A critical reflection on the Commission on Religious Education’s proposed National Entitlement to Religion and Worldviews in England and Wales

Abstract

This paper responds to the Commission on Religious Education’s proposed National Entitlement to Religion and Worldviews in England and Wales. Qualitative data were collected from nine English primary Religious Education (RE) teachers to establish their responses to the proposed National Entitlement from their perspectives as RE practitioners. Findings show that teachers were supportive of the high ambitions the National Entitlement has for RE, that they saw opportunities for pupils’ social and personal development as well as advancement in substantive knowledge, but that they were concerned about content-heavy curricula and structural barriers to implementing the National Entitlement. In response, the paper examines ‘cumulatively sufficient’ curricular design and ‘pedagogical reduction’ as strategies to activate the National Entitlement, and raises questions about ‘instrumental purposes’ in the conceptualisation of Religion and Worldviews. The paper recommends sharper account of the originality of Religions and Worldviews in order to advance the cause of the National Entitlement.

Analysing metaphorical pebbles in English RE

“…In 2018 the Religious Education Council of England and Wales (REC) published Religion and Worldviews, a report produced by fourteen independent expert professionals, which made a number of recommendations for the future of RE in England (see Tharani in Chater 2020 for further detail). Trevor Cooling was the Chair of the REC throughout the process and has repeatedly stated that the CoRE report should be viewed as a pebble in the pond to cause ripples and not commandments written on tablets of stone -and he has also claimed that he hoped that it will be a gamechanger (Salter, 2021). Each of these three notions are of course metaphors and will be considered in turn.…”