ABSTRACT
Values in education are manifested in different ways. They may be explicitly taught as part of some deliberate programme or stated in the goals set out in a school mission statement. They may be transmitted as an aspect of a school’s ‘ethos’ or hidden curriculum or, more implicitly still, institutionalised in the very fabric of the education system. In the case of grant-maintained (GM) status the values have been those championed by what was a reforming Conservative government, suspicious of local education authorities (LEAs), admiring of the mechanisms of the market place and apparently anxious to give more power to parents whilst expanding central controls over the curriculum and tightening up compliance to its agenda through inspection and the publication of tables measuring school performance against its own criteria. The debate about ‘opting out’, the term used to describe the process by which schools left their LEAs to take on GM status, and about fee-paying independent schools ‘opting in’ to take state funding through becoming GM, however, was particularly beset by questions of the morality involved, especially in the case of schools with a religious affiliation. This chapter makes use of a variety of sources, including a survey of all the Catholic GM schools in England, an interview with a bishop at the centre of such a debate in his own diocese, and a number of documents, to analyse the issues and to derive insights about the processes involved. These matters, it is argued, have a more general relevance in understanding the relationship between church and state and have implications for those of other faiths who may be implicated in similar controversies.
