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The Bishop of Warrington, the Rt Revd David Jennings, scored a spectacular own goal this week, when he went on Radio 4 to justify the Church’s manoeuvrings in the matter of the Blue Coat grammar school in Liverpool. The row is over a request by the diocese of Liverpool for a government ruling on whether one of the city’s most successful schools is, in fact, a Church of England school, though the school’s head claims that the Church has not invested in Blue Coat or visited it in more than 40 years.
The Bishop ought to have realised that he was on a sticky wicket when he heard the way the interviewer set the story up. One of the country’s highest-performing grammar schools is resisting an attempt by the C of E to take it over, listeners heard. Governors said the “hostile” attempt by the diocese to get its hands on the school was “despicable”. One newspaper had even referred to the Church as being involved in “an Evangelical land grab” for a school that holds valuable property.
The chairman of the governors tersely set out the case for listeners. Blue Coat reflected the city’s multicultural diversity (a third of its students are Roman Catholic, a quarter Anglican, and the rest Sikhs, Jews, and Muslims). It was oversubscribed, and got better results than any local church school. Its staff, governors, parents, and children wanted it to stay that way.
Then came the Bishop. When asked why the Church wanted change, he offered an orotund “A happy New Year to everybody,” followed by “And thank you for that question.” He sounded like someone from a different planet. He cited, on three separate occasions, the 1998 Education Act — a more up-to-date authority, admittedly, than the school’s 300-year-old foundation document, which is the basis for the Bishop’s claim. His bottom line sounded alarmingly legalistic: “The law is the law.”
What elevates this from a local row into a matter of national concern is that it takes place against a wider debate on church schools. Opponents of Muslim state schools have criti-cised all faith schools in recent months, in an attempt to deflect allegations of Islamophobia.
The subtext of what the Bishop said was damaging. The key line of defence for church schools is that they work — often better than their state counterparts — and so we should leave them alone. This is precisely the defence that Blue Coat is using. Those who want change have allowed themselves to be portrayed as zealots or land-grabbers. The Bishop’s high-handed tone did nothing to dispel such a charge.
Attacks on faith schools are becoming more insidious, as in last week’s ITV drama The Perfect Parents, in which a couple pretended to be Roman Catholics to get their daughter into the best local school. To anyone who knew anything about contemporary Catholic schools, it was a preposterous concatenation of errors, half-truths, and outdated stereotypes, plus the inevitable paedophile priest. But, to a secular audience, the picture was pernicious.
Where faith schools are better than secular ones, it is not because they offer outmoded dogma. It is because, in them, religion is experienced, not just taught. That’s what makes faith schools something for the nation to treasure, not to dismantle. There are, of course, many national treasures that don’t proceed from faith, and perhaps Blue Coat is one of them. What is clear is that we need more complexity, and even anomaly, not less.
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