One of the things we have to get used to in England is the tedious mantra that so-called ‘faith schools’ are ‘divisive’. The charge is always put, but the evidence is never there to back up the (apparently) self-evident claim. It seems that the conclusion is assumed on the basis of prejudice and then the evidence adduced from the odd anecdote. Well, new research published today – Strong schools for strong communities: Reviewing the impact of Church of England schools in promoting community cohesion – might just force a bit of a re-think. (Dream on…)
The study by Professor David Jesson of the University of York (commissioned by the Church of England) examined the reports of 400 secondary schools inspected between March and June 2009 and 700 primary schools inspected in June this year. According to the press notice:
The data for primary schools, serving relatively small cohorts of pupils, suggested faith schools perform just as well as community schools based on the average grade received for promoting community cohesion. Grades are awarded on a scale of 1 (outstanding) to 4 (inadequate), with both types of school averaging 2.2 at primary level. However, the data for secondary schools indicates “clear evidence that Faith schools were awarded substantially higher inspection gradings for promoting community cohesion than Community schools,” according to Professor Jesson. The data shows that the mean average of grades given to secondary schools with a religious foundation is 1.86, compared to 2.31 for community schools.
In his research paper, Professor Jesson comments:
This finding is particularly relevant to the debate about schools’ contribution to community cohesion – and runs completely counter to those who have argued that because faith schools have a distinctive culture reflecting their faith orientation and are responsible for their admissions that they are ‘divisive’ and so contribute to greater segregation amongst their communities. This is clearly not supported by this most recent Ofsted inspection evidence.
In reaching their judgements on a school’s performance in promoting community cohesion, Ofsted’s inspectors look for evidence that schools have undertaken an analysis of their school population and locality and then created an action plan focused on engaging with under-represented groups outside the school and between different groups within the school itself.
Ofsted also looks for evidence that schools have strategies for promoting participation by learners in all the opportunities that the school provides and strategies for tackling any discriminatory behaviour between groups of learners. Comparing the data on grades awarded for this part of the inspection between different types of secondary school, Professor Jesson writes:
Here again the contrast between Faith schools and Community schools is clear. Faith schools achieve higher gradings on this aspect of their contribution to their pupils and their community.” Community schools received a mean average of 2.03, while schools with a religious foundation received a higher average of 1.68.
But, the response by Jan Ainsworth, Chief Education Officer for the Church of England, in her introduction to the report makes the point usually ignored by commentators:
Schools with a religious foundation have a particular role in modelling how faith and belief can be explored and expressed in ways that bring communities together rather than driving them apart. They can minimise the risks of isolating communities for whom religious belief and practice are core parts of their identity and behaviour. In Church of England schools that means taking all faith seriously and placing a high premium on dialogue, seeking the common ground as well as understanding and respecting difference.
Schools contribute most actively towards nurturing a shared sense of belonging across communities when they are clear about their own distinctive values and how that grounds their engagement with other groups at local, national and global levels. Promoting community cohesion is not about diluting what we believe to create a pallid mush of ‘niceness’.
Our Christian foundation places the strongest obligation onto Church of England schools to help children form relationships of mutual care and affection with people from every creed and background. For church schools, community cohesion is more than ticking a box for the government. It is about acting out the values articulated in the school’s mission statement in ways that serve and strengthen our human relationship with our neighbours.
Not surprisingly, this won’t be good news for some people, as evidence will be seen to have intruded into prejudice.There is more to be said about this latter point and an excellent article in the Church Times by a Croydon headteacher, Richard Parrish, makes a case for distinguishing between ‘faith’ schools and ‘church’ schools. I’ll come back to this one anon.
November 27, 2009 at 2:42 am
That is spectacular. Well done!
I wonder wether the divisiveness complained of is not among adults and others who do not attend such schools?
Can they not become bywords for prejudices even when their pupils bring away values which promote social cohesion?
Perhaps it is simply the position of faith schools which can easily become divisive?
November 27, 2009 at 3:53 am
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November 27, 2009 at 7:56 am
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November 27, 2009 at 8:07 am
On one level, this is heartening news…
I would like to know how things like class sizes and available resources compare between the faith schools and community schools studied before drawing any conclusions from the data, and I’d like to know whether there were any non-Christian faith schools included.
But then I’m not at all sure that lumping children into groups of 30 based on the year they were born and trying to teach them all the same things at the same time is an optimal strategy for education!
November 27, 2009 at 9:06 am
Nice article which gives the correct guidance about facts and faith on schools in england.
I want to say thanks to Nick for that !
