Faith Schools Provide An Essential Education

The Archbishop of Canterbury has launched a strong defence of faith schools as helping to provide the 'broadest possible access to ideas' for young minds. In a speech given at the National Church Schools Conference in London, Dr Williams argued that faith schools offer an essential contribution to the development of strong and integrated communities and rejected accusations that they encourage divisiveness, exclusivity and irrationality. Rejecting the misconception that faith schools offer mostly middle class families an alternative to paying for private education, Dr Williams said that the Church of England educates children from a diversity of social backgrounds and regularly provides a faith based education for those living in deprived areas:

"The often-forgotten fact that church schools are the main educational presences in some of our most deprived communities means that it simply cannot be said that these schools somehow have a policy of sanitising or segregating."

Dr Williams also argued that an avowedly secularist approach to the provision of public education had serious implications for good community relations in the future:

"If the choice appears to be between systematically secular schools in the public sector and explicitly sectarian schools privately resourced, the dangers should be obvious. Religious conviction becomes something fiercely guarded from the light of public discussion or scrutiny; the way in which it relates to other areas of life and thought can only be looked at in ways that are not publicly accountable. This really is educational ghettoisation."

In his speech, Dr Williams suggested that church schools should adopt national criteria for admissions and that the Church as a whole should encourage more young people to become teachers. He also recommended that church schools should adopt universal principals of teaching about other faiths and that they explored the possibilities of exchanges between schools to complement that.

He stressed that it is beneficial for both faith groups and for wider society if close partnerships were the standard between faith and public bodies in the provision of services:

"Far from cementing religious believers more firmly into their inherited framework, educational partnership with public authorities should have the effect of engaging religious groups with the stubborn realities of a wider world and making what they say and do in some ways accountable to that wider context, its language and its standards."

Dr Williams also said that church schools were already proven in their ability to reach out across faith boundaries and helped to build confidence amongst minority communities:

"Church schools are among the relatively few public institutions generally regarded with trust by minority religious communities. And it is this...which gives the lie to any idea that faith schools are automatically nurseries of bigotry. In our present context, an education system which conveys some sense of what religious motivation is actually like is more helpful in avoiding communal suspicion or violence - avoiding 'ghettoisation' - than one which rigorously refuses to engage with any religious practice on its own terms."

Dr Williams also rejected the charge that faith schools 'indoctrinate' children with irrational beliefs, asserting that they teach widely held and inherited moral and ethical values in context:

"It might look attractive, as it did to so many rationalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to say that we all start with blank slates; but in the actual historical world, people learn from a variety of stories, practices and relationships. And for the majority, these naturally and unselfconsciously include religious elements. The struggle to keep them out of view or to demand that they be dropped in a sanitised container at the entrance to any educational institution is not a sensible one to get involved in."

The lecture was given at the National Church Schools Conference at the QE2 Centre in Westminster.