London, England - A national curriculum for religious education in English schools may be needed to guarantee standards and help improve community cohesion, the Ofsted inspectorate said yesterday. It suggests school children should be taught more about the complexities of religion and its role in a modern world under the threat of terrorism - and that they should learn religion is not always a force for good.
Secondary schools in particular do not place enough emphasis on exploring the changing political and social significance of religion in the modern world, a five-year study has concluded.
The report, Making Sense of Religion, found the teaching of Christianity was "often much less rigorous and more fragmented" than carefully sequenced units of work on other faiths. "Work on specific aspects of Christianity, such as the life of Jesus or the Bible, is isolated from an investigation of the religion itself." GCSE syllabuses paid little attention to issues related to religion's role and significance in contemporary Britain.
In primaries, schools tended to teach RE once a week in isolation, rather than taking advantage of the project approach used in subjects such as history. The report recognised, however, that standards have improved in recent years.
RE is compulsory for all pupils in all state schools, but the curriculum is determined locally through conferences organised by local authorities. Many local syllabuses are being revised under a voluntary national framework introduced three years ago, but Ofsted found secondary schools were not making the changes. To complicate matters further, all Roman Catholic schools and a third of Church of England schools within the state sector decide their own syllabuses.
Ofsted's recommendation of a review of current arrangements follows an appeal by the Religious Education Council to ministers to consider a national curriculum among options for strengthening the subject. The council, representing the interests of faith communities and professional associations, recently reported that about a third of secondaries did not teach the subject to all pupils after the age of 14 and only one in five taught all sixth formers the subject.
Miriam Rosen, director of education at Ofsted, said: "Recent world events, the rise of more fundamentalist forms of religion, the growth of faith schools and the debate about the relationship between religion and British identity have given a new impetus and urgency to RE."
The report notes that 10 years ago, a series of lessons on Islam for 13-year-olds might have started with the assumption pupils knew little. That was no longer the issue. But schools will soon have a new duty to promote community cohesion and the government wants those where pupils are mostly white and English to twin with others with a different racial and religious mix to help prepare children for life in an increasingly diverse society.
The Church of England said it strongly supported compulsory national arrangements for RE, while allowing flexibility to reflect local circumstances. The education department said it had no plans to change RE's legal basis.