The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury rose to call attention to the importance of society's moral and spiritual well-being, and in particular to the responsibility of schools; and to move for Papers.

The Most Reverend Primate said:

My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to initiate this debate. After reading some of what the newspapers have had to say about it, your Lordships must be wondering what to expect. It has been said that I am today launching a new crusade to re-moralise the nation. It has been said that I am about to deliver a boring sermon. It has been said that my main concern is to relaunch my own image. It has been suggested that I shall be enunciating a right-wing moralistic agenda or, alternatively, a left of centre agenda associated with new Labour. I hope that your Lordships will not be disappointed to hear that I disavow all these intentions. Your Lordships will be particularly pleased to hear that I know the difference between a pulpit and the Bishops' Bench in this House.

I hope that we can avoid a twin danger in this debate. On the one hand is a temptation to drift into a "golden age" mood in which we assume that in the past our people were better, more moral and more decent than they are now. This is at best an unhelpful over-simplification. We should not, for example, underestimate the strong moral concern for many forms of human suffering or about the environment. The second danger would be to regard debate about the moral and spiritual dimension of education as a more or less harmless diversion for people of a religious inclination, so they can get a few anxieties about modern society off their chests. No, we are talking today about a very serious issue for the future of our country and which challenges us all, whatever our religious belief or philosophy of life, to own up to the values which we wish schools to impart to our children. Noble Lords will be aware that this House has a long-standing concern for the moral and spiritual dimensions of education, and was indeed responsible for inserting these as primary purposes of education on the face of the Education Act 1988. It is, I think, a good time to remind ourselves of these wider dimensions of education. We have heard a great deal lately about standards in schools, about examination results and about the requirements of a competitive economy. These are all important and of course laudable concerns. At the same time, it would be a failure if our schools were to produce people with the right skills and aptitudes to take on our economic competitors, but who cannot string two sentences together about the meaning and purpose of life or who have no idea what it means to be a good citizen and a moral person. As Cardinal Basil Hume recently put it:

"We are not engaged, surely, in producing just good performers in the market place or able technocrats. Our task is the training of good human beings, purposeful and wise, themselves with a vision of what it is to be human and the kind of society that makes that possible".

Against that background, may I pinpoint two major concerns? The first is the moral climate in which we are educating and "forming" young people. If I may use an analogy, we are reliably informed by the medical profession that there is such a thing as passive smoking. That is to say, non-smokers may, without realising it, be affected and even damaged by the lifestyle of others who happen to smoke. The same is true when it comes to the moral health of a nation. One of my most consistent concerns since I became Archbishop of Canterbury has been, in common with other religious leaders, to highlight the dangers of moral relativism and privatised morality. There is a widespread tendency to view what is good and right as a matter of private taste and individual opinion only. Under this tendency, God is banished to the realm of the private hobby and religion becomes a particular activity for those who happen to have a taste for it. Many people now find it embarrassing to talk about either religion or morality in public, and the traditional vocabulary of moral discourse - for example, virtue, sin, good, bad, right, wrong, wholesome, godly, righteous and sober - all these terms have come under acute contemporary suspicion, as though their validity has disappeared along with traditional sources of authority.

The present Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, has brilliantly described the dangers of moral relativism in his book Faith in the Future. He puts it this way:

"it is as if, in the 1950's and 1960's, without intending to, we have set a time bomb ticking which would eventually explode the moral framework into fragments. The human cost has been colossal, most visibly in terms of marriage and the family. There has been a proliferation of one-parent families, deserted wives and neglected and abused children. But the cost has been far wider in terms of the loss of authority, institutions in crisis, and what Durkheim calls "anomie", the loss of a public sense of moral order."

And yet, my Lords, I sense that many, many people of all political persuasions recoil in horror from such a relativistic world, in which there are no firm "rights" and "wrongs" except what we as individuals deem to be true for ourselves. When we see how people react to an event such as the Dunblane massacre and to the efforts of the emergency services, the school teachers and parents and all the others involved in coping with the aftermath of the tragedy, we see that the assumptions of moral relativism simply do not adequately reflect what virtually everybody actually believes. To be sure, we differ over many questions, but we also have important shared values on which our society depends. I believe (THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY) that there is now a reaction against moral relativism and there is a growing mood in favour of a more truthful and more constructive way of describing all those things that bind us together.

This takes me into my second concern: how may we strengthen the moral fibre of our nation and challenge the pervasive notion that nothing is ultimately good, noble, true or right? Like some other Members of your Lordships' House, I was privileged to watch several games of soccer in the recent European Cup. It was a marvellous tournament on which the organisers deserve our congratulations. We take it for granted that you cannot play a game of football without rules. Rules do not get in the way of the game; they make the game possible. It is strange that what we take as so obvious for games we deem unnecessary for life. That is not to trivialise what we are debating. Rules which make life worthwhile and keep relationships faithful and true are inextricably linked to the deepest things we believe about God and values which transcend us all. Our nation, steeped so deeply in the faith and values of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, has traditionally found our rules shaped by the Ten Commandments and the teachings and example of Jesus Christ. And yet we are in danger of squandering this inheritance.

