Education (Assemblies) Bill [HL]

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 7th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak extremely briefly, but I endorse everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, said. It seems to me that morality is incredibly important in our society; we are losing a huge opportunity by having Christian assemblies in schools, which of course exclude the majority of children. Children need to be taught early the importance of generosity, kindness, neighbourliness, community support and so on. All of these values are hugely important; it is vital that children get hold of and endorse them early on in their lives, then put them into practice through their school careers.

I regard it as very important that we replace religious Christian assemblies with morality-based assemblies that are completely inclusive. Every child must understand why they are there and the importance of what is being said. This is a hugely important issue, as far as I am concerned. I endorse very much what the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, said.

Schools: Citizenship Education

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The issues around citizenship, promoting engagement in our democracy and ensuring that young people feel it is worth their while are not served by using the Chamber in that way.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that people need maturity as well as education to vote responsibly and that, at 16, people might have a very good education but are unlikely to be mature? Does she agree, therefore, that the voting age should not be reduced to 16?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

It was a manifesto commitment of this Government to consider that. The evidence demonstrates that young people take on quite a lot of responsibilities at 16. Following on from the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, starting voting earlier seems to ensure that people will be more engaged in democracy throughout their lives.

Schools: Special Needs Pupils

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government have made a huge amount of progress, and a very significant financial commitment working closely with those on the ground. As I said, we have announced £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025 to fund new special educational needs and alternative provision places. Together with the new free schools we have already announced, it will add 60,000 new specialist places to the system. I know the noble Baroness will appreciate that this is a very significant increase.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

I have a grandson with ADHD who has had little or no support from his school throughout his education. He was sitting his A-level mocks recently. He has time blindness, among many other problems, and spent the whole exam doing one question. Can the Minister take any action to make sure that children with ADHD actually receive the support they need? ADHD makes a complete havoc of a child’s education, however bright they seem to be.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sorry to hear about the struggles of the noble Baroness’s grandson. Of course we want our schools to be well equipped to respond to a range of special educational needs and disabilities, but we also know that often those will have knock-on effects in other aspects of a child’s life. It is not just the response within the school that is crucial, but also the partnership with local health services in particular.

Schools: Gender-questioning Children

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The department typically works through a range of stakeholder groups, including those that represent the voice of children. There have been direct conversations with children on these issues.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that schools must strongly discourage school-age children from taking any steps towards gender transition until their late 20s, by which time the decision-making part of their brain—the prefrontal cortex—will be fully developed?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The guidance is very clear that each case should be taken individually. The safety and well-being of children must always be our primary concern, which is why that is at the heart of the guidance. Some of the medical steps to which the noble Baroness refers are implicit in that safety and well-being focus.

Religious Education in Schools

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for tabling this Question for Short Debate. This is an incredibly important issue affecting all children, and currently it is failing. He will not be surprised that I approach this subject from the perspective of non-religious children, whose beliefs are not recognised at present in RE. When the UK was overwhelmingly religious and Christian, the treatment of RE with that focus was completely understandable. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, has described the incredible decline in faith among young people. More than two-thirds describe themselves as non-religious. If RE is to be relevant to all children—and I want spiritual teaching as well as non-spiritual teaching to be relevant to all children—the Government’s first step should be to issue guidance making it clear that RE needs to be fully inclusive of non-religious worldviews. Indeed, the subject needs to be renamed “religion and worldviews”.

Last year’s Bowen judgment in the High Court provided legal clarity about the need for the subject to be objective and pluralistic and to include humanism within it. Indeed, since the Fox judgment of 2015, the subject has been required to be fully inclusive of humanism. In May 2023 a High Court ruling found that it was unlawful for Kent County Council to refuse to accept a humanist pupil as a member of an RE group. The Bowen judgment makes it clear not only that syllabuses must include humanism but that humanists must be included within RE. This is necessary in order for the UK to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights. That convention provides for non-religious worldviews to be read into most instances where religion is used in current law. As important as the legal requirement is the impact on children of an inclusive approach to RE. This enables children with belief to understand those who do not have a belief, and vice versa. Surely that is important for community cohesion.

I applaud the 2018 Commission on Religious Education chaired by the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, the Dean of Westminster. A core recommendation of that commission was the reform of RE to make it more inclusive. This reform is also the policy of the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education. This is the reform that the RE profession wants.

