THE Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, went out of his way last weekend to publicise his continued support for church and other faith schools, in an exclusive interview with a Sunday newspaper.
The Sunday Times said that Mr Balls was seeking to draw a line under the recent row over school admissions, when he told the paper: “I fully support the role faith schools play, and indeed want them to play a wider role.”
During the wide-ranging interview, which touched on Mr Balls’s close relationship with the Prime Minister, and his own political ambitions, the Secretary of State reportedly refused to condemn those parents who are said to attend church to gain places for their children in church schools. Mr Balls said he could understand their desperation to get their children into such schools, and spoke of how impossible it was to judge the nature of another person’s faith.
The interview coincided with his visit to an academy in Leeds, partially sponsored by the joint education board of Bradford and Ripon & Leeds dioceses, which serves an area of exceptional social deprivation.
Mr Balls’s reported remarks are being seen as an important part of the fence-mending exercise undertaken by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, after the minister caused widespread anger among those involved in faith schools, when, on two occasions, he publicly accused voluntary aided schools of unfair admissions practices.
His comments resulted in the widespread pillorying of church schools in some sections of the media. It is understood that he has since expressed his regrets privately, as well as in public.
Tom Peryer, director of education for the diocese of London, who strongly criticised Mr Balls’s use of the survey in an article in the Church Times (Comment, 4 April), and the chairman of the London diocesan board of education, the Archdeacon of Middlesex, the Ven. Stephan Welch, have written to Mr Balls, seeking a meeting to discuss the issues.
In their letter, they express “disappointment and consternation at the way the exercise was publicised”. They also refer to “clear inaccuracies in some of the judgements made about non-compliance and the subsequent naming and shaming of schools, when, in fact, some were not guilty as charged”.
It is understood that Church House education officials are to meet the Chief Adjudicator for Schools, Philip Hunter, later this month, to draw up parameters for further co-operation. |
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