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SOCIETY

In favour of faith

Photos: Shyamantha Asokan

Culture or education: Students at Guru Nanak School in London get down to work.

The Gujarati children in maroon uniforms, leaving the Krishna-Avanti Hindu School in north London for the winter break last December, were probably unaware of the dispute surrounding their school’s existence. The same could be said of the teenage boys in turbans at the Guru Nanak Sikh school, who skidded down the icy streets of west London as they arrived for the new term in January.

These are some of the 7,000 state-funded religious schools in the U.K., accounting for one in three of the country’s state schools. The current Labour Government has been keen to trumpet and fund ‘faith schools’, as they are called, and has raised their profile in recent years. But critics say the schools are dividing British children at a time when racial differences and religious extremism are particularly pressing issues.

Arguments on both sides were fuelled when Krishna-Avanti, the U.K.’s first state-funded Hindu school, opened last autumn. “The children at my school are either second or third generation, so it’s important to preserve their Hindu culture,” says Naina Parmar, headmistress. Parmar’s students pray three times a day, as well as taking meditation and Sanskrit classes. The school can give preference to Hindus when selecting teachers and pupils if places are oversubscribed.

Indian parents at the school gates seem satisfied. “The children spend 80 per cent of their day at school so it’s good to have a school that preserves our culture. They can pray during the day and have vegetarian food,” says one mother taking her son home.

However, in the same month that Krishna-Avanti opened, a campaign to highlight the problems with faith schools was also launched. The Accord campaign argues that schools should not select students on religious grounds, as this divides children along ethnic lines. With religious disputes playing a part in violent clashes around the world — from Mumbai to London, from Gaza to New York — this is a growing concern in the multicultural U.K.

“Race riots in the north of England and the growth of Islamophobia here in recent years have driven concerns about divided communities,” says Alison Ryan at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, which is a member of Accord. “Schools cannot solve all the problems but they have a role to play. It’s easy to say you teach respect for others, but how can you do that if ‘the others’ aren’t there?”

Accord’s members include think tanks, charities and trade unions. Its supporters include the children’s author Philip Pullman. The group has joined a growing chorus of opposition, as faith schools gain more prominence and funding in the U.K.

In December, the Runnymede Trust, a British charity that promotes good race relations, published a report saying faith schools often risked “limiting” young people’s ability to integrate. The U.K. Government in March ordered a probe into private faith schools, after a think tank raised concerns that some Muslim schools were encouraging negative attitudes towards the West.

However, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government remains staunchly in favour of faith schools overall. The Labour party, led to power by Tony Blair in 1997, has repeatedly encouraged new state schools to be set up and private schools to apply for state funding. When Blair took office, there were no Hindu, Muslim or Sikh state-funded schools in the U.K. There are now 11 Muslim schools, three Sikh, and one Hindu. There are also plans to open the country’s first Buddhist state school in Birmingham by 2013.

Rajinder Sandhu, headmaster at Guru Nanak School, agrees that Labour’s backing has been crucial. “[The local Labour candidate] came to visit the school in 1997 before he was elected. He said that if he got in he would really support the school.” Sandhu’s school subsequently became state-funded in 1999. It was set up in 1993 by the Guru Nanak Isher Thath Trust, a Sikh charity that has founded 15 schools in India (mostly in Punjab). For GCSEs — the U.K. equivalent of India’s secondary school certificates — the London school has produced the best grades in its borough every year since 2003.

Downing Street not only supports faith schools to cater for the U.K.’s ethnic minorities, the schools are also academic success stories that help the government hit national targets for exam results. The Times’s 2008 education charts, which rank schools by results, show that 13 of the country’s top 20 state junior schools are faith schools. A Muslim school and a Christian school occupy the top two places in a senior school chart.

However, recent studies show that faith schools may triumph because they use unfair means to select the brightest students from the most affluent families. During the application process, these schools can ask parents to fill in a form about their religious beliefs. But a government investigation last April found that schools often also asked about marital status and occupation. This was widely read as a move to sift out poorer, less stable families.

Five Jewish schools and one Church of England school were even caught asking for “contributions” before a child was admitted. The Beis Yaakov school in London was asking for £895 (approx. Rs. 66,000) a term.

Faith schools deny “cherry-picking”. They say their students are simply instilled with religious values, which encourage hard work and produce top grades. “We are taught to work hard. That’s one of the main Sikh values,” says Kamalpal Singh Randawa, head boy at Guru Nanak School. “You can see it in the classroom. Everyone gets their books out and has their heads down.”

Religious bodies are to gain an even greater hold on education through academies, another of Blair’s legacies. Academies are state schools with a private sponsor, who contributes at least £2m. This sponsor has an input in hiring staff, selecting students and tailoring lessons. Of the 134 academies in the U.K., 42 have religious sponsors. The Church of England is to increase its fleet of academies from 17 to 30 within the next two years, with another 40 “under discussion”.

“Who else is going to sponsor academies in a recession?” asks Rebecca Allen, a lecturer at the Institute of Education who has written several reports on faith schools. “Private companies will wonder if they can afford it; it’s a long-term commitment and it’s not part of their remit. For religious bodies, education is a part of their mission.”

However, Downing Street’s support for faith schools could hit an unexpected obstacle; a number of these schools do not want to join the state. Some faith schools say the government, to some extent, only offers funding to gain control over closed religious communities. Once in the public sector, schools must comply with a host of regulations and teach the U.K.’s official curriculum.

“There is still reluctance in the Jewish community to accept [state funding],” says Rabbi Abraham Pinter, headmaster at Yesodey Hatorah, a state-funded Jewish school. “They see the government as a power that wishes to neutralise faith schools. They fear intervention.”

Rabbi Pinter points out that, in 2006, the government tried to make state-funded faith schools take 25 per cent of their pupils from other religions. The proposal was dropped after an outcry from religious groups.

A reluctance to join the public sector is particularly noticeable among the UK..’s Muslim schools; there are 107 private schools, but only 11 state schools. “With state funding comes state control,” says Ibrahim Hewitt, a trustee of Al-Aqsa, a state-funded Muslim school in Leicester. “When we were private, we could recruit staff and students by word of mouth. We could choose who came into the school. It’s harder to run this school in a Muslim way now.”

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