In conclusion, all faith schools should provide inclusive RE as an option on request but, most importantly, the Government need to legislate to reform the subject entirely, change its name to religion and worldviews, bring it within the national curriculum and ensure adequate funding for the subject. I support RE but want it to be broader.

Schools: Admissions

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

It is not quite clear to me what my noble friend’s question was, but he is absolutely right that, on oversubscription, certainly at primary, there is no difference between faith and non-faith schools.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister will probably be aware that the UK is one of only four countries in the OECD that allows state-funded schools to discriminate on grounds of religion in their admission practices. The others are Israel, Ireland and Estonia. Ireland recently ended discrimination in admission practices for Catholic junior schools. Does the Minister accept that it is high time for this country also to end its discrimination on grounds of religion for state-funded schools?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

It is really hard to compare the role of faith-based schools between countries with an overwhelmingly dominant faith and those, such as the one we are all very proud to live in, with many faiths, all of which are respected.

Vulnerable Teenagers

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

Before the Minister sits down, I wonder whether I might pick up one point that the Minister made. Mental health support in schools reaches a quarter of the children who need it at present and the aim is to increase that percentage—

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry, the noble Baroness was not here at the beginning of the debate, so it is not appropriate for her to intervene. She can certainly write to the Minister, who will respond in writing. Thank you.

Childcare

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

A great deal of work is going on at the moment looking at different options, as I have said, to increase affordability but also to increase flexibility for parents. In addition to the report, which the right reverend Prelate mentioned, I can think of at least half a dozen think tank reports that have been published recently. What struck me in looking at those was that there is very little agreement on the solutions to this issue—hence the time we are taking to get it right.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, do the Government have a clear view about the maximum acceptable cost per hour of childcare? If the Government do have such a figure in mind, will the Minister explain to the House what it is? Are the Government providing subsidies to childcare to ensure that the cost does not rise above that level?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Obviously, the majority of providers in the childcare market in terms of number of places—whether childminders or nurseries—are effectively private businesses. The Government are well aware that their costs have risen much faster than their constituent parts, namely labour and rent. The Government are concerned about that, and we hear the impact on working families.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

I note that Amendment 30 is tabled in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and will respond to it in my closing speech so I can hear the arguments that she puts forth first. For now, I beg to move.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 30 in this group. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, for adding their names to the amendment, and I also thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for our very helpful discussion on it.

The aim of the amendment is to make it explicit that religious education in schools which are not faith schools or academies must be inclusive. That is to say RE must include worldviews, including a number of different religions and non-religious values. Just because one does not believe in a metaphysical god, it is absolutely vital that we do not then lose Christian values. For me, as somebody who does not have a religion, I believe passionately that Christian values should be taught in schools on the basis that, if you do not believe in a metaphysical god, then you have to consider that you must support these values and find some rationale for doing so. I am very conscious of the Action for Happiness movement and the world well-being movement, and that is all about loving your neighbour as yourself and treating others as you would wish them to treat you. If we lose those fundamental values simply because more than 50% of the population now do not have a religion—and that number seems to grow every year—we will be in trouble as a society. So I think this amendment is very important: we need to hang on to Christian values.

As I said in my discussion with the right reverend Prelate, a key phrase in the amendment, which applies only to schools without a religious character, is that it requires the new subject to reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are, in the main, Christian, so it is those values that we would be wanting to hang on to.

The amendment is in line with the recommendations of the 2018 report of the Commission on Religious Education, convened by the Religious Education Council for England and Wales. The commission’s members included 14 experts from different fields and various religions and beliefs, and of course it was chaired by the very reverend Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster and former chief education officer of the Church of England.

I emphasise that this amendment makes no attempt to affect religious teaching in faith schools. The changes reflected in this amendment—that the subject should include humanism and be objective, critical, and pluralistic—have been the policy of both the Religious Education Council for England and Wales and the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education. In other words, this is the amendment that the RE profession actually wants; there is nothing revolutionary or odd about it.

Indeed, a recent government statement—which I was hoping to read out, but I cannot track it down on my phone—includes exactly the same principles and ideas in this amendment. So I would hope that the Government would have no problem at all in accepting this amendment; this is government policy according to the Government’s updated statement on RE teaching.

