Editorial

Welcome to REtoday Summer edition 2024

We are writing this editorial piece in September after conference season during the summer months. You will be reading our words (with luck) in January 2024 as many RE teachers limber up for the ‘Strictly RE’...

Welcome to the start of a new academic year and with it our second special issue of ProfessionalREflection, this time focusing on the topical issue of knowledge in RE. As before, this issue is special in having been...

It is with excitement, humility, and, if I’m honest, a little trepidation, that I introduce myself as the new Editor of REtoday and present to you this inaugural issue. My heartfelt thanks and gratitude go to the...

We are writing this editorial having enjoyed attending two recent RE/RW teacher conferences, RExChange and Strictly RE. Moving online is an interesting shift for knowledge exchange and teaching. We miss the...

In this edition we re-visit our more regular format for Professional REflection, following our special issue on the NATRE Curriculum Symposium (Autumn 2022, Vol. 40:1).

RE is a subject with a past and a future, linked in all kinds of ways. Our communities press our governments across the UK to change the subject to be better suited to learning in the coming decade.

Welcome to our second Professional REflection publication as editors! This time we have brought together a whole range of voices from different parts of the Religion and Worldviews Education (R(W)E) world. Some of...

It is with excitement, pleasure and some trepidation that we embark as the new Editors for Professional REflection, journal of the National Association of Teachers of RE (NATRE). We are committed to the long and...

‘A generation goes, a generation comes, yet the earth stands firm for ever’

In writing about identities in his editorial to Spring’s edition of REtoday (Volume 38, Number 2, p. 3) Lat Blaylock says, ‘The question “Who am I?” doesn’t seem adequate to me – we are forever changing,...

In April 1963 Martin Luther King wrote a ‘letter from Birmingham Jail’ that has become a landmark statement against racism in the USA and globally. Here we are, six decades later, still needing to talk about it....

One of the positive things about Mark Chater’s recent book Reforming RE (2020) is that it brings together theorists and practitioners to make their contributions about how they see the future of the subject. It...

It was during a recent school half- term break, when my five year-old granddaughter began to cry because she was missing her class teacher, that I was reminded, once again, of the significance of the teacher as a person...

Since the publication of the Commission on RE’s report, the title of which heads our editorial this term, there has been much discussed and written about its recommendations. This writing, a sample of which is...

For RE, in recent times autumn seems to be more significant than merely the start of another academic year. September 2018 saw the publication of the final report of the Commission on RE. As I write this it is October...

The January 2020 issue of REtoday responds to the new Ofsted inspection framework for schools in England, which asks simple questions: what’s the intention of a school’s curriculum planning? How is it implemented?...

When I was studying for my MEd at the University of Birmingham I majored in Curriculum Studies and Philosophy of Education, with a focus on ethics and epistemology. One of our lecturers, Dr Mike Degenhardt, arranged for...

I doubt if there is anybody reading this who is not at least aware of the Commission on Religious Education final report published in September 2018. Many of you will have seen Ben Wood on BBC Breakfast or heard him on...

My brain seems to be hard-wired to notice fine details, particularly regarding word use. I can remember, for instance, the exact circumstances when I first came across specific words such as ‘pact’,...