The Right to Divide report recommends that faith schools should:
* End selection on the basis of faith
* Give children a greater say in how the school is run
* Make broad-based RE lessons part of the national curriculum
* Do better at serving the most disadvantaged
* Stop privileging religious identity over those of gender, ethnicity, age, ability or sexual orientation

But it also says that faith should continue to play an important role in the education system.

It places the current system of mixed religious and community provision within its historical context (religious organisations have long been involved in education) and also in the context of competing New Labour policy objectives.

For while separate religious schools have seemed to help towards the goal of choice and diversity, they have done so at the expense of disadvantaged students, children’s rights, respect for other identities such as gender and sexual orientation and community cohesion.

As Accord only launched at the start of September, we did not exist at the time that the research for Right to Divide was being conducted, although Accord members such as the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the British Humanist Association were consulted. So too were religious organisations, teachers and parents at faith schools.

What this report and, we hope, the launch of Accord show is that there is a new public mood that recognises the need to tackle exemptions from equality laws for religious state schools. More importantly, perhaps, we are also finding that the public media and politicians are often very receptive to the idea that you don’t have to be anti-religious to realise that the current system does not work.

Over the coming weeks and months Accord will continue to argue that children from different backgrounds are best educated together and that it is in the benefit of pupils and society for schools to teach about the full range of religious and non religious beliefs. It is not going to be easy and we need as much help as we can get, so if you think things must change please sign up to support Accord.