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Baroness Blatch: My Lords, I rise to comment briefly because much of what I wished to say, and support, has been outlined by the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lords, Lord Dearing and Lord Alton. However, I have a few points to add to the debate.
First, I return to the proposition being made by the noble Lord, Lord Peston. This would be the abolition of faith schools. There is no questioning that fact: if they cannot be funded, I doubt if many of them would have the wherewithal to go independent and become faith schools outside the state school system. The faith schools throughout the country about which we know are populated by young people from the local community who simply would not have the wherewithal to do anything as regards making alternative provision. We are talking about a large number of schools that would be abolished. Indeed, they would very quickly become secular schools. The moment the money stream was cut off would signal the end of their lives as state schools.
Secondly, I should like to repeat what I have said many times previously. I really believe that education without a spiritual and moral dimension would be an education lacking. It would be clinical and arid. One has only to consider the example of America where parents look across the ocean to our country and long to go down the road that we have taken where a spiritual and moral dimension is a feature of all schools, not just those that have a distinctive faith.
Thirdly, as I said earlier, I have always been conscious of those children for whom school is the only anchor in their lives. For some children it is the only place where they will learn about the parameters within which to grow up and develop, and where they will receive any kind of yardstick, or any kind of help, to enable them to cope with those rather deep questions of life; in other words, how to grapple with difficult situations. My goodness, some of our young people do have to face such situations and that dimension of education, which applies to children right across the sector, does help them enormously.
The question was asked why people choose such schools. I believe that they do so for a variety of reasons. Some of them choose them unashamedly because of the Christian ethos or the Jewish ethos or the Muslim ethos. People look for an education imbued with a particular faith.
For many people there is something about the ethos of faith schools that makes them special and different. Faith schools have a dimension that is not present in secular schools. For many parents one manifestation of that is behaviour. People are at ease with the framework and the parameters, within which children grow up and develop, that are set by the faith schools.
I believe that faith schools are popular for good reasons. I believe that they are part of the tapestry of educational provision in this country. Long may they remain so. The noble Baroness, Lady David, talked about not wanting to go down that road, but we have been going down that road for a long time—some hundreds of years. We should also remember that the Church started mainstream education in this country. Mainstream education, including free education, was brought about by the Methodists and the Christian Churches in the century before last, so we have much to thank them for. I certainly want to support their continuation. I hope that the noble Lord will not succeed in his amendment to cut off the money supply because I believe that the country would be the poorer for it and many thousands of children would certainly be the poorer for it.
Lord Kilclooney: My Lords, I feel provoked to speak in this debate, although in Northern Ireland education is now a devolved matter. As one who is a parent of six children, who has watched education develop in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years, and who is an Ulster Unionist Peer, I fully support the idea of faith schools. We have two types of schools in Northern Ireland: state schools attended mainly by the Protestant majority community and by the Jewish minority community; and Roman Catholic schools supported and attended by the Roman Catholic minority.
I have no doubt whatever that people of a minority religion have the right through parental choice to select the schools that their children attend. We in the Ulster Unionist Party have always supported 100 per cent the financing of faith schools in Northern Ireland that are mainly and almost entirely Roman Catholic schools.
When I hear a Member of this House say, "Look at Northern Ireland", I despair. That shows a distinct misunderstanding, perhaps even a lack of knowledge of what is happening in Northern Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland has not come about simply as a matter of religion, of Roman Catholics and Protestants; that is the European, ill-informed approach to Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland matters go much deeper than religion. I say that as a Protestant who supports the right of the Roman Catholic minority to have their own schools and who is well pleased at the success of the Church of England schools in England.
The situation in Northern Ireland is not about religion but about nationalism. It is the mixture of religion with politics. If one does not understand that, one should not say, "Look at Northern Ireland".
Lord Hylton: My Lords, I am grateful for what my noble friend has said. However, he could have gone on to say that some parents in Northern Ireland have demanded that children coming from the Protestant and the Catholic traditions should be able to meet and to mingle in the same schools. Ever since my late noble friend Lord Dunleath's enabling Bill in about 1977,
they have been able to do that. I have witnessed the growth of some of the integrated faith schools and they are very good.
Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, this is a somewhat daunting debate to which to respond, which began, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn said, with a very gracious expression from my noble friend Lord Peston. But though the amendment has taken flight in terms of the range and depth of the contributions, it is fairly prosaic and perhaps the House will forgive me if I address myself first and foremost to that prosaic quality. That is the basis on which I shall seek to persuade my noble friend to withdraw it.
