Edward Leigh – 2022 Speech on Religious Education in Modern Britain

The speech made by Sir Edward Leigh, the Conservative MP for Gainsborough, in Westminster Hall on 1 November 2022.

Happy All Saints’ day, Dame Maria. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), who indeed is a very good friend, on securing this debate.

It is not all doom and gloom. There is an extraordinary, vibrant faith school sector in this country that provides tolerance and superb religious education. Indeed, I was a bit torn over whether to come to this important debate or to the mass at my granddaughter’s primary school this morning; however, I could not miss this debate because the subject is so important. My hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes made a powerful case in his introduction to the debate. It is extraordinary and, in a way, shocking that one in five schools offers zero hours of religious education. That is around 500 secondary schools. My hon. Friend is therefore right to say that children are subject to a postcode lottery. The entire thrust of our education reform since 2010 has been to drive up standards in all subjects.

It is a fundamental principle that parents are the primary educators of their children; that is in the universal declaration on human rights and the European convention on human rights. The state’s role, then, is to act as the agent of parents and facilitate their role. That we have a diverse ecosystem of schooling in this country reflects that our society is a rich tapestry, rather than a boring grey cloth. Each child is an individual, and finding a school or other educational route that matches and suits the needs and nature of that individual child is the task of their parents.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes that we need a national standard in religious education. I am rather bemused at the decline of religious education and the ability of so many schools to ignore what is in the Butler Education Act and more recent guidance. As I understand it—the Minister can comment on this—it is the duty of schools to provide some religious education.

My hon. Friend, again, is right to say that parents need the tools to challenge poor or non-existent provision. We need to give them the levers that they can pull to raise standards in our schools and hold staff and school leadership to account. The statistics he has cited regarding the number of RE specialists are disconcerting. We know—it is clear from this debate—that the current provision of RE in schools is not enough, but it seems that we also do not have the number of properly trained specialists to meet the existing level of provision. I hope this debate may make a difference.

I am sympathetic to our Education Ministers. I think we have achieved great things since 2010, and the Minister of State, Department for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), has achieved so much himself; I think of him a lot as I try to converse with my granddaughter, who is learning through phonetics, rather than the alphabet that I was brought up on. The Minister has achieved great things, and he and other Ministers have been responsible for the free schools programme that has fundamentally shifted the balance away from a decrepit, left-leaning echo chamber in education provision. Parents have been put in the driver’s seat, and we have greatly lowered the barriers to entry into the education sector for those who wish to start new schools. However, there are still problems that need working out.

In that context, I mention the faith schools admissions cap, which I have campaigned against for many years; the Minister is well aware of my views. I am disappointed that we have not got rid of the totally counterproductive admissions cap for faith-based free schools. It was introduced as a sop to our Liberal coalition partners in the wake of the Trojan horse scandal, when Islamist extremists were infiltrating schools. That policy has been a total failure—it has not achieved what it was supposed to. First, all the schools involved in the Trojan horse scandal were secular, not faith based.

Secondly—this is the key point—the admissions cap only hits schools that are over-subscribed from outside their faith grouping. Whatever their merits or virtues, Islamic-run state schools tend to educate members of their communities and receive very little interest from non-Muslims. Catholic schools, on the other hand, are incredibly popular with non-Catholics, but although Catholic schools educate many non-Catholics, their primary purpose is obviously to provide a Catholic education to Catholic children. For that reason, our Catholic schools have not been able to take part in the free schools programme. In fact, the only practical effect of the cap is to prevent new Catholic schools from being founded. The policy is not even in legislation—all it would take is the Education Secretary’s signature for it to go away. In our 2017 manifesto, we made a promise to parents that we would scrap the counterproductive admissions cap and allow the Catholic schools sector to expand. We have still not fulfilled that promise, and I very much hope that when the Minister sums up the debate, he will deal with that issue.

Returning to general matters, I know—we all know—that Ministers are balancing a wide range of priorities, but our job in this debate is to remind them that RE is important, and needs to be backed up with funding and support. We last had a debate on this subject in 2011, as my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) mentioned. She was far too modest; it was her debate. Since that time, she has been made the Prime Minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief. She made a point that I will repeat, because it is obvious: the fact that we live in a world where persecution of people for their religious beliefs or world view is increasing only reinforces the importance of religious education as a school subject, and religious literacy more broadly. The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) spoke powerfully in that respect—I think we all agree with everything he said, and he said it in a very moving way.

My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton is right that as Britain becomes more diverse, we face more challenges. There is a danger that Britons know less and less about their own background, and how central Christianity has been to the development of our society—to our family of nations, our monarchy, our democracy and our constitution. Indeed, Christian iconography is all over this building. Meanwhile, Britons from newer communities often have very vibrant and active religious faiths: Christian, Muslim, Hindu and otherwise.

Without sufficient religious education in schools, there is a danger that newcomers will find there is no culture to assimilate or acclimatise to, because the natives have forgotten it themselves. We need a holistic and inclusive approach that teaches pupils about not only their own faith, which is vital, but others; in this country, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism are important. Catholic schools in England and Wales devote at least 10% of their curriculum to RE, which allows them to do preciously that. Pupils in Catholic schools spend more time learning about other faiths and world views than students in most secular schools. Despite over a third of pupils in Catholic schools being non-Catholic, the withdrawal rates are almost non-existent at 0.02%, according to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference survey data. I wonder if the lessons from the model that Catholic schools provide could be deployed in other state schools. This is an excellent and important debate, and I hope it makes a difference.