🙂
November 27, 2009 at 11:49 am
Archbishop Tenison’s High School is a good model of community cohesion in that it draws children from widely diverse social and ethnic backgrounds, north and south of the Borough of Croydon. My 2 children have learnt so much about community cohesion in this school community with its Christian values that stem from God’s love to all people, and the need for human respect.
November 27, 2009 at 12:23 pm
It is true that many church schools work hard to promote good community relations. But admission and employment policies based on religious selection have led to segregation and its a shame if we see the issue in black and white terms. There is an inherent contradiction between the values that the schools strive to put into practice, and admission and employment policies.
Jesson’s report needs to be evaluated carefully, and considered in relation the significant body of other independent evidence that paints a different picture. The 2008 Runnymede Trust report ‘Right to Divide?’ (which examined religious schools in their full historical, cultural, political and educational context, interviewing 1,000 stakeholders, including, parents, pupils, governors and teachers); the Oldham Independent Review report in the aftermath of the 2001 riots there (the Richie Report); the 2009 Cantle report on community cohesion in Blackburn and Darwen and the 2001 Cantle Report, following similar disturbances in Bradford and Burnley, all look at connections between religiously restrictive admissions policies with the isolation of particular communities in the major urban conurbations and resulting tensions.
November 27, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Richard Parrish’s superb article should have been read by the author of the Jessop report because it tacitly and intelligently eliminates the problem that was assumed to be there in the first place. Jessop’s conclusion that faith schools are not divisive leaves us precisely where we were before the muddled discussion started. Perhaps it is worth adding that Tony Blair must have been one of the first to start referring to “faith” schools. Mr Parrish points out that they all are.
November 27, 2009 at 8:37 pm
We should be under no illusion that those who oppose faith schools do so on an evidential basis: they are doctrinally committed and no evidence will change their minds.
An interesting perspective comes from the US black educationalist Thomas Sowell of Stanford University, whose extensive research taught him that legislating the intake makes no difference if the lunch tables remain self segregated which he found continued long after the problem had been ” solved”.
This is the problem with superficial answers.
The success of the Church Schools is founded on the ethos within, not policies imposed from outside.
November 28, 2009 at 10:48 am
Jonathan
Our local church primary school allocates half of their annual places through local church connections and the other half through the local authority. Does this go some way to ameliorate the ‘inherent contradiction between the values that the schools strive to put into practice, and admission and employment policies.’ ?
Is it perhaps a model that could be used elsewhere?
November 28, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Jonathan
Yes, and equally of course all those other studies need to be carefully evaluated as well. And so it goes on.
If you are starting from a premise that selection which affects the social mix in a school is divisive then I assume you are conducting an even more robust campaign against private schools which tend to take more middle class children, therefore meaning the surrounding schools are less socially varied, and of course any form of catchment area which creates high achieving middle class comps which people can buy their way into.
November 28, 2009 at 7:37 pm
I think we are in danger of picking up a worldview which is dogmatic not logical. The assumption seems to be that everybody is born equal and should be given equal educational opportunities. Is that the right place to be?
Some parents will always help their children more, perhaps because they have the time, perhaps because they generally care, etc. Some will take an interest in homework and take their children on otings which are ‘educational’ or encourage them to do extra activities. If we follow the present agrument to its conclusion we should stop all parents from doing that because some can’t or won’t. That doesn’t seem to follow a proper ethical course to me.
Further more if we truly believe that worldview we should be ensuring that children throughout the world receive an identical education of the lowest common denominator. I am not at all happy with that!
Didn’t Christians get involved in education, through sunday schools to help the poor who were receiving poor or no education? It seems to me that setting up Chgurch schools that set out to do that is still a good aim. To select those children who we expect to make best use of those scarce resources does not seem to me to be a bad thing. Selecting those who only share my faith does, although screening out those whose parents worldview would undermine the work might be OK.
Fighting for freedom for others to educate their children is probably something I could support as a Christian. Fighting to improve the standards in all schools rather than going for the LCD feels to me like something I must support.
But we need to think and pray pour way through this minefield. Handing all the initiative to government control does not sit well with me and we need to be involved.
November 29, 2009 at 11:12 am
Martin – I think that’s definately a step in the right direction. Indeed, the fact that there are also many church schools (some oversubscibed) which don’t operate admissions policies which favour Christian families over others, rather proves that they aren’t necessary to maintain a “Christian ethos”.
