The amendment of the law on education, which would mean that schools run by the Catholic Church and funded by the British State would have to allocate a quarter of their places to pupils of other faiths, will be debated by the House of Lords on 30 October. “We oppose quotas because it would mean sending away Catholics from our schools”, declared the Archbishop of Birmingham Vincent Nichols. The change in the legislation is due to the decision of the British government to fund for the first time Muslim schools alongside Christian and Jewish ones. The government of Tony Blair fears, in fact, that exclusively Islamic schools would fuel religious fundamentalism and wants them to admit pupils of other religions, and the same provision would also be extended to Christian and Jewish schools. For the time being the law would only apply to new schools, but, according to the Catholic weekly “The Tablet”, a strong secular political lobby would like the new quota system to be applied to all Catholic schools. The Catholic Church runs 10% of all schools in England and Wales, and in many of them children of other religions already amount to over a quarter of pupils. The problem would be posed for those schools where applications exceed the available places and which would therefore be forced to turn down Catholic families.
