Our Strategic Direction Part 2

Today I want to share with you another of our strategic objectives. Which is:

• Advocating for the importance of a high-quality education in religion and worldviews within the education world

In my last vlog I spoke about changing public perception and influencing government, this objective today about advocacy provides a pivot between those two, and our last two objectives which I will focus on next time which are more related to the religion and worldviews community itself.

Educationalists – headteachers or school leaders, Directors or CEOs of multi academy trusts, governors or union representatives, local authority advisers or Ofsted inspectors, members of the Chartered College or colleagues in Ofqual – all of these in many different ways hold the key to promoting religion and worldviews. It is this broad group of educationalists who we need to work closely with to advocate for the indispensable nature of the subject.

The Norfolk Agreed Syllabus (2019) says:

Through this subject…. Pupils will have the ability to hold balanced and well-informed conversations about religion and worldviews. Pupils will be able to make sense of religion and worldviews around them and begin to understand the complex world in which they live. Pupils will become free thinking, critical participants of public discourse, who can make academically informed judgements about important matters of religion and belief which shape the global landscape.

For these reasons, we need to champion our subject more earnestly with all in the education world.

We need to promote existing research in this field, for example, the work of David Lundie on Social Disadvantage or the University of Bristol/NATRE Shared Space project on community cohesion. We also need to identify gaps in research and consider how we can better measure the impact of an education in religion and worldviews. Equipping leaders of our subject to speak into these spaces is also of vital importance, which is why we support groups such as NATRE, Learn Teach Lead RE and run our own leadership programme in partnership with others.

Next time, I’ll say more about our final two objectives but in the meantime you can find out more on our website www.cstg.org.uk

 

Norfolk Agreed Syllabus (2019) https://www.schools.norfolk.gov.uk/teaching-and-learning/religious-education-agreed-syllabus

Dr David Lundie https://davidlundie.wordpress.com/2019/08/16/religious-education-and-social-disadvantage-report/

Shared Space Project https://www.natre.org.uk/about-natre/projects/the-shared-space-project/