How time flies….

It is hard to believe I’ve now been in my role at Culham St Gabriel’s for four years. Interestingly, this last 12 months will have been my first without a Covid Lockdown to contend with! As I reflect, one thing stands out to me – how incredibly passionate the religion and worldviews community is. One of the greatest joys I have is working with such enthusiastic people both within and outside of the Trust. Last Friday the leadership programme steering group met together to review applications, I wasn’t the only one who said it was one of the highlights of their year!!

Our vision is for a broad-based, critical and reflective education in religion and worldviews contributing to a well-informed, respectful and open society.

Our vision is ambitious, we want to transform society through education and we can’t achieve this on our own. This is why the word ‘contributing’ is so important. We work alongside other organisations, funders, grantees and scholars. Together I believe we are making a difference and I reflect on a few things here, but there is still much work to do.

1. Promoting positive public perception of an education in religion and worldviews
   Our two Savanta ComRes commissioned surveys has shown us that most of the general public do have a positive public perception of the subject. So our work has been focused on utilising this through a series of promotional films, as well as developing our understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion and its relevance particularly in relation to religion or belief. This has led us to work with the business sector and those engaged in interfaith work.
2. Influencing government policy in supporting religion and worldviews, including the recommendations of the Commission on RE (2018)
   We have worked closely with the RE Policy Unit to campaign for several of the recommendations. These include funding of recruitment, maintaining the subject knowledge enhancement courses for RE, and calling for a National Plan. In addition, we have been increasingly promoting freedom of religion or belief (Article 18) and developing projects in this area.
3. Advocating for the importance of a high-quality education in religion and worldviews within the education world
   One of the highlights this year for me has been establishing senior educationalists focus group who are working with me to unpack and explore the wider context in which our work sits. This has been very insightful, and I’m grateful to those who volunteer to take part.
4. Developing excellent leadership and teaching of religion and worldviews
   Setting up our new e-learning platform and reimagining our scholarship programmes has been extremely rewarding over the last couple of years. Our e-learning platform has around 1000 people registered with hundreds of teachers completing one or more of our free courses. Alumni from many of our scholarship programmes have moved on to undertake doctoral research or take on regional or national leadership roles for the subject. Establishing RExChange as a researcher-practitioner knowledge exchange conference also stands out to me as a highlight.
5. Facilitating the Religion and Worldviews community to work more cohesively.
   It has been such a pleasure to work with many steering groups, executives and with groups of funders. Online meetings have certainly helped to bring people together more frequently, but I do miss sometimes the in-person chat over coffee! Last year a chance conversation between four colleagues in a car between conference venues led to the Trust piloting a secondary mentoring programme in partnership with AULRE… I wonder what this year’s chance conversations will bring….

In this short blog I’ve offered a few reflections on our current strategy (2020-2023) which has recently been reviewed and evaluated by the trustees. I know I have not mentioned everything! There is far too much!! Later this summer we will be sharing some revised (but similar) strategic objectives and we hope you will want to continue to partner with us as we work together to fulfil our vision for a well-informed, respectful, open society.

If you’re interested in reading a review of our work last year, please see our annual report