Group-Focused Enmity in Europe

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Fresh light on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Britain is shed in a report published by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin on 11 March 2011. Entitled Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination: A European Report, it is written by Andreas Zick, Beate Kupper and Andreas Hovermann. It is available to download from:

http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/do/07908-20110311.pdf

The publication is based upon the Group-Focused Enmity in Europe project which is located at the Bielefeld Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, and which has been supported by funding from a consortium of six foundations.

Fieldwork for the underlying survey was conducted in eight European countries during autumn 2008: France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland and Portugal. A sample of 1,000 adults aged 16 and over was interviewed by telephone by TNS in each nation.

Attitudes to various groups were measured, but this particular report concentrates on a sub-set of six types of prejudice: anti-immigrant views, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia (or anti-Muslim attitudes, as they are termed here), racism and sexism.

There continues to be evidence of anti-Semitism in Britain, with 14% of adults agreeing that Jews had too much influence, 22% that they tried to take advantage of being victims during the Nazi era, and 23% that they did not care about anything or anybody except their own kind.

However, these figures were actually the lowest for all the eight countries, with the exception of The Netherlands. Britain and The Netherlands came joint first on a fourth measure, agreeing that Jews enriched the national culture (72%). Hungary and Poland were generally most negative about the Jews.

Levels of hostility rose somewhat when the question of Israel-Palestine was put to a half-sample. 36% of Britons said that, given Israeli policy, they could understand why people did not like Jews. Still more, 42%, concurred that Israel was conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians, which was a bigger proportion than in Hungary, Italy and The Netherlands.

Negativity towards Muslims was greater still. 45% of Britons considered that there were too many Muslims in the country, 50% claimed that they were too demanding, and 47% regarded Islam as a religion of intolerance.

These three items were combined into a scale of anti-Muslim attitudes. While Hungary and Poland were about as Islamophobic as they were anti-Semitic, the mean scores for the remaining nations were much higher than for anti-Semitism, Britain included. Portugal was least Islamophobic.

Other questions did not form part of this scale but, administered to a half-sample, reinforced the evidence of enmity. Only 39% in Britain felt that the Muslim culture fitted well into the country and Europe, and 82% viewed Muslim attitudes towards women as contradicting British values. 38% believed that many Muslims perceived terrorists as heroes, and 26% that the majority of Muslims found terrorism justifiable.

Anti-Muslim sentiments were shown to have an especially strong relationship with anti-immigrant views, and this was particularly true of Britain. The correlation between anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic opinions was less marked but still observable. Anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic attitudes had a relationship of medium strength.

Correlations with self-assessed religiosity were explored in a separate report on the same survey: Beate Kupper and Andreas Zick, Religion and Prejudice in Europe: New Empirical Findings (Alliance Publishing Trust, 2010), which can be found at:

http://www.alliancemagazine.org/books/religionandprejudice.pdf

Whereas, for Europe as a whole, the researchers discovered that ‘the more religious individuals are, the more prejudiced they are’, the pattern in Britain was more complex.

For Britons greater religiosity was most associated with sexism and homophobia, and – to a lesser extent – with racism and anti-immigrant views. In the cases of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the very religious were the least prejudiced of the four religiosity groups but the quite religious were the most prejudiced.

Overall, 5% of Britons described themselves as very religious, 29% as quite religious, 27% as not very religious, and 38% as not at all religious. A YouGov poll of 5,000 plus respondents for The Sun last month revealed that 27% saw themselves as religious and 71% not.

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Self-Supporting Ministry

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Clive D. Field

In 2009 3,100 or 27% of all the Church of England’s diocesan licensed ministers were in self-supporting ministry (SSM), sometimes described as non-stipendiary ministry. Hitherto, comparatively little has been known about these SSMs and how they are utilized by the Church.

That omission is now rectified by research published in the Church Times of 1 April 2011 (pp. 5, 22-3) and 8 April 2011 (pp. 4, 22-3, 30). These articles, together with some of the raw data in chart form, can be downloaded from:

http://www.1pf.co.uk/SSM.html

The study was undertaken by Rev Dr Teresa Morgan, Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Oriel College, Oxford and herself in the SSM, in the parish of Littlemore.

Fieldwork took place during the autumn of 2010 by means of an online questionnaire, to which 890 SSMs in the UK (but mostly from England) responded, representing 28% of the universe.

