Don't knock parents who put faith first

Published in the Evening Standard

Tory politicians have one big advantage over their Labour rivals: they can send their kids to whatever school they like. David Cameron could blithely announce this week that he’s going to choose a faith school for his daughter, rejecting 15 others closer to home, safe in the knowledge that not a fragment of flak will come his way. If he were leading Labour rather than the Conservatives, he’d still be cowering under the incoming fire.

It’s not just his party affiliation. Cameron has also been careful to say that politicians should be perfectly free to do whatever is best for their children. He said that when Ruth Kelly was hammered last month for sending her son to a private school, able to cater for his special needs. If that logic holds good for her, it should hold good for him.

More to the point, few London parents will scold Cameron for sending three year old Nancy to a school - the 210-pupil St Mary Abbots Primary off Kensington Church Street - more than two miles from his home. We’ve got used to going to much more extreme lengths than that to secure a decent education for our kids. All but the most ideologically committed now understand that in London, where so many schools face such severe problems, the conscientious parent is allowed to do whatever it takes.

For some that means paying fees. Others, who either can’t afford to pay or want to stay in the state sector on principle, have to find other paths to a good school. That can mean moving house, to be in the catchment area for a quality comprehensive. Or it can mean putting your child up for one of the handful of schools that are still selective. Or it can mean finding a corner of the state sector that outperforms the rest: faith schools.

David and Samantha Cameron have taken that last route, one that counts as a lurch leftward by Tory standards, where private education has long been the norm. There are contradictions, not least the call Cameron issued at the Conservative Party conference last autumn for faith schools to open up until a quarter of their pupils were from other faiths or none. At the time, Cameron explained that this quota should apply to new faith schools: in other words, emerging Muslim schools would be forced to open their doors, while a cosy Church of England establishment like St Mary Abbots Primary could stay just as it is.

Still, few will hold that against him. And I’m not going to bash him for taking the faith route, since my wife and I have made a similar choice for our own children, opting for a Jewish primary school (though one that is rather nearer to our home than St Mary Abbots is to the Camerons’.) Still, in some left circles, that counts as an ideological crime just short of going private.

The criticisms tend to fall into two categories. The first - call it the Richard Dawkins critique – says that to send a child to a faith school is to submit him to a programme of religious indoctrination little better than cult-like brainwashing. The second, which we might call the ghetto argument, worries that faith schools lead to ethnic segregation, separating off London’s different communities almost from birth, so that even our youngest children grow up apart when they should be mixing.

The Dawkins view rests on what may be a misunderstanding of how religious schools actually operate. If the education of my five year old son is anything to go by, most of the “religious” content he receives is not theology, but instruction in Jewish tradition and customs, from learning at Passover time about Jewish slavery in Egypt or wearing fancy dress for Purim. Beyond that, the school is infused with what the experts call an “ethos”, a sense of values which owes nothing to the coercive indoctrination into superstition Dawkins fears.

The second objection is even more frail, especially in London. Contrary to expectations, faith schools often end up being more diverse than their secular counterparts nearby. That’s because while most schools draw their pupils geographically, from areas that are often economically and ethnically homogenous, those guided by faith look further afield.

St Mary Abbot’s is a case in point. You might imagine it, with its Kensington address, being an all-white enclave where Nancy Cameron would join other straw-hatted, well-heeled girls dropped off in their 4 x 4s. In fact, its pupils also come from Shepherd’s Bush, north Kensington and Kensal Rise. The result is that some 43% of the children are from ethnic minority families, while more than half do not have English as their first language.

So the pre-conceptions about faith schools are often false: if David Cameron needed to defend his choice, he could. Where things could get trickier is when he and Samantha have to find a secondary school. (Though by then he may already be safely installed in Downing Street – or consigned to the back benches.)

If they want to stay in the state sector, they may plump for a faith school once again. My own instinct will, I suspect, be different. Having chosen a faith school for the primary years, I’d be very wary of doing the same from 11 to 18 – for reasons that go back to that ghetto argument.

I balk at the idea of children spending all their formative years with a single group. Fine for one stage – either primary or secondary – but surely too limiting for an entire education. And not good for our society either, not if we are to chase that elusive goal of integration – pursued once again in yesterday’s report by the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

So this, as most London parents know, is a vexed area, too complex for the glib slogans of those who don’t have to make such decisions themselves. Cameron has made his choice; the rest of us are making ours. But let no one tell you it’s easy.

Posted on February 22, 2007 08:27 PM

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