Government backs down on faith schools discrimination

16/01/06

The British government has backed down on proposals in its Equality Bill which would have allowed faith schools to discriminate by excluding pupils or 'subject[ing] them to any other detriment' on the grounds of their religion or belief. Alan Johnson, secretary of state for the Department of Trade and Industry, is proposing an amendment to remove this provision at the Commons Report stage of the Bill today. The change of position is being seen as a victory by Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights and by the British Humanist Association (BHA), which lobbied against these provisions with the support of a range of parliamentarians.

The reversal will also be welcomed by those in Britain’s faith communities who wish to see a level playing field in public education and an end to discrimination. The BHA says that this is the latest in a series of “welcome climb-downs” by the government over the powers of faith schools since the Bill was first introduced in the House of Lords in 2005. Initially, part two of the Equality Bill also exempted faith schools from new duties not to harass pupils, but after lobbying this provision was removed.

At the time, education secretary Ruth Kelly, a Roman Catholic, commented: “We recognised [that] we went too far in exempting faith schools from the harassment as well as the discrimination provisions of the Bill.” Ms Kelly, who has been associated with the secretive religious movement Opus Dei, is presently in hot water over the number of registered sex offenders teaching in schools in England and Wales, and her own role in one contested case. Hanne Stinson, executive director of the British Humanist Association, says that she recognizes that “some exemptions are needed to protect the legitimate activities of religion and belief bodies, but in the interests of human rights and equality, they should be as narrowly drawn as possible.”

In particular, recent opinion polls have demonstrated the public unpopularity of religiously and culturally segregated schooling. But the government’s Bill outlawing religion and belief discrimination in other walks of life avoids this issue, and prime minister Tony Blair has pushed hard for schools run by religious groups – sometimes very narrow ones – to have a key role in Labour’s controversial education reform platform. The question of admissions, where discrimination will remain lawful, is a particularly contentious one. The heads of the large faith communities in the UK all back religiously based schools and say that they can form part of a mix of options in a plural society.

But on a TV programme last year Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, and Tom Butler, Anglican Bishop of Southwark, both admitted that they would be unhappy with Christian children attending a Muslim school. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks also said that he needed to reflect on the consequences of segregating Jewish children or removing them from mixed schools – the likelihood that children from Muslim and other backgrounds would grow up without first-hand knowledge of the Jewish experience. The BHA says that rightly outlawing discrimination on the grounds of religion and belief in other areas of life while simultaneously encouraging it in schools makes no sense. This is a view supported by teachers’ unions and by the UK Christian think-tank Ekklesia.