The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, raised eyebrows recently by suggesting that Labour in power would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the current government.

Given the current administration’s enthusiasm for faith-based education, it is hard to see how this could be achieved in practice. It may have been an empty gesture, a case of playing to the gallery – Starmer was speaking during a visit to a state-funded faith school. But if he is serious, the implications are worrying.

Labour’s uncritical support for religiously segregated education is alarming – especially as religiously segregated often means, in practice, racially segregated too. In pluralistic societies, inclusive secular schools can be powerful agents of social integration, forging connections that transcend the boundaries of race and religion. In a world riven with religiously motivated conflicts and tensions, it is unwise for the state to fund a form of education that restricts exposure to diverse worldviews and to critical thinking.

Britain’s Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu faith schools are largely monocultural zones – silos of segregation that do nothing to foster greater social cohesion. Interfaith work between schools is often offered as a remedy to this, but it is a poor substitute for a school in which children of different backgrounds are educated together and mix with one another every day.

Earlier this year the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child urged the UK to end the use of religion as a selection criterion for school admissions. Starmer’s promise not to ‘tinker’ with faith schools signals his intent to do nothing about discriminatory admissions.

The evidence is clear, though, that religious selection also acts as a form of socio-economic segregation. Recent research additionally reveals that Church of England and Catholic primaries ‘serve as hubs of relative advantage’, less likely than community schools to admit children with special educational needs and disabilities.

It seems that Labour’s promise to ‘break down the barriers to opportunity’ only applies where it will not upset religious interests.

Probably the biggest clash between education authorities and faith schools in recent years has been over the introduction of relationships and sex education (RSE) – particularly the requirement for this to be LGBT-inclusive. Catholic, ultra-Orthodox and Muslim activists have objected to requirements imposed on schools to teach pupils about sex, the existence of same-sex relationships and the legal rights of LGBT people. Good quality RSE needs to be evidence-based, impartial and free from ideology of all kinds. It would be shameful if Labour’s keenness to appease religious groups were to allow faith-based prejudice to undermine the subject, leaving faith school pupils in the dark and young LGBT people feeling isolated.

The 50 per cent admissions cap is another area where religious groups are lobbying for privileges. This is the rule that where newly established academies with a religious character are oversubscribed, half of their places must be allocated without reference to faith. It is the only meaningful effort we have seen to promote inclusivity and address the problems caused by faith-based schooling. However, Catholic and Jewish groups have been lobbying to get it abolished. In 2018 they almost succeeded, but Theresa May’s government eventually backtracked in the face of vigorous opposition. It would be bizarre for any party to resurrect a regressive policy that risks increasing levels of discrimination and making integration less likely. Yet under the Conservatives, the cap remains under review.

When it comes to faith schools, all the major parties appear minded to maintain the status quo.

The Liberal Democrats have typically advocated a more inclusive approach to state education. In 2017 the party passed a policy to support an end to religious selection in publicly funded schools. But the policy failed to appear in the 2019 manifesto – and there was no mention of reform to faith schools in the party’s ‘core policy offer’ on schools that was set out at their conference in September.

The Greens, meanwhile, are much more upfront about their vision for an inclusive and secular education system. Their education policy is underpinned by sound secularist principles and includes ending the state funding of faith schools, removing religious opt-outs from equality legislation and abolishing the archaic requirement on schools to provide daily acts of collective worship.

The Greens would also prohibit schools from delivering a form of religious education that ‘encourages adherence to any particular religious belief’.

England’s outdated model of religious education is certainly ripe for reform. Faith schools still teach the subject ‘within the tenets of their faith’, which means the subject is often confessional in nature, rather than objective, critical and pluralistic. Even in secular schools, RE remains compulsory yet separate from the national curriculum – and heavily influenced by religious interest groups, through bodies called standing advisory councils on religious education (SACREs), which determine the syllabus for each local area.

Both Labour and the Lib Dems have promised to review the curriculum if they form the next government. This ought to include replacing religious education with a more relevant subject that promotes critical thinking while giving pupils a solid understanding of diversity of belief and non-belief among the UK population and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But whether either party will be bold enough to wrest this area of the curriculum away from vested religious interests is another question.

Whichever party forms the next government, it is imperative that they tackle the scourge of unregistered schools. An estimated 6,000 children are being systemically undereducated in illegal and often unsafe ‘schools’ that teach a narrow, religion-based curriculum without oversight or adequate safeguarding.

This year, the government scrapped proposed legislation which included measures to address this issue, such as a register of children not in school and new powers for Ofsted to act against schools which operate covertly. Despite junking the Schools Bill, in which these proposed measures were contained, the government insists that it remains committed to the bill’s objectives concerning unregistered schools. Labour has also pledged to crack down on unregistered schools but suggested it would take a ‘different approach’. What that may be remains to be seen.

