Lessons for the Godless

The Gordon Brown era, as short lived as it appears to be, has people suspecting that he'll trample on faith schools to woo old labor. Cristina Odone has written a paper for the Center for Policy Studies, a rightwing think tank, in a pre-emptive move against the anticipated savaging from an interim report by schools adjudicator Philip Hunter.

She makes some compelling points, which I don't have the brass neck to precis in full, so I'll just sketch my favorite: anti-faith schoolers insist that the establishments cherry-pick rich kids, justifying that claim by comparing the uptake of free school meals (official figures for 2005 show that in an average primary school, 20% of kids have free school meals; in a Church of England school, it's 11%). Odone counters that free school meals are a poor index for impoverishment in communities of strong faith because, anecdotally, Catholic or Jewish mothers would prefer to beggar themselves than take a state handout. I like that; it's a new perspective, and it also boils down to: "We're not richer. We're just better."

I have always been against faith schooling, on the basis that a lot of the teachings of religion would be barred as discriminatory if carried into regular life. A more mainstream attack on faith schooling is to say that we wouldn't accept a hospital that had religious entrance requirements, so why should we take that from a school?

Let's concentrate on primary schools, since this is where faith schooling seems to reap the greatest rewards - they constitute 197 of the 209 schools, nationwide, scored as "perfect". I can understand why a parent might move heaven and earth, and pretend postcode, if their child was being bullied at school. But the furious jostling for places has nothing to do with that. The child won't even have been enrolled before the parents start campaigning, and moving house, and grudgingly attending a church they don't believe in, dementedly chasing the Ofsted "outstanding" - and never asking what that actually means.

There is a tacit understanding that being able to select pupils is the holy grail of schooling, since it brings the promise that parents who are too slovenly to care will have been filleted out by the arcane/religious/postcode admissions policy. It's not about results - many teachers say good results at primary level are a mixed blessing, since fixating on them inhibits flexibility. The kind of people who intend to put their child up for a selective secondary will buy private tuition when the time comes anyway. The difference in equipment and teaching at primary level is no great gulf; it really is just about social environment - making sure your child is educated with the children of other people like you.

That's fine: if you are religious, go for it. But if you're just fulminating that they won't let you in because you're not, isn't there a case to be made for working to improve the school that does let you in? And if you really examine the social environment in these desirable schools, isn't it just characterized by obnoxious, pushy, lying, middle-class people?

I think the competitive taper was lit and we all hared off without wondering what we were chasing: it looks like a scarce resource - grab that big bit! If you think faith schools are better because they're underpinned by faith, then griping about it is like griping that they have a better afterlife. More likely, you think there's a bit of social engineering; but no amount of social engineering is as influential as staff with high morale and parents who are fully involved.

We're never going to dismantle faith schools. We can argue against their expansion, but to argue for their disassembly is willful. Instead, we could take all that energy and find a nice godless primary to invest it in.