The politics of religious literacy

You turn your back for a month and when you look again things have got out of hand!

January saw the first meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on RE (the APPG) since the 2015 General Election. It seems one of the concluding remarks was that “the aim of RE should be to awaken and promote moral awareness and character education”. What happened? Has the world gone mad?

We are engaged in a debate about the purpose of RE and the meaning of ‘religious literacy’. What is clear is that this is a political debate. It is a debate about ‘who owns RE’. There is a wide range of opinions and, crucially, a wide range of powerbrokers operating across the RE landscape.

What is the nature of the debate? How can we define the landscape? Three metaphors come to mind: a garden of delights, a warzone and a wasteland!!

A garden of delights: the most positive image sees the landscape as a fertile diversity of ideas and perspectives which are mutually enriching. There are a number of gardeners working to create a richly diverse landscape. This metaphor recognises a range of pedagogical approaches allowing teachers to select and combine in ways that suit their teaching style, their pupils’ needs and the demands of the curriculum. Together they help describe (rather than define) a range of possibilities within the concept of ‘religious literacy’. The challenge is how to encourage teachers to spend time exploring the garden without getting lost.

A warzone: a troubling image but perhaps one we cannot pretend does not exist. The meeting of the APPG reminded us about the battle lines. This image portrays the landscape as one in which there are genuine disagreements and red lines. One of the problems the RE Council faced in developing the 2013 Framework for RE was trying negotiate a compromise where, in reality, there was covert discord. For some, the inclusion of non-religious perspectives on the RE curriculum is beyond the pale. For others, the confessional model of RE reflected in some sections of the faith school sector is simply anathema within a state funded education system. We ignore the disputes and disagreements at our peril.

A wasteland: equally troubling – an image of teachers wandering lost without a clear compass or roadmap to help them make sense of the landscape around them. I am sure this is far too negative as a description of what is happening but there are elements of this metaphor around us. I fear that, in the continued absence of national agreement, we may see a deepening of fragmentation within our community unless we can grasp the issues around purpose and aims.

All this brings us back to the issue of who owns RE. Answers such as ‘the children own it’ or ‘we all own it’ are sentimental responses that have little meaning

The debate about local/national control is still with us. Who should exercise control? What would be the best model of power distribution for the future of RE. Let’s not go there today!

The most successful period for RE in recent years, in terms of generating a shared vision of ‘religious literacy’, was the period after the launch of the 2004 RE Framework. An authoritative national body, the QCA, with an internal structure of discipline and relative detachment, battled to produce an approach to RE which aligned with thinking in the wider curriculum.

So, when it came to writing the 2013 Ofsted report RE: Realising the Potential, a decision was made to try to shortcut the complexity around the purpose of RE by referring to the concept of ‘religious literacy’ rooted broadly in the expectations of the 2004 Framework. There were some things that most pupils did ‘understand’ by the time they left school:

• They recognised the world of religion and belief is diverse
• They ‘knew’ religion is controversial and there are no right answers
• They respected the right to believe what you want
• They knew there are ‘big’ moral and social issues about which religions have views

But pupils struggled to:

• identify some of the big ideas that underpin different religious/belief traditions
• connect up different aspects of any religion/belief into a coherent picture
• explain the diversity that exists within different religions/beliefs
• offer informed balanced and reasoned judgements about issues of truth in religion – too often they reduce everything to ‘it’s all a matter of opinion’
• understand the metaphorical/non-literal nature of religious language
• explain patterns within the social reality of religion and belief in the modern world – e.g. links between religion and wider cultural, social and political change.

So, it is good to see that the impetus created by last year’s three major reports on RE and religion in public life is not being lost – despite the fact that the APPG seems not to have noticed the reports exist!!

The RE Council will announce very soon the details of its “independent Commission to look into the complex range of issues that relate to the legal and wider policy framework around RE. This will involve appointing a set of commissioners to independently investigate the issues and report back with findings and recommendations. It is hoped that the Commission will begin its work in mid-2016 and complete a final report by mid-2018.”

Watch this space http://religiouseducationcouncil.org.uk/