The Irish Government has this week set out plans for a public consultation on changing how state funded faith schools select their pupils. If enacted, the proposals will make faith schools policy in England and Wales even more anomalous.
In a set speech on Monday (January 16th) the Minister for Education, Richard Bruton, described as ‘unfair’ the current situation whereby children could lose out on a place at their local school on religious grounds or that some families felt pressured to baptise their children to secure such access. He set out four possible admission models the country’s state funded faith schools could move to: allowing the schools to select pupils by faith from a geographically defined catchment area; to select by faith where the school is a family’s nearest faith school; faith schools being capped in the proportion of pupils they can religiously select; or an outright ban on such selection.
Education Equality – a campaign group set up in 2015 to ensure all state funded schools in the Republic of Ireland are made open and accessible to people of all beliefs – has criticised the consultation because three of its four proposals will still permit schools to religiously discriminate. Around 95% of state funded schools in the Republic of Ireland are faith schools, and 90% are under the patronage of the Catholic Church.
Chair of the Accord Coalition, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, said ‘The Republic of Ireland and the UK are among the tiny number of Developed Countries that still permit any religious discrimination at state funded schools. That the UK Government is currently proposing to remove restrictions limiting the extent to which England’s faith free schools can religiously select pupils – when other countries that permit faith discrimination are looking at how they can change, and when public opinion is so strongly opposed to it – only highlights how detached policy in Britain has become.’
