Facing the Axe? Diocese of Bradford in the Headlights

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Periodic reports about Islam overtaking the Church of England in terms of the number of worshippers have been a feature of media life for much of the past decade.

The latest variant on the theme is to be found in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, in an article by Jonathan Petre and Andrew Chapman. A version of this is online at:  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1323237/Facing-axe-Diocese-twice-Muslim-worshippers-Anglicans.html

The opening paragraph summarizes the story: ‘A historic Church of England diocese where Muslim worshippers outnumber Anglican churchgoers by two to one is set to be scrapped.’

The diocese concerned is Bradford, which – the article suggests – is being lined up by the Dioceses Commission for possible merger with the neighbouring Diocese of Ripon and Leeds (it was actually part of the Diocese of Ripon until separated out in 1919).

Neither the Diocese of Bradford nor the Commission was willing to comment on this mooted reorganization. But what of the other half of the equation, the suggestion that Friday mosque attendances have surpassed Anglican Sunday congregations?

The Bradford diocesan churchgoing statistic quoted is the Mail on Sunday is the usual Sunday attendance figure of 8,700 for 2008, taken from the latest edition of Church Statistics.

Other and more favourable figures for the Diocese of Bradford in that year are overlooked, one suspects deliberately. These are (in ascending order): average Sunday attendance of 10,200, electoral roll membership of 11,300, average weekly attendance of 12,200, Easter Day attendance of 13,800, and Christmas Day/Eve attendance of 26,100.

As for Muslims, a total population figure of about 80,000 for Bradford is cited, apparently put forward by Peter Brierley of Brierley Research. The basis for this estimate is not explained.

The 2001 census of the Bradford Unitary Authority identified 75,200 Muslims, representing 16% of all inhabitants at that date. However, if the Muslim community in Bradford has grown at the same rate as in the rest of the country since the census, the number of Muslims in the city must now be about 110,000, rather than 80,000.

The article goes on to say that ‘Government surveys have established that at least a quarter of Muslims are weekly mosque-goers’. Therefore, ‘on a conservative estimate 20,000 are regular worshippers, more than double the number of their Anglican counterparts.’

It is not clarified what these ‘Government surveys’ are. By far the largest such enquiry which includes religion, the Integrated Household Survey, is confined to religious affiliation and does not measure religious observance.

The question used in the Government’s Citizenship Survey asks whether respondents practice their religion, and 80% of Muslims in 2008-09 said that they did.

An as yet unpublished academic study of Muslims, conducted by Ipsos MORI in 2009 and made available by BRIN’s David Voas, records claimed weekly attendance at services as higher than one-quarter, 30% for the 18-34s and 50% for the over-35s. These claims may, of course, be exaggerated.

It is also far from certain whether the Mail on Sunday’s journalists are comparing like-with-like in spatial terms. The Diocese of Bradford is larger than the city, as regards both population (by 37% in 2001) and area, its 920 square miles taking in (as the article acknowledges) the western quarter of North Yorkshire and parts of East Lancashire, South-East Cumbria and Leeds.

Thus, while the general point made by the article still stands, that Anglicans are in relative retreat in a city which, in 2001, had the fourth highest proportion of Muslims anywhere in the country, it otherwise leaves a very great deal to be desired in respect of presentation and interpretation of the facts. These appear to have been sacrificed in the pursuit of a sensationalist headline.

The story is rerun in today’s Daily Express, in an article by Mark Reynolds, with the additional twist that, following projections in Christian Research’s Religious Trends, it is claimed that ‘even Hindus will soon come close to outnumbering churchgoers’. See:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/207388/Church-diocese-is-axed-because-of-Muslim-influx

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Lies, Damned Lies …

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Were you, like me, too preoccupied with last Wednesday’s Comprehensive Spending Review announcement to remember that 20 October was also the first ever World Statistics Day, co-ordinated by the United Nations?

The day was celebrated in over 100 countries and territories and by 40 international agencies. In the UK it was marked by a series of events and activities organized by the Office for National Statistics, the Government Statistical Service and the Devolved Administrations and by the Royal Statistical Society.

It is often said that there are three kinds of untruth: ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’. This phrase was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain in 1906, who attributed it to the nineteenth-century British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (although it is apparently not found in any of his works).

