Good school, bad school; faith school, secular school

Yesterday, a new organisation was launched called the [Accord Foundation](http://www.accordcoalition.org.uk/), which claims to be “a new broad-based coalition calling for inclusive schools and an end to special arrangements for state funded religous schools”. Its member organisations are listed as the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the British Humanist Foundation, Ekklesia, the Hindu Academy, The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, the Socialist Education Association, a Labour affiliate which was once the party’s main think-tank on education, and Women Against Fundamentalism. The supporters do include a few religious figures, but also includes Polly Toynbee (who wrote [this](http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/sep/02/education.labour) in yesterday’s *Guardian*) and AC Grayling, prominent secularist thinkers, as well as Professor Steve “I’ll tell you about evolution and you can tell me when I’m lying” Jones.

On the BBC London breakfast show on Monday, they brought the topic up for discussion; I don’t think that show is a good one for debating heavy issues, as the interruptions are too frequent and everything feels hurried. Still, a bloke got through saying that religious schools are hotbeds of racism which should all be abolished. I had to object to that, called the station and, for the second working day in a row, got through. I told them that I’d been to a Catholic school in south London and, much as the school (St Mary’s junior school in Croydon) was not great, with a headmaster who was a real reactionary and an atmosphere that was “more repressed than disciplined”, racism wasn’t a big problem because the school was ethnically so diverse; whites, blacks and Asians were each well-represented.

The problem faith schools often present is not racism but religious discrimination, as [David T points out](http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/08/31/accord-a-challenge-to-faith-schools/) over at Harry’s Place:

> What I do object to, is priests denying potential students access to a state funded school, because their family hasn’t attended church services with sufficent frequency. This happened to a friend of mine: a busy mother of two who missed two Sundays in a row and was told by the priest that he was beginning to doubt their commitment to the Church, and that this was bound to be relayed to the school at admissions time. At the risk of sounding like an Essex taxi driver – and no shame in that – this is being subsidised by my taxes!
>
> Likewise, who can have missed the shambles at various Jewish schools, where Rabbis have decided that culturally and ethnically Jewish students who want to attend a school with a Jewish ethos, should be excluded on the grounds of their interpretation of some ancient rabbincal commentary that, to them, determines whether a person counts as a Jew or not?

The latter point is one of the few examples of actual racial discrimination at religious schools; children whose mothers converted to Judaism but whose conversions were rejected by a major London Jewish school, because their rabbis did not accept them as Jewish. They effectively have a dispensation from racial discrimination laws, and while this may have been justified in past decades when anti-Semitism was a real threat, it is much less easy to justify now. I am personally aware of Catholic schools with a reputation for discriminating against Catholic children of only part Catholic parentage, while a Muslim school might end up narrowing the ethnic criteria by restricting admission to a certain type of Muslim which tends to occur in certain ethnic groups and not others. Admittedly, I know of nothing of the sort actually happening in a state-funded Muslim school, but that is because such schools are so few and are small.

This controversy seems to have built up steam because of two separate issues: one being the need of middle-class parents to get their children into good schools rather than dump schools, and who find that the best schools happen to be run by the Church, and the demand of Muslims for state-funded schools as Catholics and Protestants have had for decades. On the latter topic, people have spoken openly in favour of discriminating against Muslims in this regard, because they claim Muslims could not be trusted not to inculcate extremism. However, given that even MI5 are now known to believe that “a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation” (see [earlier entry](https://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/mt.php/2008/08/21/mi5_there_is_no_terrorist_profile)), this fear seems unfounded (or rather founded on bigotry), and it might also do to reflect on the fact that most of the girls given away in forced marriages every year go to non-Islamic schools – they must do, as the number of Muslim secondary schools is so few. Perhaps a decently-run religious school would be a better protection against such happenings than a secular ghetto state school where teachers might not know what to do if girls complain about such a situation – perhaps contacting her parents, or telling her that she (or he) can’t interfere?

To an extent, I agree that parents’ church-going should not be a major factor in deciding children’s admission to a state-funded religious school; what should matter more is their good character. If a religious school restricts itself to teaching the children of churchgoing Catholics or five-times-daily praying Muslims, it effectively abdicates its responsibility to look after the lost sheep as well. It is all too easy for a school to maintain a religious atmosphere when they cherry-pick the children with two practising Catholic, Anglican or Muslim children; to use a quote from Len Deighton’s book *MAMista*, when the American wannabe revolutionary found the peasants revolting, but not in the way he expected, “any fool can make a revolution among revolutionaries”. This discrimination is particularly objectionable where a religious community is large and dissipated, as is the case with many Christian communities; where it is religiously strong, and the number of places low, and particularly when that school has been established as a private school for a number of years, using religious practice as an admission criterion has that much more merit, in my opinion.

On the other hand, religious parents pay their taxes as well as do the secularists and the uncommitted, and building up a school environment does not just take money, it takes *work*. While I appreciate the predicament of parents who find that the best schools in their district are church schools, one wonders how many of them noticed this before it came to deciding on a school for their children. We do, of course, need good schools for all children, but destroying existing good schools is not a good way to do this.

Of course, not all religious schools are good schools. Some of them, like the aforementioned St Mary’s (at the time I was there in the mid 1980s), are run by reactionary idiots and have unimaginative curricula which, according to the headmistress who succeeded the man who ran it when I was there, subject the pupils to “slow death by worksheet”. A lot of Muslim parents would love to send their children to an Islamic school, but refuse those which are on offer because the curriculum is too narrow, the tuition not good enough, or they do not like the way the school is run. It is also a myth that a religious school can only cater for those of their own faith; I once met a Muslim man who told me that he had been taught Islam in a Catholic school in Sri Lanka, and there are already Anglican-run schools in the UK which cater for a predominantly non-Christian intake, due to the ethnic and religious make-up of their neighbourhoods. The question is how religious schools could be encouraged towards such public-spirited action, and how overt and backdoor racial discrimination can be eliminated, without simply destroying several decades of work by turning them into “bog-standard comprehensives”.