Shap Journal 2001/2002

World Religions in Education

Making a Community of a School: 
Being DIRECT with Primary School
Religious Education and Local Communities

Julian Stern

The REaSE Project and Croydon

The   Religious   Education   and   School
Effectiveness (REaSE) project, based at the
BFSS National RE Centre, Brunel University,
has attempted to raise the status and quality of
RE, to increase its effectiveness, and to help RE
contribute to raising school effectiveness more generally
(see Stern 2000). One of the nine local REaSE projects
was based in the London Borough of Croydon, looking
at primary school RE and ways of improving
relationships with local communities. It developed
strategies for taking pupils into communities, for
celebrating faith and diversity within schools, and for
creating a video of 'virtual visits' for schools made by
members of local groups. In these ways, there was a
clarification of the relationships between RE, whole
school communities, and wider local communities. The
work is a testament to the enthusiasm of children and
adults in Croydon to share and celebrate their beliefs
and their ways of life. As one pupil said:

'Can we wear our school uniform in the video?
Because since we failed that OFSTED thing, people
have kept dissing our school. We want people to see the
good things we do.'

Schools and the nature of community

Amongst the principles underlying the project, the
most important was the idea that schools
themselves are and should be 'communities', and that
one of the main functions of schooling is to teach pupils
how to live in community. If a school is a living
community, this can in itself have an effect on wider
communities, and RE has a central role in helping
integrate the school curriculum and life beyond the
school. These principles were derived in particular from
the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, for whom
'the school is a community; and we learn to live in
community only by living in a community' (Macmurray
1968: 149-150), and 'a school's first principle is that it
must be a real community. Not because community is
a good thing - I would underline this - but because this
is the condition of success in its educational function.
Only in a community can a living culture be developed.'
(Macmurray, 1968, p. 35.)

'Such schools are based on people being helped to be
'real' people, as when we try to teach, we must deal with
living human beings. ... We may act as though we were
teaching arithmetic or history. In fact we are teaching
people. The arithmetic or the history is merely a medium
through which a personal intercourse is established and
maintained.' (Macmurray, 1968, p. 5.)

Schools, therefore, are 'required' to be communities: this
was the most important principle underlying the
Croydon work. The relevance of this to specifically
religious education is, for Macmurray, the result of
religion being 'about action' (Macmurray, 1995, p 65),
as best exemplified in the parable of the Good Samaritan
- the man who 'defined' his neighbour through his
action rather than simply through a set of beliefs or
formal membership of a group, and who thereby made a
community. It is an understanding of the religious and
secular meanings of community that can therefore
provide foundations for both schooling and for religious
education.

REaSE findings in Croydon

By responding to many of the central concerns of
teachers and pupils in schools identified as 'failing',
the Croydon part of the REaSE project identified
surprising links between RE and whole-school
effectiveness. Pupils and teachers in schools having
difficulties often seemed to suffer from low self-esteem,
and found it harder building positive relationships
within the school community, let alone with wider
communities beyond the school. Where there was a lack
of community involvement, this had many causes.
Sometimes, the stigma of failing, felt by both teachers
and pupils, affected the opportunities to develop good,
community-based, RE. Schools often had a wariness of
visitors, too, with one school having had 2 7 visits in one
year - mostly from inspectors. Those schools identified
by inspectors as failing were often under tremendous
pressure to meet narrow action plans, which rarely
included improving relationships with local community
and religious groups. Furthermore, the deprivation and
the disrupted communities of the surrounding areas
also at times contributed to difficulties in building up
good relations. (See also Stoll & Myers 1998.)

In some schools, the beliefs and cultures of pupils were
insufficiently recognised and celebrated, according to
this research, and RE was adversely affected. For
example, successful RE co-ordinators were often
promoted out of the subject or even the school, as,
apparently, RE was seen as a lower priority than other
subjects. Yet in more successful schools, RE seemed to
have a key strategic role in the school ethos and
relationships with wider communities. The REaSE
project concentrated on practical research and
development, bringing together expertise and advice
from schools, LEA and independent advisers, and
university-based RE specialists. Joy White, then Croydon
LEA RE adviser, and her colleagues, developed and
tested improvement strategies following a set of 'DIRECT'
principles (White 2000). 'DIRECT' stands for:

•   Dialogue - forging links to initiate and sustain
communication between schools and communities.

