ABSTRACT
The recent report, Transforming Religious Education (Ofsted 2010: 41) identified as one of the challenges facing religious education (RE) that ‘there is uncertainty among many teachers’ about ‘the way to structure and define a clear process of learning in RE’. In addition, among the ‘weaker aspects of teaching’ in secondary schools, inspectors observed ‘limitations in the structure and sequencing of learning, so that students were unable to see the connection between tasks and the overarching purpose of the lesson’, as well as ‘a lack of clarity about what constituted making progress in RE’ (20). These problems were attributed in part to a ‘lack of clarity about the core purpose of RE’ (41). While it was acknowledged that this lack of clarity made for ‘stimulating and lively debate within the subject community’ it was found to inhibit ‘the effectiveness of classroom practice’. Inspectors observed that ‘teachers were often working with a variety of different perspectives about the basic purpose of the subject. Teachers were often very unsure how these perspectives could be combined or prioritised to promote coherence and progression in RE programmes’ (41–42). The report indentified a number of objectives to which the Non-Statutory Framework, most agreed syllabuses and other RE policy statements refer but found that ‘many teachers remain unclear how to prioritise and organise them within a coherent RE curriculum and the teaching of the subject. As a result, much of the work observed in the RE visits lacked a clear focus and structure’ (42).
