Family proceedings

In determining how to reconcile a dispute between parents about their child’s education and religious upbringing, authority required the court to consider the following: what in our society today, looking to the approach of parents generally in 2012, was the task of the ordinary reasonable parent? In the conditions of current society, there were three answers to that question. First, the recognition that equality of opportunity was a fundamental value of our society: equality as between different communities, social groupings and creeds, and equality as between men and women, boys and girls. Second, we foster, encourage and facilitate aspiration: both aspiration as a virtue in itself and, to the extent that it was practical and reasonable, the child’s own aspirations. Third, the objective had to be to bring the child to adulthood in such a way that the child was best equipped both to decide what kind of life they wanted to lead—what kind of person they wanted to be—and to