According to an Ipsos MORI poll, conducted by telephone on 15-17 October among a representative sample of 1,009 adults aged 18 and over, 65 per cent of Britons agree with this proposition, just 17 per cent disagree, with 18 per cent neutral or otherwise expressing no opinion.

The context for this question about ‘lies’ was British official statistics, which seem especially distrusted. Only 35 per cent agree that they are mostly accurate; and just one-quarter say that they are produced without political interference and used honestly by the Government when talking about its policies.

A related problem is that the public is not especially numerate. In an earlier Ipsos MORI survey, undertaken among 1,004 adults by telephone on 10-12 September, one-third of Britons could not convert 20 per cent into a fraction. The very youngest (aged 18-34) and very oldest (aged 65+) were the least likely to be able to answer this correctly.

The Ipsos MORI findings are freely available at:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2682

They suggest that statisticians in general, and BRIN in particular, will have their work cut out to promulgate the quantitative gospel!

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Witchcraft

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Gallup today (25 August) issued a press release showing that in 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in 2009 belief in witchcraft averaged 55% of adults aged 15 and over, somewhat higher than the 37% recorded in a similar Pew Center survey in 2008-09. Gallup further discovered that believers in witchcraft rated their lives worse (evaluative wellbeing) than those who did not.

This has prompted BRIN to dig out what we know about the extent of belief in witchcraft in contemporary Britain. Three relatively recent surveys seem relevant in this regard.

The first was undertaken by Gallup UK between 26 August and 8 September 2005 among a telephone sample of 1,010 adults aged 18 and over. Of these, 13% claimed to believe in witches, the same as in Canada but less than in the United States (21%). Whereas women incline to hold to most religious and supernatural beliefs more than men (for example, 44% versus 29% believing in haunted houses in the same poll), the figures were absolutely identical for each sex for belief in witches.

An Ipsos MORI telephone survey for The Times between 5 and 7 October 2007, in which 1,005 adults were interviewed, recorded 13% belief in witches and wizards. Breaks by standard demographics did not reveal any significant differences, but belief was notably higher among those who described themselves as spiritual (21%) or superstitious (19%).

Another Ipsos MORI poll, on this occasion for the BBC, and carried out by telephone among 1,070 adults aged 16 and over between 3 and 6 January 2008, discovered 16% believing in witches and wizards. The figure was slightly higher for women (19%) and considerably more for those from an ethnic minority background (27%). 

These British results are, therefore, pretty consistent. Like many alternative beliefs, they are probably fairly loosely-held and will not impact much, if at all, on people’s everyday lives. However, a recent (26 July) Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Britain’s Witch Children has highlighted evidence of a more disturbing kind of belief in witchcraft among some evangelical African churches in the UK.

The last in a line of Witchcraft Acts was repealed in 1951, one of the final prosecutions under them being of Helen Duncan in 1944, whose story is told in Malcolm Gaskill’s Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (Fourth Estate, 2001).

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Trust in the Clergy

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Clive D. Field

How trustworthy are the clergy, both absolutely and in relation to other professionals? Several opinion poll companies have tried to answer this question over the years, including Ipsos MORI, which has data on the extent to which Britons trust the clergy to tell the truth or not going back to 1983, some of which is abstracted at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/documents/Table-9-1-Trust-Professions-Ipsos-MORI-1983-2009.xls

GfK Custom Research has undertaken a similar exercise annually since 2003, asking respondents whether they trust the clergy and other groups or not. But GfK has polled internationally and not just in Britain.

Most recently GfK surveyed 15 European countries (including by telephone in the UK) and the United States, Brazil, Colombia and India in February and March 2010 on behalf of the Wall Street Journal Europe, with an average of just under 1,000 interviews in each nation.

GfK has issued a press release about the 2010 survey, which will be found at:

http://www.gfknop.com/imperia/md/content/gfk_nop/newsandpressinformation/100609_pm_trust_index_2010_fin.pdf

Unfortunately, it does not feature any of the UK results. However, some of these have been made available exclusively to British Religion in Numbers by Mark Hofmans of GfK Custom Research and are quoted here with his kind permission.

Across all countries, trust in the clergy stands at 58%, the range being from 33% in France to 86% in Romania. In the UK the figure is 63%, the highest in Western Europe (and 15% above the sub-continental average), closely followed by Sweden on 62%.

