‘An unholy mess’: Investigation finds faith schools breaching admissions code

The British Humanist Association (BHA) said dozens of faith schools have been found to have failed to comply with the School Admissions Code by turning children away.

BHA chief executive Andrew Copson said: “It’s a scandal to begin with that these schools are able by law to discriminate against children on the grounds of their parents’ religious beliefs, but the fact that they’re seeking to find further ways to turn children away is disgraceful. Religious selection by state schools is the archaic practice that allows these abuses and must be brought to an end.”

Given that 1.2 million school places in England are subject to religious selection criteria, the number of children who are unfairly losing out on places is significant, the report said.

It lists dozens of ways the code has been found to have been broken, including “widespread issues” with clarity, fairness and objectivity, particularly lack of clarity as to the required frequency and duration of religious worship required, or expecting both parents to attend worship.

A number of schools were found to have broken the Equality Act 2010 in directly discriminating on the basis of race or gender, while some did not make clear how children with special educational needs were admitted.

Many schools did not allow all applicants to be admitted even when under-subscribed, and some considered parents’ occupational or marital status when deciding whether to take pupils. The findings came from an investigation into the matter by the Fair Admissions Campaign (FAC) in 2014. The FAC looked at a random sample of 70 religiously selective secondary schools and concluded that 69 of them broke the code, referring them to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA), which also found widespread non-compliance.

The report, An Unholy Mess, said although not all of the code breaches were upheld by the OSA, there were approximately 1,566 breaches among the 69 schools.

The BHA said that using this figure, it estimated that across the 535 religiously selective secondary schools in England there could be about 12,055 breaches of the School Admissions Code, or 23 breaches per school.

The report makes a series of recommendations, including calling for the code to be revised in a number of areas, and for the establishment of an independent monitoring service to enforce better compliance.

Mr Copson also said the system of religious selection must be abandoned altogether.

“Over a million state school places in England are subject to religious selection and it’s well known that religious schools have been abusing the admissions system for some time,” he added.

“Even so, no-one can have imagined the problem was as widespread as this report shows.”

Professor Ted Cantle, chairman of the Institute of Community Cohesion (iCoCo) Foundation, said: “The system by which religious schools are able to set their own admissions criteria is clearly not fit for purpose.

“Not only does it require each school to be incredibly well-versed in the regulations in this area, it also gives cover, as this report illustrates, to those schools that wish to manipulate their intake and discriminate against individual or certain groups of children.

“This is clearly unacceptable and the system urgently needs to change in order to address it.”