I know that the Minister will also want to take note of two important legal cases on RE, which have concluded that a narrow RE curriculum breaches the human rights of the non-religious. The 2015 judgment R (Fox) v Secretary of State for Education was a landmark decision, which requires the subject to be inclusive of humanism and to be objective, critical, and pluralistic, in order to comply with human rights under Article 9 of the European convention regarding freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Following that judgment, the Welsh Government introduced the Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021, which ensures that RE will be inclusive in these ways in Wales. All this amendment is doing is to ensure that education law in England is in line with the two legal cases and developments in Wales; surely, we do not want to be left behind by Wales.

I should refer to the specifics of the Worcestershire case of June and July 2022, because this has not yet been publicised so noble Lords will not be aware of it. An academy school which did not have a religious character had a narrow curriculum for its GCSE RE course. Following pre-action letters from a humanist parent citing discrimination on human rights grounds, the school agreed to provide RE inclusive of non-religious worldviews, such as humanism, for all pupils in years 10 and 11.

In conclusion, the Bill already clarifies issues in relation to RE for faith schools, so we are not touching on that at all. We know that a number of non-faith schools already provide inclusive RE and worldviews, but this amendment aims to provide clarity for all academy schools which are not faith schools.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very happy to support the amendment so clearly set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. I too am heartened by the knowledge that the Religious Education Council for England and Wales supports the amendment and that it fits evolving case law.

I can, in fact, put my finger on the text that the noble Baroness referred to. Our Government very recently signed up to an international conference of Ministers, saying, in terms:

“We recognise the importance, at all levels of education, of promoting respect for human rights, including freedom of religion or belief, and pluralistic and peaceful societies, where all people are equally respected, regardless of religion, ethnicity, gender, disability status or other characteristics.”


They said that they commit to promoting “inclusive curricula” and that

“curricula should provide positive and accurate information about different faith and belief communities and combat negative stereotypes”.

They also committed to

“promoting … efforts to support education reform, emphasising the benefits of pluralism and the importance of human rights, including freedom of religion or belief.”

It is a great step forward that our Government have committed to that text. Of course, it does no more than reflect the evolution of our diverse society, so I am sure that the Government will lose none of their positions in accepting this amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Baroness Meacher]

30: After Clause 27, insert the following new Clause—
“Religion and worldviews education(1) The proprietor of an Academy school without a religious character must exercise its functions with a view to securing, and its principal must secure, that religion and worldviews education is provided to all pupils at the school.(2) The religion and worldviews education required under this section must—(a) reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian,(b) take account of the teachings of the other principal religions and non-religious beliefs represented in Great Britain, and the beliefs and practices of their adherents, and(c) be designed and taught in a manner that is objective, critical and pluralistic.(3) In subsection (2)(b), the reference to non-religious beliefs is to explicitly non-religious philosophical convictions, within the meaning of Article 2 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, that are analogous to religions.(4) In this section, “the European Convention on Human Rights” means the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, agreed by the Council of Europe at Rome on 4 November 1950, as it has effect for the time being in relation to the United Kingdom, and “the First Protocol”, in relation to that Convention, means the protocol to the Convention agreed at Paris on 20 March 1952.(5) A provision of an Academy agreement or master agreement (including an agreement entered into before this section comes into force) is void so far as it is inconsistent with any provision made by or under this section.”Member's explanatory statement
This replaces religious education in Academies without a religious character with religion and worldviews, which is explicitly inclusive of non-religious beliefs and is explicitly required to be objective, critical and pluralistic.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the Liberal Democrat Benches for their support. I am aware that the Labour Party is having a free vote on this amendment—out of respect for its Catholic members, perhaps. I very much thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for his comments and for noting the fact that our only differences are those of timing. Bearing in mind the amount of time that legislation takes, if we miss this opportunity in the Bill, it will be many years before we have another one to recognise that schools that do not teach religion and worldviews are breaching human rights. We have legal cases that make this very clear and we have the example of Wales, which has put things right. I feel obliged to test the opinion of the House.

Schools: Citizenship Education

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not aware that that is being considered. However, the Government’s commitment to the National Citizen Service, which works with tens of thousands of children and hundreds of educational settings across the country to provide not just opportunities for children and young people but a recognition of their contribution to society, remains unstinting.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

PSHE is not currently a compulsory subject in education. As the Minister rightly said, PSHE is a part of citizenship. Does the Minister agree that it would be extremely helpful to have citizenship, including PSHE, as a compulsory subject in schools? Surely that is as important as any other compulsory subject in education so that all children are prepared for adult life in this country.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure that I completely followed the noble Baroness’s question. RSHE is already a requirement in secondary school. If I may, I will come back to the noble Baroness and clarify.