SSMs were found to contribute a significant amount of time to their ministry, with one-quarter putting in more than 30 hours a week and a further one-fifth between 20 and 30 hours. Only 15% spent fewer than 10 hours a week on their ministry.

Moreover, the overwhelming majority regarded their ministry as a privilege and a joy and had received extensive pre- and post-ordination training.

Notwithstanding, many respondents gave the clear impression that they were ‘ignored, overlooked or under-used’ in the Church, ‘parked somewhere, and left’, and ‘sidelined’. Some commented that stipendiary ministers appeared not to regard SSMs as ‘proper’ clergy and treated them badly.

Likewise, many SSMs reported a degree of stagnation in their ministry since ordination. 46% had held only one post since ordination, and 41% reported no change in their ministry during this time. Just 13% had lead responsibility for ministry in their parish or chaplaincy. 59% exercised no significant ministry beyond the Church. Almost one-quarter claimed to have received no ministerial development review.

Morgan is critical of the Church for its lack of strategy with regard to SSM and especially of the failure of dioceses to consider SSMs in their planning processes. She dismisses the raft of alleged impediments to the effective use of SSMs often cited by Church leaders, arguing that her survey has empirically disproved them.

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Marriages in England and Wales in 2009

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The Office for National Statistics published a statistical bulletin on 30 March setting out the provisional figures for marriages which took place in England and Wales during 2009. Final data will not be available until the spring of 2012.

The provisional statistics reveal a continuation of existing trends, with a decline in both the total number of marriages (the 2009 figure was the lowest since 1895, when the population was considerably less) and the proportion of them conducted according to religious rites.

Civil ceremonies accounted for 67% of all marriages in 2009, compared with 62% ten years previously. They first exceeded religious ceremonies in 1992. The growing proportion has been driven by the increased number of weddings in approved premises (such as hotels and historic buildings) since those premises were first licensed in 1995.

The actual provisional number of religious ceremonies in 2009 was 75,630, 4% down on 2008, and 33% of all marriages. Religious marriages have declined by one-quarter since 1999, twice the rate of decrease in the overall total for marriages.

For the fifth consecutive year there were fewer religious ceremonies than weddings in approved premises, suggesting that historic secular buildings are often displacing historic churches as preferred venues.

These headlines from the statistical bulletin are supplemented by Table 4 in an accompanying Excel file of summary marriage statistics for 2009. This contains absolute numbers and percentages for civil and religious marriages in 1981, 1991, 1999, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

These statistics are further disaggregated according to whether it was the first marriage for both parties, the first marriage for one party or a remarriage for both parties. This breakdown reveals that 82% of religious marriages in 2009 involved a first marriage for both parties.

There were only 4,940 religious ceremonies involving a remarriage for both parties in 2009, just 13% of all weddings in this category, probably implying that divorced persons largely opt for civil ceremonies.

Both the statistical bulletin and the Excel file can be accessed at:  

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Product.asp?vlnk=14275

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Concerns for Christians

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The indefatigable Peter Brierley of Brierley Consultancy has just brought out, under his ADBC Publishers imprint, a 24-page synthesis of statistics relating to 21 issues which are likely to be of concern to Christians.

Entitled 21 Concerns for 21st Century Christians, it can be ordered (priced £2, inclusive of postage) from Dr Peter Brierley, The Old Post Office, 1 Thorpe Avenue, Tonbridge, Kent, TN10 4PW. Cheques should be made payable to Peter Brierley.

Each of the concerns is the subject of a single-page article. The sources of data are not given for each article but can often be inferred from the aggregate note about major sources which appears at the beginning of the pamphlet.

The statistics cited go back about twenty years and some are projected until 2020. Several articles deal with church attendance (numbers 1-4, 8, 12, 15), while updated versions of two Brierley ‘old favourites’ – estimates of the religious structure of the British population, meshing religious affiliation with religious practice (number 5) and of church leavers and joiners (number 13) – are naturally good debating points.

Other topics covered comprise the religious implications of immigration (number 6), the growth in other religions (numbers 7, 20), the decline in Christian publishing (number 14), evangelical donors (number 16), and the attributes of church leaders (number 21).

The pamphlet was included with the mailing of the current issue (No. 14, April 2011) of FutureFirst, the bimonthly magazine for subscribers of Brierley Consultancy. The newsletter likewise contains several features worth looking at.

