Bishop Talking Sense (I think)

Perhaps the Sacred Triduum wasn't the best of times for saying it, but the Bishop of Oxford's statement that church schools should limit their intake of children of practising Christian parents to 10% was one I virtually cheered. I really support Church schools. We have a parish infant's school and much to my surprise I've enjoyed building up a relationship with the school institutionally, the staff, and the parents as well as the children. It's less an opportunity for spreading the Gospel (though it is that to some extent) than keeping myself in touch with society more widely, especially in terms of how the education system works or fails to work. It doesn't have a restricted admissions policy, and you have to get a long way down the list of groups which are given priority in terms of admission before any sort of Christian commitment gets mentioned. It was the same at the parish school in Lamford, and the school in Hilltop Corner, where I looked after the church for a few months (unusually that was a Church Junior school with secular infant schools as feeders).

But I did check our admissions criteria when I arrived in Swanvale Halt. At Hilltop Corner I got a call from a former parishioner who was trying to get his son into a church school in Uxbridge, St Lawrence's I think although I couldn't swear to it. The family lived almost opposite the church, but he was having to prove that he'd been a regular churchgoer for five years prior to the application, no small task as the family had moved twice in that time. He correctly identified the former vicar of Hilltop Corner so I took his word for it and wrote a letter of support. A couple of weeks later I got another call. 'They say it's not good enough', he said, 'I have to prove my wife has been going to church for five years too.'

Recently I went back to the church I was baptised in, St Mark's Talbot Village in Dorset. I was at a said Eucharist at 8.30 on a Sunday morning, the sort of service that normally attracts twenty or so people if you're lucky. By the time the service began there were well over a hundred people in the church, most of them in their '30s or '40s, some with prams. As the service finished, I headed towards the door, noticing that the 20 or so people aged over 60 were doing the same, while everyone else was going the other way, towards the front of the church. Looking at the service sheet, I saw the notice 'Parents, don't forget to sign the attendance register at each service you come to'. The phenomenon of parents turning up solely so their children will qualify for the parish school is a clerical joke (it was the subject of an episode of Rev, of course), but I'd never seen it so blatantly, shamelessly organised as this. I am told this has been the pattern at St Mark's (and I am not disguising names this time) for twenty years or more, and a vast extension to the church was built simply to accommodate the influx of parents, barely any of whom turn up once their children are safely in the school. The 8.30am service is particularly popular because people know they won't have to sit through a sermon.

I find the entire thing revolting. The Church simultaneously sits in judgement on parents and families, and encourages hypocrisy among them. It degrades the sacraments of Christ's Kingdom by making them entry requirements for something they have nothing to do with. And why is it that we should expect non-Christians happily and supinely to fork out for our sectarian schools when their kids can't even go there? Few things make me so angry.

I'm all for maintaining the ethos of Church schools, but that depends on the governing body and staff rather than the children. The ones I've been involved with have managed it - and of course half the CofE schools in the country are Controlled, not Aided, schools, and so don't control their own admissions policy anyway.