Religion and Belief: British Public Life

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for securing this debate and articulating it in such a timely and profound fashion. In the little time I have today I want to concentrate on the role of religion in education—in schools in both the maintained and independent sectors—and to talk specifically about minority faiths in this context.

We probably have broad agreement that the civic purpose of education should be to prepare children for their role as equal citizens of an ethnically and religiously diverse liberal democracy and to encourage the development of their autonomy in order that they can grow to fulfil their potential as adults. However, too many schools are not delivering that kind of education. In these schools, we often see the rights of individual students subsumed into the forced homogeneity of “community” and “cultural” identities. When taken to its extreme, as we have seen in some minority faith schools, an emphasis on group culture has allowed communities to enforce their own values and traditions upon the children. We have had the Jewish Yesodey Hatorah girls’ school in east London being rebuked by the exam regulator, Ofqual, for redacting questions relating to human reproduction and evolution on exam papers. Nevertheless, the school defiantly continues to shield young girls from vital scientific knowledge, and now simply “advises” students not to answer exam questions which conflict with the school’s strict Orthodox religious beliefs. This school’s attitude is, I am afraid, indicative of a wider problem of faith-based schools narrowing the curriculum to suit their own particular religious ethos.

The recent Ofsted inspections of independent Islamic schools in Tower Hamlets also highlighted how students are left vulnerable to extremist influences focusing on conservative interpretations of Islam, at the expense of other important areas of the curriculum. At Mazahirul Uloom School, inspectors found that pupils were unable to tell the difference between Sharia law and British law—in particular, English law. All six of the independent Muslim schools inspected in that area were judged to be failing to provide pupils with,

“an appropriately broad and balanced curriculum”.

In one school, the curriculum was focused entirely on Islamic themes.

Of course we must ensure that parents’ religious and philosophical convictions are respected in the educational provision that the state offers. Article 2 in the Human Rights Act secures that but the demand for a religious education, wholly on parents’ terms, is an unreasonable and potentially divisive demand which must be resisted. It is also important to point out that Article 2 does not provide an absolute right. However outward-looking we may hope that all minority faith schools are, the fact is that they are one of the main points of contact for a child outside the home. When society allows them to be the vehicle for propagating and promoting segregation and closed-mindedness to mainstream values, it is surely right for the state to step in and correct that imbalance. It has been less robust in that integrating function than it should have been.

In short, if future generations are to live together, they must learn together so, rather than facilitating the segregation of pupils along religious lines, we should be doing everything we can to ensure that children of all faiths and none are educated together in a respectful and inclusive environment. For Liberal Democrats, that means an end to the outdated law requiring all maintained schools to hold a daily act of “broadly Christian” worship. Such a law is unevenly applied and can reduce a broad and balanced approach, seriously undermining parents’ abilities to raise their children in accordance with their own beliefs.

It is important to recognise that organised religion has played a positive role in the development of state education in Britain. However, Britain’s religious landscape has changed radically since the Butler Education Act of 1944. We are both one of the most religiously diverse and least religious countries in the world. The time has come to look again at the role of religion in our nation’s schools and to be radical about that. Parents who want to give their child a religious upbringing are at liberty to do so, at home and wherever they worship, but it is not a reasonable demand of a national curriculum, where children’s independent interests and society’s longer-term cohesion should always be the priority.