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Comment
Education
5 min read

Why the RE teacher recruitment crisis is a problem

In the week that over a quarter of a million young people sit their GCSE Religious Studies exam, Paul Smalley analyses the crisis in religious education -demand for which is rising.

Paul Smalley is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Education at Edge Hill University and a Local Missional Leader in the Diocese of Liverpool. 

Students sit in a classroom.
Credit: Get Teaching

I could have laughed at Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Education recently – but unfortunately, I don’t think he was trying to be funny.  What caused my outburst of hilarity was a written answer he had given to a parliamentary question.  The question had been asked by Catherine West, a shadow minister, and was enquiring about what steps the government was taking to ensure that recruitment targets for religious education teachers are met.  As the daughter of a headmaster and a practising Quaker, it seems reasonable that she might take an interest in such matters; she is clearly aware of the recruitment crisis that is threatening the teaching of the subject in schools up and down the country.  This awareness seemed to be lacking in the Minister of State’s response.   

The first part of his answer was to report that the number of teachers remains high. And of course, he is correct – the number of Full Time Equivalent Teachers in England has remained fairly steady at around half a million for the last few years. What he didn’t mention is that there are over a quarter of a million more pupils now than there were five years ago. The pupil to teacher ratios in secondary schools has risen each year since 2013. Every teacher needs to teach more pupils.  Last year the recruitment target for teachers was missed by some way and will be only slightly better this year. 

Gibb’s answer was designed to suggest that there was no problem, nothing to worry about – when in fact there is a crisis. 

But the question was about RE teachers specifically. And again, Nick Gibb chose his answer carefully, choosing the one year (2020/21) in the last ten when the recruitment target for RE teachers was exceeded – the year that the target was substantially reduced.  In 2022/23 the recruitment target was missed by 25 per cent.  On average between 10 and 12 per cent of RE teachers who train leave the profession within five years of training.  This is higher than the average across all subjects. 

Gibb’s answer was designed to suggest that there was no problem, nothing to worry about – when in fact there is a crisis.  Teacher recruitment for all subjects is down 22 per cent from last year. However, RE stands out, being down a third of applicants from the last recruitment cycle.

Students often describe it as the one time in school where they can think independently about the people, events and beliefs in the world around them. 

Why does it matter if there aren’t enough RE teachers? 

Religious Education is the only subject which every state school must provide for all of its pupils.  It has been this way since 1944 – but the subject has changed beyond recognition in that time. 

It is a popular and increasingly important subject for our young people to study.  Over the last five years entries to the GCSE have stood at around an average of 250,000 with entries to the full course GCSE rising by 30 per cent over the last decade. It is a subject which helps young people navigate the complex and dynamic nature of our multi religious, multi secular world. It has never been more important, recognised by wider society as vital for preparing students for life in global Britain.  

Students often describe it as the one time in school where they can think independently about the people, events and beliefs in the world around them. It is a space where ultimate questions are discussed.  Big questions such as: ‘Why do people suffer?’, ‘Is death the end?’, and ‘How should we behave in the world?’.  In an increasingly secular world, young people need a space where they can explore these questions, gain insight into how Christians, members of other faiths and non-religious people respond to these issues and develop their own understanding of their place in the universe. 

I wouldn’t go as far as some in saying that RE is an opportunity to de-indoctrinate young people against a prevailing secularising agenda, but RE is a curricular space where pupils can come to realise, that whatever their own personal background, someone’s belief or worldview, shapes and influences how they engage with and interpret the world around them.  For some people these beliefs are fundamental; there is no place of neutrality on such matters – nobody stands nowhere.  Pete Greig reminds us (in the book How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People) that even those who state that they are not religious will often pray: there is a spiritual side to life, even if people fail to explicitly recognise it.  If children are growing up in non-religious households, school may be the only place where spiritual matters are discussed openly and objectively. 

High school pupils are now three times more likely to be taught RE by someone with no qualification in the subject than, for example, in history. 

Teaching young people is a demanding job, and as someone who has been training people to teach RE in high schools since 2006, I know that teaching RE demands a particular skill-set.  RE is multi-disciplinary, so it requires a teacher who understands how to think like a theologian, and a historian, a philosopher and a social scientist.  It requires academic skills such as ethnography and literary analysis, but also the people skills to act impartially, empathetically and sensitively when discussing important and controversial issues.  And all that on top of the skills required of any teacher – to manage behaviour, plan lessons and monitor progress for example.   

However, such is the level of crisis that all too often RE is being taught by non-specialists, simply because there are not enough trained RE teachers.  High school pupils are now three times more likely to be taught RE by someone with no qualification in the subject than, for example, in history.  Of those who teach RE in secondary schools over half spend most of their time teaching another subject (compared to only 13 per cent of those who teach English and 27 per cent of those who teach Geography). These same pressures contribute to many schools’ RE provision simply not being good enough. 

What can be done? 

The first step for the government to take is to acknowledge that there is a problem – with teacher recruitment across the board.  The teaching profession as a whole needs a boost – to show that teaching is an attractive career.  Significant workload reductions and pay increases will help this perception. 

But there is a specific problem with RE recruitment.  Postgraduate teacher training attracts a bursary to teach Geography of £25,000.  RE trainees receive no bursary.  I have heard of well qualified humanities or social science graduates who have chosen Geography over RE simply because of this.  In years when there has been a bursary available to train as an RE teacher, then recruitment has risen significantly.   

But what might really make a difference is a properly funded National Plan for RE to ensure it is properly resourced and taught by professionally trained teachers. 

