Private Christian schools suing Government over VAT policy

A group of Christian schools, parents, and pupils are suing the UK Government at the High Court over the new policy for private schools in England to pay VAT, the Times reports. The fast-tracked judicial review will assess the claim that paying VAT is a breach of their human right to freedom of religion or belief.

The legal team claim that for the Christian parents the ‘heavy secularisation of state schools, and even Church of England schools, mean that children would not be taught in line with the family’s Christian beliefs’.

However, this is incorrect. All children in England have a right to access a state-funded school. Schools with no religious character, which don’t approach things from a particular religious perspective already meet parents’ human right to have their religious and philosophical convictions respected in the education of their children. This is well-established in case law around the European Convention on Human Rights. Indeed the Equality and Human Rights Commission states the right to education ‘does not require the government to provide or subsidise any specific type of education.’

The Government rejected the call for a faith school carve-out on its VAT plans for private schools in October. Humanists UK supports the position that all schools should be treated the same in law, and welcomes the Government defending this position in the courts.

A third of schools in England are religious, with the majority of these being Christian. The claim that there is a ‘heavy secularisation of state schools’ is also therefore clearly incorrect because of the presence of faith schools. It is more often the case that many schools in England impose religious beliefs or discriminatory barriers on non-religious families, including through school admissions and employment laws, and a legal requirement for schools of no religious character to hold mandatory acts of daily Christian worship.

Humanists UK’s Education Campaigns Manager Kieran Aldred commented:

‘This legal challenge is faulty in principle and fact. All children, and their parents, have the same right to education that is respectful of their religious and philosophical convictions in all schools. There should be no discriminatory exemptions made in the Government’s private schools VAT policy to financially privilege schools of a religious character.’