Under-resourced RE teaching costs lives

Ed Pawson, Chair of the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE), argues that developing young people’s “religious literacy” would help to make them less vulnerable to radicalisation. “Good religious education has never been more needed,” says Pawson.

I taught Religious Education in a state secondary school. Or at least, I tried to. You can tell how a school subject is regarded by the amount of time it has on the timetable. At the school where I was teaching, pupils had 50 minutes a week from the ages of 11 to 16. At GCSE level, students sat a short course in RE, which gave them half a GCSE.

It was a struggle to get my pupils to see the point of the subject, especially at GCSE, because teenagers know that they know everything. And this group knew that half a GCSE in RE didn’t count for much. When I was a Newly Qualified Teacher trying to teach GCSE RE, the behaviour in my classes was challenging, and the experience of teaching what is an important, valuable and engaging subject was extremely depressing.

There were successes. I recall teaching about the Holocaust, during which a 14-year-old boy, Michael, commented the Jews must have done something to deserve what happened to them. This wasn’t racism, it was ignorance. (That can be just as dangerous, left unchecked.) Michael was overwhelmed by the horror of what he was learning about, and needed to make sense of this and feel secure again. During that lesson I watched a realisation dawn upon him: the Jewish people were innocent; we all have a shared humanity and a duty to protect each other.

The Government says RE is a “vital part” of its plan to prepare young people for modern life, by helping children to develop an understanding of the different faiths and cultures that make up our society.

School RE is a fantastic place to debate moral issues and enhance communication and critical thinking. It helps to increase social awareness. Or at least it would do all of this if it were given the status it deserved on the curriculum and were taught by specialist teachers – but it’s not.

So, when my 21-year-old Cambridge graduate cousin said she didn’t believe Jesus is the Son of God, and I responded, “Of course, that’s up to you, but you can’t deny he was an incredible teacher and a radical,” I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was amazed to learn that Jesus existed as an historical figure.

Reality tv star Joey Essex writes in his autobiography, Being Reem: “I didn’t know what the Nativity was until someone told me the other day.” He adds: “Apparently [Easter’s] got nothing to do with eggs, chickens or bunnies. I know it’s to do with Jesus but I thought the eggs came about because he was born in the hay (and you get eggs in the hay).”

It is not enough that RE is a compulsory subject; there is the curriculum, and there is the “hidden” curriculum – the lessons we teach unintentionally, the message we send out about how important a subject is, by how it is valued and presented; its place on the timetable and who we ask to teach it. Following the beheadings of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya this weekend, Bishop Angaelos, head of the Coptic Church in the UK, spoke of the need to raise awareness of the sanctity of life and the equal value in every person. To deny our young people a good Religious Education is not only to deny them their social and cultural heritage, it is to deny them religious literacy and important lessons in critical thinking, leaving them open to radicalisation.

Dr Lucy Russell taught history and RE at secondary level and now writes and edits for the church press