Thousands of families who attend church to secure places at popular Church of England schools face being denied entry under radical plans revealed today to overhaul admissions.
The C of E is drastically revising its guidelines to limit the number of places offered to those from church backgrounds….
The Bishop of Oxford, the Right Rev John Pritchard, chairman of the C of E’s board of education, said schools should end the bias towards children from religious homes even if it lowers academic results. He said: “Every school will have a policy that [it] has a proportion of places for church youngsters … what I would be saying is that number ought to be minimised because our primary function and our privilege is to serve the wider community.
Tragic. Even the Church is anti-Christian.
I can’t read the article because I don’t subscribe to the Times. So, I’m not sure about the particulars.
However, I will say that the practice of people registering at a parish and doing the bare minimum just so that their kids can get a prime school spot (and, perhaps, reduced fees) is problematic. And that’s a common practice at church schools everywhere and among different faiths.
So, if he’s proposing that the spaces for members of the C of E go to truly devoted and active members of the C of E, that’s right and proper. But if he’s suggesting that they simply cut the number of spaces available to any families registered at a C of E parish, then that’s a problem. Still, perhaps truly believing and practicing Methodists, Baptists, or others are more worthy of a space than those who are Anglicans on paper only?
I dunno. I can’t really judge (if it is mete and right that I should, lol) without reading the whole story.
Like No. 2 above, I am afraid to speculate on what exactly is being insinuated here. I lived in England for a year, and I never figured out their bizarre amalgam of state and religious schools that everyone fought over to get into. It appeared to me to be a strange throw back to the days of the rigid class system where which school you went to amounted to everything.
There was a time when people had enough confidence in their faith that they understood that raising a generation of committed Christians was a much greater gift to wider society than refusing them a Christian education in the name of political correctness.
But then given the appalling standard of religious education and worship in most schools, which are nominal at best, it is all academic anyway.