•   Inclusion - ensuring all groups within the school
community were represented.

•   Relevancy - highlighting that religious traditions
have an effect on contemporary, local, life-styles.

•   Esteem - affirming the beliefs, values, and
traditions of the local community.

•   Changing   dynamics   -   harnessing   and
authentically reflecting the local contemporary
faith communities.

•   Togetherness - exploring ways of working together
on common targets.

Of course, it is not enough simply to identify such a list
of principles. The 'DIRECT' ideas themselves only came
out of the work already underway to improve RE and
whole-school effectiveness.  There were three inter-
linked activities - visits, celebrations, and a video. Each
of these activities targeted a specific aspect of RE, school
and community development, and all of them, together,
made a DIRECT approach possible.

The 'visits' work involved intensive preparations with
pupils, a focus during the visit to a church on the nature
of the church-as-community, and follow-up research on
different religious groups and places of worship. An
interesting activity involved discussing which adjectives
were most appropriately attached to places of worship,
hospitals, and schools. This has been attempted with
various groups, and it always manages to elicit a wide
range of responses highlighting the feelings that the
children have about different institutions - both before
and after the visit.

When it came to the 'celebration' activity, one of the
schools arranged a day of hope, aiming to raise the self-
esteem of the pupils, schools, and local communities.
After considering a celebration centred on community
representatives or parents, it was decided that the pupils
themselves should be centre. Every child worked in
school on their hopes for the future, and during the
celebration - held on a Sunday - children from many
different traditions shared stories, prayers, songs and
other music, with a huge entirely voluntary audience of
around two hundred children and two hundred adults.
As the headteacher said 'The people were moved by what
seemed to be a real sense of the spiritual, ... [and]
members of minority faiths saw their religion affirmed by
the whole school community'. (Brendan Schmack,
quoted in Neumark 2000.)

A Video for Schools

Whereas the use of visits to places of worship took
pupils out of school and into the local
community, and the celebration brought members of the
local community into the school to see what the pupils
believed, there was also a perceived need to make more
'active' use of members of local religious groups within
schools. As has been said, failing schools, in particular,
may be treated with a certain amount of distrust by
'outsiders'. Visits to schools by members of religious
communities can therefore be problematic, 'with
respectable places of worship saying, flatly, "we don't
cater for children like that".' (Neumark 2000). A video,
a sort of 'virtual visit' to schools by members of local
groups, was therefore planned. Making a video of local
people talking about their beliefs, with the talks related
to the religions and topics identified in the Agreed
Syllabus, was an effective way of overcoming distrust. It
was not just the video itself that was aimed at
overcoming difficulties, but the making of the video, and
the possibility of using the video to complement, rather
than replace, visits from members of religious
communities. Amongst the successful aspects of the
video was the participation of children and adults from
a very wide range of groups, including Buddhists,
Baptists, Hindus, Humanists, Jehovah's Witnesses,
Muslims, Quakers, Rastafarians. Roman Catholics, and
Sikhs. All were able to talk with great clarity about the
whole range of religious issues. This participation has
helped create a situation in which members of these
groups are very rarely withdrawn from RE in Croydon.

Responses were sought on issues such as what God is
like, what prayer means to you, who is your role model,
what helps you in time of trouble, what is your favourite
festival, what is precious to you, and what happens after
death. The participants also talked about various beliefs
and practices of their own tradition. Amongst the 50
participants in the video, aged from six to 80, were
children from local schools and adults - including the
Mayor (a Muslim) and Deputy Mayor (a Christian). The
relevance of the work, getting responses from such a
range of people, is clear, and the filming itself had an
effect on the participants - with pupils proud to wear
their school uniforms to show that it was a good school
(as the pupil quoted in the introduction to this article).

