On 2nd December 2025, the Second Church Estates Commissioner, Marsha De Cordova MP, gave the following written answers to questions from MPs:
Clergy: Abuse
Cat Smith MP (Lab, Lancaster and Wye): To ask the hon. Member for Battersea, representing the Church Commissioners, what steps the Church is taking to rebuild trust with survivors of abuse within the Church of England.
Marsha De Cordova MP: The Church of England recognises that trust among victims and survivors varies greatly, as each survivor is on a different journey. We engage with a high number of people with lived experience, and we are committed to learning with those with lived experience and rebuilding trust, relationships, and steps to healing and recovery.
Some survivors are rebuilding trust through support services such as the Interim Support Service, and diocesan support provision, while others actively shape safeguarding improvements by co-developing policies and practices. We recognise that for many survivors developing trust is hard to do, and we acknowledge that reality and seek a victim-led approach.
In recent years the Church has created multiple opportunities for survivors to speak out and influence change, through survivor participation opportunities, feedback forms, questionnaires, and involvement in interview panels, project boards, and audits, including the National Safeguarding Team audit last summer.
We regularly update the survivor participation webpage and send a monthly newsletter to maintain open communication and transparency.
Last year, we co-developed a National Survivor Participation Framework with victims and survivors, which now guides engagement across the Church, and we achieved a milestone of having the Redress Scheme – also co-designed with survivors at the heart of it- to be approved by the General Synod.
Looking ahead, we plan to activate a framework tailored to listening to children and young people, create a national system to capture the impact of survivor engagement, and embed the Framework across dioceses and cathedrals. Building trust is a long-term commitment, and we continue to work with victims and survivors, and external agencies, to build on the work we have started.
Church Schools: Admissions
Cat Smith: To ask the hon. Member for Battersea, representing the Church Commissioners, what discussions the Church of England has had with Church of England academies with admission processes that exclude potential pupils of another faith or none.
Marsha De Cordova: In a voluntary aided (VA) school or former VA school that has converted to become an academy, school admissions are the responsibility of the governing body or trust directors. Church of England schools, as Church Schools, have to consult with the Diocesan Board of Education as they set their admissions policy and oversubscription criteria. In doing so they will be mindful of the need to be true to their foundation principles and respond to parental preference, whilst meeting their desire to serve the community for which the school was established.
The Church of England Vision for Education sets out our aspiration to be ‘deeply Christian, serving the common good’, and schools, in consultation with their dioceses, will consider how best to achieve this at a local level.
Schools cannot and do not exclude pupils on the basis of faith, but when a school is oversubscribed, they apply oversubscription criteria which have to be fair, clear and objective. It is right for such policies to be set locally (following regular consultation) because each local context varies enormously. For example, a school which is the only school serving a particular community is likely to take a different approach to admissions compared to a context where there are several schools available and where parental demand for the ethos and type of education offered by a Church of England school is more pronounced.
The National Church Institutions can only comment on best practice, I would suggest that if the Hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre has a specific school in mind, the local diocese education team would be best placed to discuss the matter with her. The details of Blackburn Diocese’s Education team can be found here: https://www.bdeducation.org.uk/schools/
Church of England: Assets
Jim McMahon MP (Lab, Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton): To ask the hon. Member for Battersea, representing the Church Commissioners, what estimate the Church has made of the value of community ownership transfer for church asset disposals in England.
Marsha De Cordova: Such an estimate has not been made by the National Church Institutions. Consecrated Church of England church buildings that have been declared closed under the Mission and Pastoral Measure 2011 can only be disposed of under the provisions of that Measure. The provisions of the Localism Act do not apply (even where such buildings have been designated as an Asset of Community Value).
The Measure (and its predecessors) places upon the church authorities the responsibility to find the most suitable alternative use for such buildings, which enables us to dispose of them for less than market value, for uses that continue to serve the local community.
Diocese and parishes are separate legal entities and, in the large majority of cases, the management of their other assets falls outside the remit of the National Church Institutions (except to suggest best practice).
The Church of England in Parliament 
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