Christening Children for Schooling purposes

activity level of the PTA is a fairly good indicator that the parents care about the schooling and therefore influences the results of the school. Sums of £10k p.a. were average for fund raising

Do it. Why should any school be allowed to discriminate on the grounds of religion anyway? About time this practice was outlawed if you ask me. School is for education, not indoctrination. I have no problem with anyone who chooses to follow a path that feel happy with, but if you want to bring your child up a Christian, Muslim, Jew or Zoroastian, then do it at home. Children should be educated in schools to have an open mind, and be able to make their own choices when they are ready to themselves, not have ideology thrust upon them.

If you believe this then surely you shouldn’t do it in order to prevent your children being indoctrinated?

as a parent if you object to a religious connection a school has you can chose a community one.

Try living rurally. You don’t get a choice, unless your choice is to drive 8 miles every morning and afternoon. A choice of sorts I suppose.

I haven’t signed up for bothering though it was part of the local selection criteria as a) I live about 500 yards from the school, and suspect I would have a pretty strong case were there any issues and b) not being a hypocrite is part of my personal creed.

Bear in mind once your first is in, most selection criteria give weight to additional siblings too, despite the odd horror story you hear.

I attended a faith school (many years ago).
My eldest now attends the same school. The rules have tightened up a lot since my time there.

It is based on (ascending importance of selection criteria)
– at least one parent being an active church member.
Regular church attendance required. Church attendance inevitably goes up around Jan/Feb. A minimum of two-years attendance.
– sibling already in attendance at the school
– distance

We have two schools available. One faith, the other comprehensive. Both have good Ofsted reports and very good results. The faith school has better facilities but requires a bus journey. The comprehensive is walking distance.

We applied for the faith school. I admit it’s been a bit of a game. Probably played better by middle-class.
We played it. We lost and were offered our second choice.
We immediately put our eldest onto the school waiting list. We were offered a place a couple of weeks later.
We were happy.

When considering the faith school – if you’re prepared to “play the game” – I don’t see it being *religious discrimination*. Which many have been saying – afterall, anybody who wants to better their application chances is free to do it within the guidelines given.

We did consider baptizing our daughter and my wife becoming a full member of the church. But iirc this has no bearing on the process of determining active attendance.

I wouldn’t berate any parent(s) for wanting the best for their children. It’s life.

I agree with charliemungus’ and what he has written.

Hi Marcus – which schools in our area will only accept christened children? I thought most within easy reach of us were standard local authority controlled schools?

(assuming you’re not a different Marcus from the one I know!!)

Dawkins did an excellent documentary on this which shows how damaging faith schools can be:

Faith School Menace?

The sections where he interviews science teachers in a Catholic school and science pupils in a Muslim school are quite scary.

Not nearly as scary as Steiner Schools[/url] though.

But if schools follow Steiner’s views on science, education will suffer. Steiner believed that materialism was insufficient for the understanding of nature. He believed that science needs to “go beyond” the empirical and consider vitalistic, unobservable forces, a perspective also common in 20th century New Age healing approaches. Anthroposophical medicine, similar to homeopathy but even less scientific, claims that disease is caused only secondarily by malfunctions of chemistry and biology, and primarily by a disturbance of the “vital essence.” Anatomy and physiology a la Steiner are unrecognizable by modern scientists: the heart does not pump blood; there are 12 senses (“touch, life, movement, equilibrium, warmth, smell,” etc.) corresponding to signs of the zodiac; there is a “rhythmic” system that mediates between the “nerve-sense” and “metabolic-muscular” systems. Physics and chemistry are just as bad: the “elements” are earth, air, fire, and water. The four “kingdoms of nature” are mineral, plant, animal and man. Color is said to be the result of the conflict of light and darkness. Typical geological stages are Post-Atlantis, Atlantis, Mid-Lemuria, and Lemuria.

Hi Tim,

Hope you are well. We’re in Belper now.

