THE state of non secular education (RE) in schools in England is “lamentable”; and one in five schools offer zero hours of the topic to 15- and 16-year-olds, in breach of their statutory obligations, the House of Lords has heard.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth, a former Bishop of Oxford, said that no government money had been spent on RE projects in schools prior to now five years, compared with £387 million given to music projects, while the variety of RE teachers had declined by six per cent prior to now decade.
In a debate that he introduced into the Lords, he said: “With the Government’s stated ‘firm belief’ within the importance of RE in mind, there must be a national plan for RE on a par, at the very least, with the national plan for music.
“There must also be, as a part of this national plan, the availability of teachers who’re properly qualified to show the topic and in a position to participate in continuing skilled development; this just isn’t the case in the mean time. The Department for Education has missed its recruitment goal for secondary RE teachers in nine out of the last ten years. What is going on now in RE is professionally unacceptable.”
Lord Harries quoted Ofsted’s 2023 report on religious education, which said that the availability was “unfit for purpose” and “undervalued”.
He told humanist peers that they needed to know that “religious education is education. It just isn’t propaganda. It is just basic to any understanding of what it’s to be a citizen of our society on the planet today.”
The failure to fund RE meant that schools were failing to organize their students for understanding the importance of faith for constructing good community relationships, he said. “It goes without saying that, in a world of conflict reminiscent of ours, where religion is so often an element, that is more necessary than ever.”
The Bishop of Durham, the Rt Revd Paul Butler, who’s the Church of England’s lead bishop on education, urged the Government to treat RE not as an “afterthought”, but “as an important a part of education, equipping young people to live and have interaction in society today”. The Government’s decision not to incorporate RE within the English baccalaureate was, he said, “disastrous”, and he urged it to reconsider.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, a former President of the Methodist Conference, said that he had spent 40 years involved in class governance, and, in that period, the situation had develop into “ever more dire”.
Lord Storey, a former head teacher of a C of E school, said that one quarter of faculties in England and Wales left it to teaching assistants somewhat than qualified teachers to deliver RE.
But Lord Warner, a member of Humanists UK, said that the church hierarchy and Parliament were refusing to just accept that attitudes to religion had fundamentally modified, and there have been dramatic falls in religious adherence amongst young people.
He called for the abolition of compulsory acts of Christian worship in schools, and for a broader national curriculum based on faith and non-faith beliefs. He ended by calling on the House of Lords to vary a few of its own religious practices, including the Anglican prayers and the presence of 26 Anglican bishops.
The Minister for the School System and Student Finance, Baroness Barran, said that the Government had recognised the continuing failure to recruit enough RE teachers, and was introducing a £10,000 bursary for individuals who began training this yr.
There were no plans, she said, to introduce a national plan for RE, as “our policy stays that curricula must be determined locally. . . The Government’s stance stays that we trust schools to evaluate how you can use the funding that we give them. We trust their judgement, and we give them autonomy to determine how you can use that funding.
“On the query from the Rt Revd Prelate the Bishop of Durham about whether we’re planning to incorporate religious education within the EBacc., I feel he knows the reply: there aren’t any current plans to accomplish that.”
Schools that didn’t deliver on their statutory duty to show RE weren’t monitored, she said, and any concerns needed to be raised with individual schools.
