The UK that goes to the polls on 4 July will be the most religiously diverse in election history. Less than half the population of England and Wales describe themselves as ‘Christian’. Most people in Scotland are now non-religious. And there are now more Catholics than Protestants in Northern Ireland, but even here we are seeing more and more people turning away from religion.

This sustained shift in demographics demands a radical response from the state. Entrenched Christian privilege and a laissez-faire approach to social cohesion are ill-suited to a religiously diverse, pluralistic population. That’s why the National Secular Society is calling on the next Government to seriously rethink the role of religion in public and political life.

Here’s what we want to see from the incoming Government.

Secular, inclusive education

Schools play a key role in shaping future generations and fostering a culture of tolerance and understanding. But faith schools build division into the system.

A third of all schools are faith schools. This isn’t sustainable. Already, the prevalence of religious schools means many nonreligious families have no choice other than a faith-based education for their children. This needs to be addressed.

Dividing children by religion leads to ethnic segregation, too. The next Government should commit to phasing out faith-based education to better encourage integration and ensure that every child can receive a secular education.

The calling of the election means that the outgoing Government’s plans to abolish the 50% admissions cap in faith-based academies hit the buffers. The Conservative manifesto revives plans to lift the cap and allow faith schools to apply 100% religious selection, paving the way for yet more discriminatory faith schools.

Worryingly, Labour didn’t oppose plans to scrap the cap and will come under pressure from regressive religious groups to reinstate this policy. They should resist.

Religious selection means faith schools are not only less religiously and ethnically diverse; they admit fewer children from poorer backgrounds, children in care, and children with special educational needs and disabilities. Any government interested in tackling unfairness and discrimination in education can’t afford to ignore the pernicious effects of faith-based admissions. That’s why it is alarming that Keir Starmer has said a Labour Government would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the current Government.

In all state-funded schools, even the two-thirds without a religious character, daily acts of ‘broadly Christian’ collective worship are required by law. This law, dating back to 1944, has no moral or educational basis. Teachers don’t support it and many schools flout it. Imposing worship in schools undermines children’s freedom of religion or belief and opens the door to evangelism in schools. We will encourage the next Government to support its repeal as soon as possible.

England’s outdated model of religious education dates back to a similar era. Labour’s plans to modernise the school curriculum must not shy away from reforms to liberate this subject area from the inappropriate control of religious interest groups. All children and young people should have an equal entitlement to an objective and critical education about worldviews, citizenship, and ethics.

We will also push for new legislation to boost Ofsted’s powers to crack down on unregistered religious schools operating illegally. The creation of a register of children not in school is a key part of this. During their time in office, the Conservatives made plenty of encouraging noises but ultimately failed to tackle the problem. The required legislation for a register was in the Schools Bill which was ditched by the Sunak Government in 2022. The Tory manifesto promises to revive the register plans.

Labour’s manifesto makes no such commitment, but the Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, has previously signalled her support for a home-school register to deliver better oversight of home education, which in too many cases leads to children being indoctrinated with fundamentalist dogma in unsafe and illegal schools. She also says she wants ‘every child to receive a world-class education’. To achieve this, the next Government will need to stand up to religious lobbyists who impede attempts to protect the educational rights of children in independent and unregistered religious schools by spuriously claiming that such attempts violate religious freedom.

Free speech

For all its faults, the Conservative Government has shown willingness to protect the right to free expression. It was slow to do so when Islamic fundamentalists descended on a school in Batley in 2021. But after a parent was left pleading for mercy after her son was involved in the scuffing of a Quran in Kettlethorpe last year, the Home Secretary robustly asserted: ‘We do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain, and must not be complicit in the attempts to impose them on this country.’

A recent recommendation for the creation of guidance to better protect schools and teachers facing blasphemy accusations should be adopted and implemented—as should the recommendation from Sara Khan, the Government’s Independent Advisor on Social Cohesion and Resilience, to create a special unit tasked with responding to ‘flashpoint incidents’ such as blasphemy protests.

The next Government needs to find ways to address anti-Muslim prejudice in ways that don’t impede the freedom to scrutinise and criticise Islamic beliefs, ideas, and practices. It needs to be clear that there is no right not to be offended—and no legal obligation to be reverent towards any religion.

In opposition, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, and the Greens have all shown a worrying disregard for free speech by uncritically adopting a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ proposed by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG)  for British Muslims. The concept of Islamophobia unhelpfully conflates hatred and discrimination against Muslims with criticism of Islam. This blurring is intentional. The silencing of scrutiny, criticism, mockery, and anything deemed ‘offensive’ has been a long-term aim of Islamist groups, some of which have been too close to Labour for comfort. Labour has promised to reverse the Conservatives’ decision to downgrade the monitoring of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate incidents that fall short of criminality. There are also fears that a Labour Government will seek to incorporate the APPG definition into law.

