Praying for success? Faith schools and school choice in East London

Abstract

The article discusses research undertaken in East London into perceptions of educational choice amongst a group of middle-class parents drawn from all the main ethnic groups. It focuses on the way in which faith schools are slowly being drawn into the mainstream discourse of choice and how many groups are now beginning to regard such schools as their fall back of choice when it becomes apparent that they are unlikely to get their child into a preferred non-selective secondary school (and increasingly a preferred primary school). This mainstreaming of faith schooling is driven by the attractions to such parents of these schools’ ethos, their perception of them as having a favourable social mix of ‘people like us’ and their generally high record of attainment. It is argued that this increase in demand for faith schools is leading to changes in the recruitment patterns away from primarily faith-based criteria to ones based around a more diffuse (and middle-class) ethos and educational potential. In addition, where such schools once served a wider East London geographical area, there is some evidence that they are now becoming more focused around a local ‘catchment area’ in ways similar to the same popular non-selective schools to which the same group of parents aspired.

Introduction

It has long been recognised in the geographical literature that access to high quality education, medical care and housing are of great importance in terms of social welfare, life chances, and social reproduction in the broadest sense (Smith, 1974, Pinch, 1997, Massey et al., 1991). Without access to such facilities (as well as to jobs, shops and transport) households struggle to maintain a reasonable quality of life. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the issue of geographical inequalities in access to finance and banking facilities and basic provision such as shops (e.g. Leyshon et al., 2008, Clarke et al., 2004) and inequalities in housing and health provision and health care have been of continuing importance (Curtis, 2004). As part of this focus on the role of spatial inequality in the reproduction of social inequalities, there has also been a recent development of interest in the geography of inequalities in education provision and attainment (Butler and Hamnett, 2007; Burgess and Briggs, 2010, Harris and Johnston, 2008, Gulson, 2011) which has been intensified by the stress given to the importance of improving educational attainment and the ‘widening choice’ agenda promoted by both British New Labour and Conservative-led Coalition governments. Since the 1980s successive governments have imposed greater performance monitoring and assessment systems on schools which has had the effect of increasing competition for places at high performing non-selective schools. In the 1960s and 1970s the emphasis in educational policy making was on reducing inequalities through – for example – the identification of Educational Priority Areas, which pumped additional resources into socially-deprived areas, and the replacement of the binary system of selective grammar schools and non-selective secondary modern schools by mixed comprehensives. In recent years however, the drive to improve educational standards has led to increasing competition for places at popular schools and, given the limited supply of such places, the result has commonly been the allocation of places on the basis of distance to school. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s geographical inequalities were something to be overcome by social policy, there is now a tendency for geography to be seen as the unit of allocation and ‘rationing by postcode’ has become increasingly the accepted norm – in relation to school choice the ‘distance from school’ measure is an indication of this.

In a situation where more affluent parents can buy access to popular schools via the housing market, this serves to amplify rather than diminish equality of opportunity at the expense of ‘parity of esteem’. It is our argument that there is a distinct geography to the inequalities identified by sociologists of education (Butler and Hamnett, 2011, Ball, 2008 for a summary of the sociological analysis). In a society where educational credentials are becoming ever more important in the competition for jobs and social position, geographical inequalities in educational provision, access and attainment are playing an increasing role in the reproduction of social inequalities more generally. This suggests that, given its role in social reproduction, the geography of education is becoming more important. Where you live influences, to a large degree, what you have access to, and hence life chances more generally.

