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Failures of meaning in religious education

One of a series of four articles and a monograph published as part of an AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme funded large project (£360,000) at the University of Glasgow. This paper represents the most significant conclusions of the largest qualitative study ever to have taken place into Religious Education in the UK, with over 240 days of ethnographic observation undertaken in schools across the country. The reach of this research can be demonstrated by the engagement of senior policymakers and stakeholders from Ofsted, RE Council, NASACRE and other key organisations, who attended events reporting draft findings of our work. The confusion of purpose reported in this paper is echoed as a key finding in the subsequent Ofsted subject report (2013) "Religious education: realising the potential" and its findings fed into the recent RECouncil review. The author made a significant contribution to this work, writing up and coding the empirical data, providing philosophical and theoretical perspectives, and writing the content of the paper. The author continues to publish original conclusions from this empirical work at Liverpool Hope University.