Are 'faith schools' more or less divisive than Grammar and Independent schools

[zanzibarmum]

Accord 'research' says faith schools are divisive (there's a surprise coming from them). Are they - more or less so than GS or public schools

zanzibar, that Catholic holy days only require 40mins attendance doesn't tell me what other faiths require, & still might be an issue for those without their own transport.

However, whether or not time constraints are the reason working class people shy away from religion is really irrelevent - it was a tongue in cheek comment in response to your chelsea tractor jibe. The important point is that in many cases churches (& presumably other religious meeting places) are mainly frequented by the middle classes and working class people often don't attend which leads to a social bias in faith schools.

We've got a large Irish, Indian and Filippino community here, not many of them qualify for your middle class label.

Snorkle - I have to say that my experience (in London) is that while there does seem to be quite a strong middle class bias in Anglican churches, this is not really true of Catholic congregations. Doesn't change the principle though of course.

I don't think it is right for schools only to take people from the faith as a school should also represent its local community.

However if you take away all the church
places people who attend church and are less well off would not be able to send their children to a church school of their faith. If you take away all the church places it would end up being those living nearest only which always ends up being those who can afford a house at an inflated price next to a good school.

I have looked at accord's website and they are a pressure group to stop schools offering church places...so any survey they have done is likely to be biaised in favour of what they are trying to achieve.

I will certainly not be signing up for their nasty organisation

Why nasty? If you "don't think it is right for schools only to take people from the faith as a school should also represent its local community", then surely you are in broad agreement with them?

I'm not in agreement with them because they are trying to stop church places altogether, which will mean some people who are active church goers and want to send their children to a church aided school will no longer be able to.

I really think that school admissions policies should be looked at area by area. Eg. if there is a town that has several church schools and only one community school the town would be able to ensure there were a decent number of non church places at each school. If there is a town that only has one church school and several community schools there would not be a problem with having more church places at the church school as there would be a few non church schools to chose from.
In a village with only one school the places could be allocated to those living nearest.
I expect this happens in most places and there are a few areas where there are not enough school places and admissions criteria need to be looked at.

I don't have a problem with trying to make school admissions fairer to all but this will not be achieved if church places are scrapped altogether. It will simply be different chunk of people getting into good schools and another chunk of people finding they can no longer send their children to a faith school.

At our local C of E faith school we have traveller children and muslim children. The school's charitable fund pays for children to go on residential trips if they can't afford it. The ethos is one of caring for one another and rewarding children for acts of kindness.

Just how is this socially divisive?

IMO grammar schools are the most divisive out of the three the OP has mentioned. This is because faith schools divide communities by religion, indie schools divide communities by wealth. Grammar schools divide both communities and often families by intellect. Division in communities is unpleasant, but division in families is far worse. I have one average child and one academic one. They will be both be going to a (faith) comprehensive.

Independent schools are the most divisive, because you can't get in without the money, whereas religion is open to all those who believe I suppose.
Grammar schools are a good idea for bright working class kids to have a leg up but I guess they have been flooded by those who could afford indie but decided to save their money

abraid - your C of E school sounds as though it does have a fair admissions policy. So that's working well. Many of them don't, and aren't.

All of the schools I know of have an ethos of caring and being kind. It's just that, round here, the faith secondary can choose its pupils and the other schools can't so they get the remnants. So it gets far more of the middle class families, fewer with special needs, fewer from low income families.

(not quite my understanding of a caring ethos... why doesn't it care more for the low income and SN children and less about its exam results?)

You can argue most of this any way though. I don't think anyone should be expected to change something as deeply rooted as their religion in order to get their child the education they want, so don't accept that they're less divisive on the grounds that anyone can join the faith, but some of them are either undersubscribed or have spaces specifically reserved for those of other faiths, so that can be argued in their favour.

Increasingly independent schools have bursaries so the poor can attend which goes a little way to mitigating their divisiveness.

Grammars - hmm, hard to argue that they're not always divisive on IQ, unless you claim unreliable tests that can be coached for (but that only goes so far I think and isn't something you really want to encourage).

The thing is though, people have different ideas about what is acceptable - some see division by IQ as OK and others are happy with division by faith and still others think division by wealth is acceptable too. So some sorts of division are OK and others aren't, but which is which depends on individual opinion, so to try & compare them is pretty much impossible.

I think a lot of it comes down to population density and I will admit that our area isn't long on primary-aged children. Cities like London have seen big increases in numbers that we simply haven't down here. In fact, a couple of 'extra' children would be good for us.

