summer term when many families take their children out of school to travel for work.

@twentysevendresses I think it's a different category of faith schools - the kind that have strict church attendance rules over years, in order to even qualify to apply. Not the average c of e that will take most within catchment. The one near me requires 3 years of WEEKLY church attendance and only recently even opened that to other faiths (like maybe 5 spaces a year or something tiny like that, with strict attendance rules for world faiths too). It's very sought after, has great results, and all the parents know each other from membership in about three nearby churches (catchment is very wide, but covers the same diocese).

@twentysevendresses

None of these schools had any real connection to the church (other than the name, eg St Matthew's C of E Primary School) and the very occasional boring assembly delivered by a vicar who clearly did not want to be there.

It really depends. The faith school my brother went to has it's own chapel in the school grounds where they do the morning assembly as it's basically used as the school hall and also used for school drama/plays/choir/orchestra, etc. They had a permanent vicar attached to it, so saw a lot of him, and he was also involved in other school activities.

At the end of the day, these rules only apply if a school is oversubscribed though. If the school is not at PAN (which more and more are not as rolls fall) then they legally have to take any child.

The catholic school and CofE school in my town both have about 22 per class. Non faith state schools have 30. In addition to an engaged parent community, and highly valuing education; having less kids in a class will help too.

Again, it depends. Some faith schools have 30 pupils in a class, and some comps will have less. You can't say that all Faith schools only have 22 or that all comps have 30. They basically receive the same governmental funding etc.