Rob Freathy

This essay considers the Church of England’s policy towards religious education in fully-maintained schools without a religious character in twentieth-century England and Wales. At first glance, religious education may seem to be a minor aspect of ecclesiastical and political history.Yet, it is very revealing in several respects. First, the Church has always been committed to the religious education of the whole of the people in England and Wales, not least through schooling. It has consistently taken the view that,as the national Church,it has the cure of all souls, regardless of faith. Such is the Church’s commitment to the religious education of all, that its attitudes on this issue towards schools without a religious character is difficult to distinguish from those in its own Church schools.Second, policies on religious education maybe regarded as a barometer of the dynamic between Church,state,other denominations, other faiths,and those of no faith. Education has been an issue on which the Church has always sought to exercise a role in the public sphere, locally as well as nationally, regardless of the population’s self-declared religious sensibilities.Third, despite the relentless decline in affiliation, as measured by baptism and confirmation statistics,the Church has maintained a significant influence within education. Across the twentieth century the Church has obtained states upport and patronage for its schools, with the costs of buildings, repairs and staffing increasingly borne by locally-drawn revenues and the national exchequer. In 1903, there were 11,687 Church of England schools educating 2,338,602 children, forming around 40 per cent of the school population. By 2000,the proportion of children educated in the Church’s schools had fallen to around 20 per cent, that is 924,000 children. However, in parallel with this decline, the Church negotiated a retention of its direct influence over the nature, purpose and content of religious education in the wider maintained sector,chiefly as a result of the 1944 Education Act, which required Local Education Authorities (LEAs)to constitute Agreed Syllabus Conferences to prepare, adopt and reconsider syllabuses of religious instruction,and permitted LEAs to constitute Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education to advise the authority upon relevant matters. The Church has also shaped developments in religious education by means of the financial resources available to it through the Church college trusts, which emerged from the shrinkage in the Church-college sector during the 1970s.Moreover, the Church has extended its reach and influence in religious education beyond Church schools, particularly during the post-Second World War period, through its network of diocesan advisers. Their role has become all the more important and influential with the gradual demise of support by local authorities for religious education,from the Thatcher period onwards. How this came to be is recounted below, by examining the dominant opinions within the Church on religious education across the century, as they emanated from bishops, dioceses, church commissions, the Church’s National Society, and the Church’s Board of Education and diocesan.

Amidst the busy-ness and strains of workaday life, teachers of RE will perhaps rarely pause to reflect on their place either within an ongoing historical and educational process or within a European context. The research project outlined in this compact article is a reminder, however, that they are

What opportunities and challenges are presented to religious education across the globe by the basic human right of freedom of religion and belief? To what extent does religious education facilitate or inhibit ‘freedom of religion’ in schools? What contribution can religious education make to freedom in the modern world? This volume provides answers to these and related questions by drawing together a selection of the papers delivered at the seventeenth session of the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values held in Ottawa in 2010. These reflections from international scholars, drawing upon historical, theoretical and empirical perspectives, provide insights into the development of religious education in a range of national contexts, from Europe to Canada and South Africa, as well as illuminating possible future directions for the subject.

This essay considers the Church of England’s policy towards religious education in fully-maintained schools without a religious character in twentieth-century England and Wales. At first glance, religious education may seem to be a minor aspect of ecclesiastical and political history.Yet, it is very revealing in several respects. First, the Church has always been committed to the religious education of the whole of the people in England and Wales, not least through schooling. It has consistently taken the view that,as the national Church,it has the cure of all souls, regardless of faith. Such is the Church’s commitment to the religious education of all, that its attitudes on this issue towards schools without a religious character is difficult to distinguish from those in its own Church schools.Second, policies on religious education maybe regarded as a barometer of the dynamic between Church,state,other denominations, other faiths,and those of no faith. Education has been an issue ...

