Although state “faith schools” will automatically and permanently become religious academies, state community schools will not automatically become secular academies and may even acquire a religious sponsor and become religious academies. What’s good for the goose, however, is apparently not good for the gander. Inclusive community schools, free of religious discrimination, privilege or management, which should be the norm, could easily become the exception.

Once a state “faith school” has become a religious academy, it does not need to follow the national curriculum and we know from experience that there are curriculum and teaching concerns specific to existing academy schools with religious sponsors. Since 2002, the teaching of creationism, narrow religious ideologies and inferior sex education has been a constant public concern in connection with religious academies. The present bill removes at a stroke what protections do exist in the national curriculum against such doctrinaire and divisive practises and leaves a thousand questions hanging. Up until now, the religious schools that will become academies have been obliged to teach human sexual reproduction in biology lessons, and the variation over time of species in biology – will they all necessarily do so if they are not so obliged? Nothing in the new, deregulated system proposed by this bill would prohibit abstinence-based relationships education, or the teaching of creationism as a valid alternative to evolution, or the literal truth of a personal god. And – for the first time – it will permit even primary schools to become state-funded religious academies.

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jun/11/religion-academies-bill-education