Compare and contrast the aims of a ?secular' and a ?religious' school.
A school is ? a place where children go to be educated.'( Collins Dictionary 1991 pg 892), therefore is there any difference between a secular or a religious school, as surely, the main aim is to educate the children in accordance with the national curriculum and not in an accordance with a religion. However, if you are being educated with the concepts of a religion is this a negative thing? And is there any real difference between the set up of both schools as surely education itself derives from a religious background. All these ideas I will endeavour to explore in my following discussion.
I looked at two schools in the local area, both were girls schools, one being a religious school of Roman Catholic origin, named ?Notre Dame School for Girls', and the other being a secular school known as ?Devonport High School for girls. Initially, I didn't imagine that there would be an awful lot of difference between the two schools, however this wasn't the case. The first thing that I noticed, was the drastic difference in the results for GCSE students and A level results. DHSG had a 98% pass rate of pupils getting A-C grades whilst Notre Dame only had 63% of their pupils attaining A-C grades in their GCSE examinations in year 2004. There could be a number of reasons for this contrast, one of which could be that Notre Dame added an additional curricular time for religious worship or retreat, which or course took away some of the time set aside for more standard curricular, academic studies. This time of worship wouldn't be available to students at DHSG and so this extra time could benefit these pupils into gaining higher grades. Although it obviously depends on ...