Suella Braverman promises ‘consequences’ if pupils don’t sing Christian hymns

Reform UK has said schools will face ‘consequences’ if they fail to make pupils regularly sing hymns and the national anthem under a Reform government. The party’s education spokesperson, Suella Braverman, told Schools Week after her conference speech on Saturday that the requirement ‘will be in law, in guidance’, would apply to ‘every school’ up to and including sixth formers, and would be policed through Ofsted inspections and by parents reporting their children’s schools to the party .

Asked whether inspectors would check for compliance, she said: ‘We will find out if schools are breaking the law and there will be consequences.’ She would not say how often children would have to sing, only that it must be ‘regular’ enough for pupils to know the anthem by heart.

Humanists UK, which has campaigned for decades to replace compulsory worship in schools with inclusive assemblies, said the pledge would take the law in precisely the wrong direction.

Compulsory worship is already the law, and most schools ignore it

England and Wales are almost alone in the democratic world in requiring every state school without a religious character to hold a daily act of ‘broadly Christian’ collective worship. The 1944 law is widely disregarded and Ofsted stopped inspecting it years ago because head teachers, teachers, and parents in a country where most young people have no religion do not see why children should be made to pray. Despite this, it remains a legal requirement and the UK Government is ‘committed’ to retaining it. 

In 2016, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child told the UK to repeal the requirement outright. In 2019 humanist parents Lee and Lizanne Harris favourably settled a legal case against a school that had made their children sit through evangelical assemblies, securing alternative arrangements. In 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled in the Northern Ireland case JR87 that exclusively Christian religious education and collective worship amounted to ‘indoctrination’. While a Northern Ireland case, it has significant implications for collective worship for England and Wales. This February, peers from the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group proposed a Bill to replace worship in schools with no religious character with inclusive assemblies. 

In response to the Supreme Court ruling, the UK Government further conceded that its 32-year-old guidance on the subject would have to be rewritten, as subsequently did the Welsh Government.

Humanists UK Policy and Campaigns Manager Lewis Young  said:

‘The Supreme Court has ruled that forced Christian worship in schools amounts to indoctrination, and the UN has said it breaches children’s rights. The sensible course, which peers of all parties have been urging on the Government this year, is to replace daily worship with inclusive assemblies that every child can take part in. Threatening schools with consequences for not singing hymns is a step in the opposite direction, and one that most parents will not thank any government for.’