School Gate blog: should faith schools admit children of a different religion?

Faith schools should no longer select children on the basis of their religion, a new report recommends.

The two-year study by the Runnymede Trust, the race-relations think-tank, provides a devastating critique of the role of faith schools in 21st-century Britain, accusing many of having lost sight of their original historic mission to help the poor.

It concludes that faith schools educate a disproportionately small number of poor children, offer inadequate education about other religions and often display an “insular and absolutist” approach to the rest of society.

Rob Berkeley, of the Runnymede Trust, said that the solution was not to get rid of faith schools, but to encourage them to end selection on the basis of religion, so they could work for the benefit of all of society. “If faith schools are convinced of their relevance for society then that should apply equally for all children. With state funding comes an obligation to be relevant and open to all citizens,” he said.

The report comes at a key point in the debate about the role of faith schools in an increasingly secular and multicultural society. Ministers, who are concerned about distinct ethnic or religious communities living “parallel lives” without ever mixing, have said that schools have a key part to play in promoting community cohesion.

Churches in England were the first to provide free education for the poor in the early 19th century, long before the State became involved, and England’s 6,900 faith schools still make up a third of the total school estate. The Church of England has 4,657, followed by 2,053 Roman Catholic, 36 Jewish, 8 Muslim, 2 Sikh, 1 Hindu and 82 other Christian schools.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has distanced himself from encouraging growth in the number of faith schools, but has said that local communities should have a right to them. His expansion of trust and academy schools has made it easier for faith groups to get involved with education.

The Church of England last year committed to opening up all of its new schools to wider communities, but the Catholic Church agreed only to “consider the scope” for a similar move and no such commitment has been made by other faiths.

Mr Berkeley praised those faith schools that went out of their way to be inclusive of their local communities, adding that there were Church of England schools in the East End of London with an almost entirely Muslim intake. He noted, however, that this inclusive approach was not universal. Only 11.4 per cent of pupils at primary faith schools, for example, are on free school meals, the shorthand for poverty, compared with 17.7 per cent in nonfaith schools.

Steve Chalke, chief executive of Oasis Community Learning, which runs nine Christian academies, said that selecting pupils by faith was incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. “You cannot be both a Christian school and a school only for Christians,” he said.

However, the Rev Janina Ainsworth, chief education officer for the Church of England, disputed the report’s statistics and said that stopping selection on the basis of religion would be “deeply unpopular with parents, and would do nothing to foster community cohesion”.

Jon Benjamin, director-general of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: “To take the successful model that is the faith school in this country and to try to mould it into something that will effectively strip away precisely that which makes it successful will do a huge disservice to this country.”

Pick and mix: Case study

Three quarters of the children at St Paul’s Whitechapel Church of England Primary School in East London are Muslim. They and the other pupils at the 200-strong school learn about Islam and have a weekly assembly taken by the local vicar.

Darren Rubin, the deputy head, said the children were all excited about Christmas and about the Muslim festival of Eid ul-Fitr. “We work in a big Muslim community and what we look to do is celebrate that,” he said. “Seventy-five per cent of children will be off for Eid.

“They learn about all religions and their festivals. We have lots of children from different backgrounds and they all learn from each other.”

Most parents at the school are of Bengali origin and the school runs English classes for those whose second language is English.

St Paul’s selects on the basis of faith and gives priority to children whose parents attend the local church. It also gives preference, however, to pupils whose parents are of another faith and have chosen the school because of its religious tradition.