Teaching RE: Sparking deeper thinking and worldview discussion

RE is one of those subjects where the gap between a flat lesson and a brilliant lesson is enormous, and it is rarely about content knowledge. You can know the five pillars of Islam, the noble eightfold path and the structure of a Sunday service inside out and still leave the room having taught nothing that lasts. RE done well is fundamentally a thinking subject. It asks students to compare, evaluate, hold contradictions, and notice their own assumptions. That is hard work, for the students and for the teacher leading the conversation.

This guide is for teachers who want to push beyond the comfortable surface of RE: The world religions tour, the colour-coded pillars, the polite worksheet on festivals. It draws on the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) report (2018), the Religious Education Council's worldviews approach, and the Ofsted RE research review (2021). Together they sketch out a more demanding, more honest, and more interesting version of the subject.

A quick caveat: RE in England is a locally determined subject (through Agreed Syllabuses) and varies considerably between schools. Treat what follows as starting points rather than a prescription.

The clearest shift in the academic conversation about RE over recent years has been the move from a "world religions" framing to a "religion and worldviews" framing. The CoRE report made this argument explicitly, and the Religious Education Council has built much of its subsequent guidance on it.

The practical difference is not just terminology. A world religions approach tends to treat religions as fixed, internally consistent systems that students learn about from the outside. A worldviews approach treats religion (and non-religion) as something lived, varied within each tradition, and connected to the personal worldview of the person practising it. A Muslim student in your class and a Muslim grandmother in a Pakistani village hold the same religion in name; their lived worldviews can be quite different.

That shift has three practical implications. First, be careful about presenting any tradition as monolithic. "Christians believe X" is almost always too strong; "many Christians believe X, though others would emphasise Y" tends to be more accurate. Second, non-religious worldviews (Humanism, secularism, agnosticism) belong in the curriculum as a thread running through, not a tacked-on unit. Third, students bring their own worldviews into the room. Teaching that ignores this tends to feel detached; teaching that takes it seriously, carefully, tends to feel alive.

Deeper thinking in RE has a specific shape. It is not just having opinions or reciting arguments for and against. The Ofsted RE research review describes three forms of knowledge that a high-quality curriculum develops: Substantive knowledge (what people believe and do), ways of knowing (how scholars arrive at their conclusions), and personal knowledge (the student's own reflective relationship with the material). Deeper thinking happens when these three work together.

In practice, lessons need to do more than load up content. A useful planning question is: "What is the thinking move I want students to make in this lesson?" Compare two interpretations of the same parable. Evaluate an argument for the existence of God. Distinguish between a theological claim and an ethical claim. Notice where their own intuition is doing the work. These moves are the substance of the subject.

A related move is to teach the discipline as well as the content. Theology, philosophy of religion, sociology of religion: These are distinct disciplines with different methods, and students benefit from being told which one they are doing. "Today we are going to think about this as theologians, then as philosophers" gives them a frame they can carry across topics, and models the intellectual humility the subject needs.

Discussion-based RE only works in a room that knows how to disagree well. The work of building that culture starts long before the most sensitive topic appears on the scheme of work, and the investment pays back across the year.

A few moves help. Establishing ground rules early, with student input, gives the class shared language for good discussion (listening fully, distinguishing between disagreeing with an idea and attacking a person, being willing to change your mind). Building a habit of low-stakes discussion on topics where the heat is lower means that when you reach a harder topic the class already has the muscle. Modelling intellectual honesty (saying "I don't know") gives students permission to do the same.

The role of the teacher in discussion matters too. Should you share your own view? In the English state-school context the defensible answer is usually no, particularly on religious or political questions where you hold authority over students. But neutrality is not the same as having no opinions. Teachers who are visibly engaged with the questions, who push back on weak arguments from any direction, and who can articulate the strongest version of a view they personally disagree with, tend to lead better discussion than teachers who try to be invisible.

Some topics in RE are sensitive by default. Death, suffering, identity, sexuality, religious extremism, the existence of God. Others become sensitive depending on the class in front of you. A unit on Israel and Palestine reads very differently with Jewish or Muslim students in the room. A discussion of evolution and creation reads differently in a school with a strong religious affiliation.

A few principles tend to help. The first is preparation: Knowing the topic well enough that you can hold the conversation, and knowing your class well enough to anticipate where the friction might come from. The second is framing: Naming up front that the topic is one where reasonable people disagree, and that the goal of the lesson is to understand the disagreement rather than to resolve it. The third is care for the students who carry the topic personally. A student whose family is directly affected by a topic should not be put in the position of being the unofficial spokesperson for their group. Quiet check-ins before or after the lesson can matter more than anything you say in the lesson itself.

The Religious Education Council and AREIAC guidance on handling controversial topics is a useful reference. The PSHE Association's guidance on sensitive topics also has useful overlap. Neither tells you exactly what to say, but they help you build a lesson structure that takes care of the room.

The strategies below are not exclusive to RE, but they are particularly well suited to it. Most of them take a few minutes to set up and pay back across a unit.

Assessment in RE has historically leaned on the "explain two ways" question stem, which has its place but tends to reward neat content delivery over actual thinking. A more demanding suite of question types pushes students further.

Evaluative questions ("to what extent") work well when the criteria for evaluation are taught explicitly. Comparison questions across traditions or across positions within a tradition tend to surface deeper understanding. Source analysis tasks, where students interpret a primary text and weigh its meaning against another, build the disciplinary skills the Ofsted review prioritises. Short structured writing with a clear thesis often reveals thinking more reliably than long essays at Key Stage 3.

The other side of assessment is feedback. A short, specific verbal comment in the lesson ("that is interesting; what makes you confident in that conclusion?") tends to do more for student thinking than written feedback after the fact.

Progress in RE is harder to track than progress in maths, but it is not impossible. Over Key Stage 3, you might reasonably hope to see students moving from describing what people believe to comparing and evaluating those beliefs. From treating each religion as a monolithic block to noticing internal variation. From answering questions with their own untested intuition to bringing scholarly perspectives into the conversation. From discomfort with ambiguity to comfort sitting with it.

None of these shifts will happen evenly across a class. But a department that knows what progress looks like, and builds its scheme of work around producing it, tends to end up with a stronger curriculum than one focused on coverage. The Ofsted research review puts it well: A high-quality RE curriculum is one where students get better at the subject over time.