UK education - how do you remove the Church England from the Education system?

I was having a debate with colleagues about the position of religious (specifically Anglican/Catholic schools) in the education system in England and how they are divisive in a largely secular country, and at odds with a modern system of education. Given that the recently passed Education and Inspections Act contained a requirement for schools to promote “community cohesion” there must be others in parliament and in the government that accept this is the case to some extent.

So, if you wanted to secularise all the school in England, what’s to stop you? Surely you could just pass an Act removing all religious designations to schools and reform the system of school organisation accordingly? Well in theory, yes, but in reality as the Church of England owns a significant portion of the land those schools are built on this would be very difficult (I can’t forsee a scenario where the Church cheerfully waves all this legislation through and then donates its land free of charge to the state). It would be a massive cost to take over all this land under compulsory purchase, and for the state to confiscate it (even through passing of a law) is simply theft and couldn’t be defended - could the state also declare that it can confiscate property of individuals to build schools where it wanted to? Too horrible a precedent to set.

So what would be the solution? Shall we play fantasy government for a bit? What laws would you pass or policies would you set to secularise the state-funded school system?

Personally, I’d like to declare the state secular through an Act of Parliament and then use compulsory purchase for all the land owned by the church. I accept that it would be a massive cost to the state’s coffers but ultimately it would be an investment as the state would increase its assets, or you could incentivise private sector/charity purchasing of the land under agreement to provide education on it.

Religious schools tend to perform better and have better standards of discipline.

From here. It’s unclear why you’d mess with a system that seems to be working.

Ehm, it’s been a while (over a century in one case, 70 years in the other), but both Spanish republics forbade “people who have taken religious orders” from teaching.

In both cases, shortly because exploding. The socialist grandfather of one of my classmates fought on the “national” side and claims it was in defense of his right to send his five sons to whichever school happens to teach best.

I went to “the Nuns” K-8, 9-12 at the Jesuits, the college where I studied was founded by a Jesuit and three of my teachers there where SI. Physics is physics is physics. Yes, Father Victory “the Divine” was prone to washing poetic in German; he never brought theology to class though. Perhaps I’m too close to the picture to see it properly, but I can’t find any instance where my teacher-priests’ weekend jobs impinged upon their teachings. We studied evolution, comparative theology, geography, draftsmanship, history of philosophy, logic, geology, math… The one instance when one of the college SIs declared one class “optional”, he dedicated it to “how do planes and helicopters fly”.

Do you also think that “people who have taken orders” should not be allowed to have any major other than Theology, or would you “merely” restrict them from teaching?

I think there is a wide range of teaching in religious schools.

Certainly there are faith schools which teach Christianity is a mistake, or that evolution never happened.
But my school was founded by a Christian and we teach evolution. Christianity is taught in religious classes alongside other religions.
There are atheist teachers (like moi) and no questions are asked about your faith when applying for jobs.

What Dominic Mulligan said. The Church-State-School situation that exists in the UK seems to work rather well.
We’re not talking about the same kind of religious involvement that might be observed elsewhere, say, with right-wing fundamentalist interference of the science curriculum. Most of the religious influence exerted in UK schools is ‘Christian values’ stuff - fair treatment, equality, tolerance, etc…

I’ll admit that there’s a possibility of my view being somewhat slanted; I’m a foundation* governor at my local C of E controlled primary school (*foundation governors are appointed by the church).

But how much of that is down to the fact that they are a faith school or school with a religious character? A report by the NFER (accessible here) found that voluntary aided and controlled schools had a lower proportion of children with SEN and Free School Meals (i.e. less deprived kids) and had higher prior-attainment at KS2 meaning the children were already doing well before they started at the school. Aspirational parents are willing to become members of faiths to ensure their children get into a good school, if that’s what it takes, and as these schools can select on the basis of faith this isn’t really showing that they’re necessarily better at educating children (just that they have the ability to select their intake more than non-faith schools).

