About us

No More Faith Schools is a national campaign dedicated to bringing about an end to state funded faith schools. We help people challenge new faith schools, particularly where they have discriminatory admissions rules and where there are proposals for inclusive alternatives.

The campaign was launched by the National Secular Society to give a clear voice to the majority of people who are opposed to state funded faith schools; people and organisations of all different political and religious/non-religious beliefs.

Parents who want to be able to send their child to their local school without preaching or discrimination. Teachers who want to apply for jobs they're qualified for regardless of their faith/belief. People of all different walks of life who oppose the discrimination and division wrought by faith schools. This campaign helps these people make their voices heard.

This campaign is a platform for everyone who wants to see an inclusive education system, free from religious control.

Faith schools have a negative impact on social cohesion, foster segregation of children on social, ethnic and religious lines, and undermine choice and equality. They also enable religious groups to use public money to evangelise children.

If you think children from all faith and belief backgrounds should be educated together and allowed to develop their own beliefs independently, join us in saying No More Faith Schools.

Together we can build an inclusive education system today, to ensure an inclusive society tomorrow.

We work by:

  1. Educating the public, policy makers and politicians on issues related to faith schools
  2. Promoting national and local activism to oppose faith schools
  3. Highlighting the stories of real people affected by faith schools and a lack of inclusive schools

The campaign was launched and coordinated by the National Secular Society, which campaigns for the separation of religion and state and equal respect for everyone's human rights, so no one is either advantaged or disadvantaged because of their beliefs.

State-sponsored superstition should have no place in the education of children, who should be left to make up their own minds on the basis of the evidence they see around them. Education should inspire rational thought and display the pleasures of deep understanding; it should not propagate the social poison of divisive dogma.

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Peter Atkins, Writer and former Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford

The deeply flawed assumption that children 'belong' to their parents' chosen belief system is an integral part of the problem that constrains and ultimately harms children. Schools should be a communal, civil space, a melting pot for all children to learn freely together and to have a shared understanding, development and appreciation of the human values that bind us together. Faith schools do precisely the opposite, in that they limit children's education and are a living, breathing example of the sectarianism that divides society. Faith schools by their very nature frustrate the implementation of the UN convention on the rights of the child to support every child to learn freely and ultimately to be free to hold their own personal beliefs and to live a life according to their own values. School may be the only environment where children from deeply religious households might start to learn about other forms of belief and other ways of living than those espoused by their parents. LGBTQIA children are particularly at risk of isolation, bullying and a deep sense of exclusion within a heteronormative religious school environment. Faith schools celebrate their own limited vision and are set up precisely so as to close off children's avenues. In doing so, they actively prevent children from discovering communities which may often be far more suited to the individual child and the adult they will become. When my children were younger, our family was initially welcomed and then bullied out of a (faith) school which was incredibly the only available local school claiming to be able to accommodate a child from a non-faith background. What should have been a simple degree of inclusivity in the 21st century proved incompatible with the faith school ethos which venerates belief in one particular religion above all else and requires school governors to promote the particular faith of the school often at the expense of simple human kindness. Their vision of accommodation was to leave a six-year-old child alone in a room whilst the rest of the school prayed, to exclude her from a (non-religious) school play and then to harass and blame the parents when we raised concerns. Faith schools and worship in a school environment are damaging to many children, including some of those who later feel that it did them no harm; faith schools normalise the harmful practice of public, enforced indoctrination. The only time that schoolchildren should encounter worship during the school day should be on a field trip to learn about the many and varied belief systems, none of which would be constrained by ending the damaging system of faith schools.

Antony, from SHREWSBURY

Religious segregation causes so much conflict in the world, that it is obvious that children should learn toleration by keeping religion out of schools.

Patr, from CARDIFF

This campaign is coordinated by the National Secular Society. The NSS works for the separation of religion and state and equal respect for everyone's human rights so that no one is either advantaged or disadvantaged on account of their beliefs.