Admit One? Balancing the Demands of Composition in Faith School Admissions

The British Government recently announced a proposal to remove a 50% cap on religiously selective admissions in new faith schools in England. This will enable new faith schools to select all pupils on the basis of religion. Although some faith educators assert that religious composition (the proportion of pupils drawn from worshipping families) is an essential factor in the maintenance of a religious school ethos, others are less convinced by this claim. They worry the move is socially divisive and has the potential to deepen existing inequalities. Worries about pupil composition frequently arise in the context of other types of (selective) schooling, especially when the primary criterion for selection is academic aptitude or parental ability to pay. But, while concerns about the impact of religious schools on social cohesion are partially motivated by a sensitivity to issues arising from segregation— and some attention is also paid to compositional type effects in the literature on common schools — the assumption that separate schooling is, in principle, divisible from separate education (see Callan, 1997) appears to have motivated a degree of philosophical neglect with regards to the way such factors play out in faith schools. This paper examines the role of pupil composition in the context of faith-based schooling and aims to establish whether, to what extent and under what circumstances religiously selective admissions policies are ethically and/or politically defensible. Via an analysis of the ways in which competing goods and values impinge upon the requirements of pupil composition, I propose a taxonomic framework for thinking about the main types of concern engendered by cases of religious selectivity. I draw on this framework to illuminate and develop three ‘normative case studies’ (Levinson, 2016) pertaining to the issue, before establishing a set of generalizable principles to guide policy decisions on religious admissions.