At a time when too many of Britain’s schools suffer from abysmal standards of management, teaching and discipline, it seems incredible that the Government should devote resources to harassing some of the most successful state schools in the country. The establishments in questions are faith schools, and while Tony Blair was prime minister they were largely left alone (hardly surprisingly, since Mr Blair educated his own children at one of them). But since 2007 the Government has resorted to the sort of political bullying of “elitist” schools associated with the Wilson and Callaghan administrations.
As we report today, in the last six months more than 30 faith schools, most of them Church of England or Roman Catholic, have been investigated by the Office for the Schools Adjudicators, England’s admissions watchdog. The main purpose: to make sure they do not quiz prospective parents about their faith, since this could constitute “selection”. To cite one example: Cardinal Vaughan School in west London, an excellent and diverse Catholic comprehensive, is effectively forbidden from giving preference to children from committed Catholic families because this might produce a “middle-class” bias. Matters have not been helped by politically correct Catholic education advisers and, as a result, the freedom of a faith school to define itself by its ethos has been weakened.
Hmmm. Harbinger of things to come in U.S.?
they just seem hell bent on using PC silliness as a cudgel to destroy their own society, very sad…
THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH by CS Lewis – and his THE ABOLITON OF MAN – both anticipated this sort of “takeover”.
Read the comments at the bottom of the article. It’s not so simple as it seems. All of these schools are significantly, and in the case of the Church of England schools, completely, paid for by the state. Something we do not have in the United States. The state is concerned that these schools will use religious criteria to skim off the best students, or prevent some students from getting in, while the secular schools will have to take the left-overs. It’s not an unreasonable argument — essentially, “we’ll pay for your schools but then you have to educate the proles the same as we do.” The Amish have it 100% right. You don’t want the state to tell you what to do, don’t take their money.
“Free government money” is like “free drugs” – until you are addicted. Then you will do whatever you have to do in order to keep your “drug” of choice coming.
The only alternative is to detox and quit.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
#4, Catholic Mom:
You are absolutely right! Thanks for calling attention to it. Once you take government money, you allow yourself to be compromised.
##4, 6: No, it isn’t as simple as that. These parents are taxpayers too; and since the state taxes them and obliges them to educate their children, it is only right that they get some of their taxes back.
Furthermore, the rights of parenthood and children precede any state – the little battalions of life. It isn’t about ‘skimming off the best students’ – it’s about maintaining the religious character of the school. Muslim and Hindu parents often want to send their children to Catholic schools because they have better discipline and ethos than the other state schools. And Labour wants ethnic votes. That’s what this about.
We’re never going to get government out of the education business nor should we. It’s part of government’s business to promote the common good which includes a well-educated citizenry. Can there be any doubt that Catholic schools in the US have done an heroic job in promoting the common good by educating generations of immigrants while facing anti-Catholic bigotry like the Blaine Amendments? A family of six whose children all attend Catholic schools and pays taxes would be surprised to hear that a government subsidy for their education might cause them to become “addicted to free government money”.
The Catholic schools have educated a lot of students who couldn’t pay the tuition. If the government subsidized those poor students, I don’t think the Catholic schools would turn them away.
Don’t take the “state’s money”? When did it become the state’s money?
#7 It’s a question of how the school is funded. Personally I believe in the concept that every kid gets to take x tax dollars with them to any school they go to — although the fact is that we don’t have that in the United States for varous reasons which can be debated but are not inherently stupid or anti-religious.
But that’s not what’s happening here. These schools are directly funded by the state — that effectively makes them state schools administered by various religious organizations.
Well, for what it’s worth, I’d be surprised if the current gang survive the coming election. There seems to be a growing perception that our current approach to multi-culturalism etc has not worked. The left doesn’t seem to have the ideological framework required to maintain any sort of sense of national (much less historically Christian) identity…
The original formulae for “grant-maintained” religious schools, as spelled out in the Education Act of 1944, acknowledged the right of such schools (mostly Anglican but some Catholic and Free Church) to maintain their religious character. In an English context, the notion of a church-state partnership did not then seem as insidious as it does now. As the whole notion of establishment has crumbled, the church schools are caught between a rock and a hard place not entirely of their own making.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
Of course the origin of this is that in England the church was involved in education in a huge way before the state ever cared a hoot about it. So that when finally the state decided it had an interest in the education of its citizens the church was already the dominant partner. It had owned and run many thousands of local schools, trained most teachers, and had invested in education for centuries. In the course of the nineteenth century the state in effect asked if it might share in this, offering not to purchase the thousands of local schools which the church owned and which the state could not and cannot even now afford, but substantially to fund running costs.
I should say in the issue is of course that church schools in areas of urban deprivation often offer the highest quality education. It’s not too surprising then that parents attempt to use any means to ensure their children gain entry and are upset when there is not enough space for their child. The school has the right to select on religious grounds in order to preserve their ethos. That’s part of the deal with the state – if the government wished to purchase all the church schools they could do so but it would cost billions of pounds.
Thus the issue is not that church schools in areas of deprivation are unpopular with parents but that they are, in general, too popular.
True for the 19th century, Driver. From the Butler Act onwards, however, the benefits accrued much more to the Church of England than to the state, since the former would have found the costs of upgrading unduly prohibitive.
