A simple job made complicated.

I was taking a school assembly this morning about Pentecost. We began by recalling the Ascension of Jesus which a colleague had taught the children about last week. I then asked them what job Jesus had left the disciples to do. They responded straight away: 'Go and tell everyone about Jesus'. That was it. Of course doing it is another matter and that's where the Holy Spirit comes in.

A few days ago the Church of England published its attendance statistics for 2011. There has been a mixed response to the figures and the stats have been spun in different ways; viewed by some as encouraging and by others as evidence of continued decline. The British Humanist Association sought to use the figures to bolster their argument for disestablishment.

David Keen has done an excellent job on his blog of analysing the figures in a post entitled Church of England: Not levelling out. David injects some hard headed realism into discussions, challenging some of the complacency that was doing the rounds when the figures were initially presented. He has continued to post related articles on the issue of church growth and strategy including one today about Archbishop Justin Welby's address to the Diocesan Church Growth Strategies Conference. ++Justin's priorities are summarised as:

• prayer and renewal of the church's spiritual life 
• reconciliation, within the church and as an agent in the world
• evangelism

As I read this straightforward summary, I think back to this morning's assembly and the children's summary of the task Jesus has given his followers: 'Go and tell everyone about Jesus'. How have we made it so complicated?

h/t anglican memes for the picture.

Skewing Faith Schools

In November 2010 Ian Craig the head of the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) made some startling claims about faith schools in a press conference.  He was quoted in The Guardian as stating the following:

Speaking at the publication of the tribunal's annual report, Craig said: "We are bothered by the complexity of some faith schools' points systems. We have come across points that benefit white middle-class areas and don't benefit the immigrant children in the community." He said the issue affected all faith groups, but predominantly Christian schools because these outnumber other faith schools.

"We haven't found schools are deliberately skewing their intake, but our view is that this has been the effect. In some cases the faith schools are measuring parents' commitment to the church over and above the number of times a family attend church. Is it a measure of a parent's Christianity if they are bell-ringers at their church? In working-class areas, there might not be the option to do this."

Not surprisingly The Guardian’s headline bellowed:

Faith school admissions 'unfair to immigrants’

I found this disturbing. I’m vice-chair of a Church of England primary school and have in the past been chair of another such school. If there was something wrong with our admissions policy I wanted to know about it. So I downloaded the tribunal’s annual report and read it page by page looking for the evidence. To my surprise, apart from some rather generalised points, I could find few specifics to back up Craig’s claim.

So I phoned the OSA and spoke to one of the members of staff. I asked for specific details and examples to stand up the claims. I also wanted to know how many schools were involved. The first response was to say that it was a press conference and you know what the press are like. I pointed out that these were attributed quotes and I was concerned to see the evidence supporting the claims.

Eventually I was told that permission would need to be sought before further information could be released. I explained it was not unreasonable to expect evidence to back up such sweeping statements and was assured I would receive a call in the next couple of days. I took the member of staff’s name and waited for a call, it never came. To be honest I had a lot going on so didn’t follow up my enquiry.

Then today I read that Ian Craig has been questioned by the Commons Education Committee and criticised for the claims he made last November. The BBC reports:

Appearing before a committee of MPs on Wednesday, Dr Craig was accused of overstating the extent of the problem.

He was taking questions from members of the Commons Education Committee on the Office for Schools Admissions annual report, which was published in November.

Damian Hinds, Conservative MP for East Hampshire, asked Dr Craig to clarify how many of the cases his office had ruled on related to church schools' admissions codes.

Dr Craig said 45 of the 151 cases last year related to "own admissions" faith schools, of which 23 related to supplementary information forms and 12 related to the "clarity and complexity" of the criteria.

"So that's 12 or 23 out of 6,753 religious schools in this country," Mr Hinds said.
"Can I make a request that in next year's report, given the publicity that extended to this year's report, that the Office makes strenuous additional efforts to put into context the extent of this problem and the extent to which there is not a problem, clearly, in the vast, vast majority of schools."

"I'm very happy to take that on board," Dr Craig replied and said he had already written himself a note to that effect for the next report.

But he stood by his concerns that church school entrance criteria needed to be objective and clear.

Now I want to be clear that I am against any malpractice when it comes to school admissions. Any such poor practice needs to be challenged and addressed by the appropriate authorities. The church above all should be a model of best practice in this area, it is part of our witness to the wider community.

However, I also expect that the person heading the OSA, the body charged with adjudicating cases of potential malpractice, would speak and act in an impartial manner. If criticism is to be made, I expect Mr Craig to be able to back up his criticisms with facts and figures. I also expect such criticism to be proportionate.