Hindu groups have jumped on the bandwagon, calling on the next Government to criminalise ‘Hinduphobia’. Any attempt to do so will be met with fierce opposition from secularists and free speech campaigners. Resisting the politics of competitive grievances and sectarianism is something the next Government needs to do if Britain is to avoid becoming increasingly fraught with ethnic and religious tensions.

Towards a secular democracy

It makes no sense for one of the most diverse and secularised nations in the world to retain an established religion.

One manifestation of the Church of England’s established status is the twenty-six unelected Anglican clerics sitting as of right as legislators in the House of Lords. In 2022, Keir Starmer called the Lords ‘undemocratic’ and ‘indefensible’. He launched plans drawn up by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to replace the upper chamber with an elected Assembly of the Nations and Regions. The plans would bring a welcome end to reserved seats for bishops.

Despite originally suggesting the plans be implemented within the first five years of a Labour Government, the party is now promising a much more incremental approach. Replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber remains the goal, but the manifesto commits only to ‘immediate modernisation’ of the Lords by introducing an upper age limit of 80 and scrapping hereditary peers. Secularists will be arguing that any immediate modernisation must also include the removal of the archaic, unfair, and undemocratic bishops’ bench.

But we need to go further. A state religion is incompatible with a democracy in which all citizens of every religion and belief are equal. The announcement of the election unfortunately spelt the end of a bill backed by the National Secular Society to disestablish the Church of England.  But we’ll urge the next Government to engage with this long overdue democratic reform to transform the UK into a fully secular democracy, free from religious privilege.

A new administration will bring fresh hope for other necessary reforms, such as assisted dying, making wedding law fairer for all, outlawing caste discrimination, removing the advancement of religion as a charitable purpose, and effectively protecting children from abuse in religious settings.

Ultimately, Britain needs a new political framework to foster unity and keep religious fundamentalism in check by balancing religious freedom with other fundamental human rights. Secularism offers such a framework.

That’s why we’ll be urging the next Government to adopt secularist principles and policies which move us towards a freer and fairer society, where people can live by the creed they choose but where no particular religion or belief is privileged or imposed.

Related reading

Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? by Stephen Evans

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt, by Russell Sandberg

The case for secularism (or, the church’s new clothes), by Neil Barber

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars, by Emma Park

Bad Religious Education, by Siniša Prijić

Silence of the teachers, by Nath Jnan

The perils of dropping a book, by Noel Yaxley

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer, by Daniel James Sharp

‘This is not rocket science’: the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill 2023, interview with Paul Scriven by Emma Park

The post What secularists want from the next UK Government appeared first on The Freethinker.

The law on religious education and collective worship in England means that schools are at risk of breaching human rights law. But the government has decided to do nothing about it. 

Lost within the high drama in Westminster in the last week have been two important and contradictory developments concerning the law on religion in schools. On 5^th July, the High Court of Northern Ireland, in Re JR87 (by her mother and next friend) and her father (“G”) for Judicial Review, held that the law on collective worship and religious education there breached human rights laws, because it was not sufficiently critical or pluralist. On 12th July, the House of Lords voted down an amendment to the Schools Bill that would have ensured that the law in England would be more critical and pluralist: it would have meant that the study of non-religious beliefs would have been explicitly covered as part of a renamed ‘Religion and Worldviews’ subject in academies in England.

On the face of it, the High Court decision in Northern Ireland seems geographically specific. The laws on religious education and worship now differ in each of the four nations of the UK. In Northern Ireland, although the law requires ‘undenominational religious education’, it states that this means that the subject should be ‘based on the Holy Scriptures’ rather than ‘any tenet distinctive of any particular religious denomination’. The reference to ‘Holy Scriptures’ means that it must be Christian. The core syllabus – which applies throughout Northern Ireland – is drafted by the churches and does not mention faiths other than Christianity at all at primary school level.

It is therefore unsurprising that the High Court found that this law breached the parents’ rights under Article 2 of the First Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) read with Article 9 ECHR. Together, these provide, respectively, for the right for parents to have their children educated in conformity with their (the parents’) philosophical or religious convictions, and for freedom of thought, conscience and religion. However, the reasoning of the Court suggests that schools in England and Wales are also likely to breach human rights.

Collective worship

The concern about human rights compliance in Northern Ireland is in part because of what the High Court there said about collective worship. Colton J noted that it appeared ‘from the evidence that the only external persons invited to attend assembly are exclusively Christian’. He concluded that collective worship was ‘not conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’.

Although this finding is fact-specific, it raises questions about how collective worship is practised in other schools, not only in Northern Ireland but across the UK. There is nothing in primary legislation in England and Wales that requires collective worship to be pluralistic. Rather, collective worship must be performed on a daily basis and ‘shall be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’. This permits but does not mandate pluralism. Whether this will be enough to render it compliant with human rights will depend on what schools actually do. 

