Balancing consistency and diversity for high quality RE

Consistently high quality RE is a dream for many of us in the RE community. Consistency often seems to need a significant degree of centralised control. And yet don’t we want teachers to be curricular producers in their own right? (Teachers of RE are like Hollywood Producers a bit). The tension between consistency and teacher creativity is at the heart of debates around a national standard for RE content. It is in this context that the RE Council’s National Content Standard for RE has been called a significant landmark in the RE world (The RE Podcast: The One About the National Content Standard).

Many teachers understand that a conversation about RE content is needed because, as Ofsted has again confirmed, the scope of RE is vast, often leading to a curriculum that characterised as superficially broad and lacking depth (Deep and Meaningful? The Religious Education Subject Report ).  Many teachers also know that their often superhuman, sometimes breathless, efforts to engage with the deep and meaningful questions of RE are valued but perhaps only within relatively narrow contexts: the children and wider school community in which they work. RE does work in many places.

Lewis Young (Humanists UK) recently pointed out that, ‘[w]hen taught well, an education in religion and worldviews education can equip pupils with a good understanding of the world around them and develop their critical thinking skills. Disappointingly, Ofsted’s deep-dive into RE shows once again that … the problems faced by the subject continue.” (OfstedReport into Religious Education Shows Long Overdue Need for Reform says Humanists UK). That is precisely the point. RE is sometimes taught really well, other times not. It seems to suffer from a lack of quality control. The local determination of content has its virtues, but consistency is probably not one of them.

Uniformity of curricular content is one path. That uniformity could be imposed in strict terms by an authority (who would that be?!) stipulating very specific content that every classroom should adhere to. This could ensure consistency, but the price would be too high. Teaching would be reduced to a functionalist process of transmission that takes little account of local contexts and interests and would almost certainly erode student engagement. So, how do we maintain some measure of consistency while also allowing teachers to bring material to life in their own ways?

One aspect of the AfterRE project is developing what is known as the exemplary way: an approach which develops exemplary forms rather than specified content. Those exemplary forms elaborate in rich detail (the depth that Ofsted in after) quite specific episodes of interest to RE. The specificity means that any given episode is likely to only work in certain contexts (age range; student dynamics; local cultural makeup etc). But the exemplary structure is there to be adapted and applied to the local context. The exemplary way tries to bring into focus the learning goals and suggests that many different examples might be used to achieve those goals. Here are some examples from our project that readers might want to adapt. (https://www.afterre.org/framework)

So rather than think of RE in terms of specified content, we emphasise the idea of exemplary content which can be taken up and adapted. Teachers are best placed to know which examples, cases, and narratives to use, though the exemplary way offers some guiding questions to help keep in view the overall educational goals of RE (which are nicely summarised by a German pedagogue, Wolfgang Klafki: https://www.afterre.org/framework).

The exemplary way resonates with the proposals for a National Content Standard as well as the recently released Religion and Worldviews Approach to RE toolkit so I hope that the RE community can embrace this ideas in the spirit with which they are offered: as a template to thinking about how to develop high quality RE for all.