Removing faith school entry criteria is ‘unjust’ say religious leaders
Posted: March 5, 2009.
Telegraph.co.uk
A letter to the Guardian newspaper, signed by leaders of all the major faiths in England, argued that pupils and their parents have the right to choose the type of school where they can “flourish”.
It comes just days after new research commissioned by the Research and Information on State Education trust (Rise) said that schools such as faith schools and academies, which set their own admissions criteria, should have that power withdrawn.
Today’s letter said: “We believe that parents and students should continue to have the right to choose the type of school in which they can flourish academically, socially and spiritually.
“With faith schools making up over a third of the state schools in the UK, millions of parents are choosing them and only in cases where schools are full to capacity can faith be used as a criterion for allocating places.
“The idea of removing one of the means by which these schools of religious character protect and enhance their valued ethos would be a perverse and unjust way of responding to the increasing demand for places in such schools.”
It said that at a time of “genuine concern” about the breakdown of society, faith schools are not only teaching citizenship, tolerance, cohesion and respect as academic subjects, but “living with them as part of the very ethos of their schools”.
The letter also comes ahead of a Liberal Democrat debate on education policy at the party’s conference this weekend.
Under the new statutory admissions code, brought in last year, a faith school which is oversubscribed is allowed to admit a certain proportion of pupils on the basis of religion.
The Rise report, by Professor Anne West, of the London School of Economics, found that, overall, some schools were still asking questions which are unrelated to the admissions criteria and could be used to pick and choose pupils.
It found that 5 per cent of secondary schools selected a proportion of pupils on the basis of their ability or aptitude in one or more subjects. This is up from 3 per cent in 2001. Just under a fifth (17 per cent) use religious criteria.
The letter was signed by representatives of the Church of England, the Catholic Church, and the Jewish, Methodist, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and Greek Orthodox faiths.
