Your support enables Humanists UK to maintain its focused campaign challenging faith schools.

Currently, we employ the sole campaigner in the UK exclusively dedicated to advocating for families’ rights, opposing the increase of discriminatory faith schools, and countering the spread of religious bias, evangelism, and partisanship in education. By donating, you will help us continue this crucial work towards a more inclusive education system.

What we want to see is a fair and equal education for everyone, free from discrimination.

Our vision is an education system that offers fairness and equality to all, free from discrimination, religious bias, and unlawful practices. This year, our efforts have ranged from advocating for a change in the law to allow legal action against unregistered religious institutions masquerading as schools, to challenging the increasing presence of religious evangelism in education.

While media attention has been focused on issues like Covid, academy conversions, student absenteeism, and deteriorating school infrastructure for over a decade, the significant problems associated with faith schools have been largely overlooked. These issues have been allowed to escalate, with only a small number of voices speaking out against them. Our campaign aims to bring these concerns back into the spotlight and work towards meaningful change in our education system.

We are making real strides.

This year we have:

• Secured commitments from the new Government in the King’s Speech to legislate to shut down illegal schools, to review the RE curriculum, and to look at school admissions.

• Spearheaded a successful community-driven campaign to preserve the only maintained primary school in a Southwark ward, preventing its replacement with a Church of England institution.

• Secured unprecedented humanist representation on local Religious Education councils following our landmark High Court victory in 2023.

• Led a coalition of educationalists, faith leaders, and politicians in successfully opposing the Conservative Government's proposal to remove the 50% 'faith cap' on admissions for new and existing free faith schools.

• Supported the establishment of Parents for Inclusive Education in Northern Ireland, whose groundbreaking report revealed that 99.9% of 11,522 external visits to Northern Ireland primary schools in 2022/23 were conducted by Christian groups.

• Supported dozens of parents with issues around school admissions, biased RE, and collective worship, with a very good success rate.

We are going to:

• Work on the new Children’s Welfare Bill to see illegal schools shut once and for all.

• Leverage the 2024 King's Speech proposal to make school admissions ‘account for the needs of communities’ as a catalyst for creating a unified admissions system, ensuring all state-funded schools are accessible to children of all backgrounds and beliefs.

• Conduct and disseminate high-quality research exposing discriminatory practices in state-funded faith schools, particularly those affecting vulnerable children.

• Collaborate with parents and teachers to increase public awareness of faith school discrimination, building momentum for legislative change.

• As part of the curriculum review, advocate for comprehensive curriculum reform to ensure all children receive a balanced religious education that includes humanism, as well as mandatory, evidence-based relationships and sex education free from religious exemptions.

You can help us to:

Respond rapidly: We’re committed to exposing harmful educational practices and biased policies in the media, keeping these issues at the forefront.

Help non-religious families: Your contributions enable us to connect with more communities, support more families, and influence more decision-makers.

Shape public debate: The issues around faith schools can be politically awkward for some MPs to deal with, but more than that, most people just aren’t very aware of how bad the situation really is. It’s a major focus for us to improve the reach and impact of the cold, hard facts about faith schools.

Reform RE: We want to make sure every child in every part of the UK gets to learn about all the world religions, plus humanism and non-religious approaches to life, in an unbiased way.

End compulsory worship: Christian worship is compulsory in assemblies in state schools – not just faith schools, but all ‘community’ schools too. The UN has called for this to end, and we’re pushing to see it happen.

End the postcode lottery for non-religious families: In some areas, most schools are faith schools, even if most parents are non-religious – Liverpool is just one example. Discriminatory admissions policies mean sometimes parents have to drive miles to get to a school. Other times, they’re forced to attend a faith school.

Stop the gaslighting of parents: Many parents are forced to send their children to a religious school against their wishes. Once there, any attempt to address absurdities in those schools, including homophobic or anti-choice education, is met with ‘Well, you chose to send your child there.’ We need root and branch reform.

We want to see a high-quality education system where no child, no parent, and no teacher faces discrimination due to their religion or belief, and where everyone receives the same standard of unbiased education. Please, help us secure that today. Donate generously to our campaign so it can continue.

Thank you.