The Centre For Social Cohesion

They want voluntary aided status for many more of the hundred and twenty or so private Muslim schools, rather than the mere handful that to date have received it.

Muslims also want certain nominally Anglican schools at which Muslim pupils form the vast majority to be made over into Muslim schools. For its part, the Church of England seems willing to accede such a request provided it is able to increase the number of Anglican secondary schools in other parts of the country where there is burgeoning parental demand for them.

In our deeply fractured society, should the state financially support any faith schools, let alone be willing to support the opening of still more of them?

There is one reason why it could well do, notwithstanding any problems about cohesion that they might be supposed to pose. Their pupils tend to outperform in assessment those at community schools.

Their critics claim faith schools only achieve these better results because pushy white middle-class parents gain places at them by pretending to be religious. Their better examination results are held to be the result of a ‘peer effect’ that arises from the concentration in them of more educable middle-class children, the less easily educible children being left to languish in community schools.

The claim is that the better performance of faith schools has more to do with the income levels of their pupils’ parents than their religious ethos. Eliminate the class segregation that faith schools permit, and their bunching at the top of the school league tables would soon disappear, so it is said.

Enter into this debate the NUT whose annual conference was held at the weekend. Delegates there came out solidly against any more state funded faith schools, claiming faith schools to be socially divisive. Instead, they voted in favour of an NUT policy document entitled ‘In Good Faith’. This proposed that, instead of more faith schools, all state schools should provide pupils with opportunities to engage in acts of worship and receive religious instruction in whichever was their faith.

By providing their pupils with such opportunities, the NUT hopes to make community schools sufficiently attractive to Muslim parents that they would no longer feel the need to send their children to Muslim schools.

The NUT claims that its newly proposed policy would be far less socially divisive than the creation of still more denominational schools wpuld be. This is notwithstanding the latter are now obliged by law to establish links with schools of other faiths than theirs to enable their pupils to mix.

The NUT’s general secretary Steve Sinnitt explained his union’s proposal so:

‘ I believe that there will be real benefits to all our communities and youngsters if we could find space for pupils who are Catholics, Anglican, Methodist, Jewish, Sikh and Muslim to have more religious instruction in schools.

‘You could have imams coming in, you could have the local rabbi coming in and the local Roman Catholic priest. If there were opportunities where they all talked together to the youngsters what a fantastic example that would be.’

‘The real concern is that youngsters from different backgrounds needed to be educated together. This is not something a school should play with, it’s not something a school should create as a second tier of responsibility.’

Neither the National Secular Society nor the Church of England has responded favourably to the NUT’s proposals, rejecting them for predictably opposite reasons. A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain did welcome the call for all state schools to provide facilities for Muslim prayer and to recognise all Muslim festivals. So far as I am aware, however, the MCB has not agreed the state should not fund any more Muslim schools beyond the handful it already does.

One suspects that, to current Muslim demands for separate schools, all that the NUT’s proposal will do is add the further Muslim demand that all community schools which any Muslim pupils attend, provide them with suitable forms of religious instruction and facilities for worship.

This hardly seems a recipe for greater cohesion should, as the NUT seems to think, religion in schools be a source of social division rather than of cohesion. But that remains to be proved.

The oft-cited example of sectarianism in Northern Ireland is a gigantic red herring. For the root of the conflict there between Unionists and Nationalists was always at bottom, ethnic rather than religious. As Paul Johnson has pointed out in his history of the English people, The Offshore Islanders:

‘Religion had very little to do with the origins of the Anglo-Irish problem… The original English invasion of Ireland, in the 1170s, was carried out at papal request and with papal authority… The Statutes of Kilkenny, … English laws passed in 1366 and retained on the statute book until well into the seventeenth century… turned Ireland into the South Africa of the Middle Ages. They were wholly racist in inspiration, and their object was a crude form of apartheid….