But UK citizens’ trust in the clergy is far less than in doctors (85%), the army (85%), schoolteachers (84%) and policemen (73%), although it exceeds confidence in lawyers (48%), managers of large enterprises (34%), journalists (21%) and politicians (14%).  

GfK report that, internationally, trust in the clergy declined by 8% between 2009 and 2010, from 66% to 58%, and by as much as 17% in Germany, which GfK largely attributes to the adverse publicity surrounding the abuse of children and young people by Roman Catholic priests and the Church’s perceived inadequate response to these events.

In the UK the fall from 2009 to 2010 was only 3%, perhaps reflecting the fact that the Roman Catholic Church in Britain has been somewhat less caught up in the scandals than its counterparts in Ireland and continental Europe. The 66% having trust in the clergy in the UK in 2009 was also 6 points higher than in 2008.

Although somewhat less that the number of Britons telling Ipsos MORI that they trust the clergy to tell the truth (71% in 2009), and notwithstanding a continuing trickle of ‘naughty vicar’ stories in the media (the latest about sham marriages), the GfK figure of 63% in the UK having confidence in the clergy is still surprisingly high (and not far behind the United States on 69%).

How do we interpret this? Is the lingering respect for clergy a recognition of the influence which they exercise in the leadership of the local communities which they serve, or do we still derive comfort from the knowledge that the clergy of all denominations and faiths set a lead in religious commitment and moral standards which the rest of us will but imperfectly follow?

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Citizenship Survey, 2009-10 – First Results

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Detailed reporting from the 2008-09 Citizenship Survey may not yet be complete (in particular, the topic report on race, religion and equalities is still outstanding), but initial results from all four quarters of the 2009-10 survey were released by the Department for Communities and Local Government on 22 July in respect of the questions relating to empowered and active communities, community cohesion, and prejudice and discrimination.  

The 58-page report (Cohesion Research, Statistical Release 12) will be found at the following URL (with the 16 tables also separately available as Excel files):

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/statistics/citizenshipsurveyq4200910

The 2009-10 Citizenship Survey was conducted by Ipsos MORI and TNS-BMRB in England and Wales between April 2009 and March 2010. Face-to-face interviews took place with a representative core sample of 9,305 adults aged 16 and over. In addition, there were ethnic minority and Muslim booster samples (n = 5,280 and 1,555 respectively). However, the tables in this release mostly relate to England alone, and this is true of all those referred to below. We shall focus solely on those which contain breaks by religious affiliation (Christian denominations again being undifferentiated).

TABLE 2: Whereas 37% overall feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area, the figure rises to 40% among Sikhs, 46% among Muslims and 47% among Hindus. Similarly, while 20% overall consider they can influence decisions affecting Britain, the number stands at 35% for Hindus and Muslims, with 28% for Sikhs. It is not therefore the case that adherents of the major non-Christian faiths feel less empowered than Christians.

TABLE 3: 59% of all adults have participated in some form of civic engagement or formal volunteering at least once in the last year, a 3% decrease on 2008-09. The proportions are well below the norm for Muslims (45%) and Hindus (48%), and this is broadly true for each of the four constituent activity areas considered separately. Muslims’ engagement is 3 points lower than in 2008-09 and 6 points lower than in 2007-08, suggesting that there may be cause for concern about their level of integration.

TABLE 7: 85% of the whole sample consider their local area to be a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together, the range being from 80% for Buddhists and those with no religion to 90% for Muslims. The Muslim figure has steadily improved from 81% in 2005, as have the statistics for Christians (80% to 86%) and Sikhs (77% to 88%).

TABLE 9: 87% of all adults claim to identify strongly with Britain. This is also the figure for Muslims (as it was in 2008-09). This is 6% more than for Muslims who identify strongly with their neighbourhood, which is 5 points above the national average. Identification with Britain is weakest among Buddhists (75%, but a very small sub-sample) and those with no religion (84%).

TABLE 11: 80% of all respondents mix regularly (at least monthly) with people from different ethnic or religious backgrounds. This is least for Christians (77%) and greatest for Hindus (96%) and Muslims and Sikhs (94% each). Ethnicity is a major driver of these differences, 78% of whites mixing compared with 96% of ethnic minority groups. The statistics show little change from previous years. Breakdowns by sphere of mixing by religious affiliation are detailed in Table 12.