Depends on the faith school I guess. DD goes to one but it is the local middle school and the children just go there as on the other side of town they go the middle school that isn't a faith school if that makes sense. Church attendance etc doesn't come into it here apart from if you are outside catchment and want to go.

I'm not sure I take your point mrsruffelo. What good can it be sending an uacademic child to a shcool where they will constantly struggle and fail simply because their brother or sister goes there? Surely it would be better to send them to one with a curriculum better with wider scope for them to flourish. As a teacher I have seen far too many students buckle under the unrealistic academic expectations of their parents, where they would probably be happier, and more successful, on a more vocationally orientated course.

Having said that, the whole concept of grammar schools is a bit , but then i was educated in NZ whose system is similar to the Canadian one.

Faith schools, on the other hand, are definitly divisive. DD's school is massively oversubscribed and is a happy, multicultural, multi faith, multi ethnic, multi lingual school. It is full of children who were rejected from the multitude of local schools on the basis of faith. We were lucky to get her in there, our next option was an hour's walk away. There was no 'choice' for us, the applications were strict about the need for a vicar/priest's letter which, as practising athiests, we could not have.

I think grammar schools are a good idea in principle (I went to one) but mrsruffalo is right about the hijacking. This has happened in part because grammar schools are now a rarer currency and the affluent middle classes know best how to earn that. It wouldn't happen so much if we had more grammar schools.

Faith schools are a totally separate argument. I would argue (and have, at length, on here and elsewhere) for church and state to be separate and for no religion to have a place in the guidance of state education. (As opposed to the teaching about religion, from Greek myth all the way through to Christian myths and modern Islam, all of which is very interesting from a cultural perspective.)

In a world divided by the debate on faith schools, with atheist and religious voices all clamouring to be heard, surely the only sensible option is to keep education secular.

UnquietDad - I totally agree with you with regard to faith schools. I believe that there is a slippery slope where religion is concerned in the public domain - once you make some concessions, you have potentially opened the door to a whole host of social inequalities and problems. All religions should, in my view, be taught in schools as interesting aspects of history and culture, with teachers banned from making claims as to the absolute truth of any belief system.

I live in a place where religion and state are closely linked, and because I was asked to state my religion (none) on some official forms, it has made life difficult in some ways. There are certain local people who ostentatiously make the sign of the cross whenever they see me because they know that I do not subscribe to their religion. Slippery, slippery slope.

unquietdad. I think there is a quiet majority who are happy with things as they are and don't want a secular education system thank you. One can make the admissions system fairer for church schools without scrapping church places or the schools themselves. I suspect accor wants to get rid of church places as a step towards getting rid of church schools.

If there were no independent schools and no church schools I don't think our education system would be any better would it? Just because you personally do not see the benefit of church schools it doesn't mean they are a bad thing.

It seems acceptable for people to knock independent schools and to knock church schools. Yet you are happy with grammar schools as you went to one....why don't you campaign for more grammar schools rather than bashing church schools?

According to research last year, parents aren't that keen on faith schools when asked independently about what sort of schools they'd like.

A minority of parents (45%) are happy with having schools partnered with religious groups, fewer than partnerships with omost other sorts of organisations.

And only 8% of parents feel that faith or religion should be the main reason for choosing a school.

Which suggests that a majority aren't actually that much in favour of the system as it stands, people are just going along with it.

www.dcsf.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/DCSF-RW041.pdf

BonsoirAnna on Fri 12-Jun-09 21:33:27
"I think there should be a lot more schools that recruit pupils along different criteria. The more varied the choice for all, the more likely there is to be a school to suit everyone and the more socially inclusive of everyone as a whole the system will be."

This is assuming that everybody either lives in a city with several schools to choose from or is able to move to get close to the school of their choice. Or how is a small town going to be able to run enough different schools to suit everybody? Not to mention the immense cost to the environment if everybody has to drive to school.

If your only school is a faith school then that doesn't exactly enhance choice, does it? We have Mumsnetters on here who are no longer able to use the only local school, but have to send their children travelling long distances to other communities because they do not have the right faith and hence cannot get into their local school.

Our own two secondaries were recently merged into one and handed over to a religious group whose faith is not shared by most of the children whose only catchment school it now is- how does that enhance choice?

