Faith Schools

Consensus or Conflict?

Jo Cairns, Roy Gardner, Denis Lawton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415335263
• eBook ISBN: 9781134310418
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Until fairly recently the separation of pupils according to religion was felt to be compatible with a comprehensive education. That consensus no longer holds and there is a strong positive lobby either to absorb faith schools altogether within the state system or at least to dilute their membership ensuring they include children from other faiths, or no faith at all.

This book addresses the current concerns, questions and interest surrounding the legitimacy, support and intended expansion of faith schools. Divided into five sections, it includes chapters on:

* the legal frameworks for faith schools and the rights of the child
* faith-based schools in the UK, Northern Ireland, France and the USA
* the impact of faith schools on pupil performance
* faith schools, religious education and citizenship
* political and research issues.

Faith Schools: Consensus or Conflict? is of interest to educators, policymakers, researchers and students of education, religion and sociology.

Part I
Faith schools

Past and present

1
Faith schools now

An overview

Roy Gardner

The White Paper Schools Achieving Success (DfES 2001a) called for the expansion of faith-based education in England and Wales. The conditions set out were financially generous and sought only a contribution of 10 per cent from governing bodies in the development of their schools. At the same time, the White Paper called for a new approach to admissions policies in faith-based schools, seeking a goal of inclusiveness by setting a target of 20 per cent non-faith pupils in the school’s composition. In so doing the government could be said to be responding positively to the religiously plural and ethnically diverse population which constitutes our society in the twentyfirst century. On the other hand, those who seek inclusivity as the overriding characteristic of state-supported education argue that a continuation of the nineteenth-century historic settlement between the Christian churches and state-supported education is itself the major cause of increased sectarianism and social fragmentation in our multi-faith but secular society.

The extent of religious identification and diversity is shown by the census figures of 2001. Just over three-quarters of the population identified themselves as religious, with 15.5 per cent saying they had no religion and 7.3 percent not answering the question. At the same time just under a third of English state-funded schools had a religious foundation, educating 23 per cent of all pupils. According to the Guardian, of the 7,000 state-funded faith schools, 4,716 were Church of England, 2,108 were Roman Catholic, a small number were Methodist, there was one Greek Orthodox, one Seventh Day Adventist, 32 Jewish, four Muslim and two Sikh. These figures underline the fact that in the United Kingdom (UK) we have a multiplicity of religious and nonreligious life stances. What they do not indicate is whether we have a political, educational or religious consensus about the place of religion in full-time compulsory education.

The 1870 Education Act established state education by supplementing the existing Christian voluntary provision. A means was found of funding those existing religious schools and establishing new forms of schools to ensure elementary education for all. The place and teaching of religion in all types of schools was then regulated by the same Act. The 1902 Education Act consolidated the settlement and the 1944 Education Act continued in this tradition. It was only in the 1980s with the drive towards a national curriculum for all schools that real tensions arose in the settlement and real fears grew in the Christian communities that their historic right to determine the make-up of their schools’ populations and their curriculum was under threat from the state. Then, in 2001, the government in its Schools Building on Success firmly pledged to sponsor the extension and provision of faith-based schooling. As the Archbishops’ Council (2001:3) argued: ‘Today there is full state provision and the purpose of the Church in education is not simply to provide the basic education needed for human dignity.’

The time is therefore right to question the purpose not only of the Christian Churches in education but also the place of other religions and life stances, too.

At issue is whether the purpose of education is to induct children and young people into a prescribed way of life chosen by parents and/or religious leaders or to socialize children and young people into the norms of society in general, a matter discussed fully by Durkheim (1986).

In England, the state from 1870 had chosen to sponsor a dual system of education, and even by 1944 the state was still not prescribing a set curriculum for all schools operating within that dual system; religious education remained the one statutory subject. Interestingly, too, Harry Judge (2001:237) has also pointed out that, by 1991, at a time when the New Labour Party was emerging, signs of traditional Labour hostility to denominational schools was disappearing. In that year, when Tessa Blackstone, Labour Party spokesperson in the House of Lords, speculated about the desirability of all maintained schools becoming secular, other Labour peers hastened to make it clear that such a revolution was no part of official Labour policy.

The question of the purpose the Labour Party attached to faith-based schooling in the years leading to its election victory in 1997 remains difficult to pin down. Here Judge refers to a letter to the Church Times (ibid: 237) from the politician responsible for developing the Labour Party portfolio on education as saying:

[a Labour government] will undoubtedly wish to restore the important partnership between central government, local government and the Churches which underpinned the 1944 Act. However, it would be unrealistic…to put the clock back to 1944. It cannot be assumed that church schools that have felt the need to give up their voluntary-aided status in return for 100 per cent funding would have, or would even wish to have, voluntary-aided status restored.