Choice is St Elizabeths or Long Row. Looking at St ELizabeths policy there does appear to be an admissions ‘pecking order’ From memory:

Roman Catholic with sibling
Roman Catholic
Other denomination with sibling
other demonination
Others

My wife’s catholic and I’m a heathen…she would want any kids to go to the same catholic school she went to but I doubt they would let them in because of me.

Apparently I’ll need to start going to church on a regular basis and pretend to be a catholic.

What makes it worse is I haven’t been christened or baptised so i’m not even a Christian, I’ll have to go through all that nonsense.

If you ask me faith schools should be welcoming non-christians and people from other faiths…or do they have enough believers and the churches are already full? Seems moronic if you ask me – “you can’t come to our school unless you believe in god already…and when you get here we’ll teach you why you should believe in god, oh wait a minute…”.

I would have thought their response should be “I know you aren’t a Christian, but come to our school anyway…we’ll teach your son/daughter all about god and why they should be catholic/christian/muslim”.

The other interesting thing is that once you take into account the relative affluence and social standing of their intake, religious state schools don’t actually get better results than non-religious ones, it is just that they exclude poor people who are less likely to get better results.

This seems contrary to most of the evidence I have seen. I am interested, can you point at some evidence? I’d also like to know why exclusion on religious would result in indirect exclusion by class. The implication is that poor people are generally less religious, or maybe less concerned about the nature of their children’s education.

CharlieMungus – Member

“The other interesting thing is that once you take into account the relative affluence and social standing of their intake, religious state schools don’t actually get better results than non-religious ones, it is just that they exclude poor people who are less likely to get better results.”

This seems contrary to most of the evidence I have seen. I am interested, can you point at some evidence? I’d also like to know why exclusion on religious would result in indirect exclusion by class. The implication is that poor people are generally less religious, or maybe less concerned about the nature of their children’s education.

Faith schools – selection by the back door

The chair of the Accord Coalition for inclusive schooling, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, commented: “The strong performance from faith schools is entirely predictable given that all recent research – including the government’s own findings – show that religious entry requirements lead to covert social selection.”

“This is done either deliberately, for example by getting prospective pupils to write statements about their religious beliefs and therefore gaining insights as to their levels of articulation, spelling, punctuation and sentence structure; or indirectly, because insisting on regular church attendance means automatically privileging higher socio-economic groups, as families from those groups are more likely to regularly attend church,” said Dr Romain. “Thatin turn skews faith schools’ social and ability profile and boosts their results.”

He added: “This is why the former Department of Children, Schools and Families 2008 report on the effectiveness of the School Admissions Code found that faith schools were the schools most likely not to comply with the schools admissions code by engaging in practices that were favourable to those with greater social capital and higher socio-economic status.”

talspark – Member
i would not let my daughter get within a hundred yards of a priest.
have you been to the scotland recently and seen what religios segregation/bigitory is doing here ……its totally f…..d up

Only in Glasgow/Edin/Central belt and the Wee Free up North.

McHamish – Member
My wife’s catholic and I’m a heathen…she would want any kids to go to the same catholic school she went to but I doubt they would let them in because of me.

Apparently I’ll need to start going to church on a regular basis and pretend to be a catholic.
Not the case for my Grand kids in Carlisle

Ta,

Will read

McHamish; they will let them in because of you 😀

You honestly think a Catholic School teaches religion exactly the same as a non denomination/religious School? or a teacher with firm religious beliefs the same as an athiest/agnostic Teacher?

MFL Jr attends a RC primary, we don’t attend church though. He know more about faiths such as Islam & Hinduism than I did at his age. One faith they don’t seem to have covered in detail is Judaism. They usually celebrate the main festivals for these faiths for some reason (ethnicity probably 99% white in the school).