TABLE 13: 7% of the whole sample feel that racial or religious harassment is a very or fairly big problem in their local area. However, the figure rises to 13% for Hindus, 14% for Sikhs and 17% for Muslims, although in each instance the percentage is a little lower than in 2008-09. For Muslims it is 3% less than in 2007-08. Islamophobia, therefore, would appear to remain a sad fact of British life. Unfortunately, too few Jews were interviewed for them to be separately categorized (they are subsumed within ‘other religion’), so we cannot say from this survey whether Judeophobia is also an issue.

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Jewish Attitudes toward Israel

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Clive D. Field

‘Jews in Britain strongly identify with and support Israel. They are ready to see Israel swap territory for peace and to talk with Hamas if it will advance the cause of peace. At the same time, they are concerned about Israel’s security, support the separation barrier/security fence and view the 2008/09 operation in Gaza as “a legitimate act of self-defence.”’

These are the central findings of what is described as the most definitive (albeit not the first) study ever conducted of the attitudes of Jews in Britain towards Israel. Entitled Committed, Concerned and Conciliatory: The Attitudes of Jews in Britain towards Israel, and written by David Graham and Jonathan Boyd, it was published on 15 July by the community’s leading research body, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR).

The report is available to download from:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/JPR%20Israel%20survey%20report%2015.pdf

The investigation, which was funded by the Pears Foundation, derives from the responses given by a self-selecting sample of 4,081 self-identifying Jews aged 18 and over living in Great Britain.

They completed an online questionnaire administered by Ipsos MORI between 7 January and 14 February 2010. Data analysis and report-writing was the responsibility of JPR.

Relative to the 2001 census and other (Jewish) sources, the sample is broadly representative of the Jewish community in many respects. However, it is somewhat skewed in terms of educational achievement, synagogue membership and secular/religious outlook, and the data have been weighted in these regards.

‘The survey shows that the vast majority of respondents exhibit strong personal support for, and affinity with, Israel: 95% have visited the country, 90% see it as the “ancestral homeland” of the Jewish people, and 86% feel that Jews have a special responsibility for its survival.’

Additionally, 82% state that Israel plays a central or important role in their Jewish identities, 72% categorize themselves as Zionists, 76% consider Israel to be relevant to their day-to-day lives in Britain, and 87% view British Jews as part of a global Jewish diaspora.

‘On the other hand, these strong levels of personal attachment to Israel do not prevent respondents from expressing criticism about Israel’s civil society: 74% think that Orthodox Judaism has too much influence in Israel; 67% say there is too much corruption in Israel’s political system; and 56% feel that non-Jewish minority groups suffer from discrimination in the country.’  

‘It further paints a portrait of a community that is highly-engaged with Israel, and that expresses predominantly dovish views on the key political issues: 78% favour a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians; 74% oppose the expansion of existing settlements in the West Bank; and 67% favour exchanging land for peace. A majority (52% against 39%) favours negotiating with Hamas to achieve peace.’

Notwithstanding, ‘respondents are clearly sympathetic to Israel’s need to defend itself. Nearly three-quarters agree that “The security fence is vital for Israel’s security” and a similar number agree that Operation Cast Lead (the Israeli military action in Gaza in winter 2008/09) was “a legitimate act of self-defence.” Nearly nine out of ten respondents believe that Iran represents a threat to Israel’s very existence.’

‘Perhaps most significantly for a community that has long debated the acceptability of Jewish criticism of Israel in public, a slight majority (53% to 45%) believes that Jews living in Britain have the right to judge Israel, and nearly three-quarters believe that Jews should be free to speak their mind about Israel in the British media in at least some, if not all circumstances.’

In general, the more religious respondents claim to be, the more hawkish their stance on political and security issues. Those with higher levels of educational attainment tend to exhibit more dovish viewpoints compared with Jews with lesser education.

Commenting on the findings, JPR Executive Director, Jonathan Boyd, said: ‘Fundamentally, we found that most Jews feel a strong sense of connection to Israel … Jews in Britain are pro-Israel and pro-peace. Their hawkishness on some issues is typically motivated by a clear concern for Israel’s security, while their dovishness on others reflects a deep-set desire to see the country at peace, both with itself and with its neighbours.’

