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Religious education needs overhaul to reflect UK, says report

Charles Clarke.
The law on RE has become a barrier to schools’ ability to help children understand the world in which they are growing up, says Charles Clarke. Photograph: PA

Religious education in schools is outdated and should be replaced with a new subject: religion, belief and values, and the right of parents to withdraw their children from classes should be scrapped, according to the former Labour education secretary Charles Clarke.

Significant shifts in the UK since the Education Act 1944 mean changes to the way religion and belief is taught in schools to reflect modern Britain are long overdue, Clarke and his co-author Linda Woodhead, a professor in the department of politics, philosophy and religion at Lancaster University, say in a pamphlet published on Tuesday.

In the 1940s, Britain was a predominantly Christian country. Now a majority of people say they have no religion, and there are parts of the country where people of other religions form a significant proportion of the population.

A new nationally determined syllabus called religion, belief and values should replace religious education and be obligatory in all state-funded schools. At the moment, each education authority sets its own RE syllabus.

Faith schools could provide additional teaching if desired. Parents should no longer have the right to withdraw children from the syllabus. “Religion, belief and values should be a proper educational subject like any other,” Clarke told the Guardian.

Daily collective worship of “a broadly Christian character”, which is a legal requirement under the 1944 act, should be replaced with a requirement for all state-funded schools to hold a “regular assembly or act of collective worship in keeping with the values and ethos of the school and reflecting the diversity and character of the school community”, the pamphlet says.

School assembly.
Broadly Christian assemblies should be replaced with collective worship ‘reflecting the diversity of the school’, the pamphlet says. Photograph: Hufton+Crow/VIEW/REX/Shutterstock

An estimated one in three state schools flout the current statutory requirement. “The answer is not to insist on enforcement of an inadequate law, but to change the requirement in order to reflect society today,” said Clarke.

Clarke and Woodhead propose changes to the admissions criteria of faith schools to broaden their intake. The children of families which follow a particular faith should continue to be given priority for admission to schools of that religion, but the proportion admitted on faith criteria should be reduced.

“Where admission on the basis of faith is taking place, care is needed to look at the overall effect on society and integration. There is no reason at all that faith schools cannot continue to maintain a distinctive faith ethos and values – this does not depend on selection criteria,” says the pamphlet.

There are nearly 7,000 faith schools in England and Wales out of more than 24,000 schools in total. The Church of England runs 4,700 schools, which are open to children of all faiths and no faith on the basis that they serve the local population rather than being faith schools for the faithful.

The pamphlet, A New Settlement Revised: Religion and Belief in Schools, follows an earlier set of proposals by the same authors published in 2015. In the past three years they have consulted more than 100 public figures and experts on the issues.

“The law has become a barrier to schools’ ability to help their children understand their own situation and the world in which they are growing up,” said Clarke.

Andrew Copson, the chief executive of Humanists UK, said the report was timid and reinforced the status quo: “Far too many concessions are made to vested interests of religious organisations for this to be a report we can be enthusiastic about.”

He said it was disappointing that Clarke and Woodhead had rowed back on their previous recommendation to scrap the requirement for religious worship in schools, and that the report supported faith schools.

“In an increasingly diverse, increasingly fractured, and increasingly irreligious society, it is as clear as ever that a ‘new settlement’ is needed to end the religious divides entrenched by the current education system,” said Copson.

The independent commission on religious education, set up to review RE teaching in schools, is to make its final recommendations by the end of 2018.