Across several European countries, the State’s obligations regarding religious schools remain the object of vibrant and polarising debates. Specifically, the question of whether non-state religious schools benefit from some form of public funding seems to have an undying quality: while most education systems allow for some form of subsidisation, the legitimacy of such arrangements is routinely contested on different fronts.

At the heart of such disputes lies the question of pluralism, understood as a normative principle affirming the intrinsic value of diversity (Colombo, 2013; Jackson, 2003). Hence, it is regularly argued that institutional differentiation on religious grounds is a necessary response to religious diversity in pluralist societies. Yet critics of such arrangements similarly invoke pluralist considerations, arguing for a common-school ideal that accommodates heterogeneity and safeguards against social fragmentation (Fabretti, 2011; D’Agostino & Grau I Callizo, 2022; Reich, 2007). This is particularly the case in a number of European countries where education debates have historically been marked by disputes over secularisation, religious diversity and the influence of organised religion (Ansell & Lindvall, 2013; Glenn, 2018).

While the pluralist case for publicly funded religious schools (PFRSs) has been well-examined from a philosophical perspective, it has been less well-explored through an empirical lens (Hemming, 2015; Mouritsen et al., 2023). Indeed, the question of whether religious schools should be publicly funded has largely remained at an abstract level, while scholarship on such issues appears to be primarily informed by a theoretical mode of inquiry largely divorced from the available evidence. Such limited dialogue is problematic in that it limits our understanding of what policy arrangements (and under which circumstances) might contribute to addressing the tensions posed by PFRSs.

Responding to calls for greater cross-fertilisation between philosophical and empirical research (Brighouse & Swift 2022; Wilson, 2017), this paper addresses such a disconnect by exploring the empirical conditions shaping the realisation of pluralist principles. Indeed, the relationship between evidence and values is a recurring theme within education literature and education policy studies, with many underscoring the inseparability of philosophical questions from empirically-driven research. A key contention of this line of reasoning is the need for attention to the mechanisms underpinning the phenomena we seek to affect in order to realise certain values and principles, and for reflection on how interventions might work in specific circumstances (Brighouse & Swift, 2022; Clayton et al. 2021). Hence, gaining insight into the empirical conditions necessary to reach certain normative objectives becomes a necessary step to advance ongoing debates (Giesinger 2009).

Accordingly, we depart from the premise that, in the PFRS debate, there is much to be gained from a better understanding of how and under which circumstances pluralist principles can be realised in practice – and whether, or to what extent, competing normative positions can be reconciled and tensions addressed. Accordingly, our objective is not to adjudicate among competing normative claims, but rather to understand the conditions of realisation of (variously understood) pluralist ideals. A second assumption informing our work is the notion that a contextualized, sociologically informed approach is particularly relevant to such purposes. The potential of a sociological perspective in debating the religion/schooling intersection is indeed signalled by different authors (Fabretti 2015; Hemming 2015). A critical insight derived from such accounts is that policy action on religious schools cannot be sought in a vacuum – it requires clarity on the values it seeks to preserve but also an understanding of how PFRSs operate in context. However, the notion of ‘context’ is not a given, and must be unpacked and understood based on specific theoretical considerations, which will inform the identification of relevant units and variables of analysis.

In light of the above, this paper begins by summarising philosophical debates regarding PFRSs’ contribution or threat to pluralism, with a focus on three critical sources of tension: civic and democratic transmission, children’s autonomy, and social cohesion and integration. The paper then turns to examine what existing empirical literature can illuminate regarding such normative tensions. Probing into each one of these three themes, the paper summarises available empirical evidence on the mechanisms, contextual conditions and social processes shaping PFRSs’ outcomes in these domains. Based on this, the paper proceeds to identify and outline a set of analytical considerations that are particularly relevant to advancing towards a situated understanding of PFRSs’ contribution to pluralism and inform policy action. To this end, we draw on a review of the literature oriented to identify various social processes set in motion by PFRSs that affect their compatibility with the civic purposes of education, social cohesion, and child autonomy. The corpus of primary studies (N=119) was sourced through a systematic review approach, with searches conducted in an international academic repository (Scopus), supplemented by targeted searches in Google Scholar to capture relevant grey literature and emerging scholarship. The review prioritized empirical studies that illuminate the mechanisms and contextual conditions mediating the impacts of PFRSs, allowing us to understand how contextual specificity generates outcomes unaccounted for by purely normative reasoning. Given the unequal empirical status of different themes, and the limited evidence available for some of them, our review does not obey a hypothesis-testing function but a generative purpose. Its ultimate objective is thus to capture the various mechanisms at play – that is, clarifying what are the social processes set in motion by PFRSs that affect their compatibility with the civic purposes of education, social cohesion and child autonomy. Likewise, given its exploratory and geographically bounded nature, such an exercise does not aim for exhaustiveness but is rather oriented at offering a series of tangible starting points for a situated understanding of the religious schooling debate - shifting the focus towards the mechanisms and conditions shaping PFRSs’ alignment with, and deviation from, the normative principles routinely invoked by both their proponents and critics.

Empirical literature concerned with the differential civic and autonomy outcomes exhibited by PFRSs typically refers to school-level variables, including PFRS’s alignment with doctrinal stances taken by religious bodies and their varying degrees of value congruence with families and the broader community. Explanations for social cohesion and integration outcomes, in turn, often revolve around some variation of the so-called contact hypothesis – the notion that inter-group contact contributes to reduced prejudice by increasing emotional investment knowledge about others, but that such outcomes are dependent on conditions such as settings of equal status and institutional support. Based on this, three groups of contextual variables are identified as critical to understanding how pluralist outcomes are realised in different settings, for they contribute to shaping PFRS’s school ethos as well as inter-group dynamics. One first group of variables concerns the de jure and de facto status of religious groups. Analytical axes of interest include the nature of state-religion relations and the accommodation of religious minorities. A second group concerns the governance of religious schooling and religious education, with key axes including institutional variations in the conditionality of public funding for PFRSs but also the role afforded to religious education in non-religious schools. A third group of variables are those relative to the heterogeneity of PFRS – in particular, the varied degrees of functional and symbolic integration between religious bodies and faith-based providers. Ultimately, an empirically-informed perspective of the PFRS debate offers three distinct advantages: first, it highlights the power differential among social and religious groups; secondly, it prompts us to attend to the fact that PFRSs do not operate in a vacuum, instead being impacted by their institutional context as by a changing social space; and thirdly, it contributes to advancing a more granular approach to the religious-school category.

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