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I do not know whether the right reverend Prelate could tell us how many Christian schools ask whether their pupils have read the Bible and how many things they remember from it. The answer is none—because there is no exclusive questioning of that sort.

Let us be aware of the exclusive nature of the schools that are being established. Another admissions policy that I have found states that the aim of the school is to produce,

I have nothing against that, but I believe that that instruction should take place in mosques, synagogues, temples and churches. Until 1997, that was the policy. The Government changed the policy, reversing the policy of all previous Secretaries of State, including myself. On the whole we resisted giving permission to exclusive faith schools. In my time, I had no applications from Christian bodies but I had applications from Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh bodies. I always found good reasons why one could not give permission, and I believed that that was the right policy to follow. The Government changed that policy, which was a grievous and huge mistake, and successive generations in our country will suffer from it.

I should like to see the sort of movement that is now happening in Northern Ireland, where there is a movement to have integrated schools. One school that I have come across is the Hazelwood integrated school, which has 40 per cent Roman Catholics, 40 per cent Protestants and 20 per cent others—other faiths and no faiths. That is the sort of mixture that I am trying to achieve in my amendments.

Finally, I draw your Lordships’ attention to the comments of a Nobel Prize winner and one of our most distinguished academics, Professor Amartya Sen, who was the master at Trinity and is now a professor at Harvard. He won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his work on economics of equality, poverty and famine and on social choice theory. He is quite convinced that the policy of separate and exclusive faith schools is wrong. I have read that:

He has said that:those are the arguments that are used—

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Those comments are very pertinent today. In our society, which is having a great deal of trouble absorbing different groups, although we are making a better fist of it than most other Western countries, to create exclusive faith schools is fundamentally wrong. At a time when the world is faced with two religious wars, it is extraordinary that we are prepared to consider this. So I hope that your Lordships will give some consideration to the amendment that I have tabled. I am not against the sort of faith schools that exist in our country, but any new ones should not be exclusive. They should have children from other faiths as well.

Baroness Whitaker: In the interests of time, I restrict myself to discussing the amendments in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lester, dealing only with the curriculum for religion, beliefs and values. I add “beliefs and values” to “religion” because the amendment would broaden the statutory definition of religious education so that it better reflects the more inclusive approach of the 2004 non-statutory national framework for RE produced by the QCA, which the right reverend Prelate commended. That framework referred to “religions and beliefs” and explicitly recommended that “other world views” such as humanism should be studied. I declare an interest as the vice-president of the British Humanist Association.

The amendment goes on to require voluntary-aided schools with a religious character to follow the locally agreed syllabus for RE rather than their own, putting them in the same position as voluntary-controlled schools with a religious character. By the way, the reference in the Marshalled List should be to Schedule 19 to the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, not Schedule 8; it is a misprint. I hope that that makes it clear that we are not in any way seeking to deny parents with children at voluntary-aided faith schools the right to have their children receive religious instruction, but are seeking to ensure only that all children in all maintained schools have an entitlement to know broadly what the range of accepted religious and non-religious beliefs are all about.

Of course, not all locally agreed syllabuses are as broad, balanced and inclusive as they might be, but at least they are subject to an overall structure for the diverse views that they should introduce children to, and they will, one hopes, become even more inclusive as the influence of the non-statutory national framework on RE trickles down to the local committees that set the RE syllabuses.

In an ideal world, there might be a national curriculum subject of beliefs and values that educated all our children about all our important religious and secular beliefs, underpinned by a thorough education in the universal human rights that the UK has committed itself to in the international human rights instruments. That would be the national basis from which different religions and beliefs would take their own path in the curriculum.

As it is, we have citizenship education, which includes some human rights education as a part of the national curriculum, and religious education which is also

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compulsory for all maintained schools, but is not part of the national curriculum. It is the fact that RE is not a part of the national curriculum that this amendment seeks to mitigate. That is why voluntary-aided faith schools do not need to follow the locally agreed syllabus of RE as other maintained schools do, but may follow a syllabus of their own. It also means that the quality of locally agreed syllabuses across the country is fairly patchy, with no common standard. So, requiring voluntary aided faith schools to follow the agreed local syllabus rather than their own would at least mitigate what might be the effects of allowing some faith schools to teach an unbalanced curriculum of religious education, something that many people fear. It would ensure that our children have the opportunity to know what the full range of our heritage of values and beliefs is while learning the particular perspectives of their own.

