Why should religion have any influence on our lives?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

To put it in slightly simplistic terms: you have 10 schools in your local area. You choose which to send your child to. The government pays for your child to go to whichever school you choose - they pay the school on your behalf (it doesn't matter how much you do or don't earn, and all schools get the same tariff). The schools then grow or shrink depending on demand, so the number of classes per year can vary (within the physical constraints of the school which are slower to adjust). Over recent years the numbers of different types of schools have changed as schools will also close and new ones will open depending on demand. So in your example you would, I presume, choose to send your child to a non-faith school. So that school gets the money. If everyone wants to send their children to non-faith schools, those schools will grow at the expense of faith schools (though the opposite has been occurring in recent years). There's obviously a limit to the speed of change, but the system does allow for changing demand. In the UK, for example, Islam is growing quite a lot at the moment (from conversions, from larger families, and from immigration), and so we'd expect to see more Muslim schools appear over the next decade or so, responding to the changing ethnic and religious demographic of our country.

Sometimes a local 'preferred' school may not exist. So it's not perfect. In our case our children had to go 20 miles to school between the ages of 11 and 18* (which is probably nothing to an American, but it's considered quite a long commute to school in the UK). There must always be a certain amount of demand before a particular 'flavour' of school can sustain itself, but most schools are pragmatic and know they must willingly accommodate all children if needed.

*There is frequently, but not always, means-tested provision of transport if there is not an appropriate local faith or non-faith school.

Does that make it clearer?

That does make it clearer, thanks. It just seems a bit unwieldy and overcomplicated to me, but that might be my dumb American talking~

What Michael is saying is bollocks, though, because he's conflating choice of school with religion and religious adherence.

A large number of parents DO NOT SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO FAITH SCHOOLS BECAUSE OF THEIR RELIGION.

How many times can I say this? Faith schools have gone up in numbers whilst religious adherence has gone massively down. This is because faith schools get MORE money per head than standard comps in their local vicinity because, on average, faith school grades tend to be higher than their state run comprehensive counterparts. IT's a vicious cycle because faith schools get better grades, more people want to go to them, so their funding increases at the expense of other local schools.

And we cannot forget that faith schools can ACTIVELY PRACTICE DISCRIMINATION totally legally. They can say 'no your son/daughter is an atheist so unless we haven't filled the quota of students who don't follow our faith they aren't allowed in'.

They can also teach whatever they want in religious education classes. Michael's children went to a school where they learnt about other faiths, but there is nothing to stop a school saying "You will burn in hell unless you're Catholic and all other religions are totally false."

Indeed, I still don't know how many non-Catholics attending Michael's children's school. I know how many, more or less, attended mine, because my school wasn't free to discriminate against children based on nothing more than their personal beliefs.