The treatment of Catholic schools is a “burning injustice” – a wrong that May is now set to right

Sep 10, 2016 by

by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:

The “Trojan Horse” plot to install an Islamist ethos in schools took place in non-faith ones – primaries, academies and specialist colleges.  But many of those who glanced briefly at news about it will never get this into their heads: they will persist in believing that the taxpayer is funding a legion of Muslim faith schools that are filling the heads of their pupils with ISIS propaganda.

This view is post-truth tosh.  There is a tiny handful of state-funded Muslim schools – 18 or so – and there is no good reason why there should not be more.  Islamism, the political ideology, is objectionable; Islam, the religious faith, is not.  Even those who disagree with this view may take the view that it is better to have Muslim schools in the state sector, where they can be regulated and inspected, than in the private sector, in which government monitoring is more difficult to exercise.  Much same argument raged about Maynooth College in Ireland, the best part of 150 years ago, and the funding of Catholic priests by the state.

Mention of which leads neatly to the present admissions rules governing faith schools.  Ministers have been terrified of the electoral consequences of allowing more or larger Muslim schools.  Voter blowback against Islam has also been felt, post 9/11, by other great monotheistic faiths, including Christianity.  There is probably a sense among more people than previously that religion is a problem (which makes as much or as little sense as believing that politics is a problem).  In any event, the human rights-based norms of our modern culture bar discrimination against any particular faith by law.  The logical consequence of all this is that if the faith schools of one particular religion cannot be treated unfairly, then all must be treated unfairly.

The injustice comes in the form of the admissions rule which requires new faith schools, when over-subscribed, to limit the number of pupils they accept on the basis of faith to fifty per cent.  As an author wrote on this site, the rule “fails according to its own objective: it does little to increase the diversity of Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu schools, because for now at least they are unlikely to appeal to parents of other faiths. But the rule is effectively discriminatory for Roman Catholics: it prevents them from opening new free schools because it is almost certainly against canon law for a Catholic Bishop to set up a school that turned away Catholic pupils on the basis of their Catholicism”.

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