FOR a government pledged to improve an underperforming education system, church schools looked like the answer. The “strong ethos” of these schools, praised by numerous ministers, seemed to lead ineluctably to smart uniforms, good discipline and above-average exam results. More church schools would, presumably, mean better education; so the government set about increasing the number of “faith-based” schools, as they are called in these multicultural times.
Others, however, do not share the government's simple faith. On December 4th, the new education bill had its second reading in parliament. The worthy clauses about devolving more power to headteachers passed without comment, but the single paragraph on setting up more church schools aroused much dissent, most of it from the government's own back-benchers. There were always doubters, but opposition to state promotion of religion has sharpened since Muslim youths rioted on the streets of northern British towns this summer-and since September 11th.
Some 7,000 of England's 25,000 schools are “faith-based”. The Church of England, which runs most of them, wants more; but the groups keenest on expanding faith-based schools are Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and Jews. Since 1997, 11 schools run by minority faiths and funded by the state have started up, and they want to move towards parity with the Christians.
The government sees religious schools as a way of getting the middle classes, who turned to the private sector after selective state schools were abolished in the 1970s, back into state education. Church schools, with their apparently high academic and moral standards, look like the best way to lure them back.
Certainly, the middle classes are queuing up to get into church schools. But parents are interested in the sort of person their children are mixing with, as well as how good the teaching is. And the evidence suggests that the success of church schools is more to do with selection procedures than with the quality of teaching.
Unlike other state schools, which have to accept all children within their catchment area, church schools are allowed to select pupils on grounds of religious upbringing. Whether or not they are consciously choosing middle-class pupils, they end up with fewer poor children-as measured by the number of children eligible for free school meals-than other state schools do (see chart). Poor children tend to do worse than better-off ones in exams, so schools with fewer poor children are likely to perform correspondingly better. Indeed, a recent study carried out in Wales concluded that once the different levels of free-school-meal entitlement had been taken into account, the differences in performance between church and other schools “were not statistically significant”.
Perhaps even more damaging was a study on education standards for Civitas, a think-tank, by John Marks, an adviser on education to the Church of England. Mr Marks concluded that “overall standards are poor, with the extent of under-achievement increasing substantially for older pupils, and this is just as much the case for [church] schools as it is for local education authority schools”.
Religion's power to divide society and provoke conflict is sharper in people's minds now than it was when the government first dreamt up this scheme. If “faith-based” schools are not all they are cracked up to be, promoting them becomes harder than ever to defend.