The lead article is on ‘Church Growth and Spiritual Life’ by John Hayward and Leanne Howells of the University of Glamorgan. They use mathematics to model church growth, with special reference to the ‘reproduction potential’ of church ‘enthusiasts’.

They then apply their methods to Church of England data, showing how it has moved from ‘a reproduction potential below the threshold of extinction in 2000’ to a position where it is now ‘close to the revival threshold’. The decline in Anglican churchgoing, it is argued, ‘has slowed in such a way that suggests that its attendance will start increasing slowly again.’

Also in this issue of FutureFirst are preliminary findings from the ‘Christianity and the University Experience in Contemporary England’ project, a three-year study being conducted by the universities of Durham, Derby and Chester.

One fascinating finding is that, while 27% of students claim to be religious, 46% describe themselves as spiritual. Moreover, although roughly half the religious also thought they were spiritual, only a quarter of the spiritual regarded themselves as religious as well.

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Libya and Radical Islam

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Among the public’s many concerns about the current crisis in Libya is a fear that it may result in the country falling under the influence of radical Islam.

That is one of the findings from a YouGov poll conducted online for The Sunday Times between 31 March and 1 April 2011 among a representative sample of 2,226 Britons aged 18 and over. The relevant data will be found on page 9 of the tables available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-pol-st-results-01-030411.pdf

11% of adults said that they were very worried and a further 34% fairly worried about Libya coming under radical Islamic influence. The combined figure of 45% rose to 61% among the over-60s, 52% in northern England, 51% in Scotland, and 51% for electors who had voted Conservative at the 2010 general election.

A mere 8% were not worried at all about Libya falling under the influence of radical Islam, the highest proportion being among the under-40s (11%). 27% said that they were not very worried, while 20% expressed no opinion.

These concerns may be partly informed by the recent suggestion made by a senior NATO commander that al-Qaeda may be involved in the Libyan rebellion against Colonel Gaddafi, an assertion long made by Gaddafi himself.

The results of this latest YouGov poll have echoes in the organization’s earlier survey on 3-4 February, when the focus was on the campaign (eventually successful) to dislodge President Mubarak from power in Egypt.

At that time, 59% of Britons were very or fairly worried about the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East, with just 7% not worried at all. See our earlier post at: http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=871

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Religious Affiliation and Volunteering

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Siobhan McAndrew

Volunteering by Affiliation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This post is just to flag up the release of the most recent Taking Part in England dataset, covering January-December 2010. This survey is sponsored by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and asks an unusually large sample their leisure and cultural pursuits. It also asks questions about friendships, political participation, and volunteering.

Religion is captured in the Taking Part surveys by a religious affiliation question along the lines of the recent Census, and a question on whether the respondent currently practises that religion. I posted about the survey here last year: DCMS also provides an online analysis tool, NETQuest, for TP users.

DCMS has compiled a report on the 2010 dataset, as well as some useful crosstabulations and trend data using the complete set of datasets. I have just drawn up the graph above from their uploaded tables on volunteering available here. There are also reports and tables available on digital participation, and cycling and swimming proficiency.

Sadly, the questions on volunteering were not asked in 2009. It’s not clear whether there is any distinct trend over the past five years, but there is a significant difference in the volunteering activity between those reporting that they are Christian and those reporting no religion.

There are many possible reasons for this: older people are also more likely to say that they volunteer, which is also given in thestables, and we know that the older are more likely to report a religious affiliation: this may be the key driver.

Nevertheless, Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace found that in the US those who were religiously-active were more likely to volunteer in all fields apart from the arts. (See the volunteering category at the American Grace blog; there is also a lot of coverage of American Grace at their Social Capital blog.)

It may be that the situation is similar in the UK. There is a good deal of work to be done in this area, and a lot of data are available. The 2008 British Social Attitudes survey included three items on volunteering:

How many times, if any, did you volunteer in the past 12 months? By volunteering, we mean any unpaid work done to help people besides your family or friends or people you work with.

and

Could you tell me whether you have done any volunteer work for a religious group or place of worship in the past 12 months? any unpaid work done to help people besides your family or friends or people you work with.

Before that, the 1998 and 2008 surveys included questions on charitable, political and religious volunteering, which could be broken down by religious affiliation and frequency of attendance.

Volunteering is also covered extensively in the Citizenship Survey, with a report published here on volunteering and charitable giving using the data. This found that non-practising Christians; practising and non-practising Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs; those of ‘other’ religions who are non-practising, and those with no religion were less likely to volunteer regularly in a formal context compared to practising Christians.

