Primary admissions - its a faith school - parents committed etc really?

[crochetcircle]

Erm, feeling a bit silly and naive and under-prepared. We will be applying for a place for our dd1 in January 2015. Be gentle please.

Have just read the admissions criteria for our 'local' primary school and the first priority reads like this:

Children whose parent(s) are committed members of and regularly worship in the parish church of St XX in XX (that is at least having attended fortnightly over the past six months)

Firstly, I'm sure this wasn't the case when we moved here - I thought they just allocated places to local people and the faith stuff was incidental. Could they have changed the criteria to be more religious in the past year?

Second, argh. Do people really do this? We haven't even looked around schools yet let alone started attending a church in anticipation! (And I don't attend church, never have. Not sure I could do this without having faith - even if we really liked the school. Do people really do this? I thought this was an urban myth.)

Practical questions:

How can we find out if we have any chance of getting in without going to church? Can you just ring the school and ask them whether this happens?

We only have 5 months of possible church-going from now until the January 2015 application deadline. Would this mean we now have no chance of meeting the criteria anyway? How on earth do you get this on the record - are parents signing in at church every weekend? I mean, really.

Yes, there are other schools locally so we won't miss out on a school place. But this one is so close it seems a shame not to even have it as a choice.

Why would Birth Certificates be disallowed? You get the same one whatever your religion.

Did you mean baptismal certificates Goldi? If so, I don't think that is disallowed for a faith school if baptism is part of the criteria.

It may be 'that simple', Soontobesix, but that doesn't make it right.

Asking to see birth certificates is not "disallowed".

Yes it is. The Admissions Code says that the admission authority can ask for proof of birth date once a place has been offered, not before. And even then they cannot ask for a 'long' birth certificate.

My dad is a vicar of a c of e church and used to have issues with people joining to get into schools. He is very aware of this now and they have to have gone for a number of years to get the form signed, they can't just go for a few months, get in and go off iyswim. The vicar of your church is unlikely to give you a reference now and tbh you shouldn't be contemplating it.

Mind you, the church scramble and house moves in our area were secondary based not primary.

And obviously the vicar is aware who is at church week in, week out, no need for register. It is regular attendance that's important - if you're exhausted one week they don't expect you to drag yourself there. What a ridiculous comment!

Of course it is right Amber , faith school are subsidised by the church.

smoke your Dad might not have a register, but it's not at all uncommon. A family member had to sign one in her church for both primary and secondary admissions. No signed register, no form. And they'd been attending weekly for several years before the children were even born. It depends very much on how oversubscribed the local church schools are rather than anything else.

It may be subsidised soon but 90% of the building costs and all other costs are paid by the LA. The church subsidises less than 10% of the total costs of the school. It would be fairer if the proportion of faith places added matched the amount they contributed to funding.

Umm - except that quite often the land the school stands on and even the buildings often belong to the Church not the school. The Church is not rich (compared to outgoings).
One local village had its primary school shut, and the LA wanted to use the land for housing, only to be told it would revert unless used for Education.

Was your 'ridiculous' comment aimed at me smokeandglitter ? Because, if so, I was referring to 100% attendance possibly being necessary if there was a register to sign. Not where the vicar/Priest has discretion.

Faith schools may be subsidised by the church, but the vast majority of their budget comes from the taxpayer. I think there's something fundamentally wrong with a system that means someone of a particular faith has a better chance of getting their child into their local school than someone of another faith or none.

OP (and others in the same boat), the Equality & Human Rights Commission have put out a call for evidence on how people's religion or belief affects their access to public services.

See www.equalityhumanrights.com/about-us/our-work/key-projects/religion-or-belief-tell-us-about-your-experiences.

It's worth contributing to that if you can, as the evidence might well be used to justify change.

There's also a campaign group lobbying hard for changes to the admissions rules for faith schools, and they're making political headway, so check them out if interested: fairadmissions.org.uk/

Rafa "The church subsidises less than 10% of the total costs of the school"

Actually, it's a lot less than 10%. All of the running costs are met by the state, and the church subsidises only 10% of any capital costs. Capital costs are, on average, only about 7% of the total costs, so that means the church subsidises around 0.7% of the total costs.

However, even that is only for Voluntary Aided church schools. If they convert to academy status (as many are now doing) they get 100% of all their costs covered, and still get to keep their restrictive admissions policies.