The report does not discuss in any detail how the attitudes of British Jews towards Israel may have changed over time. Readers interested in possible trends should consult JPR’s previous report from 1997 (based on data gathered in 1995): Barry Kosmin, Antony Lerman and Jacqueline Goldberg, The Attachment of British Jews to Israel.

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The Catholic Vote

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Clive D. Field

‘Labour would be returned for an historic fourth consecutive term with a very large majority if it were just Catholics voting at the general election on Thursday, as Labour holds a huge lead of 19 points over the Tories among Catholics.’

So writes Sir Robert Worcester, founder of MORI, in his article ‘Does your Cross Count?’ in The Tablet, the Roman Catholic weekly, for 1 May (only available online to subscribers).

His findings are based on an aggregation of Ipsos MORI’s four monthly political polls in January-April 2010. Data relate to 2,673 British adults aged 18 and over (including 322 self-identifying Roman Catholics) who said they were certain to vote.

The Labour share of the vote in these polls stood at 43% for Catholics, compared with 30% for the electorate as a whole. Conservative figures were 24% and 36% respectively, and for the Liberal Democrats 24% and 23%.

Catholic voting behaviour is also revealed as different from other (non-Catholic) professing Christians. The latter are 20% more likely to support the Conservatives than Roman Catholics and 18% less likely to vote Labour. The Liberal Democrats have a 4% lead among Catholics relative to other Christians.

As Worcester comments: ‘it is clear that a “Christian bloc vote” is non-existent – Catholics do not hold the same voting intention as other Christians’.

The Catholic bias towards Labour is of long standing, largely related to the Roman Catholic Church’s historical success in retaining the allegiance (at least nominally) of those elements of the working classes who were cradle Catholics. 

Some of the evidence for this can be found on the Ipsos MORI website where there are comparative data on voting by religion in the run-up to the general elections of 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005. See:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemID=2370&view=wide

These tables show that, at 43%, the Catholic Labour vote in 2010 has fallen from 53% in 2005 (the same proportion as at the 1997 general election) and 60% in 2001. In 2005 Roman Catholic support for Labour was 30% higher than among non-Catholic Christians, whereas in 2010 the gap is reduced to 18%.

Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have gained to a limited extent from the Catholic swing against Labour since 2005; indeed, the Catholic swing to the Tories is marginally above that in the overall electorate. However, the main change since 2005 is an increase in the number of Catholics intending to vote for other parties (2% in 2005 and 9% today).

Of course, the fieldwork for the 2010 polls has been spread over rather a long period. In particular, it may not fully reflect the electoral impact, especially for the Liberal Democrats, of the televised debates between the leaders of the main political parties.

It is also the case that the Catholic sub-sample in these surveys is relatively small. Likewise, no account is taken of the significant lapsation from Catholicism. Many of these professing Catholics will be quite nominal in their adherence to the faith. Ideally, such surveys should control for frequency of mass attendance.

Worcester’s article further reports the outcome of recent Ipsos MORI polling for Reuters in Labour-held marginal constituencies. Here the Conservatives trail Labour by a massive 28% among Catholics, whereas they have a lead of 6% among non-Catholic Christians.

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Political Leanings of Britain’s Jews

Posted on May 1, 2010 by Clive D. Field

‘There is no Christian vote’ ran the headline for Nick Spencer’s article on The Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ pages on 26 April, trying to assess how significant faith voting would be in next Thursday’s general election.

But is the same true of the Jewish vote? Thanks to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), we now have some answers to this question for the first time since 1995 when the JPR collected data for a report on The Social and Political Attitudes of British Jews.

The latest data are extracted from an online survey of self-identifying British Jews aged 18 and over in January and February 2010, undertaken primarily to measure the attitudes and attachments of Jews to Israel. This study was commissioned by the Pears Foundation, conducted by JPR, with fieldwork overseen by Ipsos MORI.  

Although the full results of this survey have yet to be published, JPR has randomly selected 1,000 responses and analysed the answers to the question on party political preferences (as opposed to the more explicit current voting intention).

