50% cap on faith admissions - time to write to your MP if you think it should stay?

[notjustbaconbutties]

There have been loads of threads in the past about the 50% cap on faith-based admissions, which has applied to all the new faith academies and free schools established since 2010. If you're not familiar with it then there's a good Wikipedia article here which gives a lot of background: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_50%25_Rule

Theresa May's manifesto said that she would ignore the responses to the Schools That Work for Everyone consultation and remove the cap, but it's all gone very quiet since she was elected(ish).

A decision is expected soon, and a cross-party group of MPs has started an Early Day Motion (which is a sort of petition for MPs) to say it should be kept. MPs need to be prodded to sign EDMs by their constituents, so if you feel strongly on this, now is a good time to write to them. If you don't have time to write your own letter then the Accord Coalition (campaign group) has made it easy by setting up a template letter: accordcoalition.org.uk/2017/11/10/mps-urge-government-not-to-jettison-anti-discrimination-cap-at-faith-schools/.

Either way it's going to be really interesting to see how the Government proceeds on this, because there is pretty good evidence that the cap is doing the job it was intended to do, and is popular with the vast majority parents. (I know many people out there think it should go further and ban faith-based admissions altogether, but if even this small and unprecedented step in the right direction can't survive a change in government there's little hope for further reform in future).

notjustbacon
I know I'm naughty, but could you imagine the uproar if ever a state school was set up that excluded on faith in the opposite direction from the current ones .....
It will never happen in my lifetime though !

I love RE in schools - it is the best way of creating atheists yet invented
And the way the DfE is letting certain church groups bulldoze policy - as per your thread title - needs to be resisted.

We'll thanks for clarifying GreenPurpleRed. It wasn't exactly obvious.

And the way the DfE is letting certain church groups bulldoze policy - as per your thread title - needs to be resisted

Yes, it does, and I do know you were joking, but it's exactly those sort of comments that encourage faith groups to claim the status of a persecuted minority, helping them to hold onto their privileges, because most politicians would steer clear of any debate that associated them with that sort of language.

It's much easier and more powerful for faith groups to say "people who oppose faith schools are all anti-faith so don't listen to anything they have to say" than it is for them to actually justify their position on things like the 50% Cap. For instance this article.

In France, one of the reasons for Jewish schools is that anti-semitism is so bad in the local secular schools that many teachers feel they can't guarantee the safety of the Jewish kids.... So it's not really a matter of excluding others.

Whereas America has no state funded schools at all - and religion seems to do rather well over there

Thanks for this op

Whereas America has no state funded schools at all

I presume you mean that the US has no state funded faith schools. It has plenty of state funded schools.

Yay, PRH spotted my deliberate dumb typo - and worked out what I meant

PP: hey faith school haters, suck it up.
Various posters including me (and especially me, it seems given by their response): hmmm, try to present nuanced, factual arguments, concrete examples as to the illogicality of the situation and its essential unfairness.
PP again: suck it up haterz.

Nice, really nice.

The cap being lifted where I live would be disastrous. There's already a real problem with what is basically religious segregation at 11 because this area is already faith-school heavy (Catholic), and the new academy which is CofE and which had 50% non-faith places instantly became the one of the only two schools non-Catholic children could apply to in the borough!

one of the only two schools non-Catholic children could apply to in the borough

Non-Catholics can apply to Catholic schools. If there are insufficient Catholic applicants to fill all the places any remaining places will be filled by non-Catholics. Around 36% of pupils at Catholic schools are from other faiths or none - that is around 290,000 pupils nationally.

Personally I want the 50% cap on faith admissions to stay. And yes, there are some areas where only Catholics can get into Catholic schools and there are certainly some Catholic schools where non-Catholics have no chance of getting a place. But it is wrong to say that non-Catholics cannot apply to Catholic schools. They can and in many areas they have a chance of getting a place. Even in the Westminster diocese, which has the smallest proportion of non-Catholics, over 15% of places at maintained Catholic schools go to non-Catholics. At the other end of the scale, around 65% of places in the Plymouth diocese go to non-Catholics.

Non-Catholics can apply to Catholic schools.

Yes, I know, prh47bridge. They can apply, but around here it's totally pointless for them to apply. Unless you are Catholic, you will not get into the Catholic state schools, there is no chance at all. (Even if you are Catholic, it helps if you are the right sort of Catholic.)