Countless pieces of empirical research have demonstrated that the collective worship requirement is regularly breached. There is a longstanding concern that many schools do not hold a daily act of collective worship for all pupils. As long ago as 1994, the General Secretary of the Secondary Heads Association stated that: ‘A law which cannot be obeyed or enforced is a bad law, and it should be amended… This is undoubtedly the case with regard to collective worship in schools’. Yet, paradoxically, it is likely that those schools which are fulfilling the collective worship requirement may well find themselves breaching human rights law. 

Providing collective worship that is both ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’ and ‘conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’ – reflecting the right to freedom of religion or belief – is a tricky tightrope for headteachers to walk. 

The United Nations Committee on the Right of the Child has repeatedly stated that the UK position breaches human rights. It has expressed its concern that pupils are required by law to take part in religious worship. It has also recommended that the law be changed to ensure that children themselves, as opposed to their parents, have the right to withdraw from such worship.

Even in Wales, where the law on religious education has been reformed, the Education Minister, Jeremy Miles, has shown no appetite for reforming collective worship. He responded to me on Twitter in May that it was not part of the curriculum and so outside the scope of curriculum reform.

The High Court decision in Northern Ireland highlights the two competing legal obligations that schools are faced with. It is surely time that this impasse be resolved. Numerous private member’s bills have been considered, but so far all attempts have failed.

Religious education

The High Court decision in Northern Ireland is also noteworthy for what it said about religious education. Much of its commentary will also apply to England and indeed Wales, notwithstanding the reforms that have transformed Religious Education (RE) into Religion, Values and Ethics (RVE) in Wales but not in England.

At first glance, it might appear that the court’s verdict on the core syllabus is specific to Northern Ireland. The High Court held that ‘on any analysis the teaching of the syllabus can only have the effect of promoting Christianity and encouraging its practice’. However, the key point is that the basis of the Court’s finding was that ‘RE is not conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’. The High Court discussed in detail the case law of the European Court of Human Rights on the matter. It distilled underlying principles from this case law, including the key requirements that religious education be ‘conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’ and that it accord ‘equal respect to different religious convictions and to non-religious beliefs’. 

While the agreed syllabi developed by a local authority in England and Wales are obliged by law to take into account other religions (and in Wales, other beliefs as well), it is still possible that individual syllabi may be judged to have fallen short of these requirements. This is particularly true of schools with a religious character, which in some cases are permitted to teach RE in accordance with their trust deeds.

In England, moreover, there is no explicit requirement that RE take into account non-religious beliefs, either in terms of the content of the agreed syllabus or in terms of the composition of the local authority bodies who draft and police it. Under English law, the agreed syllabus must reflect ‘the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain.’ The composition of the local bodies must ‘reflect the principal religious traditions in the area’. There is no mention of non-religious beliefs. The reforms in Wales have redressed this problem, but England still lags behind.

Although pieces of government guidance have gone further, there is still no requirement in English law to consider non-religious beliefs; rather, the requirements of objectivity and pluralism exist implicitly at best. In the recent reforms in Wales, it was decided that these principles underpinned policy-making, but should not be underpinned in legislation.

In short, the law in England, and possibly also in Wales, does not explicitly require that religious education be ‘conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist manner’ and does not require that schools accord ‘equal respect to different religious convictions and to non-religious beliefs’. This means that it is likely that schools which are fulfilling their legal obligations in terms of the teaching of religion may well be breaching the human rights of parents and pupils.

In Re JR87, the High Court also made it plain, again referring to the Strasbourg case law, that the fact that parents can opt their child out of religious education is no answer to a charge that the religious education provided is not compliant with human rights. As Colton J observed, the case law showed that ‘exemption arrangements were insufficient to mitigate or balance courses which, as the court finds in this case, were insufficiently objective, critical or pluralistic’. The judge stressed that the right to opt out of RE or collective worship ‘is not a sufficient answer to the lack of pluralism identified by the court’:

‘[The right to opt out] runs the risk of placing undue burdens on parents. There is a danger that parents will be deterred from seeking exclusion for a child. Importantly, it also runs the risk of stigmatisation of their children’. 

Although this clearly recognises the distinct religious situation in Northern Ireland, it is applicable to the situation in England, where opt-outs exist for pupils in all schools, as well as in Wales, where they are retained in relation to schools with a religious character. It is clear that the existence of an opt-out is no defence to a finding that education is not sufficiently critical or plural. Thus the current legal framework places schools in an unenviable position, with education law pushing them in a direction that risks breaching human rights law.

The Schools Bill

It is fortunate, therefore, that there is a vehicle currently before Parliament that could and should be used to amend the law on religious education and collective worship, in order to ensure that it is compliant with human rights and that schools will not breach human rights by following it. All it would take would be an explicit requirement that non-religious beliefs be included, as well as, ideally, a further requirement for a critical and pluralist approach.