I’d guess that his school has probably over provided information regarding other faiths to avoid the misconception that the kids get indoctrinated

Just read the local league tables for secondary schools, top two school are none demoninational, then two of the RC schools. The situation in the primary schools is different though, with the faith schools topping the tables. Wouldn’t say the local area can select according to socio-economics, nearly everywhere is a shithole locally.

When are you supposed to Christen them BTW?

We know / have met loads of kids / parents at Long Row (we live on Long Row) and everyone I’ve met seems to really like it. The kids always seem happy when they go past also. We’re going to send our kid there I reckon.

The uniform at the catholic school is the worst kind of faux private school uniform, always seems pretty stupid on the tiny kids. You also see far fewer of them walking home from school, it’s more of the kind of place parents drop kids off at, personally I’d prefer my kids to go somewhere that walking to school is normal, and that is more of a local school, part of the local community.

To be honest, if you’re the sort of person that thinks this much about your kids education, as long as you don’t send them to a drug filled hell hole type of school, they’ll probably get on fine.

Hi Joe, Thanks for the response – It is encouraging to hear that parents you have spoken to like Long Row. – We are new to Belper and as yet I havent had the chance to speak to anyone who sends their children to either school. Indeed, we are only starting to think about schooling and I dont know much about either school.

I would certainly be wanting our children to walk to which ever school they attended. – On that note, do you know if there is a back way into St Elizabeths avoiding the A6 ?

Try living rurally. You don’t get a choice

You could move? Depends how important your kids’ education is to you I suppose. Anyway.

I’ve not commented here yet, but as a childless atheist I’ve been reading this thread with interest. I particularly liked McHamish’s observation, that if you’re a nonbeliever then you’re exactly the sort of person that needs their education. Surely that’s the raison d’etre of a school?

The only thing I can think is that they’d rather use it as leverage to get the parents into church, so that when the kid comes home from school the religiousness is more likely to stick than if the parents are undoing all their “good” work. Plus, why have one new believer when you can have three?

MFL, My corridor shares in the Religious and Moral Education dept cover ALL religions equally. That is council policy,indeed probably nationwide in Scotland.I know for a fact it is the same in the Catholic secondary that I did my probation,which was rather a suprise.

I agree with Fred. I wonder though what would happen if legislation was passed that banned the education of religion at schools, but allowed groups such as churches to assist in secular education if they wished. Would the effort currently invested by faith groups in education dry up or would they continue to invest time and effort in education?

In the current system could the Humanist Society fund a school and insist on evidence of atheist attitudes before letting children in?

In the current system could the Humanist Society fund a school and insist on evidence of atheist attitudes before letting children in?

they could use it as a method of selection, they would however have to accept children with a faith and also have to teach the national ciriculum which includes religions

I imagine however all the Humanist parents are too busy faking baptisms and church attendance to get into the local primary of choice rather than put the work in to get their “non” faith school. 😉

Chrisl,no they wouldn’t and why should they? But I think the schools would still exist,just your council tax would go up as the local authority bought out the buildings and land from them.Not much of a cost up here,but down in the home counties? dear oh dear!

Do it. Why should any school be allowed to discriminate on the grounds of religion anyway? About time this practice was outlawed if you ask me. School is for education, not indoctrination. I have no problem with anyone who chooses to follow a path that feel happy with, but if you want to bring your child up a Christian, Muslim, Jew or Zoroastian, then do it at home. Children should be educated in schools to have an open mind, and be able to make their own choices when they are ready to themselves, not have ideology thrust upon them.

Bang. Go. Elfin – I agree with the general thrust of what you say. BUT actually I think you’ve come to the wrong conclusion. The solution to the problems you dislike can hardly be to support or encourage them by actively seeking to put your children in such a school, and by very early on indoctrinating them into a “lie” in order to get them into that school. You are simply “feeding” the problem.

Whilst it may not be hard science I think it was Freakonomics which clearly showed that the factors most strongly affecting child performance were not the choice of school but parental background. Of course aspirational parents will all try to put their children into the “best” school, whilst those with lower expectations or who would find transport a problem will base their decisions on geography or other factors – but all this does is skew the stats.

