Christian Free Schools Part 2 - Questions Answered

Readers, thank you for your patience in recent weeks - it has been an intense time of ministry at church and activity in home life, hence writing fell to the back burner. But here is part two of my series on Christian free schools. There are only four questions here, that focus on principles rather than practise, but I hope that there is the essence of response to most questions embedded somewhere within these musings. Please feel free to ask me any other questions in the comments section.


Should churches be spending their time establishing free schools when there are so many other core ministries to focus on?
This question is really a question about the doctrine of the local church – what should its activities encompass and exclude? For centuries, the church has seen education as within its remit, under the biblical exhortations of both discipleship (providing an environment for children to develop a Christian mind) and neighbour-love (providing a truly loving educational option to those outside the church as well as within). It also speaks of a mindset that embraces Christ’s Lordship over all rather than over just a delineated ‘spiritual’ field of existence. So while a church can’t offer an effective education ministry without core teaching, fellowship and pastoral ministries in place, free schools should not be considered as a distraction form these things, but as a blossoming of the holistic mission of the local church.

Shouldn’t the state determine how its people are educated?
It has been interesting in the current debate surrounding same-sex ‘marriage’ that the question of ‘who owns marriage?’ is being asked and discussed. This follows a vacuous silence on the issue of the origin of morality and right in UK, the unspoken assumption being that it is the elected assemblies of state governance that author such matters, expressed through law. This is highly disturbing, as by assuming the state has the right to dictate the moral narrative, one hands those in government carte blanche for totalitarianism at the deepest level – the human and the moral. To avoid such a moral fascism, the source of right must be seen to be either God (for the theist) or some higher, universal-human, inherent code of right (for the atheist/humanist), under which governments must be subservient. Thus for a state to assume the right to define marriage is tyranny – it is an institution fundamental to humanity that stands above culture, ethnicity and democratic whim. The same principles apply to education – the state’s involvement in education is to be warmly welcomed where the instruction is shaped by truth and right, but when the state assumes to define what these are we have intellectual (and hence educational) tyranny. Of course, there are a vast array of parental groups with different views on how ‘truth’ and ‘right’ are to be expressed, which is the beauty of Free Schools – those convicted of the need for education to be founded on ‘higher’ (i.e. those beyond human authorship) principles have the freedom to do so. So while state education is to be warmly welcomed, insistence by the state on the right to educate every child in the realm in the way it sees fit rather than respecting parental right is to be fiercely resisted, especially when the education offered has a faulty notion or no notion of transcendent right.

Won’t establishing Christian schools create further social division?
This is a searching question, to which I would make four points. Firstly, social division has roots that are far deeper than the curriculum taught at schools. Thus it is an easy way out of facing wider social problems to point the decisive finger at schools. But this is not to say that certain curriculae don't exacerbate social divisions- witness the varied shades of fundamentalist schools that flourish globally. So the question has to weigh the curriculum itself, thus asking ‘does a Christian-founded education create social division?’, to which the answer is (or at least should be) is no. So, secondly, Christian education is a source of social unity, not division. How so? Primarily because the ethic of Christianity is peace not war, servanthood rather than self-assertion, love not hate, setting humans united under God rather than divided against each other, for social harmony and not discord. The list could continue. There is so much truth in the adage that ‘if you surrender the Fatherhood of God you quickly lose the Brotherhood of Man’, the loss of which inevitably leads to social division. Thus a truly Christian education is the best hope for social unity. Thirdly, Muslim and Sikh groups have accelerated out of the blocks far faster than Christian groups in the Free School stakes, and thus if one takes the view that ‘religious’ schools cause division, then it isn’t the small number of Christian Free schools that should be one’s primary concern. Fourthly, Christian schools are unlikely to receive government approval unless their admission policies include a significant proportion of place-selection to be awarded to non-churched families – in the case of our church’s proposed school that figure is 50%. So the idea that such schools would become church ‘ghettos’ detached from their communities and uninvolved in wider social transformation is a fallacy. In short, Christian schools will largely be founded for the good of all and open to all, not just for a few well connected well-to-do church folk.

Won’t more Christian schools lead to a flight of Christian teachers from LEA-run state schools leading to a further secularising of those institutions?
This is an acute and sensitive question, but one to which again I think the answer is no. How so? Firstly, Free Schools are released from normal recruitment policies of LEA-run schools, meaning that anyone (subject to rigorous checks of course) can be employed as a teacher – they do not need a teaching qualification. So while Christian Free Schools are likely to employ those who share their ethos, this doesn’t automatically mean the source of such teachers are Christians in LEA-schools. Secondly, many teachers I know teach in LEA schools to be ‘salt and light’ and serve their communities, so the idea that they will all run away to free schools is an affront to their dedication and commitment. Thirdly, even if there is some shifting of teachers from LEA to free schools, all the evidence has shown that having a strong centre of Christian education in an area is to the health of all Christians involved in education, regardless of whether they are based within or outside that centre. Having said all that it is vital that churches involved in free schools do not fail in their duty to equip, disciple and encourage teachers in all schools, otherwise the above observations become meaningless in practise.

