Faith schools undermine equality, choice and social cohesion.
Let's build an inclusive education system today, to ensure an inclusive society tomorrow.
Our education system should be open and welcoming to all. That's why we want publicly funded faith schools phased out and an end to religiously selective school admissions.
Around a third of publicly funded schools in England and Wales are faith schools – schools with a religious character. Scottish and Northern Irish schools are still divided along sectarian lines.
Separating children according to religion is divisive and leads to religious, ethnic and socio-economic segregation.
To make matters worse, many faith schools can discriminate against pupils and teachers who do not share the religion of the school.
Parents are entitled to raise their children within a faith tradition, but they are not entitled to enlist the help of the state to do so. The state should not allow the schools it funds to inculcate children into a particular religion.
Faith schools seriously limit choice for parents who do not want a religious education for their children, or do not share the faith of the local school. Our research has found that 18,000 families were assigned faith schools against their wishes in England in 2017 alone.
Despite a consistent and dramatic decline in church attendance, and a growing majority of non-religious citizens, successive governments have paved the way for ever greater religious involvement in education, often to the detriment of inclusive community schools.
A secular approach to education would ensure publicly funded schools are equally welcoming to all children, regardless of their backgrounds.
Take action!
1. Write to your MP
Please call on your MP to support a secular, inclusive education system for all.
2. Share your story
Tell us why you support this campaign, and how you are personally affected by the issue. You can also let us know if you would like assistance with a particular issue.
3. Join us
Become a member of the National Secular Society today! Together, we can separate religion and state for greater freedom and fairness.
Latest updates
Six independent faith schools warned over safeguarding failures
Posted: Thu, 4 Apr 2019 11:02
The government has warned six faith schools over their failures to meet safeguarding standards in its latest round of warning notices to independent schools in England.
The Department for Education (DfE) published 11 warning notices to independent schools last week after failing inspections by Ofsted and the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI). The schools included four Christian schools and two Islamic schools.
Ofsted criticised safeguarding at Assunnah Primary School, an Islamic school forming part of a mosque complex in the Tottenham area of north London.
Inspectors said "at least 70 men" had joined each of three half-hourly prayer sessions at an on-site mosque, only some of whom were known to school leaders. The pupils' fire exit was not accessible during prayer sessions.
The inspectors added that leaders did not ensure staff receive safeguarding training, and there had been no school-based training on the Prevent safeguarding and counter-radicalisation strategy for three years.
Leaders also did not routinely inform the local authority when pupils left the school and were unaware of several pupils' destinations prior to the inspection. The register only recorded that they had "gone abroad".
Ofsted said English language teaching at Assunnah was "not effective". It said teachers' subject knowledge of written English was "poor".
Inspectors also raised concerns about a lack of parental engagement and "inadequate" governance.
Ofsted also criticised Jamia Al-Hudaa Residential College, an all-girls day and boarding Islamic school in Nottingham, for "numerous failings" in safeguarding and systems to promote pupils' well-being.
Inspectors said pupils did not learn enough about "the risks they may face in life", including female genital mutilation and online safety. Some pupils told inspectors they would not tell their teachers if they were worried about a friend being drawn into a forced marriage, and some said they were anxious about sharing their concerns with inspectors.
Leaders did not "do enough to ensure pupils are safe" by routinely confirming the destination of pupils who have left the school, or "make careful enough checks when pupils miss school".
The curriculum also failed to prepare pupils adequately for "the opportunities and challenges of British society" because they had "very little opportunity to contribute to society or interact with the outside world".
Inspectors also noted that parts of the school were "in a poor state of repair and hygiene". They found toilets to be "dirty", with no soap, hot water, paper towels or sanitary bins. Pupils told inspectors that the sanitary bins are "often full and sometimes overflowing". In some toilets, "mould and damp were present, ceiling tiles were loose and wall tiles peeling away".
At Castle House School, a Christian preparatory school in Newport, Shropshire, the ISI found that employment history and references for new staff were not always checked. Failure to make adequate recruitment checks was also an issue at Lichfield Cathedral School and Sunningdale School in Ascot, Berkshire, both of which are Church of England schools. Safeguarding in recruitment processes was also criticised at Worth School, a Roman Catholic school in Crawley in West Sussex.
National Secular Society education and schools officer Alastair Lichten said: "This latest raft of failures shows a growing crisis in the independent faith school sector, which stretches back years and which inspectors are just beginning to grapple with. There are clearly providers who lack the most basic competency to run a school but for whom ideological enthusiasm trumps such concerns.
"That's before we even get to issues of narrowed curricula and inaccurate or extreme teaching. The independent sector is very diverse and schools have great freedoms. However, such freedoms are limited. Wherever children attend school they have the right to be safe and to an education that prepares them for more than just life in a narrow religious community."
