Newsline 27 September 2013

Opinion poll shows big opposition to faith schools

News | Tue, 24th Sep 2013

A new, large scale opinion poll shows that a majority of people in Great Britain are against Government funding of faith schools.

Conducted for the Westminster Faith Debates by Yougov among more than 4,000 people, the survey also reveals that parents choose to send their children to these schools because of academic standards, and not because they have a religious ethos.

The main findings are:

• Only a third of the adult population, irrespective of voting intention, approve of state funding for faith schools. Nearly half actively disapprove, and the rest say they 'don't know'.
• Surprisingly, young people are more positive about faith schools than older people. When asked if the government should provide funding for faith schools, 18-24 year olds are in favour by 43% to 36%, compared with those aged 40-59 who are opposed by 47% to 28%.
• Only a quarter of people who might have a school-age child say they would send him or her to a faith school.
• Overwhelmingly, people say that academic standards matter most in choosing a school. Values and religion count for far less. The question was: "If you were thinking about if you were planning on sending your child to a school in your local area, which two or three, if any, would influence your choice? (Please tick up to three)" In response, 70% said they would choose a school on the basis of its academic standard; 23% said they would choose on basis of ethical standards; 5% said they would choose on the basis of giving a "grounding in faith tradition"; and only 3% because for "transmission of belief about God".
• A majority of people don't object to faith schools discriminating on religious grounds in their admissions. (49% thought it was acceptable, with 38% saying it wasn't and 13% "don't know".)
• There isn't majority support for reforming proposals to make faith schools more mixed by admitting a quota from a different faith or none. The question was: Some people have suggested that all faith schools should admit a proportion of students who follow a different religion or no religion at all. Do you think…?" 23% think "faith schools should have to adopt this policy", while 30% think it is up to the school to decide whether they adopt this policy; 11% think it is better for faith schools to admit only people of the same faith and 26% say there should be no faith schools at all.
• When asked whether the Government should fund "faith schools", 32% said they should while 45% said they shouldn't (the rest didn't know). When broken down by religion, the only kind of "faith school" that has a margin of support is Church of England (4%).
• There is a margin of opposition of 7% against funding Catholic schools, 33% against Jewish and 40% against Islamic and Hindu school. Young people are more positive than older people about funding non-Christian faith schools – e.g. 32% of 18-24 year olds support funding for Islamic schools compared with 16% of 40-59 year olds.

Linda Woodhead, the academic who designed the poll commented: "In abstract debates about faith schools people talk about religion. Secular activists oppose faith schools on grounds of religious indoctrination and discrimination, while religious people support them because of the faith element. But our poll shows that when choosing a school most parents aren't concerned with religion. They are concerned with academic standards. So long as parents want their children to get the best qualifications, so long as politicians of left and right support parental choice and high academic standards, and so long as faith schools maintain these standards, the debate can rage, but faith schools are not going away."

Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said: "These comments do not address why faith schools generally have higher standards: broadly because of their unique ability to operate religiously selective admissions policies, which are known to work against children from less affluent backgrounds. Were that privilege to be taken away, the preference for faith schools would soon evaporate."

Non-Muslim women teachers being forced to wear hijabs at Derby free school

News | Fri, 20th Sep 2013

The Derby Telegraph is reporting that a Muslim free school that was set up as being "based on Muslim principles, but not as a Muslim school" is now demanding that women teachers sign new contracts obliging them to wear hijabs — whether they are Muslim or not.

Staff at the Al-Madinah School are raising their concerns with their unions — including complaints that girl pupils are being made to sit at the back of the classroom, whether or not they can see the board.

The Derby Telegraph reports that two women, who refused to comment, were spotted taking off their hijabs as soon as they were out of sight of the school during the lunch hour. The paper has not been able to get a comment from anyone connected with the school.

The school is already under investigation from the Education Funding Agency for alleged irregularities over grant funding. It is understood that the new contracts for staff also include rules about not taking non-halal food into the school and not being allowed to wear jewellery.

