In England, Atheists Win Battle for Secular Assemblies in Church-Owned School
By Hemant Mehta, November 20, 2019

Two parents who fought the Church of England over a mandatory religious worship session in their local school have come out victorious.

The saga began in 2015, when Lee Harris and his wife Lizanne found out their kids’ public school was being taken over by the Oxford Diocesan Schools Trust (ODST). Instead of merely offering generic religion classes (which are legal there), the new assemblies were explicitly Christian.

The Harrises asked for their children to be removed from those assemblies, as is their right, but the school didn’t offer any decent alternative. It’s as if they took the kids who didn’t want to be there and just shoved them in a separate room until it was all over.

The Harrises eventually turned to the school’s governors with a few simple requests. They wanted the school to “justify its current policy of collective worship” and stop having the local church run assemblies. They wanted teachers to run those events instead. They also asked for the school to “maintain a community school ethos, as opposed to a faith-based ethos” and not alienate kids who didn’t want to participate.

The governors rejected those requests.

But in July, the pressure on the school stepped up after the High Court agreed to hear this case, similar to a U.S. District Court allowing a case to proceed.

And now, a week before the case was scheduled to go to court, the ODST has agreed to all of the Harrises’ requests.