Conference Agenda

While faith-based schools account for a significant share of education provision across several European countries, the status and role of such providers in the education marketplace have received scant attention within education policy and sociology studies. On the one hand, despite sustained interest in private education provision and private school choice over the last decades (Agasisti et al., 2024; Zancajo et al., 2025), research on the strategies and market position of private religious providers has so far been limited and fragmented. On the other hand, research in education and sociology of religion has typically focused on the politics and practices of teaching religious education in secular schools, the public schooling experience of students coming from minority religions, or the emergence of minority-faith schools (Grace, 2020; Martínez-Ariño & Teinturier, 2019).

Accordingly, a significant gap can be discerned, relative to the governance of private religious schools in different European contexts. This represents a striking absence considering that several education systems feature a subsidised sector largely dominated by church- and church-adjacent providers, and that the establishment of funding schemes for private providers often originates in broader attempts at addressing complex Church/State relationships (Glenn, 2018; West & Woessman, 2010). Yet we know little about the governance of religious networks and schools run by the main Christian denominations in Europe (a notable exception being the special issue edited by Maussen and Bader, 2015), as well as the social, political, and market forces shaping faith-based schooling. Such questions strike as especially pertinent in the light of the growing religious diversity in Europe on the one hand, but also given instances of far right and nativist parties’ attempts to strengthen the position of Christian taught content, and in some cases, schools at the educational marketplace (Giudici & Pulatar, 2026; Hackett, 2017).

This symposium aims to explore the governance of faith-based education and the strategies and identities of faith-based providers in a selection of European education markets. The ways in which faith-based schools are governed actively shape the forms of religiosity considered acceptable, operating not only within competitive education markets but also within broader ideological state frameworks. Mechanisms such as accountability measures, performance evaluations, parental demands, and conditional funding influence how religious expression is framed and practiced. The papers of the symposium seek answers to some of the following questions:

How are faith-based private schools governed and how do faith-based providers govern their schools and school networks?

How do government arrangements construct acceptable forms of religiosity and normalize certain forms of religious expression while marginalizing or excluding others?

How do faith-based schools respond to competitive and regulatory pressures, and how do they negotiate their identities in market contexts?

This paper examines how contemporary governance regimes shape Islamic religious education in Israel by producing specific, politically constrained forms of religiosity. Rejecting the assumption that religious education functions as a neutral site of belief transmission, the paper argues that neoliberal mechanisms of governance actively determine which religious expressions are authorized, normalized, and suppressed. Situated within Israel’s settler-colonial context and the consolidation of a Palestinian middle class oriented toward educational achievement and socio-economic mobility (Agbaria, 2016), the paper shows how Islamic education becomes a central arena for negotiating conditional inclusion (Agbaria, 2012). Within this arena, a particular form of religiosity is cultivated that rearticulates Palestinian identity in depoliticized terms. The paper conceptualizes this configuration of religiosity as individualized rather than collective, ritualized rather than ethically reflective, and defensive rather than transformative. Islamic education increasingly resembles generic character education, detached from existential inquiry, political responsibility, and the lived realities of Palestinian citizens who continue to experience exclusion, discrimination, and structural inequality (Agbaria & Muff, 2025; Muff & Agbaria, 2024, 2026). Finally, engaging modern Islamic thought, the paper argues for reimagining Islamic education as an ethical, historical, and communal project.

Agbaria, A. (2012). Teaching Islam in Israel: On the absence of unifying goals and a collective community. In Commitment, character, and citizenship (pp. 181–198). Routledge. Agbaria, A. (2016). The “right” education in Israel: Segregation, religious ethnonationalism, and depoliticized professionalism. Critical Studies in Education, 57(1), 1–16. Agbaria, A., & Muff, A. (2025). “I must be a bad Muslim to be good for them”: Teaching about civic issues in Islamic education in Israel. Race Ethnicity and Education, 28(6), 984–1001. Muff, A., & Agbaria, A. (2024). “You can’t teach your students something that is divorced from reality”: Palestinian citizenship teachers making sense of the relevance of Islam for citizenship education in Israel. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 19(3), 429–445. Muff, A., & Agbaria, A. (2026). Spiritual and indigenous funds of knowledge: How Palestinian Muslim teachers reclaim Islam and citizenship education in Israel. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 20(1), 104–120.

