ABSTRACT
Few debates in education raise such strong feelings in Britain as faith schools. In a recent television documentary on More 4, Richard Dawkins lambasted faith schools as a ‘menace’, engaged in the ‘wicked’ practice of ‘forcing religious beliefs on their pupils’ (Leach 2010). Elsewhere he has described them as a location of ‘real child abuse’ (Dawkins 2002a: 9). Others have dismissed them as ‘causing apartheid’ (Toynbee 2001), ‘brainwashing’ children (Grayling 2007a) and ‘helping to foster terrorists’ (David Canter, quoted in MacLeod 2008). Despite such heated opposition the British government continues to invest in faith schools, apparently in the belief that they deliver what parents want: high levels of academic achievement, and coherent and effective moral guidance. Faith schools are generally popular with parents and many are oversubscribed. Public opinion polls confirm the strength of feeling about faith schools, but give mixed messages. In a Guardian poll in February 2009, 60 per cent of respondents agreed that ‘children benefit from a faith-based education’ and 69 per cent of those with school-age children supported ‘a religious ethos at school’ (Curtis 2009), but an earlier poll for the same newspaper found 64 per cent of respondents agreeing that ‘the government should not be funding faith schools of any kind’ (Taylor 2005).
