Letter: Supreme Court ruling on religious education in Northern Ireland poses challenges for multi-faith curriculum
A letter from David Armstrong:
Javed Love, a teacher in a controlled primary school, recently drew public attention when he invoked the conscience clause to withdraw from teaching RE - becoming the first teacher in a decade to do so.
He said he could no longer endorse the present Christian syllabus. He may ‘un-withdraw’ if the curriculum becomes objective, critical, and pluralistic.
This sort of curriculum shift seems likely - mandated by the recent Supreme Court judgment.
However, such a move may present new challenges for controlled schools.
The legal decision points toward a transition from teaching ‘within’ a Christian syllabus based on the Bible to teaching ‘about’ Christianity alongside other religions and worldviews.
This raises obvious questions: will it be equally valid to deny the existence of God or to affirm it; to say there are many ‘gods’ or one; to say that God is the creator or is not; that Christ is divine or not?
Such statements cannot be simultaneously true and point up a very real challenge in a multi-faith curriculum.
If religion is divorced from its ability to claim truth, its most important characteristic is ignored.
The revised primary syllabus will likely avoid any comparative approach to the truth claims of competing religious and other outlooks.
Consequently, primary RE risks becoming a shallow ‘mish-mash’ of thematic facts about religious figures, festivals and food.
A 2024 Ofsted subject report on English RE evidences this concern with its reference to a ‘superficially broad curriculum’ where ‘pupils generally remembered very little’ when religions were covered like ‘equal slices of a pie’.
Such poor outcomes persist even after decades of multi-faith instruction in the English school system.
As the late Archbishop Michael Ramsey argued, to understand ‘religion’, one must first understand a specific faith from the inside.
To present an 'amalgamated' version of religion is to present the virtues of none, ultimately failing to convey the meaning of any.
There is a further compelling argument that a child’s future autonomy and critical capacity are most effectively developed when rooted within a specific cultural or religious tradition.
The proposed syllabus shift presents a fresh ethical dilemma: while Javed Love withdrew to avoid endorsing a Christian syllabus, other teachers may soon invoke the conscience clause to avoid endorsing a multi-faith curriculum that eschews Christian nurture and ignores the mandate for RE to be based on the Holy Scriptures.
Schools may face an even more significant risk of widespread pupil withdrawal if parents believe a multi-faith syllabus will confuse children and devalue the faith taught at home as just one of many equally valid options.
Without a model of RE that offers choice and accommodates differing convictions, Mr Love’s return to the RE lesson may be overshadowed by the exit of others.
David Armstrong, Co Armagh