FAITH-BASED EDUCATION: BLESSING OR CURSE?
BY SADAF MEEHAN

Faith schools will go forth and multiply under government plans. But many say this will only bring segregation

Every parent is concerned about the influences their children are exposed to at school. But just how concerned are you about religion?

Are you a fundamentalist Christian worried that your child attends an institution where the majority of the pupils are Muslim? Is the reverse true if you are Muslim? Do you want your child to learn in an environment where your own religious beliefs and principles are dominant? Or maybe you are just fed up of how integral a role religion seems to play in schools.

Whatever your views, they have a place in the raging debate about the role of faith schools in the education system. The arguments are so volatile that a leading government minister has been pitted against his former cabinet colleague.

RELIGION

Increasingly, religion is becoming an obstacle, rather than an enhancement, to education and the concept of faith schools is worrying for many parents and stakeholders.

Faith schools took the spotlight during a speech by Home Secretary Charles Clarke at a conference on the relationship between faith and politics last week.

Speaking at the Institute for Public Policy Research conference titled ‘The State of Faith: Politics, Religion and the State’, Clarke argued that “faith and values are essential to our society…[and] faith communities are central to the cohesion of our society."

He added: “a number of false accusations are made about the nature of faith schools in this country and the contribution they make."

He was speaking on the same day that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke out against the teaching of creationism in existing faith schools.

But Clarke said of creationism: “in schools it’s a good debate to have.

He added: “There are allegations that faith schools are sectarian in character. Some people believe that that’s what faith schools do. I think that’s a completely wrong view of faith schools and I think that they try to promote their faith within the framework of all faiths that we are describing."

He added: “I think faith schools have a great deal to contribute by their values, by their ethos, by their approach in these areas."

BLUNT

But ex-minister David Blunkett, who was also present at the conference, spoke bluntly about his concerns about religion and schooling mixing.

“As an ex-education secretary I have to say that the creationists are off the wall. We shouldn’t have anything to do with it in the curriculum.

“It doesn’t add up, it makes no sense at all, there wasn’t one day when someone bit an apple and it all came from there," he said.

He added that although in principle he believed there should be no faith schools, there were in fact many good faith schools in the country which are valued by their communities and no politician could get away with any policy to remove them.

“I do believe that you can have integration with diversity but we need to make a decision as to how you want society to be.

“It’s promoting schools that operate under the national curriculum, that operate under the non-statutory voluntary framework for values and have the non-extremist values," Blunkett said.

But delegates at the conference were not convinced, with one voicing concerns as to how the government would be able to monitor whether schools had ‘non-extremist’ values or not.

Critics said that more faith schools – under the Government’s plans for ‘trust schools’ – would be used by religious groups to proselytise and further segregate members of faith communities, delegates warned.

Under government plans, private companies, faith groups and parents will be given freedom to set up and run “trust" schools within the state system, which will offer them greater control over admissions and budgets than they currently have.

Another delegate drew attention to the fact that some of the groups pushing for Muslim schools had links with far-right Islamist parties in the Middle-East and South Asia.

The comment is not so far off the mark. Last year, the New Statesman exposed a number of Muslim schools as having links to Islamist groups.

The Muntada al-Islami Trust, which owns al-Muntada Islamic primary school in Parsons Green, west London, was exposed as seeing ‘its mission as propagating a Wahhabist version of Islam.’

Wahhibism offers a puritanical and literalist interpretation of Islamic religious practice. Wahhibism is also strongly associated with the state of Saudi Arabia.

The Muntada al-Islami Trust is also involved with the Muslim Education Fund, which is behind the Hijrah School in Birmingham, a state-funded secondary school.

Similarly, the King Fahd Academy in Acton, west London, is Saudi-funded and influenced by the fundamentalist Wahhabi version of Islam.

The Academy’s 600 primary and secondary school children follow a Saudi curriculum.

Former teachers and parents have criticised the Academy’s religious teaching for instilling “hostility to the outsider" and for discriminating against female students. The Academy devotes up to half of its lessons to religious education and has different curricula for boys and girls.

But critics – ranging from progressive religious groups to the National Secular Society – have expressed their concerns about government plans for trust schools.

Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society argued that faith schools were discriminatory, both in their entry requirements and in their choice of staff.