But it is not enough to focus solely on the illegal sector. The more diverse our society becomes, the more integrated it needs to be. Faith schools build division into the system by separating children along the lines of their parents’ culture and religious belief, encouraging them to identify with this from an early age, rather than allowing them to make up their own minds about who they are and what they believe. Schools that educate children together without imposing a religious framework on them or discriminating against some in favour of others are the only model that public money should support.

There is also a big question mark over the sustainability of the Church of England’s role in state education. Church attendance is at a record low. Data from the latest British Social Attitudes survey suggests that just three per cent of those aged 18-24 – tomorrow’s parents – would describe themselves as Anglican. Yet the Church of England runs a quarter of primary schools in England and is the biggest sponsor of academies. Despite all the talk about faith schools offering choice, it is already the case that in many areas of the country, families have little or no option other than a church school.

The Church of England is currently targeting schools as part of its plans to ‘double the number of children and young people who are active Christian disciples by 2030’. It is a sign of how privileged the established church is that so few politicians appear willing to question its exploitation of state schools as mission fields for Anglican evangelism. The more pluralistic and secular Britain becomes, the less appropriate will it be for churches to exert influence over state education.

It is unfortunate that, for the upcoming general election at least, faith schools are unlikely to be on the agenda. But the case for inclusive, secular education will only grow stronger. Politicians cannot file it away in the ‘too difficult’ department forever.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

On religion in schools, see further:

Faith in education, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

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

Post-Christian Britain and religion in schools, National Secular Society podcast

Unregistered (illegal) schools with Eve Sacks, NSS podcast

A new Catholic school for Peterborough, NSS podcast

The Church of England’s influence over education, NSS podcast

The post Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? appeared first on The Freethinker.

Some stakeholders in the world of religious education believe that RE is the best subject in the curriculum, offering an exploration of deep existential questions; philosophical and ethical discussions and debates about the meaning of life, purpose and identity; and learning about other’s worldviews in a way that is culturally, morally and socially enriching. Unlike other subjects, which are a dry accumulation of facts and figures mainly driven by economic and employability values, RE offers – so the argument goes – the development of the whole person. RE complements the curriculum perfectly. It is all pink bubbles and balloons everywhere.

Religious Studies GCSE entries have fallen for the third year in the row, but according to NATRE (the National Association of RE Teachers) and the REC (Religious Education Council), this is despite the subject’s popularity among students.

In his book, Reforming RE (2020), Mark Chater describes the ‘enthusiast’ position shared by teachers and educators who believe that everything in RE is great. According to ‘enthusiasts’, the drop in intake is due to neglect by the Department for Education (DfE), low funding, and RE not being included in an ‘Ebacc’ – an accountability performance measure by which schools are monitored. RE, they say, is invaluable for a well-rounded curriculum and relevant to modern life, and we just need more of it and better funding… Why can’t others see it this way?

Ofsted’s 2013 report on RE, ‘Religious education: realising the potential’, concluded that the structures that underpin the local determination of the RE curriculum have failed to keep pace with changes in the wider educational world. The same report stated that the teaching of RE in general is poor and that many pupils leave school with scant subject knowledge.

One survey by Opinium Research asked more than 1,800 adults who had attended UK secondary schools which subject they thought was the least beneficial to their education: RE was among those ranked lowest. Just over one in five (21%) said that RE was the least beneficial, and this was followed by art (chosen by 16%) and PE (10%). Another more recent survey by YouGov from 2022 asked the question, ‘How important do you think it is to teach [various subjects] at secondary school?’ It found that 55% people in UK believe that RE is either not very important or not important at all, ranking it 15th out of 18 subjects in terms of importance. Even more tellingly, the same polling company asked school students in 2018, ‘Which subject do you enjoy the most?‘ On a scale of ‘I enjoy it a lot’, RE was second to last, with only Citizenship being behind. When it comes to the percentages of participants who chose ‘I don’t enjoy it very much’ or ‘I don’t enjoy it at all’, RE was by far the least popular, with 44% pupils disliking the subject.

Yet the number of students entering on GCSE RE full courses increased from 170,303 entries in 2009 to 284,057 in 2016. This was used by enthusiasts as evidence that the subject is popular among students – despite consistent feedback about its confusing purpose, the low quality of the teaching, and its low popularity among both students and parents. However, any weight placed on the increase in the number of students taking the subject ignores the fact that RE is compulsory across all key stages. The increase in the number of entries was always driven by its compulsory status rather than its popularity. The recent decreases which are taking place in spite of its being compulsory only serve to show how troublesome a state RE is in.

