Accord has welcomed as a step forward a proposal from Lincolnshire County Council to make the admission policies of its voluntary controlled (VC) faith schools less religiously selective. The Council, which has 23 VC faith schools, is one of the minority of local authorities in England Wales that permits its VC faith schools to religiously select.
Under recently announced plans, the Council is planning to give a lower preference than current to those families that meet Church membership or attendance criteria at 22 of the schools. It instead wants to give a higher priority to those families where the school in question is their nearest. At the 23rd school – Holy Trinity Primary School in Tattershall – the Council is seeking to remove religiously selective criteria altogether, upon request of the school’s governing body.
Unlike all other state funded faith schools, VC schools have their admissions policy determined by their local authority responsible for education. Research by Accord in 2011 showed that of the 174 such local authorities in England and Wales, 137 had one or more VC faith school and 43 of them permitted religious selection of some kind in the oversubscription arrangements of at least one school. In July Accord revealed that the Diocese of Lincoln was one of three Church of England Dioceses it had discovered that advocates its schools do not select pupils on religious grounds.
Chair of the Accord Coalition for Inclusive Education, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, said ‘Religiously selective admission arrangements entrench religious discrimination in the institutions that should be equipping pupils the most for living in a mixed-belief society. Children should not be the victim discrimination by schools, and nor should discrimination be a part of school life, least of all in the name of religion.’
‘While we would wish Lincoln County Council to go much further, we welcome as a step forwards its plan to make its VC schools more inclusive. We also commend the leadership that the Holy Trinity Primary School has displayed, and urge others to follow its example.’
