Suella Braverman’s recent statement on making hymn singing mandatory in English schools shows just how out of touch Reform is with modern British society.
Reform UK’s proposed “patriotic curriculum,” explicitly rooted in Christianity, raises a basic question: what does it mean to be British today?
Christianity is central to Britain’s history and cultural inheritance, shaping its institutions, architecture, literature, music and traditions. Children should learn about that heritage. But teaching Christianity’s role in national life is different from requiring children to take part in Christian practice. That is what the proposal would do: every school would have to make pupils sing Christian hymns regularly, backed by law and potentially monitored by Ofsted.
The policy would not reflect modern England. In the 2021 Census, 46.2% of people in England and Wales identified as Christian, down from 59.3% in 2011, while 37.2% reported no religion. Identification also overstates practice: the British Social Attitudes survey found that only about 5% of adults were both Christian and weekly worshippers, while about 9% attended at least monthly. Britain is also religiously diverse. NatCen found that around one in three weekly worshippers attend a mosque, mandir, gurdwara, temple or synagogue rather than a church, with the share higher among younger people.
Compulsory Christian hymn-singing would therefore privilege one tradition in schools attended by pupils who may be Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, of another faith, or of none. It is fair to describe the effect as religiously discriminatory, though “racist” would be inaccurate because religions are not ethnic categories.
The proposal also rests on an outdated framework. England already requires collective worship in schools to be wholly or mainly “broadly Christian” in character, under rules dating from the Education Act 1944 and reinforced by the Education Reform Act 1988, the Education Act 1996 and 1994 guidance. That framework was designed for a far more Christian and less diverse country. In theory, schools can reflect pupils’ backgrounds or seek exemption; in practice, those safeguards are difficult to use. Unless a school strongly favours another recognised religion, there is little realistic scope to depart from the Christian default.
The right response is reform, not extension. The requirement should be repealed and replaced with a duty for assemblies to explore ethics, morality and shared values, rather than promote any one religion or worldview. There are signs of change elsewhere in the system. Following the Curriculum and Assessment Review, the Government has accepted that RE should become part of a national curriculum from 2028, instead of being left to locally agreed syllabuses. The review also noted that the legal framework for RE has barely changed in substance since 1944. That reform should extend to collective worship.
That points to the real question: not whether children should learn about Christianity or whether it deserves recognition. They should, and it does. The question is whether the state should compel children, whatever their family’s beliefs, to take part in Christian practice as an expression of patriotism. That is hard to square with the Government’s own definition of British values: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths and beliefs.
A genuinely patriotic education could teach Britain’s Christian heritage alongside its Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and other traditions, as well as the history of religious conflict and tolerance, the growth of religious freedom, and today’s increasingly secular culture. Children could understand the country’s traditions without being made to perform them.
Britain’s strength has never depended on everyone believing the same things. A confident patriotism can acknowledge a Christian past while accepting that many citizens are non-religious or belong to other faiths. Making Christianity compulsory in the name of British values risks undermining one of those values: mutual respect and tolerance. A patriotic curriculum should reflect the Britain that exists now, not recreate the assumptions of 1944.
Christianity is part of Britain’s heritage, but it is not synonymous with being British.
* Keith Creswell is a member of Woking Liberal Democrats