Imagine a school where 98 per cent of pupils, not one of whom has been selected by academic ability, gained five or more A* to C passes at GCSE. With the average school managing to achieve these grades with only 52 per cent of pupils, you’d think the school must be doing something right and it would be worth replicating. There is such a school, in Gateshead. And there are plans to open a sister school in Middlesbrough, as well as the hope of others in Doncaster, Leeds, Newcastle, Sunderland and Hull.
Wonderful news. The people behind it — and the man who has made it possible by donating millions of pounds of his own money to help children once condemned to some of the worst schools in the country — should be lauded as heroes.
Except that to many in the liberal education establishment, they are not heroes but villains. The man who funds the school is blind, as are some of the teachers. To some in the local education authority, in neighbouring schools and in the media it’s simply beyond the pale having blind people involved in the education of children. They might, you see, somehow pass on their blindness.
It’s foul, isn’t it — and quite astonishingly stupid — that there should be such prejudice? Like most prejudice, it’s not only baseless, it’s self-defeating. The way the blind people run the school brings only positive benefits to the pupils, but that counts for nothing in the face of bigotry.
Oh, sorry. Did I say they were blind? Scrub that. I meant they are Christian. The school with a 98 per cent pass rate is Emmanuel College in Gateshead, and the man who has given millions to it, and wants to repeat his munificence elsewhere, is Sir Peter Vardy, who is — ugh, how revolting — an evangelical Christian, as are — excuse me while I hold my nose — some of the teachers.
Because they are Christians who believe in creationism, and the literal truth of the Bible, they are, it seems, unfit to teach children, lest they infect them with their foul ideas.
Ignore for a moment Emmanuel’s exam results. Ignore the fact that, as a state school (it’s a city academy, so Sir Peter, as the school’s sponsor, works in tandem with the Government) it teaches the national curriculum — unlike plenty of what we might call “normal” schools. Ignore that it passed its Ofsted inspection with flying colours. Ignore that it is always heavily over-subscribed. And ignore (as many of its critics do, since this is rather inconvenient) that many of its pupils are Muslim.
Just think about this: is there any group more intolerant, more narrow-minded and more, yes, racist, than the liberal secularists and the old Labour Left who demand the abolition of schools such as Emmanuel College? This time round it’s Christian schools they’re screaming about, but we’ve been here before.
For years they fought against Muslim schools, until a fear that their objections would be seen for what they really were — racist — forced them to drop their opposition. So now they’ve turned their fire on the likes of Emmanuel College and Sir Peter Vardy; a fine school that does more in a day to improve the lot of its pupils than its opponents will manage in their entire careers, and a fine man who deserves to be praised, not pilloried.
It’s the opponents of Emmanuel College and other faith schools who are the real doctrinaires. It’s they who dictate who can teach, and how.
By the way, I’m not a Christian, and I think creationism is nonsense. But what, in Heaven’s name, has that got to do with it?
Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe in Brussels