There is no such thing as a neutral education -every school’s values and underpinning assumptions will be implicit or explicit, but they will always be there, writes the CofE’s Chief Education Officer, Rev Nigel Genders, in a blog published this morning from a speech delivered to the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life weekend seminar on Religion and Belief in Education and Training. 

“The debate about schools with a religious character can give the impression that those who are opposed think that there is some ideal neutral narrative for education and that what they like to call ‘faith schools’ offer a distortion of that neutrality by adding elements on to it or discriminating in specific ways. 

But there are underlying assumptions of what we think our education system is for, or what we mean by high performance or success in education, that often go unchallenged, but are not neutral positions.”

He added: “In this wider debate about the role of religion in British society, it needs to be understood that England has an Established Church and that, whilst we are a liberal democracy, we are not a secular democracy. We believe that this distinction is one that is valued strongly by many faith communities apart from Christians. “Secular” is not the same as “neutral” – secularism is itself a belief position. Part of the role of the Church of England as the Established Church is (as Her Majesty the Queen put it recently) to secure and defend the contribution of all the faith communities to the life of the public square.”