The Trojan horse affair has been a wake-up call on faith schools

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/30/trojan-horse-faith-schools-children

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The “Trojan horse” debacle over certain schools in Birmingham is quickly morphing into an octopus whose tentacles are reaching far and wide. It has led to Ofsted cracking down on faith schools throughout the country and across religious boundaries, instigating no-notice inspections and being tougher in their verdicts.

Now Beis Yaakov – a Jewish secondary school for girls in Salford – has been placed into special measures, while St Benedict’s Catholic school in Bury St Edmunds was initially downgraded (since reversed) after inspectors said students were not aware of the dangers of extremism and radicalisation.

The irony is that the Birmingham schools at the centre of the original scandal were not faith schools, but the exposure of their failings raised major questions marks about how faith schools operate. What is alarming is that if the Birmingham schools had been designated faith schools, then many of the practices condemned – such as limiting the curriculum to exclude lessons about sex education and reinforcing a cultural identity to the exclusion of others – would have been permitted.

How can that which we find offensive in what are designated “community schools” suddenly be acceptable if they are labelled “faith schools”? Blinkering the horizons of children must be wrong wherever they learn.

Birmingham was a wake-up call for those who, until now, regarded benignly the ability of faiths to promote their traditions via the state educational system, without realising that it meant allowing them to both indoctrinate children under their care and alienate them from others in society.

The new education secretary, Nicky Morgan, is about to launch a consultation suggesting that those taking GCSE religious education should have to study more than one faith. It will expose children to traditions and values other than those to which they already subscribe. Ideally, British pupils should be conversant with all the major belief systems in Britain today, but this is a good first step.

The only sadness is that several religious bodies have opposed the move. Their official argument is that there would not be enough time to do justice to two faiths, but it is hard not to suspect they are more concerned about preserving the state of mono-vision in which they seek to cocoon children at faith schools.

Meanwhile, Morgan’s shadow, Tristram Hunt, has proposed that what happens in RE classes should be inspected by Ofsted. At present it is outsourced to inspection teams from within the same faith as the particular school, who may not have wider social interests as their priority.

While both developments are welcome, they beg much larger questions: would it be better to oblige all schools to teach a broad and balanced syllabus of religious education, and reserve religious instruction to the home and after-school classes?

Moreover, why allow segregation along religious lines in schools in the first place? It is not allowed in any other state-funded institution and gives a terrible message of “us and them” to children every time they enter the school gates.

Free schools have the rule that they can only select up to 50% of children on the grounds of their faith – why not extend that to all schools? In a multifaith Britain, it is important we work hard to ensure it does not become a multifractious Britain. What is more vital than that the next generation grows up at ease with itself?