He said that faith schools select children on the grounds of their parents’ religion and have a quota system for children of other backgrounds. He added that the schools also prefer teachers who share the school’s religious identity.

“This Labour government has made an alliance with right-wing religious groups and is pandering to them. We have always been against faith schools of any kind, whether Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim.

“They are sectarian and divisive and the government should not be encouraging more of them," Wood said.

He added: “The whole point of faith schools is for them to bring youngsters to the one true denomination or faith.

“Implicitly, if not explicitly, those who do not follow the faith are seen as inferior. Some preach that non-followers will face eternal damnation and burn in hell."

SECULAR

He added: “And denominational schools are forcing secular parents to either become hypocrites, by pretending to be religious in order to obtain entry for their children into a particular school, or miss out."

He argued that although some faith schools did perform better, this was because they are selective in who they will take.

“We should make all state schools open equally to children of all faiths and none."

But Canon John Hall, chief education officer at the Church of England disputes this. He points to a recent poll which found that seven out of ten people believe that Church of England schools play a positive role in educating children.

The poll also found that 63 per cent of people from other faith communities who took part in the poll agreed that Church of England schools have a positive role in society.

He said: “The Church’s commitment is that all our schools should be both truly inclusive and distinctively Christian.

“A key thing to remember is that half of CofE schools are ‘voluntary controlled’, and therefore admit all local children in accordance with the LEA’s (Local Education Authority) admission policy.

“For the ‘voluntary aided’ schools, each school must develop its own admissions policy with guidance from their diocese. A locally agreed proportion of places will thus be reserved for children from practising Christian families. There are also many places available to people of any faith and none.

“We categorically do not set national quotas for the number of students from Christian families. The Christian quota is determined locally. There is no non-Christian quota."

Hall added: “The law allows ‘voluntary aided’ schools of religious character to appoint staff who are of that religion. Most governing bodies will seek to use the freedom that the law therefore allows, in order to preserve and enhance the distinctive ethos of these schools. What would a Christian school be without any Christian teachers?"

Currently, more than a quarter of all schools are faith schools, most are Christian, but there are increasing numbers of schools of other faiths – particularly Jewish and Muslim.

Muslim groups, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, point out that Muslim schools are under-represented compared to schools of other faiths. They say it is a matter of fairness that there should be faith schools available for every section of society.

Riaz Khan, from south London, is one parent keen to send his children to a Muslim faith school.

He said: “It is very difficult for Muslim children to grow up in the UK. Young girls can become confused because our religion teaches them not to drink and go out with boys, but Western media and culture encourages these things.

“You can teach your children the values at home, but then when they go to school there are girls getting pregnant and children taking drugs. It is not a good atmosphere.

“When my daughter is old enough I would like to send her to a Muslim school so that she will not be pressured to conform to Western ideas."

However, he does not believe that this implies shunning mainstream society.

“I don’t think this is segregation – other religions also have schools and nobody says they are segregated. Rich people send their children to private schools but no-one says they are segregated."

However, other Muslims are not as enthusiastic about more faith schools.

Khawar Mann, of Progressive British Muslims, a group representing liberal Muslims, said: “We don’t live in a 100 per cent Muslim country, we live in a country with a diversity of ethnicities, a diversity of views and our schools should reflect that.

“I think if you have religion-based schools, that does lead to division and people looking introspectively rather than outside themselves and I don’t think that’s healthy in society."

One of the arguments used by Muslim proponents of faith schools is that they allow them to send their children to schools that reflect their values, and protect them from, for example, teenage pregnancy, which they see as a product of Western values.

Mann does not think that separate schooling is the answer. “Teenage pregnancies and drugs and the like are all functions of how children are brought up, and a result of a whole variety of influences on them.

“I don’t think sending children to religious schools is going to stop that. In some ways, going to a strictly religious schools in UK society will lead to much more friction as they will look at the freedoms and opportunities around them and I think it would lead to greater polarisation if young people did not have a chance to mix with others.

INFLUENCES

“If you were brought up with these influences around you, you would be able to talk about them and better be able to deal with them, which I think would make you much more balanced."

He added: “I think you also have to accept the fact that your values may differ from your children’s values. No matter how hard you try, we are all individuals and will develop our own personalities. If you try to restrict that then I feel you will just get polarisation."