Religious Schools in the UK- Potential Meltdown

Great Debates
1

English schools are apparently being targetted by Islamic adherents wishing to mould the schools to fit their view of education.

This is possible because of the insistence of Governments of both persuasions allowing the system of schools supported by and managed by Christian churches over the decades (where religious observance was essentially minimal and anyway in accord with the belief system adhered to at least in passing by the majority religion. There have been Jewish schools previously and recently Sikh and Islamic supported schools.

This history, together with Government policies which stripped responsibility for education from local government and created a system of essentially independent schools has now created a situation where it is being suggested that Se Education is being ignored, females are being marginalised in the classroom, ans the syllabus is being interpreted in ways more acceptable to some Islamic beliefs. This was preceded by fundamental Christians supporting Academies that were released from the national curriculum and allowed to verge toward creation science and proselyting.

I predicted that the devolution of responsibility to individual schools would result in this problem and feel that it should have been predicted and religion removed from the classroom. It may now be too late. How do we rescue them?

2

The Daily Mail has a bad enough reputation that I wouldn’t trust anything it says. If anything, them claiming something is true makes it more likely to be false.

3

I would usually agree, but this seems to be largely true- a few weeks ago it could just have been a Mail publicity drive, but the longer it goes on the more evidence is emerging.

Of course, setting up an education system like this was asking for political and religious manipulation.

The Left Wing Guardian speaks:

4

Here is my early impression, most of this seems to take place because a letter or dossier describing a trojan horse scheme was revealed.

This is happening in the context of groups that complained before and did not need to be extreme Muslims, the schools have many troubles already:

So an investigation has started but looking at the BBC they report that the dossier included these lines:

:confused:

Wait a tick, this actually describes how to manipulate Muslim parents or to incite them to look their worst and to make demands that are ridiculous. Then to put in place friendly governors to the extremist parents. And then expose them all… :smack:

IMHO there is something fishy here because the last two items show that in the end the plan includes exposing the perpetrators, incite an investigation, with the end result of discrediting whoever is managing the school.

5

BBC take

Head teachers believe there were “concerted efforts” to infiltrate and run about six Birmingham schools in line with hardline Muslim principles.

The head teachers’ union, NAHT, has been working with about 30 members in 12 Birmingham schools over claims of a plot known as Operation Trojan Horse.

General secretary Russell Hobby said he had serious concerns about events in half of these schools.

Ofsted, police, council and government investigations are continuing.
.bbc.co.uk/news/education-27257077

6

I seem to remember that the policy of encouraging ‘faith’ schools was developed under the Blair years. The idea being that the moral framework and community support made for a better school. In some cases that belief may be well founded. But, of course, it can go very wrong, especially where religion and politics collide, as it is in this case.

There is a strong drive to make state financed schools work and failing schools are shut down. It was also recognised that a good management team is essential. The headmaster or principle is often key to the success of school. The old system of control by a local government did not work so well. Poor schools were allowed to continue churning out poorly educated students with poor prospects. Successful schools were constrained by many elements of their budget being controlled by local government departments responsible for many schools across a wide area.

Problems with faith schools have always been around. I seem to remember some troublesome priests in single sex Catholic schools. There is, of course, no constitutional reason that prevents teaching religion in state financed schools in the UK.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with the main policy, these side effects can be addressed. The old system did not deliver and made education a product of barely competent local bureaucrats.

These problem schools will be closed down and new ones will be created with safeguards to ensure this sort of nonsense does not continue. Religious communities know who all about political groups trying to take over community centres, places of worship, schools, etc. The local community is also an important part of the solution and central government knows this.

Conflating this and broader public education policy is not helpful…but that never stopped the Daily Mail.

7

The problem is one of religious schools, which previously were managed in last resort by the local authority, and the current position where academy/independent status frees them from the national curriculum and other educational requirements.

8

The background to all this is the rise of the Academy schools.

This is a flagship policy of the current regime, what it amounts to is an attempt to remove local oversight of educational that is provided by city and metro district councils.

In order to encourage schools to take up Academy status, they are effectively offered more money. This has been done by allotting the money direct from central funds, which then cuts out the ‘middleman’ local education authority.

Another benefit is that Academies are allowed to raise sponsorship - called partners - from business which is something Local Education Authorities are not allowed to do, however it should be noted that Academies do not have to stick to the National Curriculum, and are also free of the process of OFSTED inspection.

The result is that Local Education Authorities are bound by legal requirements in their provision of education, and are inspected rigorously, and Academies are not.

