The Wardman Wire

Simon Barrow is involved in the new Accord coalition, aiming at Reform of Faith Schools in the UK. Here he explains why, and what changes he would like to see made.

At the end of an interview about the work of Ekklesia last year, I was asked a pertinent personal question. “Is your own major professional concern in all this journalistic, campaigning or academic?” It wasn’t something that came out in the final product, because I think I just said “a bit of each”. But it made me reflect more on how those three approaches may complement or contradict one another.

Put positively, it seems to me that good journalism is about condensing fact and opinion for rapid consumption without confusing the two; that good campaigning is about effective advocacy which builds bridges for change; and that good academic work is about deepening human enquiry so that the difference between a matter of thought and an arcane point of scholarship becomes clearer.

The problem with campaigning is that there are enormous temptations to simplify, exaggerate and polarise in order to get a point across or build a support base sufficiently indignant to apply political pressure. This is not helped by the media naturally preferring ‘either-or’ narratives to ones marked by the kind of complexity, plurality and ambiguity which are the features of actual life… but which require a bit more unravelling than 2 minutes, a sound bite or 500 words will allow. Yet these are the currency of modern communication, along with a blogsophere that can dish out enlightenment and bile, discussion and demonisation in equal measures (with a far greater preponderance of the latter, the observant cynic might suggest).

The faith schools controversy

These concerns came strongly into view for me during the last week, when I was doing my bit to launch a new coalition, Accord, calling for the reform of state-funded faith schools. Now I am sure that here on Wardman Wire there will be some quite divergent ‘takes’ on religiously sponsored schools, and on the particular proposals that this coalition is making. I welcome good, honest debate. But the current culture of ‘instant response’ is one in which this can very quickly descend into a game of point scoring.

On Guardian Comment-is-Free (not a naturally hospitable environment for religion, at least among the respondents!), I briefly set out the case for Accord, making it clear from the outset that the concern was about selective faith schools; about how we can get all publicly-funded schools to be open and inclusive; and about how reforming policy on admissions, employment, curriculum, inspections and assemblies is to be distinguished from a simplistic ‘pro’ versus ‘anti’ debate.

According to Andrew Brown, this amounted to an “attack” on faith schools and parents. It wasn’t of course. Nor was I demeaning the rightful search for high educational standards simply by suggesting these should not be at “any cost” and that socially mixed learning was also vital. And I certainly wasn’t endorsing the claim that “results are better” at selective faith schools. (The evidence suggests that some are and some aren’t, but when they are it is often because middle class kids tend to do better.)

Andrew Brown is a journalist I have great respect for. That includes respecting his concerns about this issue, upon which we seem to disagree. But his riposte does seem to me to illustrate one of the regrettable features of the “campaign” mindset (the military metaphor is not insignificant), namely that people have to be immediately aggregated into allies or enemies.

An effective response may contain good “debating points”, and may expose a weakness or ambiguity in expression. But has it worked hard at meaning? Or has it simply sought some convenient caricature to bolster a particular viewpoint? That is a challenge to me as much as to others, of course. The fact that what any of us write or say can come back to haunt us is one of its potentially redemptive qualities. It also points to the fact that there are always bigger issues of integrity at stake than the immediate argument or discussion one is involved in. If we give up on the search for truth in the midst of different accounts and estimates of life (even ones you or I hold passionately), we are in deep, deep trouble as persons and as a society. In other words, there are always bigger issues of integrity at stake than the immediate argument or discussion one is immediately involved in.

An agenda for reform

Accord is an attempt to open up a new way of talking about a very divisive issue. It brings together those who have been openly sceptical about faith schools and those who believe they can make a positive contribution, uniting them on a positive agenda for change.

It is hard for people to get their heads around something that breaks out of the old “faith schools good - faith schools bad” paradigm. The initial responses from the Faith Schools’ Providers Group and the Catholic Education Service (CES) were made before Accord was launched - on the basis of a news embargo broken by the Jewish Chronicle, which also contained a leader rather personally criticising its chair, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain. They all immediately interpreted the coalition in purely antagonistic terms and Muslim News branded it a ’smear’. Meanwhile, some hard-line secularists have been unhappy about an initiative that does not seek the abolition of faith schools, but their reform towards full inclusivity.

The reality is that everyone is going to have to move on this. There are now nearly 7,000 religiously sponsored schools in this country, a third of the total. They are not going to go away. Both the main parties are clear on that. The issue is how they and other schools should be run and regulated. That’s the debate we need to be having, and in a much more open way.

Accord’s argument is that if government wants to encourage diversity and participation, with public money partnering philanthropists, religious bodies, civic groups and businesses across the education sector, then we need a common framework. That should include agreeing that the beliefs of children and their parents should not be a consideration in admissions, that teachers and heads should be employed because they are the best for the job (not because of religious affiliation), that there should be a balanced curriculum and common inspection regime, and that assemblies should be inviting for all.

In response, some have said that this would “change the character of faith schools” and “threaten their ethos”. Melanie MacDonagh even went so far as to claim in the Independent on Sunday that the kind of discrimination that can take place at the moment, with some parents even having to lie about their beliefs in order to get their kids admitted to church schools, is “what makes a faith school a faith school.”

What kind of faith and church?

This is an extremely pessimistic view that I do not share. There are thousands of church schools without Christian heads, and many that exemplify exactly the kind of values Accord is arguing for. That in itself shows that the ‘right’ to discriminate is unnecessary, and is in any case inimical to the tradition of neighbourly love which finds strong resources in both the Semitic and Eastern faith traditions.

From a Christian perspective, the debate about faith schools can be made more complex by a confusion between different understandings of the church - a body which, the great social reforming Archbishop William Temple reminded us (in Christianity and Social Order) “exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not in it” - in contrast to a narrow religious club.

Under Christendom (where the interests of church and state are elided) the assumption is that the main Christian concern is about consolidating and perpetuating the institution - which is why its proponents see maintaining the capacity to favour one’s “own people” as essential and why church schools are seen in an exclusive way.

A post-Christendom perspective is that the Gospel is about people committed to an alternative way of living rooted in the community of Jesus, something that goes way beyond “institutional religion” (and often needs to challenge its domestication of faith to ‘civic religion’).

In this perspective, Christians need to ‘practice what they preach’. That involves concrete virtues like reconciliation, non-violence, economic sharing, hospitality, restorative justice, social equality, forgiveness, neighbourly love, nurturing life as ‘gift’, and more.

It is the church as discipleship community that has the responsibility to proclaim and exemplify the personal and social transformation the Christian message invites. That should be the case when churches engage with the wider public realm, too, especially when they are receipt of large amounts of public money. Discrimination, exclusion and giving privileges to “our own” is a contradiction of the Gospel dynamic.

Wrapping up

So this is why, as a Christian, I would wish Anglicans, Catholics and others to be open to the reforms Accord is proposing. Rabbi Jonathan Romain is making the same case from his own deep Jewish tradition of belief, and is especially concerned that neither his family nor his congregation should be cut off from those of other beliefs and backgrounds at a formative stage of life. The Hindu Academy is also signed up, and there are conversations going on with Muslims and others, alongside those humanists who some might wish to characterise as “the usual suspects”.

I have had several Catholics telling me that they support change too, but fear the consequences within their Church of speaking out publicly at this stage. That in itself is a sad commentary on the negativity of the old debate. Let a new and different kind of conversation begin.