The latest Ofsted review of RE, published in May 2021, has provided the first academic literature review of RE and pointed out numerous flaws in subject pedagogy as well as in the general teaching of the subject. Among many technical points that are more relevant to teachers, I will focus on the parts that I think are the most important in demonstrating why the subject is inherently flawed, why students dislike it, and why its educational outcomes are not beneficial for our modern liberal democracy. 

Firstly, the problem of the knowledge being taught. The report states that there is no clarity as to what constitutes reliable knowledge in teaching religions and non-religious worldviews, and a lack of clarity as to what constitutes objective, critical and pluralistic scholarship in RE. This is because the subject is not grounded in the academic study of religions, and is consequently the only subject without a national curriculum. Rather, the ‘knowledge’ taught in RE in schools is determined by religious groups themselves, in every borough, through religious representation on the SACREs. The latter are the standing advisory councils on religious education which usually determine the syllabus for maintained schools in their area, and which act as political interest groups offering their ideological products.

Religious groups are less interested in the academic study of religions than in the pastoral aspect of their religion, religious apologetics, and in presenting their religions in the most beneficial light. They are happy to use taxpayers’ money to do a soft form of proselytising by influencing schools’ RE syllabus.

The status quo, and the power structures that determine the RE curriculum to the benefit of religious groups, are sometimes defended with an argument that the current RE settlement of local syllabus-making promotes democracy, inclusivity and diversity. But this is a fallacious and self-serving argument. The current arrangements are only beneficial to the dominant religious groups’ interest. They are not in the interest of the public, nor of religious and non-religious minorities, nor of dissenting ‘heretical’ and progressive voices, nor of our students, who are being denied an unbiased education.

Similarly, in the opening decades of the 21st century in the USA, we have seen Christian groups passing ‘academic freedom’ bills and using their privileges and influence to undermine the teaching of evolution in science lessons – all in the name of inclusivity and pluralism. They love democracy and freedom when it benefits them, but less so when their privileges are challenged.

As a consequence of the local arrangements of syllabus-making, in which the representatives of religious groups decide what should be taught, the content of RE becomes distorted. This is because the purpose and vision of the subject, as interpreted by religious representatives, is to implicitly assert a benevolent view of religious traditions and beliefs. This is usually done indirectly, through the omission of the negative parts of a religion. Explicit instruction into positive beliefs is never as effective as indoctrination through the omission of problematic ones. The subject tends to be taught as a form of indoctrination through a partial and incomplete presentation of a particular religion’s tenets. Students are left with a false sense of having complete knowledge and an educated understanding about the religion, when in fact they do not.

This outcome has been emphasised in the Ofsted review: it concludes that ‘bad RE’ is spreading ‘unhelpful misconceptions’ by presenting religions only in a positive light, and claiming that ‘only good and loving religion is true religion and bad religion is false religion’.

As teachers of RE, we seem to be masters of spreading the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. Take any of the abusive theology found in religions or any abusive beliefs or practices throughout history or today that are inspired by religions. These are usually omitted in RE lessons, but sometimes crop up. As an RE teacher, one just needs to select one of the plethora of rhetorical devices deployed in religious apologetics to dismiss any such negative aspect out of hand. For instance, one can tell students that they are taking it out of context; that people who do unpleasant things in the name of religion are not true believers but are just extremists and not true to their religion; that it is culture rather than religion; that it is politics hijacking religion – and so on and so forth. The blame is always laid on something else, while the attitude is maintained that nothing negative could truly be part of the religion.

RE as taught in England and Wales today is a subject where religions are deliberately sanitised and misrepresented in the name of promoting respect, tolerance and community cohesion. Respect and tolerance are legitimate ideals that we should still hold on to, but unfortunately, we extend these to respecting beliefs and religions, rather than promoting respect for individual people and their rights.

It is vital to promote respect and tolerance for individual human rights and people, not for individual beliefs, including religions. In doing so, we must be able to deal with the abusive elements of religions that do not respect human rights.

The 2021 Ofsted review made several recommendations that could enable RE to become a pluralistic, objective and critical subject, and not spread unhelpful misconceptions. Above all, it recommended that RE should be grounded in the academic study of religion and non-religious worldviews, using the well-established methods, processes and other tools of scholarship that are already used by scholars to make sense of global and historical religions and non-religious worldviews. However, the DfE seems unwilling to make reforms. A recent chance to make progress would have been following the REC Commission on RE final report in 2018, which recommended changing the subject to ‘Religion and Worldviews’. But the DfE rejected this recommendation on the basis that it would add too much to teachers’ workloads.

With the DfE unwilling to make reforms, RE remains cluttered with many pedagogies and different visions about the aim and purpose of the subject. Enthusiasts believe that having a subject that touches upon philosophy, ethics, theology and many other disciplines is its strength. Yet in reality, this mixture of approaches only obfuscates the subject further. It would be far more beneficial for our pupils to study only ethics or philosophy, with their clear aims and purposes, as well-established disciplines in their own right, than to keep on with this artefact of the past called RE, burdened as it is with external ideological demands that acts as a proxy for religious apologetics and soft proselytism. We do not have ethics or philosophy in our schools because RE has hijacked them and is doing their work badly. 

