CES News (150)

Monday, 23 July 2012 10:11

How is Religious Education changing?

A fourteen year old pupil once said to me, ‘You know, RE is a great subject, but you should really change its name.’ I asked why, and he said ‘Because it contains the two words that young people hate the most.’

In our two-form entry Catholic primary school just near Heathrow there are 472 children on roll including the 52 who come part-time to our Nursery. They are all baptised Catholics and they all live in the same parish. These 472 children speak a total of 43 languages between them. When OFSTED came to our school in 2002 only 6% of the school roll spoke English as an additional language. When they came back 5 years later the figure had risen to 43%. It is now over 60% for the school as a whole and amongst our younger children the figure is nearer 80%.

How many of the following can you answer ‘yes’ to?

Wednesday, 27 June 2012 14:31

Decision time for Catholic Academies

The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, is keen that all schools an England should become Academies as soon as possible. Academy status, he argues, will give schools more freedom and autonomy to make their own educational decisions in pursuit of higher standards and provide more funding to achieve those standards. For some existing schools ‘in difficulty’ it will provide ‘new start’ opportunities.

Twenty new Catholic Voluntary Academies opened on 1 July 2012, bringing the total number of Catholic academies now open to 110.

Wednesday, 20 June 2012 14:21

Handing on the faith

Religious Education has been much in the news in the last year. The Schools Minister, Nick Gibb MP, was strenuously lobbied in the hope that he might reverse his decision to exclude RE from the ‘E-Bac’ (the English Baccalaureate — a collection of core GCSE subjects favoured by the Government), but to no avail. Yet in England and Wales it remains a statutory subject which must be studied by all registered pupils until the age of 18. However, the quality of RE in schools varies considerably, as does its content, and it is true to say that most RE teachers are fearful that its exclusion from the E-Bac will see a decline in the number of pupils entered for public examinations in the subject. The situation is more hopeful in Catholic schools where RE is regarded as the core of the whole curriculum and must be allotted 10% of the time available for teaching.

Friday, 22 June 2012 11:42

Opportunities for Christian education

How are Church of England schools faring in the current educational climate? How can we ensure that they can continue to flourish as the system changes around them?

The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have issued a new edition of the Religious Education Curriculum Directory (3-19) for use in Catholic schools.

Wednesday, 20 June 2012 14:10

Let the riches shine

What is ‘Religious Education’? In some schools, RE is little more than Sociology of Religion, while in others it follows a Comparative Religion model, helping make true Ronald Knox’s observation that, ‘the study of comparative religions is the best way to become comparatively religious.’ If, as seems likely, Religious Studies GCSE declines as a result of the English Baccalaureate, then we are likely to see many RE lessons become a sort of curricular appendix into which all the non-exam subjects like Citizenship and Sex and Relationships Education may be quietly banished.

What is it that makes a Catholic education unique and a force for good?  As a practising Catholic who has spent a career working in education right across the country this is a question that I am frequently asked by education professionals and by parents looking for that special something that they see a Catholic education gives. Having thought about this many times I now have some answers to give.

Page 10 of 11