My name is Stacey Burman and I have been working as an RE advisor for several London boroughs for some years, involving some projects with the Faith & Belief Forum. I was therefore delighted when they asked me to become involved in the Special Objects Project.

How can we increase parental engagement in schools?

We wanted to consider how schools could help their parents and carers to better understand the type of learning that might be happening in the RE classrooms of their children. This followed the publication of the recent Culham St Gabriel’s Religion and worldviews survey in 2022, and the worrying finding of the 2018 NATRE survey that 16% pupils are still being withdrawn from lessons.

Our Special Objects project aimed to engage ten schools across five London boroughs to take part in a pilot program to boost parental engagement in the RE learning of their children. The idea was that children would be sent home with a particular object which was used within a certain religion or tradition. These volunteer families would then host the item in their own homes and explore the object together with their children, and were invited to take part in a simple online questionnaire that was designed specifically to start a learning conversation about the symbolism of this object:

What might it symbolise? How might it connect to some ‘big ideas’ or concepts such as ‘love’, ‘hope’, ‘belief’, ‘community’ and so on? We gave them a list of ideas.

We then asked them to think about how it might be used and what this might be showing and encouraged them to think about whether they had any other symbols or items or practices from their own worldview or tradition or in their own family experiences, that may be similar. Some even took up the opportunity to send in photos and videos, but we think more would have done so had they been able to add these when completing the questionnaire.

How can we encourage learning through personal knowledge?

The objects were purposely selected so that any connections with concepts from a particular worldview would not be obvious, and respondents were asked not to Google the objects. This was so that these families would have the freedom to identify and make connections of their own, as we wanted to focus on a model of learning that engaged parents through their own personal knowledge.

We aimed for 50 responses, but we managed to achieve over 70 and were delighted with the large array of ideas and examples from various worldviews and traditions: 32 of these were shared with us.

All of these were collated and shared with pupils in lessons, as well as in whole school celebratory events.

How can we include more worldviews in the classroom?

Almost all respondents said they really enjoyed the opportunity: 88% said they better understood how their children would be learning RE in their classrooms; and over 70% wanted to learn more. Many even offered to help share some of their own experiences with children at the school in the future. Overall, we feel that this project demonstrates and provides a model for how schools and SACREs can boost parental engagement with RE.