Sharing the purpose of secondary RE in the school

Professional Development Resource

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.