The Three Big Gamechangers

Three major reports on RE in one year. All Game-changers

Clarke/Woodhead in June: http://faithdebates.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/A-New-Settlement-for-Religion-and-Belief-in-schools.pdf

REforREal in November: http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/goldsmiths/169-images/departments/research-units/faiths-unit/REforREal-exec-summary.pdf

Woolf Commission in December: http://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/practice/commission-on-religion-and-belief.asp

And all of them produced by ‘OUTLIERS’. Not the usual suspects special pleading the case for RE; these were all produced by those outside the standard RE professional community. And they are all the stronger and more important for that! We need the ‘OUTLIERS’

But wait a moment…… they are NOT primarily reports about RE.

This matters and it’s important we understand the context. If we miss the big picture, we may miss the game-changing moment.

These reports, in different ways, take their starting point from the much broader question of the place of religion in education. Their scope extends well beyond RE to explore collective worship, faith schools and, in the case of Woolf, wider aspects of religion in public life. They are asking very significant questions about why we include religion in the educational space. In this way they are touching on the fundamental question: What is the place of religion in public education?

This echoes the concern within the RE community about the ‘purpose and aims of RE’. Ofsted and RE professional bodies are rightly focused on the issues that affect the quality of RE. They have expressed concerns about:

• Low standards of religious literacy
• Teachers’ confidence and confusion about purpose
• Patchy, and in some schools declining, provision
• Teacher recruitment and training
• Collapsing local structures
• Impact of changes at GCSE on RE

And these are really ‘no-brainers’ – the issues in themselves are not controversial – they just need sorting out.

BUT these three reports start somewhere else. While they recognise these practical issues, their questions are more fundamental:

• How far has policy about religion in education kept pace with the dramatic social and cultural changes since 1944?
• Are the structures around religion in the public school space fit for purpose?
• Does our thinking about RE need to change to reflect the reality of religion and belief in the 21^st Century?

These questions are controversial with the potential to divide and separate. The answers may challenge vested interests and existing power networks. But in many ways they are among the big political questions in contemporary education and society. It will take brave people to sort them out. A message coming out loud and clear is that pupils, teachers, parents, employers, academics, social thinkers and RE professionals think learning about religion and belief is important; it matters in the 21^st Century.

“A religiously literate society … can only be achieved by a root and branch reform of how we learn and think about religion and belief at school, at university, at work and in everyday life” Woolf Report.

The RE community must not just try to grab the bits from the reports which serve our purpose and fail to grasp the game-changing nature of the messages.

A tricky balancing act.

As an RE community (or is that communities plural?) we need to focus on RE. Getting involved in the collective worship and faith school debates will divide rather than unite us. HOWEVER, the principles and findings that will drive the agenda for change in RE will also have implications for those wider issues. There is an inexorable but edgy logic here.

If we pursue the agendas set by these reports it will involve these kinds of discussions about the future direction of RE:

• Should RE still privilege religion and, in particular, Christianity?
• Is ‘confessional’ RE (of any kind) any longer acceptable?
• Should decisions about RE be taken out of the hands of the religious (and non-religious) establishment?
• Should a ‘national’ curriculum apply to all publically-funded schools, including faith schools?
• Can we address the finding that too many syllabuses ‘fail to reflect the reality of religion and belief, having a rather sanitised or idealised form of religion as their content’?
• How do we face the finding that too much RE fails ‘to include non-religious worldviews, for example humanism, and does not deal with competing truth claims’? Woolf Report
• How does RE ensure pupils understand ‘that religion is contemporary, pervasive and real. It is lived. It is fluid identity, as well as solid tradition, and it is contested internally in each individual’s daily experience’? REforREal report.

These discussions will very quickly coalesce in the public imagination and in the minds of the politicians and civil servants with the wider debates about the place of religion in the educational space. If you apply these principles and questions to RE, they will bump into debates about collective worship and the role and nature of faith schools. We need to tread carefully but decisively.

But let’s enjoy: religious and belief literacy is now a clear educational priority.

Who would have thought 25 years ago that we would be saying this?