A Church of England primary school in Kent ended its relationship with the Christian charity Crossteach after complaints from some non-Christian parents that children were being exposed to what they called potentially damaging ideology and extremist views about sin, according to reporting in the Telegraph and the Guardian.
Crossteach national director Wayne Harris rejected the characterisation. The charity works in partnership with local churches and reflects mainstream Christian teaching, he said, adding that in sixteen years of school work no teacher had raised a concern that anything said could reasonably be read as hateful or extremist, and that schools had consistently praised the quality of the work.
One unnamed parent told the Telegraph that some children had been upset by what they heard, while acknowledging that nativity plays and Bible stories were not the issue; the concern was that, for a school where most parents were not practising Christians, the religious content had gone further than that. The Guardian quoted a similar complaint: respect for the schools Christian values, but concern that a particular brand of Christianity was, in the parents view, abusing that respect and putting childrens welfare at risk.
The headmaster said he was saddened to end the relationship but stopped short of endorsing the extremism claim, stating plainly that he did not believe Crossteach had done anything wrong and that the group did not deserve the allegations levelled against it.
The dispute sits inside a wider and genuinely difficult question for England’s faith schools: a Church of England school has an explicit mandate to teach Christianity, but is also bound by Department for Education guidance on tolerance and respect for other beliefs. Reasonable people, including committed Christians, disagree about where exactly that line sits, and this case became one of the more visible tests of it.
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