A BBC report claims that the majority of pupils in state schools do not take part in a daily act of worship each day, despite there being a law saying that this should happen.

My first reaction to this was 'ya think...?' After all, the law requiring a daily act of worship is seen by many - at least outside of faith schools - as one of those archaic laws that parliament just simply never to round to quashing. Like the laws banning kissing and making it legal to kill a Welshman with a crossbow inside the city walls of Chester (Really).

In Catholic schools, it happens far more uniformly, but I know a lot of Chaplains still struggle to enforce it. I have been to many a Chaplains' meeting where we talk about how best to, shall we say, encourage form tutors to pray with their forms each day.

Anyway, I thought it might be a good discussion for us Chaplains to have on a cold, wet Tuesday afternoon...

Yeah, it's certainly patchy. We do well in out school. SLT are good at enforcing it and yours truly gives them a good range of resources to work with. I think the key in that regard is to give the ones who aren't from a churchy background options which aren't too scary for them, like PowerPoints or asking the YP to prepare stuff. Or scripted stuff.

I did a session with our tutors last year about leading prayer - 2 key things that came out.

1. many staff had a fear of getting it wrong or if they tried something creative that it might be irreverent.
was really good to reiterate that getting it 'wrong' was not an issue, just trying it and learing through the doing was what we were aiming at. As for irreverence, we would rather they erred on irreverence than irrelevance!

2. Lack of understanding of what prayer is / can be, so staff feeling very boxed in and not really understanding how some of the resources offered fit with their idea of what prayer is 'supposed' to be.
Great to do some input on 3 forms of prayer.
Vocal - Communicating with God. - How ever we communicated with other people we can develop into a form prayer.
Meditation - Thinking about God. - As teachers, they are trained and very creative when it comes to enabling students to think about different subjects and concepts. Push the to use those practices to get students to think about God as Father, Jesus as saviour, Holy Spirit as source of power and conscience. Also concepts of us as created, saved, commissioned, called etc....
Contemplation - Being with God - Makes some sense of silence and the benefits of just being still in God's presence. Ideas about space, atmosphere, senses etc.

Also good to name that most teachers feel under equipped and un-confident in leading prayer, but that's what we are working on for the next few years. We will provide resources and ideas and support but they need to try to develop the practice.

Just got to keep encouraging, demonstrating and expecting people to engage.

Great ideas DavidB - it's useful to make those differentiations between the various types of prayer. There's also the four traditional categories of prayer that might help: adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. But I think your ones will be of more practical use to teachers.

I also agree that there will likely be a huge anxiety for most staff as they lead prayer - which is strange to contemplate in a way, since they are used to standing up in front of students all day! But prayer does have the uncanny ability to 'bring down the mighty' (so to speak) and we realise that when it comes to God we are not all that different.

At primary school we used to end the day with the 'Come Holy Spirit' prayer and I've remembered it ever since - my wife and I say this last thing every night now. If class prayers can do this for a young person then it's job-done, I think: it taught me how to pray, even if it wasn't all that 'relevant' or 'participative'.