ABSTRACT
Any new Religious Education (RE) syllabuses will have to ‘reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian’. Schools are required to continue to provide daily acts of collective worship, but this collective worship has to be ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’. As in the 1944 Education Act, any pupil can be withdrawn from all or part of RE lessons and acts of collective worship, and teachers continue to have similar rights of exemption. Statutory requirements, ministerial pronouncements, Agreed Syllabuses, Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education and the like provide a legal and advisory framework within which it is still possible for schools to plan and deliver an RE which can enhance the education offered to pupils in our pluralist society and which can properly embody a multicultural perspective. One informed commentator, describing the situation revealed by HMI inspections just before the 1988 Act writes of RE.
