In the long history of the Catholic school in Europe, it has taken various forms, linked to local cultures and to the history, particularly religious but also political, of each state. While it is possible to account for this diversity, it is also important to highlight common features and challenges, such as secularisation and globalisation,…

The Education (Scotland) Act 1872 offered the different Christian denominational schools the opportunity to transfer their schools and become non-denominational Board schools. This option was rejected by the Catholic and Episcopal churches. There were serious anxieties about issues such as the loss of denominational status and the proposal that…

Situated in the context of the Scottish Religious and Moral Education (RME) curriculum, this article considers the practice of Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI) and how it supports the RME curriculum. Sharing extracts from children's CoPI sessions, the article reflects on the ways in which ten and eleven year-old children discuss religious…

The focus of this article is on the legal requirement for schools in Scotland to ensure Religious and Moral Education (RME) is taught to all children in non-denominational secondary schools. In particular, the article pays attention to the mediating role of inspection in the relationship between the legal requirement and provision in schools. The…

This article argues that crucial elements of the three most important theoretical models of twentieth-century education can be traced back to three Protestant denominations that were developed in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, rather than to look in depth at the Protestant Reformers' own educational ideas, the paper…

This article analyses the complexities of religious identity and stakeholder discourse concerning religious education (RE) reform in Scotland and Malawi. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of 'social space', it explicates the extent to which religious identity and conflicts over symbolic power in the social space of RE reform engender polarised debates…

The debates surrounding the reform of national education in Britain and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century were often framed as a binary struggle between the religious establishment, which sought to retain control of the national schools, and dissenters who viewed education reform as an important step towards dismantling the state churches'…

The quantitative strand of the Young People's Attitudes towards Religious Diversity Project, conducted by the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, set out to capture data from over 2000 students living in each of the four nations of the United Kingdom (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and from London as a special case.…

This paper considers the right of parental withdrawal from the statutory subject Religious Education (RE) in Scottish primary and secondary schools. The background, history and current legislative situation relating to this right are considered, as well as current discussions and debates about this issue. The intentions are to establish how often…

In Scotland, and particularly with regards to non-denominational RE, known as Religious and Moral Education (RME), a current focus of debates is on how and why practitioners are implementing or deviating from legal and curricular expectations. Using the findings of a small-scale qualitative practitioner enquiry centered on one local education…

This article presents analyses of curricula in religious education (RE) for public schools in Austria, Scotland, and Sweden. A curricula is the plan that outlines the goals, content and outcomes in education. A critical discourse analysis approach (CDA) is used to explore how each national RE curricula constructs (a) the aims, status and purpose…

In Scotland, although there is no agreed definition of what constitutes the humanities, they have their locus principally within two of eight curricular areas in Curriculum for Excellence (CfE): Social Studies (SS) and Religious and Moral Education (RME). Both SS and RME are contexts for learning where broad principles apply in relation to…

The 'Does RE Work?' project, part of the AHRC/ESRC Religion & Society Programme, ran from 2007 to 2011. Drawing on textual analysis, ethnographic case studies and practitioner enquiry, the study identified core confusions as to the purposes and entailments of Religious Education as practised across the jurisdictions of the UK. This paper…

This paper explores the cross-cultural organisational adaptation of host religious organisations through their interaction with non-Christian Chinese international students in the UK. Grounded in Kim's integrative adaptation theory, the research employed the methods of participant observation, interviews and document analysis to examine the…

The "theology of religions" is concerned with the interpretation and evaluation of the divergent truth-claims and views of salvation that are asserted or implied by different religious traditions. This study proposes a new multi-choice index that distinguishes between six current positions within the theology of religions, characterised…