Children are being forced to go to faith schools against their parents’ wishes, writer and broadcaster Baroness Joan Bakewell has said.
The Labour peer raised her concerns around the availability of pupil places in secular settings.
Her comments met with a strong defence of faith schools from Lord Deben, the Tory former cabinet minister John Gummer, who said they were “extremely popular”.
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Speaking in the House of Lords, Lady Bakewell pointed out that 52 per cent of British adults identified themselves as having no religion, while 53 per cent of rural primary schools were faith schools.
‘Lack of places’ in non-faith schools
She said: “Almost three in 10 families in England live in areas where most or all of the closest primary schools are faith schools.
“So what has the government to say about children effectively being forced into faith schools against their parents’ wishes?”
Education minister Lord Agnew said: “Where parents are not offered a place for schools they expressed a preference for, the local authority must offer them a place at another suitable school with places available.”
He highlighted figures that showed 93 per cent of parents got one of their first three choices of secondary school in 2018, and this rose to 97 per cent for primaries.
Lord Deben said: “Faith schools are extremely popular, very often overcrowded because people want their children to go to faith schools.
“Faith schools are a product of the people who first started education in this country, and we ought to be very proud of the Catholic and Anglican schools which serve us.”
Lord Agnew pointed out that the largest number of voluntary-aided schools were Catholic, with 850,000 pupils, of whom one-third are from other faiths or none.
“They do get higher results, on average, compared to the state system and they started educating for free in this country before the government did,” he added.
