Post by Deleted on Sept 19, 2017 16:35:30 GMT
This is actually nothing new. When I was in secondary school some 35 years ago, the school would always timetable religious education classes to be straight after English class, in the same room, with the same teacher. And the teacher would just treat it like a double length English lesson, every single time. Clearly this was done deliberately as a way to do an end run around the requirement.
In fact there was only one occasion in all my time in school when we actually did an RE lesson, and that was because the school inspectors came in. Back then schools had a few weeks notice of that, so we were told in advance that the RE lesson would be an actual RE lesson, and that if an inspector asked we should just say that it was always that way. The cheating was really that blatant.
I know when I was a teacher that had changed and RE was taken a lot more seriously - a whole RE department with proper RE teachers who didn't teach anything else, textbooks, schemes of work, etc. But I'm not at all surprised to find that some schools are de-emphasising it or slipping on meeting the requirement these days.
In fact there was only one occasion in all my time in school when we actually did an RE lesson, and that was because the school inspectors came in. Back then schools had a few weeks notice of that, so we were told in advance that the RE lesson would be an actual RE lesson, and that if an inspector asked we should just say that it was always that way. The cheating was really that blatant.
I know when I was a teacher that had changed and RE was taken a lot more seriously - a whole RE department with proper RE teachers who didn't teach anything else, textbooks, schemes of work, etc. But I'm not at all surprised to find that some schools are de-emphasising it or slipping on meeting the requirement these days.