7.30 pm

Lord Skidelsky: I support the non-exclusive version of the faith school amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Baker. He made a powerful argument against complete separation, but at the same time he did acknowledge the powerful case made by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed. I should like to say a few words about that, but here I must take issue with the noble Baroness, Lady Flather. I always hate to disagree with her, but in this case I think I must. It is no solution to the problem of under-achieving Muslim boys to force them into low-achieving, multi-faith or no-faith schools. Many Muslim parents and other parents who choose faith schools do so not because they want to preserve their family religion, but because they are fed up with the quality of education they would otherwise be getting in state schools. This illustrates the point that parents choose faith schools because they want a good education for their children and faith schools are much more likely to provide it. I agree with the point made that they should not be exclusive.

In principle, of course everyone should rise together, but equally, highly motivated minorities should not be held back by majorities. As for the integration argument, the best way to integrate Muslim and other minorities is to get as many as possible into the middle class, and the quickest way of doing that is up the educational escalator. I would not mind so much if people had a period of relatively separate education provided that they could mingle together at university and there find their role in British society according to their abilities. That is why I support a moderate version of the faith school.

Baroness Rendell of Babergh: I rise to speak to Amendment No. 81 in the name of my noble friend Lady Massey. My concern is with extremism and what may be taught in schools run by fundamentalists of any or all faiths, with their belief in the absolute truth of the creation of the world and origin of mankind as delineated in their holy books.

When I was at school, the theory of evolution was taken as, if I may use such a word, gospel: the good news, the truth, undoubted and rarely questioned. My father was a geologist and a science teacher, and I was brought up on Darwin. Genesis, Adam and Eve and

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the Flood were taught in what were then called “scripture lessons”, but taught as beautiful myths, as stories to be believed in only by a credulous society living in a world before science as we now know it began. Now, thousands believe them and are being taught to believe them. Biology teachers at a sixth form college have told me that many of their students say that they will learn the theory of evolution in order to get their A-levels and go on to higher education, but they know very well it is false and that God created the world in six days.

The usual answer to the question, “Is creationism taught in faith schools?” is “no” and that what is taught is the national curriculum requirement, the theory of evolution. Those replying usually fail to add that creationism and/or intelligent design is taught alongside it as a viable option, or taught in religious education classes. Professor Steve Jones, addressing the Royal Society, has said that to give creationism and evolution equal weight in education is,

The Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches have no problem with evolution, as they have none with the descent of man. Fundamentalists of almost all faiths refuse to accept this and therefore want their children to subscribe to it too. The Seventh-day Adventist school in north London became in 1996 the first school run by a minor Christian denomination to receive state funding. It teaches Darwin because it is obliged to, but teaches creationism as well, as do some Muslim schools and a Hasmonean school which educates more than 1,000 Orthodox Jewish students. The director of Jewish studies at the school has made it clear that he would prefer Darwin to be dropped from the national curriculum.

I have been told by a child attending one of these schools that we have nothing to fear from global warming because God had promised that the Flood would never be repeated. When students learn that God created the world in six days, they will also hear the extremely sexist viewpoint that a woman was responsible for bringing sin into the world. In the face of fossil and dendrochronological proof, some creationists insist that the earth is 4004 years old and appear to believe that pine trees in California may seem to be nearly 10,000 years old only because God put the rings in their trunks for some obscure purpose intended to deceive mankind. Professor David Read, vice president of the Royal Society, Britain’s leading scientific academy, has said:

Surely the teaching of creationism and such views as I have just mentioned, even when presented alongside the theory of evolution in a cynical attempt to comply with the national curriculum, is done plainly to undermine young people’s confidence in proven scientific evidence. Are we in danger of entering a phase of existence in which, thanks to the encouragement of fundamentalism, to believe in creationism is the norm while to accept as truth evolution and the descent of man is an eccentricity?

