It also sets out circumstances under which a local SACRE can grant a formal determination that an individual school can provide alternatives to the "broadly Christian" collective worship arrangements required by the legislation.
[5] When the head of Ofsted announced that it would no longer inspect the provision of collective worship in 2004, he stated that 76% of secondary schools were not compliant with the law.
[9] Nigel Genders, the Church of England's Chief Education Officer stated that:[10] "We live at a time when children feel besieged by social media, weighed down by pressure and report poor mental health.
[11] Elizabeth Oldfield, the director of the Theos Think Tank (owned by the Bible Society) has opined that scrubbing religion from the public square is far from neutral.
[11] The Catholic Education Service teaches that:[12] Collective worship offers all schools the chance to explore and understand the values at the heart of their ethos.
If it is a part of a school’s routine, collective worship provides a shared language of values to build a close-knit cohesive community.
[15] In 2014 a leading education spokesperson for the Church of England, Bishop Pritchard, publicly expressed a view that the term collective worship should be re-framed as "spiritual reflection" to make it, in his eyes, "more honest, and more in tune with contemporary culture.
"[16] The Liberal Democrats have adopted a policy to make collective worship in non-religious schools optional rather than compulsory,[17] and a change in the law has also been called for by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.