It seems appropriate to revive this thread. Hats off to Justine Greening for holding the fort for a few months in the name of evidenced-based policy, but now that Damian Hinds has replaced her I'm not holding out much hope for the 50% Cap staying in place. He's spoken out strongly in favour of getting rid of it: catholicunion.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Catholic-Schools-admission-debate-30-Apr-2014.pdf

Most catholic schools round here are outstanding, and over-subscribed. Many people, say 15-30 catholic families, don't get in, each year, to the local primaries.
So the demand is there. From the catholic families themselves.

If you aren't catholic, you obviously object to being prevented from applying. But from the school's presseiectuce,

Sorry. Pressed post by mistake.
But, from the school's perspective, the demand is already there, irrespective of the non catholic opposal.

Oblomov, three points are applicable in those circumstances:

1. Catholic schools often introduce stricter criteria when very oversubscribed so they end up selecting from within their own community, based on things like relative frequency of worship, age at baptism etc. This is coercive. School admissions should not be used as a means of "encouraging" families to modify their preferred practice.

1. If local non-faith provision is scarce or inadequate it is uncharitable of Catholic schools to prioritise Catholic families from further afield (who may have other options) over local non-Catholic families who might be forced to travel some distance in the opposite direction as a result. (And if local non-faith provision is good they probably have nothing to worry about anyway).

1. Catholic children benefit from mixing with non-Catholic families at school. It helps them to be more tolerant

of people from different backgrounds.

So there we have it Mrs May. If a public consultation doesn't give you the answer you want, and people are lining up to present you with evidence about why your policy to revoke the 50% rule is wrongheaded, no need to worry - just appoint a Minister of the right faith affiliation and it'll be sorted ... schoolsweek.co.uk/damian-hinds-4-things-we-learned-from-the-new-education-secretarys-first-interviews/

Looking forward to hearing his carefully considered rationale (along with the published consultation document, which is now a year overdue).

I'm just reviving this thread again, hopefully for the last time, and I'm happy to say I was wrong in my previous post. The DfE have finally responded to their consultation and announced that the 50% rule will stay!

My favourite line in the response is the one which says the Catholic Education Service "considers that" the 50% Cap would force them to breach Canon Law. This change in language from the original consultation doc shows that the DfE now realise they were being hoodwinked. The CES have been well and truly caught with their fingers in the pie!

But it's not all good news. There's a grubby little financial backhander for the CES to soften the blow. The government now says it will set aside funds from it's free school capital budget to contribute 90% of the capital costs for new VA schools in areas where local authorities want them. This flies in the face of the DfE's prioritisation of academies and allows schools to be built with 100% faith selection if the diocese can cough up the remaining 10% of the cost. Of course, once open, the VA schools can still convert to academy status, but then they can keep their fully selective policies.

Let's hope the combination of local democracy and the financial barrier will be enough to stop too many of these schools opening. (There is already a recent precedent, but it was bankrolled by a misguided council rather than a misguided government).

Pleased to hear they've found a way for faith schools to continue 100% faith selection.

The attitude towards faith schools on here is atrocious, I've no ideavwhy you're so desperate for your children to get places at them

Ilikemychicken, this discussion has dealt with unfair admissions to faith schools, not the existence of faith schools themselves. Don't confuse the two. Many would say the attitude to fairness and equality among those who advocate 100% faith-based admissions is atrocious. It is self-serving and un-Christian.

I wouldn't mind if we took all religion out of state schools but given we do have them I don't see why they can't be what it says on the tin - of that religion. Also it does vary around the country - the Catholic primary near where I was brought up in theNE stuggled for pupils and loads of children there were not Catholics. That is not the case in some other parts of the country where some Catholic primaries are very good and people are fighting to get places at them and hten you have religious state schools like Cameron, Gove and Blair chose at secondary level (to save fees or save face or however you want to see it)

Xenia they are what they say on the tin. They have a faith ethos. They attract families that want a faith ethos, for whatever reason. That doesn't mean they have to select all their students based on how closely they adhere to narrowly defined rules of worship. If an oversubscribed school says families should worship weekly, and family X only worships monthly, that will make them less eligible. Must they really change their worshiping habits to compete for a place? We should let families choose faith schools if they want them, but faith schools shouldn't be choosing families. It's coercive.