Faith schools can bring our divided communities together

Jan 26, 2016 by

By Nick Timothy, Conservative Home:

“I like the idea of more autonomy for schools,” people often tell me, “but I do have a problem with faith schools.”  After a short pause, they usually go on to say, “well, I don’t really mean faith schools, I mean Muslim schools.”

It’s not difficult to see, given the dangers we face from extremism and radicalisation, why people jump to this conclusion. In the last couple of weeks alone, we have seen a six-year old English child in Luton posing as a jihadist for photographs, apparently in tribute to Jihadi John.  We have learned that more than four hundred children below the age of ten have been referred to Channel, the deradicalisation programme.  And we have read reports that a private Islamic-ethos school in London suspended one of its pupils simply for talking to a student of the opposite sex.

But those who argue that there should be no role for faith and religion in the school system are wrong. For starters, our education system is for historical reasons inextricably linked with religion. Any attempt to disentangle schools from the Church of England – and other churches and faith groups, for that matter – would be a perilous walk through a never-ending legal minefield. An Education Secretary who tried to take the churches out of education would not just be “courageous”, in theYes, Minister sense of the word, he or she would be suicidal. And such an approach would not only be controversial, it would be counter-productive: parents like faith schools and the ethos and high standards they tend to bring. They are significantly more likely to be rated Good or Outstanding by Ofsted, and 1.8 million children – one in four pupils – are educated in them.

“Okay,” some will say, “interfering with the Church of England’s role in education is a legal and logistical nightmare, but do we really want any more faith schools?” But why – since we are now a multi-faith society – should the right to have your children educated in accordance with the values of your faith be limited to some religions and not others? The positive arguments in favour of Anglican and Catholic faith schools apply just as well to those of other religions, too.

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