ABSTRACT
It is not always recognised outside the small sub-world of religious education professionals that England, together with Scotland, Wales and Sweden, was a pioneer of non-confessional, pluralist, multi-faith religious education at the end of the 1960s, and is still looked to by the rest of the world as the exemplar to be emulated. Adults who have benefited from good religious education of this kind over the past 45 years do not always realise that it is still innovative and unusual as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Many states follow the French and American system of leaving religion out of state-funded education altogether (not actually possible in practice, as France is beginning to realise: see, for example, Van den Kerchove, 2011), or provide a confessional religious education in the dominant tradition deemed to be that of the whole country, or offer a range of confessional options for the diverse religious traditions recognised as present. To clarify terms, for the purposes of this chapter, ‘confessional’ means religious education that seeks to nurture the child within a particular tradition, and ‘non-confessional’ religious education seeks to educate children impartially about a range of religious (and perhaps non-religious) traditions without promoting adherence to any of them. Wanda Alberts (2007) uses the term ‘integrative religious education’ to indicate that non-confessional religious education means that all children from whatever background are in the same classroom studying together.
