Religious Education

John Pugh Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on her debate. Obviously, hon. Members are speaking with considerable passion. I acknowledge that, of a number of things I have done in life for which I am barely qualified and have no genuine talent, one has been teaching RE. I taught it for quite a long time to bright adolescent boys, so I know a little about the matter.

Religious education is not an attempt to make people religious, and that must be clearly stated. It is not an attempt to instruct people on what they should believe. Religious education and religion are misunderstood and widely misrepresented.

It seems to me that a person adopts a religion because that provides a framework within which they try to understand their existence; they abandon that religion if and when it fails to provide that meaningful framework. A religion or faith is tested as one’s existence is played out day by day—religion is caught, not taught. Some people get by without using any traditional religious concepts to clarify their life and existence, and such people are called secularists. Most hon. Members present in the Chamber appear to be religious, but in general, people who are not religious are frankly indifferent to those who are. There are, however, an increasing number of angry and aggressive secularists who are filled with what can be described only as missionary zeal to ensure that people are as unreligious as possible. Some people make no attempt to apply a framework to their existence and live an unreflective life.

Within our existence we do a range of things—we study science and history, make moral decisions, listen to music. We join political parties, fall in and out of love, make speeches in Westminster Hall, get ourselves elected and so on. Those things are part of our existence, but they do not entail a particular view of what existence is about. We struggle; we sometimes wonder what we are all doing here. Happily or unhappily, most cultures have a particular view of how we should understand our existence. We call those views religions, and in a sense they come from the groundwork carried out by our forebears. The merits, strength and weaknesses of religions are discovered by those who adopt and try to live out such explanations for their existence.

We cannot teach a religion in a classroom, but we can teach about it and that is what religious education involves. RE may include a number of elements such as the history of religion to explain what people of a particular religion have done, how that religion began, how it spread and so on. The sociology behind religion may be taught to identify a religion’s social effects and the factors that influenced its growth. There may be elements of psychology in identifying traits that may—or may not—incline one towards a particular religion, and the effects of religious belief on a person. RE is not philosophy; its principal job is to clarify how religions, which exist all around us, endeavour to explain our existence and how adherents of a religion live their lives and are likely to act.

Religious education has historically been taught in a narrow way that simply explained the Christian framework. More recently we have had more of a Cook’s tour approach—I am sure that would disgust the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh)—and a whole range of religions are covered with a fairly light-touch approach. It is a hard subject to teach in a totally fair and scrupulous way.

Only once we understand how people view their lives will we know how to engage with them properly, which, I suggest, is what life is about. Therefore, understanding people’s religions is at least as important as understanding their history or geography. Arguably, it is more important than knowing about one’s own past or locale, although there is considerable benefit in understanding one’s culture, background and habitation. History, geography and religious education are all equally important subjects, and there is no convincing case for excluding one and including the others in the English baccalaureate. The reason given by the Secretary of State is that RE is a compulsory subject under law, but the grounds for that curious legal status are obscure and not explained. It is not clear—it seems a straight non-sequitur—why making a subject compulsory in the syllabus means that it does not need to be optional and given more intensive study in the baccalaureate. The blessings of compulsory status are mixed. In the average British school, subjects with compulsory status are often ignored or not explained, and even good schools feel licensed to provide minimal or poor-quality teaching, simply to comply with the law. The compulsory status of RE in this country has done little to stimulate genuine religious belief or interest. In the United States, where teaching religion in schools is absolutely forbidden, church attendance is higher and there are greater levels of belief.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Given the decline in attendance at church services across the United Kingdom and particularly in England, is there not a greater need for religious education and study in schools, so that the benefits of that will be felt by those families who do not have the chance to attend church on Sunday?

[John Pugh]

Given that people do not necessarily have an adequate understanding of what religions represent and involve, there is a case for teaching more about them in schools. I will go that far, but one cannot argue that it is the job of schools to make the nation religious. RE was made compulsory in schools due to a Victorian belief that an irreligious proletariat would be difficult to handle.

Whether or not RE is legally compulsory should not affect its inclusion as a humanities subject in the baccalaureate. The most interesting thing about humanity—we are discussing humanities—is not that we live, breathe, procreate and die, but that we seek to grasp what our existence is about and live accordingly. We are all religious in some sense or other. To make RE a statutory obligation risks diminishing its status, narrowing its scope and lessening its quality. It is a poor argument to suggest that, just because a subject is compulsory in one context, it cannot be optional in another.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gibb]

I will come on to why we have included history and geography in a moment, which relates to significant drops in the proportion of the cohort taking both history and geography.

I recognise that there are many concerns about the fact that the non-inclusion of religious studies in the humanities component of the English baccalaureate could have an adverse impact on the study of the subject. The E-bac recognises those pupils and those schools that succeed in securing achievement in the core subjects of English language, mathematics, the sciences, a language and history or geography, which reflects what happens in other high-performing countries. Singapore, for example, has compulsory O-levels in English language, mother tongue, maths, combined humanities and science. In France, the brevet is made up of exams in French, maths, history, geography and civics. In Japan, all students at the end of junior high school at the age of 15 are tested in Japanese, social studies, maths, science and English, depending on the prefecture. In Alberta, there are compulsory tests at 15 in maths, science, social studies, English and French. In Poland, 16-year-olds are tested in humanities, Polish, maths, science and a foreign language.

We deliberately kept the English baccalaureate small enough to enable pupils to study other subjects, such as music, art, RE, economics or vocational subjects. My concern is that the core academic subjects of the English baccalaureate—English, maths, science, a language, history or geography—are being denied to too many pupils, especially the more disadvantaged. In 2010, only 8% of pupils eligible for free school meals were entered for the English baccalaureate subjects, with only 4% achieving them. Of the 24% of non-free school meal pupils who took the E-bac, 17% achieved it.

In 719 maintained mainstream schools, no pupil entered any of the single award science GCSEs. No pupil was entered for French in 169 secondary schools. No pupil was entered for geography in 137 schools and no pupil was entered for history in 70 schools.

[John Pugh]

May I disabuse the Minister of his view that I was arguing for a change in the legal status of RE? I was trying to explore whether there are good arguments that he could give that are rationales for making the subject compulsory, which would not be good arguments for making it an option within the baccalaureate.

[Mr Gibb]

The arguments would be the same except that it is unnecessary to make RE a component of the English baccalaureate, because it is already compulsory by law. That is the reasoning behind our decision not to include RE in the humanities component.

RE is clearly a popular and successful subject. Judging by the increasing proportion of students who take a GCSE, it is one that is taught to an academically rigorous standard. There has been an increase in RE GCSEs from 16% of the cohort in 2000 to 28% in 2010. In addition, 36% of the cohort was entered for the short course GCSE in religious studies. By contrast, there has been a decline in the numbers entered for GCSE in history, geography and languages.