Supreme Court rules exclusively Christian RE in NI is ‘indoctrination’

The Supreme Court has unanimously ruled in favour of a non-religious father and his child that the exclusively Christian teaching of Religious Education (RE) and collective worship in Northern Ireland are ‘indoctrination’. This is therefore discriminatory under human rights law. This ruling will have wide-ranging implications for the teaching of RE in Northern Ireland and for collective worship across the United Kingdom.

The case is known as JR87, and the original judgment in the High Court of Northern Ireland in 2022 was that ‘religious education and collective worship are not conveyed in an objective, critical, or pluralistic manner in Northern Ireland [schools].’ However, the Northern Ireland Department of Education appealed at the Court of Appeal last October. It ruled that while the RE curriculum was not objective, critical, or pluralistic, this was not sufficient to conclude there had been a breach of human rights law as this didn’t amount to indoctrination. The Court also ruled that the right to withdraw was not stigmatising. Northern Ireland Humanists intervened in the case.

The father and child appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, which has now ruled that a curriculum not being ‘objective, critical, or pluralistic’ and its being ‘indoctrinating’ are ‘two sides of the same coin’. The Court also ruled that the right of withdrawal is clearly stigmatising in a context where no other children are withdrawn. Parents having a ‘reasonable apprehension’ of such stigma is ‘sufficient’ enough to mean they do not have to have actually withdrawn their children, and found that stigma does indeed occur.

RE curriculum must be objective, critical, and pluralistic

The ruling requires that RE curricula should not proselytise or indoctrinate, and that parental right of withdrawal alone from RE and collective worship is not a sufficient justification for having a non-objective, uncritical, or non-pluralistic syllabus.

RE in Northern Ireland is almost entirely Christian, with only one module on ‘World Faiths’ at secondary school level. The core syllabus was written by the four big churches and starts with ‘LEARNING OBJECTIVE 1: THE REVELATION OF GOD’.

Unlike RE in the rest of the UK, there is rarely inclusion of humanism, despite the growing population of non-religious people in NI, particularly among younger people. Northern Ireland Humanists has argued that RE and school assemblies should reflect the diverse beliefs of the population, both religious and humanist.

Mandatory Christian collective worship ruled discriminatory

Northern Ireland Humanists’ parent organisation Humanists UK has campaigned for over a decade to repeal the mandatory Christian collective worship requirement across all four nations of the UK. Parental withdrawal is not a sufficient solution to enforcing Christian worship on students, as it requires students being pulled out of important communal activities like other parts of school assemblies and often left with little alternative. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has also called for the nations of the UK to allow students under the age of 16 to withdraw from collective worship without the need for parental consent.

The peculiar case of the UK being the only sovereign country to enforce mandatory Christian worship on students now has to be reexamined.

Northern Ireland Humanists Coordinator Boyd Sleator commented: 

‘This judgment is a historic win for the rights of children in Northern Ireland. The Supreme Court has concluded that the RE syllabus is “indoctrination” and the right to withdraw from RE and mandatory collective worship is insufficient to deal with this.

‘This ruling should also prompt the governments in England, Scotland, and Wales to revisit the requirement for mandatory collective worship. We hope it is now repealed.’