This article explores the position of ‘worldviews’ in Religious Education, using England as a particular case study to illustrate contemporary international debates about the future of Religious Education (or equivalent subjects). The final report of the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE 2018) – which recommended that the subject name in England be changed from ‘Religious Education’ to ‘Religion and Worldviews’ – provides a stimulus for a discussion about the future of the study of religion(s) and worldview(s) in schools. The article offers a review of, and reflections on, the worldviews issue as treated in academic literature relating to Religious Education, before noting the challenges that the incorporation of worldviews presents. The article goes on to suggest ways in which a ‘Big Ideas’ approach to the study of religion(s) and worldview(s) (Wiggins and McTighe 1998; Wintersgill 2017; Freathy and John 2019) might provide criteria by which worldviews are selected for curric...

In response to previous articles in this journal by Rachel Cope and Julian Stern, and using an example of classroom practice, this article promotes a form of multi-faith religious education in which primary-school pupils (age 5–11) are re-conceived as joint researchers working alongside their teachers, through processes of imaginative and empathetic dialogue, to investigate the effectiveness of different methodologies and methods of studying religion(s). This pedagogical strategy seeks to teach pupils the disciplinary knowledge and skills associated with the communities of academic practice concerned with theological and religious studies, and more specifically to initiate them into the hermeneutical discourses which underlie theological and religious research and teaching. Moreover, it is argued that some of the suggested practices could be applied to the study of spirituality in any context and could contribute to the spiritual development of participants.

By Rob Freathy, Esther D. Reed, Anna Davis, Helen C. John and Anneke Schmidt What historical sources can we use to find out about Jesus? What do the gospel writers tell us? How do Muslim and Christian views about Jesus compare? What can we know about Jesus’ attitudes towards women? How might a visually impaired Christian respond to biblical stories in which Jesus heals the blind? Is Jesus the same for people across different contexts and cultures? What is the significance of Jesus for the lives of Christians today? How and why do artists represent Jesus in different situations using a variety of signs and symbols? All of these questions and more are addressed in this textbook for upper secondary school Religious Education.

Introduction: The research context Two key points are foundational to an appreciation of the nature, purpose and potential of the human sciences, of which the study of religion(s) and worldview(s) is a part. The first of these is that our ‘knowledge’ (if we can call it that at all) is constructed, not mined or uncovered. But what does it mean to say that knowledge in the human sciences is ‘constructed’? A helpful contrast can be drawn with the natural sciences, which might be perceived to rely on certain indisputable constants (forces, elements, and so on). In the human sciences, however, there is no canon of universally accepted, objective and discoverable ‘facts’ upon which our inquiries can rest. In other words, we are making knowledge, not finding facts that already exist. Given that we cannot create the ‘controlled conditions’ that scientists might use in their research, we must acknowledge that the context in which a study takes place will have profound effects on the outcome ...

Introduction We are developing an approach to RE which foregrounds methodological issues associated with the study of religion(s). We believe RE should provide an initiation into the discourses associated with the communities of academic practice concerned with theological and religious studies. This entails not only learning about religion(s), but also learning how to learn about religion(s). Our approach encourages pupils to think about the significance, and evaluate the effectiveness, of different methods of enquiry. To make research methodologies tangible to young children, we have personified some of them as cartoon character superheroes. Individually they are called Know-it-all Nicky, Debate-it-all Derek, Ask-it-all Ava and Have-a-go Hugo, but collectively they’re known as the ‘RE-searchers’. Each character holds different assumptions about religion(s) and advocates different research methods (e.g. observing and recording, questioning and arguing, interviewing and empathizing,...

ABSTRACT This article discusses the outcomes of a questionnaire survey which sought to ascertain the attitudes of young people towards the Bible. One thousand and sixty-six pupils from Years 6, 9 and 12 in nine English schools participated. The young people's attitudes are discussed in relation to gender, age and attendance at a place of worship. The research team found that being female, in Year 6 and attending a place of worship very often are factors associated with the most positive attitudes towards the Bible, while being male, in Year 9 and never attending a place of worship are associated with the least positive attitudes. The article also discusses the difficulty of explaining individual correlations regarding age and gender.

... of Education appointed a sub‐committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council, under the chairmanship Sir Cyril Norwood (President ... relationship between the church and education with particular reference to the thoughts of William Temple, Spencer Leeson, Robert ...