Education Bill

Lord Bishop of Lichfield Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2011 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Lichfield]

My Lords, I thank those who set out so clearly the reasons against religious assemblies for schools. I shall go on thinking about those reasons and some of my best answers will come in the bath tonight.

Several noble Lords have said that religious assemblies are way out of date. I am not so sure about that. I have got to leave my duties here on Wednesday because one of our home regiments is coming back. Apparently, when they come back from Afghanistan and the local population want to greet them, the first thing they think should be on the agenda is a religious service. So there we have the youth of today opting for a religious and corporate act of worship in order to express what they want to say.

I cannot help feeling also that the surroundings of this Room have something to tell us about our own history. Is what we see around us all out of date? I do not think so. It has been a constant feature that people have suggested that religious assemblies for children are divisive and divide up communities. That is not my experience at all. On the contrary, I see constant cohesion in welcoming people of all different ethnic groups and faith groups and managing that. I often go to assemblies where children are given a major part in running it. It is a regular part of our diet for someone to get up and say “I am a Jew; this is how it happened to me” and so on. Muslims, Buddhists and other parents are usually very keen to have their children come to assembly. The assertion that lots of children sit outside is just not true. I remember a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses but, apart from them, there are very few people who sit out.

We are agreed on both sides of this debate that assembly is a good thing. What divides us is whether it should be substantially Christian. My own opinion is that the great advantage of a religious assembly is that it gives us the opportunity to give worth to worship that goes further than the latest fad from the head or from the local authority, that gives not just a sense of the numinous but of someone beyond our daily matters who can guide us with regard to the values that our society should be built upon. I do not think any age is too young to start that struggle of saying, “If we want a cohesive community, if we want tolerance, truth and honesty, where do those values come from?” I think many of us in this Room would say they come from God, and that the authorised version of the Bible is not only so impressive because of the style of the writing but also because of the content.

There is much more to say but I am against those who say that Christianity is just one of our religions. It occupies a more important place in our constitution than that. If we are having debates about the constitution, we should not just nibble away at one side of it without seeing that it affects all the others as well.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, if there is one thing that is clearly agreed in the Committee this afternoon, it is the value of the assembly as a way of showing that the school has a sense of community. There is much good in the amendments put forward, but at the same time we should not forget that church schools happen to be extremely popular with parents, even those with no religion or religious beliefs of their own. Church schools are not popular by accident. If we wish to move from the current position, let us say in Northern Ireland, with mutually hostile but strongly religious schools, to something of the idealism put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Peston, we need to think very carefully about what we will put into this mix of idealism and discipline that appears equally in these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

I am sorry, but I will continue, if I may. In view of what I said, the noble Baroness will accept that in no way can I accept the subsection (2) in Amendment 138, particularly where pupils would be accepted into religious schools who were not themselves religious. I do not see how subsection (2) could in any way be accepted; it does not seem sensible. If people are being accepted who are not of that religious faith, why should they be expected to participate in the school’s religious life when it is not of their particular faith and it was known that they would not be of that faith when they were accepted into the school?

[The Lord Bishop of Lichfield]

The right reverend Prelate who laid this challenge was sitting next to me until a little while ago, and he got into serious trouble in some quarters for saying what he did. We take very seriously the possible ghettoisation of our country’s schooling, and we are constantly thinking about it. Perhaps we all skirt around the fact that we live in one of the most educationally divided countries in the world, and the fault lines run deepest between rich and poor rather than between one religion and another. We ought not to forget that.

We in the church are not new to this. It has to be remembered that for two generations, the Church of England provided thousands and thousands of schools for the poor, while our successive Governments were still saying that the poor did not need educating. Then to accuse us of ghettoisation is a misremembering of history.