The Fair Admissions Campaign had its first outing in Parliament this afternoon after a debate about religiously selective admission arrangements at faith schools was held in the House of Lords following a question tabled by Fair Admissions Campaign supporter, Baroness Joan Bakewell.

Baroness Bakewell asked the Government if it had plans to encourage religiously selective schools to adopt a more open admissions policy, and whether it believed children should be ‘integrated or segregated’. In reply, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools, Lord Nash said the Government ‘supports inclusive admission arrangements’ and believed ‘strongly that one of the secrets for success in this country is that children should be integrated’.

In total, ten Peers made contributions to the debate from the Lords’ five largest groupings, and several peers made wider points regarding state funded faith schools. Those specifically addressing religious selection in admissions included Baroness Richardson, who highlighted how not all schools of religious character select on faith grounds. Lord Dubs strongly argued that Northern Ireland’s heavily religiously segregated school system was a contributing factor to the providence’s community tensions and that the experience offered an ‘ominous lesson’ to Great Britain.

You can read the full debate on Parliament’s website. The Fair Admissions Campaign will continue to lobby Peers and MPs on the issue of religious selection.

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The Government has announced it is to fund at least 5,788 new school places which are likely to be subject to religiously selective admissions criteria. The funding was announced yesterday through the Targeted Basic Need programme, and the number of places dwarfs the estimated 3,783 places that have been created so far at religious Free Schools and yet cannot be apportioned on faith grounds – Free Schools can select to half their pupils on the basis of religion. The Fair Admissions Campaign, which aims to end religious selection by state funded schools, has expressed regret at the decision, and called on the Government to require that all schools involved in the programme guarantee that any new places they gain are open places.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain MBE, Chair of the Accord Coalition, commented, ‘It is astonishing that a time when it is vital for the future harmony of British society that children of different faith backgrounds grow up together in school, almost 6,000 faith-restricted school places are being created. The country needs its children to be integrated, not segregated.’

Professor Ted Cantle CBE of the iCoCo Foundation commented, ‘Believe it or not, the Government does actually have an integration policy, but only on paper. This is clearly a case of being departments being completely “unjoined up”, being blind to their own words – and to common sense – and allowing another 6,000 children and their friendships to be segregated during their most formative of years.’

Pavan Dhaliwal, Head of Public Affairs at the British Humanist Association, commented, ‘Yesterday’s announcement undermines the Government’s coalition agreement commitment to “work with faith groups to enable more faith schools and facilitate inclusive admissions policies in as many of these schools as possible.” We urge the Government to require that all places funded through this scheme are inclusive of everyone, instead of badly damaging this commitment.’

Jeremy Rodell, Chair of the Richmond Inclusive Schools Campaign, commented, ‘Many of the schools that will benefit from this welcome investment in education are effectively unavailable to the great majority of local children because they insist on faith-based selection when they are over-subscribed. This is grossly unfair. It would be easy for the Government to make the funding conditional on all new places created being available to everyone, regardless of their religion or beliefs.’

The Fair Admissions Campaign has written to the Government to express its concern.

Notes

For further comment please contact Accord Coalition Coordinator Paul Pettinger on 020 7324 3071, BHA Head of Public Affairs Pavan Dhaliwal on 07738 435 059, or email info@fairadmissions.org.uk.

Read the Government’s announcement: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/targeted-capital-funding-for-new-school-places

View the list of schools to be expanded: http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/l/tbnp%20list%20of%20projects%20july%202013%20-%20final%20version.pdf

The 5,788 figure was calculated by going through the spreadsheet, identifying all places at religiously named schools (6,939), and checking how many of those schools religiously select in admissions (and if so, to what extent).

The 3,783 figure refers to half of the number of places at religiously designated Free Schools to have opened so far (i.e. in the first two waves of the programme). Free Schools are not allowed to select more than 50% of their places on the basis of faith due to a clause in their funding agreement. Grindon Hall Christian School is excluded from this figure as it was already a fully inclusive private school so cannot be said to have opened up its admissions as a result of the programme.

Visit the Fair Admissions Campaign website at https://fairadmissions.org.uk/

The Fair Admissions Campaign wants all state-funded schools in England and Wales to be open equally to all children, without regard to religion or belief. The Campaign is supported by a wide coalition of individuals and national and local organisations. We hold diverse views on whether or not the state should fund faith schools. But we all believe that faith-based discrimination in access to schools that are funded by the taxpayer is wrong in principle and a cause of religious, ethnic, and socio-economic segregation, all of which are harmful to community cohesion. It is time it stopped.

