Our Catholic high school has as it's admissions criteria 'baptised catholic'. No actual church attendance is necessary. So if people are that desperate to send their kids there then surely they can just baptise them?
Yes, in some areas the admissions criteria are baptism only. However church attendance criteria are added in areas where schools that are very oversubscribed want to select from within the Catholic community. They don't just want any Catholics, they want the ones that can jump through the most hoops. There are obviously extreme examples of that like the Oratory, but in between there is a whole spectrum of increasingly stringent criteria. So if you're basing you opinion just on what happens in your local area, then you need to consider the bigger picture.
A lot of Church of England schools don't use baptism as a criteria because to be baptised you have to make a statement of faith, and in many cases that would be untruthful. Parents shouldn't have to lie to get their kids into their local school.
The thing is many non religious parents choose a faith school because it is ‘good’.
Of course they do. But they shouldn't have to lie about their beliefs in order to do it.
It is good because it is a self selecting cohort where parents have to make the effort to register their children outside the usual allocation process.
Yes, they are selective. However there are still other legal ways of being selective that don't involve religion. Why should religious people have more access to selection than the non-religious?
Filling a school with entitled, it’s not fair, I don’t like the uniform, was this teacher unreasonable, my poor child, type parents would pull it down and it would cease to be a good school
Good Catholic schools are already just as full of those types of parents as any other good school.
Can someone tell me what criteria siblings come under? Ie if you get a Catholic 50% place, then does the following sibling count as a Catholic or fall under the 'other' thereby increasing the Catholic pot
Lotsofsighing It's different for different schools. In some cases I've seen the siblings come first, before the remaining places are split. That way, if the school is already 50:50 then in theory the siblings should be 50:50 too and it should all even out.
In other cases I've seen faith places allocated first, then the siblings come out of the 50% allocated "without reference to faith". In theory that should be ok too so long as the faith families keep up their churchgoing so that the younger siblings can apply under the faith category too. But if they stop going to church when their eldest gets a place, so their younger child doesn't qualify for a faith place then they would be top priority for one of the second 50% places instead.