Liberal Democrats join call to end compulsory Collective Worship

October 9, 2014

The Liberal Democrats have called for the laws that require state funded schools in England to provide Collective Worship to be scrapped. Meeting in Glasgow on Monday (October 6th) at their Autumn Conference the Party adopted new policy calling for the legal requirement for Worship at all state funded schools, both faith and non-faith, to be repealed.

The Party’s policy follows several public interventions about compulsory worship this year. In June the National Governors Association called for the Worship laws to be abolished. Meanwhile in July the Bishop of Oxford, The Rt Revd John Pritchard, said worship was a voluntary activity and called for compulsory worship in schools to be reframed as ‘spiritual reflection’. The Bishop is Chair of the Church of England’s Board of Education and Episcopal spokesperson on education in the House of Lords.

The Liberal Democrats also reaffirmed its commitment to bring to an end the blanket opt outs from religious discrimination laws that state funded faith schools have in the employment of teachers. The Party will only seek to permit faith schools to select by faith those teachers responsible for Religious Instruction.

Chair of the Accord Coalition for Inclusive Education said, ‘If schools are not inclusive then our society will not be. The Lib Dems have contributed towards debate around the role of religion and belief in schools ahead of the 2015 Election, and we urge all parties as they draw up their manifestos ahead of next May to tackle religious discrimination by schools and to consider how schools can better promote the growth of mutual understanding.

‘We currently have the worst of both worlds – repressive laws that do not respect the beliefs and autonomy of staff, pupils and families, and many schools simply not providing assemblies, often because they find the laws around mandatory worship completely unworkable. Discrimination in the employment of teachers also gives schools a bad name and is divisive and completely unnecessary. The laws around Collective Worship and faith school employment are a national embarrassment and both should be replaced as a matter of urgency.’

A BBC commissioned Com Res poll in July 2011 revealed that a great many schools break the law and ignore requirements for daily worship, while a majority of people do not think they should be enforced. If found that only 28% of parents believed their children attend a daily act of collective worship at school, to 64% of parents who said their children did not. 60% of adults believed the requirements should not be enforced, compared to 36% who thought they should.

An Accord commissioned YouGov poll found that 72% of people ‘agreed or strongly agreed’ that ‘all state funded schools should operate recruitment and employment policies that do not discriminate on grounds of religion or belief’, with only 9 % disagreeing or strongly disagreeing.

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