Unholy Confusion

It would be overstating it to say my mother was proud of being denounced from the pulpit of the parish church, but if it was a nasty experience at the time, in her later years she was at least able to laugh about it.

   Appointed as a teacher of juniors in a tiny Kent village during the War, she was surprised when the local vicar assumed she would be taking on the Sunday School. She politely explained why this would not be possible and, incidentally, that the village school was not a church school. Nevertheless, the Vicar was furious and made it his business to warn his congregation that their new teacher was a Papist. For obvious reasons, my mother was not there to hear him but the accounts she was given left her in no doubt about his anger.

   To be fair to the wartime Vicar of Eastling, his lack of understanding about the respective roles of church and state in English Education is shared by many. Recent discussion of the refusal by a London school to accommodate Muslim midday prayer revealed that some education professionals, even today, struggle with this. History has bequeathed us a system marked by unholy confusion and, as in the story of blindfolded people trying to identify an elephant by touch alone, most tend to know only the small part with which they themselves are in contact, to misinterpret that part and to assume that the whole is just like the part they have misinterpreted.

   Roughly 70% of English schools are “secular,” which in this context means they have no religious affiliation. The 2021 census shows they have this in common with almost 40% of the population so it’s highly likely that most people give little thought to religion in schools. The legal requirement for all state schools in England and Wales without a faith designation to hold a daily act of collective worship, unless a specific exemption has been applied for and granted, and that the majority of these acts of worship should be broadly Christian in nature, is more honoured in the breach than the observance. It has not been policed by Ofsted since 2004. Parents have the right to withdraw their children from worship but it seems that many who might exercise this right are unaware the law even exists, as are a significant number of teachers.

   It seems to me anomalous that the recent High Court judgement means the law insists all “secular” schools should organise Christian worship and at the same time says there is no discrimination in prohibiting Muslim pupils from praying. (It has been pointed out by some that in the recent case it was not prayer that was prohibited but “ritual”; in this specific case the court heard, and accepted, that Muslim midday prayer involves ritual.) But there is a far bigger, unremarked anomaly.

   The Spring term in my Local Authority was a week shorter this year than in 2022/23. Its dates and length change year by year, impacting the summer term and affecting planning and activities in all our schools. This happens because Easter, the most sacred day in the Christian calendar, is a moveable feast and the school year has been consciously designed so Christians can be on holiday on their holiest days, however inconvenient this might be, however detrimental to teaching and learning (which is why “holy days” came to mean “holidays”). Yet every year I see debate on social media about whether staff and pupils may legitimately be given time off to celebrate Eid.

   At one time in our country all schools were either fee paying or provided by the churches (or both). When the Government wished to make school places available for all children, it chose to limit the number it would have to build by assimilating into the state system schools which already existed. The original owners retained the premises and control over admissions, curriculum and governance: though different models give varying degrees of this control. So today we have around 20% of state schools belonging to the Church of England while 10% are Catholic. In addition, we also have some Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Methodist and Hindu schools, so one response to the recent court judgement was that if the parents wanted their children to pray in school they should have sent them to a faith school. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible. There are almost the same number of adult Muslims in England and Wales (3.9 million) as Catholics (3.8 million): yet we have 30 Muslim schools paid for out of the public purse, compared to 2,200 Catholic schools.

   Our national anthem is a prayer; our monarch is crowned by an archbishop in an abbey; every coin in our pockets bears the inscription Fid Def or F D; 26 bishops sit by right in the UK parliament and help to make, scrutinise and interpret our laws. Secularism is not a “British Value;” but fairness is.

   It is not fair to mandate Christian prayer and allow Muslim or other prayer to be banned. It is not fair that we manipulate our term dates to accommodate Easter while making bones about others having time off for Eid, Divali or Yom Kippur. It is not fair that my children were taught their Catholic faith at taxpayers’ expense, while other parents have to pay for their children to attend religious classes at weekends or in holiday periods. It is unfair to say to parents who have no choice of a faith school: “you must adapt your beliefs and practices and if you don’t like it, go elsewhere.”

I don’t have an easy solution to any of this. Every year, faith schools are disproportionately represented in the highest places on academic league tables which makes them very popular and therefore difficult to abolish, even if a Government were prepared to take on the huge financial cost of replacing 30% of our school buildings, or the political cost of expropriating them. Besides, I personally support faith schools and would like to see more of them. What I dislike is the unfairness which means it works for those of my faith but not for others who should have equal rights. I think we should strive to do better for all our wonderfully diverse population and that starts with people making the effort to understand the current system so we can have an honest, informed debate.

   In the meantime, unfairness is sometimes a spur to action. The Vicar of Eastling continued showing unremitting hostility to my mother. The vicarage was about a hundred yards from where she was living in the school house and Eastling is tiny: it has fewer than 400 inhabitants today. After a year she was driven to apply for a job as head of a Birmingham Nursery which had been evacuated to North Wales. This meant a promotion and a change from Juniors to Early Years. She never looked back.