State schools to be less secular

Melbourne, Australia - Teachers in Victorian public schools will be given the legal right to discuss religion in the classroom, in a historic modification of legislation governing the state's secular education system.

The Government intends to change the Education Act to recognise that teachers at senior levels already discuss religion when it is relevant to an area of study, giving the example of the Iraqi conflict.

Under the current legislation, drafted in 1872, government school teachers are banned from giving "any instruction other than secular".

Education Minister Lynne Kosky argued that, at present, a teacher discussing religious issues surrounding Iraq could be accused of being at odds with the legislation.

"We just want to modernise the legislation so that it actually accords with current practice in schools, which most would say was appropriate practice," Ms Kosky said.

She also revealed that as part of the Government's rewriting of the act, voluntary religious education in state schools by outside instructors would continue.

Since it announced in February that the cornerstone of a secular state education system would be part of the review of the Education Act, the Government has faced a campaign of letter writing and petitions led by the Council for Christian Education in Schools.

"There's unfortunately been a misunderstanding of what was intended," Ms Kosky said.

"I think that information had been provided to a whole lot of groups that is not correct, that we were thinking of preventing religious instruction in schools. I've always made it very clear we were not going to do that."

Council for Christian Education in Schools chief executive Neville Carr welcomed Ms Kosky's plans. On the decision to keep the system of religious education, Dr Carr said it recognised the value of providing a "very minimal grounding in the beliefs and practices which go back 2000 years to the Judeo-Christian foundations of our Australian culture and society.

"I'm speaking equally here not just for Christian religious education, but for the Jewish, or for the Muslim, or for the Buddhist, or whatever."

Dr Carr urged the Government to tighten the regulations relating to religious instruction. School principals were supposed to send an opting-out form home when a child started prep, but some were sending the forms to parents at the start of each school year.

"That is because of the pressure they are feeling to put literacy and numeracy in a crowded curriculum in the morning programs," he said. Religious instruction was then "shunted" to the late afternoon, when children were tired.

Dr Carr also supported changes to allow teachers to discuss religion.