Dave Francis asks: Where have all the children gone?
Eight months into the tenure of the Labour Government, we do not yet know how the shape of a revised school curriculum will affect subjects like religious education. Or, to use the current favoured phrase for referring to RE, ‘Religion and Worldviews’ (RW).
Curriculum Tsar, Becky Francis, a civil rights and justice campaigner in a previous life, is conducting the government’s curriculum and assessment review. She knows that there is too much to cover in the current curriculum and that teachers are concerned about accountability and prescription. But she doesn’t want to water down the curriculum either. Because then, “we risk facilitating poor practices that further marginalise disadvantaged young people.”[1]
It is surely right to focus some attention on disadvantaged pupils. But whatever Professor Francis comes up with regarding the school curriculum, we already know that more and more parents are removing their children from school and ‘educating’ them at home. Some are inspired by articles such as those in the Telegraph claiming that “Labour is about to wreck your child’s education.”[2] Bringing a response from one reader, styling themselves ‘Up The Pankhurst’, “No one will be teaching a child of mine that bollocks.”[3]
In fact, since the pandemic, ‘elective home education’ (EHE) has become an epidemic of its own. In the Autumn of 2024, local authorities identified 153,300 children in the UK that were being homeschooled at some point in the year.[4] This is around three times as many as before the pandemic.[5] The figure is rising, year on year. This is bound to accelerate as personalised AI tutors make it an easier choice for parents.
One of the major difficulties is that the sector is pretty much unregulated, and we can be sure that whatever children are learning at home, it is unlikely that RE/RW is a prominent feature. Where religious education takes place at all, it is more likely that parents/ carers will be keen for their offspring to share the family ‘faith’, whether religious or not.
The value of children learning to navigate the complex world of faith and belief, vital for cross-cultural understanding in today’s world, will not figure highly in the home-schooler agenda. Of the online education providers that parents can buy into, few offer substantial RW programmes. King’s InterHigh, for example, which trumpets that it is the UK’s ‘leading online school’, offers a primary ‘humanities’ programme with no mention of religion, worldviews or beliefs. It offers RE in the secondary phase only as an optional, rather than the core subject that it is in law.
Similarly, IXL, which claims to be ‘the most comprehensive learning site for kids’ only really features English and Maths. Other providers are completely silent about provision for RE/ RW, offering only ‘Skills for life’ with no mention of building a solid foundational understanding of the power and influence of religions / worldviews in personal and social life.
Thankfully, the government’s own online school, ‘The Oak Academy’ does include a comprehensive RE/RW scheme, at both primary and secondary level. Pennine Learning, who won the contract for primary school RE, wanted to take a ‘Big Ideas for RE’ style approach to the RE curriculum. With the help of Denise Cush and myself, they have adapted key principles of ‘Big Ideas’ for their programme. The result is a very positive step forward for children’s home learning, in our view.
In the meantime, however, government ministers should be put under pressure to ensure that resources are available for local authorities and / or inspectors to monitor what is going on in the home-schooling environment. What disasters await for a society that fails to ensure its young people possess the knowledge and thinking skills required to steer their way successfully through multiple cultural streams? One might do well to look across the world and be forewarned.