Yet, during these decades of rapid educational change, one part of the system has remained largely intact, and that is what is termed ‘faith’ schools which largely recruit on the basis of religious faith, belonging and attendance. These have primarily been Church of England or Roman Catholic schools, with a sprinkling of Jewish and Muslim schools. Many (but not all) have had a good reputation in terms of the quality of education they offer and, not surprisingly, some of these schools have become increasingly popular with parents trying to ensure a good education for their children in the face of fears about school quality, particularly in inner city areas – notably London. In recent years, however, growing pressure has been placed on such schools to widen the social basis of their recruitment, partly to ensure that they are not engaged in closet social selection under the guise of faith criteria. Faith schools thus represent an important, if relatively under studied, aspect of the wider issue of the geography of educational inequality of opportunity, attainment and choice. In so doing, they have increasingly been seen to contribute to the continued inequality of social reproduction in general (Allen and West, 2009, Allen and West, 2011). We argue in this paper that there is evidence in East London – an area which has had a growing school-age population with significant numbers of non Christian, often Asian, and aspirational parents – that the faith schools which once served a non-geographic sub-regional catchment are increasingly coming to serve more narrowly-defined geographic catchment areas in which perceptions of good behaviour standards, the reproduction of social privilege and educational attainment rather than religious faith have become their main attraction.

In this paper, we examine the ways in which faith schools are becoming incorporated into parental strategising over school choice in East London; specifically we explore some of the consequences for faith schools of the ‘school choice agenda’ in an area in which there are relatively few well-performing schools. This has put huge pressure on the relatively few highly popular schools such that aspirational parents are forced increasingly to cast their net wider in search of schools they believe to be acceptable for their children. We suggest that faith schools are frequently being considered alongside local authority maintained schools as part of the mainstream ‘choice agenda’ – both at primary and secondary level. Parents considering such schools are not restricted to faith members who want their children to be brought up in a religious tradition nor even those baptised in the faith and prepared to renew their faith observance but increasingly include those who have never belonged to or indeed, in some instances, come from a different faith background.

This paper is primarily informed by an analysis of parental views derived from in-depth interviews undertaken in East London. The methodology for the study on which it is based is discussed at the end of this section. The paper is divided into six main sections. Following this first introductory section, the second section considers the ethnic composition of East London and the distribution of faith-based schools; the third section looks at the difficulties of getting into faith schools and some of the ways in which our respondents managed this challenge and goes onto examine the role of faith, values and standards in school choice. Section four considers the link between faith schools, social divisiveness and ethnic segregation whilst the fifth section discusses strategies adopted by parents for getting their children into faith schools. In the sixth and concluding section, we suggest that increasing numbers of middle-class parents view faith schools as an attractive alternative to non-faith schools partly because of their stress on social and moral values and standards of behaviour, partly because of their higher attainment and partly because of what is perceived as their acceptable social mix of class and ethnic backgrounds. In this sense, there is a growing convergence between the ethics of faith schooling and the ethos of attainment which, coupled with the increasing pressure on faith schools to ‘up their game’ is leading to them being considered, and considering themselves, as part of a mainstream menu of choice.

The explicit focus on choice began with the 1988 Education Reform Act passed by Margaret Thatcher’s government which, inter alia, gave parents the right to choose a school (or to be more accurate, to express a preference for a school) within or even outside their own local educational authority (LEA). This was what the middle classes had long been doing but the 1988 Act formally recognised the practice as a right for all parents. By transforming a discretionary activity by well-informed individuals into a universal right, it ran the danger of swamping the system as increasing numbers of parents pursued a limited number of places in popular and/or well-performing schools (the two not necessarily always being the same). That is what happened in some parts of the country – particularly London. The alternatives to the local school have increasingly become focused around fees (for private schooling) or faith (for state-funded but religiously-run schools) – and, at secondary level where they exist, academically-selective state-funded ‘grammar’ schools.

The New Labour government, which came to power in 1997, focused many of its energies on enhancing ‘consumer’ choice, as part of its approach to drive up the quality of the services provided by state providers – notably in health and education. In education a key element was placed on the annual league tables of pupil attainment and sanctions were applied against so-called ‘failing schools’. While the extension of school choice may be laudable in principle, the extent to which pro-choice policies lead to greater real choice of school for parents (rather than just expressions of preference) or have ‘driven up’ standards is doubtful. In areas such as London it is largely a device to ration access to the limited number of popular schools – by offering choice suppliers are also able to deny it on a systematic basis so replacing the more ad hoc and informal basis on which schools previously tended to operate. Where demand exceeds supply, school allocation is increasingly determined by the application of a ‘distance to school’ criterion with the consequence that many parents in London (33%) do not get their first choice of school unless they live well within its catchment area (Butler and Hamnett, 2010, Burgess et al., 2009, Ball, 2008, Gorad et al., 2003). Given the classed nature of local housing markets, geography thus becomes a mechanism for perpetuating inter-generational class segregation.

