Richy Thompson: Faking faith for school places leads to a class division

MORE than 1.2 million places at state-funded schools across England and Wales are subject to admissions criteria that allow priority to be given on the basis of faith.

This means requiring parents and children to attend religious worship on a regular basis, requiring baptism/christenings, or perhaps even requiring participation in other activities such as flower arranging.

This prevents children from being able to attend their local schools, segregates on the basis of faith and ethnicity and also causes socio-economic segregation. It makes the UK an outlier internationally – a recent OECD survey suggested that only Ireland, Israel and Estonia also allow such discrimination – and it is time that the law was changed to prevent this.

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A new piece of research underlines just how ludicrous the current system is.

A survey conducted for the Sutton Trust’s Parent Power? report found that six per cent of English parents said they have attended church services when they otherwise wouldn’t specifically so that their children could gain access to a certain school. These figures are staggering when put in the context of general church attendance – 12 per cent of British adults report attending religious services weekly, whereas actual recorded English attendance is under six per cent. As such, a hugely significant proportion of those of parent age who are attending church are doing so specifically to get their child into a school that is 100 per cent, or virtually 100 per cent, funded by the state.

Parents can hardly be blamed for manipulating the system in this way. Every parent wants what’s best for their child, and if they believe that this means the local religiously selective school, then it’s unsurprising that they are going to take advantage of the system.

But it does suggest that the system is fundamentally broken: it surely cannot be right that the state is propping up churches by requiring religious attendance to gain admission to state schools?

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The Sutton Trust’s figures also have something to say on social class. Ten per cent of upper middle class parents and eight per cent of middle class parents have manipulated the system in this manner, falling to around five percent for lower middle, working class or non-working parents.

This reinforces findings recently published by the Fair Admissions Campaign, comparing schools to their local areas on the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals. Here it was found that comprehensive secondary schools with no religious character admit 11 per cent more pupils eligible for free school meals than would be expected given their areas.

However, comprehensive Church of England secondaries admit 10 per cent fewer; Roman Catholic secondaries 24 per cent fewer; Jewish secondaries 61 per cent fewer; and Muslim secondaries 25 per cent fewer. These results are repeated across Yorkshire.

And we can see that religious selection is almost entirely the cause of the disparity between the different groups. Church of England schools have a great variety of admissions policies, with some allowing religious selection and some disallowing it.

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The campaign found that Church of England secondaries that don’t select on faith admit four per cent more pupils eligible for free school meals than would be expected, while those whose admissions criteria allow full selection admit 31 per cent fewer.

Why would religious selection correlate with socio-economic selection? For our answer, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a parent. Research shows that there’s just a nine per cent chance we’ll consider the religion of our local schools to be an important factor when picking which one to apply to. Instead there’s a 66 per cent chance we’ll care about the performance of the school, with this factor much more important than any other.

What if there are two local schools, one of which religiously selects and the other doesn’t?

Presumably our parent will give preference to whichever school performs better academically. If the better school is the one that doesn’t religiously select, then our parent will have an equal chance as everyone else to get in.

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But if the better school is religiously selective, as we might naturally expect to be the case about half the time, then not only would this school become the most desirable, but some parents will start attending church, even if they are not religious. And as the Sutton Trust results underline, those with the most time to do that would be those that are not single parents, nor dealing with issues related to poverty, but that are from wealthier backgrounds. And this is why faith schools socio-economically select.

Because of this selection, because of the ludicrousness of faked church attendance and because of the religio-ethnic segregation, we think it is past time that religious selection is stopped.

*Richy Thompson is the Education Campaigner at the British Humanist Association. The BHA are a founding member of the Fair Admissions Campaign, which aims to make all state-funded schools equally accessible to all children, regardless of their or their parents’ religion or belief.