Comments ignore evidence of damaging effects of religious discrimination.
Education Secretary Michael Gove has openly urged Catholic schools to convert to Academies as a way of avoiding ‘unsympathetic meddling’ by secularists.
Critics of faith schools, argued Gove in an article for the Catholic Herald ‘often misrepresent the Catholic school ethos as a mechanism of religious indoctrination and wrongly portray the admissions criteria used by Catholic schools as selection on the sly…’ and ‘by becoming an academy, a Catholic school can place itself permanently out of range of any such unsympathetic meddling’.
The Academy model, writes Gove, gives Catholic schools a chance to extend ‘hard-won freedoms’ over admissions, staff appointments, the teaching of religion and the way they are governed.
Catholic schools that convert to an Academy will also no longer have to contribute 10% of the capital costs of the school – meaning that the schools will be 100% funded by the taxpayer, if they were not already.
BHA Education Campaigns Officer Jenny Pennington commented:
‘Catholic schools already have the ability to exclude children from families that are of the ‘wrong’ or no religion, dismiss teachers for their private lifestyle choices and to teach subjects in line with religious doctrine, such as subjective sex and relationships education. Converting to Academies will give even more power to ‘faith’ schools to discriminate, segregating children and communities along religious and socio-economic lines. To dismiss concerns about the damaging effects of such practices as ‘meddling’ ignores the evidence of to support them.’
Notes
Read article on Michael Gove’s comments.
ICM poll commissioned by the BHA in 2010 found that 72% of the public are concerned that the Academies Bill could lead to taxpayers’ money being used to promote religion. The figure includes over a third (35%) of the public who said that they were ‘very concerned’. https://humanists.uk/news/view/599
Academic studies have repeatedly demonstrated that where ‘faith’ schools do outperform community schools, this can be explained by their discriminatory admissions policies that in practice prioritise more able children, take disproportionately fewer pupils entitled to free school meals and that complex questions related to religious observance put off many parents who lack confidence in writing.
Studies which have linked ‘faith’ school admissions policies with unrepresentative pupil populations include:
• Faith primary schools: better schools or better pupils?, Centre for the Economics of Education, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2006
• Right to Divide?: Faith schools and community cohesion, Runnymede Trust, 2008
• Unlocking the gates: giving disadvantaged children a fairer deal in school admissions, Barnardo’s Policy and Research Unit, 2010
For more information please contact Jenny Pennington jenny@humanists.uk
020 7462 4993