Head of Education Steve Beegoo explains the growing consensus that the Schools Bill should be scrapped, and the harm it would do to home and school education, particularly for Christians.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will be a disaster for families and schools.
At our Education Revolution event last month we had over 270 delegates, many of whom are deeply concerned about the secularising and sexualising influences in culture and in our schools, which is having a major impact on our children and young people. Many are starting to take action. Christians have taken courageous steps to address the issues of the day, as the Lord has led them, responding to his Great Commission to disciple our children.
But this new bill is a real challenge to the historic freedom of parents to educate their children as they see fit.
Bill disastrous for families and schools
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, now in the House of Lords committee stage, is being increasingly recognised as disastrous for Christian families and schools.
Along with the Labour Government’s unfair VAT charges on Christian schools, it validates our long-held concerns of over-reach into the independence of schools and the private lives of Christian families.
And the pressure is building on the government as people awake to these issues.
March for Children protested outside Parliament
The March for Children campaign, which gathered on Sunday outside Parliament, raised 14 major issues with the 128-page bill. This bill was rushed through the House of Commons with very little time for review and consideration. Those protesting outside Parliament included many Christian home educating parents deeply concerned that the clauses in bill will give rights to local authority officers to require all sorts of details regarding their family life and private activities (including church Sunday school attendance) or face fines or imprisonment.
State overreach proving intolerable
A recent Critic article by Sebastian Milbank, entitled ‘Nationalising Childhood’, provided accounts of how local authority officers have already made parents’ lives intolerable with their demands, simply due to the fact that these families elect to home educate their children.
At Christian Concern, we regularly support families where the state is overreaching into their lives, through school staff or other authorities. This bill will grant even more permission to such state actors who may be suspicious of Christian families for their motivations to actively nurture, teach and protect their children in line with biblical principles.
Risk of punitive regulation to cooperative home educators
In addition, Christians who regularly cooperate with others in their home education through learning centres, and the similar family-based Jewish community’s education provision, both risk being caught up in punitive and intolerable statutory regulation and monitoring as though they were seeking to operate a full-time school.
There is a misplaced emphasis on creating legislation so that Ofsted can more easily close illegal schools to protect children. However, through the clauses in the bill, this will undoubtedly result in preventing safe, nurturing, religious based education, overseen by parents, from continuing to thrive.
Freedoms being withdrawn from schools
Furthermore, state school teachers, including many Christians, are also making the case that the significant freedoms that came through the academies and free school movement are being withdrawn.
Requirements to align to a new National Curriculum, which has yet to be drawn up by Professor Becky Francis and her team, combined with a removal of the ability to employ staff without specific teaching qualifications, will distort the successful and unique culture of many schools.
Recruitment, a key issue for schools that want to maintain a Christian ethos, will become even more difficult than it already is.
Pupils forced into under-achieving schools
There are strong socialist elements to our new government. Equality of outcome rather than opportunity is being emphasised, and this has led the bill to include measures which would not only limit, but even cut, the places available in the best schools. This will mean that low achieving schools in a geographical area can be sent more pupils, even when parents have been voting with their feet.
Parents will therefore have no option but to send their children to failing schools to prevent those systemically poorly achieving schools from being closed or taken over.
Katherine Birbalsingh, one of the UK’s most successful headteachers, who was at the march on Sunday says, “Trust parents, trust headteachers – and for heaven’s sake, scrap this bill.”
As the March for Children movement explains, “The Government needs to reverse action they have taken which is not in the best interest of children and think again about action they are about to take.”
Still time to scrap the bill
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is now going through the committee stage of the House of Lords. The Government could amend or scrap the bill.
Referencing international human rights law, our expert legal advocate Roger Kiska explains, “No amendment could successfully neutralise the discrimination inherent in the premises behind this bill, and the practice which will inevitably result through local authority or inspection enforcement. Nor can amendments cure the compatibility issues with the Convention [ECHR]”.
At the first committee stage debate in the House of Lords, Lord Lucas issued a direct challenge to the transfer of parental responsibilities to the state proposed in this bill:
“In English law, parents are responsible for their children’s education. In the Bill… the Government make substantial moves towards transferring that responsibility to the state.”
“The state should be respectful and humble in its dealings with parents who educate their own children… If they are doing well, why should the state not applaud that?”
Will the Government listen?
Pray and act
Please pray, and act by making your views clear to your local MP, and members of the House of Lords, requesting that they get involved in the committee stage which will end on July 2nd.
Lord Wei and Lord Frost, among others could be sent your views and personal stories of state overreach to assist their opposition.
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