Volunteering is also covered in the European Values Study and European Social Survey.

Substantial research programmes already exist to study volunteering, social capital and philanthropy. The task remains for researchers in the sociology of religion to explain the causal mechanisms through which religiosity affects voluntary effort, and to suggest what the impact of secularisation and growing religious diversity is likely to be.

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Domestic Abuse and British Jews

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Clive D. Field

We reported four months ago (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=718) that Jewish Women’s Aid (JWA), the UK national charity for Jewish women and their children affected by domestic violence, was intending to carry out an online survey into the incidence and perceptions of domestic abuse against women in the Jewish community.

The results of that survey have just been published as chapter 3 (pp. 44-58) of Sarah Abramson and Cora Peterson, ‘You know a Jewish Woman suffering from Domestic Abuse’: Domestic Abuse and the British Jewish Community. The 96-page report, exclusively previewed in the Jewish Chronicle of 11 March 2011, is available to download from:

http://www.jwa.org.uk/documents/JewishWomensAidResearchonDomesticAbuseMarch2011.pdf

Data collection took place online, via Survey Monkey, between 15 November 2010 and 15 January 2011. The study yielded 842 complete responses, 94% of them from women and 81% from London and the Home Counties.

Recruitment of interviewees was primarily by means of emails forwarded by friends or colleagues (53%), JWA communications (19%) and synagogues (15%).

It is readily conceded by the authors that the sample was entirely self-selecting, non-random and probably not statistically representative of the national Jewish female population.

‘It may be … that people with personal experiences of DV [domestic violence], or knowledge of someone close to them experiencing DV, were more likely to fill out the survey. It is also possible that people sympathetic to JWA objectives were more inclined to take the survey.’ Awareness of JWA (84%) was certainly exceptionally high.

The profile of respondents, while covering a reasonable spread of ages and Jewish religious traditions, was also skewed towards the highly-educated. No fewer than 69% of the women had been educated to university level and 35% had postgraduate qualifications.

Although slavish reliance should not therefore be placed on the data, they are nevertheless still interesting as an indication of a social problem which, despite being hardly discussed in a public religious context, is probably just as widespread among practising members of faith communities as it is in the rest of the population.

Indeed, 68% of these Jewish respondents assessed that domestic abuse occurred at about the same rate in the Jewish community as in society at large. The proportion of Jewish women in the study claiming to have personally experienced domestic abuse (27%) was also close to the national statistic of 25%. Two-thirds of the abuse of Jewish women was at the hands of a partner and the rest by a family member.

Moreover, 55% of respondents said that they knew somebody else who had been a victim of domestic abuse. The number having either direct or indirect experience or knowledge of abuse was 60%, rising to 69% among those in their forties.

78% stated that they had never heard, or could not recall hearing, a rabbi addressing domestic abuse, and only 13% recollected a rabbi condemning such abuse. Just 7% viewed rabbis as a primary source of support in abuse cases, compared with 51% for friends, relatives and neighbours, 44% for JWA, 34% for the police, and 30% for health professionals.

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Feminism and Religion

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Women have historically scored more highly than men on most indicators of religious belief and practice, but there have been signs in recent years that the situation may be changing, as females succumb to secularization, and apparently nowhere is this truer than for feminists.

This is the inescapable conclusion from a new article by Kristin Aune, ‘Much Less Religious, a Little More Spiritual: the Religious and Spiritual Views of Third-Wave Feminists in the UK’, Feminist Review, Vol. 97, No. 1, March 2011, pp. 32-55.

Together with Catherine Redfern, Aune surveyed the religious and spiritual attitudes of 1,265 ‘third-wave feminists’ in the UK by means of online and paper questionnaires. The fieldwork date is not cited but can be inferred to be circa 2008. Details of response rates are not given.

Two-thirds of respondents were members of feminist groups and initiatives established since the new millennium, thus representing the third wave of feminism in the UK, and one-third were attenders at four feminist conferences and festivals.

91% of the sample comprised women and 7% men. Three-quarters were in their twenties or thirties, with a mean age of 31 and a median of 27. They were mostly highly educated, 90% possessing or studying for an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.

Interviewees were asked to ‘describe your religious or spiritual views (including none/atheist/agnostic)’. Over 200 different self-designations were used, making aggregation and classification of the replies somewhat problematical.

