Centenary Conference - Jeremy Taylor's Speech
The Future of RE
I want to be provocative about what I see as the five characteristics of UK RE for the next five years. I've tried to synthesise them out of the responses that were in the report, and I've tried to set them against the reality of classroom life.
First characteristic - we will go on fending for ourselves as a subject outside the National Curriculum, but one with strong professional motivation and self awareness. Think back to the National RE Festival, which we called for at the last of these conferences, and how it has affected 50% of the schools of the country. Think of the networking which goes on in the local groups of RE teachers - with more to come, perhaps, as a pack is produced to support them. Think of the work on subject standards, working towards levels of achievement, that the Advisers' Association have worked on and is now with QCA. Think even of ICT and the work that we are doing in REfIT. Already two RE dedicated websites are up and running, and another will be commercially sponsored (that's interesting) in a few weeks' time. Even BECTa, the Government agency, will have RE well placed in its Virtual Teachers' Centre within months. We've written it for them, and we hope they'll publish it. What links all of those things is the way that Trusts work with teachers. When teachers and Trusts meet in the RE world, it is the equivalent of the government pouring millions in for everyone else. Rightly or wrongly, that's the way it is.
Second characteristic - we will go on maintaining the pressure, particularly since the 1988 Act and the work that led up to that. The effective coalition between teachers, other professionals within RE, churches, faith groups and life stance groups, that have come together around the RE Council and other bodies, has maintained pressure and has led to the present situation. We will need to go on doing so. I suspect that recruitment initiatives such as RETRI will need to go on full speed. Training provision for existing teachers and for non-specialist teachers (though they are a reducing number as we've heard already) will continue. The work on a subject leaders' guide, produced by the RE community and led by AREIAC, is critical. Notice, too, the way that commercial providers of in-service training such as FFE are coming on board. They've just appointed an RE specialist to their staff. That speaks to us. Farmington continues its work: the Farmington Fellowship Scheme is the equivalent of seventeen full-time researchers. We'll need to maintain the pressure too on compliance with the legal entitlement, particularly in Key Stage 4 where we've moved from a 20% figure to a 40% figure in two years. We must press on to 100%. At sixteen-plus the situation is much more dire as the papers indicate. That's an area we must move on into.
Third characteristic - we need to join the agenda. If only we could prove that good RE cuts truancy down; if only we could prove that good RE reduces exclusions; they'd all want it! But there's a serious point here. We've been effective in the past where we have joined the agenda, not where we've asked the agenda to change. We need to have the political skill and nous to identify the agenda issues where we can say, 'We've got a solution.' We need to be able to say, 'We see you've got a problem about... We could supply the answer.' That's the political reality. We need it on raising standards, grasping the assessment nettle as we are beginning to do in the work of QCA, and a raft of further stuff coming out in November. The message the government has is that schools are fed up with receiving things and they don't want it all landing on the desk. They may be right usually, but they're not right about RE. Any RE specialist will tell you, 'Send me more paperwork, because if you send me more paperwork I can walk into the Head and say, "Have you seen this? What are we doing about that?" We want more paper!' The work of the British and Foreign Schools Society, REaSE Project, the School Effectiveness Project, I think that will give us major answers that we can offer to the debate. My joy is that I don't have to talk about Citizenship, because it's been done already. There are still problematic areas in the balance between local control and national. We need to be at the political cutting edge, and we need people who can speak for us in that way.
Fourthly, we need to be fighting the invisibility factor. Have you noticed how you never hear about all the good things that happen in RE? In the media, in School Management Teams, we need to be influencing people and saying, 'Look, this is happening.' Now there are two ways of doing this. You can write off rude letters to the Editor of the Times Ed. My experience is that it doesn't work. What you need to do is to cultivate people. Getting to know people and getting trusted, getting able to slip the message in, is the way forward in the political and in the media arena. We need to work co-operatively. The work of the RE Council, the people who meet from time to time with the DfEE, in a kind of openness to listen which is unprecedented, has done things for RE and I believe it needs to go on doing so. If we work co-operatively, and if we are working out what we ought to say together and then all saying it in different ways, maybe we'll get heard.
Fifthly, we need to be celebrating our successes. The teacher-led demand for short courses which occurred five years ago, and was then announced four years ago at this conference, has raised the figures from less than 20% doing an examined course three years ago to more than 40% of the cohort doing an examined course now. If we go on from there projecting onwards, how soon can we reach 50%, 60%, 70%? We'll do that by celebrating the successes, the Ofsted-led improvements, the quality of resources. If you go to any conference and look what is available today in terms of books, artefacts, videos and ICT, you can see that the situation is moving steadily forward. We need to have a sense of confidence. For too long RE people have lacked self-confidence, and perhaps at times rightly so. In my judgement, it is now time to take up a more confident stance because we will be listened to more. My experience is that RE in Britain is the envy of the rest of Europe. It is seen as more coherent, more sophisticated, more vibrant, with better relationships, more effective grappling with issues of authenticity and of truth, than anywhere else in Europe. We need to celebrate that. Two days ago I was at a meeting where the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge said that in his judgement, RE had come of age. That made me think. Coming of age, probably around 18, the end of acne, the end of angst, and on into confident adult maturity. My guess is that that is where we should see ourselves, and we should live as mature adults in the educational world.