 

For more information about becoming an RE teacher or supporting the campaign, visit: Teacher Recruitment - Culham St Gabriel's (cstg.org.uk) 

Article
Comment
Digital
Football
Sport
6 min read

Fed up with today’s football? Blame this passion killer

How the beautiful game became boring

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

An AI image of apathetic football players being watched by dis-spirited fans.
Nick Jones/Midjourney AI.

The football season has begun. And with it, the usual rigmarole of adverts, fantasy football and over-priced shirts. But this season has a slightly different feel to it. Perhaps it is the obscene - and record - amount of money that was spent in the transfer window (benefitting the biggest clubs), or the sour taste of the Isak saga between Newcastle and Liverpool.

Or maybe there is just a malaise with the game that has been growing for years and is now perceptible just below the surface. Friends and family tell me they have lost interest in football, echoing the words of former Chelsea and England player John Terry who recently made headlines by lambasting the state of the modern game as ‘boring’ . The tendency for one team to defend while a more technically gifted and drilled team tries to break them down means ‘You don't see many shots,’ according to Terry. 

His thoughts reminded me of comments made by pundit Gary Neville a couple of months ago after a dull 0-0 draw between Manchester United and Manchester City: 

‘This robotic nature of not leaving our positions, being micro-managed within an inch of our lives, not having any freedom to take a risk to go and try and win a football match is becoming an illness in the game'. 

Neville and Terry are referring to the style of play inaugurated by Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola who has undoubtedly revolutionized how football is played in the last decade. The style is geared towards complete control and domination, ironing out any potential errors and minimising risk. It is statistics and data driven, with managers and coaching staff constantly looking at iPads during matches and clubs employing data analysts. 

This strategy has of course been wildly successful for Man City in recent years. I don’t think these former players are contesting these remarkable achievements or that this style of football can’t be inspiring and entertaining when executed by players at the top of their game. But because it has become such a dominant way of playing, worse players and teams feel that they have no option but to mimic it. The result is often a boring game with neither team willing to take risks as they are desperate to keep possession. Just look at popular memes comparing wingers from 20 years ago putting crosses in the box compared to simply passing backwards.

Liam Manning, the former manager of my team, Bristol City, very much models himself on this data-driven Guardiola style. Tellingly, one of his catchphrases in interviews refers to ‘taking the passion out of the game’. By this he means ensuring that players keep cool heads and stick to the game plan - but I wonder if he inadvertently betrays the philosophy Neville and Tarry rail against: it is passionless, soulless and mechanical, less open to moments of surprise and unexpected brilliance. 

To put my cards on the table, I agree wholeheartedly with Neville. Modern football in my estimation has changed beyond recognition even from the 90s when I grew up. While I cannot deny that some of this has been for the better – stadia safety and decrease in hooliganism for instance – I lament the introduction of VAR and its flawed search for objectivity, the replacement of stadia rooted in the heart of the communities which gave rise to them with soulless bowls located outside of town and the expense that often prices poorer fans out of the game. 

Are Neville, Terry and I just hopeless Luddites longing for a past that would inevitably pass away, or is there a deeper philosophical point to all of this? Perhaps. The French Christian thinker Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) critiqued modernity’s propensity to seek ever more efficiency no matter the cost. The French word he gave to this was ‘technique.’ While this is often translated simply as ‘technology,’ it is wider and deeper than this. He describes it as ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of activity.’ 

In a ‘technological society,’ efficiency rather than creativity, beauty or freedom becomes the norm. It is not hard to see this all around us as we scan our shopping on machines to minimise time-consuming personal interaction, use our pocket computers to organise our lives and dominate our attention all the while we do not know our neighbours’ names. Most Western institutions, the systems of business, politics and morality (and perhaps now football?) have been consumed by this system. 

Technique, according to Ellul, is not any one person or group’s fault, but develops its own internal and de-humanising logic which will never reach its goal as it searches forever greater efficiency:  

‘proceeding at its own tempo, technique analyses its objects so that it can reconstitute them; in the case of man, it has analyzed him and synthesized a hitherto unknown being.’  

But the spiritual consequence of technique is a flattened and banal account of human life, desacralizing the world. ‘Technique denies mystery a priori. The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized… Nothing belongs any longer to the realm of god or the supernatural. The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing sacred anywhere… He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself.’  

There is a clear parallel here with the principalities and powers the Apostle Paul warns against in the Bible: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ 

What is the antidote to technique in football and elsewhere in life? It is tempting to collapse into a fatalism assuming the march of technical and de-humanising efficiency is unstoppable. Ellul acknowledges the potency of technique but suggests that the greatest weapons against its totalising control are both an awareness and consciousness of its methods and consequently a certain conception of freedom which will willingly not conform to its pattern. ‘Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents a victory over necessity… We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined and being free. We must look at it dialectally, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom.’ 

In footballing terms this might be seen in an enigmatic figure like Khvicha Kvaratskhelia who seems to belong to another era and whose national team Georgia lit up Euro 2024 with their fearless and free flowing play, or by supporters applauding players who take greater risks even if they do not come off. In life in general this might be expressed through consciously avoiding the ‘necessity’ of efficiency: like choosing to do things more slowly like queueing at a supermarket checkout rather than using the automated machine, or walking to rather than driving where possible.  

For Ellul and Christians, however, the ultimate liberation from enslaving systems comes in the form of a God revealed in Jesus Christ, who lives a life wholly free from such slavery and takes upon himself the debt and weight enslaved humans hope to escape on their own. As Paul puts in another one of his letters: ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery.’ 

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