Religious Education

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is a very interesting report. As I started to go through it, I was very impressed by how it designs a method for improving the training of teachers and broadening the information they have.

To start with the practicalities—I will come to my philosophical point in a moment—the report has the right approach: make sure that the people who teach the subject have a good understanding of it; otherwise, you will be trying to push water uphill from a very early point. The fact that we have got into a system where we do not take this subject seriously is probably at the heart of it—it has lost status. The noble Lord will be familiar with the criticism of EBacc. It has downgraded many subjects and religious education has merely joined a list. I am normally in a room supported by people who talk about the creative subjects—things that we make money on. Avoiding conflict and stress in society might be a very good way of saving money but we actually make money from them. However, those subjects are downgraded by the EBacc. The road to hell is undoubtedly paved with good intentions, and, trust me, you are on the road to purgatory when you insist on downgrading useful subjects. I am afraid that the EBacc misses the mark.

I turn to the philosophical point. It is probably presumptuous for a dyslexic—I join the noble Lord, Lord Stone, in the mafia of the mis-spellers; we would take over the world but we forget exactly who we are and where we jotted it down—to point out that the “s” on the end of the term “world views” is where this report scores. The first step towards a more civil and co-operative society is knowing what other people think and how they think. It is deciding that another person is well intentioned or it is thinking that they are wrong most of the time as opposed to evil, whether because of religion, politics or anything else. When we reach out from inside ourselves, politics works well. Those are good things to do, and this report says that we should do them and prepare other people to do them. The methodology is very similar to that devised by—back to the mafia of the mis-spellers—the British Dyslexia Association for training people in schools to deal with those in neurodiverse communities. It is important that there is expertise and support in this area.

If I were an Education Minister, I would instinctively go for two strategies. One would be to hide under the biggest desk in the room; the other would be to punt it down the road. We are talking about making a structural shift. My noble friend Lord Alderdice hinted at one or two of these things, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, suggested that the current system would be okay if only we would put a bit more effort into it. I think that the system is broken. It is out of date and reflects the old times. Politicians tend to be reactive—they say, “That was the problem yesterday. Let’s fix it today”—and we have a system that fixes the problems of some time ago. We have to try to address this situation in a new way, and this document gives us the platform to start thinking about that.

We do not need to reinforce faith. Jedi got on to the census. To the English, religion is a movable feast that does not go down certain tram-lines. It does not even go on branch lines; it is hiking across hills somewhere. Then we have groups that want to acquire an identity. Those of Islamic faith seem to defend themselves and their identity by hanging on to aspects of religion. We have to try to make these people see each other as the norm and not as alien. If you are alien, we can disagree with you and persecute you because you are not us. We are right and, if you are not us, you must be wrong.

This approach is a good one; if the Minister can give us some idea about how the Government are starting to address some of the ideas, I would be very grateful. However, the point of the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice—throwing a few more pounds at the problem, training three or four more teachers and saying everything will be fine and quoting a couple of statistics about a pass rate at, say, GCSE—does not begin to touch this. The important bit will be in primary schools to get the base of understanding.

If the noble Lord can give us some idea, I will be very surprised—it is a difficult question and this may be the opening shot—but primary is where we must put the emphasis on. Understanding will probably lead to great rewards in the future.