knees and fees

As I was driving between a Church funeral and the crem the other day I was listening to Radio 4 – this turned out to be a mistake as I found myself turning into the gates shouting at the radio. Luckily I had a few minutes and that gave me the chance to compose a very quick text to the programme in question and calm down.
The basic premise of the argument from the contributor, in a programme based around issues thrown up by the occupy movement at St. Paul’s, was that Church Schools (en masse) were missing that mark by being highly selective – hit the knees, save the fees – to quote Rev.
Whilst we do have at least one such Church of England school in our area I was angry that all Church Schools were tarred with the same brush. Even the aforementioned Rev has changed its Church School stance – from the last series where we saw middle class parents turning up at Church to make sure that their electoral roll applications were backed up by the vicar actually knowing them and therefore being able to sign off on the school admissions form – to this one where we see children from apparently more challenging backgrounds interacting with the vicar. We shall see where the storyline goes.
The simple fact of the matter is that there are plenty of Church Schools out there who still elect to serve populations who live in difficult circumstances. Many of these schools are geographically placed in areas of social or low rent housing and draw by simple distance from the building and not by a long and complicated process of signing up for Church before the baby’s first nappy change.
I can only offer statistics from our own parish school – but children who enter as high achievers, often from middle class backgrounds, will (without any mitigating factors such as ill health) go through the school as high achievers and continue into top streams for secondary education. Children who enter with significant delays in development and/or with social problems will nearly all improve their personal development, results and thereby their opportunity later in life. This adding to a child is called Value Added – and our school does well in those scores. (And incidentally looking at value added is a much better indicator of what a school is actually doing than looking at the test scores which, in populations which were always going to do well, may look good but may not indicate much actual improvement in already bright children).
Our school has nearly four times the amount of seriously needy children than any other school in the Borough. It is Christian ministry at the front line and it is more than worth doing.
When people ask why we devote so many resources to this particular school, the obvious answer is that it is our Church school, but the deeper answer is that we are working, as Jesus did, with the most vulnerable and offering love to the, sometimes, not much loved. I suppose we could change admission criteria – but I hope not.