Pam – I don’t think we are starting from a premise that selection which affects the social mix in a school is divisive. Indeed, it would be wonderful to see church schools selecting more on the basis of social deprivation, looked after children, free schools meals, SEN etc… If schools followed through in their admissions what is contained in the excellent C of E website http://www.christianvalues4schools.co.uk then we would I think find ourselves close to that.
Some schools do have elements of the bias to the vulnerable in their admissions. Some do it in practice. Some pay lip service to it, but it doesn’t happen in practice eg LEA approaches school, school says “no” so children have to go elsewhere. Our work however has mainly focused on the state sector. Private schools of course have huge problems, but it’s harder to argue when they don’t receive state funding.
November 29, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I think you are being a little bit obtuse about my point about private schools Jonathan – my point is not about the social mix IN private schools but their effect on the social mix everywhere else – for there to be social cohesion via state schools all classes need to be represented in them, so I would expect anyone who is fired up about social cohesion to direct quite a lot of that fire towards abolishing the private sector.
Quite frankly I think Ekklesia has backed the wrong horse in this race, there seems to be very little argument to me for tax paying parents who want a faith based school to be denied that under the parental choice banner unless we outlaw all parental choice. And that’s not going to happen. The ‘biased admission policy’ is particularly self defeating – if more parents want faith based schools than can get places surely that’s an argument for more not less faith based schools?
There also seems to be a (IMO rather naive) assumption behind your views that there is more diversity in non-faith schools. We sent our sons to the C of E comp precisely because it offered more social variety than the local (middle class) comp which had very few students from non-white backgrounds and certainly very few from non-white collar families.
November 30, 2009 at 7:12 am
And here we are again on a Monday morning arguing about schools just as we were before Prof Jesson published his report. Distracted by conventional arguments which tend to run in ruts, we ignore the one blisteringly intelligent comment post-Jesson from Richard Parrish.
November 30, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Little doubt that parents who c are about social cohesion will be a little more likely than the rest to send their children to faith schools.
Ab ounce at home is worth a pound at school imho.
December 1, 2009 at 9:10 am
It seems odd to me that a sports based Academy or Music Academy can apply entry criteria but not a Faith School.
I am inclined to prefer local solutions, some working well, some less so, rather than ending up with a ” one size fits all” approach countrywide. The proposed empowerment of parents via the Swedish model seems attractive to those who think that way.
December 1, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Thank you for your strong support of faith schools. Anglicans and Catholics made their schools available to the state school system after the War, and as taxpayers Christian parents have every right to maintain the nature of their schools by selection.
However, I do not understand your comments on traditional carols in your new book, as reported in the last Sunday Telegraph. Of course the Three Wise men were ‘faithful’. They were just not Jewish. The Bible is full of faithful non-Jews, and there are a billion and a half of them around today.
And of course the baby Jesus cried, but presumably not all the time. The contemplative scene envisaged in the carol ‘Away in a manger’ fondly pictures a quiet moment. What a pity you take offence at this.
You also criticise ‘Once in Royal David’s city’ on the grounds we can not say Jesus was ‘our childhood’s pattern’, since we know so little about Christ’s early years apart from what you mistakenly says was Jesus’ ‘disobedience’ to His parents at the age of 12. Well, we can deduce from that passage alone that by the time Jesus was 12 he was so well versed in the scriptures he ‘astonished’ those who heard him talking with the doctors in the Temple. And his parents, along with billions of Christians since then (with the possible exception of a few learned Bishops!), accepted Jesus’ explanation of the incident: ‘I must be about my Father’s business’, even if they didn’t immediately understand it. Not a bad pattern for childhood at all.
In short, traditional Carols are true to the Bible and Christian tradition. Why should they not be presented in beautiful ways that do justice to their core salvation message?
December 1, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Giles, I don’t disagree with you. The Telegraph’s selective quotation shouldn’t be confused with the content or thrust of the book. The comments are simply a way into a consideration of the reality of the Incarnation in a world that thinks of it as fairy tale. I think you’ll find (if you read on) that we agree. I raised the question (rather than ‘taking offence at’ or complaining about) in order to spark thinking about the real story you describe. However, I probably made the mistake of thinking that it would be read in full by adults – rather than in headlines by journalists.
December 14, 2009 at 8:07 pm
This is a fascinating debate and Andy Peck makes some excellent points concerning Faith Schools on the Emmaus Recruitment website:
http://www.emmausrecruitment.com/articles/newsDetail.asp?secID=1&newsID=5
Emmaus Recruitment were set up earlier this year to focus on helping Church Schools with their recruitment and, where possible, ensuring their Christian ethos remains intact through the recruitment of Christian teachers and school leaders.