Backing the right team has no place in schools

JOHN McEnroe has a simple way to solve the row he started by saying that Serena Williams would not rank above 700th in the men’s game: have one circuit for both sexes, and see who comes out on top. Great idea. And to make it fair, we’ll pit Serena against

YOU are the Minister for Education and you’ve been asked to look at the question of school admissions. Some schools, it seems, are selecting their pupils based on their parents’ support of professional football clubs.

The majority of schools are Manchester United fans, and will give first dibs on their limited places to children who can produce a valid Man Utd fan club membership card, and who turn up at the school gate in the new ‘away’ strip.

A much smaller proportion of schools are Liverpool devotees, and they are allowed to turn away Man Utd fans, even if they live next door, so as to give their places to the Reds’ followers.

As for the schools run by Bray Wanderers’ fans, they are fewer and farther between but they can prioritise the Wanderers family, no matter how far away from the school they might live.

In all of these schools, club chants are taught, club history is devoutly learned and examined, the names of legendary players are rattled off each morning before lessons, and pilgrimages to Old Trafford, Anfield and the Carlisle Grounds are encouraged.

As Minister for Education, you know that many people are unhappy with this system. You know that a lot of parents don’t know or care the first thing about soccer at all, and are only subscribing to the clubs and going to the matches so as to get their kids into the local school. Then there are others who think sports of all kinds are a load of old rubbish, and who have great difficulty finding schools where nobody gives a flying fig for the offside rule.

And you’ve also got some absolute weirdos who reckon that loyalty to soccer clubs should be a private matter, to be passed on from parent to child by all means, but definitely not something that has any place in an education system. These oddballs believe that all children can be taught about fair play and sporting behaviour and gamesmanship and rules without any mention of soccer whatsoever.

It might seem a stretch to compare religious affiliations with soccer fandom, but if you’re an atheist then it’s six of one, and half dozen of the other.

Either way, it’s about membership and loyalty of a club determining your child’s educational opportunities. As Minister for Education, Richard Bruton has decided to tackle the role of such loyalties in granting school places.

But here, to continue the above analogy, is the way he’s going about it: He’s decided that he’s going to ban all the Manchester United schools from prioritising the children of their supporters, but only them. The Liverpool fans and the Bray Wanderers fans still get to keep their schools and keep preferring their own tribes. Instead of taking soccer out of the schools, in other words, he’s deliberately disadvantaging one club so that the others might flourish.

And instead of taking religion out of our schools, as Minister Bruton has the chance to do right now, he’s decided to disadvantage the Catholic-run schools while allowing the other religions to continue using the education system to grow their supporters’ clubs.

Only Catholic schools, under his proposed legislation, will be prohibited from using religion as a factor in admissions. Church of Ireland, Jewish and Muslim schools may continue to prioritise the children of their own faith.

NOT only is this proposal hugely discriminatory and almost certainly unconstitutional, it’s also missing the whole point of reform. The challenge to equality in schools isn’t with individual religions – it’s with religion, full stop. Religion, like soccer loyalties, should have no place in schools.

Teach children about religion, by all means, but leave the instruction to their parents and their churches.

If parents want their children instructed in their own faith, then they have options: they can do it themselves at home, they can chip in and hire a religion teacher to come in a couple of days a week after school, or they can approach their churches about Sunday school-type tuition in their own time.

If Minister Bruton wants to be the one to reform the school system for good, he’ll take religion out of education. Not just the Premier League behemoths, either, but the whole lot of them.