NEWS: More Faith Schools for the UK?

The survey reveals that following last month's terror attacks, the majority of the public are uneasy about the proposals, with 64% agreeing that "the government should not be funding faith schools of any kind".

The government is due to publish proposals in the autumn which will make it easier for independent schools, including Islamic, Christian and Jewish institutions, to opt into the state sector, accessing millions of pounds in funding.

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Yesterday Barry Sheerman, chairman of the Commons education select committee, warned that religious schools posed a threat to the cohesion of multicultural communities.

"Do we want a ghettoised education system?" asked Mr Sheerman. "Schools play a crucial role in integrating different communities and the growth of faith schools poses a real threat to this. These things need to be thought through very carefully before they are implemented."

There are currently around 7,000 faith schools in England, 600 secondary and 6,400 primary. The vast majority [6,955] are Christian, with 36 Jewish, five Muslim and two Sikh schools.

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Earlier this year the chief inspector of schools, David Bell, criticised Islamic schools, saying they posed a challenge to the coherence of British society. In a speech to the Hansard society, Mr Bell said that "traditional Islamic education does not entirely fit pupils for their lives as Muslims in modern Britain".

But last night the Association of Muslim Schools said faith schools "turned out rounded citizens, more tolerant of others and less likely to succumb to criminality or extremism."

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Dr Mukadam, head teacher of the Leicester Islamic Academy which is moving to a new building when it reopens as a state school 2007, said none of the British Muslims convicted following the riots in Bradford and Oldham in 2001 or any of those linked to the London bombings had been to Islamic secondary schools. "Often Muslim children in mixed secondary schools feel isolated and confused about who they are. This can cause disaffection and lead them into criminality, and the lack of a true understanding of Islam can ultimately make them more susceptible to the teachings of fundamentalists."

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Keith Porteous Wood, director of the National Secular Society, said the two thirds opposed to government funding for faith schools reflected the public's unease about the growing influence of religious organisations in education.

Recent figures in Hansard [Proceedings of the Houses of Parliament and Lords] confirm the plentiful anecdotal evidence that church schools are selective: they take fewer than the national average of pupils entitled to free school meals, and, more surprisingly perhaps, so do Roman Catholic and other religious schools. The Welsh Assembly, which has chosen not to go down this route, analysed absenteeism and GCSE results in Welsh schools, and found that differences between church and other schools were insignificant when free school meal entitlement was taken into account.

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And they will be divisive, because however much these schools claim to teach respect for other cultures and religions, these will remain just that - "other". Religious schools nurture an in-group and, with it, a sense of the other - strange children who believe and practise alien things and who you never meet, except perhaps as rivals on the sports field. This ignorance tends not to survive the close proximity of the truly inclusive school - it's hard to believe so completely in otherness and difference if you sit next to Bernadette or Israel or Ahmed or Baldip in class, and find that you share an interest in football or pop music or TV soaps, or even in Science or English.

Neyrissa said:
There's loads of catholic/christian schools so why shouldn't other faiths have schools?

In all fairness I don't think there should be ANY faith-based schools, and that includes the christian ones. RE (Religious Education) is an excellent idea, but a school devoted & run by a religion is NOT.

dpk said:
I guess Athiest class would be an education in how to think for one's self? Heh.

Neyrissa said:
In all fairness I don't think there should be ANY faith-based schools, and that includes the christian ones. RE (Religious Education) is an excellent idea, but a school devoted & run by a religion is NOT.