Faith schools to be protected from humanist campaigners

CATHOLIC SCHOOLS will be protected from vexatious complaints by humanist pressure groups under new government proposals.

The Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, announced new rules on Monday which she said would get rid of bureaucracy surrounding admissions and give parents more say in the process. Specifically they would permit only local parents and councils to lodge objections.

Earlier this year The Tablet revealed that the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) blamed soaring costs on complaints against faith schools mostly lodged by the Fair Admissions Campaign (FAC) which is supported by the British Humanist Association (BHA) and groups hostile to faith schools.

In recent years several faith schools, most prominently the London Oratory, have fought a series of actions before the Schools Adjudicator and in the courts, over objections, often from parents outside the catchment area, backed by such groups. Ms Morgan said she wanted to stop “vexatious complaints” in order to “unclog” the admissions process.

Paul Barber, director of the Catholic Education Service, said it was pleased to see the Government taking action to reduce “this unnecessary burden on teachers’ workloads”.

He said: “Referring a school to the OSA for campaigning purposes hinders legitimate referrals from parents, dioceses and local authorities. School admissions are extremely complex. Most breaches of the School Admissions Code are found to be unintended administration errors.”

However, campaigners argue that some Christian schools use their powers to select children from religious families as a way to discriminate against ethnic minorities and working-class pupils. Faith schools are legally able to give priority to children who come from particular religious backgrounds if they are oversubscribed.

Last year the British Humanist Association and the Fair Admissions Campaign lodged objections to the admission arrangements of a representative sample of 50 religiously selective secondary schools and claimed that the adjudicator had identified more than 1,000 breaches of the admissions code.

The BHA chief executive, Andrew Copson, said: “Instead of moving to enforce the law, the Government has responded by planning to make it harder to identify future violations of it.”

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, from the FAC, said: “There is evidence of systemic problems in schools – for instance, when faith schools use criteria about the religious involvement of parents –  and it is vital that unions, campaign groups and other bodies are able to expose them. Such challenges are very much in the public interest. It is astonishing that the Government is trying to stop attention being drawn to those abuses.”