Church schools are unpopular places to work for many senior teachers and both Church of England and Catholic schools find it harder than community schools to recruit head teachers. Check these findings (pdf document) that come from research into head teacher vacancies at secondary schools conducted by Education Data Surveys.
40% of Church of England Schools and 58% or Catholic schools were forced to re-advertise their head teaching posts - compared to an average of 29% of all secondary schools who needed to re-advertise.
The report also says church schools generally attract fewer applicants for head teacher vacancies and some church schools "don't seem to attract any applicants at all".
The reports is highly critical of the churches:
"We believe that it is little short of scandalous that the recruitment problem in the Roman Catholic sector has not been solved by now. We first drew the attention of the Bishops’ Conference to this problem some 15 years ago. For a number of years, there seemed to be a denial that the problem existed. Even though the problem has been acknowledged, it has still to be solved. We no longer believe that either the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church or policy makers at the DfES can avoid taking urgent action to solve the problem."
But why should we be surprised that church schools are relatively unpopular with senior teachers? The church schools popular with parents are usually so through various means of selection. These schools have also been given the right to discriminate against talented head teachers on the grounds of their personal beliefs or marital status.
With the number of religious believers plummeting year by year in this country, fewer and fewer teachers will fit into the narrow discriminatory person specification devised the growing number of faith schools. It is also likely that fewer education professionals will want to apply to schools, which as employers, actively discriminate against non-believing staff and parents.
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