Gosh, that sounds bad for faith schools.
The report is question is from the Institute of Community Cohesion (sounds official), and it is about community cohesion in Blackburn and Darwen, and the BHA post makes it sound like a slam dunk for faith schools. To be fair, the BHA weren't the only ones to pick up on it. Well known opponents of selection on the basis of faith in schools Ekklesia reported on the report, saying that the IoCC's conclusions were that 'faith schools are one source of segregation'.
Well you can read the Summary and Recommendations from the report yourself. If you do, you won't recognise either the BHA or Ekklesia's version.
The whole document makes just two references to faith schools. The first reads:
A particular issue in Blackburn with Darwen is the number of faith schools: half the borough’s schools are at least partly segregated on religious grounds. However, faith schools can work to reduce segregation. Some primary faith schools have an open door policy and a very mixed intake. Indeed faith schools are generally well regarded and sought after by Asian parents. The Anglican diocese has a mission to serve the needs of the community and will admit children other than Anglicans though these have priority. St Wilfred’s is the sole Anglican secondary school and has opened its admissions to be more welcoming to the local community of whatever faith, even though it is oversubscribed. The second is:
"We therefore recommend that the Council should adopt a bolder, higher profile approach to promoting community cohesion which specifically recognises the challenges of separation and engage with partners and the community in seeking ways to reduce it. The starting point would be to develop a shared and positive vision of a mixed community, which is widely owned by the community. Specific interventions could then be developed in terms of promoting and facilitating mixed housing developments such as: undertaking a proactive campaign with parents and communities to promote the positive benefits of diverse schools and perhaps challenging faith schools to reconsider their admissions policies in the light of the impact on cohesion; developing role models to help employers to combat stereotypical trends and asking employers to review recruitment policies to encourage more mixed workforces."
When it comes to making recommendations, the only one relating to faith schools is a repeat of the second of these to references to challenge faith schools to reconsider their admission policies in light of the impact on cohesion.
That's it folks. That is the slam dunk from this report that the BHA and Ekklesia were trumpeting.
On Mouse's reading the first reference to faith schools was actually positive about their potential to improve community cohesion. There is only one Anglican secondary school, and this has an open admissions policy.
The summary runs to ten pages, and makes dozens of recommendations for how to improve community cohesion, but it barely mentions faith schools.
Mouse has said a number of times before, that the way to stop faith schools reserving places for people of a particular faith is to remove the need for them to do so, by allowing them to expand to take everyone who wants to attend.
By the way, if you're looking for the quote from the BHA's headline that "faith schools 'automatically a source of division'" you won't find it in the report. That is something one of the report authors apparently said. So the headline 'New report finds ...' is rather misleading, isn't it.
5 comments:
Mousey,
1. We are not opponents of faiths schools as you have claimed. Indeed, all three of my kids go to one! Ekklesia wants to see them reformed in the areas of admissions and employment as we have made clear on numerous occasions, including in the article you quote above. I'd be grateful for a correction asap.
2. I am not sure what it is exactly that you take issue with in the Ekklesia story about the report? What we said is that faith schools were one element, which is exactly the case.
3. You seem to have ignored the fact that religion is at the heart of the report. Blackburn with Darwen has the third largest Muslim population in the country. identified in the report was "a reluctance to openly discuss or address issues of race, faith and segregation.” To say there are only two references to faith schools and so the issue is incidental is to entirely ignore the context of the report. Are you sure you have read it properly or were you pehaps distracted by some cheese?
4. I think mouse is either being mischevious or needs to go back to mouse school. The report doesn't make "dozens of recommendations" it makes 8 which are broken down into subpoints. One of these eight recommendations is devoted almost entirely to schooling, which covers faith schools as well as others. Yes, just one of these subpoints uses the phrase "faith school" but the other points cover faith schools eg "Ensuring all schools are open to wider use and for different communities" which clearly has a specific and important application to faith schools.
4. It is great that mouse is thinking creatively about thse issues. But your proposed policy of church school expansion on the scale you suggest is I am afraid unworkable. For a start there simply aren't enough Christian teachers to go around (something which the Church maintains is vital for the Christian ethos of its schools). One third of primaries are already church schools which means that they are already disproportionate to the wider population and are facing many shortages of Christian headteachers in particular (as I know from my experience as a governor of one).
Jon
Mouse does not normally reply to comments, on the basis that Mouse has said what he has said, and the comments is everyone else's chance. However, since its you, Mouse feels he really should. For those who don't know, Jon is Jonathan Bartley, Co-Director of Ekklesia.
