After a week where the faith schools debate was again prominent in Parliament, and the Church of England hosted a major conference on the role of faith education, an article in The Times considered the changes since the 1902 Education Act and the present day.

Let all churches enjoy the freedom to teach
Credo by Stephen Plant
 
It is coincidental that the Government’s Education and Inspections Bill comes a century after the 1906 Education Act, but events leading to that Act are instructive for anyone concerned about this Bill — especially with regard to the role of faith communities as educational providers.

In 1906, on the back of non-conformist church opposition to the 1902 Tory Education Act, the Liberal Party won a landslide victory. The 1902 Education Act raised hackles because it taxed people who were not members of the Church of England to pay for schools where only Church of England members could teach, and where children baptised as Anglicans were given priority. Methodists and others had limited right of access to Church of England schools in spite of the fact that their parents paid for them through the rates.

It was not that opponents objected to religion in schools. What they feared was the Church of England being granted a franchise to educate the nation as Anglicans. One leading nonconformist Christian, playing on suspicions that Anglicans were really Papists in disguise, coined a catchy slogan to describe the 1902 Act as “Rome on the Rates”.

The depth of feeling roused by the 1902 Education Act makes the present debate look like a storm in a teacup. A National Passive Resistance Committee was formed and by 1906 170 men — mostly Methodists in rural communities with only one school — were jailed for refusing to pay their rates to fund Church of England schools. The row soured relations between the churches for decades.

If passed, the current education Bill is likely to make it easier for new faith-based schools to be built. In a lecture this week Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, announced that the Church of England plans to increase by 110 the number of its secondary schools. He also pledged to adopt standard criteria for admissions for the Church of England’s existing 4,700 schools.

So should I follow in the nonconformist traditions of my Methodist forebears and resist the increase in Church schools? In some ways the present situation is quite different from a century ago. Church schools have changed. I do not fear, as nonconformists did a century ago, that my children (one of whom begins school in September) will be taught that Anglicans have a monopoly on truth.

I want three things for him: a school where he will flourish, where faith traditions will be treated sympathetically, and where he will receive education of a high standard. Unlike my forebears I’m confident he will get all three at his local Anglican primary school. The issues surrounding Church schools are therefore no longer to do with a fear of aggressive sectarianism. They are about educational standards and integration into a pluralist society.

Yet in one important way the issues surrounding faith-based education are similar to those facing legislators in 1902 and 1906. Today no less than a century ago, attitudes to religion are closely bound up in educational philosophy and practice. No philosophy of education is free of ideology. If as a parent I think faith is fundamental, why should I not be free to shape my child’s education according to a religious ethos rather than a secular ideology to which I don’t subscribe? This is precisely why Article 26 in the UN Charter of Human Rights guarantees parents the right to choose the kind of education their children receive.

Education goes to the heart of one’s deepest convictions. To make this choice real as well as theoretical I want there to be more faith schools — even if it is other Churches than my own that build them — so that every parent can exercise the choice the UN Charter aspires to give them.

Stephen Plant teaches theology at Cambridge.