A Difficult Read for RE and Philosophy Parents
RE and Philosophy in schools are facing an existential threat
If your child has chosen GCSE or A-Level Religious Education and Philosophy, congratulations! The two years to come should be the most fascinating, mind expanding, challenging but enjoyable in their education so far.
Like no other subject, RE helps us all to understand the world around us better, but also to challenge the assumptions we’ve grown up with (or have been taught elsewhere in our education!), to criticise long believed truths, and to look at life with a new, informed eye.
It’s going to be tough, but worth it.
Tough because by its nature, dealing with difficult, often controversial issues - the existence of God, the morality of abortion, the definition of a truly ethical act, the problem of evil - is difficult to get our heads around.
But tough also because the evidence shows religious education and philosophy as a subject is faltering in today’s education system.
It’s no exaggeration to say religious education is now the ‘Cinderella’ subject in many schools, and if Prince(ss) Charming doesn’t come along soon, schools' ability to teach high quality, deep and meaningful, religious education and philosophy might be lost.
Under the current school system, after decades of changing the rules and defunding the education sector, the religious studies slipper no longer fits.
I’ve seen this in action. Many secondary schools, if they offer RE at all at GCSE and A-Level, certainly don’t prioritize it. At Key Stage 3 (that’s years 7 to 9), it is often treated as an afterthought.
The Progress 8 problem
The first problem is a system you may not have heard of, but it’s in the mouths and minds of every member of senior management teams: Progress 8 and Attainment 8.
It’s a way that schools are judged, and compared with each other. The higher a school’s Progress and Attainment 8 scores, the better regarded - academically - it is.
On the surface that might seem fair, but dig deeper and it strongly biases schools away from investment and interest in ‘creative’ subjects like RE.
Pupil achievements in the subjects Maths and Double English are worth twice any achievement made in RE and Philosophy, under the Progress 8 and Attainment 8 system.
So if a school wants to achieve better overall , it invests time, resources, and both detectable and undetectable bias, in those subjects - the so-called Bucket 1.
Bucket 2 contains the sciences, computer studies, history, geography, and languages.
RE languishes in Bucket 3, alongside Art, Drama, Music and PE. In short, the ‘creative’ subjects. There’s a hole in this bucket because no matter how hard we try, any result we RE teachers produce will still be worth only half of that in maths.
Deprioritisation of RE
The deprioritisation of RE is not just a statistic, it can be seen in schools day-to-day.
In one school I worked in, RE and social care were relegated to the old fashioned ‘mobile’ class rooms, tucked behind the school. The staff room was full of maths teachers who, every lunchtime, would talk about how they were teaching a particular conundrum, while the couple of RE teachers would skulk around, feeling our subject didn’t matter.
I was the only specialist RE teacher in that school. There were four other RE teachers, but each of them had in some way ‘ended up’ teaching RE aside from their other main subject.
Across UK schools, the pattern is the same: For year 7 to 9 classes, I taught each class for just a single hour a week. If there was an occasional holiday, a school trip, special assembly, or a child was ill, it could be weeks between RE classes for them.
And, thanks to Progress 8 and Attainment 8, if students struggling with maths (taught four times a week compared with my one) were regularly removed from RE to do extra maths.
This deprioritising of RE in schools has a direct effect on older students who are neither explicitly nor implicit encouraged to study RE at GCSE or A-Level. For some pupils it takes an act of will, to go against the grain.
The mess around subject
Indeed, many have grown up through years 7 to 9 thinking RE is the ‘mess around’ subject, while maths, science and english is where they have to behave. Those few students who do want to achieve have been constantly put off by bad behaviour: they associate RE with frustration, distraction, and a teacher at the end of their tether.
RE teachers can’t teach RE, because they’re too busy doing crowd control. Which means those students who are keen to learn, don’t have a chance to be inspired enough to risk RE as one of the few remaining choices they have when it comes to GCSE or A-level.
And poor behaviour generates another issue: In an average secondary school that does offer A-Level GCSE or RE, their teacher will necessarily have to be teaching throughout Years 7 to 9 as well.
In one school, I taught four classes of each of years seven, eight and nine - that’s 12 hours a week of ‘mess around’ subject, before the mere two hours a week of A-Level for Years 12 and 13.
As my year 13s would frequently say, ‘Sir, you look exhausted’.
And I was.
Because attempting to teach the value of RE to younger years for 12 hours a week, in an education system that doesn’t itself value RE, with the well documented ever decreasing behaviour of those year groups s in general, is not only tiring and demotivating.
It is depressing.
Teachers are giving up
Despite the Labour government commitment to increasing the number of teachers in England by 6,5000, we are leaving the profession in droves. Teachers cite workload, poor behaviour and top-down pressure as the key reasons.