The broadest categorization employed by Aune suggested that only 11% of the feminists subscribed to a major world religion, with 39% describing themselves as atheists, 16% as agnostics, 15% as of no religion, and 9% as spiritual rather than religious.

Aune compared these figures with data about women’s religious affiliation from the 2001 census and survey evidence and concluded that, relative to the wider population, feminists ‘are significantly less supportive of traditional religion and somewhat more supportive of alternative and non-institutional spiritualities’.

This comparison is rather deceptive since these general sources mostly used closed questions with pre-set response codes, rather than Aune’s open-ended approach.

It would also have been desirable to factor in age as well as gender in analysing the census and surveys, to produce a ‘control group’ that would have been a better match in age terms with the feminist profile.

Such comparisons do appear to bear out that ‘religion and spirituality are areas of only limited interest or concern’ for feminists. Whereas in the 2008 British Social Attitudes Survey, 47% of British women aged 18-44 said they had no religion, the equivalent figure in Aune’s study seems to be around 82%.

Neither the census nor national sample surveys are especially helpful routes for quantifying alternative and non-institutional spiritualities, and Aune’s comparative comments here seem to draw mainly on the classic study of religion and spirituality in Kendal in 2000-02 by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, whose statistical methods have been questioned (see http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/1405 for details of this research).

Aune suggests three possible explanations for her finding that feminists are less drawn to traditional religion than the norm and rather more to alternative and non-institutional spiritualities. These are: ‘feminism’s alignment with secularism, secularization and feminism’s role within it, and feminism’s association with alternative spiritualities’.

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Census Day

Posted on March 27, 2011 by David Voas

The census manages to evoke contrary responses: it’s either a bit of a joke or a threat to civil liberty. I’ll address the objections in a moment, but let’s start with the jolly part.

Religion makes an important contribution to census-related humour. Who can mention the subject without bringing up the 390,000 Jedi Knights enumerated in England and Wales in 2001? Not The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/10/census-2011-do-we-need-it

The columnist Lucy Mangan wrestles with the problem of counting bedrooms, though she also notes that “The question about religion is voluntary, but precipitates an avalanche of self-interrogation nevertheless.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/lucy-mangan-uk-census-politics

And the ‘alternative census’ available on the Guardian’s website offers some non-standard answers to the religion question:

What is your religion?
   Facebook
   Twitter
   The Wire
   Professor Brian Cox

We are gratified to see that, at the time of posting, our Manchester colleague Brian Cox is running neck-and-neck with Facebook (at about 34% each). To see whether Brian has pulled into the lead, you’ll have to complete the form:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/poll/2011/mar/25/alternative-census-2011-poll

And now to the objections. Will your details be left on a train? The Office for National Statistics goes to extraordinary lengths to safeguard confidentiality. The claims  – for example by the NO2ID campaign  – that data identifying individuals can legally be released to analysts in this country or any other are based on a misunderstanding of the relevant legislation. The EU directive being cited by objectors sets minimum standards; it allows but does not require data sharing. The law in this country mandates high levels of protection for census data.

The information collected is far less sensitive than that routinely stored on us by GPs, the Inland Revenue, banks, employers, telephone companies, credit card companies, and so on. There are richer pickings elsewhere for security services; cracking the census vault to learn whether we have central heating is an unlikely use of resources. The Muslim Council of Britain has urged Muslim households to complete their forms. If Muslims, who have more reason than most to be paranoid, are keen to be included, why not the rest of us?

Credit details, medical records and so on are inherently sensitive because they are linked to you specifically. The census isn’t like that; no records on named individuals are used. We don’t want to know the religion or non-religion or Mr Smith or Ms Patel; we’d just like to know how many people in each local area have which characteristics and need which services.

For these purposes, the sad truth is that no one cares who you are. Names and addresses are stripped off as soon as the data are processed. Some of our colleagues in the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research spend their working lives ensuring that no identifying information is released, and it is understandably frustrating to them when objectors act like American ‘Tea Party’ activists who think that the government is conspiring against them.

If this census is the last, it will have to be replaced by something. The government has talked vaguely about linking public and commercial datasets. Leaving aside the feasibility of such an exercise, it would pose far greater risks to confidentiality than the tightly controlled census of population. Anti-census agitation seems misguided.

