To anyone trying to navigate it for the first time, England’s education system can seem like an old ship, endlessly patched and repatched by successive governments until the original structure has been lost and nothing moves without taking on water. Its Byzantine edifice of rules and regulations contains many a rotting timber – not least the exceptional status given to faith schools. These are defined as schools of religious “character” or “ethos”, or which may have formal links to a religious organisation. The National Secular Society (NSS), which campaigns against faith schools, estimates that about one in three schools in England and Wales, both independent and state-funded, can be so labelled.
These schools are permitted to select some or all of their students, as well as their staff, on the basis of their or their family’s religion. Then there is the curriculum. It may be no surprise that faith schools are allowed to teach religious education “within the tenets of their faith”. Yet this also applies to relationships and sex education, giving them leeway to insert bias and promote religious doctrine on important topics such as homosexuality, extra-marital sex and women’s rights.
Opponents are concerned about the extension of influence from churches, mosques and synagogues into schools – particularly as, in addition to Ofsted inspections, faith schools are subject to statutory “religiosity inspections” by their sponsoring religious body. The problem becomes more worrying when it comes to unregistered faith schools, which are not regulated at all and which operate in a shadowy world on the margins of the law. Although they are far fewer in number, these schools can have a severe effect on the lives and future prospects of the children who pass through their doors.
However, even when properly run, many faith schools fail adequately to serve the needs of their local communities – a problem that grows more complex as England’s population becomes more diverse. Even if parents are happy for their children to be brought up within the narrow tenets of a particular faith and with limited exposure to different ways of thinking, it is far from clear that this is always done with children’s best interests in mind. We might question, then, why state faith schools – funded in part or wholly by the taxpayer – are still able to be established with apparent ease, regardless of the wishes of locals and prospective parents.
The case of one such school, which opened in September just south of Peterborough, illustrates the complexity and depth of the problem.
A "Catholic ethos" in the school curriculum
St John Henry Newman Catholic primary school was developed to serve a growing housing development in the town of Hampton Water. Its “Catholic ethos”, according to its sponsor, the Catholic Diocese of East Anglia, “will permeate all areas of the curriculum and underpin the school’s work and objectives”. It is a voluntary aided (VA) school, benefitting from the funds set aside by the government in 2019 for 14 new VA faith schools, to add to the 2,640-odd already established in England.
Local opinion seems not to have been factored in. A consultation was conducted by Peterborough city council, but among those who gave a Hampton postcode, 127 opposed the school. Only 17 were in favour. “Hampton Water is a very diverse community,” said Tracy Butler, a resident who campaigned against the school. “We have lots of different faiths; we also have residents of no faith at all.”
The reasons behind the approval have never been made clear. “The Department of Education have on multiple occasions . . . refused to provide any information about how they assess these proposals,” says Alastair Lichten, co-ordinator of No More Faith Schools. As such, it is difficult to tell how far St John Henry Newman, or JHN, is symptomatic of a wider trend. Even so, a pressing question remains: why has the UK government supported a new wave of faith schools, permitting them to open in parts of the country whose inhabitants they may not represent?
Anger in Hampton Water is likely to have been compounded by the way the school was funded. Ten per cent of the capital costs were raised through a charge on local facilities, levied by the council on developers and passed on to purchasers. This means that, in buying a property in the housing development, residents will have helped to pay for the school, despite not knowing what type it would be.
This could happen anywhere, so that young families moving to a new housing development in England might end up paying for a faith school their children are not qualified to attend. At JHN, as at other VA schools, the remaining 90 per cent of capital costs, and 100 per cent of running costs, are being funded by the state. In other words, we’re all paying for religious privilege.
It’s true that the Diocese has committed an additional £250,000 to projects at JHN. However, foremost among these are a chapel and “a crucifix on the outside wall of the school” – hardly symbols of inclusivity. According to Lichten, JHN will be “the most discriminatory new school that has opened in England in about 10 years.”
The government has typically justified faith schools on the grounds that they improve academic results and increase parents’ choice. In a 2014 Commons debate on Catholic schools, the Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, praised their “high performance”, which he attributed to their “ethos and character” (Hinds himself attended a Catholic grammar school). The evidence, however, is less clear. A 2016 report by the Education Policy Institute found that while pupils in state faith schools did do better academically than their peers at non-faith schools, the gap was much smaller when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic background and prior attainment.
Religious groups have certainly latched on to the diversity argument. In the case of JHN, the Diocese said that a new Catholic school would “enhance choice and diversity of education provision for parents within the Hampton area”. What will actually happen, says Butler, is that the school will end up selecting children from Catholic families living further away in preference to local children from non-Catholic families. As a resident, she sees JHN as “a huge missed opportunity for integration”. People moved into the area “hoping that their children would all be able to go to school together”, she says.
Yet the government seems unperturbed, and doesn’t even bother to monitor the effectiveness of faith-selective admissions. In response to a Freedom of Information request by the NSS in 2020, the Department for Education (DfE) admitted that it “does not hold information on which schools select on the basis of religion as an element of their admissions criteria”. They do not seem to be concerned that religious organisations may be using the school system in England to extend their power, largely at the expense of those who do not share their beliefs.
