A sample of 187 female students, attending a sixth-form study day on religious studies, completed a questionnaire containing four scales concerned with assessing: attitude towards theistic religion, attitude towards science, scientism and creationism. The data demonstrated a negative correlation between attitude towards religion and attitude…

This article explores the mixed fortunes of historical inquiry as a method in educational studies and exposes evidence for the neglect of this method in religious education research in particular. It argues that historical inquiry, as a counterpart to other research methods, can add depth and range to our understanding of education, including…

Anglican school inspectors will usually be Christian. Is it possible that their beliefs might compromise their inspection judgements? Neutrality is impossible when holding opinions or making judgements about matters of signal importance. Religious beliefs are strongly held. Using the concept of "ordinary theology" I argue that religious beliefs…

The Teenage Religion and Values Survey was conducted throughout the 1990s among young people between the ages of 13 and 15 years. A total of 33,982 young people took part in the survey. As the next phase of this research begins for the twenty-first century, this paper looks back at the survey conducted in the 1990s and considers two aspects of the…

The article presents a curriculum-sociological study of "religion" in the classroom. More specifically, it is a study, inspired by Bernstein, Foucault and Bourdieu, that examines various forms of identity politics tied to "religion" and "culture" as these concepts unfold in the classroom in relation to knowledge production and social…

In Jewish primary schools, religious education is centred on the study of Torah. At Sinai, according to Jewish tradition, Moses received the Torah in two parts: a written tradition (Hebrew scripture) and an oral tradition. The oral tradition contained much scriptural "interpretation" known, in Hebrew, as midrash. Midrash continued to be taught and…

Possibly the largest qualitative study in RE policy and practice in many years, the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society project "Does RE work? An analysis of the aims, practices and models of effectiveness in religious education in the UK", headed by the University of Glasgow, seeks to map the complex processes of curriculum formation as experienced in…

This paper addresses the sensitive issue of the teaching of religions and beliefs in schools by analysing two recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. In these cases, the Court asserts that students should be exempted from compulsory courses on religion or from courses that are not conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist…

This article sets out the findings of an exploratory study which looked at the impact of the Hampshire Agreed Syllabus, "Living Difference", on teaching and learning in religious education. The research was carried out in Hampshire, Southampton, and Portsmouth, UK, between April and June 2008. Twenty teachers were interviewed, all of whom were…

The 2004 "National Framework for Religious Education" (NFRE) innovatively recommended that secular philosophies such as humanism, or secular worldviews, be included in locally agreed syllabuses for religious education (RE) in England. However, the NFRE is a non-statutory document, and Agreed Syllabus Conferences (ASCs) and Standing Advisory…

This article was first presented as a short paper at the annual conference of the Association of University Lecturers in Religious Education in Exeter, July 2009, and seeks to clarify different possible interpretations of what is meant by current uses of the terms "learning about religion" and "learning from religion". Drawing on research/reports…

Studies of the image of Muslims or "the Other" in general have been done to a certain extent by Western scholars showing that stereotyped images have been prevalent. In the case of Islamic studies, the long tradition of Orientalist scholarship is a clear example of this, but, as researchers have shown, generalisations and stereotypes are still…

A sample of 10,851 pupils (5493 males and 5358 females) attending Year 9 classes (13- to 14-year-olds) and a sample of 9494 pupils (4787 males and 4707 females) attending Year 10 classes (14- to 15-year-olds) in non-denominational state-maintained secondary schools in England and Wales completed questions concerned with conventional Christian…

Within the UK and in many parts of the world, official accounts of what it is to make sense of religion are framed within a rhetorics of neutrality in which such study is premised upon the possibility of dispassionate engagement and analysis. This paper, which is largely theoretical in scope, explores both the affordances and the costs of such an…

Debates on teacher accountability are informed by research generating, for example, evidence-based policy and practice. Debates on pedagogy, too, are informed by research, albeit with only a limited amount of empirical research being currently available on religious education (RE) pedagogy. In this article, research is conceived as not simply…