Stop state funding of faith schools

This petition demands that the government stops the state-funding of all faith schools.

The tax collected from the public should not be spent in funding faith schools that may be contrary to the religious or atheist beliefs of those from whom the tax was collected.

Where religion is taught, it is the right of every pupil to learn of all mainstream religions and atheist belief, without bias, pressure and influence, in accordance with Article 9 of the Human Rights Convention 1998. No child should be forced to participate in any religious practise.

This petition is for the right of a pupil to learn of a variety of religions and choose or practise a religion if he/she likes without the objection of the school.
This is not a petition against religious education but against state-funded faith schools, which indoctrinate children in a particular religion.

To quote Richard Dawkins;

"There are nearly 7,000 state-funded faith schools in England. These schools have many special privileges – they can select pupils on the basis of parents’ religious observance, discriminate on religious grounds in the employment of teachers, and teach their own RE syllabus, free of Ofsted supervision and free of any National Curriculum. By the way, RE is the only subject (together with religiously ‘sensitive’ subjects like Sex Education) for which there is no National Curriculum.

Some faith schools, as I discovered while making my recent television documentary, use their state-subsidized freedoms to undermine the teaching of science. It should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a state-funded school whose science teachers believe the world is less than 10,000 years old, yet that is what I found. And at a school that is little short of a flagship for state-funded Muslim education, I found the pupils regurgitating the Koranic claim that salt and fresh water do not mix. Once again, with the blessing of the teachers, a Holy Book takes unquestioned precedence over scientific evidence – as the pupils could have discovered for themselves in a trivially easy experiment."

Children have the right of free choice to follow whichever religion they choose, without pressure and coersion, and to make this choice at whatever point in their life they are informed and mature enough to do so.