Not surprisingly the usual suspects were out in force following the OSA press conference, continuing their campaign against faith schools. Heading the charge was the Accord Coalition.  Ekklesia ran the story under the headline ‘Faith schools criticised for skewing admissions towards better-off’. But it seems a more appropriate headline would have been ‘a handful of faith schools may have inadvertently skewed their admissions policies towards the better off.’ Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?

Update: The British Humanist Association has posted an article based on Craig's Commons Education Committee appearance yesterday which  continues to misrepresent the situation. I am interested to know why they make no mention of the state schools with admissions policies criticised by the OSA?

Schools should be palaces

There is a wonderful scene in an early episode of The West Wing. Sam Seaborn, the White House Deputy Communications Director, is trying to ask Mallory out on a lunch date. Mallory is a teacher and the daughter of Sam’s boss Leo, the Chief of Staff. Sam and Mallory get into an argument about a paper Sam has written on school vouchers; Mallory is vehemently opposed  to vouchers and is a committed public (state) school teacher. Things don’t look good for Sam until he reveals that he is as opposed to vouchers as Mallory and that his position paper was simply written to reflect the views of the administration’s opponents. Sam goes on to declare his commitment to education with the following statement:

Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Sam’s words came to mind yesterday, as I listened with horror to Michael Gove in the House of Commons announcing that the government is to abandon the Building Schools for the Future programme as part of their slash and burn approach to debt reduction. I accept that the scheme could be more efficiently administered and savings could be made, but to suspend the proposed building projects for 715 new schools is absurd. Anyone with a modicum of insight into education knows that poor school buildings and facilities have a direct impact on teaching and learning as well as significant implications for the wider community. This short term, knee jerk and what increasingly looks like an ideological decision is going to damage the education of children in our society for decades.

I have served for many years as a school governor in a variety of schools, including as Chair of Governors. I have chaired school appeals panels for a London borough. I have two young children at school and am grateful for the significant refurbishment their schools have undergone in recent years. I’ve seen first hand the difference major school improvements make to learning. The quality of our school buildings speaks volumes to the children, staff and wider community of the value we ascribe as a society to the education of our young people.

David Cameron enjoyed the privilege of going to one of the most  expensive privately funded schools in our country. I don’t begrudge him that, but I want to hold him to words he uttered when campaigning to become Prime Minister: I know how lucky I've been to have the chances I had. I want every child to have the chances I had. That is why I'm standing here.

Well Prime Minister, there are two ways to fulfil your aspiration; either you’re going to have to build a bigger Eton Wall or you’re going to have to fund the state education system to ensure that every child gets the education they deserve; in school buildings which are the best our society can provide.



The West Wing: Six meetings before lunch (2000)

paperless Christmas nativity

The Adventures of Mary and Joseph – The Road Movie presents a re-telling of the nativity with a series of nine short videos. Simply go to the Paperless Christmas website and the story should load (I had to use IE to view it). The screen displays an open road with a series of billboards to either side which is a neat alternative to the atheist billboard campaign. Click on the arrow to travel down the road and as you come to each billboard, click on play and a video tells part of the nativity story. It’s a great way to explore aspects of the Christmas story and resources have been produced to make use of the videos by Barnabas in Schools.

Paperless Christmas is produced by Jerusalem Productions and the Bible Reading Fellowship and Richard Fisher chief executive of BRF comments:

We hope it’s something that will cause people – both within and outside the church –to think afresh about the Christmas story. Already, since the beginning of October when the website went live, the videos have been viewed just over 15,000 times by visitors from 61 countries. They’re being enjoyed by all ages, and a growing number of churches and schools are telling us that they plan to show some or all of the video episodes in services and assemblies in the lead up to Christmas.

I particularly liked the humour, choice of actors and the contrast between traditional costumes and modern settings. The videos can be downloaded from the Barnabas in Schools site, so even if your venue doesn’t have internet access you can use the material.

no faith schools officer

I had a look at the British Humanist Association website today and was interested to discover that they are appealing for money to fund a dedicated campaign officer against faith schools. Here’s what they say:

Help the BHA in its effort to phase out state funded 'faith' schools by ensuring we can employ a dedicated campaign officer against faith schools for another year. When we raise £30,000 we will be able to continue employing our dedicated campaigner for twelve months. Our campaigner will make sure that the voice of UK citizens who oppose faith schools is represented in the most powerful way. To do this our campaigner helps to stimulate and organise local campaigns against new faith schools and lobby government and parliament to reform the laws that allow state funded schools to discriminate in their employment and admissions on religious grounds, and to teach unbalanced curricula of religious education.

I was wondering whether the position of campaigner against faith schools was open to anyone or only to humanists? In other words does the person have to subscribe to the beliefs of the British Humanist Association as a necessary requirement for the job or can people of other faiths apply?

