Opinion: Curriculum

It’s time to finally put RE in the national curriculum where it belongs

Excellent religious education is hampered by inefficiency and inequity caused by the lack of a national framework

Excellent religious education is hampered by inefficiency and inequity caused by the lack of a national framework

30 Jan 2025, 9:21

Year 3 can scarce contain their excitement. They cannot wait for the prince to begin the battle. When it comes to the best stories, religious education (RE) does not disappoint.

Everything in the story has led to this moment. With horses neighing, armour clanking, elephants stamping and trumpets blowing, the battlefield is alive. Surely, poised in his chariot, the prince will begin the battle, won’t he? Battlefields generally result in battles, right?

Then it happens. The prince freezes. He is paralysed by doubt, right in front of his army.

And so one of the most famous conversations in the history of religions begins: the conversation between the prince and his charioteer, Krishna. It is a conversation in which time stands still, a conversation that will become that timeless text: the Bhagavad Gita.

But Year 3 are now open-mouthed a second time. They have spotted that Krishna is blue! Is he…? Could he be…? Yes, he is. Krishna is yet another manifestation of the god Vishnu who Year 3 know so well.

Such are the dream teaching moments that skilled humanities teachers craft: pupils so completely ready for what will happen next, while not having a clue what will happen next. They create a state of such heightened attention that pupils grasp the new material readily.  

How does it work?

It’s called curriculum. Curriculum is knowledge structured as narrative over time. In other words, the significance of this moment will land with Year 3, not just because it’s a splendid story, but because of weeks of other stories that make it make sense.

Now imagine the cumulative effect of such shared experience continuing. In Year 5, when these pupils meet Buddhist traditions, crucial features resonate. Because of their earlier study of Hindu traditions, a raft of useful vocabulary already carries rich meaning – vocabulary established through deliberate encounter with countless stories from related worlds.

Systematic knowledge has readied these pupils to be startled by underlying similarity and to discern profound difference.

Such purposeful continuity, prior knowledge affording access to later knowledge, certainly exists, but it is not the norm. Even where it does, the chances of a secondary school building on it properly are slim because secondaries must teach numerous other pupils who arrive in Year 7 without having learned anything comparable.

So this is the problem. Despite seven years in primary school, England’s secondaries cannot assume even basic knowledge, such as enough stories about Vishnu to supply common starting points. Invariably, they have no option but to start from scratch.  

There are myriad reasons why pupils get a poor deal in RE, but we will make little headway tackling any of them until this one structural barrier is removed.

All this is deeply unfair. It is also wasteful – wasteful of years of classroom time.

Most infuriating of all, the inequity and waste are unnecessary. Adequate, useful and enriching knowledge of the world’s main religious and philosophical traditions is readily achievable. When such knowledge builds cumulatively, systematically, coherently and predictably, its time burden is light. 

By contrast, the effects of uneven localism – different syllabi in different settings, variable quality or imprecise content – make the burden heavy.

Many secondary RE teachers complain of excessive content at GCSE. But through rich connected story, multiple GCSE basics could and should have been made secure in primary, never mind Key Stage 3, leaving post-14 RE teachers the space to deepen and complicate existing knowledge, to broaden and extend reliable foundations.

With a simple, national framework of common knowledge for all, school RE curricula could be what any curriculum should be: a set of promises to future teachers in subsequent years and phases.  

What we urgently need is what we’ve needed for decades: a secretary of state with the nerve to solve a problem which others have shied away from, placing foundational knowledge about religions and worldviews within a common outline framework – the national curriculum.

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4 Comments

  1. Ellen Jackson

    Literature,poetry,visual art are things kids need to see, and experience, if some of it is religious that’s fine but why waste time on religion as a subject. Its a load of rubbish, much of it horrible and cruel. So deal with it as just another expression of human imagination alongside others.

  2. Jay Keen

    You can’t beat the way a good enthusiastic teacher conveys a subject. RE, even if it had a national curriculum, is hampered by the fact that so many non-specialists are lumped with it on their timetable. They lack a feel for the subject and this is what communicates. A world views approach is just papering over the cracks in a subject that to many will feel irrelevant in a more secular society.

  3. There are schemes of RE work that I have encountered in different schools but they all seem to have the exact same issue; they only really teach about Christianity with any depth.

    Every year group does Christianity and one other faith. So primary children study Christian beliefs and stories 6 times but only learn about Judaism or Islam once or twice in that time.

    Of the 6 half terms in a year, 3 are devoted to Christianity but they’re always the same 3 stories. Actually the scheme we follow has me teaching 4 half terms of Christianity and only 2 of Judaism.

    I don’t hate Christianity but all of this seems to be so biased and unfair and completely against the point of RE lessons. If the majority religion of the UK is Christianity then why on Earth am I wasting so much learning time telling children about things they already know. Surely RE should be about developing and academic understanding of lots of different faiths?

  4. Francis

    Couple of sensible comments, and then a reductive, dismissive one. RE has the potential to be a fantastic and fascinating subject. It’s a multifaceted discipline, which draws upon religious, philosophical, sociological and historical skills (to name a few). At its core it can be underpinned by a rich and potentially diverse curriculum. However, as the article and other’s comments identify, this is hampered by the lack of consistency between different authority’s and MATs, as well as the training of staff, and placement on timetables. RE can really drive students forward and develop them holistically. As a subject it is uniquely placed to pull together a plethora of substantive and disciplinary knowledge and skills, which gets students to think deeply and reflect respectfully. RE just needs time and attention from government and school leaders. Otherwise it risks becoming an add on, leading to people viewing it as antiquated and out of touch.