Education Bill

My Lords, I am very pleased that I gave way to the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths. It was a humane contribution to a discussion that was otherwise beginning to polarise. I do not have interests to declare of the kind that others have declared. I am not a card-carrying member of any secular society or indeed of any church or religion. I suppose that my interest, if I have one, is that I was once a professor of philosophy of religion. In that context, I learnt that there are all sorts of philosophies, and on the whole the one that I liked best was that of David Hume, who taught me a bit of pragmatism. For example, I have discovered pragmatically that if you want a seat that allows you to take part at Question Time and you are a Cross-Bencher, you have little choice but to attend worship in the main Chamber. It is between me and my conscience what I am thinking when all that is going on, although I am not quite as clear in my mind as perhaps some of my noble friends are. In this context, the reality—and this has been happening for a number of years—is that in many schools assembly is withering on the vine. In other schools, the assembly is very important because they have either a statutory or at least a common religious character that is accepted in the community. There, the assembly fits very well into the day’s activities and, by and large, the parents respect it. I reiterate an additional point that the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, drew out. If you were to replace assembly completely by fiat and say that assemblies must not take place, that would be a rational position that I would understand, although I would not share it. However, if you do that, you need properly to sort out the alternative. The one thing that assembly does is to engage the emotions of young people, which, sadly, is what we have failed to do with much of the curriculum. There are a variety of alternative ways of engaging the emotions of young people and, for some, religious worship in the community is one. Therefore, I would be very reluctant to get my tanks lined up and say, ““Shoot it out of the Bill now””. If, as a matter of evolution, assembly is withering on the vine—which, I believe, is the reality—alternatives will, in an evolutionary way, begin to emerge, and that would seem a wholly satisfactory way of changing the situation in our schools. However, without further discussion and without a further clear picture of the alternative, I would not want to support the amendment.