Cardinal welcomes the Government's support for faith schools

BY ANNA ARCO
FAITH scHoccs are to be integral to the Government's aims to promote community cohesion as part of a radical new approach to schools of religious character, it was announced this week.
The sounds of schoolchildren singing Hebrew psalms as well as verses from the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita greeted assembled leaders of Britain's main religious denominations as they came together with Ed Balls, the Children, Schools and Families Secretary, to launch "Faith in the System", a declaration of the role of faith schools in Britain.
Incorporating faith schools into the process of education reform has been greeted with relief by faith leaders.
Last year the Catholic Church thwarted Government plans to impose a mandatory 25 per cent non-Catholic or non-faith-based admissions quota for faith schools after Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham, who chairs Catholic Education Service (CES), led a successful campaign against the proposal. Attempts to introduce an antihomophobic bullying policy and a change to the admissions policy for state-maintained schools provoked outcry among the faithful and Church leaders earlier this year.
Last Monday Church leaders pledged to commit to a partnership between the Government and faith schools which seeks to "promote community cohesion" and "welcomed the involvement of local authority governors as members of their governing bodies". This comes at a time when all state schools have been assigned the additional duty to "promote social cohesion" beginning in this academic year. which involves school twinning programmes.
Cardinal Corrnac MurphyO'Connor, president of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, welcomed the initiative and said that it served as a three-fold invitation: first, as an invitation "to all of us to understand that education is at the service of human development", second, as an opportunity for non-religious schools to recognise the value of religious formation and third, as a chance for the "churches and faith communities with Government to continue in wholehearted partnership for the benefit of the young people of our society".
The document also seeks to promote the creation of jointfaith academies. Of the 47 new academies that are open, 16 are faith-based, with three Catholic academies and one joint Anglican and Catholic school. Plans are underway to establish a joint-Anglican and Muslim school. Any new faithbased academies "that are not replacing existing faithschools" will be required to take 50 per cent of their pupils from outside the faith community.
Mr Balls said "Faith in the System" was removing the barriers to the creation of new faith schools, especially Muslim schools of which only seven are maintained by the state, but stressed that the Government was not proposing more faith schools. Instead, he insisted that the founding of new faith schools would be according to the demand of local communities.
When asked whether the Government's turnaround in its attitude to faith schools was a concession, Mr Balls said: "The reality is, even though we've been making really good progress. not every school is yet delivering on those two goals [promoting fair admissions and social cohesion], faith and non-faith schools alike.
"If I have on my side the leaders of the faith organisations, they will make it easier for me in partnership with them to ensure that every faith school is delivering fair admissions and every faith school is working with us jointly towards social cohesion in the community.
"So when you ask, is this a concession from my point of view, I see this as a strengthening of my hand and the ability of Government to deliver on these objectives in every school because I've got the faith organisations with me signing up to those shared objectives to do the kind of wok that the community cohesion guidelines deliver."
Archbishop Nichols lauded the initiative and said: -It's always been clear that in striving for a coherent and well
ordered and balanced society. respect for faith is going to be part of the solution, not the problem. and I think this document is the greatest step ahead. not only from your point of view but for us in our partnership, that we know now that there is a profound recognition within the Government that the efforts of the faith community to educate the children in a principled, coherent way is recognised as part of the solution." Catholic state schools make up about 2,000 of the 6,850 faith schools in Britain today.
Oona Stannard, chief executive of the CES, said that she had made proposals to the Secretary of State suggesting that his department commissioned research into the impact of education that faith schools made in students' post-school lives. She has also offered to organise a conference with key members of Catholic education and other faiths to better understand the eight commitments faith leaders made on Monday. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers spoke out against "Faith in the System-. insisting that faith schools were socially divisive rather than cohesive.
Mary Bousted, the secretary general, said: "We need schools which embrace the diversity within our community, not a diversity of schools dividing pupils and staff on religious grounds."