Amendment No. 31, quite straightforwardly, would exclude all schools with a religious character from any form of financial assistance from central government. That would mean that no Church school could, for example, receive funding from the Standards Fund, formula capital funding or the School Standards Grant.
I recognise the strength of feeling behind my noble friend when he presents this vision. He is saying that he believes that the basis upon which British education has been established over the past 170 years, and certainly since the great formative education Acts of the 20th century, should be reconstructed because of societal change, which means that formal religion occupies a lesser place in the life of the nation now than it did in the past, or that the concept of religious education was misconceived in the first place.
My noble friend needs to recognise that it is no easy matter to contemplate the withdrawal of funding from a sector of education which has served a large section of the nation well in the past. I recognise that arguments are increasingly presented that this is a multi-faith and multi-cultural society and therefore the predominance of the faith schools, which are predominantly Christian, ought to be altered. But I do not think that my noble friend believes it is a realistic proposition that, on the basis of a simple amendment to this Bill, we should end the basis of faith education in this country. Nor do I think that he sustained any argument for saying that those who belong to minority faiths want the situation to be solved in that way.
It is perhaps easy for us to say that if we could rewrite history we might have produced the American solution—the concept of the melting pot—in which religion plays no part in the formal education system and the task of communicating religion to children is taken on by the Churches and religious institutions. But we do not start from 1776 and the revolution; we start from an evolved educational culture over several centuries, against a background in which the Church played a formative part in the early years of education, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, rightly identified. My noble friend will recognise that the belief of large numbers of those who have a different faith from Christianity is merely that they should have equal opportunity with Christian schools; namely, that it is only right that the finance available to faith schools, as
established in the Christian ethos, should also be available in areas where there is a substantial demand for it in Muslim and other religious faiths.The Government are not encouraging faith schools. Nothing in the Bill encourages such development. But we defend the right of existing schools to receive resources on the basis of the education which they provided in the past. The argument has not been sustained that there is a massive flight from faith schools; in fact quite the opposite. It may be for a whole range of reasons—my noble friend began by suggesting that those reasons may not be wholly related to religion—but it is the case that the demand for education in faith schools remains buoyant, to put it at its mildest.
I am in no position—I am not sure that anyone in the House is—to identify exactly the elements that lead to that, although I have some sympathy with the argument made by the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch. Parents find the issue of how to inculcate moral values and to meet the challenges of the next generation pretty daunting. After all, not all parents are as well blessed as is my noble friend Lord Peston with intellect and capacity to take on any intellectual challenge—no doubt even from his redoubtable offspring. For many other parents, increasingly well-educated children can produce challenges at an early age that make most of us scratch our heads.
It is not easy to inculcate such values. In certain areas, parents run away from the issues altogether—hence the abysmal level of sex education communicated in the nation as a whole. I think that that also obtains in certain areas of moral values. Parents find it easier to believe that it is the role of the school to provide an intellectual, spiritual and ethical framework within which children can evolve. Of course, parents are in the business of teaching children right from wrong from an early stage. That is rather different from creating over time a framework that is eminently sensible and withstands the challenge that young people can often make.
One can at least say that those who have been involved with Church schools have a framework within which they can meet such challenges. Parents' wish for faith schools reflects that need and their belief that, on the whole, that gives their children a framework within which they can develop.
So the Government merely say that we acknowledge parents' wishes to educate their children in mainstream Christian schools. Given our multi-cultural society, it is only right that parents of other faiths should have similar opportunities to educate their children in accordance with their own beliefs. We are not campaigning for more faith schools. We are merely saying that, where there is a clearly articulated demand, opportunities should occur.
Whereas there are more than 7,000 faith schools in the United Kingdom, the increase year-on-year is low. We are not talking about an immense surge towards such schools. The amendment would produce a revolution in education provision in this country and we are not prepared to countenance that within the framework of this rather modest Bill.
I recognise the value of this debate for allowing some extremely telling contributions from many parts of the House, some of which were prompted, as debates should be, by contributions that caught raw nerves and inevitably raised issues of deepest principle to us all. As far as the Government are concerned, the amendment, modest though it is in a long list of amendments before us, proposes to withdraw financial support to a system of education that has served our country well and which is still in great demand among parents. If we could devise a means to measure spiritual depth, we would have a rather more sophisticated education system and society than we have. I do not think that we will reach that position, so my noble friend will have to take the position on trust. I hope that on that basis he will seek leave to withdraw the amendment.
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