TAKE ACTION: Tell Peterborough City Council local residents want fully inclusive schools

Peterborough residents: help stop new 100% religiously selective school in Hampton East by responding to the Peterborough City Council consultation.

Peterborough City Council is currently running a final consultation on the plan to open Hampton Waters Roman Catholic Voluntary Aided School. To be successful, the school must be able to demonstrate sufficient local support for the bid.

Will you oppose religious selection in Peterborough by responding to the consultation and help to ensure that every school that opens in Peterborough is open to all regardless of background?

In the published proposal, the Diocese says that 20% of places at the school will be reserved for local children regardless of religion. However, as this is a self-imposed cap, the school will be legally entitled to change this and revert to prioritising Catholics for all places in the future. Whether a school selects 80% or 100% of pupils by faith, this is still discriminatory and still poses a significant threat to integration and social cohesion.

We’d like as many local people as possible to respond to the consultation and speak up against religious selection to prevent this discriminatory new state-funded school from opening.

We’ve provided a model response to the consultation questions below. However, since the Council are more likely to pay attention to original contributions, we highly recommend that you adapt the text.

Tips on adapting your response

To assist you in writing your consultation response, we have provided a suggested text (see below). You are strongly encouraged to edit this to make it more personal – we know that original responses have more impact and your input is more likely to be fully considered if you can make reference to personal experiences.

If you are a parent... please say so, and talk about any relevant experiences you have had trying to get your children into a suitable local school. If you have ever lived in an area with lots of religious selection, talk about the segregation this causes. You should also explain why you think it is important that new school places in Peterborough are in fully inclusive, non-partisan schools for the whole community.

If you are a pupil… talk about the importance of being able to access a local school and why having a diverse range of friends and classmates is valuable to you.

If you are a teacher or governor… talk about how your experience has shown you how important it is for schools to be diverse and inclusive.

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To Whom It May Concern, I am writing with reference to the proposal to open a new, voluntary aided Catholic school in the Hampton East area of Peterborough. I firmly believe that state-funded schools should not be able to turn pupils away because of their religious background, and that any decision to allow more schools that are legally permitted to religiously select up to 100% of pupils in Peterborough – something that hasn’t previously been possible since the introduction of the Free Schools programme – is discriminatory and seriously threatens social integration. This is true whether those schools select 100% or 80% of pupils by faith as is currently being proposed by the Diocese of East Anglia. What’s more, since once open there is nothing to stop Hampton Waters VA school from changing its proposed admissions policy to make the school fully religiously selective, the Council should be careful not to place too much weight on a self-imposed cap. 
There is a great deal of robust evidence showing that religiously selective schools separate pupils along ethnic and socio-economic lines, as well as by religion. This is because religious selection enables oversubscribed schools to discriminate against non-religious pupils or those of other faiths, and, by so doing, allows those schools to become unrepresentative of their local areas. 
In addition, research suggests that insufficient opportunity to mix with those from differing backgrounds robs individuals of the meaningful interactions necessary to build sustainable inter-communal relationships. While the DfE funding for this new school requires it to explicitly demonstrate how it will ‘attract applications from all parts of the wider community’ and ‘equip pupils with the skills, values and knowledge to become active citizens in wider society’, the sorts of measures that would be required to do this (e.g. school linking programmes) simply cannot replace living and learning alongside those holding other beliefs and worldviews all day, every day. What’s more, the requirement that the school must be attractive to parents of other or no faith but will, because of its religiously selective admissions policy, be largely inaccessible to them, is patently unfair.
I would strongly urge Peterborough Council to reject this divisive proposal and ensure that every new school that opens in Peterborough is open to all children regardless of background or belief.

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TAKE ACTION: Tell Peterborough City Council local residents want fully inclusive schools

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