Chine McDonald unpacks the state of theology and religious education in the UK. TRS is more than just a ‘soft’ conversation 09/07/2026

There may be trouble ahead in the world of religious education. While steps are being made to strengthen RE within schools, theology & religious studies (TRS) departments at universities are quietly disappearing. Over the last 20 years, the number of TRS  departments in England and Wales has roughly halved. While the schools sector is recognising the need to bolster faith literacy and education among pupils, the future pipeline of those equipped with skills to teach the school pupils of tomorrow well is being  decimated.

Added to this, the decline in TRS, social sciences and humanities departments more generally across the UK are coming at a time when we need people equipped with the skills of philosophical, spiritual and ethical enquiry to wrestle with some of the big questions we are asking today: what does it mean to be human? What is the impact of AI on our understanding of who we are? What is a good life? How do we live well together? 

Last weekend, Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson announced that proposals to make religious education part of the English national curriculum, having received a consensus of support from the RE sector, would move to the next steps with a public consultation in the autumn. While RE is compulsory in schools in England, it does not currently form part of the national curriculum, leading to significant variation in the content and ways of teaching the subject at school level. The government had last year accepted a call for inclusion within the national curriculum, provided that the RE sector could reach consensus on what religious education in the national curriculum should look like.

With consensus now reached – and ahead of Phillipson potentially being reshuffled out of her position at the Department of Education (DfE) when Andy Burnham becomes prime minister – plans will now begin on the how and what of RE’s integration into the new national curriculum.

“Learning about the world’s great faiths and traditions teaches children not just about the world, but how to live alongside and tolerate one another within it,” the Secretary of State said. “In such fractured times, it should be a source of hope that those representing the full spectrum of religion in this country have reached consensus on the most fundamental of points: what our children should learn about the world’s faiths, communities and traditions.”

This milestone is to be celebrated – it could have so easily been a different story, of no consensus. Tireless work by many across the sector, including our friends at Culham St Gabriel Trust, has led to this historic move towards strengthening teaching of religious education in schools. But who will teach it? And how can religious education wherever it is found – in schools, lecture theatres, and beyond the classroom (see our 2025 report on this) – be seen as not just a nice to have, but a necessity in these fractured times?

Sometimes a defence of TRS can fall into the trap of sounding… well, soft. We speak of understanding and tolerance, of being able to see another person’s point of view. But – good though these things are – it’s about more than this.

Last month, I was at the DfE for the first meeting of its Community Cohesion Advisory Group. Run by DfE in collaboration with the University of Salford and the National Union of Students, the group has been brought together to provide feedback on a research–based approach to developing a cohesion framework for education. There, Minister of State for Skills, Baroness Jacqui Smith, spoke of the important role higher education institutions in fostering a sense of communality and cohesion, as well as tackling misinformation.

This is not just fluffy stuff. Sometimes it’s a question of life and death. Nic Beech, vice–chancellor of the University of Salford, said that we are living in a “period of heightened polarisation” and pointed to the attacks in Heaton Park, Golders Green, Belfast and Edinburgh as examples. “There is an urgent need to come together,” he said.

In this setting, I highlighted the importance of religious education and literacy as something we just cannot ignore. Many of the atrocities we see stem from religious and ethical ideologies. Organisations like ours are among the few in the nation who are equipped try to make sense of them.

It’s why TRS is more important than ever. It’s great that the schools sector is starting to understand this, but the closure of religious education departments across the country suggests higher education institutions don’t.

We’ve long seen this coming. Last year, we penned this open letter, signed by people from across different spheres in public life – some of whom are TRS graduates – calling for the safeguarding of religious education. But it seems very few in higher education are listening. For many university vice–chancellors, theology and religious studies, social sciences and humanities, make little business sense. For prospective students facing extortionate tuition fees, the pressure to study a subject that offers the strongest chance of a job with a high salary (which, dare I say it, aren’t the ones that are instinctively geared towards working for the common good) is strong. It’s a sad state of affairs when everything becomes about financial gain.

TRS provision is patchy and dwindling at a time when we need it more than ever. As my colleague George Lapshynov writes so eloquently in our latest Theos blog: “Critical religious literacy, the ability to understand, interpret and engage with different beliefs, is unevenly distributed. Where it is weak, empathy and cohesion suffer, and misunderstanding grows.”

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