Here are two responses to the question 'What does God
mean to you?', and one response to the question 'What
happens after we die?':

When children laugh at seeing perhaps a dog
chasing its tail or a kitten playing with a ball of
wool, it really shows that God is a happy God, with
a sense of humour. (Joel Davis, a Jehovah's Witness.)

T don't think there is a god or gods outside this
world, what people call a supernatural power'.
(John White, a Humanist.)

'My view is that there is something there after we
die, which is beyond our present understanding,
and, I suppose, to put it rather crudely, we'll find
out when we get there'. (Cedric Briscoe, a Jew.)

The video, edited down to two hours, from seven hours
of tape, is already being used to increase pupils'
understanding of faith groups, to help student teachers
and experienced teachers learn about religious
viewpoints. RMEP will also be publishing the video and
accompanying teaching notes, during 2001, so it will be
made available nationally. Joy White has also been
working, more recently, on a REaSE project in an area of
similar social deprivation, but within much more
'secular' and monocultural local contexts - in which a
typical response of a member of staff in one school,
when she referred to a Jewish child, was 'She's fine, no
problems at all. You wouldn't know she was Jewish'
(White 2001).

Conclusions

The relationship between religious education in
school, religions, and local communities has been
central to many developments in RE. Careful use of
visits, celebrations, and 'virtual visitors', in the Croydon
project, were successful as the relationship between RE
and religions were explicit, active, and negotiated by all
parties. To be able to do such work in challenging
circumstances also suggests that RE can help overcome
school and pupil 'failure', rather than fall victim to the
low self-esteem that failure can generate. Although the
Croydon team worked in primary schools, the principles
may also apply to secondary schools, as all schools can
be described as 'communities' in the sense outlined by
John Macmurray. The work in Croydon suggests that,
whatever happens in terms of syllabus design, effective
use can be made of local communities, and we can
successfully place schools and local communities at the
heart of any attempt to improve RE and whole-school
effectiveness. John Macmurray stressed the need to
make community through our actions, not simply
through our abstract beliefs or statements of intent.
This was the message he saw in the parable of the Good
Samaritan, and it is the message I saw in the REaSE
project work described here. 'We are all more or less
unreal. Our business is to make ourselves a little more
real than we are'. (Macmurray, 1992, p. 143.)

Endnotes

Macmurray, J. (1968) Lectures/Papers on Education;

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Library, Special
Collections Gen 2162/2.

Macmurray, J. (1992) Freedom in the Modern World; New
Jersey: Humanities Press.

Macmurray, 1. (1995) Search for Reality in Religion;

London & Toronto: Quaker Home Service and the John
Macmurray Society.

Neumark, Victoria (2000), A feeling for all faiths: Links
with local communities help schools to fully know their
pupils, says Victoria Neumark   TES Curriculum Special
Spring 2000: 24th March 2000.

Stern, Julian (2000) RE and School Effectiveness,
Resource Vol 23:1, pp 8-14, Autumn 2000.

Stern, Julian (2001a), John Macmurray, Spirituality,
Community and Real Schools   International Journal of
Children's Spirituality Vol 6:1, April 2001.

Stern, L. J. (200 Ib) ‘Being DIRECT With Primary Religious
Education: Linking Primary RE to Local Communities,’
Resource 23:2, Spring 2001.

Stoll, Louise, & Myers, Kate (eds) (1998), No Quick Fixes:
Perspectives on Schools in Difficulty (London: Palmer).

White, Joy (2000), DIRECT: Dialogue, Inclusion,
Relevancy, Esteem, Changing Dynamics, Togetherness:
Croydon LEA REaSE Report for 1999-2000 Presented at
the REaSE Conference, May 2000.

White, Joy (2001), BRIDGES - A Way Forward: Draft
REaSE Report, BFSS National RE Centre, Brunel
University.

(This article was adapted from Stern 2001a and Stern
2001b, listed in the bibliography.)