Good thing the National Secular Society don't believe in the 10 Commandments!

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The National Secular Society have been caught out again telling porkies about the protection of non-faith staff in faith schools:

Responding to letter from the National Secular Society to the Secretary of State, shared with the media, about the protection of non-religious staff in faith schools, a Department for Education spokeswoman said:

We are disappointed with the misleading claims from the National Secular Society (NSS). The clause highlighted by the NSS is in fact there to ensure that the statutory rights of staff are protected when a school converts to Academy status.

The Education Bill does not reduce protections for teachers within faith schools that convert into Academies and we are confident that the Bill does not breach any domestic or European law.

As I've said before - if the NSS want secular schools, they should go and set them up rather than frothing at the mouth over faith schools.

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Faith Schools - or why Richard Dawkins is a fundamentalist jihadi

Richard Dawkins, militant proselytising atheist, is worried about “faith schools”. And Channel 4 has given him a platform to articulate this worry

The number of faith schools in Britain is rising. Around 7,000 publicly-funded schools - one in three - now has a religious affiliation. As the coalition government paves the way for more faith-based education by promoting 'free schools', the renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins says enough is enough. In this passionately argued film, Dawkins calls on us to reconsider the consequences of faith education, which, he argues, bamboozles parents and indoctrinates and divides children.

Now I look at the net effect of all this religious “indoctrination” and see that the fastest growing viewpoint on religion is…atheism! Or more precisely not professing any religion.

According to the 2001 UK Census, those of no religion are the second largest belief group, about 2 and a half times as many as all the other (non-Christian) religions altogether – at 15.5% of the population.

And more recently – seems those faith schools ain’t doing a great job! And yet thousands of essentially agnostic patents pretend to be good churchgoing folk so as to get their offspring into church schools. Perhaps those schools aren’t doing a bad job at delivering what parents want – a good education for their children.

I make no secret of my disagreement with Dawkins – his spiritless, dry, confrontational obsessions have created an atheism that is no longer fundamental but that requires a range of beliefs beyond the essence of atheism. That essence is, of course, very straightforward – that there is no god. What Dawkins has done has been to take upon himself a jihad directed at anyone who does not adhere to his obsessions – unreconstructed Darwinian evolution, a view that religion is a pathology and utter contempt for any promotion of a religious viewpoint.

If faith schools were bad schools – and some might be – then parents would reject them rather than queue up to get their sprogs in. If atheists wish to have secular schools then the case is simple – set them up and show how their soulless, sceptical, ethics-light ideology can produce a better education. Religious schools should not be the only choice but if parents want that choice they should have it.

And finally the “I don’t want my taxes to fund religious education” argument – if we believe in state-funded education and in parental choice we must respect that choice and fund it. Unless – as I suspect is the case with Dawkins and his acolytes – you don’t really believe in choice? Just like those other jihadi you want to impose your world view on those who - however stupidly - don't share it.

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The Academies Bill or In which I agree with a paragraph in The Guardian

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Every now and then my colleague Huw draws my attention to writings within that evil rag, The Guardian. I am now strong enough to stomach short exposes to this kind of stuff so was quite delighted to read this today from Julian Glover:

This bill introduces no new brand of school; no extra cash; no anything, really, except the extension of what we already have, which was anyway the aim of the last government when Tony Blair promised "every school an independent school". That was before it became inconvenient for Labour to take the side of consumers over providers.

And there you have it – people like Fiona Millar are paid to argue the case for the producers of education services. For the people who produced a system where it’s a source of celebration when nearly half of Bradford’s kids get five good GCSEs.

So yes let’s have that school system run for the consumers of the service – children and their parents – rather than run for the continuation of producer interest. We surely can’t carry on with the sorry state we’ve got now.

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Regeneration ain't about sustainability or community. It's about people.

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Something of a curate egg from Julian Dobson over at Living with Rats - a set of slides on regeneration that are challenging but sadly contradictory. Most worryingly though - given the reality of life in our modern day slums - Julian focuses on the touchy-feeling, greeny, sustainability, no-growth stuff that will to precisely and absolutely zero to help the poorest folk in our society. Here's some comments to the first six of his slides - I have been restrained.

Slide 1. The idea that we can infinitely add more to what we currently have underpins most 'regeneration' strategies.

After about ten years involved in regeneration and a period studying the past 40 years of regeneration strategies it seems odd that the same knee-jerk, anti-growth position opens up these slides. A cursory look at the primary regeneration investments since the early 1990s – City Challenge, SRB, Neighbourhood Renewal, New Deal for Communities – tells us that this isn’t the case. The focus has been on what Steve Hartley, then Chief Executive of Bradford Trident, called “making the place normal”. While there were job creation schemes and business support these made no distinction between types of business or between the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Bluntly, it is untrue.

Slide 2: Our response to the financial crisis of 2008 was to prop up what we had. The banking system now is not fundamentally different to that of 2006.

I agree with the essential observation – that the response to the current banking crisis has been to save the banks (and the bankers). But what do we mean by ‘sustainable’ in this context – seems to me that the Obama (and Osborne) position of separating retail and speculation plus seeking smaller banks is more sensible than trying to reinvent economic theory with well-meant words and some reddish-green ideology. And one thing that should be made possible is for setting up a retail bank to be much easier – barriers to entry were one contributor to the crisis. Without schumpeterian renewal (a party colleague got into trouble for talking about creative destruction so I won’t) banks – and indeed other institutions including government – become ossified, become a problem not a solution.

