Recommendation 8 (Local Advisory Networks on Religion & Worldviews)

Recommendation 8 of the CORE final report calls for the current legislation regarding Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education to be amended.

It effectively calls for something I’ve written about before, namely the abolition of Agreed Syllabus Conferences. Local Advisory Networks would be able to create programmes of study, but would not be required to do so.

However, it seems to want to replace them with something resembling a SACRE in all but name. If the current antiquated local model is not working why replace it with one that looks near identical and will likely involve the same people? Currently SACREs are made up of separate committees containing representatives from the Church of England, ‘other’ local faiths, teachers and members of the local education authority or child services.

The CORE report calls for SACREs to be replaced with (rebranded!) a Local Advisory Network for Religion and Worldviews. This body would be required to exist by statute (as SACREs are now) but would be made up of volunteers including representatives from the teaching profession, the local authority and, you guessed it, local religious groups.

I may be missing something here but this does not look like radical change. It looks like replacing one bureaucracy run at a local level with another bureaucracy made up of volunteers run at a local level.

This section of the CORE report does conclude by making clear that statutory funding must be provided for all Local Advisory Networks for Religion and Worldviews, calculated by size of local authority and of a sufficient level to enable the group to carry out its activities effectively. But this is just not going to happen. That money would be better spent going into schools directly, going into training new RE (Religion & Worldviews) teachers directly.

There already exist plenty of local and national opportunities (NATRE local groups, webinars, social media, the newly appointed local ambassadors) for teachers to receive CPD and support from experts in RE. Replacing one antiquated local model with another is not the answer to the problems we as a subject face.