Currently, statutory guidance on closing rural schools dictates that "the likely effect of the closure of the school on the local community" must be taken into account when making a decision.
The C of E provides more than 70 per cent of the country's very small schools in rural areas (less than 110 pupils), and said it must look at the challenge of providing quality education within small communities.
Nigel Genders, the CofE's chief education officer said in a recent blog post that the Church is rising to the challenge in a number of ways.
"Most importantly, we are committed to putting children's education first, and ensuring every child in our care can achieve their potential," he said.
"To do this effectively, we need to reimagine what outstanding education looks like in small schools and rural, often isolated, villages, and to be aware that the data we use to measure the quality of a larger setting may not be appropriate for the smaller cohorts of children in a rural school."
He said the Church is also helping small schools share resources "such as Head teachers or business managers".
Genders told Tes (Times Educational Supplement) that he believes the Department for Education was "very open" to the change.
"Too often in the debate we put [educational quality] as a subsidiary question and say, 'We don't want to see the school lost because we have already lost the post office and the pub and the doctor's surgery'," he said.
"I just think that's the wrong way around, and I think we need to start by asking, 'What's likely to give these children the best education they can have?'
"It may well be that we do that in a way that still means they can access it locally within their village. But it needs to be that way around, rather than asking, 'How do we keep this village's last bastion as a community presence open, which is the school, irrespective of what the quality of education might be?'"
A C of E report published this year entitled Embracing Change: Rural and Small Schools recognised the challenges and limited resources that rural school face, including poor infrastructure such as a lack of public transport or limited internet connectivity.
The report recommended families of schools working together, developing leadership for rural and small schools, and researching what makes for good and outstanding education in a rural context.
The C of E will host a symposium in November that encourages the government and communites to embrace change and reimagine a vision for rural communities.
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