Education Bill

Baroness Turner of Camden Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2011 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

I just point out the statistic that 98 per cent of primary schools have a daily act of worship. The noble Lord is quite right that in secondary schools the figure is not as high as that: it is between two and three acts of collective worship a week; on other occasions, the school is meeting for an assembly purpose. That is what I mean by the generous interpretation of religious and spiritual reflection, which is crucial.

Secondly, the system of opt-in rather than opt-out would drive a wedge into our schools which would be regrettable. We could find social division. As it is, there is a difference between collective worship and corporate worship. Collective worship is a gathering of everyone who is together in a certain place at a certain time, such as a school. Corporate worship is when people opt into the faith and want to go to a church. Therefore, we have a collective gathering which allows youngsters to experience something and not just learn about it. As we are legally charged with promoting the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils and society, experience matters, and the candle, the singing, the prayer, the stillness and the silence, which are so often present, are all part of the experience of the spiritual, which is part of what we are required to provide.

Thirdly, there is the problem of a wedge appearing between two different types of school. One of the glories of our system is that it is an integrated church state system or a system of church schools within the state. It works well because it is integrated and, if we drive a wedge by saying that there are church schools over here and non-religious schools over there, we will deny ourselves something rather precious about the British system. There is much more that I could say but I will not go on.

Lastly, let us remember that in 2010 the Office for National Statistics said that 71 per cent of the population of this country still want to identify with—I think that that is the phrase—the Christian religion. If we are swapping statistics, 86 per cent of people in this country go into a church at some point during the year, but if 71 per cent want to identify with the religion, that would seem to indicate that most parents are happy with the way that we go about things at the moment. We have a good British compromise and, if we rock the boat with this, I do not know quite where that will lead. I think that it will probably be to our detriment.

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I support the contributions of my noble friend Lady Massey and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, to this debate. In my view, the law as it stands is a legacy of a society which is unrecognisable compared with the one that we have today, with its wide variety of beliefs and traditions. The Bill provides an ideal opportunity to modernise an outdated and overly prescriptive law, and the amendments give us the opportunity to do precisely that.

Although it is true that parents have the right to withdraw their child from collective worship, for many parents this is very unsatisfactory because it means that the child may feel excluded and separated from their classmates, and this can have a very damaging effect, particularly on very young children. In some respects, I speak from personal experience in that regard. My mother was a Roman Catholic and my father was not, but they insisted that we went to state schools, and my mother filled in the appropriate forms to the effect that I was a Roman Catholic. Therefore, when I went to school, instead of going in with everyone else, I sat outside the door. It was thought right and proper that I should be separated from the rest of the children. I remember being very upset about this, getting home and saying to my mother, “They don’t really like me, you know, because I’m a Roman Catholic”. Perhaps that is one reason why I grew up to be a secularist. That is by the way but the fact remains that it is not a very good solution simply to say that parents can withdraw their children. Much better in my view is the kind of assembly envisaged by my noble friend Lady Massey, which is available for everybody. People can attend irrespective of their religion or no religion.

I turn to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. Amendment 92 would at least ensure that conducting an act of worship was made optional for schools without a religious designation, and Amendment 93 would make attendance at worship optional for all children. However, the less satisfactory amendment from my perspective is Amendment 94, which would lower the age at which pupils may withdraw themselves from collective worship from sixth-form age to a default age of 15.

The three amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, would certainly be an improvement on the present situation, and we now have an opportunity to reform what I think is a very outdated way of looking at collective worship. I therefore hope that the Government will be prepared to respond suitably to these amendments.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I have no interest to declare save that in previous pieces of legislation I have tried to achieve exactly the same objectives that my noble friend is trying to achieve today. I agree with what he is saying. I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, that it is important that children are able to make decisions for themselves about something like this. We are not just talking about a piece of religious education; we are talking about worship. I wonder whether the proponents of the out-of-date law as it stands would feel the same way if this were a Muslim country and Christian children were being asked to worship in the way that Muslims do, even though they did not espouse that faith.

The noble Baroness, Lady Turner, also put her finger on the fact that this is completely out of date in our multicultural society. If it is true that academies have the freedom to decide whether or not to do this and maintained schools do not, that is not right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, my name is also to Amendment 138. For me, these two paragraphs together describe the ideal nature of a faith school when it has the freedom of being an academy. Subsection (1) makes the point that a faith school should not in any way have admission criteria that insist that all children shall have some kind of allegiance to the faith of that school. We have all heard stories about parents suddenly turning up at a church in the last few months before their application to a school that happens to be the best school in the area and a faith school. That is unfortunate; it distorts what should be an open choice by parents of a good school that has a particular ethos. Subsection (1) is inclusive and says that faith schools would be inclusive. Around half the children they took would share a commitment to their faith, but the other half could be of any faith or no faith.

I strongly believe in subsection (2). Exactly as my noble friend Lord Lucas said, if parents have chosen a Catholic school, an Anglican school, a Jewish school or a Muslim school for their children, they must respect the traditions of that faith. It is not a secular school; it is a school of that faith. They should be included in the general ethos of the school and pay tribute to the customs within it that reflect its faith. My experience and that of noble Lords who spoke earlier reinforce this; parents of other faiths welcome the ethos of a Christian school, and perhaps parents of other faiths will welcome the ethos of a Muslim or a Jewish school as well.

Parents are looking for a school with strong values, and if those values are based on faith, the parents will accept that. The success of faith schools has been widely demonstrated by their popularity and their academic success.

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Massey on Amendments 103, 140 and 141. I do not accept Amendment 138. In fact, I seem to recall that the bishop in the Anglican Church in charge of education recently announced that he would welcome the idea that people not of the faith were accepted into religious schools. That should be welcomed.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

Does the noble Baroness not recognise that the amendment specifically states that 50 per cent of the children would not be of the faith?

[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.