Sacred Freedoms and Subtle Restrictions : The FACTs of religion’s presence in English state education

Hobson, Charlotte (2025) Sacred Freedoms and Subtle Restrictions : The FACTs of religion’s presence in English state education. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Britain’s religious landscape has changed radically over the last century. The population here is now more pluralistic and nonreligious than ever before, with religion and spirituality increasingly perceived through neo-liberal frameworks as highly individualised, privatised, and even marketized affairs. However, the English education system does not reflect this new reality – all state-funded schools must lead pupils in daily Christian worship, prioritise teaching about Christian beliefs over other worldviews in RE, and most faith schools, if oversubscribed, are able to religiously discriminate against applicants when allocating school places. None of this aligns with the neoliberal emphasis on freedom of choice and personal agency thought to be prominent in wider British society. Using information gathered from the websites of nationally representative samples of English state schools, the present thesis investigates this apparent contradiction. I outline how schools claim to involve religion in collective worship, RE, school values, and, where relevant, faith-related admissions criteria, and analyse whether and how individual freedoms are considered and navigated here. This not only offers valuable insights into how schools appear to engage with religion – something we currently lack large-scale research into – but also sheds light on broader societal attitudes towards religion in contemporary Britain. My findings, summarised in the acronym “FACT,” indicate that while schools rarely explicitly state their commitment to protecting individual religious choice and agency (F is for Free Choice), most implicitly indicate this (A is for Ambiguity, and C is for Contrasting Approaches) in describing these elements of school life. However, any attempts to protect religious freedoms are also always subject to limitations (T is for Tacit Restrictions) and therefore we should be cautious of oversimplifying the influence of individualism on modern perceptions of and interactions with religion, or indeed of overlooking simultaneously influential collectivistic ideals.