The affected schools were required to submit action plans for improvement by the end of March and to implement them within two months. The notices were sent in February.
Independent schools which fail to improve can be removed from the independent schools register.
NSS expresses support for RE and RSE reform in Wales
Posted: Fri, 29 Mar 2019 10:45
The National Secular Society has expressed qualified support for proposed reforms to religious education and relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in Wales in response to two government consultations.
The responses came after the Welsh government proposed a new curriculum which would change the role of RE and said it would reconsider parents' right to withdraw children from RSE.
In January the Welsh government said it planned to make RE part of a humanities area of learning and experience (AoLE), along with history, geography and business and social studies.
It said "essential aspects of learning" would be outlined across each AoLE, rather than within individual subjects.
In its response the NSS wrote: "We broadly support the proposed moves towards a modern more inclusive RE curriculum that addresses the diversity of worldviews in Wales. It is good for this to be embedded in a wider humanities area of learning, rather than being treated as an exceptional area."
But the NSS criticised provisions which allow faith schools to continue to teach RE in accordance with their ethos and the retention of SACREs – local bodies which determine RE curricula.
The Welsh government's plans would see non-religious representatives admitted to SACREs. The NSS welcomed "efforts to make SACREs more inclusive" but said the influence of groups who wished to present their religion or belief in a positive light was "educationally inappropriate".
The NSS also said the parental right to withdraw children from RSE should be removed.
"Parents do not have a right to selectively withdraw their children from science or history lessons that may conflict with their religion or belief, and we argue that the same should hold true for RSE.
"The right of withdrawal is most likely to deny knowledge to children from conservative religious backgrounds, who most need impartial, appropriate education in this area. This can place both themselves and others at risk."
This week education minister Kirsty Williams told the BBC she was considering whether allowing parents to remove pupils from the lessons was "still appropriate".
The NSS expressed support in principle for the end of the right to withdraw from RE. But it added that the right should only end if it can "be guaranteed that RE is not promoting a particular view of religion".
The NSS said current guidance meant some parents had "legitimate concerns about RE being used to promote particular religious views or a positively biased view of religion".
The society added that older children who wished to overrule parents who opted them out of RE and RSE should have their opinions taken into account.
The NSS expressed disappointment that the proposals did not include plans to reform Wales's collective worship law.
The law in Wales currently provides that children at all maintained schools "shall on each school day take part in an act of collective worship". In community schools, the worship must be wholly or mainly of a Christian character.
In a separate response to guidance on RSE the NSS expressed concern that faith schools would continue to distort the way they taught about relationships and sexuality.
The guidance says education practitioners should be "aware of, and sensitive to, the personal circumstances of individual learners". It adds that this should enable them to "deliver suitable tailored content to the religious and cultural background of learners".
The NSS said this should not be allowed to interfere with schools' duty to deliver "a rights based, comprehensive and non-discriminatory RSE curriculum for all pupils, regardless of school or background".
In May 2018 NSS research exposed the way Wales's secondary state faith schools were distorting sex and relationships education (SRE) by teaching it through a religious lens. All 12 of those schools which had an SRE policy were teaching it within the tenets of Catholicism or the Church in Wales.
Shortly afterwards the NSS welcomed plans to make LGBT-inclusive RSE compulsory in Welsh schools from age five but warned against allowing faith schools to teach it on a religious basis.
The NSS's response on RSE also said education should not be considered less "age appropriate" depending on "the sexuality of examples used".
"If it is age appropriate for pupils to receive certain information about sex, it is age appropriate for them to receive this information about LGBT and non-LGBT sex. If it is age appropriate for pupils to receive certain information about relationships, it is age appropriate for them to receive this information about LGBT and non-LGBT relationships."
The NSS campaigns for an impartial religion and belief curriculum, education about sex and relationships which is free from religious influence and an end to compulsory worship in schools.
The society has made the case for these reforms in meetings with Welsh education officials over the last two years.
More information
Protect relationships and sex education
Age-appropriate relationships and sex education should be every child’s right.
Remove religious appointees from Scottish councils
Religion shouldn’t grant people privileged places in local democracy.
Research and reports
The faith schools research bank
The choice delusion: how faith schools restrict school choice
Three in ten families across England live in areas where most or all of the closest primary schools are faith schools and thousands are being assigned faith schools against their wishes.
Power grab: Academisation and the threat to secular education
Academisation has enabled faith groups to increase their influence over all schools, including those with no religious character. With little public debate, religious governance has increased, while secular oversight has diminished.
Religiosity inspections: the case against faith-based reviews of state schools
Faith based inspections of state schools are an unnecessary drain on public finds, frame widely held values as exclusive, and promote biased religious education.
Faith-shaped holes: How religious privilege is undermining equality law (PDF, 1.3 Mb)
