Serious questions need to be asked following a new report by the Church of England about Chaplaincy in Anglican secondary schools in England and Wales – which has cast further light on how churches are no longer abiding by the agreement to contribute to school costs.
The report found that four in five of the schools responding to its survey had a designated Chaplain, a majority of whom were ordained. It found Chaplains undertook a range of tasks, including providing pastoral care, leading collective worship and ‘commending the faith’ to others. It noted that ‘… almost all are directly funded from the school’s own budget’.
This is a sharp contrast to past practice. Most Church Schools in England and Wales joined the state-funded school system in 1944, when the state agreed to meet their revenue costs, but required faith groups to make a 50% contribution to the capital costs of their schools. However, the contribution faith groups make towards their state-funded schools in England has come and down over time and, as Accord has previously revealed, the proportion of costs met has fallen not far from zero.
Chair of the Accord Coalition, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, said ‘Pastoral support can make a multifaceted contribution to school life, including counselling and mentoring for staff and pupils. However, it will come as a surprise to many that the cost of Chaplains, many of whom evangelise, is not met by faith groups themselves, but invariably from public funds. This is doubly problematic: the purpose of schools is to educate not evangelise, while attempts to indoctrinate should certainly not be funded by the state.
‘The traditional argument that faith schools should be able to enjoy exemptions to act in narrow and discriminatory ways because they help to meet some of their own costs has been almost entirely eroded away. At the same time, the argument that the wider community should have a say about how state funded faith schools operate only grows even stronger.
‘There is nothing wrong with Chaplains having a pastoral role, but everything wrong with them having a missionary task and receiving funding out of school budgets to achieve it. We need to ask why the Church is not paying for its Chaplains, and whether their role in state-funded schools should be more closely defined.
Notes
‘The Way Ahead: Church of England schools in the new millennium’ (2001) by the Church of England’s Church Schools Review Group, set out The Church of England’s policy towards its schools. It saw them as on a long term mission at securing ‘the long-term well-being of the Church of England’, with a duty to ‘Nourish those of the faith; Encourage those of other faiths; Challenge those who have no faith’, a quote repeated by the Church as recently as its current school admissions policy guidance, published in 2011.
