This week students from all over the country receive their results, and the nervous wait to find out which universities and other next steps in their education they will be heading off to begins. Turn on your television and you will be inundated with interviews from schools, and tomorrow’s papers will be bursting with pictures of teenagers leaping into the air clutching pieces of paper. Stepping back from the end-goal however, education is an interesting area for us and not one we cover that much. Over the last few years we have seen a couple of cases, primarily a series around major changes being made in Somerset, but today another one crossed our path.

Curiously this new one is not actually directly related to consultation, though it does appear, and it is these appearances that have drawn our attention. The case, Re: JR87, is a challenge to the teaching arrangements for religious education and the principles of collective worship in controlled primary schools (those managed by the Education Authority). Brought by the humanist parents of a pupil, the claim alleges that both the teaching of RE and the collective worship practiced in the school had led their child to adopt a religious worldview incompatible with their beliefs, and in breach of their human rights to freedom of belief. In short, they claim that rather than learning about Christianity, their child is in fact just learning Christianity in a manner that assumes absolute truth and encourages the adoption of this by the child.

As part of the case the legislative history of religious education in Northern Ireland was examined, and though it did not form a core part of the case there are some interesting points to consider. The story starts with the Education and Libraries (NI) Order 1986, which in Article 21(2) provides that religious education shall be based on “the Holy Scriptures”, but in a non-denominational manner. It must be Christian, but not denominational. In 2006, this was supplemented by the Education (NI) Order 2006, which states that the syllabus must be prepared by a drafting group representative of “persons having an interest in the teaching of religious education in grant-aided schools”. This was further clarified the following year by another order which stated that this core syllabus would be drafted by “the four main Christian Churches in Northern Ireland”.

The draft syllabus was consulted on for three months, though the only related document that the court could actually find was the Equality Impact Assessment. The responses to the consultation and the Government response to the same, were nowhere to be found. What was noted however, was that multiple bodies had raised concerns about the idea of a “Christian RE” model on equalities grounds- though the Department for Education pointed out that this was mandated in the secondary legislation. Three bodies particularly raised concerns, the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action which criticised the decision as absurd, the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, which criticised, amongst other things, the exclusively Christian make-up of the Drafting Commission, and the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities, which was sufficiently unhappy as to refuse to take part in the consultation as they considered it fundamentally flawed.

Whilst it’s far too late to do anything about this consultation, which does sound like it might have been worth investigating, it does highlight some interesting questions about the writing of syllabuses. One of the things that has come up a lot recently is how subjects (particularly history) are taught, and with the rise of academies in England which don’t have to adhere to the national curriculum, it does make us wonder if more attention needs to be put on curriculum consultations. We most often see it arising (and get the odd enquiry) about relationships and sex education, another place like religious education which often attracts controversy.

In the Northern Ireland case, several of the legislative instruments that had enabled the process were found to be unlawful- though the court also noted that there is an ongoing review of the school curriculum in Northern Ireland, as well as the changing religious demographics. We’ll look a little further into the review- and the current state of curriculum consultations more broadly- we hope they’ve come on in leaps and bounds since the mid-2000s!