Clearly then the government was interested in partnership with the churches as one of a number of sponsors of different categories of schooling. That policy indication and the subsequent White Paper of 2001 make little or no effort to differentiate between the different types of faith and religious groups which may choose such partnerships in return for generous funding. Also no effort was made to coax individual schools going forward for such state support to articulate the place they understood religion to occupy in education within our present diverse and mainly secular society. Nor were questions asked about the different roles religion and faith do/might play in individual schools. In that way, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent comment (The Times, 12 September 2003) about young people to a conference of Church of England headteachers may be similarly applied to the government’s lack of clarity in the matter of sponsoring an extension of faith-based schools:

I don’t think I’m the only person to have struggled with groups of teenagers, trying to get them to articulate values that really matter to them, to discover that practically the only thing they will agree in voicing is the importance of tolerance— usually seen as an incurious co-existence, even a bland acceptance of mutual ignorance and non-understanding, in the name of not passing judgment.

Despite the Blair’s government’s emphasis on standards as the main criterion for judging between schools it seems content to permit a dual system of sorts to continue, alongside numerous other partnership-based alternatives to ‘bog-standard’ schools. As yet it does not seem ready to move to a situation where state provision for education is stripped down to a legal state framework concerned only to enforce certain core standards and an adequate examination system. Schools could then present an unambiguous offering of their purpose and values in education to their parents, pupils and local communities. Those that were faith based could take on the challenge to offer an alternative mode of education to those ‘without a spiritual ethos’, which, the Archbishop of Canterbury (as above, The Times) has claimed, risk generating ‘individualism, functionalism and ultimately fragmentation’. In that scenario the richness and diversity of the education system might then be complemented by a state partnership based on responsibilities proper to the state and each educational institution.

In part, the difficulty in addressing the question of whether the existence of faith-based schools is a source of consensus or of conflict in our society arises from a very peculiar English problem. It is that highlighted by Michael Hastings at a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) (RSA, 28 January 2003) in which he pointed out that in England we now have a situation in which different faith communities have sought to become integrated into a nation which itself lacks a faith identity of its own. He argued:

When faith issues are at the forefront of people’s thinking, whether that is about matters of behaviour, or ideas of belief, or about constitutional issues such as the role of the church or the monarch’s relationship to the church or the constitution of the nation, there is no clarity about the way we should go.

This is not an excuse for vague or muddled policy-making. Nonetheless this lack of a common national faith identity is often ignored in discussion at national and local levels to the detriment of clear policy decisions. Already the issues which have arisen from the extension of faith-based schooling indicate a failure to get to grips with the huge cultural and social differences in the political and educational climate between 1870, 1944 and those of the present day At the same time, confusion marks much debate about the purpose of faith and religion in education in our society, which is increasingly characterised and shaped by the plurality of its beliefs and cultures and the multiple identities of its citizens. Faith and religion shape not only a national identity but the belief systems of communities as well as those of individuals. To what extent can faith communities in their state-sponsored schools set about answering the questions set out by Hastings according to their own dispositions and preferences alone? Should they not also respond to them against criteria embedded in the boundaries of inclusiveness and multiple identity which both implicitly and explicitly underpin and shape the purpose of our current general state education?

Indeed, imprecision and a failure to engage with the more fundamental aspects of the challenges and outcomes of faith-based schooling often arise from a non-recognition that the very concepts of ‘faith’ and ‘school’ are themselves complex and contested. Sociologists and philosophers have identified, for example, the following typologies of religion, which can each be found in our plural culture today (Heelas and Woodhead 2000:2–3):

• religions of difference
• religions of humanity
• spiritualities of life.

Further, a recent survey conducted by the Institute of Jewish Policy Research (IJPR 2003) points out the consensus and ‘dissensus’ among certain types of London Jews, who for the purpose of the survey were asked to identify themselves into three sociological categories of ‘belief: their attitudes and opinions’; ‘belonging: their membership, attachments, participation’; and ‘behaviour: actions and answers to certain questions’. Not only does the survey provide a rich source of information about the bases for likely consensus and ‘dissensus’ among a particular diverse religious group, it also points up the diversity in belief, belonging and practice among any religious community in Britain today. As one leading researcher into faith communities has commented (Jackson 1997:202): ‘When I meet a person from a religion I do not meet someone who relates straightforwardly to a whole cumulative tradition.’

Complex and contested concepts demand a response from policy makers which is at once consistent with the concept’s intellectual and ethical seriousness and its epistemological influence in our plural society. To take one example, schools are required (DfEE/QCA 1999:11, 47) to promote the diverse value systems which operate among their pupils and to give them equality within spiritual education. One researcher has recently pointed out that the requirement for spiritual education should apply differently to faith-based schools for two reasons (Pinner 2003):

• faith-based schools have axiological threads woven into their philosophical fabric in the form of defined value systems;
• faith-based schools catering for religiously homogenous populations need to promote their pupils’ spiritual education within their own religiously oriented frameworks.

