Linked with Mina Ahadi – Iran.
Homepage: Those strongly in favour of faith schools often cite the rights of religious parents, as taxpayers, to ensure that their child has State schooling within a school that promotes their faith. However, in areas where faith schools are over-subscribed, there is a real risk that non-religious parents, who are also taxpayers, do not have the same rights of access. Also, should the number of faith schools substantially increase, many parents may lose the right to ensure that their child goes to a community, non-faith, school. Parental choice, although a mantra of the present government, is not without cost: one parent’s choice (and their ability to exercise it) has an impact on the choice of others. Ultimately, with regard to the most popular schools, choice is exercised far more by the schools than by the parents. (Position Statement on Faith Schools, Association of Teachers and Lecturers).
Welcome, excerpt: … The only way to prevent the kind of religious power-seeking that leads to conflict is to make both religious discrimination and religious privilege constitutionally impossible.
We need a secular constitution that will:
- End the privileged input of religious bodies to policy making and law-making;
- Keep all public services free from religious control so that that they remain equally available to all on the same terms;
- Abolish the established church and all its privileges (including 26 bishops in the House of Lords);
- Put an end to the divisiveness of publicly funded religious schools by making them open to all without discrimination on grounds of religion, or lack of it, and bringing them under local authority control;
- Abolish blasphemy and similar repressive laws, rather than extend them.