Fiona Bruce MP explains why Government proposals to require registration
of ‘out-of-school education settings’ are disproportionate, will be
ineffective, pose a serious threat to free speech, and must be stopped
The Government
has announced plans which mean that many Sunday schools, youth clubs and other
young peoples’ groups will have to register with Ofsted and may be inspected to
see if their teaching fits with the Government’s ‘British Values’. This is
chilling, and makes a serious and concerning change in the relationship between
people of faith and the state; effectively, the state could be deciding what
Christians, and those of other religions, can and can’t teach, and what parts
of the Bible are ‘undesirable’ and can’t be taught to children.
This would wrong
– and I believe illegal, under the UK’s human rights obligations. In fact, I
think that checking if Christian beliefs match up with some Government list of
‘British Values’ is profoundly un-British! Freedom of speech, conscience and
belief have been preciously won in our country – and should be equally keenly
preserved.
This is all part
of the Government’s response to radical extremism. They are rightly concerned
about young people being radicalized, and encouraged to go off to fight in
Syria or even to commit atrocities in the UK. I completely support the
Government’s desire to take very strong action on this. It is a matter of
safety for every one of us. But these proposals are a sledgehammer to crack a
nut. Anyone can see that putting Ofsted inspectors in a Sunday school and
marking Christian teaching against a list of values written by civil servants
isn’t going to help anyone be safer, but what it will do is marginalise, even
criminalise, people of good faith, and potentially inhibit free debate on key
issues such as marriage, creationism and even salvation. To top it all, the
very organisations the Government seeks to target – extremist groups – are
hardly going to voluntarily register with Ofsted and open themselves up for
inspection! At the same time, thousands of law-abiding, salt of the earth
groups doing positive work with young people could be involved in the
additional bureaucracy of registering – and many volunteers may be deterred
from continuing to volunteer at all.
The Government
needs to scrap these proposals and get on with the essential task, using its
already extensive powers, of supporting intelligence services in rooting out
extremist and terrorist groups.
MPs are starting
to understand the seriousness of this. Recently, a packed debate in Parliament
saw MPs from four different parties united in opposition to the Government’s
proposals. Please write to your MP objecting to the proposals and asking that
they be abandoned – it could make a huge difference.