Official data shows that 38,600 qualified teachers left the state-funded sector in England in 2015. That’s one in 12 of the teachers in England. And nine of then of them left to pursue a different career rather than to retire.
Children, they say, are coming to secondary school without even basic skills like reading, writing, or the ability to concentrate, let alone the ability to consider and discuss deep and meaningful topics like the existence of God, or the morality of war.
In one school in which I taught, I was remonstrated by senior management for even mentioning the Israel/Palestine conflict - arguably the most relevant religious based conflict in modern times - because it might offend or overwhelm some of the pupils.
An RE teacher who can’t teach controversial topics is an RE teacher with both hands tied behind their back.
So we end up only able to offer a kind of ‘RE Lite’ that is draining, shallow and, frankly, boring for the teacher, and boring for the pupils.
And that means more bad behaviour.
The result? Even those who grew up as specialist in RE - I have an A-Level in RE, and a BA in Theology and Philosophy from Oxford - are exiting the profession.
And that means we’re leaving non-specialists to teach RE, who have no particular interest, little subject knowledge, and barely any understanding of the critical and evaluation skills required of RE and philosophy at A-Level.
Non-specialist teachers
Ofsted reported in 2024 that more than half of secondary RE teachers lacked a qualification or appropriate expertise in the subject.
Government figures in 2021, the latest available, reveal about half of secondary RE and philosophy teachers have no relevant A-Level themselves. In Academies, less than half of RE teachers are specialists, in mainstream schools only 58% are specialists, and even in faith schools only three quarters are specialist RE teachers.
Where RE is delivered by experienced specialists, they are also being asked to teach other subjects too, splitting their subject knowledge, expertise and attention - let alone planning and admin time - between their preferred subject, and others.
In November 2021, only less than half of teachers teaching RE spent the majority of their timetable teaching RE, compared with 72% for geography, 73% for history, and 87% for English.
GCSE Religious Studies classes are getting smaller, A-Level classes tiny. On Facebook groups, RE teachers are decrying the fact they now, somehow, have to teach year 12 and 13 together - even though those pupils will be at very different stages, with very different needs.
“Come September, in order to deep delivering RS A-Level, I’ll be teaching Y12 and Y13 together (8 isn’t viable for a class)...”
When I learned RE at A-Level, there were two classes of 15 students in Year 12 and 13. That meant two full time RE teachers, just for A-Level.
In the last school in which I taught, I had just eight students in Year 13.
In year 12, I had five.
One headteacher recently told me they were waiting for their social care teacher to retire, so the school could itself retire the subject. I fear RE is going the same way.
Another Facebook post:
“We’re going down to 8 lessons a fortnight for both year 12 and 13 (2 years ago we had 10 hours…)” says another Facebook post. “Would anyone mind sharing their Scheme of Work to show how you get through the course on that amount of time?”
New teachers, new jobs?
In 2024/25, the Government offered a bursary for graduates who wanted to train to be RE teachers. The fees of more than £9,000 were paid. But at the end of the year, jobs were few and far between. Why? One might argue that rather than invest in a new teacher, schools simply gave RE to other teachers who wanted to up their hours, or maybe even reduced their offering of RE completely.
The Department for Education pulled the bursary the very next year, demonstrating just how deprioritised RE is, from the top down.
A university PGCE tutor recently told me the jobs market for new RE teachers was even harder in Spring 2026.
Though all secondary schools have a legal obligation to offer RE from years 7 to 9, some merely bundle it in with a light touch Personal, Social, Health, Relationships, and Economic curriculum, where non-specialists teach a lightweight ‘religious diversity’ alongside how to be a good citizen, eat healthily, and stay out of trouble online.
Religion and philosophy aren’t even in the title.
I don’t doubt the ability of those teachers, but in a non-specialist gathering of this-and-that, there’s no possibility of depth in RE, there’s no critical faculties being exercised, and there’s certainly no inspiration to go on to take RE and philosophy at GCSE and A-Level.
The effect of huge Multi Academy Trust (MATs), particularly those demanding only ‘directed learning’, is also having a negative effect on teachers of religious education, and arguably pupils desire and ability to pursue the subject into A-Level.
Directed learning involves teaching from the front, where students have to copy from the board, rarely speak to each other and only to the teacher, and frequently do silent worksheets to prove how much they have been listening, reading and ‘learning’ in each class. There is little discussion, no space for alternative ideas, critical thinking, thinking independently about stuff for the sake of challenging your own assumptions.
It’s the kind of RE that might get you the marks in an exam, but a student comes out with no deeper knowledge about the topic than they came into it. They’ve been painting by numbers for two years.
