BHA launches whistleblowing site for faith schools

The British Humanist Association (BHA) has created The Faith Schoolers Anonymous site, aimed at young people who attend faith schools.

The BHA said it created the site in bid to provoke a better public awareness of issues within faith schools, including ‘indoctrination, misinformation, discrimination, neglect and abuse’.

The news comes as the government and Ofsted have cracked down on practicers at private religious schools, as well as illegal or unregistered schools. Recently it was unveiled that an independent Muslim school in Luton was found to be ‘actively undermining’ British values, while Rabia Girls’ and Boys’ school was reported to have insisted on the segregation of male ad female staff.

Ofsted is expected to publish a further letter detailing which schools are suspected to be operating illegally.

The new BHA website will contain testimonies from former pupils at private Muslim schools, illegal Jewish Yeshivas, and fundamentalist Christian schools.

Pavan Dhaliwal, director of public affairs and policy at the BHA, said: “We acknowledge, of course, that there are plenty of ‘faith’ schools out there in which problems of this kind described in some of the blogs do not arise, or do not arise to the same extent, but it remains the case that there are a huge number of people out there who have experienced indoctrination, misinformation, discrimination, neglect, and abuse during their childhoods as a result of the extensive freedoms and pervasive lack of oversight that ‘faith’ schools of all kinds enjoy.

“For the sake of the children still experiencing these problems, and for those who have all of this ahead of them, these stories need to be told, and we would encourage anyone who has had experiences of this kind to get in touch.”