National Director of Learning and Development, Oasis Community Learning
Is it time for your school to review its RE teaching? SLT teams will know that teaching RE is a statutory requirement for all students up to year 11. But all too often the result is tokenistic RE taught by non-specialists. As a result, too many students miss out on RE at its best - a subject that promotes diversity and inclusivity in relation to the many religious and non-religious worldviews now practised in modern Britain and the world beyond.
The new National Content Standard for RE in England, published by the RE Council of England and Wales (REC), is designed to help schools improve their religious education. It provides a non-statutory benchmark for syllabus providers and other bodies to evaluate their work in relation to the best practice found in the country. It is a standard by which different RE curricula, content, pedagogy, and provision can be benchmarked rather than determining precisely what content academies should teach. The inclusion of key thresholds supports this as well as supporting formative and summative assessments. This is a framework to build around existing content, which, although nationally designed, is locally led and influenced.
Given the importance of RE in the curriculum and that the subject is being supported through this standard to match other national curriculum subjects, we expect an acceleration in the quality of teaching and learning and personal development across academies such as ours, where competence, character and community are the focus. The inclusion of concepts and careful sequencing will support planning and promote a better understanding of disciplinary and subject knowledge, which is often a gap. It’s vital that senior leaders engage with this important development.
We welcome the REC launching a ‘toolkit’ for teachers to help them develop a curriculum based on the best RE practice in the country. This will be published in May 2024. This toolkit is the culmination of a three-year Religion and Worldviews in the Classroom project drawing on academic research and exemplary classroom practice. It will give teachers access to a set of resources which aim to enrich and deepen pupils’ scholarly engagement with religion and worldviews.
Alongside these positive curriculum developments, the subject has finally had its teaching bursary restored by the government. From September 2024 a new cohort, attracted by £10,000, will be beginning their training. The bursary is placing RE on par with other ‘difficult to recruit to’ subjects.
Organisations such as NATRE and Culham St Gabriel’s Trust provide ongoing professional development and support for the subject. You can find out more about them at the upcoming CST Directors of Improvement conference on April 30 2024.
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