Look what happened to much of the Catholic education system in the 1960s, when parents demanded that parochial schools offer the same educational variety as the public system and yet continue to assess consumers the same low charges that had been the norm in the first half of the century.
As a school governor at a Catholic school in England I would like to weigh in. Jeremy is essentially correct. It is true that the older schools were entirely paid for by the churches. The proportion of capital and repair cost paid by the churches has been steadily reduced over the years. Even so, to this day 10% of new church school building costs are still met by the church, and also 10% of capital repair costs.
Why the tension around schools in Britain? Well:
1) In urban areas, as said above in # 13, church schools drawing on the same social make-up as state schools have much better results and a much calmer and more reflective school culture than the state schools around them. I am surprised that Catholic Mom has swallowed Labour Party propaganda about such schools ‘creaming off’ the best. I can tell you that inner city Catholic schools are racially and socially as mixed as state schools. In the one where I am governor, we have children from over 20 different languages and roots in Africa, SE Asia, and Latin America. As well as white working class children.
2) The competition for places means that parents do indeed sometimes discover their ancestral faith. Now this is the bit that I do not understand: it is precisely the Christian background of these schools that makes the crucial difference in them. Even so, some parents who want their children to get in resent having to pretend to being practising Christians. So they want to have the benefits, but to cut away the very system that produces the benefits. A little illogical, to say the least.
3) There is growing unease about Islam producing a ghetto effect. So there is a feeling that no more government-supported faith schools should be opened. It would not be possible to allow faith schools to Christians and Jews and then not allow them to Muslims, so the answer seems to be no more new faith schools unless they are replacing or consolidating existing schools.
4) On the general subject of the separation of church and state, with regard to schools this would have the paradoxical effect of dismantling success.
Terry (#16),
I’m glad we’re in agreement, particularly as I actually meant to cite the [b]US[/b] Catholic education system in my earlier comment.
I know too little about the British Catholic education system – being C of E in upbringing – to offer an opinion.
#14 Of course but the Butler Act recognized the reality that the church was involved profoundly in education in thousands of communities and that the state had much to gain from working co-operatively with churches. In other words there is a long history here that explains the entanglement of churches and state in working together to provide high quality education. It may look baffling and odd from a US perspective but knowing a bit of the history helps in understanding how England ended up where it is now.
The CofE was at least planning to increase its involvement in secondary education: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6890844/Church-of-England-to-run-50-academy-schools-by-2011.html
#4 Catholic Mom says:
#15 Terry Tee says:
I find these two comments to be curiously talking past each other. If I understand “Catholic Mom’s” point correctly, she’s suggesting that the religous schools are, or might be, “skimming off” the best students — the highest academic achievers — under the guise of the religious requirement. (Presumably this would be done by applying the requirement with judicious inconsistency.) Terry Tee replies that the religious schools are diverse in race and social class, which is laudable, but not particularly relevant to CM’s point.
I know nothing about what actually goes on in those schools, so I have no idea whether CM’s argument is true or not. But it is not answered by pointing to racial and social diversity in the schools.
I know from direct experience that Catholic Mom is wrong about English Catholic schools and Terry Tee is correct about their social and ethnic diversity.
Interestingly, evangelicals opened a “city technology college” called “Emmanuel” in Gateshead, Newcastle which everybody wants to send their kids to. Richard Dawkins denounced it, of course.
On Islam, some Saudis want to open a 5,000 student girls only college in a Lancashire town of 8,000 people. People are up in arms about this.
Once again, the presence of Islam in the UK has poisoned the well for the Christian population.
More on the Muslim school plan that causes grief for Christian schools in the UK:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100109/FOREIGN/701089776/1002
From the article:
When Mr Prentice raised his concerns in parliament, the education minister Diana Johnson told him: “The figure of 5,000 for the number of pupils at a boarding school would … be unprecedented, and we would obviously have to give very careful consideration to a proposal for a school of that size.â€
“The Anglican bishop of Burnley, the Dr John Goddard, has also expressed caution, pointing out that both the Church of England and Roman Catholic churches had abandoned proposals for new faith schools in an effort to promote better community relations.”
Please note what I said:
I never said that the schools WERE “skimming off the best students.” I said the state was CONCERNED that they were, and that what might look like wacko regulations made more sense when you consider what the state is concerned about. I have absolutely zero knowledge of the actual make-up of the student body of these schools and I never said I did.
The article states:
To which, upon first reading, one is inclined to respond “what are they, nuts?” But when you consider the fact that the schools are paid for by the state, you start seeing the rationale, even if flawed, behind the concern.
The article says that the state is hassling the schools over what admissions criteria might result in a non-diverse student body. Upon first reading, most commenters took the view that a religious schoool might very well reasonably NOT be diverse (for example, it might be entirely made up of Catholics!). I then commented that because these are effectively state schools, the state had a (perceived) interest in preventing this. Terry Tee then responds that actually all these schools are very economically and racially diverse. Which, however, says nothing about whether or not the state has a reasonable interest in requiring the schools to be diverse and/or whether or not the current regulations have helped or hindered that goal — merely that in his view the goal has already been met.
BTW, my view of all of this is that everytime the church and the state get into bed, the church gets hurt. Catholic schools in the U.S. are not paid for wholly or in part by the state and therefore they can continue to say and do what they think right.