Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain with Michelle Tepper, an evangelical speaker and guest lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics
On Sunday (October 19th) Accord took part in a faith schools debate (recording here) at the annual Battle of Ideas conference, held at The Barbican in central London. Speaking for Accord was its Chair, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, who was joined on the panel of speakers by Kevin Rooney, a secondary school politics and social science teacher; Richy Thompson, a campaign officer at the British Humanist Association, and Michelle Tepper, an evangelical Christian speaker.
Rabbi Romain drew attention to how incongruous religiously discriminatory practices would be in the provision of other public services. He argued they were especially inappropriate at schools, which were supposed to prepare pupils for life in a diverse society. He believed all schools should teach about the main religion and beliefs held in society, which many faith schools failed to.
Michelle Tepper spokes of her personal experience of faith schools being inclusive, including of the non-religious. She believed schools should accommodate people of different beliefs, but that by doing away with faith schools people would not be as accommodated so well.
Richy Thompson argued that religiously selective admission arrangements were open to misuse and noted that up to 1.2 million pupil places (17%) at state funded schools in England could be given on faith grounds. He believed opposition from some Jewish and Catholic groups to proposals that RE GCES should cover at least two belief systems indicated that the many faith school currently taught about religion and beliefs in a narrow way.
Kevin Rooney challenged judgments that faith schools indoctrinated and labelled their critics as not liking schools and parents teaching strong values. He redefined Liberalism as tolerating intolerance and argued that greater toleration would be demonstrated by allowing state funded faith schools to continue to select pupils and staff by faith.
