These are donations made to some of our partners for work which directly supports the Culham St Gabriel’s strategic objectives. Award holders have the same expectations placed upon them as grantees. The Trust welcomes conversations about its strategy with potential new partners. The following awards were made to:

NATRE Leadership Fund to enable teachers to attend meetings with high level officials, Ofsted, Ofqual and so on £1,500

RE Policy Unit to support PR work in relation to religion and worldviews in particular the work of the champions £5,000

Edge Hill University to support their summer school in 2024 £8,000

These are donations made to some of our partners for work which directly supports the Culham St Gabriel’s strategic objectives. Award holders have the same expectations placed upon them as grantees. The Trust welcomes conversations about its strategy with potential new partners. The following awards were made to:

University of Glasgow to undertake a systematic review of educational interventions in religious education £9,000

The Association of Religious Education Inspectors, Advisers and Consultants (AREIAC) to further the Young Ambassadors programme £28,200

Faith and Belief Forum to develop a programme to promote an education in religion and worldviews with parents £14,870

Edge Hill University to support their summer school £4,500

NATRE Leadership Fund to enable teachers to attend meetings with high level officials, Ofsted, Ofqual and so on: £1,000

RE Policy Unit to support the advocating of an education in religion and worldviews at party conferences £10,000

These are donations made to some of our partners for work which directly supports the Culham St Gabriel’s strategic objectives. Award holders have the same expectations placed upon them as grantees. The Trust welcomes conversations about its strategy with potential new partners. The following awards were made to:

RE Policy Unit – to continue its campaigning advocacy and lobbying work £100K over 3 years

Regional Hubs Project – for more information see here  £150K over 3 years

The Religious Education Council of England and Wales to develop its own strategy and operations over the next three years: £150,000 over three years (£50K 2021-22, £50K 2022-23, £50K 2023-24)

NATRE Chair Support to enable the chair to fulfil her role effectively £12,000 over three years (£4K per year beginning in April 2021 paid to NATRE/Chair’s school to release her)

RE Council Chair Support to enable the chair to fulfil her role effectively £12,000 over three years (£4K per year beginning in Sept 2021 paid to the Chair’s employer to release her)

The Religion and Belief Literacy Partnership have been awarded a grant for their project: The Public Sector Religion and Belief Literacy Standard (ReLit Standard). The aim of this project is to create and pilot a ReLit Standard which will drive improvements and focus on the literacy of public sector bodies on religion and worldviews. As well as being a positive step in itself, the project aims to improve the ways in which public policy relating to religions and worldviews is addressed.
Grant Awarded: £20,000

Catholic Bishop’s Conference and Bible Society have been awarded a grant for their project: Made in God’s Image, focussing on the development of resources to support teacher and pupil engagement with the exhibition. The project aims to increase biblical visual and racial literacy across England and Wales, leading to a deepening of interaction with the Bible. It aims to give voice to the experience of marginalised Christians, leading to greater inclusion, interaction and diversity within the Christian visual arts. Lastly, it seeks to provide resources for school pupils enabling increased understanding of the Middle Eastern context in which Jesus lived, balancing out a historic Western-centric view of Christianity. Details of the exhibition can be found here: https://gods-image.co.uk/
Grant Awarded: £5,000

Staffordshire SACRE have been awarded a grant for their project: Developing and defining strategic leadership in RE. This initiative develops and clarifies strategic leadership at governance level, so trustees and governors are equipped to seek assurances from senior school leaders that understanding and appreciation for the richness of human diversity, including through RE curricula, content, pedagogy and provision are at the heart of their organisation. The outcomes aim to bring about a development in the mindset for some, and a refinement for others in enabling them to lead organisations that provides an inclusive respectful and enriching educational experience for all stakeholders.
Grant Awarded: £6,510

The Scottish Teachers Association of Religious and Moral Education (STARME) have been awarded a grant for a Festival of Learning to showcase best practice in the subject enabling participants to enhance the quality of curriculum enactment and classroom pedagogy. In addition the initiative seeks to foster collaborations between practitioners and researchers to address the lack of empirical and classroom-relevant research in the subject.
Grant Awarded: £5,049

The Faith and Belief Forum have been awarded a grant for their project: North-West and West Midlands Parental Engagement Project. This project aims to enhance parental engagement in the teaching of religion and worldviews by actively involving parents with their children’s learning through modelling how faith-based enquiry, and developing skills for dialogue, can take place in the home environment. The project also seeks to engage parents across diverse socio-religious contexts, develop context specific resources and nurture stakeholder partnerships within each region.
Grant Awarded: £29,772