You now have a situation where previously the LEA have a legal obligation to plan the total education requirements for a whole region and so may be forced to close schools because of changing demographics or because of very high relative operating costs - new schools tend to cost much less to run than old ones.
We have some really small facilities that were simply uneconomic to run so they were closed.

Parent power of course sees things only as far as their own direct experience, they are not interested in an overall regional picture - so the parents campaign for Academy status to save their local school, and then cherry pick the future learners so make it appear they are doing a great job. It also plays merry hell with the remainder of the education provision for LEA, which have their budgets reduced by the amount that is siphoned off to Academies

LEA are not allowed to do this cherry picking - often called entry exams -, they are legally required to provide equality of provision. Academies do not have to make due consideration to local issues such as poorer neighbourhoods or areas where English may not be a first language - Academies are pretty much free to do what the hell they want - so they can find ways to select out the more challenging learners.

We have seen it again and again and again, Academies have the habit of getting into the news and the direct cause of it is that there is no independent inspection oversight and there is frequently a lack of educational expertise, we have seen poor financial oversight too, a number of Academy directors are in prison for fraud.

The requirements for the standard of teachers in Academies has been significantly changed, in effect Academies can use teachers who would not be allowed into LEA schools because the law requires certain levels of qualifications in LEA schools.

The attempts to take over city schools comes as no surprise, its only when things are already too far gone that it hits the news and then an inspection team is finally ordered in by Secretary of State - the LEA has the power to inspect Academies removed and so the only oversight is national headlines and crisis management

It is all political, certain views are held about education by the various factions, with the more reactionary conservative sort who hark back to a ‘golden age’ of entry exams and a guaranteed path to free university - all paid for by those who do not get the opportunity to attend the better schools and have to go straight to work from school. This is counter balanced by the social types who seem to think that everyone could go much further if the strong academic learners were given the same opportunities as the weaker ones, since they would be dragged along on a wave of academic success.

Truth is that education has far too much political interference, unruly misbehaving learners simply are not inspired by better ones, and are more likely to drag them down with them, but then lots of those from poorer backgrounds might have achieved more had they been given more learning resources.

Both the views of the left and the right in our politics are mostly wrong, with a small kernel of truth in there somewhere.

I smile a little at the outrage of the Daily Mail and other right wing rags, because these errant academies are a direct result of the policies pursued by their right wing politicians.

An Academy is simply too small an educational unit to resist the rise of such takeovers, it just does not have the wider support of a regional LEA.

The rise of Academies simply fractionalises regional oversight of education and this then has an effect on all the LEA schools - because of course the LEA budget is then cut back - to pay for the Academy, and Academies also siphon off learners into often uneconomic institutions - which leaves proportionally less money for the LEA schools -the high cost units are running but those high costs are taken out of the LEA budget.

There are all sorts of implications, where things work against good sense in some cities in some ways, and then work in almost completely different ways to make things fall apart in other ways in other cities. Education cannot be run from central government, its is after all why LEA were set up in the first place because local circumstances vary so widely.

9

Agree with much of the above, but OFSTED does still have the reponsibility to assess Academies and Free Schools:

10

I always thought the faith schools initiative was a terrible, no-good idea. Having said that, I never attended state schools in the UK.

11

They should remove all religious influence from schools. It was fine when it was European Christians who are fairly moderate and secular, but not fine when someone wants to do actual religious extremism

12

It wasn’t really fine then, either, but English state schools were actually secular before the faith school thing.

13

The curriculum is the same for either, with the sole exception of Religious Studies, where faith schools have the choice to teach only their own religion (in my experience, they often don’t specialise like that). Faith schools are held to the same academic standards and monitoring. Where they differ significantly (again, in my experience) is in their internal ethos and culture.

14

I must be slightly out of date, because that site you linked shows that OFSTED has only been inspecting such schools since September 2013 and still does not have the unfettered right to inspect the Academy chain schools.

All in all it does show that oversight of such schools has been wanting, I seem to recall that the National Audit Office also had concerns over the management of finances in such schools.

The education industry is so large that you can pretty much dig up dirt on every aspect someplace which makes it so difficult to understand what is actually going on.

Not all state schools are good, good lord no, most are in the middle of mediocre which is what OFSTED inspection tends to do, promote the average. Not all Academies are bad, probably many of them have dedicated and committed individuals, but they should at least all be subject to the same benchmark.

The fact is, it is locally that we know which are good institutions and which are not, and its this that makes a nonsense of centrally funding schools.

15

I believe that Academies do not have to follow the National Curriculum.

