Education Bill

My Lords, I should like to make a few points on this subject. I think that we should turn the issue round a bit and ask ourselves what the 15 year-old derives from morning collective worship. I heard what the right reverend Prelate said about primary schools. It is much more likely that children at primary school will accept whatever is said to them, but these days in secondary school children are open to a lot of experiences, which was not the case, say, 20 or 30 years ago. I think that we need to see whether morning collective worship is still relevant to children. The question regarding these amendments is: are they relevant to young people? They are of course relevant to a Christian country but at the moment the practice of Christianity in this country is not really in your face. Falling levels of church attendance and so on is happening all around us. From my days at school I remember that we always met for assembly in the morning. Everyone had to go. We did not have worship. We had something that taught us about life, behaviour, ethics, and right and wrong, but it was not geared to a particular faith. I still believe it would be far more useful if all the young people in a secondary school came together and discussed issues that are relevant to their everyday life, not something that is many steps away from them. I have also always felt that the teaching or nurturing of faith is the job not of the school but of the church or of the home. I think we are now the only country that has collective worship in schools. As far as faith schools are concerned, obviously one cannot say to them ““Do not have collective worship””, and I would be the last person to say that to a faith school. However, where the school is not a faith school but a state-funded, normal school, it is time to take account of what the children need to learn in terms of their lives, how they are going to lead their lives and what they should or should not be doing. They should have examples, with people coming in from outside to tell them about it. I would like to see prisoners come into schools at collective assembly—not collective worship—to tell them about their experiences and why it would be a bad thing to end up like them. If my children went to something like that, they would derive far more from it than from a standard faith-type assembly. I support at least that part of the amendment that would provide that, in state schools with no faith, there should be not collective worship but collective assemblies with guidance on how to live your life.