ABSTRACT
An editorial in the Journal of Beliefs & Values, by its editor Professor Stephen Parker, raised the issue of the historic right of parents to withdraw their children from collective worship and religious education in schools in England. A ‘conscience clause,’ whereby parents can exercise a right to withdraw their children from ‘religious instruction,’ was introduced on a voluntary basis in some schools in the early decades of the nineteenth century to protect pupils from receiving denominational instruction with which their parents disagreed. This chapter considers an important piece of relevant and empirical research, Religious Education and the Right of Withdrawal, conducted under the aegis of Liverpool Hope University, by David Lundie. In setting the scene, Lundie notes that the original right of withdrawal was intended to protect the rights of parents from non-religious and non-Christian minorities to raise their children according to their own beliefs.