RE’s distorted pedagogy, lack of objective knowledge and unclear educational outcomes produce confusing assessment criteria. In KS4 (when they are aged 14-16), students face exam questions like ‘Why is prayer important for Christians?’ or ‘How does a belief in resurrection influence Christians today?’ A typical mark scheme will contain a list of benevolent generic answers: ‘It makes them do good deeds in order to go to heaven’, or ‘Prayer gets them closer to God’. It is not hard to see why students dislike the subject, especially as according to the latest research on religiosity, almost 60% of citizens in the UK are not affiliated to a particular religion. The proportion is even higher among the young. Outside school, it would seem, religion in the UK is losing relevance generation by generation.

In the limited time allocated to a subject on the curriculum, is RE as it is currently taught really what we want our students to learn about? Is it going to help them grasp the messy complexity of religion and non-religious beliefs and their global, historical and contemporary place in the world? The educational outcomes of RE are designed to create a ‘religionist’: a soft religion apologist who will not be able to think of the place of religion in the world in a critical manner, but will be well-equipped to explain away any criticism of religion. They will become bad thinkers, and fail to see both the good and the bad in religions. They are wired to believe that the RE teacher in Batley Grammar school should have never shown the cartoon of Mohammed in class, because it is ‘disrespectful’, whilst in another breath stating that violence and hatred have nothing to do with religions.

Extreme beliefs and behaviour can only flourish when they are protected with a buffer zone of ‘enablers’, a majority of well-wishers who view their tradition uncritically and are happy to endlessly explain away any abusive theology.

It might be hoped that the fallacy that ‘only good religion is true religion’, identified by the 2021 Ofsted review, will trigger a change in the way the RE syllabus is put together, and the way it is taught. But I am not so optimistic. It seems to me that there will be no change until the power structures behind RE, and the influence of privileged religious groups over it, are removed.

This does not mean that religious groups should not be stakeholders, influencers and partners when it comes to working on the RE syllabus. Rather, it means that their privileged position should be removed, so that we can have a secular RE for the 21st century. Such a subject should be grounded in academic study; should be objective, critical and pluralistic; and should be inclusive of both religious and non-religious views. It should offer powerful knowledge of the best that has been said in religious studies scholarship, not theology. It should have clarity in its aims, which will be to promote academic scholarship about religions, as well as the British fundamental values of liberal democracy, equality and individual liberty. By doing so, it should implicitly promote respect for human rights. This should in turn aid and support progressive views in religious traditions, because students will be more educated and more able to identify and discern what the real scholarship is and what is just religious apologetics.

But support for these progressive views can only happen if we are able to identify which ones are regressive and which ones are progressive. We cannot do this by lumping together all religions and religiosity in one basket. Change will not come until privilege-blind stakeholders change themselves – which is highly unlikely – or until their privileges are taken away from them. This will only happen when this country truly becomes a secular country and a state for all of its citizens, no matter what religion or belief they hold. We can start by taking into account the important insights from the 2021 Ofsted review, and work on building a national curriculum for RE that is grounded in the academic study of religions.

When the DfE, in 2018, rejected the recommendations to start working on a new subject called ‘Religion and Worldviews’, I felt disappointed. Now, after considering what kind of changes the RE stakeholders do propose, it has become clear that much of what they propose is merely cosmetics without any substantial change in the pedagogy. Religious groups are as keen as ever for RE to be their platform for apologetics.

As long Britain has an official state religion, and as long as dominant religious groups are privileged, real reform of RE will simply not be achieved. Perhaps we should replace the subject with wider civic and moral education, which would include the basics of religious education, but not be the basis of the subject. Such a subject would enable our students to learn more objectively about human rights like freedom of expression and freedom of religion, and concepts like religious discrimination and religious privilege. It would enable them to discuss the place of religions in the world in a more informed and critical manner.

Civic and moral studies was introduced in France during its 2015 school reforms. In a light of the DfE’s inability to substantially reform RE in a critical, objective and inclusive way in England and Wales, a vision for a similar subject, which would replace RE, is slowly being formed, among others by the National Secular Society’s Secular Education Forum, of which I am a member. I and others have also been helping the NSS to develop resources for schools that touch upon issues of secularism, human rights, equality and freedoms, religious privileges and discrimination. These themes should be well suited to civic and moral studies; to me, at least, they seem far more educationally meaningful than the proselytising of RE. Ultimately, replacing religious education with wider civic and moral studies would probably be the best course for future students and our society as a whole.

The post Bad Religious Education 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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