Sunday Herald

CHILDREN who go to faith schools, it is often claimed, perform better than their secular counterparts. Even the First Minister Jack McConnell has conceded that faith schools generate high educational standards. Last week during a speech at Our Lady's High School in Motherwell he pledged his support to faith schools, commenting that he was not interested in 'spurning real education achievement'. He also spoke of the 'clear benefits' of denominational education.

Meanwhile, in England, Tony Blair sent his son to faith school, while Secretary of State David Blunkett famously declared that he would like to 'bottle' the ethos of faith schools. The conclusion that higher standards may be attributed to some intangible ethos of faith schools is, however, more a matter of political assertion than of hard evidence. Indeed, critics, many within faith communities themselves, point to the very significant variation among faith schools mirroring the variation across schools at large.

Some sceptics also suggest that the debate about faith schools is simply confused with 'good' schools. Good schools are, as schools inspectorate reports continually emphasise, marked by an ethos of mutual respect, order and a drive for achievement.

Research from the United States offers another possible explanation. This attributes higher standards not so much to ethos or even to the school but to the social fabric of family, community and voluntary agencies. Cohesive families, church and community affiliation, it is argued, generate what has come to be known as 'social capital'.

Where there is a shared commitment in the home, where there are ritual or routines around church attendance -- for example Sunday 'school' -- a common gathering of adults and children, an ongoing dialogue between young and old, there is a reservoir of learning and behaviour which is of advantage to the school. Children then carry with them into school, not just the empty notebook, but a set of predispositions and a pre-prepared stock of knowledge. This is not the content knowledge that schools teach but the strategic knowledge of how to 'do school' -- how to live successfully in a world of adults and children, how to engage with learning.

Seen from a parent perspective, five or more years of investment in your child's spiritual and moral development may make you cautious about passing her on to a school which may then undo all that good work. For a deeply religious parent there are dangers in the seditious peer group, subversive teachers, heretical textbooks.

If you are a parent whose commitment to your faith infuses every aspect of family life, what you want for your child is an approach to learning which is permeated by those values. You may wish to choose a school in which subjects are viewed through a lens of faith -- an Islamic or Christian or Jewish view of history, a doctrinal view of the best that has been thought and said. This, it may be argued, is an inalienable right, indeed enshrined in statute. After all, education has increasingly become a service industry, serving parental clients who shop around, choosing schools in a more and more diversified market.

What research also tells us is that parents choose primarily on the social composition of the school, the peers their children will rub up against. We can understand the logic of their choice given the finding that of all influences at work in schools to raise achievement, it is the peer factor that weighs most heavily.

Described as the 'compositional effect', it suggests that there is a critical mass of pupils whose influence can be powerful enough to drag down a school's standards, diminish engagement and undermine the beliefs of even the most motivated child. The more a school loses parents with strong social capital the greater the downward inertia on those who are left behind. Researchers at Edinburgh University have for a decade and more demonstrated ways in which schools are drained of social capital by parents who opt for more favoured schools, whether secular or religious.

We need therefore to bear in mind tensions that are created when the rights of any individual or group compete against the rights of others. Parental rights to choose, for example, may conflict with the rights of those parents and children whose choices are more constrained. They may also jeopardise the rights of their own children who are deprived of a more broadly based social and academic experience.

The National Secular Society contends that 'the more of these (faith) schools there are, the more children will be separated by religious (and therefore often racial, and sometimes sectarian categories) at a very formative time in their lives, denying them the best, and perhaps only, opportunity to learn about each other and live together'.

The state, while recognising the rights of parents, has also to safeguard the rights of children, rights which rest on four cardinal educational principles: no discrimination on the grounds of sex, race or social background; care not to misinform children on any matter which might endanger them physically, socially or psychologically; a balance in the time given to teaching of other subjects as well as religion; ensuring that what is taught and learned does not place limits on career opportunities for boys or girls, ethnic or religious minorities.

These principles are written into the newly developed citizenship curriculum which holds that becoming a citizen of Scotland (and of the global village) means learning to live in a multi-cultural society. It affirms our inter-dependence, the importance of informed understanding, tolerance, diversity, inclusiveness and intolerance of injustice. These are values that lie at the heart of an education which is intrinsically concerned with rights, equity and justice in the exercise of social choice.

As one whose work is now primarily with schools in England, issues of choice present themselves in starker terms than in Scotland. There, choice is among Church of England and Catholic schools, Muslim, Sikh, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish schools, with the potential for further splintering within any one of these groups among fundamentalists, charismatics and progressives.

