Sharing the purpose of secondary RE in the school

Religious Education as a school subject has suffered a decline in status over recent years. An analysis from the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education in 2019 showed significant decline in RE in secondary schools with almost 40% of community schools and 50% of ‘Academy schools without a religious character’ not meeting ‘their legal or contractual requirements for the subject’ (NATRE, 2019, p.2). It is therefore important to consider how RE is portrayed as a subject across your school community. The online survey results below, from a survey completed by 949 teachers, gives some sense of the issues involved. Religious Education teachers come from a wide background of first degrees’ covering different disciplines. These different disciplines approach knowledge-building differently with different purposes. Student teachers can bring in quite different assumptions about the purposes of the subject, based on their background study or their prior experience. Religious Education as a subject might be able to help these diversities but RE itself is in a fragile condition

What is the purpose of RE on the school curriculum?

Secondary teachers of RE have a variety of different views on the purposes of RE. Purpose matters because it affects all the classroom and curriculum decisions. Being able to articulate purpose matters because a teacher is required to be able to explain the intentions of their subject to different audiences. Having a joint department view matters for a coherent curriculum experience

What are science/religion encounters and how can I prepare for them?

We conducted a survey with beginning teachers and more experienced teachers to explore what science/religion encounters they had experienced in their classrooms. The findings are shared in this module, along with some suggestions of what you might be able to do to support your teaching around science/religion encounters in the future