FAITH SCHOOLS, TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY

Helen's book has finally been published, and that is the title. Please urge any librarians you know to order it for their institutions. If you review books, ask Palgrave Macmillan for a review copy. If you know any review editors, (especially of academic journals) tell them to ask for a review copy. I am, of course, hugely grateful to Palgrave Macmillan (a branch of the vast Axel Springer empire) for publishing the book, and am very pleased with the result (though Helen wouldn't have liked the colour of the cover much), but I can't help thinking that publishing has become a bit minimal. When they accept the book, they ask you how you can market it (on the basis that they're not going to) and now I discover that if we want a book launch we have to organise it ourselves; they'll give us some discount flyers, but that's it. Worst of all, though, for an academic publisher, is that they don't routinely provide an index; my co-editor Germ produced a lady in the Netherlands who is a professional indexer, and I paid her five hundred pounds to do the job.

So what does the book say? It presents the results of Helen's research into the effect that schools might have on students' attitudes of tolerance, and demonstrates that "faith schools" do no worse in that regard than secular schools, with the single exception of a Muslim independent school. She was interested to see whether you could identify a paradigm of "fundamentalist" education across religions, and so examined Roman Catholic and Evangelical Christian examples, as well as Muslim, but found that it was not so. Even in the Roman Catholic boarding school, where the children lived in a total environment, saturated with religion, they emerged with entirely mainstream, tolerant attitudes. One of the publisher's reviewers remarked that it was a pity that she hadn't studied a really right-wing Evangelical school, at which I exploded, because actually the school in question was pretty much as "extreme" as you can find in England, drawing all its pupils from a single large congregation, of very conservative Evangelical outlook, and actually you can't tell how right-wing it was from anything that Helen wrote. The students' views weren't particularly right-wing, and so the reviewer supposed that the school can't have been right wing; but THAT'S THE POINT! Schools aren't actually very successful in indoctrinating children. And frankly that school wasn't trying to indoctrinate its students, however theologically conservative it was. None of the Christian schools were. There are quotes in the book from students (from the hours of material that Helen recorded) demonstrating quite nuanced ethical reasoning, and some of the most impressive are from students from very "closed" religious backgrounds.   

One of the by-products of the research was to demonstrate the uselessness of the term "faith schools", which makes it ironic that we had to use it in the title. Helen pointed out that it's not an official term, though it was popularized by the Blair government and happily taken up by journalists; the official term is "schools of a religious character", but actually the category is not meaningful, because the "character" of these schools differs enormously. Helen excluded Church of England schools from her research (which make up the vast majority of "faith schools") because their aim is explicitly different from any others, in that they exist to educate the general population in a way that is congenial to the teachings of the Church of England, not to educate only the children of a specific group of believers. Now, it can be argued that Anglican secondary schools are increasingly educating only the children of believers (or at least attenders, the historian recognises "occasional conformists" here) because their admission policies allow them to select on that basis, and in the current climate they have to select on some basis, but that's not actually the ethos of the school, and so it does not result in a school climate which is narrowly sectarian. As we point out in the preface to the book, the problem there is selection, not faith. So Anglican schools are unlike the rest because they exist for the general population (and the great majority of Anglican schools embrace that wholeheartedly, though I know one locally that emphatically doesn't, which is frankly shameful). Even among the schools that exist to serve a particular religious group, Helen's research makes it clear that there is great variation in character.

The publisher's reviewer also thought it was a shame that Helen hadn't researched a wider range of schools, well, she thought that too, but there are limits to what you can do, and frankly her supervisors were anxious that she had taken on too many as it was. She conducted her research in six schools: state and independent Roman Catholic, state and independent secular (as a "control"), Evangelical independent, and Muslim independent. There were no Evangelical state schools (though an interesting discussion might be had about the academies belonging to the Emmanuel Schools Foundation in the north-east) at the time of research, so that category didn't exist. Helen tried at length to get access to Muslim state schools but was consistently rebuffed, which was a real frustration. In fact, getting into any schools to do research is a major struggle, as any educational researcher will tell you. It's easier to get into independent schools simply because head teachers have more freedom and there is less sense that the staff are so burdened by record-keeping and jumping through hoops that they need to be protected from anything else that makes their lives more complicated and might take up valuable time. Several of the schools used (and I think all those involved in pilots) were acquired through personal connections, which wouldn't have been open to the average PhD student in their twenties. I came out of this thinking that state schools should have an obligation to co-operate with state-funded research (as Helen's was) but that's never going to happen because the Department For Education doesn't actually believe in research. So she regretted not having been able to get into a Muslim state school, and I think she had mixed feelings about not having extended the study to Jewish schools, but realistically it just wasn't possible, as it would have been a whole lot more work, because there would have been a whole new literature to read as well as more children to interview.  

Colleagues said to Helen that she couldn't do that research because it was too sensitive, which only made her more determined, and perhaps one should say that it was all checked by the ethics people at the Institute of Education, so she had covered her back, but there was a feeling that it was dangerous to distinguish between religions (which is why opinion-formers are comfortable with the term "faith schools"). The truth is, though, that it was only in the Muslim school that most students expressed intolerant views, and it is possible to see how the school might encourage or entrench those views. Helen used Social Identity Theory to demonstrate how unsurprising that was in contemporary England, which I thought was interesting rather than inflammatory.