Funding Cut for British Free Schools that Teach Creationism

Guardian recently reported that free schools that teaches creationism or intelligent design as science will lose government funding. This is an important step in combating the encroaching of pseudoscientific alternatives to the science of modern evolutionary biology, especially since this could have been a wide-spread phenomenon in newly started British free schools.

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are “evidence-based views or theories” that run “contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations”.

They can technically teach creationism in religious studies I suppose, but it will no longer be possible to teach it as if it was a scientific viewpoint. This, of course, assumes that the government will actively be checking up on these free schools, so it remains to be see if this will be powerfully applied.