The UK is undertaking to review Religious Education (RE) in UK Government schools.

In the UK, RE is legislated to be provided by all government schools and it is supposed to be a fairly comprehensive programme, teaching the study of different religions, about key religious leaders and religious and moral themes according to local and national guidelines. In reality it is only provided in approximately 75% of schools and in those schools it is often parochial: the curriculum is required to reflect the predominant place of Christianity in UK religious life, so Christianity forms the majority of the content of the subject. Moreover, RE is determined and provided by local ‘Standing Advisory Councils on RE’ aka SACREs.

A preliminary report was published by the REC Council of England and Wales in late 2017.

The same council had published a review in 2013.

A book was recently published titled We Need to Talk about Religious Education

“Although Religious Education (RE) is a legal requirement in UK schools, it is an oft-neglected and misunderstood subject. It is important to seriously re-think this key subject at this time of low religious literacy and rising extremism, to protect communities from the consequences of hatred and misunderstanding. This book promotes a public discussion of what exactly is needed from a new model of RE within our education system to benefit wider society.

“.. It covers the most pressing and urgent issues for RE such as hate speech, educational reform, and the weakening of moderate religious institutions.”

The UK National Secular Society has recently provided commentary and conducted a one day conference on Saturday 14 April 2018.

This article provides commentary on that conference, based on tweets arising via #21RE4All

 

RE should reflect the real religious landscape: the importance of understanding the “dynamic and changing real religious landscape”, recognising that there is more believing without belonging, and [various] ways of ‘not believing’.

There was reference to “the risks of a narrow knowledge focus to the RE curriculum” and “an accountability structure that emphasises it”. There needs to be a change to the legislation around RE.

One panelist excoriated the arbitrary postcode lottery of [locally determined] syllabuses & the ‘inbuilt religious prejudice’ that [often] provides … if RE can be guaranteed to be objective, critical, and pluralistic then the parental right to withdraw their child from the subject should be removed [withdrawal from RE has increased in recent years, often by Anglo-Saxon parents withdrawing their children from the Islam components of RE].

“RE is labouring under 2 incompatible aims: learning about, and learning from religion. It was argued that they compete with each other and can cancel each other out.”

The focus on learning from religion can make it hard to teach critically about religions. One panelist said that the primary aim should always be understanding of religion & belief, & that pupils’ personal inspiration is not their aim as a teacher

There was reference to worldview literacy, rather than religious literacy: there should be a national entitlement for all pupils to an objective education about worldviews

High quality RE … does take place in many classrooms, but there are too many where it doesn’t … that’s why there needs to be a national entitlement for RE for all pupils in all schools

RE should be taken out of the hands of faith & secular belief communities in order to uphold its legitimacy (RE is increasingly being controlled and dominated by faith communities).

Prompts for table discussions –

      Image: c/o Rudi Eliott Lockhart @ThisisRudi

AC Grayling gave a keynote speech calling for teaching about “the history of ideas”.

There was the comment that ‘Good RE already uses the discipline of history (along with sociology, anthropology, philosophy, theology, at al.)’.  And reference Western-centric history of ideas, and ‘how then should we approach non-Western traditions[?]’

Reference to more great prompts, c/o Rudi Eliott Lockhart, CEO of Religious Education Council; “Where should RE fit in the curriculum & what should pupils learn about freedom of/from religion?”

One thing that was brought up in the table discussions was a necessity to teach [not necessarily in RE, but in PSHE/citizenship] the basis of [discussing] ideas, not the people that hold them: [to] get it in a respectable academic structure.

 Image: c/o Rudi Eliott Lockhart @ThisisRudi