Schools must support all their pupils, whether they’re LGBT or not

Commenting on the Government’s revised Independent School Standards, currently out for consultation, the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) recently made the suggestion that Orthodox Jewish schools that do not want to teach about same-sex relationships ought to be accommodated. A spokesperson said:

‘Our view is that a reasonable compromise is to ensure strict school policies which ensure that, at a minimum, there will be zero tolerance for homophobic bullying, and that Jewish LGBT children in these socially conservative schools should be referred to spaces where they will be properly supported and affirmed outside of schools, such as KeshetUK or the Jewish Gay and Lesbian Group.’

There is nothing reasonable about this. Either the BoD is ignorant to the needs and challenges of LGBT children and young people, or it doesn’t care sufficiently about their wellbeing. Here’s why.

First of all, how is it possible to target homophobic bullying specifically if the schools in question are refusing to even acknowledge the existence of LGBT people? In order to address homophobic bullying properly, pupils must be told, at the very least, that LGBT people exist and deserve respect. The schools that the BoD are defending have expressed their unwillingness even to do that. (To pre-empt the apologists and sticklers, no, it obviously isn’t sufficient to simply teach that everyone deserves respect.)

Secondly, in what circumstances would an LGBT pupil at a school like this feel comfortable coming out to a teacher? The whole topic of same-sex relationships, let alone gender identity, is off-limits in these schools, as well as in the communities they serve. This has been made clear not only by the schools themselves, but also by the rabbis who control them and, devastatingly, by the national organisation that claims to represent British Jewry as a whole (i.e. the BoD).

Does the BoD really think it’s that easy for a child to come out in an environment like this? Perhaps it has forgotten the ongoing tragedy of the transgender mother who has been entirely ostracised from her Charedi community and has been denied access to her children on the grounds that they might be ostracised too, were they to have even the most limited contact with her.

No, the idea that ‘Jewish LGBT children in these socially conservative schools’ would come out in order to be ‘referred to spaces where they will be properly supported’ is either naive or disingenuous. Indeed, writing in the Jewish Chronicle this week, Simon Rocker explained that even adopting this token approach ‘would be a big step for some schools’.

None of this is to mention the most frightening implication of the Board’s suggestion – that schools should be free to abdicate their responsibility to promote the wellbeing and development of their pupils. This is at odds with the principles and purpose on which all schools ought to be founded, and those who take this view should rightly face questions about the appropriateness of their involvement in children’s education.

All children, LGBT or otherwise, deserve to be ‘properly supported and affirmed’ at their schools. This, after all, is where they spend the majority of their waking, not to mention formative, hours. It is unbelievable that anyone could argue that forcing children to suppress their identity and live a lie, but only during school hours, represents a ‘reasonable compromise’. It is equally unbelievable that anyone could fail to recognise the psychological and emotional impact that this scenario is likely to have on the children involved.

We repeat. Either the BoD is ignorant to the needs and challenges of LGBT children and young people, or it doesn’t care sufficiently about their wellbeing. Whichever it is, it needs to change.

FSA staff

Is the Catholic Education Service statistically illiterate?

The Catholic Education Service (CES) has a long history of abusing statistics, both to justify its schools’ discriminatory admissions policies in general, and to force the removal of the 50% cap on religious selection in particular.

It has long claimed that its schools are socio-economically inclusive, by comparing how poor the areas its schools are located in to the national average. Catholic schools, the CES says, are disproportionately located in poorer areas. This shows that they are disproportionately inclusive of children from poorer backgrounds, right? Wrong. All this tells us is that its schools are in inner cities. It doesn’t tell us anything about the pupils themselves. In fact, when you compare the intakes of Catholic schools to the children living near those schools, you see that Catholic schools actually take  pupils who are much better-off than the local average. Moreover, when you do the same comparison with the national average, Catholic schools still take a disproportionate number of well-off pupils.

The CES has also long claimed that its schools are much more ethnically diverse than the national average. But its schools are only diverse to the extent that Catholics themselves are diverse. This means its schools take lots of white and black pupils. But in terms of taking pupils from ethnic backgrounds not associated with Catholicism (i.e. Asian minorities), its schools are massively exclusive. This is true in comparison to both the national and local averages, meaning they are still not as diverse as schools of no religious character.

More recently the CES has started to boast about the number of Muslim pupils in its schools. In fact, its schools take about 2-3 times fewer Muslim – and 10 times fewer non-religious – pupils than there are in Britain as a whole. While 15 of its schools have Muslim-majority intakes, around 73 are located in areas where most pupils are from Muslim families.

Yesterday the CES added another line to this sort of faulty argument, when it argued that a 2017 poll showing rank-and-file Catholics are against discrimination in admissions is unsound:

‘A source within the CES… told The Tablet that the results of the survey quoted in the letter were misleading. The letter cited 80 per cent of the public – 67 per cent of which they said were Catholic – opposing the government’s consultation on the policy.

The survey, conducted by research and strategy consultancy Populus in May 2017, asked 2,033 people, 129 of whom identified as Catholic, their thoughts on admissions policies for state-funded faith schools.

This is a very small sample size of Catholics compared to the thousands of Catholics who have petitioned the Education Secretary to lift the cap, the source said. At the last count 15,000 faithful had signed the petition.’

Let’s explain how the statistics here work. First, let’s work out how many Catholics there are. The latest British Social Attitudes Survey suggests that about 8.6% of British adults are Catholics. The ONS says the British adult population is just over 50 million. So this comes to 4.3 million Catholics.

