David Aaronovitch: An ethos of excellence is the key to educational success

'Church schools are popular because they perform better, and not because they teach the gospel'

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Church of England plans 100 new schools to meet demand

Popular with parents, but only Sunday regulars need apply

Leading article: State schools should promote common values, not religious divisions

After thirty-odd years I can still recite the Lord's Prayer (note for younger readers, this is the one that begins, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name"). Since my family were all atheists ­ my mother having cast aside her childhood Anglicanism and my father having forsworn the Judaism of his youth ­ I learnt the prayer at primary school. In the same way I could fight the good fight with all my might and ­ theoretically ­ no discouragement could make me once relent. Unfortunately, my trespasses were usually only forgiven after a rubbery whack on the bum from Mr Dupre's impossibly large plimsoll.

It's hard for me, then, not to regard religious instruction in schools (as opposed to education about religion ­ a very different thing) as being at best hopelessly pious, and most usually hypocritical. How could it be otherwise? If learning is about the absorption of knowledge, the gaining of skills and the development of critical awareness, how can it be compatible with an instruction to accept a very particular version of the supernatural?

That then, is where I start ­ the world, as ever, starts somewhere else. Parents ­ it seems ­ long to send their offspring to Jewish schools, Catholic schools, Muslim schools, Zoroastrian schools and, according to Lord Dearing in his report published yesterday, Church of England schools. Dearing's work, commissioned and endorsed by the church, concludes that there should be about 100 extra state church secondary schools set up to add to the 4,540 primary schools and 204 secondaries. Dearing points out that, currently, three-quarters of a million kids are educated in St This's or That's primary, yet only 150,000 of them can go on ­ at 11 ­ to St Elsewhere's. They'd like nothing better, apparently, than to be pilgrims.

As a flat proposition this is odd, because it doesn't correspond to any increase in church-going or adherence to organised religions. Far from it. The Church of England has been in long-term decline practically ever since it was founded (I take no pleasure in this, it's just a fact), and most other faith brands are also suffering a bad erosion of their customer base. Pick'n'mix spirituality, where you make it up as you go along (a bit of Buddhism here, some Shiatsu there, a couple of chakras and stir), is what now keeps body and soul together. So if fewer of us are ourselves denominational, how does it come about that we are to have a shed-load more denominational schools?

The answer is, of course, because religious schools are widely seen as having something that non-religious schools lack. They are popular ­ for the most part ­ because they are thought to perform better, and not because they teach the gospel according to one particular historically established sect. In support of my proposition, I advance the following hypothesis: if it was felt by the non-orthodox Jewish community, for example, that non-religious state schools offered a better all-round education than Jewish ones, then the Jewish schools would close within a few years.

I want to return, in a moment, to the reasons why denominational schools may perform well, after I've considered what the implications of my logic are for the C of E and other religious providers of state education. My question to them is this: what exactly are you in the education game for?

Dearing talks beautifully about how teaching is a great vocation for a Christian. Amen to that. And there is another lovely bit in his report when he recalls the desire to serve the poor, a desire "that took the church so magnificently into education in the 19th century". All true. "Today," he continues, "the church is still committed to serving those in the most deprived areas of society, in the inner city and in rural areas where deprivation may be less visible because it is dispersed, but no less real." This suggests that the only criterion for attendance at a church school is need.

But that's not the way it works out in practice. In under-subscribed C of E schools ­ provided you can put up with the tedium of the annual nativity play instead of the recreation of musicals that the rest of us enjoy at Christmas ­ they don't ask too many questions. As long as you don't draw a pentagram on the floor during the parents' interview, you're in. If the school, however, is popular, then a peculiar form of selection takes place where they make you pretend to be a communicant. Every year thousands of atheists and Wicca enthusiasts go along and suck up to their local vicar so that they can get their letter for the school. Sometimes they even have to go to sit in church for a few weeks so that they can qualify.

If it is this stealth-evangelism that motivates the church, then it stinks. In the context of a large state-subsidised expansion of church schools, either there must be a decision to waive any faith qualification altogether, or else the church must recognise that it is engaged in a huge operation designed to turn honest parents into prating hypocrites. And at the taxpayer's expense.

Though I do not like segregation by faith, and would ideally like to see it wither away, I am not in principle against state-funded denominational schools. In the first place I think that parents should have the right, if they really want to, to make faith an important part of their children's schooling. And even if I didn't believe in this right, I would have to recognise that many would still find ways of educating their children in this manner, but outside the state system. Second, to have different types of schools adds to educational biodiversity, increasing the chances of accidentally conducting successful experiments in education, which can then be copied elsewhere.

Even so, they are not really what we need. Parents, after all, aren't asking for more religion in schools or more religious schools. If that's what they wanted then they'd be taking their kids to St Frideswide's for Sunday School instruction every week. What parents like about religious schools (I think), and what makes some of those schools successful is that they are governed, in part at least, by a transcendent ethic; something that makes education different to shopping or going to discos or to other aspects of behaviour in a consumer society.

Schools need this. Good schools often tend to produce it on their own, identifying music or sports or drama or art as a speciality of the house, a point of pride, a claim to excellence. The recognition of this is what lies behind the Government's desire to increase the number of schools "specialising" in sport, technology, language or arts and media. If this strategy works, it is hard to see what additional purpose is served by setting up extra denominational schools.

But the long-term logic of specialism and ethos is this: once the basics have been agreed (as they have been in most primary schools) then the time has come to let schools loose, to teach as they wish, to experiment, to work hard and to have fun. The finger of destiny (as wielded by me) therefore points forward towards free schools, and not backwards to church schools.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com