THE structure of Religious Education (RE) GCSE is lagging behind developments in the subject, with religions sometimes “pitched against each other”, the chair of the Religious Education Council, Sarah Lane Cawte, told MPs last week.
Warning that the current 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 best opportunity to secure high-quality RE for all students that there has been for . . . generations”.
Last year, an Ofsted report concluded that RE often lacked adequate preparation for students to “live in a complex 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 end of Key Stage 3, children are coming from different places, from different starting points, because we have a different curriculum for every school, we have locally agreed syllabuses,” she said. “There is also the issue of prior cultural capital. If they’ve been in a situation where they have been on lots of visits to places of worship they are going to have a real advantage in accessing some of the content of GCSE.
“The RE community is unanimous that the provision of RE needs reform,” she said. “At a minimum, we would want the RE Council’s National Content Standard to be included in updating Department for Education guidance that Ofsted can inspect schools against.”
RE is not currently part of the National Curriculum. Each local authority has a Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) responsible 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 part of one with no funding at all.
There was a “growing consensus that RE should be within the National Curriculum to safeguard the entitlement for pupils”, she said. She referred to data that suggests that one in six secondary schools may not be providing RE for Year 11 students. The subject had been disadvantaged by not being included in the English Baccalaureate or Progress 8 (measures by which a school’s performance is measured).
Besides a lack 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 is very content heavy, but it’s also been a bit left behind by developments in the subject. There is a focus on institutional knowledge about religions as if they are in silos and sometimes they are almost pitched against each other. For example, some questions require you to provide counter arguments. These sometimes move into things like ‘all Christians believe this’ and ‘all Muslims believe this’, when actually the situation is a lot more fluid.”
The syllabus could be reformed to reflect “the more exciting teaching that is going on”, enabling pupils to “make contact with their positions, that challenge them to think about their positionality”, she said.