Six degrees of separation and the safety of faith education

Excellent news. Faith schools are going to remain a permanent part of the English education system. It must be true, because a politician said so – Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt, during a Progress event in Westminster last October. Oh, wait. He said something else as well. OFSTED should inspect religious teaching in faith schools to ensure that a broad and balanced curriculum is being delivered (under current regulations, provision of religious education in faith schools is subject to a Section 48 inspection conducted by its own diocesan inspectorate). So by implication, faith schools are delivering narrow and unbalanced curricula. Now why would he imply that?

His first justification was rather curious. He quoted Trojan Horse and the alleged takeover of Birmingham schools by Muslim extremists. But this is a totally spurious argument – none of the schools involved was a faith school so they were already subject to OFSTED inspections of all aspects of the curriculum. The fact that they were allowed to operate as if they were faith schools was part of the problem. The structure was in place to deal with it – it just wasn’t used. That’s a failure of OFSTED, not of faith school inspection protocols.

The next argument related to the exacerbation of religious and ethnic segregation by faith schools, which he claims are creating islands of isolation based around religion. As evidence he offered a report from Professor Ted Cantle, formerly of The Institute of Social Cohesion. But the report was not only written 13 years ago, it doesn’t actually place faith schools in the frame at all. The report says: ‘physical segregation [in housing estates and inner cities] is compounded by so many other aspects of our daily lives: separate education, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, languages and social and cultural networks’. It also goes on to say that: ‘communities operate on a series of parallel lives. They do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchange’ and that fears about race and culture dominate.

So why quote it as supporting evidence for the need to bring RE inspections in faith schools under government control? Time to test out the six degrees of separation theory. Actually, it took only two degrees. Tom Cantle is part of a pressure group called the Fair Admissions Campaign (FAC) which is lobbying to prohibit, or at least limit, intake to faith schools based on religious belief, on the grounds that it leads to greater socio-economic segregation. The group includes, among others, The British Humanist Association (BHA), campaigner Melissa Benn and Fiona Millar, the partner of Alistair ‘We don’t do God’ Campbell. So far the BHA has secured a judicial review of two schools’ admission procedures, both of them Catholic.

OK, so the agenda actually has nothing to do with the inspection of how RE teaching in faith schools is delivered then, and everything to do with manipulating admissions policies. There’s a lot of faulty thinking going on here. There appears to be a current view amongst politicians and social campaigners that every form of social problem can be solved by education. It can’t. The kind of social segregation that Ted Cantle reported on is a much more complex issue than just the school that children go to and it needs much more complex answers. Actually, he suggests links between schools, not the disruption of communities by randomising allocation of places that the FAC suggests.

Yes, there’s a suggestion that a fairer way to allocate school places is by lottery. Yet schools are supposed to be reflections of, and are in many, many schools the centre of, the community. Why fracture communities in order to force social cohesion that has been manufactured, rather than allowed to evolve? And perhaps most importantly, why assume that parents would want to send their child to a faith school just because that’s the one they get in the lottery? Many parents choose faith schools, but many more don’t. As a Christian parent who chose not to send her children to a faith school, I would have felt very strongly about being compelled by a turn of chance to send my children there. But here, I suspect, is the real reason why this is being proposed.

Currently, about one third of English schools are designated as faith schools. They can’t just be closed down – they are very popular, they are always among the top schools in league tables and closing them just wouldn’t be feasible. Tristam Hunt knew that when he made the statement. But reduce the permitted faith intake to 50% and you very effectively dilute the school’s ethos. Take RE back into state control and you can also dilute the unique faith character of each school. So in two steps, religious and cultural diversity can be neutralised. Faith schools, just not as we know them.

But even if this is achieved, it naively assumes that social cohesion will be the result. It won’t. Effective social cohesion is about relationships between people who know each other.  It’s about trust between different communities, a willingness to accept opinions and beliefs different to our own, and ultimately it’s about relationships between people who know and care about each other. Only then can social cohesion be achieved.

If you want to debate the role of faith schools in our society, have that debate, even if it means that you will have to accept their continued existence because people still care about religion. But you don’t overcome bigotry through allocating school places by lottery. You don’t overcome prejudice by creating a society empty of faith. And you certainly don’t build a strong and secure society by manipulating the essence and nature of our schools to political ends.

Seemingly, faith schools will remain a permanent part of our English education system. But what will happen to each school’s distinctive nature? How long will that remain?

(This updated article first appeared on http://www.patheos.com/blogs/adrianwarnock/ in October 2014.)