The Commission on Religious Education’s final report: brief remarks

The publication of England’s Commission on Religious Education’s report last month deserves proper attention and critical consideration (https://www.commissiononre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Final-Report-of-the-Commission-on-RE.pdf). Over the course of the next few issues of the journal a number of commissioned and submitted responses to this report will be published. Getting the ball rolling on these is a perspective from Friedrich Schweitzer, a member of this journal’s editorial board. Its overall critique is apposite, but here I am going to briefly refer to his comment in relation to research, which he sees as a crucial missing element to the commission’s final recommendations.

The function of research, in and on religious education, is a perennial matter, which religious educators, researchers and funding bodies periodically return to but never resolve. Culham St Gabriel’s Trust project-funding aside, there is presently a dearth of funding specifically for religious education. As a matter of concern for this and other journals in the field in my view, research needs greater strategic consideration. Specifically, a structural response has long been needed from amongst religious education associations and funders. Moreover, the time is ripe for a dialogue with the public funders also on the specific nature and breadth of religious education research. The impact of the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society funding programme of 2007–2012 continues to reverberate, but this funding stream was not specifically for religious education, and what funding there was has dwindled in publications, if not in impact. Given the importance of RE (or Religion and Worldviews, should the commission’s recommendation be taken up) to recruitment subjects in the humanities and social sciences, specifically Theology and Religious Studies, then university researchers need to be seen as having a stake in the success of the RE and the merits of studying it at school more strongly upheld.

I welcome Friedrich’s Schweitzer’s perspective on the Commission’s report, and look forward to the publication of others in due course.

Other articles in this issue once again represent the breadth of submissions to JBV, cutting across religious education in school and faith communities, to the broader aspects of practical theology and religion in public life. The issue is especially rich in addressing matters of the exercise of faith in different contexts. Amongst the cluster of articles on religious education in schools, Zembylas and Altmeyer examine how religious education might be theorised about and framed. Ben Clements’ article traces differing perspectives on abortion over a 50-year period, whilst Francis and Rouse in turn provide studies on church school ethos and the personality of Jesus. Baker, Schwarz and Montemaggi’s papers each provide fascinating examples of the deliberative ethical responses of people of faith in differing social and political contexts, times and places.