Heavy reliance on non-specialist teachers makes RE an ‘outlier’

More than a third of RE lessons at key stage 3 are taught by teachers without a relevant qualification, with new analysis finding specialist expertise is concentrated in exam classes.

RE is an “outlier within the humanities”, the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE) said, with much heavier reliance on non-specialist teachers than geography or history.

Its analysis of Department for Education school workforce data - shared exclusively with Tes - finds that 34.1 per cent of RE hours at KS3 are taught by teachers without a relevant post-A-level qualification.

This compares with 10.7 per cent of history hours and 18.5 per cent of geography hours at the same stage.

The specialist gap narrows among older students, with 22.5 per cent of RE hours at KS4 taught by teachers without a relevant qualification and 14.2 per cent at KS5, NATRE’s analysis reveals.

These figures are considerably higher than for both geography (6.9 per cent at KS4, 2.7 per cent at KS5) and history (3.8 per cent at KS4, 2.1 per cent at KS5).

Schools are ‘rationing’ specialist teachers

This pattern suggests schools are “rationing” specialist RE teachers towards exam classes - at a time when entries data shows RE is in high demand - leaving younger students with the least access to subject expertise, NATRE said.

GCSE RE was the most popular non-English Baccalaureate subject in 2026 with 240,945 entries, although this was a reduction of 0.6 per cent on summer 2025, annual entries data showed earlier this year.

The new NATRE analysis finds that across all year groups, 42.2 per cent of qualified teachers who taught at least some RE held a relevant post-A-level qualification, compared with 76.7 per cent in history and 65.3 per cent in geography.

However, RE specialists delivered 72 per cent of total teaching hours, indicating many teachers without an RE qualification were being given relatively small timetable allocations.

An RE specialist taught an average of 12.8 hours of the subject per week, compared with 3.6 hours for a teacher without a relevant qualification.

The DfE’s definition of a specialist is a qualified teacher holding a relevant post-A-level qualification.

Specialist teacher share at 16-year low

The proportion of RE teachers who held a relevant qualification fell to 42 per cent in 2025-26, the lowest point in 16 years, the NATRE report finds.

The share was at its highest in 2017-18 (48 per cent) before falling back, and the proportion of RE teaching hours delivered by specialists dropped from 76.3 per cent to 72 per cent over the same period.

This shows that the problem is not only about recruiting specialists but also about how existing expertise is deployed, NATRE said.

It called on the government to restore the postgraduate training bursary for RE, which was available in 2025-26 but removed for trainees starting this year.

NATRE also called for funded subject-knowledge enhancement courses to be restored for RE, and for schools and trusts to audit specialist teacher deployment, particularly at KS3.

The government’s schools White Paper says every child should have “expert teachers” and sets an ambition for “an expert teacher in every classroom”.

Its teacher workforce plan also says that investment will focus on subjects facing shortages, but funded subject knowledge enhancement is currently limited to computing, languages, maths and physics.

NATRE added: “A credible expert-teacher policy should not wait until examination classes before pupils gain access to subject expertise.”