The Campaign is already being supported by the Accord Coalition, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, the Campaign for State Education, the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education, the Christian think tank Ekklesia, the Hindu Academy, the Liberal Democrat Education Association, Liberal Youth, the Local Schools Network, Richmond Inclusive Schools Campaign, the Runnymede Trust, the Socialist Educational Association, and the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.

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Building on the launch of the Fair Admissions Campaign in June, one of the founding groups of the campaign, the Accord Coalition, held a fringe event on the future of religiously selective admission policies at Church of England schools at the meeting of its General Synod in York yesterday (July 8th). Chair of the Accord Coalition, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, was joined on the panel of speakers by Fair Admissions Campaigns supporter, Professor Ted Cantle CBE of the iCoCo Foundation, as well as Huw Thomas, former head teacher of a joint Church of England and Roman Catholic School and Education Director for the Diocese of Sheffield.

Rabbi Romain contended that appeals for religiously selective Anglican schools to modify their admission policy present the Church with a moral challenge. He argued that choosing between a Christian system that allowed selection and a non-Christian one that did not was a false choice, and that committing to not discriminating was not a ‘secular sound bite’, but also a religious principle. He noted the comments made in 2011 by the Chair for the Church of England Board of Education Board, The Rt Revd John Pritchard, that it was his hope that the number of places reserved for Anglicans at Church Schools could be reduced to 10%.

Professor Ted Cantle CBE spoke of the findings his 2001 ‘Cantle Report’ into that year’s race riots, which found that people living in riot-hit areas were leading ‘parallel lives’ where they did not mix with people from other backgrounds in social, work and invariably school life. He argued this led to people living in fear and ignorance and created an environment where mistrust and even hatred could be stirred. He noted that while the 2011 Census showed that British society was slightly less segregated overall, it disguised some areas where minority groups had become more residentially segregated, while evidence suggests that faith and ethnic segregation between schools has not improved, but has got worse.

Professor Ted Cantle highlighted what he saw as an apparent irony between the Church of England embracing central Government’s ‘Near Neighbours’ scheme, which seeks to advance community relations, and those Anglican schools that select pupils on faith grounds, which be believed undermined social cohesion, and urged selective Anglican schools to recognise and address the inconsistency of their approach.

Huw Thomas explained that he needed to know there was a good reason to prevent people or bodies from doing things they might wish to do, and took issue with how some critics of religiously selective schools framed such selection in terms of exclusivity and separation. He argued that many organisations in society sought to engage with and cater to particular constituencies; that all schools needed to select which children to admit when oversubscribed, and questioned why faith and Church Schools should be singled out and accused critics of advancing a separatist agenda.

He also argued that other forms of selection in education could be shown to be more pernicious, such as division by postcode, and noted that in his experience when deciding upon the location of new schools Diocesan Boards of Education favoured locating them in more vulnerable areas. He also highlighted that the first school where he was head teacher admitted about 95% of pupils from a Muslim background.

Mr Thomas argued that Church schools sought to engage with and develop pupils’ ‘huge’ spiritual capacity and that by helping pupils grow a stronger sense of faith identity so pupils were better able to go out into the world and relate to those around them. He appealed to Synod members to keep in mind what kind of society they would like when considering what Church schools do.

As meeting Chair, Rabbi Romain took interventions from the audience. A Synod member from Cheltenham urged that a distinction be made between Church schools in rural areas, which he believed acted like community schools, and Church schools in urban areas, which he argued was where most selection in admissions takes place. The member also argued that a parental choice agenda was currently the driving force in school age education and that those who favoured religiously selective policies the most were parents.

Another Synod member spoke of feeling ‘tarnished’ for their involvement in drawing up the religiously selective admissions policy of a school, and questioned whether Church schools should be providing incentives for parents, prospective governors, teachers and job applicants to feign religious adherence.

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President Barack Obama has criticised faith-based ‘segregated’ schooling in Northern Ireland as ‘encouraging division’ and ‘discouraging cooperation’. His comments were made in a speech on Monday, ahead of the G8 summit, to 2,000 young people:

‘Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity—symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others—these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it.

‘If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs—if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.

‘Ultimately, peace is just not about politics. It’s about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the  divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don’t exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation.