The grip of the Church of England
It is no coincidence that the organisation to take the greatest advantage of this means of influence is the Church of England, the established church of this country. The C of E is the biggest sponsor of faith schools, and is currently running 4,644 state schools, around three-quarters of which are primary schools. It estimates that around 15 million adults alive today will have attended one of its schools in the course of their education.
If you ask most people about their experience of attending an Anglican school, a common view is that it “didn’t do me any harm”, or that all it really teaches is “being nice to people”. There is little doubt that the C of E is, for historical reasons, the best assimilated into mainstream British culture. But by the same token, most of its so-called “Christian values” – faith and piety aside – are no longer seen as distinctively Christian, but rather as near-universal. Anglicanism in particular does not form part of the identity of most British people, especially in younger age groups: only 1 per cent of 18-to-24 year-olds identify themselves with the creed, according to the NSS.
This seemed to be playing on the mind of Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, when he urged the General Synod, in a paper presented in June, to adopt “a bolder commitment to Christian education and ministry with children, young people and students,” emphasising the need for “youth evangelism”. Clearly it is a question of survival.
The so-called “religiosity inspections” are a key tool in this drive to proselytise. State-funded faith schools must be inspected by their sponsoring religious body every five years. According to Matthew Hill, a former head teacher who contributed to a recent NSS report on the subject, schools have to show not only that their values are “rooted in an exclusively Christian narrative”, but that they are working closely with the local church. He has also seen inspectors questioning primary school children, some as young as five, on theology. “Some were asked about the Trinitarian nature of God,” he said. A 2020 NSS report examined 40 “religiosity” reports on schools produced by two C of E dioceses in 2019. It found that over half “conflated successful [religious education] with promoting or eliciting Christian viewpoints”.
Yet in Hill’s experience, few parents realise the difference between a religiosity inspection and a standard Ofsted inspection. The inspections thus put enormous pressure on heads to “ramp up the evangelism. . . If the school used to be an excellent church school and now it’s a ‘requires improvement’ church school, that’s not good PR.”
The C of E’s involvement in education isn’t only confined to the promotion of the Christian faith. In order to protect its own privileges, the organisation seems to feel compelled to defend all religions against the encroachments of secular democracy. This approach has even extended to unregistered faith schools.
Disadvantaging minorities
By law, all schools for children aged 5 to 16, both state-funded and independent, must register with the DfE and submit to regular inspections. However,
according to statutory guidance, “out-of-school settings” that provide cultural, religious and other types of “study support” only need register as schools if they are operating for at least 18 hours a week, and teach five or more children. Some organisations, including Charedi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) and fundamentalist Islamic and Christian groups, use this provision to their advantage. While claiming to operate for less than the 18-hour limit, or outside normal hours, they in fact run as full-time religious schools. According to an updated report on unregistered schools published by Ofsted in November 2021, children attending them are “at risk because there is no formal external oversight of safeguarding, health and safety or the quality of education provided”.
The very secretiveness of these unofficial schools makes it hard to estimate how many there are, let alone the numbers of students. However, recent data from Ofsted showed that 90 out-of-school settings in Britain with a Christian, Jewish or Muslim faith have been investigated for potential illegality over the course of the last five years. There is additional concern that children whose parents claim they are in elective home education (EHE) are actually at unregistered schools, and that this figure has increased since the Covid-19 lockdowns made EHE more common.
Back in 2015, when radicalisation was high on the political agenda, the existence of these schools – in particular their potential rejection of “British values” – was of sufficient concern for the government to launch a consultation on ways to regulate out-of-school settings where these provided “intensive education”. However, as reported in the Catholic Herald in 2017, Justin Welby, as Archbishop of Canterbury, personally lobbied “senior members of the government” not to change the law, while Caroline Spelman MP approached the Cabinet on behalf of the Church Commissioners.
The fear of both Anglican and Catholic interests was that a law change would subject Sunday schools and Bible study groups to unwelcome meddling. The lobbying was effective. As the Catholic Herald put it: “Very quickly, and very quietly, the government dropped the idea.”
Since then, however, the existence of unregistered schools has continued to receive media attention, thanks in part to campaigns by the NSS and Humanists UK. Ofsted inspectors have also made some progress in closing the schools. However, despite promising signs, the government has yet to tighten the law sufficiently to stop them altogether – and, according to Ofsted figures, there have only been five successful prosecutions. The DfE issued guidance in 2020 on the proper conduct of out-of-school settings, including yeshivas and madrasas, but it is non-statutory and voluntary – in other words, it is all but useless.
In the meantime, an unknown number of children may still be receiving education solely at unregistered religious schools, and potentially suffering a range of harms, from ideological indoctrination to ignorance of basic life skills, to safety risks and even physical abuse.
