The fury the P&C Federation is expressing over primary students being forced to waste their precious school hours is absolutely justified. The NSW Special Religious Education regime is an anachronistic mess. It is 2017 and we cannot afford to be profligate with the precious time our children have to learn. We need to be giving students every advantage they can possibly get as they head into a hyper-competitive Asian Century.

What we certainly can't do is continue with a policy that removes children from any kind of learning for 300-plus hours over the course of their primary schooling. Yet that is precisely what our system does.

Unless children are being taught scripture by a church volunteer, they will be forced to do nothing during that time. There can be no curriculum learning, and alternate ethics classes are available only in 30 per cent of the schools. So some children colour, some chat with friends and some are on emu duty, picking up rubbish in the playground.

To add insult to injury, the Berejiklian government actually runs a little hustle on parents to try to bolster scripture class numbers through administrative trickery. When parents enrol in a public school, they are asked to identify their child's religion. That is used by the school administration to create a list of students, which is handed over to religious education providers. Those providers then divvy up the students among their volunteers based on faith indications. Children whose parents have chosen "no religion" will, by default, end up in the time-killing stream. They will have minimal supervision as they while away the time in the classroom or playground.