‘The English were encouraged to brutalise the Irish in the name of papal supremacy… The identification of Irish nationalism with Roman Catholicism was largely accidental. It was the fanatical Catholic sovereign Queen [‘bloody’] Mary who began the systematic plantation of English settlers in the confiscated lands of Irish rebels. Hence, when England turned to Protestantism under Elizabeth, the older Anglo-Irish landed class clung to the Church of Rome more as a protest against the English plantations than for doctrinal reasons. Catholicism and the Pope became an expression of Irish nationalism, and the Papacy, which had given Ireland to England, now exhorted the Irish to resist…’

Johnson puts down the conflict to the xenophobia of the English towards their Celtic neighbours across the Irish Sea.

‘Hostility to foreigners is one of the most deep-rooted and enduring characteristics of the English; … it is a genuine force, held in check (if at all) only by the most resolute discipline imposed, against public will, by authoritarian central government acting out of enlightened self-interest…. The claim, sometimes advanced today, that England has an internationalist outlook, and a talent for promoting inter-racial harmony is spurious and lacks historical justification, at any rate so far as the great mass of the English are concerned, tolerance has only been imposed in the teeth of their resistance…. ‘

[Paul Johnson, The Offshore Islanders: A History of the English People, first published 1972; revised edition (London 1992), pp. 103-105 passim, and pp101-102]

I don’t think the English need or should feel particularly ashamed about this particular fact about them being pointed out. Human beings have always had the greatest difficulty in getting on well with those markedly different to them in ethnicity or culture. It is not an especially or exclusively English failing.

This being so, until all Britain’s various different groups have learned how to get along far better than some of them seem able to at present, their self-segregation in separate faith schools might well serve as a force for overall greater social harmony and better inter-cultural relations, as well as for better examination results.

Muslim and Roman Catholic children have been found to perform far better at faith schools of their own than at non-selective community schools, irrespective of their socio-economic circumstance. This could well have to do with those who attend them enjoying a greater sense of security as well as self-esteem.

In so far as educational success is a key to employment and that to civility, separate faith schools might be a far better way to promote social cohesion than by attempting to corral all the country’s schoolchildren together into community schools.

By all means parents should be allowed to send their children to mixed faith community schools, should they choose. They would be far more likely to do so if more schools were allowed to be selective on grounds of academic ability, but that is another story.

One senses that the opposition of the NUT to the creation of more state-funded faith schools is fear they would show up just how dire and abysmal are all too many community schools at which the majority of NUT members work. It is not the fault of these teachers that their schools are so bad.

Partly, it is because these schools are places at which on a daily basis the strains of sudden and excessive diversity are played out, as well as the effects of years of official encouragement of single-parent families that leave to many boys without responsible male roles model and sources of discipline the presence of fathers typically provide them. Partly, it is because excessively permissive educational policies and over-regulation of schools have left teachers demoralised and exhausted.

One can only hope that, eventually, some elected government will be able to reform the school system to allow a new generation of state schools to come into being that will so raise standards that parents will want to send their children to them regardless of their faith, and that they will become galvanised into ensurng their children behave at them on risk of their expulsion if they misbehave. There are encouraging signs the Conservative party is positioning itself to be able to create such a new generation of schools in the form of city academies.

Even so, it is going to take more than this revolution in schooling to break down all the barriers between Britain’s various groups, especially those more recently settled. Until then, state-funded faith schools are likely to prove far greater forces for cohesion than are community schools, provided what is taught in them is adequately regulated and inspected.

The NUT ‘s proposals should be understood for what they seem --an attempt by suppliers of a service to preserve a restrictive practice. In fact, the restrictive practice it seeks to preserve, viz community schools, is one that does not serve the lng term interests of its members at all well.

The state school-system needs a jolly good shake up. State schools do not need to be turned into a multi-religious theme-parks where all too many pupils would be obliged to mark out their time cowering in fear and trembling of superior forces they might meet there of very different to that which Soren Kierkegaard had in mind when he gave this title to one of his theological tracts.

In sum, it could well be that the NUT came up with its new policy because it recognised faith schools achieve better results and wanted to head off the competition that still more of them would provide the schools where most of its members work.

If so, the question that needs to be considered is: Was the NUT really acting in good faith in calling for more religious instruction and worship in community schools? Or was the call for them just plainly NUT’s ?