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It is a possibility if the present trend in certain schools continues. I therefore support my noble friend’s amendment.

The Earl of Onslow: I rise to support my noble friend Lady Flather, but I also have difficulty with supporting her. That may sound slightly schizoid, but if we go back to the Book of Common Prayer, the Authorized Version of the Bible and Shakespeare, those were the great works which were taught in Church schools before state education came along. The Church of England primary school in our village is a totally excellent and tolerant institution. The Roman Catholic school, whose prizes I gave out some years ago, is another excellent school in Guildford. What I suspect has happened is that we avoided the clash to which my noble friend Lord Baker referred—the clash between the Church and the state as happened in France. It was a vicious argument that lasted for 100 years and ended in total victory for secularism.

However, because the Churches produce such good and tolerant schools, we think, “What a good idea”. I also suggest that the Muslims, the Jews and the Roman Catholics are saying that they want to follow the good example of the Church of England in its contribution to education. But the dangers pointed out by my noble friend Lord Baker override that. His speech on the admission criteria of some Muslim schools struck me, first, as something which the great Muslim intellectuals of Baghdad who translated from Greek into Arabic the principles of mathematics, chemistry and algebra, certainly would have regarded as profoundly intolerant. What my noble friend read out for the Committee were the conditions of intolerance. The conditions in Northern Ireland are those of intolerance. It is that intolerance and exclusivity which is harmful to society. We have enough stresses in modern society, and we have enough difficulties with people who come here with completely real faiths that are not the same as what the country has been used to for many years. We must, because we are a tolerant and a successful society, adjust and ensure that we accept those arguments. What we cannot do is to apartheid-ise anything. Ghettoisation would be nothing but extremely bad, so, reluctantly, I come down to the view of my noble friend Lady Flather. I can see the argument for the tolerance of the Church of England system but, reluctantly, I come down to the view of supporting her amendment.

Baroness Turner of Camden: I support my noble friend Lady Massey on Amendment No. 205 in this group, to which I have put my name. As a number of people have said, faith schools are extremely divisive. I do not want to go over that ground again, except to say how much I support that view. Nevertheless, we have faith schools, and Amendment No. 205 endeavours to preserve the rights of pupils who do not support any particular religion and parents who do not wish their children to have religious education or attend religious worship. It gives the right for those pupils to be excused from religious education. It says that,



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I would have thought that a perfectly reasonable proposition in an amendment that overall deals with collective worship. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be willing to accept it. It seems to me that those who do not profess a religion ought to have the right not to be taught religious education or anything to do with religion if they or their parents do not want it.

Amendment No. 129, which the right reverend Prelate has spoken to this evening, concerns the employment of staff in schools with a religious character. I hope that the Minister will not feel inclined to accept the amendment, which would mean that very good and competent teachers might face non-employment. The idea that there should be arrangements under which teachers, before being appointed, should be willing to accept the religious colouring of the school in question is not acceptable. We have debated this from time to time in this House, and I think that there has been general agreement. Not all subjects have a religious content, and it should be possible for a teacher of, say, mathematics to still have a job at a religious school even though he may not himself adhere to the religion of the academy or organisation concerned. The amendment should not be accepted. Although it is perhaps not what the right reverend Prelate intended, I am quite sure that if it became part of the statute it would very soon become a practice among those foundations and voluntary schools or schools with a religious orientation. I hope that it will not be accepted.

7.45 pm

Lord Taverne: I want to add a few words to support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. First, I reinforce the point that she made strongly and which was extremely convincingly argued by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that more faith schools are bound to favour more segregation rather than integration. I do not want to repeat the arguments, but I will quote an eloquent description of what one would seek from education. This is from a letter from Rabbi Jonathan Romain, in the Times, on 1 October. He said:

and I add, not necessarily by being taught about it—

I do not see how separate schools will further that aim, because the acknowledged purpose of such schools is to inculcate religious beliefs in children. The Church of England has declared that it aims to promote the Church of England through its schools; Catholic schools promote the Catholic religion and the aim of Muslim schools is to teach Islam. The headmaster of the Islamia School, to which the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, referred, said that it was part of the aim of his school to inculcate profound religious beliefs in the children—I think that that was how he

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put it. That must move people away from the kind of ideals expressed in the rabbi’s letter. We live in a multicultural society, and I am in favour of a multicultural society, but with a maximum amount of integration. That integration must come from the schools. With great respect, I do not agree withthe noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, that this can be left to the university stage—the earlier the better.