‘And I know, because America, we, too, have had to work hard over the decades, slowly, gradually, sometimes painfully, in fits and starts, to keep perfecting our union. A hundred and fifty years ago, we were torn open by a terrible conflict. Our Civil War was far shorter than The Troubles, but it killed hundreds of thousands of our people. And, of course, the legacy of slavery endured for generations.

‘Even a century after we achieved our own peace, we were not fully united. When I was a boy, many cities still had separate drinking fountains and lunch counters and washrooms for blacks and whites.’

Faith-based admissions cause ethnic, religious and socio-economic segregation in England and Wales, as well as in Northern Ireland.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, Chair of the Accord Coalition, commented, ‘The dangers of social segregation caused by dividing children into faith schools applies not only in Northern Ireland but in the rest of the UK too. We should learn from the terrible example of the Province and how decades of mistrust, although caused by other factors, were reinforced by the faith-based educational system. Separating children at the school gate is not the way to teach them about an inclusive society.’

Professor Ted Cantle of the iCoCo Foundation commented, ‘Separate schooling teaches children that their differences are more important than their similarities. More than that, they divide whole communities by defining social networks. It takes an outside view, like that of President Obama, to see what we cannot see for ourselves: a school system based on religious selection is divisive. No wonder the United Kingdom’s system is almost unique in Europe.’

Pavan Dhaliwal, BHA Head of Public Affairs, commented, ‘Barack Obama’s groundbreaking comments on the issue of faith-based segregation in schools reveal two things. First of all they show just how unusual the situation appears to an outsider, with very few OECD countries allowing such segregation. And secondly the parallels he draws between segregation by schools on the basis of faith and the race discrimination that has taken place in the United States show the seriousness of the situation. President Obama’s comments must act as a wake up call for politicians across the UK to act on this pressing issue.’

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Barry Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield and former Chair of the House of Commons Education Select Committee, has announced his support for the Fair Admissions Campaign. Mr Sheerman was Chair of the Committee from 2001 to the 2010 general election.

In declaring his support, Mr Sheerman commented:

‘As chair of the Education Select Committee for 10 years, and chair of the Schools to Work policy review, I know only too well the huge impact a child’s schooling has on the rest of his/her life.

‘That is why I am pledging my support to the “Fair Admissions Campaign”, which aims to end discrimination on the basis of religion in British schools.

‘Currently, faith schools are permitted to admit children solely on the basis of religious orientation. While I fully support faith schools – some of the best schools in the country and in Huddersfield are based on a religious ethos – it is utterly wrong that schools should be allowed to dictate a child’s future on the basis of religious identity.

‘It is not longer right, in the 21^st century, to legally enshrine religious discrimination, and according to polling, three quarters of the public agree. I hope you can join me in supporting the campaign.’

In other developments, the Campaign for State Education has also joined the Campaign as a supporting organisation.

And Vince Cable, MP for Twickenham and Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, has written in his monthly email to constituents that faith schools in his area should be more inclusive in their admissions: ‘I have always been a defender of faith schools because of the extra choice it gives to parents, respecting their religion. But we are getting into difficult – and nasty – competition for places. In a band from East Twickenham to Teddington there are now five faith schools (three CofE, two RC), and two non-denominational schools which are also bursting at the seams.

‘Local residents are finding that they cannot get places and are passed over for church goers who live much further away. I am appealing to the church authorities to be community minded on admissions.’

Notes

For further comment please contact Accord Coalition Coordinator Paul Pettinger on 020 7324 3071, BHA Head of Public Affairs Pavan Dhaliwal on 07738 435 059, or email info@fairadmissions.org.uk.

Visit the Fair Admissions Campaign website at https://fairadmissions.org.uk/

The Fair Admissions Campaign wants all state-funded schools in England and Wales to be open equally to all children, without regard to religion or belief. The Campaign is supported by a wide coalition of individuals and national and local organisations. We hold diverse views on whether or not the state should fund faith schools. But we all believe that faith-based discrimination in access to schools that are funded by the taxpayer is wrong in principle and a cause of religious, ethnic, and socio-economic segregation, all of which are harmful to community cohesion. It is time it stopped.

The Campaign is being supported by the Accord Coalition, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the British Humanist Association, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Professor Ted Cantle CBE and the iCoCo Foundation, the Campaign for State Education, the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education, the Christian think tank Ekklesia, the Hindu Academy, the Liberal Democrat Education Association, Liberal Youth, Richmond Inclusive Schools Campaign, the Runnymede Trust, the Socialist Educational Association (affiliated to the Labour Party), and the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.

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