Is it time to do less, in more depth

English religious education changed after the New Labour Governments of Blair and Brown. During the first decade of the 21st century it reached a zenith of engagement in terms of numbers doing a qualification at GCSE and Advanced level. At that time one of the striking features was the combination of subjects within what was RE. When I was teaching (1997-2003) students of A Level might do Philosophy of Religion or Ethics (of a largely philosophical kind) and a paper in either New or Old Testament studies.

Students who really loved the subject could proceed to university study of philosophy or the social sciences, or to theology or biblical studies. At GCSE level RE varied. Some schools engaged with the study of a Gospel alongside study of a religion. Others combined a paper focused on religious ethics with a paper focussed on religious belief or doctrine. But other schools engaged with social and ethical issues and how religious and non religious philosophies engaged with those issues.

There were quite different pathways which I suggest spanned sociological and progressive ends of the subject and tradition focussed studies with a strong textural analysis. A student might begin studying sacred texts at 14 and study them for 4 years, systematically. Another student would have an extensive focus on social and ethical issue. Both might also receive a philosophical formation.

I don’t mean to cast these with too much nostalgia, but at one level the subject provided pathways for both ends of the political spectrum: the socially progressive and the tradition conservative. The subject provided scope for the whole political-religion spectrum, the spectrum that sits within the subject community and spans our society. England is filled both with diverse socially conservative communities and also a strongly progressive presence. One thing RE I think really delivered was the divergences that happened in the social ethics classes where honest differences were engaged. Issues like assisted dying, which is proving extremely challenging to navigate into law in this country at the moment, were the bread and butter of the subject.

I wonder if we have lost that dimension.

Under the Conservative led governments, the study of traditions occluded social ethics. This was advanced as rigorous and it gave the opportunity of studying two traditions and this is something special, but with the addition of a lot more content. I remember interviewing an RE department soon after they were teaching the new specifications in around 2016 and they were complaining that they no longer had no time to really do complex topics like abortion or euthanasia in detail.

Depth was lost. The space to do thoughtful and complex engagement with different areas of disagreement disappeared. I was shocked recently when teaching a class of undergraduates, to discover that only 20% had discussed euthanasia at school. The vast majority had simply not had that experience at school.

I think we have lost something we once had space for—the space of difficult dialogue about issues where there was disagreement in society. Maybe that education had value not because of some end of study examination, but because it had space and time to treat difficult topics.

I wonder if it is time to review that decision that we hardly realized we were making - the move away from the focus on areas of disagreement in social and ethical life based on diverse ways of living that are found throughout the country.

Maybe the curriculum and assessment review will give us a chance to think again about that decision.