Knowledge in a religion and worldviews approach in English schools

The Final Report of the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) in England published in 2018 advocated what it called a religion and worldviews approach. One of the significant questions it provoked was the approach to knowledge that it took. This article explores this question. It first explains the background to the Commission Report and then the subsequent interpretative work undertaken by the Religious Education Council of England and Wales to develop its recommendations. It then focuses on the vision lying behind the religion and worldviews approach that draws on CoRE’s claim that ‘everyone has a worldview’, and reviews the debate that resulted around that claim. A detailed consideration of the approach to worldview taken in the subsequent REC work and its exemplification in a revised Statement of Entitlement follows. Finally, it is argued that the understanding of knowledge taken in this literature resonates with that of Michael Polanyi in his development of the idea of personal knowledge and that of Andrew and Elina Wright’s exposition of critical realism. The article advocates that this results in an approach to RE that puts learning to make scholarly and reflexive judgments at the heart of knowledge-rich RE.