More state funding is headed their way
“GIVE me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” This Jesuit saying both attracts and frightens many religious folk. The idea of influencing the life of a nation by running its schools is attractive. Infuriating secularists by hinting that proselytising is the real purpose of those schools, however, is scary.
But the secularists' star is on the wane. On September 10th the Department for Children, Schools and Families, together with 15 religious groups, published a quasi-official vision of the future role of religious organisations in running schools. A bigger role and in more schools, was its central thrust. Around 100 independent Muslim schools are to be helped to join the seven already in the state sector, and the Church of England's ambition to add an extra 100 state secondaries to its current 200 or so is endorsed. Nor will new religious schools have to reserve places for those of other religions, or of none; the government tried to insist on this in 2006 but backed down in the face of opposition, mainly from the Roman Catholic church.
The state came late to education in England. It was not until 1870 that local school boards began to be set up to provide primary education for all. By then the established Anglican church had opened many thousands of schools to cater for the poor, and the Catholic church had been offering education since the mid-1800s. Most schools run by both churches eventually came into the state sector, accepting public money in return for giving up some freedom over what they taught. The result is that 6,250 of the 17,500 state primary schools in England and Wales, and 600 of the 3,400 state secondaries, are run by religious bodies. Most of them are Anglican or Roman Catholic; 37 are Jewish.
Should their parents desire it, Christian and Jewish children can usually find a place in a school run by co-religionists (see chart). Most of those from other religions must pay for the privilege, however, even though there are ten times as many Muslim school-aged children as Jewish, for example. Demands for a wider range of state-funded religious schools found a willing listener in the previous prime minister, Tony Blair. Since 1997 seven Muslim, one Seventh Day Adventist, one Greek Orthodox and two Sikh schools have joined the state sector, and a Hindu primary school will do so in 2008.
To some, this is a recipe for disaster. Sorting children by religion leads to segregation, if not extremism, they say, and Muslim schools in particular risk fuelling dangerous fires. The current situation is unfair to those who are neither Christian nor Jewish, but this argues for taking away the privileges of existing religious schools, not opening more of them.
Supporters reply that many religious schools are ethnically mixed: Roman Catholic schools see Irish, Filipino and Polish children rubbing shoulders, and many Anglicans are black. More surprisingly, some such schools are religiously mixed too. If places are not filled by those of the appropriate religion, they must be offered to anyone else who wants them, and some, particularly Catholic girls' schools, are popular with Muslim families.
The government claims to be following parents' wishes in opening more religious schools: they tend to be popular and often have good exam results. Yet a study in 2006 by researchers at the London School of Economics showed that this apparent success was due to the social characteristics of the children they admitted, rather than to superior teaching or ethos. That points to a more potent cause of segregation than opening a handful of new state Muslim schools: if Christians (or those who can put up a decent pretence) don't like what they see in a local secular school, they can abandon it to others, fostering in effect an ethnic ghetto. Segregation is a game it takes two to play.