A Denomination-based Description of Churchrun Primary Schools – before and after the 2011 Expansion
A Denomination-based Description of Churchrun Primary Schools – before and after the 2011 Expansion

Summary/Abstract: There is a vast amount of literature on the differences between schools operated by bodies belonging to different sectors. There has been an extensive research on the differences between church-run and state schools, especially on the variance in performance between the two sectors. However, there is much less literature on the differences between the schools run by different denominations within the church sector. This is partly because national and international databases do not usually make a distinction between schools belonging to different denominations. Yet there has been an increasing demand in professional discussions and conferences for the distinction to be made; therefore, the aim of this study is to describe the transformation of the church sector in education from the denominational aspect. Our study gives a cross-section of the church sector before and after the expansion by looking at the schools of different denominations regarding student performance and social background. Our study deals with three research questions. The first focuses is the expansion of the church sector. We examine how it affected the system of church-run schools, what denominations became newly involved and what happened to the dominance of the major denominations that had operated schools before. The second part of our analysis presents the denominationspecific characteristics of the schools in both years of our survey (2010 and 2015). The third part focuses on the schools’ student performance figures both in the absolute and relative senses to their social backgrounds. In this part, we treat schools that were already run by a denomination in 2010 separately from those that were taken over by the church later.

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