This article explores the implications of funding increasing numbers of religious schools on the children of minority communities. It argues that handing responsibility for schooling to religious bodies undermines transparency, democracy and accountability in educational provision. Far from promoting 'inclusion' as the Government claims, increasing the number of religious schools atomises and isolates communities, stifles debate and marginalises complex expressions of identity. 'Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man', the founder of the Jesuits is reputed to have said. Other branches of the church have been less brazen about celebrating their skills in brainwashing the young but have nevertheless hung on tightly to the schools they run according to their own religious beliefs. They have also negotiated hard and successfully for the taxpayers to finance them.The high number of state-funded religious schools in Britain, with varying degrees of control over their own admissions and curriculum, has always sat uncomfortably with concepts of broad, liberal, outward-looking, comprehensive education. Over the course of the twentieth century this came into increasing conflict with internationally accepted standards of human rights, children's rights and freedom of expression. At the start of the twenty-first century, though, a government prepared to push through profound changes in education is invoking the language of rights not to open doors to new worlds and ideas for all children but to distribute more state money and the political power that goes with it to groups and institutions with a narrow religious agenda.State funding of church schools (and from the early twentieth century, a handful of Jewish schools) has risen consistently since 1833, when the Government first gave grants towards school provision for poor children by Christian groups. Since the 1944 Education Act, for example, 'The proportion
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