They may be able to recite Tillich’s argument for signs and symbols in religious language, and even the arguments against him, but do they really understand anything beneath what they’ve learned to repeat by rote?
Sixth Form colleges
Sixth Form colleges may also suffering as a knock on effect of undervalued RE teaching in secondary schools.
Teachers of RE at Sixth Form colleges are far more likely to stick in their jobs, because behavior is better and kids are more engaged. So, there may a ‘dead man’s shoes’ effect.
New, keen, and full of the latest knowledge teachers don’t get a chance at teaching at A-Level Sixth Form Colleges, because they, seemingly, haven’t ‘won their spurs’ teaching the manic classes of years 7 to 9.
As if teaching badly behaved 12-year-olds, who ask to go to the toilet every ten minutes, is comparable with teaching young adults with driving licences, old enough to go for a pint after college.
And because of the trends outlined above, fewer students are leaving secondary schools wanting to learn RE at sixth form colleges or anywhere else anyway. They have not been motivated to do so.
And if they do want A-Level in Sixth Form college, well, the pickings are few. There are actually only 90 Sixth Form colleges in England (and far fewer by proportion in Scotland and Wales, compared with schools). Based on published prospectuses, one in five doesn’t offer any kind of religious education or philosophy.
And at Universities
And if proof be further needed, the decline in interest in RE at a macro level is now being seen even at the other end of the chain. Universities are closing RE departments, because they’re not getting investments they need.
Over the last 20 years, the number of universities offering theology and religious studies in England and Wales has roughly halved.
The think tank Theos published an open letter to the government in 2025, saying:
“HE institutions are reducing staffing levels and ceasing to offer some courses, in an attempt to balance their budgets at a time of financial pressure… There will soon be only 21 HE institutions in England and Wales that offer an undergraduate degree in Theology and Religious Studies. For comparison, 90 run undergraduate degree courses in History, 80 in Music and 101 in Sociology.”
The think tank goes on to say this will lead to fewer specialist teachers of RE and philosophy in the future. It’s a vicious cycle that will continue to devalue RE in schools, because the teachers won’t be there to teach it, let alone defend it.
Teaching is broken
When I left teaching, it was because I believed education was systematically broken. You will struggle to find a work-a-day teacher who thinks the hours they put in, the pressure they’re under, and the behaviour they have to deal with, indicates anything but.
But I now realise the system is far more broken for subjects like religious education and philosophy.
Societies change. From the outside, it may look like maths, science, and technology - particularly AI - is solving each and every problem we have. No wonder it’s prioritised in school.
But scratch the surface, and the desperate need for the human understanding that religious education and philosophy offer is as alive as ever. If not more so.
Whether it is understanding the prejudice that leads to race riots, discrimination, assumptions, anti-semitism, biases, or lazy misinterpretations on a religious person’s actions, to large scale conflicts like Palestine and Israel, the continued practice of FGM across religious communities, or the oppression of women, these are questions that those STEM subjects do not have an answer to.
As the Director of Theos, Chine McDonald, puts it: “the importance of religious education and literacy as something we just cannot ignore. Many of the atrocities we see stem from religious and ethical ideologies. Organisations like ours are among the few in the nation who are equipped to try to make sense of them.”
Mainstream education is failing religious education and philosophy.
A change of direction?
But it is time for religious education and philosophy to stand up, state its case, and to be a real influence in the world around us. We must continue to wave our flag, despite our devaluation by successive governments, and the knock on effects in schools and colleges.
But that means a difficult conversation: is the fight for religious education and philosophy in schools a lost cause, in a broken educational system? Is there another way of pursuing the universe's deepest questions, outside the restraints of the cage in which it has found itself contained?
If the teaching of religious education is broken, thanks to the education system surrounding it, should it be fixed up with a sticking plaster? Or completely rethought?
The founders of philosophy, the ancient Greeks, saw no difference between talking about God, philosophy, money, politics, morality, mathematics or science. Everything was approached in a spirit of genuine and generous enquiry.
How can we get back to that? It’s time to deepen that conversation, so keen learners at GCSE and A-Level get the level of RE and philosophy learning and skills they deserve, and will need to make the world a better place.
Five questions every parents should be asking their head of A-Level
- Is my student’s A-Level RE and philosophy teacher a specialist in that area (e.g. do they have a relevant degree, and subject specific PGCE?)
- Will my A-Level RE and philosophy teacher be expected to regularly teach any other subject, that is not their specialism?
- How much Continual Professional Development (CPD) will my A-Level RE and philosophy teacher do, that is specific to the subject?
- How much protected planning time will my teacher have that is specifically for religious studies A-Level, that won’t be overtaken by other duties, including meetings, dealing with non-A-Level behaviour issues, planning for non-A-Level lessons, and other school admin?