The Centre For Social Cohesion

Faced with this imbalance between supply and demand, the government has struggled to ensure that children have equal opportunity to gain a place at a school that achieves good results. To this end, all manner of demands have been placed on schools and local education authorities to ensure school places are not allocated in a way that confers on any children greater chance than others of a place at a school where they would be likeliest to do best.

It turns out, however, for reasons that are highly contested, that faith schools achieve much better examination results in general than do community schools. Being denominational, however, faith schools remain at liberty, when oversubscribed, to choose to admit as pupils those whose parents declare an affiliation to the same faith as those schools.

Not all oversubscribed faith schools avail themselves of that liberty, but many do.

Many critics of faith schools argue that their selection policies lead to children from middle class backgrounds gaining unfair advantage over those from less affluent backgrounds. Faith schools enable them to, so these critics claim, because middle class parents tend to be more pushy than their working-class counterparts and hence more given over to playing the system. They feign affiliation to some denomination so as to secure a place for their child at a faith school of that same denomination that achieves good examination results.

The consequence, according to these critics, is disproportionate representation of middle class children in highly achieving faith schools, with correspondingly disproportionate representation of working class children in poorly achieving community schools.

This pattern of distribution is then claimed to be unfair because it undeservedly privileges middle class children whilst simultaneously undeservedly penalising working class children. Justice demands that they should all enjoy equal educational opportunity for the sake of more equal life chances that a good education brings. To achieve it, these critics claim, faith schools must be made to forgo selecting pupils on the basis of the declared religious affiliation of their parents, since it is that which leads to the unjustly skewered distribution of places between social classes.

The front page of last Sunday’s Observer led with a report about this matter whose headline ran: ‘Religious schools show bias for rich: Middle –class favoured, study shows’.

The study in question to which the headline alluded is an unpublished report by Ms Rebecca Allen, a PhD student at London University’s Institute of Education. By comparing the class profiles of the pupils at faith schools with those of the schools' surrounding neighbourhoods, Ms Allen discoveredthat ‘Faith school intakes are more affluent than the areas in which they are located’.

As the newspaper report explained:

‘Despite the fact that schools are expected to reflect the social make-up of the communities they serve, the research … suggests that some of the schools are using the fact they can select by religion as a way of picking out middle class pupils.’

How exercised should we be by these claims, assuming for the moment that we wished to equalise educational opportunity for reasons of social justice and cohesion?

I confess to some scepticism about the report in last Sunday’s Observer. Last September, the same newspaper ran a similar story written by the same journalist. That story reported the results of another unpublished study by the same research degree student whose report formed the basis for last Sunday's report and who, it turns out, was an undergraduate friend of the journalist who wrote both news stories.

The September story also reported that the researcher had found that ‘faith schools are "cherry picking" too many children from affluent families and contributing to racial and religious segregation.’

According to this report, what Ms Allen found, working with co-researcher Professor Anne West of the LSE, was that ‘religious schools in London educate a smaller proportion of pupils eligible for free school, meals than non-religious schools and that their intakes are "significantly more affluent" than the neighbourhoods in which they are located’.

These facts, however, do not by themselves show faith schools are necessarily creaming off middle class pupils. This is because, as representatives of faith groups pointed out in defence of faith schools, they tended to draw from a much wider catchment areas than their immediate local neighbourhoods.

Moreover, the claim that faith schools have a very much more middle class profile than community schools is also open to question.

In a parliamentary debate on the admissions policies of faith schools held in February 2006, the then schools minister Jacqui Smith asserted:

‘It is statistically not the case that there are large discrepancies in the social make up of faith schools as compared to non-faith schools. For the most disadvantaged schools – those with more than 21 per cent of their children receiving free school meals – the proportion of voluntary-aided and other schools is broadly similar. In voluntary-aided schools it is 33.8 per cent, whereas in non-voluntary –aided schools it is 34.1 per cent. However, it appears, from the achievement levels in those equivalent most disadvantaged schools, that despite those similarities voluntary-aided schools are making an important contribution for disadvantaged pupils: 47.6 per cent of pupils in voluntary added-schools achieve five or more GCSEs at A* to C grades compared with 40.6 per cent in non-voluntary aided schools.’

What the statistics Ms Smith cited suggest is that it is the ethos of faith schools rather than their class composition that accounts for their better performance. As such to risk damaging that ethos by denying these schools the right to select pupils on a faith basis risks making some worse off without securing any compensating benefit for others.

In other words, what seems these critics of faith schools seem to be calling for in the name of justice is a general levelling down of educational opportunity that would have John Rawls, that great apostle of liberal egalitarianism, spinning in his grave.

Rather than endlessly discuss how to allocate most fairly places at good state schools that are faith schools, the energies of MPs and academics would appear to be far better spent trying to figure out how best to increase the supply of places at good schools. The main problem here seems to be that of breaking the current supply side monopoly maintained by local educational authorities that keeps too many pupils captive in poorly performing community schools.

There are encouraging signs that both main political parties have begun to grasp this nettle: Labour by opting for more academies; the Conservatives by being willing to countenance a Swedish style voucher system that would vastly increase the number of independent schools being paid for by the state.

In the end, my view is that the whole question of whether or not faith schools are divisive or unfair will turn out to have been a gigantic red herring. Once there is genuine supply side liberalisation, we will find, I believe, that society becomes both better educated as well as more harmonious, as parents gain genuinely wider and better choice over what form of schooling is available for their children.