As for non-faith schools being inimical to education: the standards of this school have slipped incredibly since it was handed over to the said group; parents whose children have to attend this school are devastated at how little they are learning. I am not surprised: I went to the introduction meeting and the whole talk was about their religious ethos and the childhood experiences of the founder: the curriculum was not mentioned once. It was like being at a revival meeting. A week before the application deadline they were not even able to tell us what subjects would be on offer.

Faith does not automatically equal quality.

womble, conflating the grammar school issue and the faith school issue is misleading.

I can campaign for one while explaining why I find the other unhelpful - I don't think those ideas are mutually exclusive.

As I always say on this issue - you only see nothing wrong with church schools as you have grown up with them. If they suddenly landed in the middle of the education system they'd seem bizarre.

Imagine a football school or a politics school, where you had to support a particular team or party to get your child in. And someone saying "I can't see how abolishing football schools would make the school system any fairer."

We have a situation where I used to live where the number of children at secondary age had grown (although that at primary had shrunk enough to close one school, and reduce two others to single form entry). So they started up a new school. It is Catholic. They presented no evidence that locally there was a need for another Catholic school, nor of any evidence that locally that is what parents wanted. The only reason appeared to be that the catholic church was prepared to stump up a (small) contribution to the costs. I really fail to see how that can possibly be right. The new school may not exclude that many children (I'm not sure what it's entry criteria are and how many non-faith families will be able to apply there) but why should parents be forced to send their children to a school which does not hold the same values and beliefs as they do? Given the shortage of places in the area I wouldn't be surprised if the existing Catholic school was oversubscribed, but then all the schools (except for the two really crap ones) are oversubscribed because there aren't enough places. I really feel there is something ery wrong about opening new faith schools when all the evidence suggest that religious belief is declining, and active participation is very much a minority activity.

Unquietdad -

You were the one who brought grammar schools into the debate. Grammar schools are in the title of the OP so it is not just a thread about church schools anyway.

I didn't go to a church school myself (it was a county primary).

You don't have to go to church to get your child into a church school. At my DS church school people living in the parish get in first whether they go to church or not.

Some church schools may have odd entry policies which of course should be looked at but not all church schools. C of E voluntary controlled schools do not have any church places they just take the nearest children irrespective of faith.

You and others are just taking the worst examples of unfair entry criteria and applying them to all church schools in order to justify closing church schools, just because you personally don't see the value in them.

No I would not compare a church school to politics or football team..

I personally would not chose to send my child to a catholic school. However catholic schools are always oversubscribed and get very good results so why shut down a school that is very popular and successful. I'd rather send my child to a school linked to a church than big business.. I believe that private sector companies partly finance city acadamies.

If all the money from the church is taken out of education where do you think the extra money is going to come from or would you be happy for class sizes of 40 or more?

I noticed an article yesterday saying that under labour people have been encouraged to send their children to state schools rather than private. Now fewer people can afford private the government is going to have to lay on bulge classes etc at extra cost to the taxpayer. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to threaten the charitable status of private schools?

Scrapping the best schools in this country whether they be faith, grammar or independent is not going to make the system better unless people pay a huge amount of extra tax to make up for the lack of church money or private money (from parents in the private sector)

In our neck of the woods, the academies replacing the old (and successful) council state schools are financed by an evangelical group. The problem is that the vast majority of parents are not evangelical Christians (or indeed Christians at all) and do not wish their children to go to a religious school. We wanted out secondaries run by the council and financed by the taxpayer. It was decided above our heads.

It can't be about choice, when these are the only schools in their respective catchments. (I was lucky to get dd into a school out of catchment, but that was only because she is disabled and this sorry lot had no disability policy)

A lot of private sector financing of secondary education is now by religious groups/individuals, some of whom are very keen to see e.g. teaching on evolution replaced by creationism. Our local one does not do this, otoh they have an extremely negative attitude to academic studies, seems we should all be humble like Jesus (who didn't go to Oxbridge). No homework; subject teaching has been replaced by themes- in other words, they have more or less decided that children from this area are not going to go to top universities, because they are not encouraged to work for academic results.

Teens from our area used to be known for their good behaviour: in the last year there have been riots in the school and former star pupils are hopelessly disaffected.

I think we would all prefer to pay higher taxes.

Happywomble, I have to differ with you there. Grammar schools are in the thread from page 1, long before I joined in. And I was making the point that they probably should not be, as the two issues are so different.

I don't want to "close" church schools. This contention almost always comes up, and it's an unfair one. I'd simply like to see the state education system being secular.