The census helps to guide the allocation of billions of pounds of our money. Recording your existence is a minimal form of social responsibility. Avoiding it has real consequences: public services in some areas suffered because of undercounts in 2001.

Apologies for the sermon – can Brian Cox absolve me?

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English Schools and Community Cohesion

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The Education and Inspections Act 2006 placed a new duty on the governing bodies of maintained schools in England to promote community cohesion.

In order to see how much progress schools had been making, the previous Labour administration commissioned Ipsos-MORI to survey a sample of them, through a combination of self-completion postal questionnaires and telephone interviews. 804 schools responded, of which 321 were primary, 348 secondary and 135 special schools. 174 were faith and 630 non-faith schools.

Although fieldwork took place between 10 February and 14 May 2010, the Ipsos-MORI final report (by Chris Phillips, Daniel Tse and Fiona Johnson) was only published by the Department for Education on 28 February 2011 (as Research Report DFE-RR085). Entitled Community Cohesion and PREVENT: How Have Schools Responded? it is available to download at:

http://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/DFE-RR085.pdf

This post highlights only those findings which touch on religion.

82% of all schools associated the term ‘community cohesion’ with faith, which came third in a list of fifteen possible word-associations, only citizenship (87%) and multiculturalism (85%) scoring more highly. Bottom of the list came violent extremism (31%) and radicalization (27%).

In 56% of schools the senior leadership team was said to have a great deal of knowledge about the different faiths in the school and the local area. This proportion was somewhat less than for knowledge of different ethnic origins and cultures (60%) and different socio-economic groups (63%).

In 47% of schools the teaching staff was said to have a great deal of knowledge about the different faiths, but this fell to 26% in secondary schools (compared with 52% in primary schools). The topline figure was better than for awareness of different ethnic origins and cultures (43%) and different socio-economic groups (41%).

School governors were felt to be relatively uninformed about the different faiths, just 33% of schools reporting that they had a great deal of knowledge about them (a mere 2% above the level for support staff). Statistics for governors’ knowledge of different ethnic origins and cultures and different socio-economic groups were not that much better, 35% and 38% respectively.

In trying to learn more about and understand better the different religions in the community, the most frequently-cited tool was contextual or demographic data for pupils on the roll (72%), followed by consultation with or surveys of parents (62%), local authority guidance or training (55%), consultation with or surveys of pupils (50%), and guidance from Government or Teachernet (42%).

Schools were asked how much knowledge they had about the performance and experience of pupils from some different religions relative to other pupils. The proportion claiming to have a great deal of knowledge was 41% for the achievement of worse academic results, 38% for a greater likelihood of exclusion, 38% for a greater propensity to be bullied, and 23% for a reduced likelihood of applying for a place at the school.

All these percentages were lower than for the comparable questions about different ethnic origins and cultures and different socio-economic groups.

In respect of pupils from different faiths, just 10% of schools had taken any action to address academic under-performance of these groups within the past two or three years, the statistics for exclusion (3%), bullying (4%) and application for places (4%) being still smaller. In each case many more schools had conducted a review of the topic and concluded that no action was necessary, but another third had not even carried out a review.

Just 3% of schools (virtually all primary schools) reported that they used links with local faith groups and places of worship to promote community cohesion. This is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the subsequent claim by 14% of schools that they had developed such links since the introduction of the statutory duty to promote community cohesion.

Religious education topped the list of curriculum subjects used to promote community cohesion, being cited by 89% of schools. This was 2% more than for citizenship lessons and 8% above geography and English.

Differences between faith and non-faith schools in tackling community cohesion were more limited than expected. While issues of faith and religion appeared to be more of a concern for faith than non-faith schools, as reflected in their perceived knowledge of them (especially by senior leadership teams), the approaches used to promote cohesion, monitor its effectiveness and involve the broader community did not vary dramatically between faith and non-faith schools.

The survey also covered the extent of school compliance with the then Government’s agenda for preventing violent extremism (PREVENT). 7% of all schools (but 14% of secondary schools) said that they had actually obtained information and/or support from local religious leaders in this matter. Five times that number (37%) wanted local religious leaders to provide more help in building pupil resilience to violent extremism, which was only 8% less than those looking to the police for assistance.

Attitudes to PREVENT overall and approaches used were broadly similar between faith and non-faith schools, except that faith-status primary schools were more likely than their non-faith counterparts to say they knew a fair amount or more about the PREVENT-related schools policy. No similar difference emerged among secondary or special schools.

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