With growing reliance on the private provision of public services, the alignment between the values of private operators (including religious organizations) and public administrations becomes fundamental to the achievement of public-policy goals (Capano & Lepori, 2024; Mettang & Euchner, 2023). Private education provision presents notable particularities in this regard, especially when it is predicated on pluralist considerations justifying institutional differentiation. This is the case of those education systems that evolved from a private-provision system run by faith-based organisations, and where the emergence of public schooling did not put an end to religious provision but rather gave way to a system of subsidies for religious and other private schools. In such contexts, the preservation of a form of privateness alongside public-service commitment is expected for faith-based providers - although the balance between such roles is contested and increasingly subject to public scrutiny. The French education system constitutes a particularly productive site for the analysis of such questions. Faith-based education provision has a long-standing tradition in France, with Catholic schools benefiting from substantial levels of public funding and a moderately restrictive regulatory framework. Such features reflect the dualistic nature of Catholic education in France, defined as a private service of public interest (Poucet, 2024). Contradictions derived from this ambiguous position have intensified over the last decade, as Catholic education providers face increasing demands to reinforce their public-service dimension (Cour des Comptes, 2023; Durand & Salles, 2015). The paper examines how Catholic education providers in France interpret their role as public-service providers and navigate contradictory expectations and mandates in a changing political environment. Drawing on conceptual advancements around the notion of publicness (Anderson, 2012; Bozeman, 2013), our investigation aims at mapping different understandings of the public-private dualism across the French Catholic sector; capturing underpinning cognitive and normative frames; and identifying the associated organisational attributes. We draw on 32 semi-structured interviews with representatives from the main federative organisations of the Catholic education sector and senior officials from a sample of Catholic education providers in three contrasting regions. Our study underscores the plurality of the faith-based sector in its public-service ethos, with normative dispositions varying according to proximity to State bureaucracy and the nature of coupling with religious institutions, and draws attention to three sources of internal transformation critically shaping understanding of public-service obligations - namely, professionalization processes, the secularisation of the workforce, and evolving doctrinal orientations and public-engagement patterns in the Catholic Church.

Anderson, S. (2012). Public, private, neither, both? Publicness theory and the analysis of healthcare organisations. Social Science & Medicine, 74(3), 313-322. Bozeman, B. (2013). What organization theorists and public policy researchers can learn from one another: Publicness theory as a case-in-point. Organization Studies, 34(2), 169-188. Capano, G., & Lepori, B. (2024). Designing policies that could work: understanding the interaction between policy design spaces and organizational responses in public sector. Policy Sciences, 57(1), 53-82. Cour des Comptes. (2023). L’enseignement privé sous contrat. Rapport public thématique. Cour des Comptes. Durand, Y., & Salles, R. (2015). Rapport information sur l’évaluation des politiques publiques en faveur de la mixité sociale dans l’éducation nationale. Assemblée Nationale. Mettang, O., & Euchner, E. M. (2023). Christian churches and social welfare in secular times: How goal congruence shapes religious involvement in morality-based social services. Politics and Religion, 16(2), 266-285. Poucet, B. (2024). Le retour du religieux dans les établissements catholiques en France: état des lieux et interrogations. Éducation et Sociétés, 51(1), 89-108.

Zuquete (2017) closes his foundational paper on the nexus of politics and religion and the surge of religious populism by calling for an approach sensitive to the ‘repeat encounter, with many intersections, between the two fields, instead of a clash’. While religious populism as a political strategy has been attracting vast scholarly attention (DeHanas&Shterin, 2018; XXX), how the religious field transforms in this encounter and how organized religion has engaged with conservative populist politics have remained largely neglected (Cremer, 2021). As part of the broader trend of outsourcing service delivery and welfare provision, faith-based organizations (FBOs) have become formative actors of neoliberal governmentality since the millennium. In societies governed by religious populists, the increased service delivery involvement of FBOs is a form of Christian conservative identity politics. The Hungarian far-right government has generously subsidized the educational involvement of politically loyal religious organizations. Applying a Bourdieusian analytic lens, I explore how the Hungarian religious field transformed under the religious populist strategy of instrumentalizing religion as a source of legitimacy and transferring formerly state-managed service delivery to the churches. Based on 38 semi-structured interviews conducted with the policy-makers and administration of the faith-based school networks, the paper identifies the key positions and major tensions emerging with the complicity of religion in populist governance. The interview analysis concentrates on the unfolding legitimation struggles and emerging justification narratives in the religious field, and differentiates between field-specific and field-external logics driving such legitimacy claims. Field-specific claims reflect different positions taken alongside the interpretations of the mission of the church. Legitimacy claims referencing the norms, values and standards of the broader education system mobilize the logic of subsidiarism, democracy and the market. Legitimacy struggles unfolded around the interference of the political field, leading to the dominant strategy of depoliticizing religious service provision. The paper contributes to sociological scholarship aiming at situating religious service delivery within the broader education system. It aims to produce a refined account of the various positionalities and strategies within the religious field, partially shaped by relationships among actors in a shared space as well as external pressures and resources, as field theory suggests (Bourdieu 1996 cited by Krause and Robinson, 2023). Instead of viewing religious policy narratives as stark choices between purity and pollution, or between naivité and realism (Krause, 2014), these positions are approached as objects of sociological analysis, shaped by the social space that makes them possible.

Cremer, T. (2021). Nations under God: How Church–State Relations Shape Christian Responses to Right-Wing Populism in Germany and the United States. Religions, 12(4), 254. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12040254 DeHanas, D. N., & Shterin, M. (2018). Religion and the rise of populism. Religion, State and Society, 46(3), 177–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2018.1502911 Krause, M. (2014). The Good Project. Humanitarian NGOs, and the Fragmentation of Reason. University of Chicago Press. Krause, M. & Robinson, K. (2023). Non-liberal Internationalism: The Field of International Mission Agencies, Global Society, 37(1), 51-67, DOI:10.1080/13600826.2022.2048801 Zúquete, J. P. (2017). Populism and Religion. In: C. R. Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo & P. Ostiguy (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.22