A year or so after 11-9-2001 (what the Americans call Nine Eleven) I wrote the first version of a paper entitled Open RE and the Fundamentalist Threat which examined the state of Religious Education in schools  and the key role I saw it could play with our large British Muslim population likely to become increasingly alienated and discriminated against as a tiny minority turned to jihadi violence.  This has been revised and updated and is now on the site as Open Religious Education and its Enemies. Continue reading →

Julie Arliss’ Academy Conferences for school students doing A Level in the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics are well known, as are her well attended conferences for gifted and talented students. This conference was quite different, it was a day for teachers Continue reading →

In October the major newspapers and the BBC reported that RE is failing in many schools because it has been downgraded and because too many teachers are not trained to teach it.  This is the subject I devoted my career as a teacher to promote. Continue reading →

Attending Julie Arliss’ Conference for Gifted and Talented students in March this year was for me a revelation for as a retired teacher such events did not exist twenty years ago. Continue reading →

On the 8^th of February I attended an event I found truly amazing, an Academy Conference for 400 Sixth Formers laid on in central London. Mostly from schools in the South East, though one party had come down from Derby for the day, the students had come to hear top academics and teachers deal with the topics they were preparing for their A  and AS level papers in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. Continue reading →