“Defence of the weak and vulnerable can easily flip to defence of a leadership cadre…”

School worship in Scotland

S.9 Education (Scotland) Act 1980 gives parents the right to withdraw their children from religious observance, and the Scottish Government is proposing to amend the law to oblige schools to take the children’s views into account. The Government says that this will align the law with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was incorporated into Scots law last year.

However, in response to a consultation which has just closed, the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland (CYPCS) has said that the Government’s proposals “may appear, superficially, to provide progressive realisation of children’s rights” but do not represent “significant progress towards UNCRC compliance, given its divergence from a clear recommendation made by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in the 2023 concluding observations”. Continue reading →