Standing Up or Falling Down – What is the point of Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education? – Neil McKain

The following is written in response to Lord Nash’s letter sent to all SACREs last week.  His message got me thinking about whether the current legal position on RE is working. I wish to start a genuine debate in the wider RE community about how we can improve.

There is a lot to take issue with in Nash’s letter, but here is what I see as the main problem. Nash’s argument seems to be that SACREs aren’t doing their job well enough and that Local Authorities aren’t supporting them. Here, I agree with him and would argue that it is down in part to an agenda of fragmentation pursued by his government. His reason for the letter is that he wants to see an improvement in standards and this stems from the fact that ‘The introduction of the new and more demanding National Curriculum makes the importance of improving religious education even clearer’. There’s a key word here that gets to the crux of the problem. Have you spotted it yet? That’s right: ‘National’. The content of RE is agreed locally. Now, localism is great. I support localism. I want to support my local high street book shop. I want to support my community-owned village pub. I want my local council to collect my bins on a weekly basis. But I don’t see why the curriculum content of a subject that is required by law to be taught throughout all key stages should be decided locally. When the new Maths or History curriculum was being drawn up, did anyone seriously say, ‘Do you know what, Sir Humphrey? You need to be careful with this. They need to learn calculus in Cumbria but long division in Lincolnshire.’ No, of course not. Is it too much to ask that as professionals we cannot come up with some form of national agreement (I don’t see why we should be afraid of using the word curriculum!) on the core knowledge about religion that we want our young people and future citizens to learn? @thegoldencalfre dealt with the serious problem in the quality of agreed syllabuses in his first blog, which you can read here: http://thegoldencalfre.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/religious-illiteracy/

However, and I know you’ve already realised this, there’s another problem with what Nash is saying. He states that ‘SACREs must provide an agreed syllabus to support the religious education curriculum in schools, which must be reviewed every five years’. Yep, that’s what Is generally happening but what happens to the syllabus? It’s likely to be ignored or be deemed irrelevant. And here’s why. According to the latest statistics 60% of secondary schools are Academies – schools that are not required to follow any locally agreed syllabus. The current fragmented, localistic, anachronistic system of deciding the RE curriculum just doesn’t tally with Nash’s drive to encourage schools to be more independent – and it makes no sense that the government is limiting the role of the LA in all areas apart from in RE. Why is Nash insisting we prop up a failing system, run pretty much entirely by well-meaning volunteers who are under-resourced? The response to the DfE #reconsult reforms was unprecedented. Approximately 2,000 responses were received, yet we don’t seem to care that content for KS1-4 (5 in some cases) is decided by random groups (who decides who represents the local traditions? What is the vetting process?) of well meaning people from varying backgrounds and with varied expertise, with little guidance or financial support and without any central quality assurance or accountability. In many cases those sitting on SACREs will be members of religious organisations that don’t even demand that their own schools even teach the LAS. Seriously, if someone proposed this system – inherited from the random passing of various education acts – as a new workable solution today, they’d be laughed out of town.

I concede that there are many SACREs doing good work with little support or reward. But think about this for a second. Every local authority has one. And do they work together? Some do, but many don’t. And isn’t this a colossal waste of time and effort? Teams of local geography ‘experts’ (geographers?) don’t meet up in every local authority every five years (why five years? On what evidence is that term fixed?) to reinvent the wheel. How much duplication of effort and time goes into these documents that end up with incredibly similar content and outcomes? Andy Lewis (@iteachRE) posted this on the SAVE RE Facebook page in a thread on this issue: ‘I know Barking/Dagenham and Havering are working on a joint one and this is seen as revolutionary that two (neighbouring) London boroughs are working together. Why the hell aren’t all the London boroughs working on one with the rest of England?’ This lack of national cohesion leads to an inequality of provision, not the good or outstanding provision Nash claims is his aim.

The launch party for the last agreed syllabus in my county was embarrassing. A dozen or so people in a cold room listened to two speeches, then went home. SACREs need urgent reform or abolishment, not a friendly letter from the minister for faith schools (sic). The documents they produce are widely ignored (schools know that no-one, including OFSTED, will check on them) and the minister responsible seems to have his head in the sand if he thinks he can fix a broken relic of a system. Its clear the DfE has no plans to inspect locally agreed syllabuses or implement a rigorous quality assurance process. There is NO quality control over membership or output as far as I can see. When the agreed syllabus lands on the desk of the primary Headteacher, how do they judge the quality of it? If they are lucky they’ll have a specialist RE teacher in their school but many do not. SACREs have failed to provide quality to date, and this letter and its vague proposals about collecting reports together on the NASACRE website to record best practice is a laughable solution. How does Nash seriously expect these bodies to hold schools to account for not teaching RE when they themselves are hugely underfunded, under-resourced, and lack statutory power?

I’m fed up with RE being a cinderella subject. As teachers of RE and others with vested interests, we need to demand we are taken seriously and we need to act like it. Let’s start by working together to decide the core knowledge our young people need to learn, and let’s get this nationally agreed. Now!