COMMISSION ON RE: A View from the Inside

Intentionally and otherwise, we the members of the RE Commission 2016-18 on which I served were possibly overly ambitious in our Final Report which models an ‘anti-essentialist’ heuristic approach to the discipline and maps a centralized future for the subject. This ‘imposed complexity’ found expression in such things as the suggested National Entitlement and the proposed name change for the discipline as well as a recasting of roles for bodies such as SACREs and faith-sector stakeholders. On reviewing Commissioner exchanges from that time, however, it is evident that our methodology owed more to antecedent convictions and a desire to be a ‘game-changer’ than to practitioner consultation. As a result, our failure to form an ‘irresistible coalition’ to help relaunch the subject via the Final Report has been unsurprising and risks further fragmentation of provision. Seeking consensus rather than imposing a paradigm shift may lack ambition in terms of Commission legacy, but it may avoid the wisdom of the great traditions being lost to an increasingly utilitarian educational system.