Nick Raine, regional NUT officer, said he was "very worried" about the school and the education of the 200 children there. He told the Telegraph: "It's one thing to have a dress code which we can challenge and quite another to build it into a contract. There are worries over practices concerning the discrimination between male and female pupils in the school."

When the school was originally set up in 2012, the then head teacher Andrew Cutts-McKay, said that he aimed for half the pupils to be Muslim and half not. He assured parents that "the timetable will be flexible with time for Islamic teaching but pupils will be able to opt out of this and there will be a chance to learn about other faiths". Mr Mckay left his post after less than a year.

Sue Arguile, branch secretary of Derby National Union of Teachers, said: "This school was first launched as based on Muslim principles and not as a Muslim school. If the school is not sticking to the original reasons behind why it was set up, then it does call into question whether public money is being used properly and for its intended purpose."

According to the school's website, one of the school's distinct features is the offering of an Islamic studies program, which includes Quran reading. The school also says it teaches Islamic jurisprudence, oneness of God and Islamic beliefs. Daily prayers and weekly religious assembly also takes place.

Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, said: "This school is due to be inspected soon. We hope that the Government will ensure that it is not drifting away from its original promises and towards exclusivity. This is the danger with this free school system — promises are being made that are not worth the paper they're printed on."

Source Derby Telegraph

More revelations about the Derby Muslim free school

News | Mon, 23rd Sep 2013

More revelations have been revealed by The Sunday Times about the Al-Madinah school in Derby — Britain's first Muslim free school.

As previously reported, concerns have been raised that female staff are being forced to wear head coverings, even if they aren't Muslim. However, it has now emerged that lessons are routinely scrapped to make way for prayers, that singing is banned and children are prevented from reading fairy stories (because witches are un-Islamic). It has also been alleged that the original head teacher and his deputy were "bullied" out of their jobs.

Andrew Cutts-McKay resigned from his role as head teacher in August. His deputy, Suzanne Southerland, had already resigned in June. Both are understood to have been side-lined by members of the school's trust, who are predominantly Muslim. The school strongly denies the allegations.

The Sunday Times said that its sources had revealed that since it opened, the school had become extremely religious. Girls are made to sit at the back of classrooms away from boys and some teachers claim that during Ramadan lessons are sacrificed to prayer sessions. Teachers claim the children's education is suffering.

One anonymous staff member told the paper: "They have three prayers every day, an hour of Koranic studies and an hour of Islamic studies as well as Arabic. They are not following the national curriculum, there isn't enough time."

Hard-line Islamism seems to be the ethos of the school with a strict dress code, a ban on stringed instruments and on singing.

The whistle-blowing staff member said: "When teaching children the alphabet, you could not associate the letter 'p' with pig. We couldn't teach fairy tales to children nor play them any ordinary music. Any music played has to be Islamic-related. We are not allowed to have guitars on site because stringed instruments are forbidden in Islam. And children are also forbidden to sing unless the singing is to do with Islamic faith songs. Everything that teachers want to teach children has to be approved by Islamic scholars on site."

The source also revealed that girls always had to give way to the boys, even on social occasions: "On a school trip to Drayton Manor Park zoo girls queued up for all the rides, only to have to cede their places to boys and male teachers when they got to the front of the queue."

Another staff member said that lunch and break times had been extended to give more time for prayer.

The school issued a statement rejecting the claims. "Al-Madinah is a pioneering school, the first of its type in the whole country, and not everyone wants it to succeed. Unfortunately politics have been allowed to interfere with education."

Sources close to Cutts-McKay and Southerland told The Sunday Times that the two former school leaders, who are not Muslim, had made official complaints alleging bullying to the Department for Education. Other teachers have raised concerns about the way the school is being run and about employment contracts.

The revelation comes as the DfE continues its investigation into the school's financial management, which was expected to report last week. The department said the report would be "issued in due course".

