Bethan Marshall: 'We should query this article of faith'

Faith schools are controversial, and becoming more so. Last month, a new law was passed making it possible for faith schools to employ the head and the non-teaching staff from people who share the religious belief of the school. So, anyone from the teaching assistants to the dinner ladies may have to be paid-up members of whatever denomination or religious belief the school demands.

For some people, this is progress. One of the reasons faith schools are said to be so popular – and successful – is that they share a common ethos. Parents who send their children to such schools have to prove that they attend a church or a synagogue or a mosque. Lives at home and at school are in accord. Parents and teachers talk from the same script. From the ideas you get from your mother or father to the assemblies at school, even in the classroom, a common faith prevails.

Certainly, the exam results of faith schools are better, in the main, than your average comprehensive. They get more A* to C grades. Where they have a sixth form, more students are staying on. It seems to work. But the new legislation allowing staff to be employed for their beliefs marks a major break with tradition. Previously, a person's religious inclination had nothing to do with whether or not they got a job. Why should it matter if a teaching assistant working in a Church of England school is an atheist, or a committed Baptist has a job as the school secretary in a Catholic institution? Why, indeed, should it matter if an orthodox Jew is the head of a Christian organisation?

That is why a number of organisations are objecting to the reform. One of them is the think-tank Accord, which has criticised the Government for changing the rules, arguing that what it is doing is positively discriminatory. Accord is made up of a number of organisations that question Labour's approach to faith schools. It includes, typically, the Humanist Society, which attacks the whole nature of such schools, but it also involves, among others, Ekklesia, an evangelical think-tank, and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

Mary Bousted, chair of the ATL, believes that faith schools should operate under the same provisions as all other state schools. Why, she argues, should faith schools, which are either totally or 90 per cent funded by the state, be able to ask what you believe before appointing you when other state schools can't? As long as an individual goes along with the general principles of a faith school, why could they not have a job in one?

Accord's argument goes further. Faith schools draw from more middle-class catchment areas than other state schools, it says. This may mean that their superior exam results are a function of social advantage. Also, many families using local church schools aren't churchgoers themselves.

Several London education authorities, for example, contain two or three – sometimes more – church schools, making it difficult for someone who does not believe to find a place. For Bousted, this involves sacrificing the principles of state education for religious zeal. She feels strongly that all children should be able to attend the local school.

Some academies do accept all-comers. The Vardy Foundation, a Christian organisation in the North-east, has three academies, and a Christian statement of principles of behaviour that parents have to sign. But they don't specify that you have to share the beliefs of the foundation.

In the end, it comes down to whether or not you think the job of the state is to educate, and that this should be separate from what you believe. Making it an article of faith as to whether or not you get a job in a state school seems to be taking us too far in the wrong direction. Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, who chairs Accord, says: "I'm for faith, not faith schools." I couldn't have put it better myself.

The writer is a senior lecturer in education at King's College London