St Peter Saltley Trust and the University of Birmingham have been awarded a grant for their project RE:Connect RE Teacher Fellowship Programme Phase 2: National Roll-Out. In this project, the team want to see a generation of pupils and their teachers becoming confident, informed and generous agents in caring for the earth, through their learning about environment, climate and nature through their studies. Having successfully trialled this approach in 2020-22, they are now planning on expanding and building on the initial pilot.
Grant Awarded: £18,728

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has been awarded a grant to develop engagement with minority faith communities to encourage faith-led and interfaith activities to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. The project will include addressing identity-based prejudice and increasing understanding of the Holocaust and recent genocides, and the long-lasting effects of these traumas on communities today.
Grant Awarded: £30,000

London South Bank University has been awarded a grant for their project Understanding the interplay: Education, lived worldviews & global citizenship. Working with three secondary schools, they will undertake a content analysis of school RE & Citizenship curricula and policies to understand the way in which citizenship is framed in relation to religion/worldview. Host a Lego Serious Play® workshop to explore young people’s conception of citizenship and worldview and the relationship between the two. Data from the content analysis, workshop and focus groups will be analysed and a process of abductive analysis will recontextualise student perceptions of citizenship in light of the framings of citizenship found in curricula. The project has multiple aims, but will primarily focus on strengthening articulation and understanding of ‘worldview’ within RE, R&W and citizenship education.
Grant Awarded £29,593

The London School of Economics Faith Centre has been awarded a grant for their Religious Imaginations Educational Video Series to build deeper literacy of religious traditions as civilisational imaginations that shape contemporary geopolitics. They plan to produce a series of short films introducing the main world religions and worldviews in an imaginative accessible format, suitable for a 16 to adult audience. They aim to increase literacy across religious and non-religious worldviews in a way that enhances knowledge and expands imaginative empathy of other perspectives as well as highlighting the points of connection between world religions and contemporary political, cultural and social discourses in daily life and global affairs. They plan to broaden this cross-cultural religious literacy provision beyond LSE students and towards wider publics and institutions, both governmental and non-governmental.
Grant Awarded £29,968

The Jewish Museum London has been awarded a grant for further dissemination of their project Inclusive Judaism: Teacher Empowerment. The project aims to ensure every teacher has access to training and resources for teaching Inclusive Judaism and to see a change in classrooms from using stock images portraying Jewish people as one stereotype and instead empower teachers to use diverse images and language with their pupils.
Grant Awarded £13,000

Wikimedia UK have been awarded a grant for a project entitled ‘Tackling Cultural Bias on Wikipedia’. The aim of research project is to provide the community of Wikipedia editors with both awareness and understanding of the current knowledge bias on Wikipedia, in regard to the content on underrepresented religions and religious culture. Conducting and publishing this research will assist Wikipedia editors from around the world to help close these content gaps, providing open knowledge and sharing understanding about all the world’s religious beliefs and traditions to a global public audience.
Grant Awarded £6,625

Barnet SACRE have been awarded a grant for a project bringing the high-level academic religion and worldviews approach of Anne Taves into the RE Classroom. This will enable teachers and wider partners in education to have a greater understanding of religion and worldviews and empowering teachers to apply the academic research by providing an easily replicable exemplar planning format.
Grant Awarded £10,000

University of Leeds have been awarded a grant for a project engaging local communities with teaching religion and worldviews. This project explores how to develop new methods of engagement between the religion and worldviews community and faith communities in Britain, by using the teaching of Sikhi as a case study.
Grant Awarded £14,000

Open University have been awarded a grant for a project entitled, ‘Young People and Religion: Creative Learning with History and Filmmaking’. This will build on and raise awareness of the EU-funded Religious Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA) project approach of making ‘docutubes’ among teachers and others working with young people. It will strengthen the evidence base for the effectiveness of the docutube method in order to promote its widespread adoption and support arguments for the adequate resourcing of Religious Education.
Grant Awarded £25,971

Canterbury Christ Church University have been awarded a grant to understand, explain and develop ‘decolonising pedagogy in secondary school Religious Education lessons’. Literature on decolonising pedagogy in secondary schools exists, but research regarding RE is rare. Decolonisation in school is not only about curriculum content and presentation. In partnership with schoolteachers they seek to nurture inspired and decolonised teaching and learning about religion and worldviews.
Grant Awarded £28,387

The Religion Media Centre have been awarded a second grant to build on their highly successful Creating Connections project. This new award will bring this initiative to another five cities across the UK over the coming 12 months. You can read more about the project and its impact so far here.