Cutts-McKay's attempts to stop the alleged bullying against Southerland by the trust's members — which reportedly went on for at least two months — eventually led to him resigning for the same reasons. He has since accepted a post as head teacher at another free school.

The trust has refused to comment but Stuart Wilson, the interim head teacher at al-Madinah who began his job on September 5, defended the school against charges of bulling. He said there was nothing in staff contracts requiring women to wear the hijab or a headscarf. However, he added: "The expectation for female staff, raised in adverts and interviews, is that the head is covered while on site. To date, no complaint has been raised with the governing body relating to female staff wearing the hijab or headscarf."

The crisis at the flagship free school emerged as three more Muslim free schools opened, in Blackburn, Bolton and east London, bringing the total number of Muslim free schools now open to five.

The Sunday Times has discovered that more than a dozen other applications to convert private Islamic schools into state-funded free schools have been vetoed by the DfE.

It has asked the schools inspectorate, Ofsted, to conduct about 20 emergency inspections over the last few years into private Islamic schools, some of which require girls as young as 11 to wear burqas.

Sources within Ofsted said inspectors had grave concerns about some of the schooling they had seen.

A Department for Education spokesman told the Sunday Times: "These allegations are very worrying. The DfE will not hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to prevent religious intolerance or any breaking of the rules for free schools."

Terry Sanderson. President of the National Secular Society, said: "I really don't know what it will take for the Department for Education to admit that extreme religious interests are taking full advantage of the free school system.

"Maybe the people who are running these schools consider it normal to endanger children's education by putting so much emphasis on religion, but the rest of us are very worried. These schools are literally free to do as they please, and religious extremists exploit that freedom to the limit. And all at the taxpayers' expense.

"For the sake of the children, Ofsted must deal with this school — and all the others that have fallen into the hands of dubious religious interests — and quickly. Unfortunately, there is no political will to do anything other than make the situation worse by handing over more and more schools to people who say one thing at the approval stage and then do something entirely different when the school opens."

See also: Teacher forced out of Al-Madinah school because she wouldn't wear hijab

Why is the state funding the indoctrination of children in schools with dangerous ideologies?

Opinion | Thu, 26th Sep 2013

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, made a statement last week about the Nairobi shopping mall massacre which almost beggars belief. He said:

"These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion – they don't. They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world. They don't represent Islam or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world."

Nobody but a politician scrabbling around for votes could possibly imagine that separating Christians from Muslims and then killing the Christians was not an act related to religion. It might be the extreme end of religion, but it was a religious act – pure and simple.

The danger is that in denying it in such extreme circumstances it makes it easier for him to deny it in other instances.

Last week we were reporting on the goings-on at a Derby state school with an Islamic ethos. What emerged — girls treated as inferior to boys; women teachers of all religions made to wear head coverings; ham sandwiches banned; no stringed instruments on the premises; no singing (except Islamic prayers) and the whole curriculum overwhelmed by religious studies and praying — is part of the same pattern of denial.

To pretend that such a school is not divisive is just plain foolish. Some educationists actually argue that such schools increase integration and social cohesion.

But Mr Cameron, and his acolyte Michael Gove, intend to increase the number of these schools. They seem completely unconcerned that Islamic schools with such an unbalanced emphasis on religion pose a potential danger to us all. Our politicians appear to make no connection between this inculcation of ultra-orthodox religion with the growth of religious extremism.

How can children raised in this "ethos" have a balanced view of the world? How does telling them that they are the true believers and everyone else is an infidel help them respect their fellow citizens?

How have we allowed state schools to fall into the hands of people with such a sinister agenda of indoctrination?

This coalition government is complacent about it, but unfortunately so would be a Labour government. No-one in parliament is prepared to even question the desirability of swamping this nation's children in religion while they are at school.

By permitting the extremists and the zealots — determined and well-organised as they are — to install their agenda in our schools, we are storing up big trouble for the not-too-distant future.

The answer is not just to dismantle Muslim schools, but the whole ridiculous "faith school" system.