Update: If you want to see what a positive contribution church schools are making to education then check out +Alan Wilson's blog on Seer Green School.

in defence of church schools (1)

I’ve followed the debate about the place of Church Schools in the education system for many years and I am continually disappointed by the way in which church schools are misrepresented both by sections of the national press and by some Christians and Christian organisations pushing an agenda of secularisation. In recent weeks the discussion has become more heated and one of the aspects of the debate which I find concerning is the apparent ignorance of, or deliberate distortions about, church schools by some of those commenting on the issue.

I need to be clear about my own experience of church schools and the state education system. As a child I attended a mixture of church and state schools and during my ministry I have been involved in a variety of ways including:

• 1990 – 1994 I was Chair of Governors of a Church of England Voluntary Controlled Junior School.
• 19946 – 2001 Governor and Vice-Chair of Governors of a local authority Primary School in London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. During this period I also chaired school appeals panels on behalf of the education authority.
• 2001-present day. Governor and Vice-Chair of Governors of a Voluntary Aided Church of England Primary School.

Now what is the substance of some of the complaints about church schools? An organisation that has spearheaded opposition to church schools is the think tank Ekklesia. One of the directors of Ekklesia, Jonathan Bartley recently wrote an article in The Guardian entitled The church must not discriminate. The article was in response to a new website Christianvalues4schools set up by the Church of England to communicate the Christian ethos of Church Schools. One of the values espoused on the website is Justice and in response Bartley asks the following question:
‘So how exactly does the church square "never showing partiality", "dealing with everyone fairly" and "not insisting on their own rights at the expense of others" with discriminatory admissions and employment policies that prioritise church children over non-church attenders and refuse to allow non-Christians to apply for jobs? It tries to claim itself as a "special case", but to most people this will be seen as special pleading. In reality, discriminatory practises undermine and contradict the very Christian ethos they are supposed to protect.’

The simple response to this accusation of discrimination is that all schools have a discriminatory policy. Every school has an admissions policy with a set of criteria by which children are admitted and that means that some children are discriminated against, unless every school has an infinite capacity to admit children. The admissions policy may be set by the education authority or in the case of voluntary aided church schools by the governing body. In some schools priority is given to those living nearest to the school; in some priority is given to those with siblings at the school; in some priority is given to children in care or those with special needs; in the case of some church schools church attendance may be one of the criteria.

What Bartley and Ekklesia are complaining about is not that schools' admissions policies are discriminatory, they all are, they just don’t like the particular criteria applied by some church schools. Why is it more discriminatory to prioritise those who share the ethos of an institution, but not discriminatory to prioritise those who live nearest to that institution?

The church school where I presently serve as vice chair of governors has the following admissions criteria:

1. All children looked after.
2. Children living in the parishes of …….
3. Children with sibling at the school not in year 6.
4. Children with a parent who joins in the worship of one of the parish churches.
5. Children with parents active in another Christian church where the school is the nearest church school.
6. In the event of over subscription in any of these criteria, priority will be determined by straight line distance from home to school.

As can be seen from the criteria above, church children are not prioritised over those living within the school’s catchment area and this is true of many church schools, though you wouldn’t know it from the way this issue is discussed in the national media. However, if church attendance was further up the list of criteria what would be wrong with that? The only complaint could be that, while happy to discriminate on grounds of geography, personal circumstances or relationships, religious affiliation is not considered legitimate. Now how is that not discrimination?

I would suggest that applying geographical criteria in a schools admissions policy is in some cases much more discriminatory than church affiliation. Popular schools often create distorted housing markets within catchment areas, with the wealthy being able to access the school because they can afford the housing prices nearest the school. It could be argued that a church school placing church affiliation as a high selection criterion opens the school to those on lower economic means living further from the school. In such cases the church school is less discriminatory in terms of wealth and class than some state schools.

The question is really 'what values determine school selection criteria?' and here I believe we get to the heart of the matter. Ekklesia and Bartley are not just concerned about justice and fairness in access to education; they are supporters of a body that is seeking to promote the secularisation of the education system. Ekklesia states that it is 'a founder member of the Accord Coalition which seeks to make faith schools better. Accord also includes the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) and the British Humanist Association.'

This statement is rather disingenuous as examination of Accord’s aims make clear.

We believe that all state funded schools should:
1. Operate admissions policies that take no account of pupils’ – or their parents’ – religion or beliefs.
2. Operate recruitment and employment policies that do not discriminate on the grounds of religion or belief.
3. Follow an objective, fair and balanced syllabus for education about religious and non-religious beliefs – whether determined by their local authority or by any future national syllabus or curriculum for RE.
4. Be made accountable under a single inspection regime for RE, Personal, Social & Health Education (PSHE) and Citizenship.
5. Provide their pupils with inclusive, inspiring and stimulating assemblies in place of compulsory acts of worship.

