Christian parents are receiving an increasingly clear message from the state. They must accept an education system moving further from biblical truth and traditional Christian beliefs, or pay an additional tax to escape its secular indoctrination. This is evident in proposed changes to Religious Education across the UK, increased regulation of home education, and VAT imposed on independent-school fees, which is about to be challenged in the UK Supreme Court.
Across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the place of Christianity within education is being reconsidered, diluted or reframed. The details differ across the devolved nations, but the direction of travel is the same. Christianity is treated less as the faith that formed our institutions, law and national life, and increasingly as one “worldview” among many.
Labour is introducing Local Authority monitoring of Christians and other parents who elect to home educate, and has already imposed VAT upon parents seeking a genuinely Christ-centred alternative in a private school.
What is happening should concern us all. The state does not need to formally or legally prohibit Christian education. It can weaken Christianity within public provision and then constrain by making Christian alternatives unaffordable. It can then increase pressure on families through local-authority monitoring and, in some circumstances, home visits before permitting you to teach your own children.
Of course, the Christian school technically remains free to exist and the parent technically remains free to choose it, or to home educate. But the squeeze is on.
Squeeze 1: VAT
On 1 and 2 December 2026, the Supreme Court will hear an appeal from Christian schools, parents and pupils supported by the Christian Legal Centre. Permission has been granted on the question of proportionality: whether the Government struck a fair balance between its aims and the severe effects imposed upon families and schools.
The Christian claimants include Emmanuel School, The Branch Christian School, The King’s School Southampton and Wyclif Independent Christian School. These low-cost schools, and many like them, exist to provide education centred upon Jesus Christ, provided by Christian teachers. They do not exist merely to add a prayer to an otherwise secular education.
For these communities, Christianity is not confined to an assembly, a religious-education lesson or a seasonal carol service. It supplies the foundation for understanding all truth, identity, morality, human dignity and the purpose of education itself. This is the kind of formative discipleship our children need in an increasingly post-Christian culture which seeks to tighten its grip.
Squeeze 2: RE
In England, discussion surrounding Religious Education has increasingly favoured a broad “religion and worldviews” model. This was once the subject where a thoughtful Christian presentation of biblical truth could be expected. Advocates say that the developments, and the changes currently proposed across the UK, promote literacy about a diverse society. However, teaching on Christianity is being reduced from being the study of biblical stories and coherent truth claims, to the fleeting presentation of one cultural option in a carousel of competing perspectives. Is this what should shape our children from their earliest days at state-funded schools?
There is also pressure to centralise Religious Education through a national curriculum entitlement, reducing the historic role of locally agreed syllabuses planned by local churches and faith groups. National consistency may sound attractive, but centralisation places enormous power in the hands of whoever controls the narrative of the national framework. A highly disputed consensus is being used to support this direction of travel.
Northern Ireland faces its own debate. Proposals for a revised Religious Education syllabus have recognised Christianity’s historic role but have also generated concern about presenting it primarily through the language of comparative “worldviews”.
The problem is not that children might learn about other religions. Christian schools should not produce ignorance about the beliefs held by all people in society. The question is whether Christianity is taught deeply and truthfully on its own terms to our children, or filtered through an official secular framework that assumes every faith is merely one human social construction among others.
A recent report found Welsh schools were failing to provide consistent religious education, since their recent changes. The subject has already been broadened and renamed Religion, Values and Ethics (RVE). According to a new report by academics at Bangor University and the National Centre of Religious Education for Wales, RVE was not being taught consistently in Welsh secondary schools, with insufficient curriculum time and declining access to specialist teachers. It found that some schools allocated as little as 15–20 minutes a week or less.
Scotland also has separate curricular arrangements, and has been becoming more and more ‘progressive’ in its approach. This November further proposals on curriculum planning for the future are being debated and consulted on. The drafts seen by colleagues already include proposals framed around decolonising the curriculum and expanding LGBT-inclusive content. Having already renamed Religious Education as Religious and Moral Education (RME), Scotland has now legislated to remove parents’ right to withdraw their children from the subject, following a similar change in Wales.
