Would you/have you started going to church to get child into a good church school?!

[Bomper]

My ds should pass his 11+, but I am not 100% confident he will. The comprehensive schools in my area are pretty awful, except one, which is a C of E school. Lots of parents have now started to go to church in order to be able to apply, and I am being urged to do the same. Most of me thinks - 'this is my childs future, I will do whatever it takes', but a small part feels guilty. WWYD?

sorry yes to answer the OP

I wouldn't go if I didn't go anyway, but I might step up my attendance if that was an issue

just because I know that my family are Christian and we are already active members of the church and I wouldn't want my child to miss out on an education in her own faith because there were some people going through the motions just for a school place

agree with someone further down the thread though that a lot of priests/ vicars will be able to tell the fakers a mile off

yes and agree with Smiley

faith schools were set up to educate children when the state was not doing this

not set up as elitist alternatives to the existing state system

Personally no, because I'm too lazy, but don't blame anyone else for doing so. You make a hoop for someone to jump through just so they can get their kid educated, and some people will jump through it. Others may have the resouces not to have to, or the confidence not to to feel the need to. In either case, lucky them.

"Hahabizarre in what way are faith schools elitist??" They are discriminatory and selective.

We must be very, very lucky here as the state schools are pretty good, there is the option of grammar and we opted for the catholic school - why? because that is what you do. Many of the parents went to that school themselves and some even had the same teachers, you don't often get that in a city state school

It is quite annoying when you get the temporary mass attenders who then complain about the school once the child is there - about the requests for donations and a lesson cancelled for masses on holy days.

Cappuccino:
That's interesting.
We were looking for a school with flat access throughout because DS will not be independently mobile for large periods of his primary school life when he is having orthopaedic surgery. I applied to a handful of flat schools which were handy for travelling, i.e close to home or my work. I was told, on appeal at one of these schools that they would not accept DS over children living nearer (even though SN was a higher priority in their admissions criteria than proximity) because the DDA now meant that every school had to have an access plan and therefore there was no justification for them to accept DS because of his access needs!!

It is true that I did not apply to the nearest school which had flat access because it is underperforming, riven with social problems, huge and tumultous etc etc. The other nearby schools were Catholic or highly competitive and has 5 steps before you even get in the front door! (this is the school the appeal panel said should take us...the school itself said on it's website that they could not accommodate children with mobility difficulties!)

Blu - but what does 'access plan' mean? Does it actually mean they have to build anything or just produce a 'plan'?

it would be interesting to see if any school would actually have had time to get any ramps in place to meet the needs of a child due to start school

we had pressure put on us to put dd in a school right across town because the access was good. it was only because our school, independent of the LEA or any legal obligations, wanted to improve their access that we could tell them to bog off

Cappuccino - that was what was so ludicrous. He actually said to me 'a plan to make the school accesible within 5 years'. The school in question is a London Victorian primary - they are built with about 4 or 5 storeys around tights stone / brick stairways. Of course it couldn't have been made acessible easliy. I ponted out the difference between a 'plan / policy/ and a bricks and mortar entry to an actual school, and he shrugged and threw out his hands in a 'what can I do?' kind of way!!
Of course, they put this in writing to us, and i guess they would have taken care to be sure ofd thier facts. Although our LEA is notorious ofr taking an adversarial stance in relation to SEN. i.e 'say no and sort it out when the parents win the tribunal'.

Non-faith schools can be discriminatory and selective too.

Indeed mercy.
Of 4 applications, giving exactly the same evidence of DS's needs, we got two refusals (one on appeal), and two immediate acceptances. Acceptances from a regular (but small and competitive) maintained school and from a small and competitive foundation CoE school, refusals from one Foundation school (but not faith) and one regular but competitive maintained school.

(any school which is not actually a failing school is competitive in our LEA as there are not enough places!)

PPB - "It seems to me that maybe some of you should be getting more upset about the state schools being so bad instead of being derogatory about schools that are good." The two are not mutually exclusive. It's all part of wanting schools to be good across the board, rather than for a select few. And I don't think I have been derogatory. It's great if a school is good. I'd just still like to know how much - or little - it has to do with the god element.

Violet - if the system didn't suck, people would need to do so. I wouldn't, but I sympathise with those who do.

kimi "the church school my son will be going to IS by far the best in the area, as the league tables show" Good, that's great. I bet it still would be if it wasn't a faith school.

Quite often one of the reasons that other schools are bad, is because the good schools take more resources, both in terms of finance and the children of middle class concerned parents.

It's a vicious circle. Concerned middle class parents don't want to send their kids to "bad" schools, so the bad schools stay bad because there is no mass of concerned middle-class parents pressuring them to be good and providing them with the support needed for them to establish a good ethos.

So saying that we should be getting angry about the bad schools instead of the good, doesn't address the fact that the two are inter-related.

UD What do you think makes faith schools better then?

Surely faith schools get alot of their better resources through donations and church support

I don't think it matters where they get their better resources from, the fact that children who attend any school which has more spent on their educational opportunities than other children have spent on theirs, is what the issue is for me.

I really don't understand how that is a moral position, tbh. Life isn't a level playing field, but education should be.

Does the government roughly give all the schools the same sort of money? If this is the case I don't see anything wrong with a community, local church, local atheist group, local naturist enthusist supplementing their children's education.

Unquiet Dad, in response to your point about whether it is the 'faith dimension' that makes successful faith schools successful...
I wonder if it is more to do with the parents and their, well, 'culture' for want of a better word. I only have experience of my own catholic schools, but as I said in my previous post, the parents were predominantly working class with a great respect for both authority and education. My parents included. I have no idea whether that was true in other schools with families from a similar socio-economic background, but I do believe, as I said before, that it was a very significant contributing factor to the school's success.

has anyone apart from blu read the link i posted? heaven forbid we should let some actual information into this discussion!

I think voluntary aided schools (usually faith schools) are partly funded by the LEA/Dfes but have idea what percentage - 70% maybe?

But why would an atheist group or any other group want to do this? They feel they should have the right to a decent education for their children anyway. (You don't tend to get atheists' "groups" anyway, not in the same way you get religious groups; the idea is quite silly. Why would people meet up to discuss their non-belief in some fictional deity they don't believe in or don't give a toss about? It would be like football-haters meeting up every Saturday afternoon to dicuss their dislike of Sheffield Wednesday. This is one of the most common fallacies which the religious have about non-believers.)

"What makes faith schools better" is what, statistically, is shown to make any good school "better" - a high standard of students, concerned and involved parents, motivated and inspirational teachers (although you get a lot of these in "bad" schools, because they tend to be the ones who like a challenge), good ethos, strong leadership.

And good results - leading parents of bright kids who want them to do well to send their children there, hence more good results.

As Caligula says, it's a vicious circle and a self-fulfilling prophecy. The good schools get better and the bad get worse.

From your link BK.

"The schools are much more successful than other maintained schools at creating an ethos
where pupils learn effectively. Attendance is better and parents make a stronger
contribution to their children?s education."

Aha!

Well-spotted, bbs - this is true of all "good" schools, it seems.

bossykate you certainly didn't expect anyone to let information enter this discussion did you?

good grief. I have tried that before on this subject and been roundly ignored

I've just looked at that link bk. Aside from the quote from becky I'm going to highlight for you again that the report's summary findings do show that based on entitlement to free school meals, the demographic in RC schools is very similar to that of the general school profile
Not bad going for families who are all deluded and believe in fairies.
It would be so refreshing to discuss education and faith without those of us with beliefs being insulted in this way.