Ethics Classes Form Change Unethical

By Marcus Braid on December 10, 2015 in News

The highly popular ethics classes in public schools are under threat following a key enrolment alteration by the State Government.
The check box for enrolling into ethics classes has been taken off the enrolment form, which has made it more difficult for parents to find out about the classes.

Lisa Smith, Ethics Coodinator at Clovelly Public School and Primary Ethics Botany Bay Regional Manager, said the alteration was an unwelcome surprise.

“Our understanding is that it was done at the request of some of the religious groups to remove ethics as an option from the enrolment form,” she said. “There certainly wasn’t any consultation with Primary Ethics.

“As the Clovelly school coordinator, up until the change in the enrolment form I would know how many kindy kids next year have nominated to go into an ethics class. This tells me how many teachers I need to recruit, how many classrooms we’ll need, and all of that information will no longer be available. We would normally get all of that from the enrolment form.”

There’s a very high penetration of ethics classes in the Eastern Suburbs. In the Bondi region, 93 per cent of the schools that could have ethics classes do, that is 13 out of 14 schools. In the Botany Bay region, 12 of the 18 schools that could have the classes do.

Ms Smith said that many parents may now be unaware of the option for ethics to be taught to their children.

“Parents won’t even know if it is going to be an option, and if they do know it’s an option, they won’t know how to exercise their right to have their children taught ethics. They have to actually individually write to the principal and say ‘let’s put my child in’.”

Ethics classes do not have a religious component, and they do not teach kids what to think.

“There isn’t a right or wrong answer,” Ms Smith said. “There’s no particular message or opinion that is pushed in the class; it’s teaching them how to think about an issue from all angles and how to articulate their own perspective. As the kids get older, obviously the situations get more sophisticated.”

Theresa Russell, the CEO of Primary Ethics, pointed out that children who attend ethics classes have a legislated right to do so.

“On December 1, 2010 the NSW Parliament passed a law giving children who don’t go to religion classes the right to attend classes with philosophical ethics,” she said. “We just work underneath that legislation.

Ms Russell said a freedom of information search had discovered that Mike Baird had been lobbied by members of Christian Special Religious Education to make the enrolment alteration.

“[Mike Baird] wanted to get legislation through the Upper House, and he needed Fred Nile’s approval to get that, so he went into the Department of Education and instructed them to change the enrolment form to get rid of ethics classes,” she said. “It hasn’t got rid of ethics classes at schools; all it’s done is made it harder for new parents to find out about ethics classes.”