Reconciling Catholic responses to Religious Education reform in England – empirical and analytical reflections

Recent policy reforms regarding Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales have provoked a variety of reactions among faith communities, ecclesial stakeholders, academics, practitioners, senior leaders and students themselves. In this article, we assess the situation in the Catholic context using empirical and analytical tools which shed light on the nature of the subject in a manner relevant to the non-faith sector and internationally. We demonstrate that vectors of reform have drawn attention to key pedagogical aporia in RE such as ‘academic accessibility vs academic rigour’, ‘confessional truth vs critical doubt’, ‘exclusivity vs inclusivity’ and ‘information vs formation.’ Although these risk fomenting partizan binaries at an important time in the evolution of the subject, we contend that such tensions actually underpin the discipline, helping to articulate both its peculiarly holistic ambition and its transformative possibilities. Thus understood, RE becomes a spacious place, deliberately mapped by co-ordinates of paradox.