Schools must meet ‘spiritual and moral needs’, says Children’s Commissioner

All schools should address the spiritual needs of children as well as their education, material and psychological needs, the Children’s Commissioner has said.

According to Dame Rachel de Souza, England has a strong tradition of pastoral care offered by its schools and this is sometimes being forgotten. Speaking last week at the Catholic seminary Allen Hall, she said: “I was an RE teacher and the Education Act tacitly says we need to deal with the children’s spiritual, social and moral development.”

She pointed out that a row over whether prayer rooms should be allowed in secular schools had revealed different ideas of the education system.

“There has been a misunderstanding with some of the discussions I’ve seen around some of these areas recently that we have some kind of secular French education system,” she said, “but I always say thank goodness for the Anglicans because [without them] we would not have had a school system at the turn of the century.

“Our system has always had a pastoral system and been concerned with children’s spiritual and moral needs.” 

And she confirmed her support for prayer rooms in secular schools – in sharp contrast to the High Court which recently ruled that the Michaela School in Wembley was within its rights to not provide such a facility.

Dame Rachel was at Allen Hall to give its annual lecture. During her talk, “The Big Ambition: A million children’s stories”, she reflected on research she commissioned into children’s lives and how they feel about growing up in Britain today.

It revealed that many children who experienced deep isolation during the Covid pandemic lockdowns and disruption to their education have still not recovered.

“Post lockdown there has been a tsunami of anxiety, one in five of half a million children put mental health and anxiety as their main concern,” she said. “Every level of children’s mental health has worsened.”

Dame Rachel also paid tribute to the education she received in Catholic schools and the upbringing she received within a stable Catholic family and parish community, as well as the rigorous education in theology that she received as an undergraduate from Jesuits at Heythrop College. 

The nuns at her Catholic comprehensive, she said, “would have done everything to keep me safe and cared for but also installed values. It was being part of something bigger. I want to contribute something of that when it comes to children.”

She told the audience that when she first began her work with children, she thought that education was the priority but now, she said, the family was the bedrock of society and so “a loving family is the foundation of everything else”.

Her comments mirror those of Cardinal Vincent Nichols who said last week on the release of electoral guidance to Catholic voters from the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales that family was the most important issue in the general election.

“How do we seek to construct a society in which families can flourish? That’s the bedrock,” he said. “My view is that our next government should strive to create the circumstances in which families can flourish”.

Dame Rachel told her audience that like other public servants she is now “in purdah” during the election campaign. However, as she had already made her views known to ministers on certain subjects, she urged the government to think again about the two-child Universal Benefit cap, and voiced her concerns about the plight of children coming to Britain in small boats.

She described them as “children who arrive who have lost everything, families and possessions, who’ve faced incomparable pain, victims of trafficking, organ harvesting, rape, they have nothing, drenched in see water”.

“We have an opportunity to treat these children with the love and dignity they deserve. We have the ability to choose to treat children with love, that they feel that much is possible,” she said.

Dame Rachel also outlined the importance of churches in supporting families. While society needs statutory services to step in, she believed that churches and other voluntary organisations have a major role to play.

“The voluntary sector can be there and is often highly valued and trusted,” she said.

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