Last year, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority produced its model syllabuses for religious education. As a result of SCAA’s recommendations, a conflict is emerging within schools and the profession about the way religion should be taught. The conflict concerns whether or not religion can be taught thematically - as a series of common human experiences, differently interpreted by the different faiths.

Every teacher in every subject faces the same question: what to teach and how to teach it? The subject syllabus should give the teacher clear guidelines for what to teach. The teacher’s professional skill and experience provides the resource for how to teach it. But in RE the “what” and the “how” are a bit mixed up, and SCAA has produced syllabuses which attempt to cover both. How did they come to this position?

First a bit of background. Since 1988, successive Secretaries of State have strengthened that dimension of education which is about acquiring “facts”. The human and natural sciences, where facts are supposed to be easier to get hold of, have been elevated over the “interpretative” arts subjects. A different motivation lies behind the RE syllabus, the belief that young people must be taught how to be good. But RE, too, must respond to the current desire for facts. So the answer to the question, “what should be taught in RE?” is, “the religious facts, please”.

So SCAA set up six faith groups, representing the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Sikh religions, to tell them the religious facts. Each faith group, or working party, was asked to set out the essential elements of their faith, as they would wish it to be taught.

What did SCAA expect to get in response to this brief? What they got, of course, was six coherent but incompatible sets of religious facts - a clear message that each religion maps the world and its experiences in a fundamentally different way.

No longer was it possible for curriculum makers to think that words such as “God”, “family”, “death”, and “salvation” crossed religious boundaries. It seems these words do not describe common social experiences, on to which different religious interpretations are put. Within the different traditions they describe different experiences.

SCAA did not ask the working groups for advice on how to teach the faiths, only on the content of what should be taught. But the religious message came back: a faith is only understood, and therefore only learned, from within. The comparative approach is inadequate and misleading.

Following this religious advice, SCAA’s conclusion was that thematic approaches to RE could not really work very well and should be largely abandoned.

This is a very important conclusion which has huge implications for RE in schools. Most current RE teaching probably follows a thematic approach. The two model syllabuses which SCAA has offered for Agreed Syllabus Conferences to consider do not include this option.

Instead, Agreed Syllabus Conferences are being asked to consider approaches based on what it is like to live within a faith tradition (Model 1), or on the particular teachings of the faith tradition (Model 2). This poses a severe problem for the traditionally thematic RE teacher. In saying that a religion is only understood and learned from within, SCAA is also saying that it can only really be taught from within - that is, with religious commitment.

That is the religious position, which SCAA has largely adopted. But the educational approach is different. From the educational point of view, a liberal comparative stance, not committed to any one tradition, has many advantages.

Standing on such neutral ground as can be found, the RE teacher can survey all the faiths, and try to relate them all to the common human experiences.

The working groups which SCAA appointed, and whose advice SCAA followed, said that there were no neutral vantage points from which to survey religion. The implication is that religion and education have a fundamental incompatibility at heart.

Religiously, the SCAA models make excellent sense. After all, they are based on the authentic voice of those six religions. But many RE teachers will argue that they don’t make such good educational sense.

It is not just that schools will not be able to find enough teachers competent to teach in this way (ie from within, and committed to, a religious tradition). More importantly, education relies as much on dispassionate comparison as it does on immersion and inculturation.

The professional skill and experience of teachers, which is what we usually rely on in deciding how to teach something, has tended towards thematic RE. Has SCAA been hasty in suggesting that this approach is unprofitable?

The model syllabuses are in the very early stages of consideration by Agreed Syllabus Conferences. Not many Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACREs) or local education authorities seem keen to speed up the normal quinquennial review of Agreed RE Syllabuses just because these models have been published.

Early indications, however, are that the teachers’ voice is getting a better hearing at the local level. Whether for pragmatic reasons or because of a reassertion of educational over religious factors, it seems that thematic RE is not going to disappear in the face of the SCAA model syllabuses.

What SCAA’s work might achieve, however, is a better acknowledgement of why RE is in a class of its own: no one knows how to reconcile the conflict between the religious and educational dimensions of religious education.

Kenneth Wilson is chairman of governors of a church-controlled school in the Midlands.