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I am in Good Company…
..if you define a government minister as “good company”. According to the Telegraph David Milliband, an atheist, is sending his son to a faith school.
Unusually, for the Telegraph they give space to the anit-faith schools position:
Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, which seeks the abolition of faith schools, said: “Mr Miliband joins the thousands of parents forced into hypocrisy by the education policies of his own government.
“It is a vicious circle because, as faith schools get a reputation for better results, the most assertive – and, I suppose middle-class – parents choose them and that pushes the results up even further.”
Quite.
Atheist in Church 
And you were worried about your identity being discovered!
At least no danger of your church-based deception appearing on the pages of the Telegraph.
I foresee his argument may be that while he is a declared atheist, his wife isn’t and it was she who attended church and made the school decision. Harder to explain is why a Government minister has so little faith, in every sense of the word, in the state school system and why he’s ended up sticking his child in one that seems to be running contrary to educational policy.
You’re right about him appearing to have little “faith” in the Government’s own schools. I don’t think it really goes against Government policy, however: they are in favour of faith schools and in favour of “choice” (whatever that means).
Have you clocked that David Cameron has given his endorsement to faith schools and promised an expansion? It appears to me that mainstream politicians are utterly out of touch with public opinion, thinking that the popularity of selective faith schools constitutes an endorsement.
My view is that faith schools are popular because they have the ability to keep out the kind of vile little oiks who will disrupt classes and turn the playground into a war zone.
I don’t suppose that it concerns the CofE that said oiks are the kind of people that Jesus Christ told them that they should be looking after. Who the hell is he anyway? Only the son of God and the founder of their religion, how can you take seriously someone who tells you to give all your possessions and money away?
Yes, I saw the Daily Mail article on Cameron’s love for faith schools. Hate linking to the rag, but here.
He obviously feels it is a vote-winner. Or if he opposes faith schools the resultant whining from the Churches will turn it into a vote-loser. (Or he believes the nonsense he spouts: unlikely.)
In a sense I am doing what you say: the next nearest school has more than its fair share of “oiks” because the faith schools is keeping them out. A fair admissions policy would stop this. I could send my children to the other school as agents of social change but, if I am the only one, they will suffer. I cannot change the system, so I have to play by the (unfair) rules.
In the Milliband case, it seems more surprising because (according to the reports) his nearest non-faith school has only a slighly worse Ofsted rating than the one he has chosen.
The NSS provided a link a couple of weeks ago to an article in the DM about Hypocritical Christians which I suspect that they hadn’t read. The piece was in fact bashing those who were pretending to be Christians in order to get their kids into their desired school.
What I found interesting was that the comment thread contained only about five comments all of which were in support of the article followed by a caption stating that the comments were now closed.