The first meeting of the year of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group (APPHG) yesterday focused on education issues, including the government’s current curriculum review and the Education Bill. The BHA provides the secretariat to the APPHG, which has over 100 MPs and Peers as members from across parties.
Martin Johnson, deputy General Secretary of ATL, the education union, addressed the meeting, speaking about his concerns regarding the Bill and on religious discrimination in particular. Mr Johnson said that he believed abolishing admissions forums, as the Education Bill proposes, ‘would be a backward step’, especially when taken with the reduced powers for the Schools’ Adjudicator. He said there was plenty of evidence on admissions and the tendency in ‘faith’ schools for poor practice. Mr Johnson described how a section of the Bill will allow wide and new religious discrimination against all teachers in schools with a religious character ‘converting’ to Academy status, would have very negative implications As a result, Mr Johnson believes many members of his union will be simply precluded from applying for a large number of teaching posts in many schools.
Following discussion on the Bill, APPHG Vice Chair Dr Julian Huppert MP, spoke on the threat of creationism in schools and of the need to ensure the proper teaching of evolution in all schools. Dr Huppert said that as one of the few scientists in the House of Commons, he had been quite shocked by the views since he had begun in Parliament. He said that there were a number of pro-creationist MPs, as well as those forwarding agendas which have no basis in evidence, including homeopathy and astrology. Dr Huppert said that it was also clear that there were a number of groups operating in Westminster with very strong agendas, and that MPs and others needed to be vigilant to that. Dr Huppert explained that there were some mechanisms in place to prevent schools being established which are obviously going to break the rules, such as a recent bid by a group which said that they would teach evolution – but teach that it is wrong. The real threat, he said, comes from those schools and teachers which are not so obvious in their agendas, and so far harder to police, inspect and expose.
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For more information about the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, see here https://humanists.uk/about/apphg, or contact Naomi Phillips naomi@humanists.uk on 020 7079 3585.
See here how you can take action and ask your MP to sign EDM 243 on Science Education in Schools, tabled by Julian Huppert MP, calling for the Government ‘to ensure that all schools teach and promote science and the scientific method and to include the theory of evolution in the science curriculum at both primary and secondary level’
The BHA provides the Secretariat for the APPHG but it is not affiliated to, or part of, the BHA.
The British Humanist Association is the national charity working on behalf of ethically concerned, non-religious people in the UK. It is the largest organisation in the UK campaigning for an end to religious privilege and to discrimination based on religion or belief, and for a secular state.
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