How Much Faith Should We Have in Faith Schools?

Civitas, 2 December 2004

Today’s papers contain the results of tests in English and mathematics carried out last summer on 11 years olds in England’s primary schools.
They establish beyond doubt that, on the whole, faith schools achieve much better results than so-called ‘community’ schools which have no denominational affiliation and at which religious education and collective acts of worship have all but disappeared in recent years, despite still being legally mandatory.
Whereas faith schools make up only a third of England’s primary schools, they account for as much as two-thirds of those whose pupils achieved the maximum possible test scores. Moreover, faith schools accounted for almost half of the 200 primary schools at which greatest progress had been made by pupils in these subjects since they were tested in them at the start of their schooling there.
To what are due the superior results faith schools, on the whole, seem able to achieve?

Their supporters tend to attribute the superior performance of faith schools to the educationally beneficial effects of their having a religious ethos. Their opponents tend to attribute their better performance to faith schools tending to attract larger proportions of middle-class pupils than attend community schools.
The statistics now available would seem to permit sufficiently detailed comparison between faith and community schools to enable an informed decision to be made between these two rival hypotheses concerning what accounts for their differential performances.
Should, as seems not at all unlikely, attending a school with a religious ethos be found to have a positively beneficial educative effect on pupils, quite independently of their social class, this fact would seem to have important policy implications for the future direction primary schooling should take in this country.
Those eager to know the results of such a comparison are advised not to wait until the government or the educational establishment has carried it out. Neither seems at all likely to be keen to discover or reveal that the religiously anodyne, if not wholly secular, multi-cultural approach towards primary schooling currently favoured by the authorities is educationally regressive.