Campaigners target faith-school admissions

A PRESSURE group intent on ending faith-based selection in state schools is responsible for a huge increase in the number of complaints referred to the Schools Adjudicator.

In its annual report the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) says its costs have soared due to 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.

“During the first part of the year adjudicators spent time investigating many of the 51 objections to the admission arrangements of the secondary schools that had been lodged by a campaign group, the Fair Admissions Campaign,” said the OSA report. It stated there had been a 36 per cent increase in expenditure and a £229,000 increase in adjudicators’ fees in the year 2014-15 from the previous year.
A spokesperson for the FAC said this week that its principle aim was “reducing religious selection in schools and bringing it to an end”. The campaign reported St Bonaventure’s Catholic College in Newham, east London, to the Adjudicator in April 2014 on the grounds that its faith-based admission system was ethnically exclusive. The Adjudicator found in the school’s favour, however head teacher Paul Halliwell said that dealing with the challenge had taken up countless hours of his time over a six-month period.

Last April the BHA made a complaint to the Adjudicator alleging that the London Oratory School in west London’s faith-based admissions criteria unfairly disadvantaged poorer children. The complaint was upheld and the school took the case to the High Court, challenging the OSA’s findings. The judge ruled in the school’s favour. Head teacher David McFadden said: “The real cost is borne out of the additional time and effort that the school has to put in, year after year.”

The OSA’s role is to ensure that all schools comply with the School Admission Code, which requires that places are offered in a fair and open way.

Paul Barber, director of the Catholic Education Service said: “Our admissions system contributes to the fact that Catholic schools are the most ethnically diverse in England and contain higher than the national average of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.”