The range of school provision varies from area to area – between the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, within England and within a large metropolitan area such as London. Within England, at both primary and secondary school level, parents are confronted with a range of options which fall into three main categories: state non-denominational schools, voluntary-aided denominational (or faith schools) and private, fee paying schools.¹ The great majority of non fee-paying secondary schools are local community or comprehensive schools² with just under a fifth (18.5%) of secondary school places in England being provided by ‘faith’ schools of one kind of another, most of which are Roman Catholic (10%) or Church of England (6.2%). At primary level the percentage of faith schools (37%) is double, of which approximately three quarters are run by the Church of England (26%) – see Table 1 (DCFS, 2010). In both cases, the funding primarily comes from the LEA; the (mainly church-appointed) governors however are responsible for the governance of the schools and – in most but not all instances – the admissions policy in consultations with a range of stakeholders (Allen and West, 2009, West and Allen, 2008). The remaining categories of state schools are those that select by academic testing and – increasingly – Academies³ which, whilst not controlled by the LEA, often select on the same basis of home to school distance applied by their respective LEAs to their non-selective schools. In terms of selection therefore, parents’ chances of getting a chosen school for a child depend – crudely – on place, prayer or payment.

Faith schools are therefore a distinctive group in that, whilst primarily LEA funded, they are not LEA run nor – in most cases – subject to the same universalistic selection process. Whereas opting for a faith school might once have been seen as a primarily faith-based decision, this is now less often the case. Choosing a faith school (commonly described by our respondents as ‘going the faith route’) is now often considered as another item on the ‘à la carte’ menu of school choice; such a choice may now no longer be primarily about faith, but rather about trying to access schools which are thought to offer a preferable set of values, educational ethos and outcomes.⁴

This is particularly the case in socially and ethnically-mixed urban areas where the school quality – especially at primary school level – is often tacitly evaluated (by the middle classes at least) according to whether the parents are people like themselves (Butler and Robson, 2003, Vowden, 2010). In areas where the number of such aspirational parents is not matched by the equivalent availability of suitable school places and there is a shortage of popular schools relative to demand, competition to gain places is often intense and scarce places are normally allocated on the basis of distance to school (Butler and Hamnett, 2010, Hamnett and Butler, 2011). Frequently, in such situations, the reality of school choice is that pupils are allocated places at their local school, irrespective of preferences. For parents who live in close proximity to a popular school, this may not pose a problem, but for parents whose nearest schools are seen to be less acceptable, the issue becomes a matter of considerable concern.

It is in this context that faith schools can form part of a wider set of educational possibilities in which issues of faith become inextricably entwined with those of educational outcomes and social milieu, in which the unspoken reality is the ethnic and class background of the pupils. Consequently, and perhaps partly because they attract parents articulating similar aspirations (Raco, 2009), faith schools can be a refuge for those seeking to avoid primary and secondary schools that are both ‘too mixed’ (usually meaning dominated by one or more minority ethnic groups) or ‘insufficiently mixed’ (often meaning too white working class) (Butler et al., forthcoming). Thus, the faith option often reflects a wish to avoid certain kinds of school (defined by the class and ethnic characteristics of their intake) in which the social, moral and educational offering of faith schools matches quite closely the secular aspirations of many such parents. Because they are primarily state-funded, getting one’s child into such a school neither incurs a huge financial penalty nor does it attract the opprobrium of buying educational privilege, which still matters in some areas of middle-class settlement. Allen and West (2009), in their work on religious schools in London, have shown that overall they educate pupils from more affluent backgrounds with a higher level of prior attainment than pupils from non-religious schools. They suggest that this is indicative of a degree of selection which may have led to a ‘distortion of mission’ for some religious schools many of which were originally set up to educate the poor.

