The 2007 Birmingham Agreed Syllabus: Educating Pupils and the Community

Dr. Marius C. Felderhof and Simone Whitehouse

In the following chapter Marius Felderhof and Simone Whitehouse set out their experience of the development of the Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education in Birmingham which has taken RE in a radically new direction.

When in 2005 Birmingham SACRE advised the City that its 1995 Religious Education Agreed Syllabus required to be reviewed, it also signalled the syllabus would need to be significantly revised. This necessitated an Agreed Syllabus Conference; a body to be set up according to education statute and on a basis that was more than a mere formality - as may sometimes happen when no significant change in the curriculum is envisaged. The current situation in Birmingham demanded a more deep-rooted revision. This perception was based on two developments. The first was the publication in September, 2004 by the Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA), (together with the Department for Children Schools and Families), of a Non-Statutory National Framework for Religious Education. The second was the increasing use of computers and the internet within schools. Any modern religious education syllabus must now consider the opportunities and challenges this offered.

Process

In considering a more serious review, steps had to be taken to ensure the proper resourcing of a strictly legal[1] process. This was done through backing from the City’s School Effectiveness Division - but only after political approval. The Division supported the process financially from its budget and contributed the expertise of the RE adviser, S. Whitehouse, an advisory teacher, R. Hack and a computer programmer, J. McAdam. A consciousness that the revision process needed to conform scrupulously to the requirements of the law arose from previous experience in the City in 1970-75. The draft 1975 Agreed Syllabus had stirred public controversy with the proposal to include Marxism and Secular Humanism, and a legal challenge[2] was mounted to resist it. There was a clear desire to avoid a similar fate.

To oversee and direct the Agreed Syllabus Conference, the City appointed Mr Guy Hordern as chair. Mr Hordern was already chair of SACRE and had a longstanding interest in Religious Education. Importantly, he also had close ties with the City’s Conservative Party, which together with the Liberal Democrats, controlled the City Council. His political experience and connections proved invaluable in securing political support and funding for the revision of the Syllabus and its web-based resources.

Finally, the City appointed Dr. Marius Felderhof as the drafting secretary at a substantial cost. Dr. Felderhof was a senior lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of Birmingham Department of Theology and Religion, and the University was not slow to capitalise on the opportunity. He had been the chair of Committee A for many years and was perceived to have the confidence of the many religious traditions represented there. He also had an ongoing theological interest in Religious Education. Some anticipated that through his advice the new Syllabus would gain in academic substance and rigour. Whether this is indeed the case is for the reader to decide. What cannot be doubted was the ambition of the City to maintain its reputation to be leaders in RE by making significant resources available.

In his letter of appointment to Dr. Felderhof, Cllr. Les Lawrence, the Cabinet member for Children, Young People and Families, stressed the importance of having an RE Syllabus that 1/ conformed to law, that was 2/ educationally viable and that 3/ made religious sense. In emphasising these three considerations of legality, educational viability and religious sense, he was signalling some long standing concerns with Religious Education as it was being delivered in schools in England and Wales generally and which Birmingham would now seek to address. These concerns we shall discuss below, following some further observations about the process.

As is well known, the 1944 Education Act set out the main elements of the process for devising a Syllabus for Religious Education, and in effect identified four specific interests that were required to be reconciled. Each of the four groups has one vote and an effective veto since unanimity was a legal necessity. What was different in the current process was a growing consciousness that each group had different responsibilities and interests. The Local Authority clearly has a duty to represent the community as a whole and was expected to champion principles of inclusion and social cohesion. The teacher’s group was expected to consider issues to do with pedagogy and the principles and practicalities of schooling. The Church of England, as the established church, was expected to defend the moral and spiritual well-being of the nation and as a consequence to ensure that RE played its role in that endeavour. The C of E committee was therefore expected to stand up for the main stream of religious life. The fourth committee (of dissenting churches and other faiths), by far the largest with some 24 members, was also expected to reflect on religious life and, in addition, to ensure the accuracy of any information provided on less familiar faiths. They also clearly had a responsibility to see that minority interests were safeguarded, and thus like the local authority group, to ensure inclusion.

It has been said that RE in community schools should rise above sectional interests, and that everyone should see themselves committed to one common, secular enterprise. But as Philip Barnes argued so elegantly[3] before you can cultivate tolerance it is vital to acknowledge real differences. The real work of the Agreed Syllabus Conference is precisely to tease out the differences and democratically to negotiate, to argue and to persuade, perhaps even to cajole, in order to overcome the gap that separates the different interests. Practically this was done at the level of the Conference, but often addressed in detail at the level of a smaller scrutiny committee that examined every word and line. Those who argue for the seamless unity in RE often do so from positions of power and their presumption is that everyone will conform. If differences are taken seriously then when agreement does finally come, there is much greater ownership, solidarity and backing for the product.

The recognition of genuine religious interests may also come as a surprise to those who have strongly argued for a secular form of RE in community schools[4]. It is supposed that in a secular society, the secular state should support a secular understanding of the religious world. However, the law requires the school curriculum as a whole to be broadly based and balanced. It is difficult to see how this is achieved if the religious form of life is not adequately represented in religious terms. In a secular society it is precisely the religious voice which is absent and which should be heard in an educational context if young people are not to acquire a distorted view of people of faith. There is no available neutrality that is somehow the sole privilege of a secular state versus the commitments of religious communities. Secularity is itself a position. The best that can be hoped for is fairness, openness and accuracy in any accounts one happens to provide. These values are realised most fully when in any descriptions of the other, the other concurs and endorses the information and the discourse in which it is offered.

