Provision of RE is ‘failing pupils’, MPs hear

THE structure of Religious Education (RE) GCSE is lagging behind developments in the topic, with religions sometimes “pitched against one another”, the chair of the Religious Education Council, Sarah Lane Cawte, told MPs last week.

Warning that the present system for delivering RE had failed pupils, she told the Education Select Committee — which is currently reviewing the National Curriculum and assessment system — that now was “the most effective opportunity to secure high-quality RE for all students that there was for . . . generations”.

Last 12 months, an Ofsted report concluded that RE often lacked adequate preparation for college students to “live in a posh world” (News, 19 April 2024). It criticised the Government for failing to implement the recommendations of an Ofsted report published ten years earlier (News, 11 October 2013).

Giving evidence on Tuesday of last week, Ms Lane Cawte highlighted the postcode lottery faced by pupils. “By the tip of Key Stage 3, children are coming from different places, from different starting points, because now we have a distinct curriculum for each school, now we have locally agreed syllabuses,” she said. “There can also be the problem of prior cultural capital. If they’ve been in a situation where they’ve been on numerous visits to places of worship they’ll have an actual advantage in accessing among the content of GCSE.

“The RE community is unanimous that the availability of RE needs reform,” she said. “At a minimum, we’d want the RE Council’s National Content Standard to be included in updating Department for Education guidance that Ofsted can inspect schools against.”

RE will not be currently a part of the National Curriculum. Each local authority has a Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) liable for convening the committee that produces the syllabus. Ms Lane Cawte reported that while one local authority had allocated the SACRE £100,000 for this task, she had been a part of one with no funding in any respect.

There was a “growing consensus that RE must be throughout the National Curriculum to safeguard the entitlement for pupils”, she said. She referred to data that means that one in six secondary schools might not be providing RE for Year 11 students. The subject had been disadvantaged by not being included within the English Baccalaureate or Progress 8 (measures by which a faculty’s performance is measured).

Besides an absence of specialist teachers — 51 per cent of teachers teaching RE spent most of their time teaching other subjects — the curriculum itself needed reform, she said. “The structure of the GCSE could be very content heavy, however it’s also been a bit left behind by developments in the topic. There is a give attention to institutional knowledge about religions as in the event that they are in silos and sometimes they’re almost pitched against one another. For example, some questions require you to supply counter arguments. These sometimes move into things like ‘all Christians imagine this’ and ‘all Muslims imagine this’, when actually the situation is so much more fluid.”

The syllabus could possibly be reformed to reflect “the more exciting teaching that is occurring”, enabling pupils to “make contact with their positions, that challenge them to take into consideration their positionality”, she said.