Last week we received a letter from our daughter’s school telling us that we are no longer allowed to speak to her teacher nor her head-teacher except on matters relating to our daughter’s health or safety. There are no other teachers in her small school. We stand accused of unreasonable behaviour and they have said that they are consulting with their lawyers regarding future communication with us. They have omitted to tell us what our unreasonable behaviour is.
You might think that we have been threatening or insulting. We haven’t. Nor have we been disturbing them with frequent conversations and interruptions. We believe that our ‘crime’ has been to discuss aspects of religious worship in the school with the head teacher. The same head teacher who told me a few months ago in our penultimate conversation on the subject that she really respected my position. This was after they messed up by allocating our daughter a part in an evangelical nativity play. My protests resulted in meetings with the chair of governors and the RE adviser for the county and one with the head.
Last Wednesday we found out that our daughter was rehearsing for a role in the school harvest festival play. We had previously been asked to remove her from the harvest festival as they had decided that it would be a christian service. They had made no mention of the play. The following day I asked to meet with the head to clarify and to confirm that they really wouldn’t be so cruel as to involve a 6 year old child in preparations for a show that, in all good faith (excuse the pun) they knew she would not be taking part in. They really would.
I told the head what I thought of that. She told me that she was ‘frankly tired and exhausted of all these meetings’ (2 in 10 months is a lot, I have to admit especially when my daughter is excluded every single day from non-statutory religious worship such as mealtimes). She told me to look around at other schools or home education. The next day we received our gagging order from the chair of the curriculum committee.
The current situation is that we are allowed to drop a letter off in the staff office for the attention of ccc and not allowed to speak to the teachers. My daughter’s form teacher seems unaware as she has tried to engage me in conversation. Without freedom of speech, speech becomes worthless so I say nothing, literally. It is humiliating to walk past these people but I’m not sure who’s the most humiliated. Fascinatingly, though I can’t speak to the teachers, they let me take my voluntary after-school chess club this week including 2 of ccc’s children. I must be a terribly disruptive element.
The reason we’re at this school is that we scouted round 5 local ones and this was the only one, CofE or not, that appeared to respect our views.
If all of us who felt the same way made ourselves similarly heard, made the schools get ‘tired and exhausted’ of all these meetings they don’t want to have, pushed for the basic right of our children not to be excluded from communal events, maybe this hypocritical charade will stop. Maybe we’ll start to see an end to prejudice masquerading as morality.
Our daughter in all this is fabulous, though stressed at the silencing of her parents and the prospect of leaving her little school. Her understanding is humbling. Maybe it has something to do with her ability to reason rather than pray to some decontextualised god, something the current laws and their interpretation do their best to stamp out.
Letter to NSS from Antony Lempert (October 2006)