Urgent need for review of law on religious education

Tim Devlin, director of the Independent Schools Information Service, examines the position of RE in maintained schools.
RELIGIOUS education is the only part of the syllabus in our maintained schools which must be provided by law under the 1944 Education Act. This Act replaepd the last code for prescribed syllabuses in secondary schools which the then Ministry of Education used to issue from time to time, and under which secondary schools had to provide adequate instruction in about a dozen specified subjects.
These subjects — geography, history, mathematics and so on — which were statutory until 1944, but are now optional for schools to include in their curriculum, are still being taught in every school in the country. Religious education which was not included in the 1933 Grant Regulations for schools, but is now compulsory, is not being properly provided in many schools.
In fact, the latest survey by the Assistant Masters' Association shows that four out of five schools are flouting the law by not holding a daily corporate act of worship, even though they have a hall large enough for the whole school to gather for assembly.
From my own experience as former education correspondent of The Times of visiting maintained schools, it appears that many just — and only just — remain inside the law by slotting RE into the syllabus as part of social studies, "learning for life" programmes or careers education.
The same point has been made in two debates on religious education in the House of Lords so far this year. There is a desperate shortage of teachers who are committed to Christianity and willing to teach it as RE.
For two or three years, there has been widespread concern about religious education. It started with a move in Bir mingham to get lessons in Cornmunism included in the city's agreed religious syllabus.
This was found to be against the 1944 Education Act; so a move was started by the Humanists and supported by the National Secular Society to get the law changed and the provisions in the Act regarding statutory religious education and worship repealed.
This provoked a counteroffensive from the Order of Christian Unity and other religious organisations which believe that to repeal the statutory clauses would further weaken the moral fibre of the country.
Somewhere in the middle, the British Council of Churches came out with a moderate statement in favour of repealing parts of the 1944 Act and allowing RE to stand or fall on its merits.
The Government has refrained from intervening. Last year Miss Margaret Jackson, junior Minister at the Department of Education and Science, confirmed that there was no intention to change the religious clauses in the Act. During the Great Debate earlier this year, it was assumed by Mrs Shirley Williams, Secretary of State for Education, that RE should be one of the central .core of compulsory subjects.
Yet this is the time for a cool, dispassionate look at the legal position. We are lucky to have in Mrs Williams and Mr Norman St John-Stevas, Conservative education spokesman, not only two deeply committed Catholics (probably the first time that the principal education spokesmen of the
two main political parties have been Catholics) but also two people very much in agreement and anxious to raise moral standards in the country. So there is hope that there could be a united non-partisan approach.
The first result of the assistant masters' survey must be a look at the law. Any law that can be flouted by four schools out of five is a bad law.
So the next question to ask is: should there be a law at all? Has having a law prescribing RE benefited religious teaching? The answer would appear to be negative. There is a desperate shortage of teachers even though RE is the one statutory subject. Spiritual needs are not promoted by legislation. Sometimes they are held back by the unedifying spectacle of non-Christians holding religious assemblies consisting of folk music and pop songs, which bear little relation to actual religious events. It does not help the spiritual cause much either when there are desperate attempts to use the RE statutory slot in the timetable for something that will be a bit of a rest from maths or games.
Either by flouting the law, of by complying with it in the most cursorily and sometimes hypocritical fashion, schools are encouraging their pupils to grow up as religious cynics. Denominational schools and many independent schools are religious foundations pledged to further the cause of Christianity. They attract deeply-committed Christians to their staffs and, law or no law, they will continue providing a serious and genuine form of RE.
When in 1944 the dovernment laid down the statutory duty on schools to hold daily religious assemblies and to include a weekly element of RE, the country was still a national of church-goers. The law was accepted.
Now the position has vastly changed. Yet the law which should have been changed to meet this new situation, cannot be changed without tremendous heart-searching and upheaval. It is a clumsy vehicle for upholding the cause of religion in schools.