From the outset the Bishop, Archbishop and all the members of the Faith Leaders group in Birmingham were approached in face to face discussion and encouraged to nominate their most able representatives. The condition was explicitly stated that these representatives should have a deep knowledge and appreciation of their particular faith tradition. If, incidentally, they had a knowledge of schooling as well, this would be regarded as a bonus rather than a prerequisite since the Conference would look to the teacher’s committee for the essential educational in-put. This step was taken consciously to strengthen the link between schooling and the wider community and to avoid treating the curriculum as a wholly specialist preserve or as a privileged domain of an educational community.

The reasons for this approach is that it may well be the case that the very traditions and practices of current schooling, (together with current RE theory), blind one to the constraints on the expression of religious life or to the many ways in which people are authorised to discriminate against the use of religious conceptions[5]. In order to test and communicate the religious sense of an RE curriculum, one may in fact need people who are wholly fresh to the task and see the enterprise with new eyes. There is, for example, a widely held prejudice, especially prevalent amongst intellectuals that religion is fundamentally about subscribing to a set of cognitive beliefs. In contrast, many religious people themselves see religion as a practice and direction in life. From a religious perspective the key challenge in life is to the human will rather than to the human mind, to what one chooses to do rather than to what one thinks. A curriculum that focuses on the latter (on beliefs) rather than the former subtly introduces a distortion. Admittedly, thought and will are not unrelated but primacy matters here.

Teachers, of course, have their concerns. For example, what can one possibly do in the finite time available? What scope is there for creativity in teaching? How can one engage pupils who, as persons, have their own history, integrity and freedom, which entitles them to the fundamental respect that prohibits bullying. How does one assess development, specifically, moral and spiritual development? What does moral and spiritual development look like[6]? How does one incorporate progression in one’s teaching? How does RE fit in with the other curricular demands on the school? These and many more! Sometimes the religious demands and the educational demands appeared to be wholly irreconcilable; assessment being a case in point! There are religious demands that openly state, ‘judge not’, but teachers must make judgements about their pupils and about their own teaching. Moral theory makes inner motivations a key to any moral valuations but inner motivations are not normally accessible to public inspection, thus making any moral assessment on that score impossible. If one is nevertheless constrained to assess everything one does at the behest of the school authorities, what should the teacher do? Should s/he only teach what is assessable?

Attempted solution

Reconciling the requirements of legality, educational viability and religious sense would not prove easy. But the outcome was a serious attempt to do so and that in itself was significant. It was in fact the legal requirements that provided the clue to a solution. Educational statute sets the overarching goal of education as the spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) development of children and society. This was an influential reminder that the primary focus of the curriculum should be children and society and their development, not religion(s) per se. The dominant focus could, therefore, never be religion or religions because there was always the requirement that whatever is studied must contribute to a spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.

The conference welcomed the by now traditional attainment targets for RE, but reversed them. There were two good reasons for this. The first was to ensure that ‘learning from faith’ would be (a) the driving force of SMSC development. And (b) it proved helpful as an important principle in determining the selection of material. Given the vast range of what might be ‘learned about religion’ and the finite time available to teach it, one needs good, public reasons for selecting ‘x’ rather than ‘y’. Effectively the answer was: what does the character development of the whole child and of society require?

Firstly, the whole child was considered on the basis of a handy device, namely, the traditional description of persons as consisting of three faculties: cognitive, affective and conative [to do with willing]. To these were added the considerations of [a] key skills and [b] social needs and relationships. The latter also naturally led to the considerations of the needs of society e.g. cohesion, functioning institutions. This holistic view of a pupil embedded in a social setting and of education as the development of the whole child (or young person) required some definition of the kind qualities we hoped such a person and such a society would exhibit. The conference finally settled on its list of 24[7] dispositions[8] after considering and rejecting whether ‘Being Playful’ should be one of them.

An obvious question is whether anyone is justified in seeking to influence a young person’s and society’s character in this way? But as Wolterstorff observed in his book , Educating for Responsible Action[9]

It is virtually impossible for a teacher to avoid seeking to shape students’ tendencies – to strengthen some and weaken others- and it is certainly impossible for a teacher to act in such a way that he or she will in fact not alter the students’ tendencies. … Which tendencies to seek to inculcate, and how, are the relevant questions – not whether.

In Britain, answering the Which and the How questions comes by way of negotiation, following a legal process, and, as a democratic society, the Agreed Syllabus is then adopted by elected representatives. The legitimacy comes precisely from adhering to law and engaging the wider community as fully as possible.

That the development of the young person and society should be the dominant concerns led to two challenges. First, it was necessary in an RE curriculum to show how diverse religious traditions might conceivably contribute to such development. Second, how does one engage the whole community in the same SMSC agenda as the schools? In addressing the first challenge the website was devised as a key teaching tool showing where in the judgement of the religious traditions concerned their resources might contribute to the dispositions at which the Conference was aiming – an enquiry of moving from a religious tradition to a disposition. Alternatively the website made it equally possible to move in the opposing direction: from a disposition to the religious material. In addition to the website, SACRE soon commissioned TV Junction, a production firm, to make a number of films, one for each of the dispositions and show how a particular disposition was being exhibited in the life of one or more of the religious communities in the City. The films were pitched at two different levels, initial and advanced, to be used with different age groups or ability levels. The films were put on a DVD, Faith makes a difference, together with a primary and a secondary CPD film to acquaint teachers with the substance and possibilities of the new Agreed Syllabus and distributed to schools.