However choosing a faith school is not the same as being successful in getting in, because such schools have traditionally required evidence of belief and practice on the part of the parents and children. While this can sometimes be stretched (particularly in the case of the Church of England), it can - given the level of demand in East London for good secondary schools – be difficult, if not impossible, for children who are not christened and raised in the Catholic faith to get into Roman Catholic schools (we discuss this in section five below). This is beginning to change, at least in some areas, as such schools respond to the changing demographics (particularly in respect of ethnicity) of their areas by allocating a proportion of their intake to those from other faith backgrounds who subscribe to a general ethos which is compatible with their religious one.⁵ The consequence is that faith schools are now increasingly seen as forming part of a wider set of schooling options alongside mainstream non-selective, selective and fee-paying schools particularly in areas where it is difficult to get into what might otherwise be a first choice local school and where there is a large non-Christian school age population.

East London consists of a wedge of some seven boroughs extending east and north east of the City of London out to the periphery of Greater London – defined as the M25 Motorway that circles London; it embraces the full range of borough and school attainment from the educationally high-performing suburban boroughs of Redbridge and Havering to a mix of lower-performing boroughs (see Fig. 1). The area is one of the most ethnically-mixed in London and includes the inner London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets which have some of the highest proportions of ethnic minorities in Britain (where over 80% of pupils are from ethnic minority backgrounds in 2009) to suburban Havering and Barking & Dagenham which remain predominantly white although even in Havering which had the lowest (5%) non-white resident population in London in 2001, 17% of the secondary school population was drawn from minority ethnic backgrounds. Whilst the area has undergone rapid social change over recent decades, it remains the poorest quarter of London with a higher proportion of those who are economically inactive as well as those in working-class and intermediate occupations than any other part of London. It therefore has fewer middle and particularly upper-middle-class residents although there have been high rates of upward mobility into the middle classes in recent years by those from long settled minority ethnic groups many of whom have moved out to the suburban borough of Redbridge because of its attractive schools (Butler and Hamnett, 2007, Butler and Hamnett, 2011, Hamnett and Butler, 2011).

It is this combination of ethnic and class change which, when taken together, has helped to structure the geography of school choice in East London – with parents often influenced by the class/ethnic structure of potential schools when making decisions about where to send their children and Local Education Authorities forced to employ measures to ration choice to popular schools in a situation in which one third of parents did not get their first choice of secondary school across London (Department for Children et al., 2010, BBC, 2011). Faith schools have been central rather than peripheral to these perceptions of ‘social mix’ which underlie decisions about school choice although, as we will show, this has played out differently in different areas – see sections two and five below.

There is a range of parents, from the religious who want their children to have a Christian education to those who simply want access to what they regard as ‘good’ schools and are prepared to do what it takes – including, if necessary, re-embracing their forgotten faith – if it will permit their children access to well-performing schools. Faith schools, particularly at secondary level, tend not to be evenly located geographically and this is the case in East London which means that traditionally they have recruited from a far wider geographic base than non-selective state schools. Therefore, the geographical location of faith schools across East London and the largely faith-based nature of the selection process have often enabled parents with the necessary religious ‘assets’, particularly those living in the more deprived areas, to educate their children ‘out of borough’ so freeing them, as they might see it, from the ‘social contamination’ of their local schools. Finally, in areas with large proportions of non-Christian pupils, which is increasingly the case in East London, the imposition of quotas for accepting a proportion of such children who do not meet the faith requirements is becoming more common. Taken together, this has led to faith schools having become much more incorporated into the aspirational culture of school choice in East London.

Our research was based on an analysis of the Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) and National Pupil Database (NPD), analysis of school attainment data, a questionnaire survey of 300 parents in five study areas in located in Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Redbridge (Fig. 2) and in-depth interviews with 94 of the surveyed parents regarding their educational experiences and perceptions.⁶ We defined middle class broadly and did not distinguish between those owning or renting the property in which they lived; Table 2 indicates the broad characteristics of the sample.