Its discussions like this that make me very happy to live in Scotland where the default position is children attend their local school; I do see a worrying trend however with increasing numbers of people put “placing requests” in to attend schools further away. This is to such an extent locally that there is a “perceived” problem with local children getting places etc at some schools – although in actual fact it is extremely rare for a “catchment area pupil” to not be accepted at the local school. IMHO, this you go to the local school approach avoids the “elitism” that we see in the English schools system and is actually a good “leveller”. However it can in some very localised areas result in some degree of house price distortion which further propagates the “successful parents breed successful children” issue. Its clear that the system south of the border doesn’t fix that issue either though.

Someone suggested that sectarianism was an issue up here, and it can be in some areas (the exception to the everyone goes to the local school rule, are that Roman Catholics* can elect to attend a RC school instead [which I believe is entirely state funded but still had active involvement in RC instruction]). I believe this you are either “normal” or “catholic” split is very unhealthy and is part of the seeds of sectarianism.

* technically anyone can apply, and although religious background is a factor in pupil placing at RC schools, many would be under-subscribed and would accept pupils from any background. However it would be unusual for any non RC background pupil to attend a RC school in Scotland.

hora – Member
When are you supposed to Christen them BTW?

you’re not! Do pay attention at the back! 🙄

“GW – Member
nah, but my 4yr old has”

Could your 4 year old also teach you to use punctuation?

Your brilliant education obviously worked wonders.

thought it was a pretty **** good effort for 2am and fairly wasted TBH!
I don’t actually have a 4yr old BTW

The nearest High School for my daughter is a Catholic school, it’s only 2 miles away and she is well inside the catchment area, so it should be a no-brainer.

However, we live in Scotland and Catholic schools up here are allowed to openly admit in their admissions policy that they discriminate on religious grounds.

In this day and age of anti-discriminatory regulation it makes me laugh how they can get away with it!

My wife spoke to the chap who is in charge of pupil placement in West Lothian and he said that Catholic schools up in Scotland can choose who they want to attend because they are funded out of Catholic monies.

What a load of bull’s muck.

As well as being discriminatory it is being sectarian and this is something that the SNP and the second party up here, Labour, don’t like.

Let’s see what happens when the application process runs its course and they say where my daughter is to go to school.

Just read the local league tables for secondary schools, top two school are none demoninational, then two of the RC schools.

league tables based on 5 A-c’s or the new EB no doubt, not the CVA which makes more sense.

I can’t understand what the fuss is all about? Given how passionately anti religion so many of you are why would you even consider sending your kids to a faith school? Who cares what the entry criteria are? If you really are so convinced by your atheistic standpoint I would expect you to be taking your kids somewhere else or is it all a bit of a keyboard warrior posing? And if it’s the local school then, as was mentioned earlier, perhaps you should move to a place closer to a school more in tune with your philosophical views or be prepared to transport your kids.

It’s also fair to say that not all schools that appear to have a link to a particular religious movement / body are the same and are also not necessarily faith schools.

The point, for those too dim to appreciate it is that state funded schooling shouldnt have religious aspects to it

^^
why not?

Because the point of a school is to learn facts, rather than fairy stories?

There’s an argument that religious education is valid for the same reason history is valid; that it’s useful to know about the world around us and what got us there. I have no real issue with this (apart from anything else, an informed choice is only possible if you’re informed). This sort of RE, however, is wholly different from teaching a given religion as the one truth (or indeed, truth).

Because the point of a school is to learn facts

Seriously? You think school should be about learning facts?

Even then, the faith aspect is pretty much that, faith. It’s not taught in the same way as the curriculum subjects. It is contextualised as part of the belief system. And if lots of the folks (tax payers) believe in it and want it as an option in their education system,then why shouldn’t it be provided?