Moreover, we all know that the toughest moral decisions are not always between right and wrong, but between two "rights" which pull in different directions. So we desperately need our young people to learn both the basic rules and the judgement needed with which to confront the constant dilemmas of life.

This brings me to a partnership we need to secure between all involved in the important task of nurturing and forming young people today. I want to emphasise most strongly how wrong it would be to load all our anxieties about the spiritual and moral state of society on to schools. Overall, I am told that on average children spend about one-fifth of all their time at school. We have to remember that four-fifths of their time leaves them exposed to other influences - including the media - and there is relatively little that schools can do if too many of those other influences are pulling in a different direction. In my view, most schools are far more moral places than are the places where many children find themselves outside school. The family is of primary importance. Many school teachers feel that their efforts to develop moral and spiritual teaching are not supported by families, who are giving their children quite contradictory messages. Many other players in the wider society are also very important as role models. Indeed, many young people will not take moral education from people who fail too conspicuously to live up to their own professed values. More generally, I believe that many schools feel that if society itself is too confused and reticent about its shared beliefs and values, it is difficult for schools to have the confidence that comes from feeling authorised by society to teach them to children. It has to be a partnership with families, schools and the wider community all pulling together so far as possible.

That is why I welcome very warmly the current initiative by the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, known by its initials as SCAA to consult widely about the shared values which society expects and authorises schools to transmit to children. That exercise is in itself a statement that privatised morality, reticence and embarrassment about the deeper things of life are not a satisfactory basis upon which schools can tackle the spiritual and moral dimension of education. It also assumes that society is not simply an aggregation of individuals or like-minded cliques, but that we are in fact bound together by important shared values. For example, there is a great deal of implicit agreement about the essentials of good citizenship, and about the moral goals of a good society. I also think most people will agree about the importance of a series of questions about what makes life worthwhile; how we can try to seek fulfilment and happiness; how we try to cope with pain and death. Those are moral and spiritual questions, and I personally have to reject any supposition that moral rules can sensibly be taught in isolation from spiritual questions about what life is for and what really matters. Naturally, as a Christian leader, I believe that the Christian faith and the Christian traditions, which are so deeply embedded in our culture, are enormously important sources of guidance and help in addressing all those questions. At the same time, I want to acknowledge the importance of owning up as a society to what we share in common, and that in this quest people of minority faiths and people who do not subscribe to any organised religion have a vital part to play. I am, therefore, very pleased to highlight that significant SCAA initiative and commend it to your Lordships. It is good news that the commitment and interest is there to motivate such an initiative. There are encouraging signs that the explicit incorporation of moral and spiritual goals in the 1988 Education Act is working its chemistry in a number of different areas of school life. I am pleased that the moral and spiritual development of pupils is now the subject of Ofsted's inspectors' comments. It makes it more difficult for these concerns to be marginalised. I am pleased that schools have been encouraged to produce more positive mission statements about the values they seek to embody and teach, and the involvement of parents in discussing and interpreting such statements is healthy.

If I may say so - and noble Lords may expect me to say this - I believe that it is a good sign that so many parents obviously wish their children to go to Church schools. Needless to say, I am not trying to score a cheap point here at the expense of other schools, but the fact of the widespread popularity of Church schools shows the importance which many parents attach to the ethos and to the structure of values as a positive framework in which children can be educated.

There is also exciting scope for developing the moral and spiritual dimension right across the curriculum. I am sure that noble Lords do not need reminding of the inadequacy of "ghetto-ising" the moral and spiritual dimension of education in religious education lessons. It should surely be there in the teaching of the arts, of music, of literature, and of course in the endless mysteries of science and in questions about the use of science. I believe that there is a great deal to be done here in teacher training to help give teachers greater confidence, skills and techniques in bringing out the moral and spiritual aspects of many different subjects. What we have to combat is the idea that spiritual and moral matters are add-on extras, contingent on giving overwhelming priority to more utilitarian educational goals. Having said that, I am of course also greatly concerned that the quality and status of religious education should continue to be improved. Again, there is some good news that we can report here.

I welcome the greater attention to religious education in recent years, and the excellent work which has gone into the agreed model syllabuses at national level and which has led on to fruitful engagement in these issues at the local level. I am pleased that the Department for Education and Employment has recognised that RE is a shortage subject and I hope that the recurrent plea for more resources for in- service training to help improve the quality of RE will be heard. In my view, it is good that at least 80 percent of primary schools hold a daily act of worship for every pupil, although I would of course much rather that 100 per cent, did so. It is a matter of concern that only 20 percent of secondary schools manage to do so. I sincerely hope that one result of the kind of discussions now being carried on under the auspices of SCAA, about the importance of moral and spiritual education, will in the long term help reinforce the will of governors and teachers to make the most of the rich opportunities of daily worship. The rhythm and the ritual of a simple act of worship at the start of the day will stay with a person throughout life, and will help to focus the whole of learning in a spiritual context.

In conclusion, I repeat that it would be unrealistic to load too many expectations on to schools in isolation from families and the wider community. But I believe that the fight back against moral and cultural relativism is under way and that schools have an important part to play. We all have a responsibility to support those who are seeking to explore in dialogue the shared values and beliefs which we hold ear and which we, as a society, expect our schools to transmit to our children. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.