The Accord Coalition has responded this week to two consultations looking at the role of matters of religion and belief in society. The first is a call for evidence from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is a public body responsible for the promotion and enforcement of equality and non-discrimination laws.
The EHRC is seeking information about how people’s beliefs have affected their direct and personal experience in the workplace or of using a service, so that it can improve its understanding of how people’s religion or belief impacts upon their daily life and to assess the effectiveness of government guidance and equality laws. Accord has responded by highlighting many of the unintended negative consequences of the laws that permit faith schools to discriminate by faith in pupil admissions and the employment of teachers.
These include its effect on undermining community cohesion by further dividing children by ethnicity; the extent to which religiously selective admission policies are abused and lead to much greater socio-economic segregation; how selecting by faith can act as a proxy for discrimination by race, and how religious restrictions in the employment of teachers is undermining faith school’s ability to employ the best teachers, including making the national head teacher shortage much more severe than experienced in the non-faith school sector. Accord also drew attention to how the curriculum schools provide can fail to respect the autonomy of children and the beliefs of them and their parents.
The second consultation is a national consultation by the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life, which has been set up by the Woolf Institute. The Commission is a wide-ranging and high profile project looking at religion and belief in society, and has posed several questions about education.
Accord has taken the opportunity to highlight to it many of the things addressed in its EHRC’s consultation, though in further detail. It has also explored features of the public debate around the role of religion in schools and arguments used by defenders of the status quo, as well as considered the proportionality of the laws that currently enable schools to provide a narrow curriculum and to discriminate by faith.
Chair of the Accord Coalition for Inclusive Education, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, said ‘Religion and belief in the school system is currently a source of division, discrimination and disadvantage in society. Accord has responded to the consultations with a range of practical suggestions as to how schools and government can resolve these issues, enabling school’s to better promote the growth of mutual respect and understanding.’
