What lies ahead for RE? Esmé Partridge unpacks the evolving landscape of worldviews education and citizenship. 14/11/2025
It is Friday morning in a rural primary school in Kent. After registration, the children walk over to their weekly assembly, where the headteacher opens by leading them in prayer. They say together: “Jesus is the light of the world.” It is, as you probably guessed, a Church of England school, and faith is clearly integral to its ethos and approach to education. This is also the case when the children return to their classrooms – but there, it takes a rather different form.
In the Year Two classroom, there is a question for the day written on a whiteboard: “how does the Torah bring joy to Jewish people?”. Year Three has a wall dedicated to RE, but Christianity takes up only one sheet of A3 in a display of six. Filling the noticeboard are colourful posters about all the major world religions and beliefs from Hinduism to Humanism, the latter displaying questions like “do humanists believe in God?” and “how might a humanist decide what to do?”.
It is striking, being in a primary school for the first time in years, to see how RE has evolved into “Religion and Worldviews” education. Last week, the Government’s Independent Curriculum and Assessment Review recommended that RE should be included in the national curriculum, with a view to improving provision and addressing regional inequality. Its call to give RE the same status as other humanities subjects is a welcome one, and rightly reflects the continuing and arguably growing significance of faith in modern Britain.
But it does raise questions about the purpose of RE today – how is the subject supposed to enrich learners, and to what end? Although collective acts of worship like those in the school assembly are still technically a statutory requirement, classroom RE has moved away from providing “religious instruction” (as it was called until 1988) towards focusing on cultural diversity and the experiences of minority communities. Essentially, it has shifted from a theological approach – the teaching of religion as a normative, moral framework – to a sociological one, studying belief systems from a supposedly neutral standpoint.
While this may be positive from the perspective of responding to cultural diversity, it does risk compromising another aspect that once gave RE its unique value: its potential for character formation. While other parts of the curriculum look at particular areas of study in isolation, RE traditionally offered a more holistic view; a coherent narrative about the world and our place within it. Through the study of scripture, it engaged pupils with ideas of ethics, virtue and justice applicable to world events and situations in their own lives.
The Review does not intentionally seek to undermine this aspect of RE, stressing its “important role in children and young people’s intellectual, personal, spiritual, moral, social and cultural development”. But how feasible is it to ensure all of these within a sociological, worldviews paradigm in practice? Many would argue, as the Review implies, that it is entirely possible to provide character formation while teaching multiple religions, and that the two are not mutually exclusive. It is certainly true – and one of the most valuable aspects of interreligious dialogue – that across the major faiths we find remarkably similar ideas of compassion, justice and reciprocity. The question of virtue especially can illuminate profound affinities between Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism.
Yet exposure to a vast plurality of belief systems – in a way that is, inevitably, compressed – risks a shallow engagement with all of them that is more likely to confuse than to inspire a clear moral or spiritual ideal. Children come to terms with abstract ideas and principles through the sustained familiarisation and memorisation of particular stories, symbols, parables and proverbs. Constantly moving between frameworks risks disorienting students rather than grounding them.
It also, ironically, risks imposing a certain worldview onto the classroom – precisely what the sociological paradigm sought to avoid. Presenting each of the religions as beliefs and practices which happen to be observed by different communities risks reducing them to sociocultural artefacts rather than reflections of any transcendent truth. This too, though implicitly, assumes an ideology of its own: relativism.
It does not have to be this way. We can preserve the best of pluralism without succumbing to relativism. This might mean grounding pupils primarily in the Christian tradition during primary school, by facilitating deep engagement with scripture and the history of Christianity. Although the current RE framework does designate 50% of RE teaching to Christianity, poor levels of religious literacy and training among adults can hinder this, with many primary teachers themselves lacking the training and therefore knowledge to offer confident exegesis and application of scripture. As a result, fewer than half of schoolchildren recognise narratives such as Jonah and the Whale to be from the Bible – a loss that weakens their ability to engage with other aspects of culture and literature, and which any changes to RE in Britain ought to address.
The curriculum could then – in secondary school – open up more fully to others. At this stage, students would have a firm enough foundation for engagement with different beliefs to be truly comprehensible and meaningful. The best of interfaith dialogue – a recognition of universal truths – arises not from cursive comparisons but from a deep understanding of one particular tradition. Such an approach would not only give children a much–needed grounding in their national history and culture; it would ultimately make interreligious encounters even richer, enabling a genuine appreciation of shared values and virtues.
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