Religion and Belief: British Public Life

Lord Warner Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (Lab)]

My Lords I, too, am grateful to my near neighbour, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for securing this debate and for his excellent introduction. On a personal level, I am also grateful for his continuing tolerance of my robust secularism. I declare my interests as the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group and my appointment as Commissioner for Children’s Services in Birmingham. Following the excellent speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, I want to focus on some of the issues of public policy raised by recent experiences of the practices in some extreme faith-based schools.

At a recent meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, we heard from the original Trojan horse whistleblower at Park View School in Birmingham, from a former Haredi Jew who grew up and was educated in Stamford Hill in Hackney, and from a young man who attended an Accelerated Christian Education school and is now doing a PhD studying experiences of ACE schools. I have to tell your Lordships that “ace” is a bit misleading as a description of those schools. The parliamentarians at the meeting, from all political parties, were truly shocked to learn what was going on in some of our schools in 21st-century Britain in the name of religious beliefs, and by the apparent inability of our legal and regulatory systems to safeguard our children from what can only be described as indoctrination and abuse.

I will say a little about what we heard about the ACE and Haredi school experiences. There is a network of 30 to 40 private ACE schools in the UK. The curriculum is a fundamentalist Christian one that originated in the United States. It is widely considered to be creationist, homophobic and misogynistic. The teaching materials used in these schools that were presented to us certainly supported this view. Much of the material is in a comic strip format with characters that could only be described as risible if they were not being used to brainwash and indoctrinate young minds. It was very scary that the so-called science teaching was leading to certification that was being used to progress children to further education.

The insularity of children in the ACE schools was repeated by the descriptions of education in a Haredi Jewish school. Here was a young man who literally had to escape from his community at the age of 18, having had no education in this country apart from religious study and despite speaking no English, because his so-called education had been conducted in Yiddish. This young man, now in his 20s, is a smart, articulate campaigner trying to expose the fact that more than 2,000 boys from this sect are being educated today in illegal unregistered schools. He struggles to understand why we collectively seem unable to safeguard children from his experience.

These young men and many others have had appalling educational experiences, all in the name of the religious beliefs of their parents. They are our fellow citizens for whom our legal and regulatory processes are failing to deliver the “balanced and broadly based” education—that is the wording of the statute—that they are entitled to under our current education legislation. Parliament has made clear what sort of education children in this country are entitled to expect and that is likely to fit them for the world they are living in. That entitlement is not the narrow indoctrination of their parents’ beliefs enforced through closed communities.

The children receiving such a narrow education are, in my view, being abused and deserve better protection than we currently afford them. It is arguable that this abuse is on a par with the kind of emotional child abuse in which the state has always intervened with parents in order to protect children from their parents’ excesses. This is a public policy issue that we need to debate and not shelter behind a screen of liberal tolerance of personal freedom of religious belief. That tolerance rightly extends from adult to adult but does not, in my book, extend to abusing vulnerable children trapped in households that deny them access to the balanced and broadly based education that the law entitles them to. We need to address some of these issues and not run away from them in the interests of the children who are vulnerable to these excesses and living in our society, some not many miles from this House.