My second reason for supporting the amendment is one that perhaps does not command more widespread support. I have no objection to schools teaching about religion, but it is wrong that schools should teach children to believe. They should teach doubt, and they should teach critical thinking. As a humanist, I respect the role of faith in people’s lives, and I know that many people have come to hold their religious beliefs after long critical thought. But I am worried about the attitude of uncritical acceptance, without regard to evidence, of certain articles of faith, which is likely to be taught in religious schools. Consider a debate about stem cells and whether one should use embryonic cells or adult cells. That is an issue of evidence. Some people may argue that perhaps adult cells could be sufficient and one need not use embryos, but other people of a particular religion could not accept the evidence if it showed that stem cells were more effective and would uncritically accept that they should not be used.

Consider the issue, which is of great world importance, of the distribution of condoms in Africa to prevent the spread of AIDS. The Pope has announced that it is wrong, as have the evangelicals in America. The Muslims have announced that it is wrong. I regard the policy that they advocate as a crime against humanity, because it condemns hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to death from AIDS.

I do not think that we should teach religion in our schools. The Americans have got it right. We are essentially a secular civilisation, and Enlightenment values have spread since the days of the Enlightenment gradually through our society. To promote faith schools is a retreat from Enlightenment values and is part of a current trend that I find deeply disturbing.

Lord Ahmed: Before the noble Lord sits down, he said that the founder of Islamia School said that that school teaches Islam. The noble Lord gave the example of the rabbi who wanted children to mix with different communities. I hope that the noble Lord is not insinuating that Islam does not allow that. It is quite the contrary; those who are taught in Islamic schools are very much taught to live within a society that is multicultural and multi-religious and to respect everyone equally.

Lord Taverne: The point that I was making was that the rabbi said that he wants his kids at school to play football with members of a different religion,to sit beside someone of a different religion and to go to school on a bus with someone from a different religion, and that that will not happen in segregated schools.



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Lord Dearing: My not speaking until now gives me an opportunity to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who raised a couple of points earlier in Committee. She said that all classes of schools have failure—I agree. As has been said, I chaired a group that looked at the future of Church of England schools. That caused me to look around and led me to the conclusion that any justification for the expansion of Church of England schools should be grounded in superiority of academic achievement. In a 400 to 500-paragraph report, only two paragraphs were addressed to that. In them, we referred to a degree of failure. We mentioned two schools that we had visited that were in special measures. We also acknowledged that the Church schools lived in the same world as the rest of us. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, rightly said, they depend very much on getting the right leadership. We counselled the Church not to venture into adding to the number of Church schools, especially as the policy that we recommended was to expand, if at all possible, primarily in areas of the greatest social and economic need. Those schools would therefore be at the greatest risk of failure. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness.

Reasonable academic performance is a necessary condition of being able conscientiously to recommend an expansion, but that is not a fundamental characteristic of a Church school. Rather, it is having a certain outlook on life. Young people have the experience of living within that community. However, we saw no evidence of any proselytising and seeking to convert children to something that was foreign to them.

Why then did we recommend an expansion of Church of England schools? When I spoke about this matter on the previous occasion, the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, shook her head when I said that there was parental demand. We had obtained some information on that, otherwise I might not have said it. If I remember the figures correctly—sometimes I do—in 1996, some years before we did our study, there were 1.3 applications for every place in a sample of 80 schools, which is nearly half the total of Church of England schools. By 2000, the figure had risen to 1.6. The right reverend Prelate said that, while the rolls for primary schools nationally had fallen by roughly 4.5 per cent, in Church of England primary schools rolls had fallen by only a third of that, which is further corroborative evidence. We should respond in education to parents’ wishes. I understand that that it is a building block of the policy of the Government and the Conservative Party. That was a major element in the report.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, or the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred to the Sutton report. The Sutton report stated that the top schools were all characterised, whether they were faith schools or not, by a low proportion of people having free school meals. It is true that the faith schools were heavily represented in the top 200 schools, but the social class question was distinctive, as it was with the other schools. The report went on to point out that whereas the proportion of different social classes in community schools reflected their immediate community, it did not do so in the voluntary aided schools, even though the overall proportions were the same. That is legitimate,

