Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether they encourage Christian teaching in schools.

The government’s policy is to allow religious education (RE) curricula to be designed at a local level, whether that is through a locally agreed syllabus or by individual schools and academy trusts developing their own curricula.

The government does not specify what the content of a school’s RE curriculum should be, nor does it actively promote the teaching of any particular religion.

Legislation does include the following requirement: a locally agreed syllabus must ‘reflect that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian, while taking account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain’. This requirement is replicated in the funding agreements that academies have with the Secretary of State for Education.

Exceptions to this include schools and academies with a religious designation, who are permitted by legislation and funding agreements to provide an RE curriculum in accordance with their trust deeds and tenets of their faith.