For our society, which covets its democratic institutions and way of life, can schools bring about the development of a common good as well as fulfilling the needs of the children and young people they serve? In a state education system which provides for the existence of faith-based schools alongside community schools, can we find a common learning culture which fosters inclusiveness, equality and social justice?

Is it not viable and necessary for each type of school to incorporate the three fundamental liberal democratic values described by Halstead (1996:18) as:

1. individual liberty (i.e. freedom of action and freedom from constraint in the pursuit of one’s own needs and interests);
2. equality of respect for all individuals within the structures and practices of society (i.e. non-discrimination on irrelevant grounds);
3. consistent rationality (i.e. basing decisions and actions on logically consistent rational justifications)?

With such values, could not each school ‘explore the meanings of religion, secularisation, pluralism and citizenship in an epistemologically open way’? For Robert Jackson (1997: 126), if schools could achieve this they would be developing the competence in children and young people to move ‘…between the different arenas and perspectives of religious and modern plurality’. Skeie (1995:27–9) has argued that this would mean that children become ‘subjects in their own culture’ representing traditions and working with pluralism rather than against it.

Some would, however, argue that in fact it is only faith-based schools that can effectively provide the spiritual aspect of education demanded by current legislation. In The Way Ahead (Archbishops’ Council 2001:3), the Church of England has argued that the purpose of the church in education is to ‘offer a spiritual dimension to the lives of young people, within the traditions of the Church of England, in an increasingly secular world’. Here there is a strong case for evaluating the use of language in educational policy making. There is a real danger of state education policy language in our present dual system ‘borrowing’ the language of the churches and other religious groups to explain away a direction or aim which it seeks for education. Hence the need for restraint and clarity when examining what is intended by ‘spiritual education’ and ‘mission’ in policy documents. Some would argue that the definitions of the spiritual suggested in, for example, Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) Handbooks are a shorthand for discussing those characteristics of human beings which formal education should foster. Similarly, the use of ‘mission’ in almost evangelical prose suggests that it is the role of each school to have a vision of its responsibilities and goals arising from its own beliefs and values. Yet there are surely common educational visions which most schools share, whatever their particular culture or ethos. On the other hand, the Archbishop of Canterbury (The Times, 12 September 2003), in his speech to the conference of Anglican headteachers, felt it important to point to ‘a real tension in educational thinking between those whose concern is primarily, almost exclusively, with imparting skills to individuals and those who understand education as something that forms the habits of living in a group’.

All of this serves to underline the importance of critically examining the language and values behind statements which support the expansion of faith-based schools. It is important that there is a genuine sharing of arguments and research about the significant educational differences and values which are offered by schools operating as either community schools or faith-based ones. Richard Pring (Chapter 4, this volume) has suggested that arguments for and against faith-based schools need to address the following key concepts:

• educational aims and the promotion of a valued form of life;
• the autonomy of the child and the promotion of a particular creed;
• indoctrination and notions of rationality.

In relation to the autonomy of the child, we might wish to couple Pring’s concerns with the advice of Hirst and Peters (1970:31–2), when they argued that ideals such as autonomy are ‘vacuous unless people are provided with forms of knowledge and experience to be critical, creative and autonomous with’. They (ibid: 32) continued: ‘Autonomy, or following rules that one has accepted for oneself, is an unintelligible ideal without the mastery of a body of rules on which choice can be exercised.’

The challenge which exercised our state education system over the last 30 years has been how best to encourage children from widely different social, ethnic and religious backgrounds to learn from a curriculum which has not overly changed since the 1902 Education Act. When, for example, the preamble to the 1988 Education Act called for education in personal, moral, spiritual and social development, the detailed national curriculum failed to meet in detail such fine aspirations. Individual schools, some faith-based, others standard-maintained/community schools, sought to work with the curriculum in innovative ways to meet the children’s needs, despite failures within the central curriculum. The question to be addressed to both community and faith-based schools is whether they are satisfied that they are operating a curriculum which does justice to preparation for living in the twenty-first century. For all schools are facing the opportunities and tensions which our society presents: the fragmentation and violence experienced particularly in northern cities; the call in the Education Act of 2000 for education to contribute to an inclusive society; the disappointment experienced by many from the outcomes of the national curriculum and its processes; the inclusion of citizenship education in the school curriculum; and the increasing possibility of a national framework for religious education. We must ask alongside our schools, therefore:

• How do we best incorporate the opportunities and challenges experienced b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables and figures
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Faith schools
• Part II: Faith schools
• Part III: Faith schools
• Part IV: Faith schools
• Part V: Faith schools