Visits to places of worship can be some of the most memorable experiences children have at school. They take learning out of a textbook and allow a child to walk into a mosque, synagogue, gurdwara, mandir or church, look around, ask questions and meet people whose lives or beliefs may be different from their own.
Yet increasingly, I hear about children being withdrawn from these experiences.
I have worked with schools where parents have refused permission for their children to visit places of worship, particularly mosques. On one occasion, a child was incredibly distressed. Her classmates were going somewhere together, they were excited about the visit and she simply could not understand why she was not allowed to go.
More recently, I heard about a school where parents had written to say that their child was to be withdrawn from anything involving discussion or mention of Islam.
There are two separate issues here and schools need to understand the distinction.
Parents in England have a legal right to withdraw their children from some or all religious education and from collective worship. That right should be respected and parents do not have to justify their decision. However, this does not amount to a general right to remove a child from every part of school life in which religion happens to be discussed. Religion may quite properly arise in history, literature, art, geography, citizenship and discussions about contemporary society. Islam cannot simply be erased from a child’s education at a parent’s request any more than Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or any other worldview can be erased from history and society.
Educational visits introduce another dimension because schools should give parents the opportunity to withdraw their child from a school trip, even though written consent is not required for most curriculum visits.
The more difficult question for teachers, therefore, is sometimes not whether a parent can withdraw their child but how the school manages what happens next.
We need to think about the child in the middle.
Imagine being eight, nine or ten years old and watching your friends leave school for an exciting visit while you remain behind. Imagine asking why you cannot go. What should a teacher say?
“You can’t go because your parents don’t want you visiting a mosque”?
That may be factually accurate but it potentially places a child in an impossible position, particularly if their friends subsequently ask them why they were not allowed to come. A parental decision has suddenly become something the child has to explain and possibly defend.
Schools should therefore have a thoughtful approach to withdrawal which protects both parental rights and the dignity of the child.
The first step should be conversation rather than confrontation. Where appropriate, invite the parent to talk before the visit. Explain what the visit actually involves. A visit to a mosque is not an attempt to make a child Muslim, just as visiting a cathedral does not make them Christian. Children may be looking at architecture, learning about worship, discovering why Muslims remove their shoes, seeing Arabic calligraphy or asking what happens during Friday prayers. Learning about a religion is very different from being instructed to practise it.
Schools can also remove unnecessary anxieties by being very clear beforehand. Tell parents what children will see, what they will be asked to do and, equally importantly, what they will not be required to do. Where an activity might be devotional rather than observational, explain how that will be handled.
But if, after that conversation, a parent still exercises a legitimate right of withdrawal, the school’s responsibility to the child does not disappear.
The alternative provision should be meaningful. Withdrawal should never feel like a punishment. A child should not simply be placed at the back of another classroom with worksheets because their parents have made a decision over which they themselves had no control.
Teachers should also think carefully about language. There is a considerable difference between saying, “Your mum says you’re not allowed to go to the mosque” and saying, “Different families make different choices about some school activities, so while the class is out you are going to be doing something different with Mrs Smith.” The second protects the child from carrying the burden of an adult disagreement.
And then there is the child’s voice.
Listening to a child does not mean overriding their parents’ legal rights. It means recognising that withdrawal can have an emotional and social consequence. If a child is distressed because they are being separated from their friends or because they cannot understand the decision, someone should listen to them, acknowledge their feelings and make sure they do not feel that they have done something wrong.
There is also a wider educational issue which schools should not be afraid to address.
If a parent’s concern is specifically about Islam, or Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism or another religion, a respectful conversation can sometimes uncover what sits behind that concern. It may be a theological objection. It may be anxiety about worship. It may be misinformation about what the visit involves. Occasionally, however, it may reveal stereotypes or hostility towards a particular community.
The answer is not to accuse the parent or embark upon an ideological battle at the school gates. Nor should schools use safeguarding procedures simply because a parent holds views with which staff disagree. But neither should schools allow prejudice to dictate what the rest of the school learns.
Education necessarily introduces children to people, histories, beliefs and ideas beyond those they encounter at home.
That is particularly important in a diverse society. A child does not have to believe what another person believes in order to understand them. Indeed, learning to encounter difference confidently, respectfully and critically is one of the things education should equip children to do.
Places of worship can be extraordinarily good places in which to begin that learning. A mosque stops being an unfamiliar building glimpsed through a car window. A synagogue ceases to be something encountered only in a textbook. A gurdwara becomes a real place filled with real people. Children discover that they can walk into somebody else’s sacred space, behave respectfully, ask questions and walk out again still entirely themselves.
That is not indoctrination.
It is education.
So perhaps the question for schools is not simply, “Does this parent have the right to withdraw their child?”
Sometimes they do.
The better questions are: Have we explained what we are actually teaching? Have we listened respectfully to the parent’s concerns? Have we heard the child’s voice? Have we protected that child from embarrassment or isolation? Have we provided meaningful alternative learning? And have we continued to fulfil our responsibility to prepare every child for life alongside people who may believe, worship, think and live differently from them?
Parental rights matter.
But so does the experience of the child who watches the coach leave without them.
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