Faith schools bring shame upon themselves (again)
Dear Ed Balls,
It’s nice to see you getting back to your job, after doing a superb job of humiliating yourself at this years Budget. It seems that you have picked on faith schools over the past few weeks, but annoyingly I find it hard to argue with your findings that a lot of faith schools are breaking the law on school admissions.
Parents will always want to do what’s best for their children - guaranteed. They will try to bend the rules wherever possible to get the best deal for their children, and I daresay if and when I become a parent that I will be willing to pursue every possible avenue to get the best education for my children. If, however, faith schools encourage this behaviour by getting parents to make ‘voluntary payments’ of almost £1,000 a year when applying for their child to attend a particular school, everything starts to fall apart. Any school found to be breaching the admissions code should be heavily fined or shut down – there is simply no other way to deal with this outrageous abuse of the admissions system. Michael Gove and myself agree that the system as it stands is not particularly impressive, but rules are rules and no school should escape punishment for so flagrantly breaking their legal obligations. The fact that faith schools even exist makes my stomach churn and you don’t seem to be doing anything about that because Labour are so obsessed with appeasing religious groups, but at the very least you should crack down hard on those schools that feel the rules don’t apply to them.
I respect parents wanting to do what’s best for their children, but state-funded religious indoctrination is bad enough without parents having to pay towards getting their children into these state schools. No doubt you will be tempted to do very little about this as Labour always avoids conflict with religious groups due to their unfortunate absence of a spinal cord, but I live in hope.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
If only all schools accepted children on the one critea that is really important in education – MERIT. Whether black, white, muslim, orthodox jew, male, female, rich or poor it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is the grey matter!
Nice way of putting it. A meritocracy would make for a pleasant change in our society.
Hmm, merit may get the best of people, but high schools are streamed anyway so the provision is there. I think that it couldn’t work in the real world unfortunately. You would end up with your closest school just happening to be the dross, and you having to travel 10 miles to get to a school which provides a decent education, but you can’t afford to drive there everyday or the ridiculous bus fairs, because you don’t get any help because its not the closest school…
Location based helps to create a more level field. If you have the intelligence you will do well enough in a streamed school, every school gets a balanced mix of the bad and good.
Should be on a) location and b) for high schools – feeder schools.
I do think there is an unneccesary hatred of faith schools.
People want to get their kids in even when they are not of the faith – so the school must be doing something right… have you looked at what this is and why it is not emulated in other schools?
I think this is the most important point. To be against something because it is desirable makes little sense.
The existing faith schools, to not be faith schools would still be required as the places are needed, so why get rid of the faith part because as we have already looked at, it may be improving the school?
All faith schools that I know (well – Catholic schools) the church pays towards the running of the school, they are definately putting in enough money to encourage the kids to say lunchtime grace once a day (I swear that is the most obvious difference! That and an unwillingness to show us condoms – just describe them in great deal with actions – a very interesting lesson!).
Paying for admissions, very naughty, one thing admission has never been on in the past for state schools, is money and wealth.