On Prohibiting Pupil Prayers: Conceptions of Religion and Secularism in <i>Webber Academy</i> (Canada) and <i>Michaela School</i> (UK)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Michaela Community School in London made headlines in spring 2023 when it forbade students from engaging in prayer rituals on school premises. The school’s prayer ban was recently upheld by the High Court in R v Michaela Community Schools Trust, [2024] EWHC 843 (Admin). Over 10 years earlier, two students at a private high school in Calgary, Canada, were also prohibited from praying at school. The extended litigation that followed culminated in the 2023 judgment of Webber Academy Foundation v Alberta (Human Rights Commission), 2023 ABCA 194, which—unlike its UK counterpart—was decided in favour of the students. This article considers the common ground between the two cases, including the schools’ efforts to present themselves as ‘secular’ to the outside world, and goes on to examine the courts’ opposing responses to the claims. We maintain that despite their different administrative and institutional contexts, a more fundamental difference concerns how the courts conceptualise religion: either as an expression of a person’s identity—the dominant framing in Webber Academy—or as an expression of autonomy and personal choice, adopted by the court in Michaela.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".