Church group backs calls for ‘fair’ schools admissions

‘PEW JUMPING’ was the subject of BBC1’s Panorama on Monday.

The programme explored the issue of a faith criteria policy for schools admissions as it highlighted parents joining churches to gain school places.

The Accord Coalition, a campaign group for ‘fair’ school admissions policy, is calling on Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan, to remove faith requirements for publicly funded schools.

A YouGov poll commissioned by the Sutton Trust found that six per cent of parents with children at a state funded school admitted to attending church services, when they did not previously, so their child could go to a church school.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, Chair of the Accord Coalition for Inclusive Education, said: “Faith is a personal matter and should not be a means of manipulating places in local state schools.

“No other publicly-funded institution is permitted to make faith a condition of entry. It forces parents of the ‘wrong faith’ or no belief system to either lie or bus their children further away from home.”

Some Church schools have already abolished faith criteria such as St Luke’s church in Kingston. Father Martin Hislop said he kept a spreadsheet of church attendance, and commented that 11 people stopped attending church after the April school allocation process.

“The schools admissions system had broken down. It was not serving our community. The children who the school was supposed to be for - those living close to the school - were not getting places,” he said.

Oxford, Lincoln, Leicester and Southwark Dioceses currently advocate a non-faith discriminatory admissions policy when schools are oversubscribed.