There are two main questions currently important in education as applied to the English situation that may be considered to have constitutional implications.
Firstly, to what extent should the government’s current commitment to ‘personalisation and choice’ in education be supported? It is this that has driven the proliferation of varied forms of publicly funded schools. From the 1960s and 1970s when uniformity was imposed on state secondary education, to the deliberate invocation of market forces by successive governments in the 1980s and since, policy in relation to schools has undergone immense change. We now have proposals to promote increased independence and autonomy for individual state schools, and, in particular, for ‘faith sponsors’. These will allow the development of distinctively Christian schools with the freedom to express Christian beliefs and values through the school ethos and the curriculum. This is not a new issue. The 1944 Act established a dual system that differentiated between what were County Schools (now Community Schools) and voluntary aided schools. However, the fear is that this may create Christian ‘ghettos’. The strategy also raises the question of whether other religious communities should be supported in setting up their own faith-based schools. Not to do so would be interpreted as special pleading at best, and Christian imperialism at worst. At the time of writing, a lively debate has opened up about the wisdom of encouraging ‘faith-based’ schools, and the potential damage this might do to the growth of tolerance and integration within society. However, in this debate existing Church schools are often held up as examples of how tolerance and respect for diversity can be developed within a faith-based context. The whole argument relates to the more fundamental question of whether a multiculturalism that tolerates or even celebrates plurality is a goal society should aspire towards or a danger to be avoided. We return to this point below.
Secondly in relation to education, should the government’s initiative to develop a National Religious Education syllabus be supported? This entails greater central control of what is taught and, probably, how it is taught. The Church of England supports this aspiration on the grounds that it will improve the quality of RE, which is certainly very variable at the moment. The opportunity is certainly there to develop a syllabus that is friendly towards the Christian gospel. But in so far as that is true, the obvious danger is that a nationally approved syllabus will end up being one that places Christianity on a level with a range of other faiths and ideologies, and thus seriously erodes the pre-eminence formerly given to the religious faith that has been so dominant and so formative of British national culture. There is a particular threat that a humanist or secular view of religion may become normative in the curriculum. The current opportunities for local Christians to be involved in syllabus development and delivery may also disappear.
Probably the policy that will be pursued will be a balanced economy with support being given to the development of a national approach to RE where Christian teaching is done well alongside the development of distinctively Christian schools where nurture of Christian faith can freely take place.
