ABSTRACT
It has been widely recognised for some time that English religious education is in a ‘lamentable state’. Different responses have been developed, but by far the most vocal and influential has been a number of reports, produced under the aegis of the Religious Education Council of England and Wales. In 2013 it initiated a ‘Review’ that called for a new ‘national curriculum framework,’ along the lines it set out. The Review’s analysis and conclusions failed to gain support, for a variety of reasons, and in response the RE Council embarked on a further review and established a Commission on Religious Education (CoRE). After producing an interim report in 2017, the Commission published its final report a year later. It recommended reconfiguring religions as worldviews, extending the subject to incorporate secular worldviews, shifting the focus from religions unto the ‘worldviews’ of students, and the creation of a new legislative framework to give its proposals statutory force. The RE Council subsequently initiated ‘The Worldview Project’, which aims to convince the religious education community of the merits of a ‘worldviews vision’ for religious education. This introductory essay traces these developments, identifies some of their implications and anticipates some of the criticisms that are raised in the essays that follow.
