The Coming Consensus is Tension

The Coming Consensus is Tension

In the recent Curriculum and Assessment Review (November 2025), the world of Religious Education (RE) in England was set a significant challenge: to reach a consensus. The goal is to find a middle ground broad enough across stakeholders that it can be presented to the Secretary of State for Education, signalling that the work of adopting RE into the National Curriculum can finally begin. This process unfolds against a backdrop of global religious and political conflict, schisms, and protests. Recently, at a Culham St Gabriel’s Trust (CStG) Leadership Scholarship Programme event, Fiona Moss and Kathryn Wright explored what this national adoption might entail. Attending this community of practice day as a member of the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust Leadership Scholarship programme and with one of my roles of Chair of Norfolk Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE), I found myself of two minds regarding the future of local oversight.

The Cynical View: Goodbye SACREs?

My initial reaction was coloured by natural cynicism. In a financial climate where SEND provision is chronically underfunded and local councils face bankruptcy, can we realistically expect SACREs (Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education) to be funded once RE moves to the National Curriculum? We already have robust national associations; The National Association of Teachers of RE (NATRE), the Religious Education Council (REC), Association of RE Inspectors, Advisers and Consultants (AREIAC), and Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, that bring together teachers, consultants, and worldview representatives. If these organisations can unify the RE world, does the local SACRE become redundant? While SACREs convene Agreed Syllabus conferences (ASCs) they do far more than this, one must wonder if the rest of their remit could be absorbed by national bodies or merged across regions. As councils continue to centralise, the “quiet vanishing” of underperforming SACREs feels, to a cynic, almost inevitable.

The Hopeful View: Hello SACREs!

However, a more informed perspective suggests that nationalisation might actually liberate SACREs. We often overlook their broader statutory duties, such as overseeing Collective Worship and advising the Local Authority on matters relating to RE and Collective Worship. There are also non-statutory duties advising on teaching materials and the training of teachers in RE. More importantly, SACREs provide the essential “localisation” of national materials. The UK may be small, but the experience of a child in Norwich is vastly different from that of a child in Leicester. By freeing SACREs from the costly, time-consuming process of writing an Agreed Syllabus, they can be “supercharged.” They would be free to focus on subject monitoring, teacher training, and the vital role of community building; bringing local believers and worldview holders into direct conversation with educators and councillors.

The Core Challenge: Embracing Tension

This brings me to the central theme of this discussion: the coming consensus must be one that accepts tension. There is an inherent tension between believers and their institutions, between “Western” academic standards and authentic self-representation, and between scholarly “lenses” and lived experience. RE is not an autopsy of a dead body of beliefs; it is a study of living, breathing people. Consequently, any National Curriculum cannot “cement” these beliefs into something static. If we try to remove the tension to make the subject “simpler,” we risk making it incoherent and detached from reality.