What Ekklesia and Accord really mean when they say they want to make faith schools better is that they wish to remove the Christian and religious influence and ethos from schools. They are seeking secularisation so that Christianity is no more than a subject to be studied, stripping out the underlying ethos which permeates the whole of a church school community. Presumably, according to these aims, it would be OK. to study why Christians celebrate Harvest Festival but not OK. to have an assembly which was a Harvest Festival.

Bartley also complained in his article about church school discrimination in employment practices. I have to say that the church schools that I have been involved with have not discriminated regarding recruitment or employment on the grounds of church affiliation or attendance. However, there is an expectation that those applying to work in the school will be sympathetic to the ethos of the school and in the case of the teaching staff and senior management of the school, willing to attend and participate in the activities of the school. This may include attendance at acts of worship in assembly or at the local church as part of the school’s life. If someone was opposed to what the school represented in terms of its Christian ethos and was unwilling to engage in the life the school community then I find it difficult to understand how the school could be expected to employ that person.

I was the Chair of Governors of a church school that went through a difficult period with a rapid turnover of head teachers. To address the problems we appointed a very experienced man who would not have described himself as a Christian; his religion was Tottenham Hotspur F.C.! Yet, he was just what the school needed to address the problems at the time; he was fully supportive of what the school was seeking to do in serving a community with some very challenging problems and he was sympathetic to the ethos of the school.

If Ekklesia is arguing that it would be discriminatory for a church school to expect its teaching and senior management staff to be sympathetic to the Christian ethos of the school, then what they are really saying is that the school should not have an ethos that any teacher, including a secularist or atheist, could not sign up to. In other words you cannot have a church school with a particular emphasis on the Christian faith as part of its ethos because that would be to discriminate against a potential employee.

Why not just come clean Ekklesia and admit that you are opposed to the existence of church schools because that is what your policy means in practice? And while you are at it can you please explain how such as stance is not discriminatory.

I plan to post some good news stories about Church Schools in the future but for now check out Bishop Alan Wilson’s post Living Strategy for Learning in Oakley.

I have posted about the formation of Accord in Accord out of tune.

Giles Fraser has also written about Church Schools and discrimination in his Church Times column.

Ruth Gledhill has posted about Christian Values 4 Schools in her blog Articles of Faith for The Times and wrote a piece In defence of faith schools for The Times' education blog School Gate.

Accord out of tune

A new coalition called Accord, which was launched officially on Monday 1 September 2008, is calling on Children, Schools and Families Secretary of State Ed Balls to stop publicly-funded faith schools from discriminating against students and teachers on the grounds of their beliefs.

Accord has been established by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), the Christian think-tank Ekklesia, the British Humanist Association (BHA) and a range of other organisations and individuals - including clergy, academics and public figures - to seek to build a new consensus for fairness and equality in schooling and schools policy.

The coalition has received the support of Polly Toynbee in her latest rant against faith schools published by The Guardian. Her piece is either knowingly dishonest or wilfully ignorant. For example, she completely ignores the role that the church and other religious institutions have played in the development of education provision over the centuries in Britain and the presence of church schools serving communities abandoned by just about every other institution. Toynbee also refers to Ed Balls' attack on faith schools in April this year but fails to mention that he was unable to stand up many of his original accusations upon further investigation. Some have suggested Balls’ accusations were a cynical appeal to part of the Labour Party to strengthen his political base.

Toynbee suggests that the support of faith schools has been one of Tony Blair’s most damaging legacies. Personally I believe it was just one of a number of policies for which he has never been given sufficient credit by those (including some of our own bishops) who are always claiming that the government fails to involve the church in public policy.

Why does Toynbee's undoubted intelligence and capacity for reasoned argument seem to disappear whenever she gets anywhere near an issue of faith, making her appear the most irrational of fundamentalists?

Here is a response to Toynbee by Henry Grunwald also published in The Guardian.

Anyway, back to Accord. I have been a chair or vice chair of governors of a wide range of both church and state schools for nearly twenty years. None of these schools operated a discriminatory selection process and they reflected a real desire to give the best to the children and communities where they were based. I was saddened to see Ekklesia had signed up to Accord alongside The British Humanist Association, of which Toynbee is the Chair. Accord would better serve the children of our communities by addressing the very challenging problems facing many of our failing schools, rather than by attacking those schools which have been part of the solution.

I am not in favour of discrimination in admission to schools or employment in schools and it should be challenged where it occurs. However, the idea that faith schools are the root of all the evils in our education system is just pernicious nonsense based on prejudice and ignorance.

Update 8/9/08: Here is an excellent comment piece by Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian entitled Faith schools can best generate the common purpose that pupils need.
Bunting's article is a balanced reflection on the contribution of faith schools prompted by the setting up of six academies by Steve Chalke's Oasis Trust.