https://humanism.org.uk/help-us-oppose-p...s-schools/
In a country where there are more "Nones" than Christians, there's been a rather unusual twist with the rise of the new Prime Minister Teresa May and a secret new policy of her own devising which I haven't seen on the headlines yet.
Currently in the UK faith schools for several decades have been restricted to only intake a set number of students based on their religion; while in practice this doesn't always happen since for instance Islamic Schools exist mostly in areas with 98-100% Muslim populations in theory a school funded by the state can only select a set number of students based on religion. If this happens, they will be able to select children only from their denomination.
This while problematic for non-believing taxpayers is problematic enough, but it carries something far more serious with it. With the free school policy basically the government agrees to grant funding and support for any company that wants to start up a school, and said "free school" does not have to follow the national curriculum(!!!). Now the main reason the UK hasn't seen a flush of new faith schools with this new system is purely because so long as they can't discriminate against who can enter the school and what they teach in it (e.g: Sex Education) groups like the Catholic Education Service have refused to build new schools or improve ones already here.
The UK could see a new rise in ultra-conservative schools as previously seen in Scotland's Evangelical sponsored schools, and it hasn't even made the news since the main focus has been on the Grammar School proposal.
What do you think? The CoE might be fairly mild and tame these days, and there aren't really enough Jewish, Sikh or Hindu schools for them to really have much of an impact but the idea of the wealthier and vastly more severe Catholic, Evangelical and Islamic groups here being able to say and do whatever they like in schools I find to be quite a scary prospect, never mind it will be at the expense of the taxpayer.
In a country where there are more "Nones" than Christians, there's been a rather unusual twist with the rise of the new Prime Minister Teresa May and a secret new policy of her own devising which I haven't seen on the headlines yet.
Currently in the UK faith schools for several decades have been restricted to only intake a set number of students based on their religion; while in practice this doesn't always happen since for instance Islamic Schools exist mostly in areas with 98-100% Muslim populations in theory a school funded by the state can only select a set number of students based on religion. If this happens, they will be able to select children only from their denomination.
This while problematic for non-believing taxpayers is problematic enough, but it carries something far more serious with it. With the free school policy basically the government agrees to grant funding and support for any company that wants to start up a school, and said "free school" does not have to follow the national curriculum(!!!). Now the main reason the UK hasn't seen a flush of new faith schools with this new system is purely because so long as they can't discriminate against who can enter the school and what they teach in it (e.g: Sex Education) groups like the Catholic Education Service have refused to build new schools or improve ones already here.
The UK could see a new rise in ultra-conservative schools as previously seen in Scotland's Evangelical sponsored schools, and it hasn't even made the news since the main focus has been on the Grammar School proposal.
What do you think? The CoE might be fairly mild and tame these days, and there aren't really enough Jewish, Sikh or Hindu schools for them to really have much of an impact but the idea of the wealthier and vastly more severe Catholic, Evangelical and Islamic groups here being able to say and do whatever they like in schools I find to be quite a scary prospect, never mind it will be at the expense of the taxpayer.
