by Stephen Smith
There was much about Rob Marchant’s Labour Uncut piece on Monday, “Faith schools: a bad idea just got worse ”, that struck a chord with me. On closer reading, though, I felt a little uneasy about some of it.
The article addressed Michael Gove’s proposal to end the 20% limit on recruitment according to faith for faith schools which become academies. This would mean that an academy would then be able to restrict recruitment only to members of, for example, the Roman Catholic religion, or the Islamic religion.
Rob rightly raises serious concerns about this – it takes away what many would see as a key safeguard which prevents overly sectarian influence in our education system. Let’s not forget either that the proposed changes would also mean that these faith academies could receive 100% of their funding from the state, overriding, for example, the current requirement that voluntary aided schools must have at least 10% capital costs funded by the church. A state-sponsored Reverend Moon Academy doesn’t exactly sound like a vote winner – but let’s hope that it wouldn’t meet the criteria for approval in the first place. (more…)