This subset of data was published on 29 April in David Graham’s paper The Political Leanings of Britain’s Jews, which can be downloaded from:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/Political%20Leanings%202010%20Final.pdf

There is also a much shorter news report in the Jewish Chronicle for 30 April: Simon Rocker, ‘Who Votes for Whom?’.

Overall, the Jewish population is evenly split between Labour (31%) and the Conservatives (30%), with 11% favouring the Liberal Democrats, 8% other parties and 15% undecided at the time of fieldwork.

Younger Jews are more likely to be undecided, and less likely to support the Conservatives, than older respondents. Conservative preferences rise from 24% for those aged 18-39 to 29% for 40-59 to 33% for 60+. Support for Labour does not vary with age.

Jewish men are considerably more likely (36%) than Jewish women (22%) to prefer the Conservatives. Women are more likely than men to be Labour (33% against 28% for men), Liberal Democrats (12% against 10%) and undecided (16% against 14%).

Jews who are married are more likely to prefer the Conservatives (34%) than never married Jews (22%) or cohabitees (12%). Single (never married) Jews are more likely to prefer Labour (34%) than married respondents (28%). Liberal Democrats draw disproportionate support (24%) from cohabitees.

Self-employed Jews are more likely to be Conservatives (39% compared with 29% for Labour), whereas full-time employees prefer Labour (38% versus 25% Conservative). Retired Jews also prefer the Conservatives over Labour (37% and 29% respectively).

Jews demonstrate different political leanings depending upon where they live. Respondents in Hertfordshire (54%) and West London (46%) are overwhelmingly Conservative. In North and East London 40% prefer Labour, as do 35% in Northern England.

Jews with a self-assigned secular outlook prefer Labour, those with a religious outlook the Conservatives. The Conservative leaning grows from 21% among the secular to 29% of the somewhat secular, 38% of the somewhat religious and 45% of the religious. The Labour leaning moves in the opposite direction (42% for the secular to 24% for the religious).

Conservative support is disproportionately to be found among Central Orthodox synagogues than Reform synagogues (48% against 28%). For Labour the reverse is true (22% versus 34%). Respondents who do not belong to any synagogue are most likely to support Labour (40%).

Since Jews only constitute approximately 0.5% of the electorate, these trends are unlikely to have a seismic effect nationally. However, the community is highly concentrated spatially (for example, in Greater London and the South-East and in Greater Manchester), so in particular constituencies, especially the marginals in the 2005 general election, the Jewish vote could be influential on 6 May. However, the beneficiaries are likely to be Conservatives and Labour in equal measure. So there is no distinctive Jewish vote, after all!

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Who should run State Schools?

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Who should run state schools? A new survey commissioned by two trade unions, NASUWT: The Teachers’ Union and Unison, has posed just that question. It was conducted by Ipsos MORI who interviewed a representative sample of 1,211 adults aged 15 and over in England face-to-face in their homes on 5-11 March 2010.

The sample was asked to consider the idea that ‘more schools in the future could be run directly by private companies, religious groups, charities or groups of parents rather than being run by the local council as they generally are now’.

When quizzed which would be the most appropriate group to run state-funded schools, 62% replied that it should be local authorities and 14% universities or colleges. Only 4% suggested religious organizations, with the highest percentage among demographic sub-groups being 15% for parents whose children attended a private school. The next highest figure in favour of religious organizations was the 7% recorded for those aged 65 and over, Londoners and readers of broadsheet newspapers.

When the question was inverted, and respondents were asked which group should not run state-funded schools, religious organizations headed the list at 35%, closely followed by private companies (34%) and groups of parents (32%). The opposition to religious organizations was never an actual majority for any particular sub-group, but it did exceed  40% for single people, those aged 15-24, middle income earners, those who considered the standard of state education to be relatively poor, and residents of East Midland, Eastern, North-Eastern and South-Western counties.

It should be noted that the answers in respect of religious groups should not be confused with attitudes to what are popularly known as faith schools, which remain maintained schools generally drawing their recurrent funding from the local authority. The principal conclusion of the poll is that most people want state schools to remain under direct state control, rather than their management to be ‘privatized’ in some way. However, it is significant that, of the various ‘privatization’ options, management by religious organizations is one of the least attractive with the public.  

Detailed computer tabulations of results from this poll will be found at:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2579

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