16

Remember what it was like before this massive concentration on improving the education service? Local Authorities often presided over a large group of ‘sink’ schools. Where education was mediocre, the teachers were left to get on with it, unchecked.

It was an education system designed for an industrial economy where the jobs required little reading, writing and maths for work that was mechanised, directed and controlled. Higher education was for the minority of skilled workers or the ‘professions’.

From the 1980s, just about every developed country started either dismantling its heavy industry and manufacturing. Why? Because the improvements in distribution due to containerisation meant that you could build a factory anywhere there is easy access to a deep water port. Some industries became completely unecomomic in the UK due to competition from developing economies with far lower labour costs. What was left in the UK was upgraded and rationlised with the help of foreign investment and made more efficient to compete on a world market. Consequently the required far less workers and this period was one of high unemployment and all the pain that goes with that.

So what about the workforce?

The plan was to move the economy into new areas. Service sectors employ huge numbers of people. In the UK there are about 1.3million people just working in call centres. Each call requires one worker to answer it. Financial services also expanded greatly turning to the UK into the go to place for businesses and banks that want to move their money around. The public sector also expanded. The NHS is much bigger than it was.

So how do you educate the next generation of workers? The are not going to be bashing metal, working on production lines and so on. The wealth of the country will come from exploiting intellectual property. It is clear that the profitable end of manufacturing was the connection with the customer. They are going to need a different skill set. It helps if people know what an email is, what a document is, a spreadsheet and so on. Out with the production line, in with the office cubicle.

Education had to change to meet this new requirement. Tolerating local education authorities and their ‘sink’ schools was no longer tenable. Blair/Brown pronounced that their policy was going to be ‘Education, education,education’ Teachers and schools and local education authorities were not going to get in the way of driving through reforms.

The education saw huge investment, many new schools, a consolidation of the higher education that doubled the number of universities. The target was to get 50% of students up to university level from 10%.

There are new schools everywhere in the UK. If they don’t work, they get closed. If headmasters don’t perform, they are sacked. Those that do and turn around a failing school get rewarded considerably and their skills are used to spread successful formulas to other schools that need help.

These sort of reforms can only be driven from the centre. You do not erase decades of mediocrity by giving the local education authorities an increase in budget and the teachers a pay rise and simply hope for the best.

I don’t doubt that there are problems, but these can be addressed tactically. The strategy is sound.

I am pretty sure that most teachers and headmasters would like the pressure to be off and for most local authorities to return to administering schools in the same fashion as they did in the past. These are vested interests and they don’t like change.

Faith schools - some of these are very good indeed. I have a cousin teaching in part of Yorkshire that is predominently Muslim and he says it is a teachers paradise. Polite, motivated students, supportive parents ambitious for their kids to do well. Some Catholic schools are also very good. But this is quite a small number of schools in the scheme of things.

I have a nephew at an academy, that has just closed down. It is very difficult to make them work sometimes. Especially if it is in an area of the UK that does not appreciate or prioritise education. Just as the mindset of teachers was out of date, so too, was that of many parents, especially if they come from a working class background. These things take a generation or more to change.

The US with its single currency, free mobility of labour and comprehensive education system has structural strengths and flexibility in its economy that other nations envy.

17

That’s true - they can develop their own curriculum, but are still required to meet the same standards according to a set of quite detailed assessments (cite) - so essentially, they are expected to demonstrate that their own curriculum achieves the same end result, or better.

Which, interestingly, isn’t so very different for non-academy schools - the National Curriculum defines what is to be taught, but permits a good deal of freedom on the how - for example, some schools using the National Primary Curriculum teach discrete topics (i.e. a maths class, then an English class, then a science class); the school where I am a governor implements an integrated curriculum.

  • In an integrated curriculum, subjects are taught as part of themes - so the theme might be ‘The Romans’ and it would include maths (calculate the supplies required for your garrison), science (investigate the principles of mechanical advantage used in Roman siege weapons), English (write a report on the above), computing (create a Powerpoint presentation about life in Roman Britain), etc.

So in practice, Academies maybe don’t have enormously greater freedom than the rest of the system anyway.

18

No non-academy has yet sought to teach creationism.

19

How is this possible? I thought the UK, as part of Europe, was a “civilized” country unlike us barbaric savages in America, and therefore they’d never allow such a thing as religious indoctrination in schools.

20

We don’t have separation of Church and State in the UK. Oddly, it’s my impression that this actually yields a lower level of religious interference than I seem to hear about happening in the USA. Could be a lot of factors at play in that perception though.