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Collective worship in schools

Schools could be found in breach of failing to fulfil requirements for daily ‘collective worship’.

The Education Act (1944) requires all maintained schools to provide a daily act of collective worship. Many schools have allowed this requirement to gradually lapse as the UK becomes more secular. However this recent article in the Times Educational Supplement has raised the potential threat that schools could be investigated for not complying with the requirements cited in the Education Act (1944) to provide collective worship.
It is a retrograde step that some MPs appear to be advocating upholding these archaic requirements for collective worship. The implication being that schools could be reported and subsequently investigated for failing to conform to the requirements of the Education Act (1944). The ‘collective worship’ requirement was dying a natural death anyway as many schools merely paid lip-service to it, at best. Other schools just ignored it and got on with non-religious daily assemblies. Of course, faith schools still insist on it, despite the fact that they are ‘maintained’ schools (funded by all us tax-payers) and have to provide places for children from non-religious backgrounds, or from other religions. (Author’s note: I’m not getting into the labelling of children as ‘non-religious’ or ‘religious’ in the topic of this post). The point is that the Education Act (1944) advocates and requires ‘collective worship’ from the ‘accepted Christian normality’ for the ‘moral and spiritual’ development of children. All parents, non-religious or otherwise, have the right to have their children excused from collective worship and religious education classes. Hopefully, this will always be with your child’s informed consent.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Rad Doherty

    Belief in god(s) and belief in witches is equally superstitious – and harmful.

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