Government goes to astonishing lengths to undermine NSS calls for end to discrimination against non-religious teachers

The National Secular Society’s Keith Porteous Wood last week called at a high-profile education conference for the Government to end discrimination in employment against non-religious teachers in “faith schools”.

The two day Conference, with the title Faith Schools: their Impact on Education and Wider Society, was attended by religious and educational academics and other interested parties and was held at Windsor Castle. Details of the conference and our part in it (Keith Porteous Wood spoke on the impact on teachers) will appear in the next Bulletin for members.

Our calls were carried around the world by the Press Association, and seems to have hit a raw nerve in the Government. The Department for Children, Schools and Families were so determined to protect the churches’ outrageous privileges and to oppose our attempts to end this discrimination, they sent out a supplementary press release directly attacking the Society’s proposals, but subsequently had to withdraw it as it was so inaccurate.

A further example of misinformation from the DCSF can be found in the Government’s legally incorrect response to a recent e-petition on the No.10 website calling for collective worship to be removed from all non-faith schools.

In its response, the DCSF claimed that schools could apply to the SACRE (Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education) for the requirement for collective worship to be lifted, if it is not appropriate for the pupils in their school. This is simply not the case. The Schools Standards and Framework Act permits schools to apply to the SACRE to have the requirement for collective worship mainly of a broadly Christian character not to apply, if it is not appropriate for the pupils in their school, but nowhere does the law permit collective worship to be dropped altogether.