Accord welcomes RE review
The Accord Coalition has welcomed an announcement during the House of Commons Second Reading debate of the Academies Bill by the Secretary of State for Education, Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, that Religious Education will be included in the Government’s curriculum review later this year.
Religious Education has a unique status in England and Wales. It is a compulsory subject in all state maintained schools, but is not part of the National Curriculum in either country.
Instead most schools follow a RE syllabus that has been produced by a committee of its local authority responsible for education, called an Agreed Syllabus Conference, which comprises of members of different religious groups, teachers and also local councillors. …
Chair of the Accord Coalition, Dr Rabbi Jonathan Romain, said ‘not only are the arrangements for local syllabus RE incredibly bureaucratic and costly, but they often lead to a provision of RE that is unbalanced and of poor quality.[']
The British Humanist Association is a founding member of Accord, a wide coalition of organisations which includes religious groups, humanists, trade unions and human rights campaigners, campaigning against religious admissions criteria in ‘faith’ schools and for fair and balanced teaching on religion and belief.
Teaching in a balanced and critical way about the variety of human beliefs past and present is surely an educational necessity. Pragmatically, without it (and USA, Turkey & India are hardly encouraging examples) children are at the mercy of family prejudices and the divisive absolutisms of faith.
But SACREs (mine here comprises about 25 people from 4 groups – Cof E, all other religious, teachers, local authority) exist precisely to provide an RE syllabus linked to religious power. These baggy self-serving bureaucracies enable faults such as automatic enrolment in examinations where the only comparative element required is within Christianity, and the favouring of a covert evangelism.
The beliefs and morality of ordinary life and the right of children to grow toward independent belief should be recognised, otherwise “if it’s not our faith it doesn’t count”. Better perhaps to stand apart from such nonsense than to legitimise it by seeking token admission.