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The Lord Bishop of Blackburn: I suspect that Members of the Committee expect me to make some contribution—although I must say that I had not interpreted the words of the amendment in the light in which the noble Lord, Lord Peston, referred to it. I had intended to speak of behalf of my former profession, RE teacher and specialist, and not on the generality of faith schools or on the Emmanuel school, which is no part of the Church of England's family of schools. I believe that the date the noble Lord was seeking is 4004 BC, which I believe Archbishop Ussher came up with in the 17th or 18th century.
I shall deal merely with the amendment and not with the larger questions raised. I do not believe it is appropriate to deal with those at this time of night, and I wholeheartedly support the noble Lord's comments about our procedures. No curriculum is value free when it is taught. When I was an RE specialist, I was always extremely worried about what the English masters were putting across by way of interpretation and values in regard to religious matters and the faith of others. That happens across the board.
The amendment as worded places a strict delimitation on religious education. I am sure that the noble Lord would agree that it is probably too vague to be practical in the real world of schools. For example, would it prohibit the teaching of the poetry of George Herbert or John Milton within the English
curriculum, since an element of religious education is necessary to understand those authors' works? Would it place a similar—
Lord Peston: The answer to that sort of question is simply no. It would not prohibit such teaching.
The Lord Bishop of Blackburn: As worded, it could do so. One would be dealing with matters that are properly part of the RE curriculum in order to get the youngsters to understand the poetry. Again, it would almost rule out the teaching of the history of the Tudors because of the religious matters involved. One might ask how we deal with the Middle East today. As the amendment is worded, it gives rise to a series of issues that would lead to confusion and great difficulty.
I am trying to get my mind round this. I know that the amendment refers to the curriculum, which is published and agreed, and in the case of RE, through the SACRE, is carefully agreed by a series of groups of committees which come together to form that body. So it is probably more a matter of public participation in the creation of the curriculum in the generality of the community schools. As I understand it, the noble Lord is using the amendment as a peg for the general teaching that goes on.
It is said that hard cases make bad law. I wonder whether, by singling out the Emmanuel school in Gateshead, we are drifting into an area where, as the noble Lord admitted, we can think of no examples of schools in the maintained sector, or even within the generality of the independent sector, where these kinds of difficulties between science and religion occur. We need to be reminded that many scientists are people of faith and indeed practise their faiths across the great world religion. That is fact.
I hope that having raised this matter the noble Lord will wait until there is a greater engagement in the course of the Bill on the whole issue of faith schools and what they do or do not do.
As drafted, the amendment is unworkable and would do a great disservice to RE teachers and to others who deal with matters that raise ethical, moral, spiritual and religious issues in the general curriculum. On those grounds, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw the amendment.
10.30 p.m.
Baroness Blatch: I am puzzled by what appears to be almost an obsession on the part of the noble Lord, Lord Peston, about faith schools and his apparent fear of any extension of their numbers. He has made no secret of his disappointment in the present policy of welcoming and encouraging faith schools. The noble Lord is right that the amendment requires a great deal of debate, but, like the right reverend Prelate, I cannot get my mind round what he finds fundamentally disagreeable about the existence of faith schools. We shall deal later with the issue of whether we should have faith schools, so I shall leave my comments on
that, but the noble Lord seems disturbed by the notion of faith schools and would apparently like them out of the system altogether.The amendment would be almost impossible for teachers to comply with—not just RE teachers, but teachers generally. The impact of religion on art, culture, the lives of people and even on science, scientists and the ethics of science—I know that there is the whole Emmanuel issue to discuss—is so great that they are inextricably linked. That is why we have moved from religious instruction to religious education. This is all about religious education, not religious instruction. I am not offended by faith schools—in fact, I positively welcome them. We have always been very tolerant about these things in this country. We have a tradition of people who hold a strong faith but who positively prefer to go to a secular school, but we also have a tradition of people who hold a strong faith—or sometimes not such a strong faith—and who prefer the ethos of a school that supports a particular religion. I do not find that offensive. I find it all part of the rich pattern of education.
