Blogs

A pivotal year for religious education

Languages and humanities Pedagogy Resources and projects
Ofsted has criticised RE teaching in some schools for lacking depth. A new curriculum toolkit is hoping to support schools. Sarah Lane Cawte explains and considers the state of RE today
Image: Adobe Stock -

This May will see one of the most exciting developments in RE teaching in the last decade.

The Religious Education Council is launching a toolkit for teachers which will include a handbook for curriculum developers, exemplar curriculum frameworks, and a national content standard for RE to help improve the quality of RE across the country. The aim of this is simple: to help teachers to develop a relevant curriculum for their school and local community based on the best RE practice in the country.

What does this best practice look like? It is inspired by the “religion and worldviews” approach to RE. This is a means of placing students at the heart of an academic and personally enriching inquiry into the complexity of modern belief and practice in both Britain and around the globe.

What is a worldview? Whoever we are or wherever we live, all of us still think about the big questions in life. Each and every one of us has a set of beliefs which affects how we encounter, interpret, understand, and engage with the world.

This includes where we get our morals, our response to questions about the value of human life, or how we understand the idea of believing in God or a “higher being”.

It helps pupils to understand “organised” religious and non-religious worldviews like those of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Humanists, as well as their own personal worldviews. It does not see “personal” and “organised” worldviews as binary or fixed, but places an emphasis on the lived experience of belief.

Such an approach, contrary to some misunderstanding, does not entail teaching less about religion, nor does it bring about the “secularisation of RE”. For one thing, the requirement that the RE curriculum includes both Christianity and the other principal religions is enshrined in law.

However, this knowledge-rich, academic approach to RE is vital in helping students get to grips with both the richness and complexity of different religious and non-religious responses to life’s big questions. It allows students to meaningfully reflect upon not just their own worldview, but those of others they encounter in the classroom and the world beyond.

Put into practice in the classroom, the religion and worldviews approach has had positive feedback from teachers and students alike.

Enter a typical RE classroom which has inspired the resources in this toolkit and you will find a lively, engaging, safe space for debate about issues that are highly relevant to our society. These include questions like, where do Muslims and Christians find out about God and do they all agree what God is like?

Or what is the “golden rule”, where is it from, and how is it put into practice by people from different religious and non-religious worldviews?

Crucially, the new subject handbook offers a national statement of entitlement – a tool for the school’s curriculum developers to set out what all state school pupils up to the end of year 11 are entitled to be taught.

This makes very clear what pupils need to know in order to take their place in modern British society amid the dynamic and diverse nature of belief.

The development of this new set of resources stretches back to 2018. The Commission on RE was the most comprehensive forum for discussing the future of religious education the country has ever seen and its final report set the scene for the developments since.

The new toolkit has been inspired by many of the recommendations, but importantly it has sought to focus on how teachers teach within their own communities.

One of the major assets of the new resources is that they have been developed with different contexts in mind. This is especially important given that around four-fifths of state-funded secondary schools and two-fifths of primaries are now academies and have the freedom to develop their own curriculum. Many continue to follow a locally agreed syllabus, but these freedoms can have consequences for consistency of standards.

For example, teachers in an urban school given responsibility for developing a curriculum will find themselves with a set of resources that allow them to build on their existing curriculum priorities.

Similarly, a Church of England-led school in a rural setting will find resources that will complement their own context. In other words, this is not a national curriculum programme of study being enforced, but rather an opportunity for teachers across the country in a range of diverse settings to “level-up” their practice.

The launch of this new curriculum framework comes at the right time. Ofsted’s very recent subject report finds that there is a lack of clarity on the curriculum and says that RE “often lacked sufficient substance to prepare pupils to live in a complex world”.

It adds: “What schools taught was rarely enough for pupils to make sense of religious and non-religious traditions as they appear around the world. Curriculums did not identify clearly the suitable mix of content that would enable pupils to achieve this.”

Ultimately, the report calls for better guidance about what should be taught and when (Ofsted, 2024).

And this comes after the former Ofsted chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, had described the teaching of the subject as “generally of poor quality”.

This is perhaps no surprise. Despite attracting some of the most committed and passionate teachers in the country, the subject has been sidelined by the government in terms of both funding and support.

Only recently, the £10,000 teaching bursary for trainee teachers of RE in England was restored after a four-year hiatus. This worsened a recruitment crisis that has forced senior leaders to place teachers of other subjects in front of RE classes, or to water-down the content by combining it with other subjects like PSHE or citizenship.

This is a great shame. The case for teaching RE in modern Britain is very much alive. A recent survey by Culham St Gabriel’s Trust (2022) shows a majority of adults in the country want children discussing and meaningfully engaging with the nature of modern belief in schools. And a previous Ofsted research review in 2013 described the subject as “intellectually challenging and personally enriching”.

With this new set of resources on the horizon (see further information) we have a great opportunity to provide the high-quality RE that every young person in every school deserves.

 

Further information & resources