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Back in the early 1990s, a lone Pakistani boy appeared in my otherwise entirely white primary school class. If that wasn’t isolating enough for him, each week, as we went into the assembly hall for hymn practice, he would be quietly ushered away. An hour later, we were reunited – the rest of us with heightened voices, him with a box of freshly sharpened pencils, which he had laboured at while we were gone. Every week, for an hour a week, over four school years. That’s 156 hours of sharpening pencils on his own. Just for being Muslim, in a school that was supposed to cater for everyone.
This bonkers situation occurred because of a rule passed in 1944 as part of the settlement that brought religious schools under the state’s jurisdiction. Every English school is legally required to have its children take part in “collective daily worship” every day. Even if the school is secular, even if the school is packed to the rafters with atheists.
In faith schools, this makes sense. They do faith-based assembly, of whatever religion, and get on with the day. But even in secular schools, which are the majority of state schools, teachers are supposed to lead children in a “broadly Christian” daily act of worship, which really means that for at least 51% of the time God must be involved.
Happily, the rule is regularly flouted. My primary school did its weekly hymn-singing session instead of daily prayers. Around half of primary schools are thought to have no daily worship, and almost no secular secondary schools seem to bother. Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, declared in 2004 that it would stop even checking.
But while half of secular primary schools completely ignore the rule, the other half don’t. Which is why two parents, Lee and Lizanne Harris, are taking a case to court in the autumn after their children were made to take part in Christian prayers during school assemblies even though Burford primary school is a community school with no religious character. They withdrew their children from the assemblies, but the Harris family say the children were then put in a room with an iPad and a supervisor. Better than sharpening pencils, but not by much.
The Harrises believe their children should be provided with an alternative, inclusive assembly. If that sounds like a hippy impossibility, I can promise it’s not. See, there’s a further quirk in the law. If a school doesn’t want to do Christian daily worship, it can apply to the local authority to carry out – I kid you not – daily “worship” of a non-religious nature. The process is incredibly onerous but a few hundred schools have taken this step.
I know this because the school where I first taught dug in, did the lengthy form-filling, and received the exemption. It is now one of the few secular secondary schools that really does complete daily worship – except, in its case, the children all take part in a “thought for the day” exercise during registration time, covering a plethora of topics including all major world religions and philosophies. Surely that’s 10 times better than mindlessly bashing out another verse of Make Me a Channel of Your Peace? Plus, every child can take part: no pencil-sharpening in sight.
It would be shrewd to switch the rules, so that secular schools default to delivering non-religious “worship”, allowing them to retain the option to apply for an exemption if they want to have Christian worship after consultation with the local community. Doing this would mean many more schools would actually start following the rules. Children would learn more about religious ideas than they do right now – and no one would be excluded.
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