Incidentally,

Is there a central record of christenings, confirmations et al? Is there anything to stop you going “ah yes, little Hermione was christened ages ago”? Is there any means of finding out whether, say, I was christened (short of asking my mum)?

^^

Look on your scalp, just near your crown, there should be a number there which refers you to the church where you were baptised

http://rcdhn.org.uk/churches07/churchcontact.php?chid=xxx

replace xxx by the number on your head

good point compound the lie about your religious beleief with a lie about actually being one after all iirc two wrongs do may a right
Dr M – The thing about education is that you should not teach an opinion as factual. There is no “proof” of God. Can I have a vegan school with no meat and we can say how everyone else is wrong to eat meat etc or should I just accpet that that is one opinion amongst many?
religious secondary schools do not teach sex education the same as non faith schools or contraception and “ban” organisations in the school from saying anything other than abstain. Certain Islamic schools [often gender segregated] do not teach art or music as it runs counter to their beleiefs etc.
I do object to funding these via taxation – indocrination of your children about your beleifs is really the job of the parent not the state – see vegan point above and my kids not eating meat- but any religious person can be sent at state expense to the nearest religious school whatever the cost. Sadly non beleivers have no right to go to an non faith school and just get the nearest school.
This ignores the fact thjey are wrong on their beleif an dthat education ais about learning as well what next David icke schools for the gullible?

Seriously? You think school should be about learning facts?

I’m struggling to see where you’re going with this.

Engaging my pedantry filter, you could say that it’s really about learning believed / perceived ‘facts’, theories I suppose. It’s about learning about the world around us and how to live in it, teaching life skills and such. Arguably also, many high school “facts” are simplified ‘lies to children’ in order to teach basics and pique interest.

Putting on my cynical hat, you could talk about how the curriculum could be improved, that they’d be better off learning how to cook and such rather than learning about the intricacies of China’s tea export trade in the 1950’s.

Thinking extra-curricularly, school is about learning social skills, about trying not to get the crap beaten out of you, and integrating with “society” and fitting in.

Thinking about STW, you could be trolling and talking horsesh!t.

Have I missed anything?

Look on your scalp, just near your crown, there should be a number there which refers you to the church where you were baptised

I have a Harry Potter scar(*), does that make me the son of the devil?

(* – no, really)

My wife spoke to the chap who is in charge of pupil placement in West Lothian and he said that Catholic schools up in Scotland can choose who they want to attend because they are funded out of Catholic monies.

thats wrong – for nearly 100 years Scottish “Catholic” Education has been 100% funded by the state. Prior to 1918 the Catholic Church may have funded education and may have owned the buildings – but not any more.

As well as being discriminatory it is being sectarian and this is something that the SNP and the second party up here, Labour, don’t like.

Have you raised it with your MSP – be prepared for an answer that conflicts with most people here! Its totally archaic and its frightening how much power the church (catholic and otherwise) still have on the Government, but 2/3rds of the population claim to be “christian” in the 2001 census so perhaps its reasonable!

Let’s see what happens when the application process runs its course and they say where my daughter is to go to school.

Unless the school is full, then she will get a place, WLC policy is quite clear and they will follow it strictly because if they don’t parents take them to court!

I have no problem with religion being taught about but I think the state shouldnt be involved in peoples faith.
I would object if faith was involved in my medical care too or policing etc

Seriously? You think school should be about learning facts?

I’m struggling to see where you’re going with this.

I’m not going anywhere, it was a straight question. School is currently much more than learning facts. School is about teaching for understanding, reasoning, evaluation, synthesis, discrimination etc. Facts are becoming worth less as google takes over.

I’m not being cynical or pedantic or extra-curricular,just practical. I’m not trolling, I really don’t think heavy emphasis on facts, is useful.

In church schools the particualr religion is not taught as fact, it is taught as faith and it is,in most cases, not integrated with the curricular education. Evolution is taught in biology in religious schools.