ABSTRACT
It is now some thirty years since the 1944 Education Act legislated that in every maintained school there should be religious instruction and a daily act of collective worship. This legislation reflected not only general agreement about the value of religious education itself but also the conviction of many that the moral standards of the nation could best be secured by these means. Thirty years later we are becoming deeply dissatisfied with the moral education our schools give, even amongst Christians there is a growing number who think moral education should be divorced from religious education, and compulsory religious instruction and worship seem to grow yearly less justifiable in a religiously open society.
