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Faith schools admissions may promote social inequality
03 November 2010
Faith schools' admission rules have unfair “white middle-class” criteria and discriminate against immigrant applicants, says head of the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) Ian Craig.
The partially selective schools are permitted to favour members of their faith, with many operating on a points system. Prospective pupils have an increased chance of being accepted if, for example, their parents are involved in church-based volunteering.
However, critics have in the past argued that parents with less free time to spare or those lacking in skill at manoeuvring the often complicated points-based systems to their advantage are likely to lose out.
Craig said: “We have come across points that benefit white middle-class areas and don’t benefit the immigrant children in the community,” as reported in the Guardian newspaper. He added that the issue predominantly concerns Christian schools as they significantly outnumber other faith schools.
The points system assumes that parents have time to volunteer, and that they follow specifically Western European Christian practices. In some Eastern European countries, children are not baptised until they are one year old.
When surveyed 88 percent of local authorities believed that faith schools in their area were compliant with school admissions laws, when in reality just 47 percent were, according to the OSA.
In an authoritative and comprehensive report on faith schools and community cohesion, Runnymede’s director Rob Berkeley states: “By taking an exclusivist approach, these schools are forced into making judgments not just about the declared faith affiliation of the parents, but also interpretations of the depth of commitment to a particular faith.”
Click here to read the full report ‘Right to Divide? Faith Schools and Community Cohesion'
