Measuring the Contribution of Independent Christian Secondary Schools to Students' Religious,Personal, and Social Values

From the late 1960s independent Christian schools have emerged in England and Wales, initiated either by churches or by parents. Many of these new independent schools are linked through the Christian Schools Trust. The impact that these schools are exerting on their students may be of interest for the churches with which they are associated and of concern for wider society. The political debate concerning these schools has so far been informed by only a small number of empirical studies conducted in England and Wales. The present study extends previous research in three ways. It offers a comparative study by examining the responses of 271 year-nine and year-ten students (age 13 to 15 years) from 11 independent Christian schools with 20,348 students from 93 schools without a religious foundation. It examines a range of religious, social and personal values. It employs multilevel models to identify the contribution made by independent Christian schools after taking into account personal, psychological, and contextual differences within the students themselves. The hypothesis was that Christian schools were committed to developing distinctly Christian values among their students. The data supported this hypothesis. Even after allowing for differences in the religiosity of the students themselves, attendance at an independent Christian school was associated with higher self-esteem, greater rejection of drug use, lower endorsing of illegal behaviors, lower racism, higher levels of conservative Christian belief, and more conservative views on sexual morality (abortion, contraception, divorce, homosexuality, and sex outside marriage).