Christian Free Schools - a good idea?

My church is in the process of putting in an application to open a new school, under the Free Schools legislation enacted by the Coalition government. It would be an all-through school (i.e. covering ages 4-18), open to all and with a curriculum founded on the Christian world view. This has led many in our congregation to think carefully about whether establishing such schools is a wise effort or not. While there are objections that need to be answered, my conclusion is that establishing such schools should be an absolute priority for churches and church groups across the nation. I will consider and respond to objections in a sequel post.

While there are doubtless others, I would propose six major justifications for seeking to launch new Christian Free Schools (CFSs henceforth):

1. CFSs mobilise the church to thorough and active involvement in education. The central truth of the Christian faith - that Jesus is Lord - demands that his followers (i.e. the church) seek positive involvement in all spheres of life, whether that be the grand pursuits of politics, scientific discovery and spiritual well-being, or more 'everyday' things such as cookery, sport and coffee mornings. Thus education - the instruction of a human into all truth and flourishing - must surely be close to the heart of the Christian call. The church must be actively involved in education if it is to fulfil its mandate of being 'Christ's body on Earth'.

2. CFSs return revelation and reason to the heart of education. It is not too much of a simplification to say that the whole weight of western thought (and consequent civil development) rests upon two pillars: Proverbs 1:7a - "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" and the philosophy of Aristotle. Or to put it another way, upon the dual strands of revelation and reason. Revelation in the sense that what we can know about the world we know because it has been revealed by God, and all our endeavours to understand the universe will warp, reduce and ultimately fail to make sense of things unless we keep God as an unmoving banner over it all; reason in the sense that we have been given rational minds able to assess moral, social and material questions with agreed and rational method. This marriage of the ancient revelation of God and Aristotelian method has marked Christian thought throughout its history. Sadly, these epistemological foundations seem little understood or practised in much of mainstream education. Instead there is a dangerously utilitarian drift that sees education’s core goal as teaching that which is needed ‘to get by in the world’: the skills to make money and the opinions that will keep us from offending. I’m not at all suggesting that education should be all theory and no practise, but when it all is utility that is not anchored in the wider development of the whole human within a cohesive framework of thought, we educate our children as if they were robots and not humans. This is a shameful error, and one which will reap negative social consequences. A free school has the freedom to teach the classical disciplines that are vital to rectifying this error – epistemology, logic, philosophy, reason and theology.

3. CFSs challenge the view that the state has ultimate authority over the education of its people. Throughout history the right and responsibility to educate a child has been commonly understood to rest with its parents or guardians; this of course does not mean that the parents have to be the sole providers of education, but they have the authority to decide what kind of education their child gets. Different ages have seen guardians send their children to a remarkable range of institutions or to none, and theirs is the ultimate burden to ‘make or break’ the child. This right and responsibility was challenged by both the right- and left-wing totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, and sadly became the mindset of many (including, critically, many in positions of power) in the social democracies that emerged after those dark years. That the state provides education is a positive to be celebrated – indeed fee-less Free Schools would not be possible without state support for education – but when that provision becomes, whether by design or by culture, a hegemony over the responsibilities of guardians rather than being subservient to it, we are in a dangerous place. Not that this has necessarily happened in every LEA-run school, but survey after survey is showing a growing gulf between parental aspirations and the on-the-ground reality of education, and a new wave of schools that offer something different and come closer to meeting parental aspiration must be seen as a social good, as it will encourage guardians to truly think through how their child ought to be educated.

4. CFSs are a powerful reverser of social deprivation. Free Schools are able to set their own admissions policies, and thus able to positively discriminate towards those from areas of relative social deprivation. There are no ‘catchment’ areas to speak of. By committing to taking in an over-sized proportion of those from less privileged backgrounds into a high-quality educational environment for a period of upto 14 years, a significant improvement in the well-being of those students (and indeed their families and communities) can be confidently forecast. It is a route out of the ‘post-code’ trap, where middle class families are able to monopolise the best of state-provided services through their mobility advantages over the poorer.

5. CFSs offer vital flexibility of curriculum, teaching personnel and method. This is at the heart of the Free School vision, with each school being able to propose their curriculum, their staffing strategy and pattern of school life with remarkable freedom. This gives wonderful flexibility for schools to cater to any in-demand style of school that simply does not exist in a particular locality, and to shape the school according specific local needs. For example, there are high levels of economic stagnation in the North East of England, so a new Free School could particularly work on the development of entrepreneurial skills and vision amongst its pupils.

6. CFSs allow the most powerful educational resource of all to be unleashed - the gospel. The gospel Jesus Christ is not only the most important thing for every human to know, but due to its transformatory nature it is also the deepest and most powerful source of social capital. A school whose staff, pupils, practises and philosophies are rooted in the gospel will experience the wonderful fruit that Jesus promises such a grounding will bring – a true community of love, a community where all are valued, a community of joyful discipline, a community with purpose, a teleos community. I’m sure most guardians in the land would jump at the opportunity to send their children to such a school free of charge.

So, I'm praying our application to open a Free School is approved, and that many more Christian Free Schools would emerge across the United Kingdom.