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“We offer a new vision. The subject should explore the important role that religious and non-religious worldviews play in all human life. This is an essential area of study if pupils are to be well prepared for life in a world where controversy over such matters is pervasive and where many people lack the knowledge to make their own informed decisions. It is a subject for all pupils, whatever their own family background and personal beliefs and practices. To reflect this new emphasis, we propose that the subject should be called Religion and Worldviews.”1
These words are an excerpt from the Foreword to the final report of the Religious Education Council of England and Wales’s Commission on Religious Education (CORE), published in September 2018.2 As we will see, as well as ‘a new vision,’ the report deals with pupil access to high quality teaching, the need for investment in teacher education and different aspects of subject development and structure: the Commission had been tasked to review the legal, educational and policy frameworks for RE, and it aimed to improve the quality and rigour of the subject and its capacity to prepare pupils for life in modern Britain.3 But it is worth pausing at this early stage to underline claims made of visionary subject renewal, through exploration of the role of religious and non-religious worldviews in all human life; preparation of young people to deal with widespread related controversies, including (it is implied) the knowledge they need to decide about these for themselves; and a renewed subject appropriately offered to all pupils, of any background, beliefs, or lifestyle. The report’s proposed new name for religious education (RE) is Religion and Worldviews, and this name is chosen to reflect the different aspects of the new vision.
Three years on from the CORE report, at the time of this writing, it might be fair to say that the vision is in ongoing discussion. Within RE, there is no lack of interest, though the report has added a controversy, namely itself. Some of the elements disputed are traceable to the original vision statement. Is broadening the subject to bring in material from beyond religion a renewal or a dereliction? What is a worldview, and is the concept sufficiently clear to underpin a school subject? Is knowledge what young people need to deal with controversies, or decide their own positions? When we speak of understanding the operation of religious and non-religious worldviews in all of life, how do imagination and reflection figure in this ambitious project? What about young people who bring their perspective from a particular faith, in schools organised to enable this?
At the very least, the CORE report has provoked debate on critical questions, which set agendas for this book, if not all for this chapter, although the chapter attends to some of those which have been framed as interpretations or re-interpretations of CORE, or as objections to it. The chapter has three further parts. We look in more detail at the content of the report, then discuss its reception, and finally the issues of implementation, given the UK government’s initial negative response.4
The Content of the CORE Report
The report’s content will already be familiar to many readers. Whilst consulting the original document is certainly recommended, a summary should help contextualise the present chapter. The themes are adapted from those of the report, from whose text I also briefly highlight some questions which arise.
The Need for Change
CORE begins from the position that all young people need to be educated in relation to the world’s increasing diversity of religious and non-religious worldviews: “to live and work well with people with very different worldviews from themselves.”5 But in many schools, the report continues, RE is not good enough to meet this need, and CORE urges that it must now be reflected in a statutory national entitlement to the study of Religion and Worldviews. Schools may interpret this national entitlement in relation to their own needs, ethos, and values, but the new subject must draw on developments in the academic study of religion and non-religion, as well as social changes in England and the world.6 Too often, RE fails to reflect such developments. Because many schools are now academies outside local authority control, the local structures that used to support RE have not kept pace, and new national arrangements are needed so that up-to-date practice exists in not just some schools and localities.7 The presentation of religions has not always placed sufficient emphasis on their diverse, plural nature or how they change over time; sometimes, portrayals of diversity within religions are limited to ‘crude’ differences between denominations and RE reinforces stereotypes.8 Non-religious worldviews have also become ‘increasingly salient,’ with around half of British adults not identifying with a religion; yet some of these people have loose rather than organised forms of affiliation and may blend aspects of religion and non-religion in their personal worldviews.9 This complex diversity must be reflected in the school subject, so that pupils understand that there are different ways of adhering to a worldview, including identifying with more than one, study a wider range of worldviews, and have conceptual understanding of how worldviews operate; worldviews provide accounts of reality and influence behaviour, institutions, and forms of expression.10 We might note in passing that the relevant passage begins by describing this as a form of understanding and ends by describing it as a form of knowledge. Whether the two need closer contradistinction is taken up occasionally in later chapters. Meanwhile, a further question arises from this same passage: is the picture of worldviews influencing behaviour, institutions and forms of expression drawn so that a worldview is something distinguishable from its outer expressions? This would be at variance with other passages in the CORE report, for example, on pages 36–37, where readers are advised against assuming that worldviews are “predominantly a matter of assent to a series of propositions.” Still, in these ways, CORE recommends, the subject must become more academically sophisticated, and at the same time new national statutory arrangements to enable this must be made and more rigorously enforced than are those currently applying to RE.
Statistical evidence is given to back this need for more rigorous enforcement. Room can only be made for some illustrative examples here, but these alone convey the deficit, and readers wishing to access the full data set can follow my references to the relevant report passages.
- Despite its requirement, many English schools, particularly academies, provide no RE at Key Stages 3 (11–14 years) and 4 (14–16 years). In 2016, 33.4% of schools offered no RE at Key Stage 4 and 23.1% offered none at Key Stage 3. The percentage of schools without a religious character offering no RE at Key Stage 4 (38.9%) was almost four times that of schools with a religious character (11.2%).11
- Survey data suggest that nearly 30% of primary schools surveyed offered less than 45 minutes of RE per week.12
- The quality of RE is ‘highly variable’: the most recent Office for Standards in Education subject review (2013) “found RE to be to be less than good in just under half of secondary schools and in six out of ten primary schools observed.” In Church of England schools, a 2014 report is cited to have found RE to be good or better in 70% of secondary schools, but 40% of primary schools.13
- In secondary schools, more than twice as many teachers of RE (53.6%) as History (25.3%) have no relevant post A-level qualification in the subject. Almost three times as many lessons in RE (24.2%) as History (8.8%) are taught by a teacher with no relevant post A-level qualification. In primary schools, over 60% of recently qualified teachers had received fewer than three hours of subject specific RE-related training in their initial teacher education course.14
- Schools becoming academies outside local authority control, together with funding cuts, have reduced local authority support for RE to the extent that it is disappearing in some localities and cannot be sustained in others; changes to the inspection regime (with individual subjects no longer being inspected) and the exclusion of RE from the English Baccalaureate, a measure of school performance at Key Stage 4, have removed incentives for schools to provide high quality RE.15
- Support for RE is much more stable in schools of a religious character. It is inspected as a specific subject, a much greater amount of professional advice is offered from diocesan or other authorities, and faith schools take up more professional development activity such as gaining a quality mark for RE.16
Evidence of under-provision seems clear, but that it is linked to a need for the academic renewal of RE less so. Why is it not sufficient to enforce existing legal protections for the subject of RE? Why is CORE’s Religion and Worldviews curriculum model also warranted? Whether under-provision has been exacerbated by failure to keep up with academic developments or simply reflects political processes such as academisation and the exclusion of the subject from the English Baccalaureate would need research to establish. The findings of the Does RE Work? project suggest a background to possible slippage in public commitment to RE (and, thus, lack of concern if statutory obligations are unmet). The study took place between 2007 and 2011 and focused on 14–16-year-old pupils, in twenty-four schools across different parts of the UK; mired in competing purposes, the subject often failed to engage pupils meaningfully, instead rehearsing them to provide model examination answers and treating religious traditions su...