Unfortunately, this opportunity has not been taken by the government. The vehicle in question is the Schools Bill, which has enjoyed a somewhat bumpy ride since being introduced in the House of Lords in May. The Bill is a ragbag of provisions that mostly attempt to resolve problems caused by previous education reforms by the Conservative government. Some of it is welcome, at least in principle, such as the greater scrutiny of unregistered schools. Other aspects, such as the imposition of standards upon academies, are incredibly vague, and it is unclear what the general thinking is behind them other than a power grab by the Secretary of State. The Bill has since been ripped to shreds by the Lords, so much so that whole parts of it have been largely gutted; the government has said that the Lords will have the opportunity to scrutinise the replacement clauses after the Bill has proceeded through the Commons. 

The Bill as originally drafted made provision for academies with a religious character which was basically in line with the current law. This led to amendments being considered at the Second Reading that sought to reform the position, especially in relation to academies without a religious character. These proposals sought to recast religious education as ‘religion and worldviews’ and sought to make explicit the inclusion of non-religious beliefs. Unfortunately, however, they were rejected. Similarly, amendments were tabled and rejected to replace collective worship with inclusive assemblies, following the unsuccessful approach of a recent private member’s bill.

At the Report Stage on 12^th July, after the decision in Northern Ireland, a further attempt was made to amend the Bill’s stance on religious education, on similar lines to the previous amendment. But this too was unsuccessful, voted down by a majority of 145 to 82.

Baroness Meacher, tabling the amendment, stated that all it would do would be to ensure that education law in England would be in line with the recent legal cases and developments in Wales: ‘surely we do not want to be left behind by Wales.’

Baroness Penn, responding for the government, saw the reform as unnecessary, since ‘worldviews can already be taught as part of religious education’. She also insisted that such reform would go against the spirit of the legislation, which sought ‘largely to consolidate existing requirements on academies, not place more burdens on them or interfere with their freedoms’. The government, she said, believes that academies ‘should be free to determine their own approach to the teaching of RE’. 

It is that word ‘can’, italicised above, that is the crux of the issue here. The Northern Ireland case and developments in Wales highlight that ‘can’ ought to be replaced by ‘should’. In order to be compliant with human rights, worldviews should be taught as part of religious education. The absence of an explicit statutory obligation to do so means that schools in practice are more likely to be in breach of human rights provisions by adopting a narrowly denominational understanding of RE. 

Baroness Penn said that the Schools Bill should ‘not specify the nature of how RE should be taught, which we think is best determined at the local level.’ This is absolutely right – though I think it should be determined at the school level rather than by local authorities. However, the amendment would not have affected this, but would have cleared up the statutory obligations on schools by showing them how to meet human rights standards. In contrast, the law as it currently stands pulls schools in the opposite direction, leading to confusion and a conflict between obligations under education law and human rights law. 

Concluding thoughts

The judgment of the High Court in Northern Ireland makes it plain that changes are needed to the law on religion in schools in England and Wales in order to make it compliant with human rights. The knee-jerk rejection by the government of amendments to the Schools Bill is therefore foolhardy. In the absence of reform, schools are left to attempt to marry education law and human rights obligations, which at the moment are an ill-fitting pair.

The best that can now be hoped is that further amendments along the lines of those proposed by Baroness Meacher will be considered via private member’s bills or by the Commons, if the Schools Bill continues that far. But reform of the law on religion in schools is unlikely to ever become a priority for any government. As I document in my new book, Religion in Schools: Learning Lessons from Wales, the reforms that occurred in the 1940s, 1980s and more recently in Wales, were all side effects of wider reforms of the curriculum. Grappling with the law on religious education, collective worship and the position of faith schools was seen as a necessary evil.

Yet, as the amendments to the Schools Bill have shown, the main issues with the current law could be easily resolved. Adding ‘and non-religious beliefs’ would basically do the job. Religion in Schools outlines how more comprehensive reform could take place. 

There is a danger that the government’s Bill of Rights may end up resolving the matter by weakening human rights protections and the courts’ powers of interpretations. This may entrench the non-pluralistic starting point found in domestic law. As I argued in my previous post for the Freethinker, the Human Rights Act 1998, for all its faults, has played an important role in requiring that protection be afforded not just on grounds of religion but also on grounds of belief. The Orwellian-titled Bill of Rights is actually about the restriction if not removal of rights, and is highly dangerous.

The current position makes further litigation inevitable. The Bill of Rights would mean that such challenges would occur in Strasbourg rather than in domestic courts. And all the time, while this legal wrangling continues, children will miss out on an education that explores religions and beliefs in an objective, critical and pluralist manner. The result can only be the fostering of illiteracy and intolerance.

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The post Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt appeared first on The Freethinker.