ABSTRACT
Prior to the Foster Education Act of 1870 most schools were maintained by voluntary organisations, mainly religious, the two principal ones being the National Society (Church of England) and the British and Foreign Society (NonConformist). It was natural, therefore, that religious teaching and observance should have a significant place in these schools. When the 1870 Act embodied a vision of universal elementary education, it was agreed that local School Boards should be set up to establish schools in areas where one did not already exist. This policy of filling the gaps meant that publicly funded Board Schools were set up alongside voluntary schools and so, incidentally, the dual system was established which still exists today. In early considerations as to nature of the curriculum to be offered in these new Board Schools, an inevitable question referred to religion: should religion appear in the curriculum and, if so, what form should it take? The latter question was resolved by the Cowper-Temple clause, which laid down that religious teaching in the new schools should not be given ‘by means of any catechism or formulary which is distinctive of any particular religious denomination’. This usually meant that RE was developed as Bible teaching, the Bible being one of the few things which all the Christian churches had in common; and thus began the tradition that the syllabus for RE was the Bible-a situation which was to remain for almost a century.
