To gain admission to the local church school near my home, parents were always advised to attend church. Otherwise, they were told, they should try elsewhere. The result was local antagonism: cars and buses filled with local children were ferried to more distant schools. It was a bad system in every sense.
In 2010, in an attempt to stem the growth of sectarian free schools, the Cameron government imposed a 50% cap on “faith admissions” where schools were oversubscribed. Now Rishi Sunak is proposing to end that cap. To encourage their creation, new faith-based schools – Anglican, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, whatever – can be as exclusive as they want. Since most faith schools tend to become socially selective and thus enjoy parental preference, the move has been welcomed by church leaders. They have something to sell. Anything will do to counter plummeting church attendance.
The proposal has been deplored by a host of educationists and others, including even the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Leaders of the free churches, headteachers, politicians and, for that matter, opinion polls are opposed. A survey by Populus shows that 80% of the public, including 71% of Christians, are against religious discrimination in the provision of state education.
The promotion of sectarianism in a publicly financed service verges on the medieval. It is no excuse that the government cannot afford to build new special needs schools and is in effect bribing churches to take on the role. This can only worsen the religious divisions that are straining communities across British cities. What children choose to believe is a matter for them and their families. The right of devout parents to send their children to private schools is fundamental. But for the state to subsidise – in effect to encourage – religious divergence between children in the 21st century is wrong.
No country in Europe has so forcefully demonstrated this evil than the British government in Northern Ireland. With the vast majority of its state-funded schools either Protestant or Catholic, they have played a leading part in entrenching the gulf between religious communities bequeathed by a history of insensitive British rule. There is no legislation, either, preventing the teaching of creationism as fact in Northern Ireland.
The same extremism does not apply in England, even though a third of English schools, mostly 8,000 primaries, are still owned or administered by churches. Throughout recent history, the ambition of educational reform has been to equalise standards and opportunities. The new board schools of the 1870s, the “nationalisation” of church schools in the 1940s and the rise of comprehensives in the 1960s all sought to erode educational division. London’s board schools were deliberately built tall, perhaps to rival churches and preach the superiority of education.
Comprehensive schools ended the cruelty of segregating teenage children into grammars and secondary moderns. Their differences should be handled within schools, not between classes of school. There is no doubt that many church schools do good work. Those located in difficult districts have been valiant in tackling social inequality. But that any school should be allowed to exclude children from its immediate neighbourhood on grounds of parental faith so often means excluding local immigrant and other minority families. Neighbours should not be torn apart to serve the interests of sectarian teachers and governors. A school should be building cohesion within its community, not isolating its separate groups.
School segregation supposedly ended with the demise of selection at 11. It has crept back under the guise of academy chains and “free” schools that lie outside the control of local government. The 21st century has seen a trend towards central state control under both Labour and Tory governments. The removal of 80% of English secondary schools from their local councils has stripped local democracy of what was once its proudest – and in many ways its most successful – responsibility. Turning schools over to trusts has introduced a fiercer regulatory regime than anywhere in Europe, dominated by the “performance” dictatorship of the exam. For the next four months, British secondary schools, steadily losing extracurricular activities, will behave as little more than exam factories for the benefit of Whitehall’s measurers.
This issue is not just about children. The licensing of religious discrimination will exaggerate a sense of difference between Anglicans and Catholics, Muslims and Jews, at the worst possible time. The school should be a community’s bonding institution. As every parent knows, the school gate is a precious forum of local congregation. It’s a shame our politicians don’t seem to recognise that.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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