Schools break law on religious education

 Up to a quarter of secondary schools are breaking the law by failing to teach religious education.

A survey published by the Religious Education Council and the National Association of Teachers of RE (NATRE) found that a quarter of the schools polled said they do not offer the subject to all students at GCSE level (aged 14 to 16). In addition, the survey found differences between types of schools – with 96 per cent of faith schools saying they offer the subject to all 14 to 16-year-olds, compared to 73 per cent of academies.

Information gathered by the two organisations also suggests that some schools are not teaching RE. Their FOI request asked for the number of hours of RE each secondary school in England taught to each year group – from Year 7 to Year 11. The proportion of schools teaching no hours in 2015 was around one in four, with the highest proportion being around 28 per cent for Year 11. By law, RE must be taught by all state-funded schools in England.

Fiona Moss, an executive officer for NATRE, said: “If you are an academy, there’s a freedom about how you can teach RE and I think some schools struggle with that freedom.”

By law, all state schools are required to offer religious education, and yet one in four in England is failing to do so. The reason given is that it’s an easy option to cut in order to save money on teachers. But it is a false economy. Schooling is not only about preparing children to pass exams but equipping them for adulthood; and part of that involves an understanding of what and why other members of society believe what they do.

Clearly, religious schools that seek to exclude any knowledge of other faiths are causing harm to their pupils. We also saw in the so-called Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham how zealots can be accused of trying to hijack the curriculum for their own ideological ends. But head teachers should not treat RE as an expendable subject, leaving aside the legal obligations, which many get around by claiming that religion is covered in other lessons.

Among academies, which make up a majority of all secondary schools, a third were not offering RE to 13-year-olds and almost half were not offering it to 14 to 16-year-olds. Taught properly, RE is the prism through which many of the issues pupils will encounter in adulthood can be factored. It is a subject that can encapsulate philosophy, history, architecture and ethics. The great questions that underpin religions are common to them all and are just as important to those who do not have faith.

Moreover, in a world in which extremist doctrine is being promoted as mainstream, RE enables children who get much of their information on social media to more easily identify those who are abusing religion for their own fanatical purpose, This is an important subject, and schools should end their policy of discarding it.