I would argue that VA/VC/faith schools achieve better because of their ability to select (ensuring their intakes are able and committed to education in a way that other maintained schools can’t), not because they educate better. So in that respect they are divisive as they compound an unfair system based on selection, thereby making the system broke. That’s why I’m asking how you’d fix it.

Aaaah, that’s a completely different question!

Which one are we supposed to talk about, how to kick the Church of England (or any other for that matter) from the educational system, or how to ensure that religious beliefs or lack thereof do not interfere with access to adequate education?

It’s not that simple though. Are religious schools practicing a ‘back door’ selection policy that biases results? Are the house prices in the catchment area giving a middle class bias to the intake? Does an initial perceived advantage get widened year on year as ambitious parents either move into the catchment area or conveniently catch the Jesus bug?

New academy schools get more resources and a lot of them are faith schools. Faith schools do well, but whether that has anything to do with them being faith schools is debatable.

Impact of Specialist and Faith Schools

IMHO the divisiveness of faith schools, in a society struggling to integrate minorities, outweighs anything else.

It’s not like secular schools can’t be as good or better.

And IMHO the State has no business funding the corruption of kid’s minds with mumbo jumbo in the first place, parrticularly Islamic schools when intergration is already an issue.

I went to a C of E Primary School but that was decades ago and it was the only school in a small village.

Well, I can only speak for the school of which I have experience and in this particular case, the admissions policy is probably the most lenient in the area; we regularly accept pupils that have been refused admission elsewhere and this policy is the way it is explicitly because of church influence. I would not wish to generalise from a sample of one though.

I’m not even sure the ‘Jesus bug’ comment is relevant in the case of C of E controlled schools.

Tagos has summarised my thoughts quite nicely - I think my main point was removing “mumbo jumbo as truth” from schools, which wouldn’t be difficult in theory but in practice (with the Church owning so much of the assets of these schools) it wouldn’t be straightforward.

The fact that this whole process would also close a significant loop in the system with regards to selection and unequal access to education is a significant and welcome bonus. :smiley:

It might be a facetious way of expressing it but the phenomena of parents suddenly becoming regular church goers when little Timmy is approaching school age seems well established anecdotally. What’s your experience with this?

As to how to get the religion out of schools? Stop funding them all together like was done with the old style direct grant grammar schools and buy those that don’t go completely private, out.

Just curious as someone who isn’t from the UK, do you actually have to be religious to go to a religious school? That’s not the case at most of the more respected religious schools in the United States.

Basically, yes. Or at least the pretense of it by parents who dutifully attend church for a while. Recently there was an attempt to impose on-faith quotas but the faiths lobbied hard and got this replaced by a nebulous and unenforced ‘commitment to diversity.’

Don’t forget the requirement to promote community cohesion - the Education and Inspections Act 2006 amends the Learning and Skills Act 2000 to say at S23A(6):

“The foundation of a school to which this section applies shall, in carrying out its functions in relation to the school, promote community cohesion.”

If that doesn’t make schools start to take the requirement to have broad and balanced intakes seriously, I don’t know what will. :smack:

You cynic you. :wink:

I’m astonished by it. As far as I know, it simply doesn’t happen here.

I’m wondering if there’s some lumping together of terminology going on in this thread; there are different types of school, each with their own arrangements and each with different levels of control(with which is implied responsibility) by the various elements of the governing body. The church (or other charitable organisation - it doesn’t have to be a church) doesn’t really have the capacity to subvert the curriculum. I’d like to see a citation supporting the notion that there really is a significant level of ‘mumbo jumbo’ being presented as truth.

In my outdated experience there was plenty. No ‘if God exists’ about it.

Core Curriculum

From the curriculum. A search of it for athiest or athiesm gets zero hits. Looks like all Jesus All the time to me. No ‘Attainment’ that at any point requiring critical thinking or even knowledge of any other religion.

Your links seem to relate to curriculum proposals for a specific kind of school (grant-maintained faith schools) in Northern Ireland, and does seem a bit Jesus-ey.
I’ll just have to say that this is outside of my experience in many ways. The Church controlled school of which I have experience is of a different type.

This core syllabus applies to England and Wales, Google just happened to hit an NI sub page.