Designing a secular religious studies curriculum

The Religious Education Council has warned that without good religious education (RE) teachers, religious discrimination could rise. Yet, 2017–18 saw a third of training places for initial teacher training in RE unfilled (Sellgren, 2018). This is perhaps symptomatic of one of the deeper problems with RE: a lack of clarity about the purpose, disciplinary methods and content that should be taught through the subject (Georgiou  and Wright , 2018). Two  years  ago, I  was in the  lucky position  of designing a religion  curriculum from scratch. I  had joined East London Science  School, a free school that was committed  to teaching religion through a knowledge-rich  curriculum. By ‘knowledge-rich’, the school meant  that the intrinsic worth of the content should take  precedence over teaching generic skills. Gaining knowledge  is empowering because  it allows  students to  make sense of  a complex world  (Young  , 2009). Below,  I explain my efforts to  deve