A self-selecting sample of 15,000 out of a population of 4.3 million tells us absolutely nothing about the views of the 4.3 million as a whole – not least given that the 15,000 were responding to a call to action promoted by Catholic dioceses.

There were in fact 149 Catholics in the Populus poll, not 129, of whom 67% said they’re against the dropping of the faith school admissions cap. This may sound like a small number. But we have to remember that, unlike the 15,000, those 149 were selected to be representative of the population as a whole. That scientific approach is why people pay polling companies to do research, instead of just asking the same number of their friends and supporters what they think, or asking people who visit their organisation’s website (which is basically what a petition does). And, indeed, if you stick a 4.3 million population figure and a 149 sample figure through a margin of error calculator, it spits out a margin of error of almost precisely +/-8%.

8% is not a small margin of error. But it is easily small enough to mean that that 67% undoubtedly represents a majority of Catholics either way.

So, yes, CES, 149 representatively selected Catholics is a significant number. Whereas 15,000 self-selected Catholics is not.

FSA team

Gender segregation at faith schools: Lady Justice Gloster’s dissenting opinion

“Segregation or no segregation, why on earth should we accept the right of a school in the UK, state-funded no less, to espouse this kind of ethos to begin with?”

Last week the court of appeal ruled that a Muslim state school in Birmingham has been acting unlawfully by segregating boys and girls in all areas of school life. The decision came after Ofsted condemned such segregation as unlawful discrimination, and overturns a previous decision by the High Court which found in favour of the school.

The court’s ruling is an interesting and complicated one, primarily because it establishes that such segregation discriminates against girls and boys equally, by denying each the benefits that come from socialising with the opposite sex. Understandably, this has led to (misguided) questions about the status of single-sex schools, which have an exemption from the Equality Act 2010 allowing them to discriminate on grounds of gender.

All of this has been well-documented, however, so what we focus on here is the dissenting opinion of the court, given by Lady Justice Gloster.

Unlike her two fellow judges, it was Justice Gloster’s view that the segregation of girls and boys, enforced as it was for ‘religious reasons’, should have been deemed as discriminatory against girls specifically. Ofsted did make this argument, in fact, as did Southall Black Sisters and Inspire, the two organisations who intervened in the case. But it was rejected by the majority opinion of the court, and the appeal was therefore only upheld on the more limited grounds outlined above. This was an oversight, as even a quick read of Lady Justice Gloster’s dissenting opinion demonstrates. This opinion needs little commentary, so here are some highlights.

Noting that ‘the majority in this court…takes the view that there is no evidence to support the submission that the practical consequences of segregation in this case cause a greater detriment girls rather than boys’, she states:

‘First, I do not agree with the majority, or with the Judge, that there was no evidence of greater practical detriment, or potential detriment, to girls, as opposed to boys, as a result of the regime of sex segregation in operation at the School. It is correct, as was accepted by Ofsted, that the June 2016 Inspection Report does not suggest that girl pupils receive a different, or qualitatively poorer, level of education than boys, or that the former achieved worse examination results or other educational outcomes than the boys. But, in my view, in order to judge the impact of the segregation regime, one has to assess its operation in its actual context in this particular school. And the picture disclosed in the evidence clearly demonstrates that the environment at the School, including, and underlined by, the segregation regime, had a real potential for exposing girls to greater detriment than the boys.’

The evidence she refers to, by the way, includes books found by Ofsted at the school that contained ‘messages about the subjugation of women’ and ‘included derogatory comments about, and the incitement of violence towards, women.’

In any case, Justice Gloster continues:

‘One does not need to be an educationalist, a sociologist or a psychiatrist to conclude that a mixed sex school which, whether intentionally or otherwise, tolerates an environment where extreme and intolerant contemporary views about the role and physical subservience of women, and the entitlement of men physically to dominate and chastise them, are on display, or available to read, in the school library; [and] whose teachers approve the expression by the pupils of gender stereotyped views about the roles of women as homemakers and child minders and the role of men as the breadwinners…is a school where a strict sex segregation policy subjects girls to a greater risk of extreme and intolerant views and is likely to reinforce or create misogynist attitudes amongst the boy pupils towards them.’

Quite. She goes on:

‘In my judgment, once the principle is accepted, as it was by the Judge (and the majority in this court), that, as a generality, men exercise more influence and power in society than women, and that persistent gender inequalities remain in the employment market, evidence is not required to establish that an educational system, which promotes segregation in a situation where girls are not allowed to mix with boys or to be educated alongside them, notwithstanding they are studying the same curriculum and spending their days on the same single school site, is bound to endorse traditional gender stereotypes that preserve male power, influence and economic dominance. And the impact of that is inevitably greater on women than on men. One does not need to have been educated at a women’s college at a co-educational university, at a time when women were still prohibited from being members of all-male colleges, to take judicial notice of the career opportunities which women are even today denied, simply because they are prevented from participating in hierarchical male networking groups, whether in the social, educational or employment environment.’

Finally, she concludes:

‘In my judgment, it is not difficult to conclude that in such circumstances, and against the background of the past history and current reality of gender relations, not only generally in UK society, but also in the cultural and community context of this particular School, segregation on grounds of sex necessarily endorses gender stereotypes about the inferiority of women or their perceived place in a society where predominantly men exercise power.’

One wonders how anyone could argue with any of this. And yet, none of it made it into the majority opinion of the court. The education system is all the worse for it.

Irrespective of what the law now says, however, the questions we have to ask ourselves go well beyond the appropriateness of segregation within such schools. Because segregation or no segregation, why on earth should we accept the right of a school in the UK, state-funded no less, to espouse this kind of ethos to begin with?

FSA team