First Hindu state school eyes expansion in UK

First Hindu state school eyes expansion

Krishna Avanti primary opens its doors to media as founders propose £30m single-faith secondary in London or Leicester

Riazat Butt, religious affairs correspondent * guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 January 2010 17.36 GMT

Some of the things that set Krishna Avanti apart from other primary schools are its yoga sessions, green credentials, an exclusively Hindu intake and vegetarian menu. But the most striking difference is at the centre of the building: a temple carved from Makrana marble, the same material used to build the Taj Mahal.

Today, Krishna Avanti opened its responsibly sourced doors for the media to take a look around Britain’s first state-backed Hindu school, which comes complete with shrines, a meditation garden and Vastu Shastra – a Vedic design system applied especially to temples.

Nitesh Gor, chair of the governors, says around 200 people in the Indian town of Makrana worked on the school’s centrepiece, carving out scenes from the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu scripture, before it was shipped over in boxes to the north London borough of Harrow.

The temple is eye-catching, and so too is the ambition of the I-Foundation, the charity behind Krisnha Avanti. It wants to expand across the country because, it says, it is “patently unfair” that Hindus in Britain do not have schools of their own while Jews, Christians, Muslims and Sikhs do.

It is proposing a secondary school costing up to £30m that would cater for up to 600 pupils, with the ability to expand to 900, plus a sixth form. Gor, flanked by the headteacher, Naina Parmar, defends the use of £11.1m of taxpayer money to fund the single-faith primary. The remaining £2.4m came from community contributions.

“Hindus also pay taxes and the fact is that they should also have a faith school. The number of faith schools for Hindu is far less proportionate when you compare it to the number of schools that other groups have. There is a disadvantage. It is the responsibility of local authorities and the government to act fairly towards faith schools,” Gor says.

The primary will soon be five times oversubscribed. The I-Foundation is considering two locations for a secondary – one in London and the other in Leicester – and anticipates a similar level of demand for places. Not all of the children are of Indian origin; around 10% are white, a mix that gives a “slightly different flavour to the school”.

Parmar says emphasis is placed on inclusiveness, despite an entirely Hindu intake. “We are not an exclusivist ghetto. They learn about different religions. We celebrate Christmas and we have links with the local Jewish school. We do not indoctrinate the children to be vegetarian, we just say that we are vegetarian.”

The politics of faith schools, state-funded or otherwise, are lost on the four-year-olds having great fun performing yoga poses in the sports hall. The pupils have more success lying on their tummies doing the cobra than they do with the tree, which requires them to stand on one leg with their arms in the air and leads many of them to topple over on to their yoga mats.

At lunch, sitting cross-legged on the floor and munching through wholemeal pizza and salad, Aryan Patel says he is delighted with his new school. “I like it. It is nice. I like the yoga because it makes my body healthy.” He punches the air to prove it.

Hindu identity flows through the school. Each classroom has its own shrine where pupils can leave offerings, whether citrus fruits or felt-tipped pens, and there are multihued wall displays bearing Sanskrit and images of deities and farm animals. A poster for Diwali has diva lamps fashioned out of DVDs and tea lights.

Miss Allen, one of three teachers at the school and a Hare Krishna, says the school ethos is conducive to a calm atmosphere. “The children enjoy coming to school and that’s nice for us because we enjoy coming to school. They race into morning prayers. The faith aspect is really important.”

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Posted by : Upananda Brahmachari.