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because if the faith school is distinctive in wanting in its pupil population a certain element, it has a wider catchment area than the immediate community.

I would have wished to have heard the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, before I spoke, but as few people were speaking up for faith schools, I felt that it was about time that we had a change of menu. I agree with the first element of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, about beliefs, as long as we can find a way of defining the main beliefs rather than 1,001 beliefs. She will know what I mean. The other amendments in the group refer to importing as a matter of statutory requirement the use of an agreed curriculum into voluntary aided as well as voluntary control schools. That should be an objective, but a good deal of thinking and talking is needed beforewe move to a statutory requirement rather than something that has been accepted by the faiths and is gradually being adopted. We should not go about it this week, but it is an objective that we might look forward to meeting.

The issue of Muslim schools has come up several times. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred to the fact that Roman Catholic schools were originally exclusively for Roman Catholics. I think that thatwas because they were supporting an immigrant community. As time has gone by, they have accepted a wider intake in the great majority of cases. It is not surprising that, when there is a very small number of schools of the faith of an immigrant community, those schools should want to serve that community. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, said that there are 135 Muslim schools. That is a very small number and many of those schools are very small. It is not surprising that immigrants should want the same opportunity as the indigenous population to have their children work within the framework of their parents’ faith. If there were 1,000 such schools, it would be a different matter, but the number is small.

I was listening to a lecture by Prince Hassan of Jordan a couple of months ago—one or two other Peers were perhaps present. He examined the reasons for the world’s great problems. Underpinning them all, as he said it, was the divide in dignity. He was referring to his own people in particular and their feeling that dignity is denied them. Similarly, in our own community, we have to be very sensitive to the feelings of those who have come to this country and who are often—this is so of Muslim families—living on low incomes. The families contain many more members than is normally the case. None of the adult members of the family has a job and they live in overcrowded conditions.

If it was the will of Parliament in some way to block Muslim schools, that would be seen as a profoundly unacceptable signal about their rights as members of our civilisation and as a lack of acceptance of their right to dignity. We should do well to ponder that. I have been into only a couple of Muslim schools, but I have read elsewhere that many of the parents who send their children there are not as well heeled as is typical of the Anglo-Saxon community. They make a great sacrifice. They only pay low fees, and that is reflected in what can be

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offered them. If there was a bar on any more faith schools in the public sector, the aspirations of quite a number of those schools to come into the public sector and be properly funded with adequate and well qualified teaching staff—aspirations that have been encouraged to some extent—would be denied. The composition of the governing body would not be widened as it otherwise would be. Even if the school is voluntary-aided, it is always a local authority member.

For a time, the noble Lord, Lord Baker and I had different roles in life and I knew where I stood. He was the Minister and I was the chairman of a nationalised industry who came and made a case to him. On the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, I am not speaking for the Church of England at all; I am speaking for Ron Dearing. Of the hundred-odd Church of England schools coming along, 30 per cent must be not of the faith of the foundation. I would say, “No problem, easy!” I nearly said that some might find it difficult to make up the number of the faith. There are definitional problems, but for many long-established faiths this would not be a problem. For the Muslims, however, it could be. I would regret anything that would be interpreted in the Muslim community as a rule that would bite on them but nobody else.

8 pm

Lord Baker of Dorking: My 30 per cent target to prevent a school being exclusive was meant to encourage schools of separate faiths—not just Islam—to encourage children from other faiths to go to that school. If they did, they would get the state money, the very point the noble Lord was making at the beginning. They would not be cheated. But if they did not get to 30 per cent, they would not get the state money. That is the iron hand in my velvet glove.

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