Year 3 can scarce contain their excitement. They cannot wait for the prince to begin the battle. When it comes to the best stories, religious education (RE) does not disappoint.
Everything in the story has led to this moment. With horses neighing, armour clanking, elephants stamping and trumpets blowing, the battlefield is alive. Surely, poised in his chariot, the prince will begin the battle, won’t he? Battlefields generally result in battles, right?
Then it happens. The prince freezes. He is paralysed by doubt, right in front of his army.
And so one of the most famous conversations in the history of religions begins: the conversation between the prince and his charioteer, Krishna. It is a conversation in which time stands still, a conversation that will become that timeless text: the Bhagavad Gita.
But Year 3 are now open-mouthed a second time. They have spotted that Krishna is blue! Is he…? Could he be…? Yes, he is. Krishna is yet another manifestation of the god Vishnu who Year 3 know so well.
Such are the dream teaching moments that skilled humanities teachers craft: pupils so completely ready for what will happen next, while not having a clue what will happen next. They create a state of such heightened attention that pupils grasp the new material readily.
How does it work?
It’s called curriculum. Curriculum is knowledge structured as narrative over time. In other words, the significance of this moment will land with Year 3, not just because it’s a splendid story, but because of weeks of other stories that make it make sense.
Now imagine the cumulative effect of such shared experience continuing. In Year 5, when these pupils meet Buddhist traditions, crucial features resonate. Because of their earlier study of Hindu traditions, a raft of useful vocabulary already carries rich meaning – vocabulary established through deliberate encounter with countless stories from related worlds.
Systematic knowledge has readied these pupils to be startled by underlying similarity and to discern profound difference.
Such purposeful continuity, prior knowledge affording access to later knowledge, certainly exists, but it is not the norm. Even where it does, the chances of a secondary school building on it properly are slim because secondaries must teach numerous other pupils who arrive in Year 7 without having learned anything comparable.
So this is the problem. Despite seven years in primary school, England’s secondaries cannot assume even basic knowledge, such as enough stories about Vishnu to supply common starting points. Invariably, they have no option but to start from scratch.
There are myriad reasons why pupils get a poor deal in RE, but we will make little headway tackling any of them until this one structural barrier is removed.
All this is deeply unfair. It is also wasteful – wasteful of years of classroom time.
Most infuriating of all, the inequity and waste are unnecessary. Adequate, useful and enriching knowledge of the world’s main religious and philosophical traditions is readily achievable. When such knowledge builds cumulatively, systematically, coherently and predictably, its time burden is light.
By contrast, the effects of uneven localism – different syllabi in different settings, variable quality or imprecise content – make the burden heavy.
Many secondary RE teachers complain of excessive content at GCSE. But through rich connected story, multiple GCSE basics could and should have been made secure in primary, never mind Key Stage 3, leaving post-14 RE teachers the space to deepen and complicate existing knowledge, to broaden and extend reliable foundations.
With a simple, national framework of common knowledge for all, school RE curricula could be what any curriculum should be: a set of promises to future teachers in subsequent years and phases.
What we urgently need is what we’ve needed for decades: a secretary of state with the nerve to solve a problem which others have shied away from, placing foundational knowledge about religions and worldviews within a common outline framework – the national curriculum.
