Ferdia Carr is fed up with policy makers feigning surprise.
If the downgrading of six Tower Hamlets faith schools by education inspectors Ofsted indicates ‘a growing nervousness about Islam in the UK’, as BBC religious correspondent Caroline Wyatt has suggested, it shouldn’t. It should make us nervous about faith schools of any kind.
Published on Friday 21 November, the Ofsted report following a snap inspection of Islamic schools in Tower Hamlets, revealed that their curricula focused too much on Islam. Students were left unprepared for modern British life, and in the case of one school, they did not know the difference between British and Shariah law. The report also found that the children interviewed had a ‘narrow view’ of women in society.
It doesn’t take a deerstalker and a magnifying glass to see what’s been going on. Schools which define themselves as religiously conservative institutions have instituted a religiously conservative outlook among their students. Whatever next?
How could any school run strictly on the basis of any single faith, whether it’s Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, or Orthodox Judaism, guarantee to offer young people a robust sense of religious plurality?
This is not to suggest that all faith schools are so single minded. Many of them demonstrate religious plurality and cultural diversity: they uphold an open-minded approach which also holds out the possibility of not holding to any religion at all. But when broadminded faith schools do this, they are in effect subordinating their own particular faith to a generally secular consensus. This, surely, is the order of priorities we should insist on.
Secularism isn’t a tool to limit or take away personal religious freedom; it’s a guarantee that one faith will not be allowed to take precedence over another in public life. Recognising that secularism also serves as the guarantor of the spectrum of religious belief, the High Court recently ruled that there is no lawful place for prayer in public proceedings. Why, then, should religious indoctrination ever have been allowed to intrude upon the publicly funded curriculum?
If the Department for Education has given the green light to religious rectitude in East London schools, it’s a bit rich for the department’s inspectorate to hit the red button when it encounters strict religious observance in the Islamic schools of Tower Hamlets.
Entirely understandable that the full-on faithful would seek to enact their faith to the exclusion of others. What’s inexcusable is the policy makers making out that they couldn’t have seen it coming.