Why are we doing this?

Ealing Fields was opened as a Free School in 2016 by a group of parents to provide a new school for South Ealing. 

For lots of reasons, the founders of the Free School approached the Twyford CofE Academies Trust shortly after opening about the possibility of the school joining the Trust. Ealing Fields became part of the Trust on 1 September 2017.

At that point, it was agreed that the school would adopt the Trust's religious ethos, approach and curriculum.  Since then the school has flourished and made real and tangible progress.

We believe that the change to our faith designation is important because:

• It will enable us to be transparent as to who we are. With the exception of a celebration service rather than a communion, our school is  functioning as a CofE school without formal title.
• We are committed to our ethos being broad and inclusive . We have developed approaches to pastoral systems and PSHE which achieve this within a framework of clear Christian values. We would like this approach to be as well protected at Ealing Fields as it is in the other three schools. 
• We feel that the ethos is secure and the Christian framework which supports it is well embedded and so it is time to recognise this legally.

Underpinning all that we do is our ethos. From our logo to our approach to teaching and learning, we are to all intent and purpose a church school - and we feel it is only right and correct that we are open about that. 

In doing so, it is important to stress that:

• We have made a firm commitment that we will not amend our admissions policy to include faith either now or in the future. In fact, we already have two CofE schools in our Trust who have open admissions - so faith is not part of the application process for their communities. This works well and we will simply mirror this approach at Ealing Fields. 
• There will be no change to the curriculum. When Ealing Fields joined our Trust seven years ago, it adopted nearly all of the Trust’s approaches to education – and this has been central to the remarkable progress that we have collectively made. We will simply keep doing what we are already doing.

In addition, broadly faith schools are subject to the same legislation as their non-religious counterparts but benefit from some specific provisions (known as ‘freedoms’) that are aimed at protecting and maintaining the particular religion or religious denomination of the school. 

For example, faith schools are permitted to make some employment decisions based on a person’s faith (such as requiring the Headteacher / Senior staff to be actively sympathetic to the values of the school)  and can provide religious education and collective worship in accordance with the tenets of the religion or religious denomination specified in relation to the school. These provisions enable the school to ensure their religious character is reflected in the life of the school.