We need our faith schools to unite not divide us

David Cohen
13 Jul 2009

Last week's Appeal Court ruling that the JFS school must admit a 12-year-old boy barred essentially because his mother is "not Jewish enough" - behaviour the court judged "unlawfully racist" - will be music to the ears of those who, like myself, have long felt that state-funded faith schools have no business ruling on who is Jewish, Christian or Muslim.

My daughter attended Brent-based JFS for seven years until 2008 and I am an enthusiastic advocate of the school - but I am also aware that faith schools which are state-funded need to justify their existence. For a parent, they offer a welcome layer of choice between (often poor) local state schools and fee-paying independent schools. But do faith schools foster separation or inclusion?

Superficially it would appear the former because the children only mix with others of the same religion. But in fact good faith schools strive to encourage tolerance and respect for other faiths.

In our case, we sent our daughter to JFS because the local state primary which she'd attended paid lip service to being "multicultural" but was Christian by default, and we did not want her to grow up feeling awkward about her Jewish identity.

As it turns out, JFS was outstanding - nourishing the children's intellect, morality and emotional wellbeing - except in one surprising respect. The way it teaches Judaism and Israel studies is, for many students, too conservative and dogmatic.

The open debate so encouraged within the secular curricula - often taught by teachers of other faiths - was sadly lacking when it came to Jewish studies, and the children rebelled.

We had sent our daughter to JFS because we wanted to foster her Jewish identity within a multicultural society, and although the school achieved that in a cultural sense, ironically it did more to turn her off her religion than any other school could.

She and her friends came out with more of an appreciation and toleration for other faiths than their own because they would not accept religious propaganda being rammed down their throats.

This point illustrates an essential paradox within many faith schools: they typically offer a superior education in secular subjects but the religious side is often controlled by zealots whose agenda is too narrow.

If this discriminatory side of a faith school dominates, and if it is reinforced by a home life that is lived within an ethnic enclave, you have a recipe for separation and, worryingly, perhaps even extremism.

Yet if the religious education is balanced by a home life within a multicultural neighbourhood, and by a healthy sceptical attitude by the students, you arguably create individuals with a strong sense of identity who feel confident to mix.

Too often, though, it's the religious zealots who are hegemonic when it comes to the admissions policies of faith schools.

And so, although the Appeal Court ruling will make many Jews cringe in embarrassment that JFS has been found guilty of racial discrimination against a child whose Italian Catholic mother did not convert to Judaism in an Orthodox synagogue, it will be welcomed by many as a necessary corrective to their power.

But the judges' ruling does create an interesting dilemma that goes beyond the political and religious issue of "Who is a Jew?" What will they say if, next time, an application against unlawful exclusion is brought by the parents of a child of a different faith entirely?

How involved are the law lords prepared to get in rewriting the admissions criteria of faith schools?

By ruling that a faith school cannot exclude children on the basis of "ethnicity", they could be opening the floodgates: taken to its logical extreme, that could do away with the whole concept of a faith school.