The Accord Coalition announced this week that a tabled amendment to the Children, Schools and Families Bill “could be the new Section 28”, referring to section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which prevented local authorities from promoting homosexuality or teaching that homosexuality was an acceptable type of relationship.
The amendment to clause 11 of the Bill adds two new sections stating that:
“(7A)
Subsections (4) to (7) are not to be read as preventing the governing body or head teacher of a school within subsection (7B) from causing or allowing Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) to be taught in a way that reflects the school’s religious character.
(7B)
A school is within this subsection if it is designated as a school having a religious character by an order made by the Secretary of State under section 69(3) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998.”
The tabled amendment to the Bill, in the opinion of the Accord Coalition, will allow religious considerations to effectively “trump” the duty of faith schools’ to “promote equality” and “encourage acceptance of diversity” when PSHE lessons become compulsory in 2011 (for more information, see our Practice note on Sex education). This amendment will allow faith schools to teach PSHE from a particular religious viewpoint, for example, Catholic faith schools will be allowed to teach that artificial methods of contraception are banned under its teachings, over and above the requirements in the Bill to promote equality and encourage acceptance of diversity. This seems to be in direct contention with the requirement in the Bill (Part 1, clause 11(6)(b)) that children are taught PSHE in a way that “reflects a reasonable range of religious, cultural and other perspectives”.
This controversial aspect of the Bill was apparently introduced following extensive lobbying by the Catholic Education Service.
However, what does the amendment actually change?
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), responding to the Accord Coalition’s statement, states that it in fact changes very little, it is “nonsense…faith schools cannot opt out of statutory PSHE and SRE (sex and relationships education) lessons”. According to the DCSF the amendment does not add an additional principle it merely clarifies that faith schools can promote their faith when teaching PSHE and SRE.
One can see how the amendment could be read as giving faith schools the power to “trump” the PSHE requirements but the powers of the existing accountability framework and planned well-being indicators should not be forgotten. These allow Ofsted to monitor and evaluate schools’ effectiveness in delivering their PSHE programme and also place a duty on school governing bodies to ensure that the accountability framework and well-being indicators act as safeguards against inappropriate teaching.
However, it is difficult to reconcile how faith schools will be able to deliver PSHE and SRE in the way that the Government envisages if their faith explicitly condones certain things, for example, homosexuality and sex before marriage. It would seem that PSHE teachers in faith schools could be faced with the challenge of teaching conflicting lessons to pupils, on one hand covering the existing non-statutory programmes for PSHE that are intended to reflect a variety of views and promote equality and diversity and on the other, possibly teaching conflicting religious views on the same subject. For example, a Catholic faith school confronted with having to teach about sex before marriage and effective contraception may also have to teach that according to the Catholic faith, sex before marriage is wrong.
What pupils will take away from PSHE lessons in cases such as this is unclear and is definitely something that needs to be considered before the Bill becomes law or alternatively clarified in Government guidance dealing with the issue.