Grant Awarded £25,000

Church in Wales have been awarded a grant to enable schools and teachers to have the confidence to design multidisciplinary Religion, Values and Ethics curriculums relevant to the needs of their learners, that are critical, objective and pluralistic and are supported by the pedagogical principles of the new Welsh curriculum.

Grant awarded: £18,700

The University of Nottingham have been awarded a grant to:

• Ensure that the move towards Religion and Worldviews is informed by teachers, by hearing and foregrounding their voices.
• Bridge the gap between RE in schools and Theology and Religious Studies in Higher education, by helping teachers to inform the Research and Knowledge Exchange agenda around Religion and Worldviews.
• Create a collaborative network of teachers and academics working on worldview, to support knowledge sharing and opportunities for joined-up and collaborative research.
• Help create a more cohesive, constructive understanding of worldview among teachers.
• Build teachers’ confidence regarding the concept of worldview, and how to use it in the classroom’.

Grant awarded: £29,522

The Rose Castle Foundation have been awarded a grant to enable children to be able to talk confidently about their beliefs and values in the company of those who have diverse worldviews and backgrounds through mutual critical engagement. The aims of the project are:

• To increase teachers’ subject knowledge about sacred texts and other significant text based carriers of meaning.
• To improve teachers’ understanding of the practice of Scriptural Reasoning through active personal participation.
• To help teachers to apply their knowledge of Scriptural Reasoning in a way that fits their own local school communities and contexts.
• To develop a mutually supportive community of learning.

Awarded: £4,950

The David Ross Education Trust have been awarded a grant to develop the epistemic abilities of students in line with the ways of knowing approach outlined in the Ofsted Research Review (Ofsted Research Review, May 2021 pp 9-10). The project will track and analyse the development of knowledge in students and their increasing proficiency in the disciplines of Theology, Philosophy, History and Human Sciences. Awarded: £4,925.50

Canterbury Christ Church University has been awarded a grant for the co-creation of ‘mood boards’ through workshops with teachers. The mood boards will provide a scaffold for planning and a visual stimulus for others, to seed future worldviews curriculum plans. The award will also enable the convening of a national worldviews seminar of around 30 people at CCCU to enable a practical exploration to take place. The project aims to contribute to the development of a shared language around worldviews in the classroom and to create a network of practitioners who will continue to share their own work and further contribute to the conversation. Awarded £17,428

The University of Bristol has been awarded a grant to partner with Religion and Worldviews practitioners in a cutting-edge, innovative opportunity to discuss Race and Education, prompted by a series of films online and in-person, within an international group of academics and practitioners. The aim is to promote a positive, accessible and informed perception of the contribution that Religion and Worldviews has within both the taught and hidden curriculum, highlight capacity to speak to issues of race, decolonisation, globalisation and anti-racism as well as recognising its limits. Awarded £5,000

Lincoln Diocesan Board of Education has been awarded a grant for a project entitled Empowering Voices. This will support young people and their families in Lincolnshire, (where less than 3/100 people are BAME) and beyond to understand the significance of a worldviews approach to understanding what it means to live well together. The project aims to support people to engage with the rich tapestry of cultural and religious diversity in the UK so that they are less likely to discriminate in future. £20,000 awarded.

The University of Strathclyde has been awarded a grant for a project which aims to promote a new vision for Religion and Worldviews (R&W) education establishing the intellectual rigour of the subject in current and educational research. Specifically, the project draws attention to the limitations of the predominant world religions paradigm in the educational representation of religion and worldviews: too often religions are represented as discrete, stable systems of belief. Drawing on expertise of academic specialists in religion and education along with experienced teachers, the project reimagines R&W education that recognises the complexity of subject matter while acknowledging the pedagogical challenges. The dissemination of this project will include curricula materials which may also be used to make a case for a policy shift to illustrate the nature of the new vision for Religion and Worldviews. £16,600 awarded.

RE Today Services The research and planning phase for Understanding Islam (provisional title). This includes initial drafting of the resource, trials in schools and the setting up of a theological advisory group including scholars from a range of Muslim communities and academic institutions. £44,715 awarded.

Diocese of Bristol/South Gloucestershire Local Authority The ‘RE Hive’ project: peer to peer school improvement. To identify RE subject leaders and train them to provide peer to peer support. £9,525 awarded.