RE Commission report: A Way Forward?

Commission on Religious Education
The number of students being entered for the public examinations in Religious Studies in England and Wales (GCSE, at 16 and A level, at 18) fell significantly in the summer of 2018, and more than a third of schools are breaking the law by failing to provide Religious Education (RE). The decline can be explained in part by educational policy decisions, for example RE is currently excluded from the EBacc, a group of GCSE subjects which are viewed by government as a performance measure for schools. Policy decisions both reflect and feed public assessments of the value of subjects, and public support for RE is demonstrably low. Perhaps the public imagines (rightly or wrongly) that RE is aligned with religion itself, and thus the subject suffers with the same ‘toxicity’ that Linda Woodhead considers attaches to the ‘brand’ of religion. Whatever the case, confusion about the aims and purposes of the subject in schools is unlikely to support its flourishing.

A report published in September 2018 by the Commission on Religious Education entitled Religion and Worldviews: the Way Forward: A National Plan for Religious Education attempts to tackle these problems. Its central proposal is for a change in the law to ensure that all pupils in England, no matter what type of school they attend, receive their ‘National Entitlement’ to education about religion and worldviews. The report, authored by fourteen Commissioners from a range of sectors (including academics, teachers, headteachers and consultants, a broadcaster and a Human Rights lawyer), was the culmination of two years of intensive consultation with a range of stakeholders, and an ambitious attempt to bring the whole ‘RE Community’ together to push for statutory change. Considering the neo-liberal fragmentation of the education system over the last two decades, and the growth in the number of schools with a religious character, this attempt to achieve consensus on the core content of RE is indeed ambitious. The Commission on Religious Education’s report is not the only one published in recent months suggesting ways forward for the subject. Linda Woodhead and former Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke, recently published A New Settlement Revised: Religion and Belief in Schools. Though the detail of their recommendations differs, both reports lobby for urgent governmental intervention to secure a place for an academically credible subject on the school curriculum.

At a recent RE research and policy conference #2020RE, Dr Wendy Dossett had the opportunity to chat with two of the Commissioners and authors of the Religion and Worldviews report, Dr Joyce Miller and Prof Eleanor Nesbitt, along with Religious Education sociologist (and convener of SOCREL), Céline Benoit. Their conversation ranged over some of the following issues: the rationale for the move from calling the subject ‘Religious Education’ to ‘Religion and Worldviews’; the inadequacy for the classroom of a world religions approach; the degree to which faith communities are entitled to influence what gets taught in schools; and the anomaly of the so-called withdrawal clause.

Listeners outside the UK context may be unfamiliar with the following terms:
Key Stages (introduced in the 1988 Education Reform Act) are age related periods in education: Key Stage 1 (aged 5-7), Key Stage 2 (aged 7-11), Key Stage 3 (aged 11-14), Key Stage 4 (aged 14-16), Key Stage 5, (aged 16-18).
SACREs: (Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education) are statutory local education authority bodies, including representation from the Anglican Church, other Christian denominations and other faiths, teacher representatives, and elected council members. SACRES support and resource RE in all local authority schools, and every five years review the locally Agreed Syllabus.