Like the right reverend Prelate, I find the amendments unworkable in an educational sense. They would do a disservice to teachers, but worse than that, it would be asking the impossible of teachers to accept what I believe is behind the amendments.
Baroness Walmsley: I am a biologist and my subject is most affected by the issue that the noble Lord, Lord Peston, has raised. Like him, I abhor the teaching of creationism in a state-funded school, mainly because it is so far beyond what any credible scientist would accept as to be incompatible with providing a broadly based education based on the real facts and possibly preparing our children for a career in science.
However, just as the noble Lord has difficulty understanding what is meant in other parts of the Bill, I have difficulty understanding what he means by "extraneous". I am afraid that I feel that Amendment No. 35 is unworkable.
On Amendment No. 36, society today has to deal with many ethical issues. As a biology teacher, I have always felt the responsibility to try to prepare children to make those decisions when they become adults.
I feel that there is a need to prepare children to make moral decisions, not based on a particular faith, on biological matters. I therefore feel that it is not inappropriate to introduce those types of issues into the teaching of science in our schools, particularly given that there are so many issues which citizens who take the responsibility to take part in politics feel they must take upon themselves. We have to prepare our children for that. Therefore, on this occasion, I am afraid that I am not able to support the noble Lord, Lord Peston, in his amendment.
Lord Dearing: I had guessed that the issue of Emmanuel might come up. Not knowing anything in particular about Emmanuel, I thought that I would find out what was going on so that it might inform the
House. I have not a lot of expert knowledge. However, if creationism is defined, as I believe it often is, as a belief that,
- "Earth History can be clearly dated to show that the world is younger than 10,000 years and . . . that the universe was made in six days, each made up of 24 hours",
- "The truth is that our Science Department teaches neither".
- "Within the assumption that 'creationism' is defined",
- "such 'creationism' is not and has never been taught within Emmanuel College".
- "within the College's Science Department ... hold a wide variety of views regarding these issues, ranging from atheistic evolution giving rise to life from nothing to the concept which sees everything as having been created by an Intelligent Designer God from nothing",
I made inquiries about the children who go to Emmanuel school. They correspond almost exactly with the normal ability range. In science, 87 per cent of them received A to C markings in GCSE, way above the national average. It is a faith school which is not a Church of England school. Being a technology college, it does not have a duty to teach the national curriculum, yet it does so in science. So perhaps there is more to be said about Emmanuel than is commonly thought. I was told that the matter is being pursued by Her Majesty's Inspectors and the Commons Science and Technology Committee. Perhaps we will see what they make of it.
I was puzzled by Amendments Nos. 35 and 36. If people are to be given greater freedom in the curriculum, new material will come in. I could not see precisely what the noble Lord, Lord Peston, had in mind in being so concerned about new material, unless it was specifically religious material. I do not think that it is part of the Government's thinking deliberately to make space for more religious teaching. However, RE is one of the subjects in the national curriculum examined at GCSE. Very many schools do the RE short course, which is the legitimate curriculum subject. It may be that, if there were more space in the curriculum, some schools would choose to do the full RE GCSE.
Religion is part of the reality of the world. We cannot wish it away. It is there around all of us. It is central to very many people's lives. It influences the way we live and what happens in our streets and our homes. We cannot say, "You must pretend there is not such a thing".
So I turn to the point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn. If one is teaching history after 1530 right through the Stuarts and even beyond, one cannot make sense of it without addressing the religious controversies of the day. People burned at the stake for them. Kingdoms were at risk for them. In human geography, one cannot avoid looking at the religious composition of the world. As the right reverend Prelate said, the point arises in
teaching English literature. We would have to give kids some help to understand, for example, Manley Hopkins' poetry, which is so complex that his friend the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, could not understand it.
Religion is so much concerned with the way to live and about moral and ethical issues. They pervade art and literature. You cannot say that because religion considers those moral and ethical issues we cannot discuss moral and ethical issues in the context of other subjects. While I understand that within his framework of reference the noble Lord is concerned about freeing up the curriculum and providing opportunities as regards extraneous religious material, I do not think that that is part of anyone's thinking. If his thinking is that it is wrong in understanding life to take into account the religious dimension, he is not giving people a full education.
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