Nicky Morgan is wrong to block complaints about faith schools
It is not up to the Government to decide if it wants to listen to the voice of its people before those people have spoken out
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Your support makes all the difference.The Education Secretary Nicky Morgan’s declaration that complaints against faith schools over how they use (and abuse) their admissions policies will, from now on, be accepted only if lodged by councils or by individual local residents – and not if submitted by a group or organisation – will muffle those who are fighting against the social inequalities exacerbated by the selective status of such schools.
Morgan herself has been clear about as much. In a public statement on the policy, she said: “We will put a stop to vexatious complaints against faith schools by secularist campaign groups.”
Vexatious she may consider them, but groups representing secular interests have also been among the most thorough in analysing the activities of faith schools and whether or not they are abusing the rules, enshrined in their faith school status, which allow them to select pupils to manipulate their intake.
Last year, a report by the British Humanist Association (BHA) carried out research that exposed questionable practices and outright violations of the school admissions code by faith schools in Britain. One in five schools in the study requested financial or practical support; a quarter were religiously selecting in ways that even religious authorities neither required nor supported. The majority of schools did not give enough priority to children in the care system, while a handful discriminated on race or gender. These are not insignificant findings.
Under the new rules – though it may nevertheless be possible for such information to be obtained and distributed by a group or organisation – the ability to act upon it is lost. Both Ms Morgan and the Government must be well aware that neither councils nor individual citizens are likely to have the time or inclination to make such formal complaints that – let us not forget – seek only to ensure faith schools are behaving in the ways they are expected and legislated to do.
The BHA believes the step is a “thinly veiled” attack on its own operations. It may be so; more importantly, it is a direct attack on British democracy. It is not up to the Government to decide whether it wants to listen to the voice of its people before those people have even spoken out.
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