Education and Inspections Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 6:15 pm on 24 October 2006.

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Photo of Lord Wedderburn of Charlton Lord Wedderburn of Charlton Crossbench 6:15, 24 October 2006

My Lords, I support Amendment No. 104, in accordance with paragraph 6.54 of the Companion, because the amendment was discussed, in a way, a week ago before your Lordships. It was a casualty of what I call irrational grouping; that is, it was hidden in a grouping to which it manifestly did not belong. That is an important issue which your Lordships should consider this evening. Amendments remain the property of the noble Lords in whose names they appear. They can alter a proposed grouping, but very often—sometimes because the groupings appear rather late—that is impossible, as it appears to have been impossible for this amendment, which appeared in a vast, almost surreal, grouping with other amendments when it came before the House.

I shall use this occasion deliberately to deplore the proposals that departments sometimes advance for groupings that are manifestly irrational and unhelpful. We thought that we had seen the back of this sort of thing in the 1980s, but if 30 years' experience in this House has taught me one thing, it is that proposals for groupings should be the basis of sensible and orderly debate. No department should try to hide an awkward issue—if that was the intention; no doubt it was not in this case—by putting it with amendments that are manifestly not on the same subject.

Amendment No. 104, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, spoke last week, at cols. 706-7 of the Official Report, addressed a duty that was created only in 1944 for schools to have an obligatory daily act of collective worship. The amendment, as the noble Baroness made clear, would replace that duty with a duty to hold a daily assembly aimed at supporting people's,

"spiritual, moral, social and cultural education".—[Hansard, 17/10/06; col. 707.]

The importance of that phrase was made clear earlier this afternoon.

The act of worship needs to be broadly Christian, but the amendment is of interest not only to humanists, atheists or agnostics, or even to religions other than those with a Christian tradition. This is a fundamental issue, which the Government so far have not addressed. The Minister addressed Amendment No. 104 in another sitting, but I hope that he will not mind my saying that I thought that his reply to its case was rather perfunctory. Having been given a little more time, he may do better tonight.

The Minister claimed that this obligatory act of daily worship represented,

"the values and traditions of the majority in this country".—[Hansard, 17/10/06; col. 736.]

I beg leave to doubt whether that is now the case and suggest that it is out of date. No doubt polls will be quoted, but I refer those who cite polling evidence to an article in the Times only yesterday, in which an expert on the matter said that polling is increasingly,

"being used to manufacture the headlines rather than uncover the facts".

The expert is a chief executive of a very important polling organisation.

The Minister did not address the substantive case, made by the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society and many other organisations, that the time for this obligation in all schools has passed. I will not quote those organisations, because noble Lords will think that they are parti pris; I will quote what the Government's inspectorate wrote in a document that was separately published, so important was it, a year later, under the heading Secondary Education. In 1998, Ofsted said that the whole question of daily collective worship,

"raises questions about the ... Act and its interpretation, and in particular whether schools in a broadly secular society can or should bring their pupils together in order to engage in worship. For Roman Catholic, Church of England and other denominational schools the answer is clear in principle. For most LEA and grant maintained schools, however, the notion of worship, and indeed that of prayer, can be problematic at both an institutional and a personal level".

In my submission, nothing has changed to make that decisive judgment inapplicable today.

Of course, the Government may refer to Amendments Nos. 79 and 151, which were passed in your Lordships' House on 17 October. Those government amendments allow sixth formers to have a special right to escape from collective worship in which they do not believe. That right is for sixth formers, but what about the rights of fifth or fourth formers—or third formers, given that I have grandchildren who have reached that elevated level? Do the Government think that those students do not discuss such matters and that they do not have incipient and, in some cases, firm beliefs, and that sixth formers alone should be granted this inalienable right to get out of collective worship?

In order to clarify the point, I asked a very close friend, who is a devoted and devout Christian and a very honest person, what it was all about. He laughed and chided me, and said, "Come on, you must be joking. You know perfectly well what it is all about. We want to get at them early on. Give us a few years of prayer and worship and you can do what you like with them and, what's more, the Jesuits can do what they like with them". The noble Lord shakes his head. I am sorry to offer that to him, but that is what my friend said. It may be wrong, but if it is not the case, what on earth is the point of making these boys and girls go to a religious occasion in which they may already not believe or, more important, in which they may have begun not to believe?

Professor Richard Dawkins addressed this issue on page 185 of his recently published book, The God Delusion. He wrote:

"Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love? Certainly, religious faith has something of the same character as falling in love (and both have many of the attributes of being high on an addictive drug)", which he names in the footnote—I did not know it—as "Gerin Oil". That is not an oil company; it is the name apparently of an addictive drug. He went on to quote the neuropsychiatrist, John Smythies, who said:

"One facet of the many faces of religion is intense love focused on one supernatural person, i.e. God, plus reverence for icons of that person. Human life is driven largely by our selfish genes and by the processes of reinforcement. Much positive reinforcement derives from religion: warm and comforting feelings of being loved and protected in a dangerous world, loss of fear of death, help from the hills in response to prayer in difficult times".

Your Lordships will forgive my reading, which has recently suffered an attack of something no doubt from beyond the hills.

In the face of the question that we are addressing, the point of the quotation is: what on earth is the point of getting together boys and girls from third, fourth and even fifth forms to obey an order that they must express warmth and loving hopes for help coming to them from beyond the hills? It seems a very strange thing to do, except perhaps in very unorganised and not advanced societies. Dawkins concludes his argument on such matters with words that I suggest the Government should gather together daily to read—aloud, if possible—on their sofas in an assembly devoted to collective inquiry. He wrote:

"An atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam"— no doubt he would have added other religions had he time—

"and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage".

That is important because this amendment does not seek to make anyone do anything except attend an assembly, which, as I have understood today's debate, is a matter of common ground in the whole House, on all Benches, to advance the,

"spiritual, moral ... and cultural education", of all pupils. There lies the nub of the amendment, which I am happy to support.