The further we progress down this route, it is feared, the greater the potential fragmenting of communities. Seen from the perspective of a non- religious parent, extending state provision of faith schools may be viewed as discriminating against those without an espoused cause, their taxes used to subsidise myriad forms of special pleading. Given the statistic that regular religious worship now encompasses 2-3% of the population and that 77% of young people in a recent Mori poll claimed not to believe in a God, there is a strong and sometimes vociferous secular lobby for religious schools to be put in their place. In other words, as in many other countries of the world, in the private sector.

The situation in Scotland is in some significant respects different from England. We have essentially two kinds of public schools. We have schools which are religious and schools which are secular or non-denominational. One serves a relatively homogeneous faith, the other a heterogeneous population of atheists, agnostics, true believers, and religious fundamentalists representing a wide spectrum of different beliefs and creeds.

This is widely recognised as an anomalous position, with 81% of the Scottish public in favour of separation. We live with a historical legacy held in place by political timidity or pragmatism, absence of enlightened discourse and lack of imagination as to a more satisfactory alternative.

If we accept that the status quo is rarely the preferred option we will, sooner or later, have to choose among three possibilities. One posits an extension of diversity within the state system. This is the Blair scenario, curiously an option currently being advocated by Bush as well. A second option proposes an integrated comprehensive approach with schools as co-educational in the broadest sense.

The third option is to come into line with most other countries, with a clear separation of church and state, locating faith schools in the private sector. As an adjunct to the third of these options (which would clearly discriminate against the least well off) the introduction of an American-style voucher system could allow parents to 'spend', or top up, their educational vouchers within private schools of their choice.

Common to all of these options is the premise of the school building, more or less in the mould as we have known it for a century and more. As we have witnessed in recent new-build initiatives in the west of Scotland, the local authority decides it has to build a new school to accommodate the swelling population of a desirable neighbourhood. After much discussion, lobbying and financial dealing, a compromise is reached to build two schools, denominational and non-denominational, side by side, separate entities divided by a common fence and common national priorities.

This is a compromise driven by a simple failure to find more imaginative solutions. We will have to start to think in new third millennium ways, how to achieve two desirable, but not antagonistic, goals. On the one hand, to maintain respect and provision for diversity of faiths, on the other hand, pursuing the goal of learning to live together in enlightened tolerance of difference and informed intolerance of oppression and racism.

First Minister Jack McConnell has suggested a sharing of dining halls and playing fields, a shallow end, toe-in-water advance. An invitation to venture further? Homework clubs, Easter and summer schools, field trips, community-based learning, all offer opportunities for collaborative learning out-of-hours, but there is plenty of scope to extend this -- shared lessons, mini conferences, workshops, buddying and mentoring schemes across sites. It is hardly a radical strategy at a time when government sees the future in terms of network learning communities.

For some Scottish communities such collaboration will not be seen as problematic. The 780 pupils that attend Cumbernauld Primary and St Andrews Primary, who since the beginning of the year have been sharing a new campus, are already moving in this direction. Pupils from both schools took part in a Scottish Opera project and more collaborations are planned in the future.

But for much of the west, that large segment of the country which divides humanity by three -- Rangers, Celtic and the unconverted -- the challenge is greater but more acutely to be desired. Deep-rooted historical and cultural prejudice will not be cured by schools but they can all too easily reinforce prejudices both symbolically and in practice.

The sociologist Basil Bernstein famously wrote that 'schools cannot compensate for society' but it is possible for schools to work across traditional boundaries and inert ideas. Archbishop Conti has spoken eloquently about tackling the broader issues of poverty, the breeding grounds of bigotry and violence in which schools can play their own significant part. These words echo the traditional strengths of Catholicism, a vision of society which exceeds the institutional perimeters and is concerned for all God's children and their right to a quality of life.

It may be an appropriate time to appoint the czar that the Catholic Church thinks it requires to protect and promote the interests of the Catholic education. Such an appointment might be seen as a reactionary stance, or alternatively as the expression of a need to reconcile the goals of a Catholic education with the wider needs of a post-September 11 society.

The interests of Catholic children and families, as of all faith groups, are vouchsafed when the system is concerned with what happens to all children. It is not just about the kind of schools we want but the kind of society that is worth growing up in. The argument should be less about schools and more about the nature of an educational system that serves the intentions and welfare of the 'good life', in the materialistic, moral and spiritual meanings of that term.

John MacBeath is professor of educational leadership at the University of Cambridge