New guidance on managing parents’ right to withdraw their children from religious education in Wales is largely common sense, says Alastair Lichten. But it downplays the confessional nature of some RE teaching.
The right to withdraw from RE is a difficult area we deal with a lot in our casework. While it’s obviously undesirable for pupils to be marked out in or withdrawn from any part of the school day, many parents concerned with poor practice and biased teaching feel it remains necessary. If the subject were always preparing young people for life in modern Britain, then we wouldn’t want pupils missing out on that. But where the subject is confessional, we don’t want parents forced to accept it.
The ‘NSS articles’ category contains links to my opinion pieces, written while a campaigns officer or head of education for the National Secular Society, before June 2022. You can read the full original of this article here >>>
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