Slide 3: To create new ideas, is it sensible to start in the old places? Was Google invented in a reference library and if it had been, what would it look like? We need to think laterally and creatively and stop being proprietorial about ideas.

Good words but is it meant? Show me the epochal, world-changing innovation that came as a result of government initiative? There are none – government doesn’t do creative, creative is scary. Government does “how big a piece of elastoplast do you want, sir?” The big changes – the massive innovations – have been in the private sector. And that is where future innovation will be driven from – unless, of course, you cut it off early by following the ideas implied in ‘slide one’!

Slide 4: We need to think too in terms of the natural lifespan of ideas, economies, and institutions. A process of growing, flourishing, maturing, expiring and recreating is something that adds vitality and vigour to our social, physical and economic fabric. Shouldn't we think of regeneration as the process of nurturing and assisting that constant change?

Now we’re getting silly. The “natural lifespan of ideas” – you mean that suddenly the ‘idea’ of freedom or philanthropy or equality suddenly ceases to have relevance? Or is it the idea of ‘evolution’ or ‘gravity’ that stops working? Maybe this is a call for creative destruction – for recognising that times change, that things are not set in stone. But did you say that in 1985 when they started the second round of pit closures? Did you say that in 1990s Birmingham as they watched their manufacturing industry move to China? Probably not. The sentiment of this slide is with us – people are getting used to the end of ‘jobs for life’ and for the personal responsibility that goes with that situation. But there’s still many who think the job of regeneration is simply to stop change happening – at least while it affects me!

Slide 5: There's a difference between that organic, assisted process and the directed, programme-driven forms of regeneration we've seen in the last three decades. The role of institutions should become one of nurturing and supporting what already exists and enabling it to grow, not one of constantly imposing grand strategies and plans.

And what precisely “already exists” on Seacroft Estate in Leeds? Or for that matter on a hundred other estates across the country? A culture of benefit dependency. A world where drink, fags and sex set the boundaries of life and the person in work is an exception rather than the norm. What are we nurturing here? What are we giving to these people? Have the schools done their job or are the teachers just a combination of childminder and prison warden? We – politicians, press, ‘experts’ – get shown round regeneration schemes. You’re being fooled – this is the East German tour not a real picture of the problem.

Slide 6: That means rethinking our approach to funding programmes, targets and accountability and creating new, hybrid organisations that bring together those who have a common interest in improving places and communities. Nobody has a monopoly of ideas and nobody should have a monopoly of implementation.

Much though it pains me to say so, we need to stop thinking at all about programmes, targets and schemes. Rather than sinking further into the collective groupthink we should consider the individuals – the young girl with three kids from two fathers, the lad who can write his name and recognise McDonalds but not much else, the thirtysomething bloke who has spent six of the past ten years in prison and the rest of the time waiting to go there, the obese 45 year old grandma so addled with drink she barely knows her own children let alone the grandkids. Schemes, institutions, programmes – all the superstructure of regeneration does nothing, has done nothing, for these people. The problem isn’t special programmes but the mainstream programmes of education, health and social care. Oh yes, plus a dreadful, debilitating, divisive and stifling benefits system. And we fund programmes to increase “benefit take-up”!

Lets be clear, I make my living from regeneration – just like a load of other comfortably off, intelligent, caring people living in nice places. There’s lots of lovely conferences, debates, seminars, workshops and sharings of best practice. And mostly it’s just an excuse to talk – little better than me sounding off on my blog here.

But let’s be clear. We have failed. Yes, you, me, Julian Dobson, Nick Falk, the Prince of Wales, Michael Heseltine, John Denham. We’ve failed. And we are going to fail again. And again. And again. Until we remember that salvation comes one soul at a time. Until we remember that people aren’t just some spit in a pool called “community”. Until we put an end to groupthink – to the crazy collectivist idea. To fancy dan chattering class nonsense like “sustainability” or “socially useful jobs”.

Until we give that girl, that lad, that bloke, that grandma some hope, some reason to do something different with their lives. A reason to smile, work, detox or slim. A reason to live not just exist.

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Why the National Secular Society should set up its own schools rather than just attack faith schools

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The National Secular Society is frothing at the mouth over Conservative education proposals. Its boss, one Terry Sanderson said this:

“The idea that an unlimited expansion in the number of religious schools will continue to drive up standards is illogical. If there are to be no community schools, where will all the unsupported and disadvantaged children from deprived homes — the ones that the Church doesn’t want to know about — go? It’s at that point that the myth of the “religious ethos” causing this success will come crashing down. It is fallacious to suggest so-called free schools will extend “choice”.

This is firstly a complete misrepresentation of the Conservative’s proposals on free schools and secondly a statement of monumental ignorance. Now I agree with the NSS on removing religious privileges but it is not achieved by the removal of choice.

So here’s a suggestion:

Why doesn’t the National Secular Society set up schools serving local communities in partnership with parents and teachers? After all that’s all those churches, mosques and temples propose to do isn’t it? There’s a real opportunity for organisations to set up schools specialising in working with children from troubled backgrounds and deprived communities.
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