The state is becoming less willing to recognise parental authority or Christianity as uniquely formative for our children and young people. It is increasingly determined to supervise how religious truth may be presented, and indoctrinate young people into a ‘neutral’, progressive, secular approach to life and learning through the curriculum time that was once given over to teaching about the Lord.
Need
The squeezing processes make independent Christian schools even more necessary. Yet those are the very schools being placed under financial pressure.
In the Westminster Hall debate of 26 February 2026, Jim Shannon MP spoke about parents whose personal faith was at odds with movements away from the moral beliefs they cherished. He described working families who “scrimp and save” for faith-based education and said that what had been portrayed as a tax on the rich had become “a tax on those with a strong faith”.
Christian parents do not receive a rebate because they decline a state-school place. They continue contributing to state education through taxation. They then pay school fees from already taxed income. Labour now takes another 20 per cent from those parents who refuse to surrender the Christian formation of their children to the state.
Tax Break
Ministers have consistently described this as removing a ‘tax break’ when it is no such thing. A VAT exemption is not a grant. The Government was not funding Christian parents, it was simply refraining from taxing education, in line with every other European country. The policy is especially brutal because a flat percentage tax is not flat in its consequences. Wealthy families can pay. Ordinary families leave. The result is a more socially exclusive independent sector, in the name of equality. Families of modest means are driven out, while affluent parents remain.
The Government says exemptions would create administrative difficulties and boundary disputes. Of course, tax law always draws boundaries. Ministers distinguish among goods, services, institutions and charitable activities whenever they believe the distinction matters, but they declined to protect low-cost Christian schools because the ideology behind the policy would not permit the necessary admission: independent education is not synonymous with privilege.
Parents possess rights under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 2 of its First Protocol. These provisions do not oblige the Government to fund every educational choice. But the legal minimum does not settle the political or moral issue, as there is a profound difference between declining to subsidise an educational choice, which countries often do, and deliberately taxing parents for exercising it.
Christian education developed in Britain long before the modern state assumed its present educational power. Churches, charitable societies and Christian families created schools because they understood education as the formation of the whole person under God. Now the state behaves as though every educational freedom exists by its permission. It does not.
Children do not belong to the Government. Parents possess the primary responsibility for their upbringing and education. The state has an important role, but it is not the ultimate authority over what children must believe or how they should understand the world. And this leads us to the final squeeze.
Squeeze 3: Home Education
The squeezes on the state system and Christian private schools are partly why many parents have embraced home education, and this is why so many of them are concerned about the new Local Authority ‘Children Not In School’ records, monitoring powers and unique identification numbers being shared across departments. Where a Christian parent protects their child from, say, being groomed by the LGBT club into a trans identity and chooses to home educate, how will the Local Authority view such actions? What safeguarding records will be passed between agencies and schools about religious beliefs of parents which differ from those espoused in the school’s diversity and inclusion policies? Will permission to home educate even be refused?
Centralisation
We are seeing a squeeze. A centralisation of power, which narrows affordable alternatives and enforces conformity rather than supporting the Christian conviction of parents.
As Christianity is diluted within state education, Christian families will increasingly need home education options and private schools in which Christian faith is not treated as an optional worldview perspective by the teachers, but where Jesus Christ is honoured as Lord by every member of staff.
Christian education does not exist by the permission of the state. It arises from the responsibility God has given parents to raise their children in truth. That freedom must not be taxed beyond reach, diluted in the curriculum or regulated out of practical existence.
The Government should be protecting the freedom to establish and attend Christian schools, and not stigmatising parents who home educate. A Christ-honouring society would prioritise and support the clear teaching of the Bible and the truth claims of the Christian faith. Instead, parts of the governing framework risk treating orthodox Christian beliefs, and those who hold them, as a problem to be managed. The squeeze is on. How should we respond?
Action
If you want to see children equipped for eternity through Christian education, join us at Education Revolution 2027. There are many recognising the squeeze, but also the power of God to see change and transform education. We will be inspiring and equipping people like you to pursue a more Christ-centred education whether in the state system, private schools or in elective home education. Tickets are available now at a Super Early Bird rate, so take this opportunity to be part of the movement that is seeking to ensure that all children can truly flourish in Christ. Please do also consider supporting us in our case against the Government, which begins on 1 December.
Steve Beegoo is Head of Education at Christian Concern.
