Faith Schooling: Principles and Policies
The project, which is funded by the Spencer Foundation has two aims:
1. To engage in innovative philosophical research on the various normative
issues raised by faith schooling; and
2. To develop a regulatory framework for faith schooling in England and Wales.
We are looking for a post-doctoral Research Fellow (PRF) to work on the empirical
side of the project. No previous philosophical training is required, only a willingness
to consider and engage with the normative implications of empirical research relating
to faith schools.
The PRF will assist the three PIs working on the project —Matthew Clayton, Andrew
Mason and Adam Swift—in identifying more completely the strengths and
weaknesses of the relevant social science literature on educational regulation,
religious selection, and the educational outcomes of religious schools. She or he will
be expected to co-author a policy pamphlet proposing a regulatory framework for
schools with a religious character in England and Wales that is both politically
feasible and sensitive to the normatively significant empirical literature. In
collaboration with the (rolling) Director, the PRF will also help to organize seminars
and workshops.
In addition our plan is to enable the PRF to read the literature on faith schooling
through a normative lens and undertake research of her or his own—collaboratively,
individually, or both—to be decided in the light of her or his particular interests. At
the end of the project, she or he will be equipped with valuable and rare
interdisciplinary capacity. The topic of the PRF’s research will be a matter for
negotiation but, for example, it might involve one of the following:
1. Quantitative social science research on access to schools with a religious
character; the effects of such schools on students’ performance, social
attitudes, or sense of belonging.
2. Research on recent policy developments in the field of religious schools within
the UK and/or comparatively across different countries.
Overview of the project
Whether faith schools should receive public funding; to what extent, and in what
ways, they should be regulated, for example with respect to admissions and
curriculum; whether regulation should differ between those that do and do not receive
public funding; how secular schools should teach, or teach about, religion; these are
familiar issues. This project approaches them in a distinctive way. It is distinctive in
being undertaken collaboratively by three PIs who are political theorists who tackle
them from first principles and who have contrasting, and competing, views about the
fundamental normative issues at stake, but who agree on the importance of translating
“ideal theory” into practical proposals for the real world, and share an understanding
of how to do that in a systematic manner.
There is a good deal of sophisticated philosophical work on parents’ rights to raise
their children as members of their preferred religion, on children’s right to autonomy,
and on the state’s interest in creating future citizens. There are many rigorous
empirical studies of policy and practice with respect to faith schools in various
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different polities. But there has been little research that combines the two in a way
that does justice to both. As well as contributing original developments to the
philosophical debates, we aim to fill that gap in the literature – and to bridge the gap
between principle and policy – and to present our arguments in a form accessible both
to readers in different academic disciplines and to policymakers themselves.
Recent policy developments around ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’, together with
worries about ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘social cohesion’, have brought issues around
government involvement in faith schooling to the centre of public debate in the UK.
That debate typically generates more heat than light. We aim to contribute to, and
improve, that debate by offering a philosophically serious and empirically informed
perspective on the key regulatory questions, with implications for societies beyond the
UK.
Although focussed on the UK, we will develop the framework by considering how
various other countries regulate and fund faith schools, especially in continental
Europe. We will draw out the implications for those other countries where
appropriate. Moreover, by making explicit the way in which particular contexts
constrain the application of abstract principles, we will offer and illustrate a method
that may be applied quite generally.
The proposed outputs of the project are as follows:
(i)
a sole-authored academic monograph (Clayton);
(ii)
five academic articles (Mason, Swift, the PRF);
(iii)
a joint-authored book, accessible to undergraduates and to readers in
different disciplines, setting out our contrasting perspectives at the
level of philosophical principle (Clayton, Mason, Swift);
(iv)
a joint-authored set of policy proposals (‘white paper’) launched at a
public event (Clayton, Mason, Swift, PRF).
Project themes
Faith schooling raises a number of difficult normative questions, impacting as it does
on three important sets of interests:
(a) children’s interest in autonomy;
(b) parents’ interest in shaping the values of their children;
(c) the state’s interest in citizens’ acquiring the capacities and motivations needed
for a healthy democracy and a reasonably just society.
Most of the academic literature on these topics operates at the level of fundamental
principles and “ideal theory”. Some of the work we will undertake on this project will
be of this kind. But, for policy purposes, non-ideal theorising is also needed, to draw
out the implications of these abstract principles for societies that are imperfect in
various ways, and in which existing institutions, traditions, and practices constrain
what is possible. Although much has been written about the relation between “ideal”
and “nonideal” theory, advocates of the latter have not often engaged in the kind of
applied, relevant work they endorse.
Our proposed method involves identifying the range of “educational goods” to be
promoted and respected by a school system (and by educational processes more
broadly), and assessing the trade-offs – as revealed by empirical research – among
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those goods, and between those goods and other values. What is needed, then, is a
clear and careful specification of the different values at stake in policy decisions about
faith schooling – primarily, but not exclusively, the three sets of interests outlined
above - and a similarly clear and careful identification of the impact of the various
regulatory options on those values. We are inevitably in the business of identifying,
weighing and balancing the interests of children, parents, and the wider society,
looking for the feasible policy, or set of policies, that, overall, best promotes and
respects the values at stake. Wise policy-making combines values and evidence:
careful normative assessment of the different goods at stake and their relative
importance, on the one hand, and social-scientific information about the feasible
alternatives, on the other.
With regard to (a) – (c) above, our project addresses the following questions:
(I) How should we interpret the different goods and interests at stake?
[philosophical]
(II) How do different societies in fact interpret and balance those different goods
and interests? To what extent do different societies have different policy agendas
and face different feasibility constraints? [empirical]
(III) Which policy proposals offer the best way of balancing the relevant goods
and interests given the particular circumstances of the UK? [philosophical and
empirical]
Although the three PIs are committed to writing collaboratively within the project
each has his own particular interests, as follows:
Clayton plans to investigate the child’s right to autonomy; the permissibility or
impermissibility of parents enrolling their child into a particular religion; the
relationship between religious schooling and the development of liberal values; how
faith schools should be regarded in the UK given its particular history of religious
involvement in education.
Mason’s main contribution will involve clarifying the concepts of social cohesion and
integration and examining the impact of faith schooling on the goods that these social
relationships are though to promote. The ultimate aim is to determine how parents’
interest in shaping the religious views of their children should be balanced against the
state’s interest in promoting the conditions for a reasonably just society and the
child’s interest in autonomy, in the particular non-ideal circumstances that are
confronted in the UK.
Swift plans to identify a range of important familial relationship goods, and then
examine the weight and significance of these goods compared to the child’s interest in
autonomy and the state’s interest in educating children for citizenship, in the context
of faith schooling in both ideal and non-ideal circumstances. He will also examine
normative and empirical questions concerning admission to faith schools in the light
of the fact that many parents choose them not primarily on religious grounds but
because those schools are believed to be better than the alternatives.
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