Minor Sub-Theme: Belief Specific Teaching

Belief specific teaching (BST) is a key part of the GMGY junior programme. It aims to explicitly nurture the beliefs and practices appropriate to the various belief groups. For four weeks each year children are differentiated into various belief groups, namely, Muslims, Christian, Roman Catholic and Humanist/Buddhist/Hindu (HBH). The teachers employed in the school teach the belief specific modules. It became clear during the coding and analysis process that belief specific teaching is the most challenging aspect of GMGY for teachers and principals.

Some of the respondents seemed unsure about what their stance on BST was, seeing many advantages as well as disadvantages to the approach. This confusion was evident when P2 stated, ‘a commentary would be that the kids are being segregated for religious instruction where in actual fact it’s not really what’s happening but then it was to a certain degree’. P3 also stated:

I had been quite convinced of belief-specific teaching…but I’m falling out of love with it. I had been of the opinion that it does really strengthen children’s beliefs, that it strengthens their identity within their own group and now I’m coming out of that opinion.

One principal (P1) was very much in favour of BST and did not wish to see it removed from the programme. This respondent argued that parents were ‘incredibly touched’ by the efforts made by the school to recognise and seek to nurture the religious identity of their child. P1

went on to argue that BST is an important part of the growth of the CNS model and provides a distinctive difference between Community National schools and Educate Together schools. While many of the interviewees were not in favour of BST in the GMGY programme, some of them could nonetheless recognise a value in the aim of the lessons to contribute to children’s religious identity development at a young age: ‘in the junior end maybe it is good to make sure that they know who they are themselves before exploring other faiths’ (T1). This was echoed by P4:

I think we need to ground children in their own identities first. I could live with BST up to second class in terms of you’re really getting them deep down into their vocabulary so that they are prepared for the more robust stuff from third to sixth class.

However, P4 went on to state, ‘we have really broadly grouped these groups and the HBH group is something that I will never be comfortable with’. The following four sub-sections outline why eleven out of the twelve interviewees named BST as one of the most significant challenges for their schools.

4.3.1 Inequality of Provision

All of the interviewees recognised that the HBH category created a deep discomfort and was unfair to the children in that group. The principal in favour of BST argued that at least it was some attempt at accommodation rather than nothing at all for these belief groups:

P1: Obviously, it’s impossible to guarantee total and utter equality to every single group, to every single faith, to every single specific belief within each of those faiths – that’s just not possible…It’s the best that we can do at this point.

However, others felt genuine discomfort about the inequality in the teaching and learning experience being shown to some belief groups. P7 said, ‘Hindus, Buddhists and Humanists all lumped in together, I just couldn’t understand how that could be right. It seems very disrespectful’. T1 also said, ‘for a programme that claims to be so into equality and inclusivity, I don’t think it really delivers that in belief specific teaching’.

Two interviewees also wondered if there was a favouring of Roman Catholic children over other belief groups. T3 stated, ‘certain groupings are getting more access to their religious education than other groupings are so straight away there is an issue.’ P5 also said:

How could it be true to the integrity of the programme… why are we splitting them? What needs and what requirements are we addressing and is it just because the Catholic Church said to meet the requirements of sacramental preparation this must take place?

T3 went on to describe how the ‘Catholic grouping’ get a lot out of the BST lessons because the teacher was not acting as a facilitator but was actually ‘faith-forming’. As stated earlier in Chapter Two, the GMGY programme acknowledges that teachers are not specialists in the various belief groups in schools and are not equipped to form children in their individual beliefs. Instead, the programme encourages teachers to be facilitators in the BST lessons; allowing children to take the lead and affirm them in their identities. However, many of the teachers disputed this, saying that in the Catholic grouping particularly, the children did not have a knowledge-base about their faith; they did not know the prayers or many of the parables. Therefore, the teacher had to teach them about their religion and felt they were engaging in faith-formation.

T2: There was an assumption… that children have a grounding in the Catholic faith and were very familiar with these stories and it made references to the wedding at Cana, to miracles, to parables and the children hadn’t actually come across that language.

T5 also raised the point that not all teachers are comfortable with teaching faith in schools and felt they should not be asked to do so in Community National schools.

4.3.2 Teacher Vulnerability

The expectations placed on teachers also arose as a challenge within belief specific teaching. Teachers were described as ‘vulnerable’, ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘fearful’ by many of the interviewees. P7 described, ‘the terror inside every teacher in terms of misplacing a child in the wrong faith group was huge and very unfair on the teachers’. T1 described the feelings of some of the teachers in her school, saying; ‘I’m not a Muslim’ or ‘I’m not a Christian so

I can’t teach that as a truth, I don’t feel I can, I feel like I’m in a compromised position’. T5 also suggested that BST was disrespectful to different belief groups:

You are teaching religion or trying to on some level teach sections of people’s faith to them and you are doing it poorly which is a disservice and it’s disrespectful when you have…the teachers not knowing what they are doing. I include myself in that.

4.3.3 Diversity within Diversity

The diversity within religions was also reported as a challenge. The way in which a religion is represented in the classroom could provoke a reaction from children or parents from that tradition. T2 described how she used to invite parents into her class to speak about their belief tradition. However, ‘what might be true for them might not necessarily be true for all of that religion…you will get told very fast by the children if you make a statement’. T3 also described this as a challenge:

Within the denominations there have been disparities…in the Islamic group we have had different opinions on what is right and what is wrong. We’ve had cases where we have invited community representatives from that belief into the classroom to talk to the children and then we’ve had other parents in saying ‘Actually, that person doesn’t believe the same thing as I believe so, no, we don’t want them in again please’.

4.3.4 The Logistics of Belief Specific Teaching

Finally, the logistics of separating children into different religious groupings and moving them around the school at the same time was expressed as a challenge by nine of the interviewees. P2 described it as ‘a massive, massive challenge’ and T5 said it was ‘a logistical nightmare and a political nightmare’. P6 spoke about an occasion where they had forty children in one classroom because they didn’t have enough staff to teach the different groups, yet in another room there were only three children because they were from a different belief system. P3 described the separation of children according to belief as potentially ‘othering’ of some groups:

If you have a very small Muslim group or a very small HBH group, that can be quite othering for a small number of children where 50% of the school are broken into Catholic groups and all of a sudden there are three or four children sitting in a Muslim group in the smallest room in the school crouched around a laptop.