In October last year, for instance, a father and daughter, Arshad and Nadia Ali, were convicted for a second time of running an unregistered Islamic school in south London. Ofsted identified a number of safeguarding failures at Ambassadors High School, as it was known, including a failure to properly vet the adults working with the children, and insufficient fire safety provisions. Inspectors had previously found that “the headteacher had no plan or strategy to promote fundamental British values, or encourage respect for other people”. It is difficult to imagine how students who attend such institutions will be able to relate to people of different backgrounds with whom they may have to work and live.
Another example is the unregistered schools known to operate in Charedi communities, particularly in the London boroughs of Hackney and Haringey. These communities tend to keep themselves largely isolated from wider society in order to preserve their fundamentalist religious practices. However, their inner workings have been brought to light by the Jewish organisation Nahamu, whose website describes its members as “deeply involved in the religious Jewish community” but “concerned about increasing levels of extremist discourse and obscurantism” within it.
As Eve Sacks, board member at Nahamu, explains, Charedi schools are “almost exclusively for boys over 13”. They provide no secular education. “Mainly they learn the Talmud and they might also learn the Torah,” she says. The boys speak in Yiddish, a vernacular language, and learn to read Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. The focus is not on writing essays: “literally what are they doing is just reading text” and receiving lectures from rabbis on how to interpret it, Sacks says. They may be doing this for as much as 12 hours a day, five and a half days a week.
Ironically, the girls – who are forbidden to learn the Torah – receive a better education, albeit a limited and segregated one, in independent but registered faith schools.
One consequence of this system is that the boys grow up barely able to speak English. Sacks has been approached by Charedi men in their twenties who want to go to university but cannot fill in an application form. “And I think, my goodness, you were really wronged there.” The lack of education in secular subjects in any language means that their choice of profession is very limited.
Abuse of children in faith schools
Another problem is safeguarding. In 2019, Amanda Spielman, Ofsted Chief Inspector, was tipped off about a pamphlet entitled “Encouragement to teachers and guidance for parents”. The pamphlet was written in Hebrew and published with the approval of “senior rabbinical figures” within the Charedi community, some of whom were thought to be serving teachers at unregistered schools. In her evidence to a statutory government enquiry on child protection, Spielman related that much of the pamphlet came across as “a manifesto for corporal punishment”. Its author states that “force” should be used on students “to knock down the strength of the evil inclination – to put fear on them – to make them submissive because submission is the foundation to revoke their own opinion and receive the faith”. In one unregistered faith school, inspectors found that isolation and forced standing for long periods were used as sanctions even on “young children”.
Even when they are told about the issues at unregistered schools, however, public authorities have often been reluctant to intervene, not least because of worries that they will be accused of racism. But this attitude, argues Sacks, is misguided. It is little better than saying that “everybody’s entitled to get GCSEs unless you’re a Charedi Jew”. What is truly “antisemitic” is depriving these children of the opportunity to have a basic secular education.
Despite these problems, it is Sacks’ impression that “a reasonably large percentage of the community” are happy with their unofficial system, which aims to turn boys into “scholars” and girls into “good wives and mothers”. If, however, parents wish to send their children into a mainstream school, they risk being shunned. “You’re excluded from your synagogue and none of your relations talk to you and everybody gossips about you when you’re in the street.” For the few who choose to leave the community altogether, moving into mainstream British society is very difficult. “It’s like being an immigrant even though it’s the country you’ve been brought up in.”
There are no easy answers to the numerous problems posed by faith schools, even those that are registered. A partial solution advocated by the NSS and others would be to remove their right to select students on the basis of their religion. This would at least ensure they are serving their local area. At the same time, continuing to allow for religiously selective independent schools, but all the while giving Ofsted real powers to regulate them and requiring them to follow a basic secular curriculum, would at least provide some protection for students’ autonomy.
It may be that, as the C of E and other advocates of faith schools argue, going to such a school, in addition to satisfying religious parents, does not inevitably harm a child or prevent him or her from making friends with children from families of other cultural and philosophical persuasions. There may even be meaningful reasons why some faith schools, at least well-established ones, can provide a higher quality of education than non-faith schools. However, these arguments have to be weighed against the benefits of integrating children into wider British society and exposing them to new ideas in the most impressionable part of their lives. There also remains the question of whether it is appropriate for religious organisations to be wielding so much power behind the scenes through their influence over the school system.
Ultimately, it is difficult to see how the knotty problem of faith schools will ever be disentangled as long as politicians and public authorities continue to defer to religion and shrink from scrutinising minority groups. In the balancing act between the rights of parents and children, which every state has to make, deference to religious interests almost inevitably favours parents, whose minds are made up, over children, who have yet to discover things.
“Children are children,” says Terri Haynes, a Peterborough councillor and teacher. “They might have Catholic parents, but that doesn’t make them Catholic.” Yet this is how they are treated by faith schools, with or without their parents’ consent.
A breakthrough might come with a written national constitution founded on secular principles of universal application. This is something that Britain, unlike France or the US, has never had. Yet unfortunately, this prospect seems increasingly distant in a land of such creaking antiquity. In the long term, though, it is hard to see how separating the education system more clearly from religious interests could fail to benefit those whom it ought, above all, to serve: the students.
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
