THE BISHOP OF SALISBURYpresented a Bill to provide for greater freedom for religious instruction in Board schools. He said this was an important measure, inasmuch as there were in England, to which the Bill referred, alone 4,747 Board Schools educating about 1,500,000 children. Many of them gave no religious instruction whatever. Statistics were very difficult to obtain, as constant confusion arose between the term School Boards and Board schools, but at least 91 Boards would not allow any religious instruction to be given. Many again allowed a certain amount of Bible reading without note or comment, while others permitted the use of prayers and hymns without any Bible reading; but, altogether, a considerable proportion of these schools gave practically no religious instruction of any kind. Others gave a certain kind of teaching after the method of the London and Manchester School Boards, which might be in some cases very good as far as it went, but was very inadequate to meet the requirements of parents really in earnest as to the future religious belief of their children. This Bill was meant to give greater security to parents of children attending the public elementary schools provided by School Boards that their children should receive religious instruction at the hands of persons in whom they had confidence. 162 The method of carrying out that object provided by the Bill was very simple, and one which the circumstances of this country seemed to call for. If our country were like Germany, possessing only four or five religious confessions, it would be easy enough to deal with this question; but, in fact, we had nearly one religious denomination for every day in the year, and, therefore, the only way of dealing with the subject at all satisfactorily as between these different denominations was to allow the parents of a sufficient number of children to apply for separate religious instruction, and to put upon the School Boards and the Department together the duty of seeing that that did not become too great a strain upon the staff and management, and that the work was not caused to be done inefficiently. The persons engaged in doing it were, according to the Bill, to be nominated by the parents, but they might be, and in most cases probably would be, already members of the school staff. The result would be to very much then what was good in the present system of religious teaching in Board schools, and where it was bad, or inefficient, to enable the deficiency to be easily remedied.
Bill to provide for greater freedom of religious instruction in Board schools—Presented (The Lord Bishop of Salisbury); read l a ; and to be printed, (No. 52.)