Maktab education serves many purposes. It provides the substantive knowledge thought to be compulsory for Muslim pupils. Its functional role is to enable them, through varied learning processes, to embody elements of their faith and live as Muslims. Hitherto, systematic attention to curricula in primary maktab education has been rare. This…

Thinking sexuality education and religion together often results in antagonisms that pit religious and secular values against each other. Political theology provides new insights into this tendency by showing how modern concepts of political legitimacy are based on secularised Christian theology. Neoliberal schooling, public sexual health and…

What does it mean to be a Muslim young woman in Britain today and with which religious and social values do these young women identify? This paper tests the thesis that Muslim identity predicts distinctive values of public and social significance among female adolescents (13- to 15- years of age) who participated in a survey conducted across the…

Queer youth are positioned as "at risk", and queer youth in religious settings and communities are seen as especially vulnerable due to the anti-LGBT sentiment assumed to inhere there. Governmental funding has recently been directed towards challenging homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in English faith schools specifically, as the…

For the first time in 2001 the Census for England and Wales included a question on religious identity. The campaign for the inclusion of this question was largely pioneered by the Muslim community who argued that religious identity was a more significant indicator of social and public significance than ethnicity. This paper tests the thesis that…

The recently introduced and compulsory citizenship education in English schools seeks to prepare children for life in a liberal democracy and is concerned with far more than the acquisition of skills and knowledge; it privileges particular forms of action, behaviour and ways of thinking. I argue here that education for democratic citizenship (EDC)…

This article explores the implications of funding increasing numbers of religious schools on the children of minority communities. It argues that handing responsibility for schooling to religious bodies undermines transparency, democracy and accountability in educational provision. Far from promoting "inclusion" as the Government claims,…

The importance of motivational beliefs and, more specifically, religion, is identified as central for both citizenship and citizenship education. Whether they take an expressly religious form, or appear in a purportedly more open form, such as faith or world view, beliefs are at the core of human being. The tendency to speak more of shared values…