I could get all pedantic and point out that although the state in theory meets all running costs, the reality is that there are some items the church has to fund. However, these are small so it doesn't make a huge difference to the figures.

More significantly the church owns the land and buildings for the vast majority of church schools.

We do go to church regularly and the children are baptised, have taken first communion etc but still might not meet the three times a month at our regular church criteria. Our parents are v old and often need support and live too far away for a day trip. We do go with them to their churches but the priest can't verify that. I also go to C of E midweek mass when children not on holiday/ settling into school etc. Here it is all done on the priest's memory of the last three years.

I personally don't feel that school should be decided by faith - I like the fact that the dc meet lots of different people with a range of different beliefs at their community primary, it helps them to appreciate other people and cultures. If an employer (e.g. Asda) only recruited employees on the basis of faith for anything other than a religious job then there would be an outcry. I also feel that it is unfair that despite actually having a faith and regularly attending church we probably still won't get into our local school due to visiting our parents (not that we would dream of not visiting them). Our nearest 5 'state' secondary schools select on the basis of faith, gender or ability and dd1 may well not gain admission to any of them.

Good luck OP in finding a primary school which you love.

Presumably the point of seeing the birth certificates would be to check if the patents were married at the time of birth - which is not a requirement under any admissions policy I've ever seen...

More significantly the church owns the land and buildings for the vast majority of church schools.

Yes, imagine if the government had to purchase all that real estate.

More significantly the church owns the land and buildings for the vast majority of church schools.

Yes, that is something the church technically holds over the Government. However, when the Church of England originally set up its schools they were aimed at educating the poor, and the land and buildings were given freely to that cause. It is only in very recent times that admissions have become restricted to those who attend church regularly. And ironically that is keeping out the very families that the school was originally set up to serve.

Unfortunately VA school admissions policies are set by governing bodies in individual schools, not by the church as a whole. The Diocese of London for instance has a policy of encouraging more open admissions but while it is making progress on its new schools it is struggling to persuade its existing schools to go down that path. That is why many people from within the Church, as well as outside of it, think its time for a change in admissions law.

Something I find interesting...

As tiggytape and others have pointed out, the admissions policy should now leave no room for judgement. It seems to me that requirements have become more precisely specified over the past few years: "active member of a CoE church" is becoming "attend St Winifred's twice every month for two years", for example.

Where does this leave people who need to move house within those two years? This is another way in which these sorts of admissions arrangements are socially selective - you need to be living close enough to your desired school when your child is as young as 16mo in order to attend a church for two years before the Jan deadline at ~3.5 years. When there was more discretion, if you moved from being an active member of one church to being an active member of another church, that was OK. And gasp you didn't have to wait for a month of five Sundays to have a two week holiday!

(Not that it was better - being mates with the vicar has given way to this silliness. IMO religion should play no part in school selection. If I ran the world, the churches would be allowed to keep their schools with their individual ethoses (ethii?!) and it would be for the parents to decide whether that was an ethos they wanted to buy into, irrespective of their religious belief or practice).

"I could get all pedantic and point out that ..."

I could too, and point out that in practical terms its generally not "the church" that funds the 0.7% subsidy, but the parents, via voluntary contributions to Diocesan Maintenance Funds.

The contributions are voluntary (although some parents do report feeling under pressure to contribute), and I think in some cases the maintenance schemes are a common fund for church maintenance as well as school maintenance, so voluntary contributions from church congregations go into the pot too. However, if those same congregations are significantly swelled by pre-school parents then it may well be the case that the schools that are subsidising the churches rather than the other way round.

SanityClause Yes, imagine if the government had to purchase all that real estate. or pay rental charges set by the church at the going rate. Some areas London would be pretty expensive I would imagine.

This is not to say I agree with the faith criteria BTW.

No, I'm not a fan of faith criteria, either, MumTrying, but it would take a huge political will to change the current system. And I don't think there is that.

tiggytape's point is born out in my DD 's school. In year 6, I understand there are children of different religions (and maybe none - I don't know) who presumably got in trhough all sorts of criteria. In Reception, we were told every child fulfilled the weekly attendance criteria (not bi-monthly or monthly). Siblings too only got priority if the family were still attending church regularly. I know of at least one child who was signed off as a weekly attender who was not admitted (so presumably they must have started choosing amongst the weekly attenders on distance grounds too). there has been a massive change.just in the last 3 or 4 years, certainly in and around London.