1. You're quite right on this point. It was sloppy wording, and Mouse has amended.
2. The issue is that your piece implies through its focus that the report is about faith schools - which it is not. As I continue to argue below, faith schools are barely mentioned.
3. Its interesting that you say 'Religion is at the heart of the report'. The report itself says, "At the heart of this challenge is the issue of the separation between Whites and Asians and within the Asian community between those of Pakistani and Indian heritage resulting in different groups living ‘parallel lives’". In other words, the segregation is primarily ethnic, cultural and social. Religion is a factor in there, but to portray it as a religious divide is an inaccurate simplification.
Mouse read the report very carefully. The segregation in education discussed is not between church schools, with all the Christians in, and non-faith schools, with all the muslims in. It is between segregated communities.
4. The report does contain dozens of recommendations. The fact that they are packaged up into 8 overall recommendations with numerous sub-recommendations is incidental. None of the overall themes mention faith schools, only one of the sub-points.
None of the eight overall recommendations are dedicated entirely to schooling. The one that mentions faith schools reads "The Council should explicitly recognise that the persistence of separate communities is a problem and engage with partners and the community in seeking ways to reduce it.". Again the issue is community segregation, with religion as a dynamic within that, not the primary driver.
The recommendation (sub-point!) you quote about "Ensuring all schools are open to wider use and for different communities" does not end there. The rest of the sentence reads, "for example for adult learning programmes". This is clearly about opening up the school outside its normal schooling activities for wider community use. This is obviously a very different issue to that of the admission policies of church schools.
5. Your suggestion that the expansion of church schools is impossible due to the lack of availability of Christian teachers assumes that all teachers at church schools have to be Christian. This is far from the case now (as you have observed on your blog before), and need not be the case. As long as people are happy to work within the ethos of the school, they should be able to work there - this is the case in the majority of church schools. The total number of teachers needed clearly won't change, they will simply move from schools that people don't want to send their kids to, into schools which are oversubscribed. There is a lack of headteachers in general - Christian or otherwise. However, you don't need an extra headteacher when you add another class to a school, only when you add more schools.
The other thing to look for is, as Sherlock Holmes would say, the dog that did not bark. If the report wanted to point the finger of blame for community segregation on faith schools, why didn't it just say so? It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say, "faith schools have caused segregation". But they didn't - because it hasn't.
The problem with church schools admission policies at the moment is that church schools are oversubscribed, so they have to impose selection criteria. The best solution to that is to remove the need to impose selection criteria by allowing them to expand to admit everyone who wants to go there.
I'm sure this one won't go away Jon - we'll have to just have a beer and talk it out!
If I may be so bold as to make this suggestion: why not let parents decide how they want their children to be educated and let the Humanist activists and their apologists get real jobs instead of constantly stirring up strife in the name of 'tolerance'?
It would be nice if they afforded the same freedoms and respect that they demand from the rest of society. They seem to forget that they are also a minority!
Mouse I am very grateful. As you say, we should have a beer (or some cheese) and discuss it.
Stewart. How would you feel if the two thirds of primaries that are 'secular' gave priority to Atheists and Humanists in admissions over religious people? The issue is not whether faith schools should exist, but whether they should have the right to discriminate in admissions and employment in favour of their own (not very Christian!). (Incidently, this sometimes includes discrimination against other Christians who attend the "wrong" churches that aren't connected to the schools).
Jon - Of course faith schools should have the right to discriminate when it comes to employing teachers.
The word 'discrimination' has been battered out of shape. We all discriminate - it's human nature and not always a bad thing.
It's certainly wise for parents to discriminate when looking for babysitters - and teachers.
Why should you, me, Mouse or anyone else dictate to parents what teachers their children must have in order to comply with the unholy project called social engineering?
And should the Sunday School teachers at my church all be Christians? Would employing just one atheist be good for 'community cohesion' even if that led to some children missing lessons and going off to smoke pot instead?
As for all the secular schools, they wouldn't be able to find qualified staff that were all atheists, because they are not numerous enough.
I repeat what I said in my previous comment - why not let parents decide how they want their children to be educated?
Do you believe a humanistic Nirvana is possible? It's utterly impossible because individual freedoms are being sacrificed to make everyone 'comply' with rules they have no influence in making.
You can't have joy when everything is reduced to lowest common denominators as it is being, because this breeds a dumbed down population that can be easily manipulated to 'comply' with whatever the elite propose.
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