Cohort 2026 Research Placement Project
About The Project
This placement will support the delivery of an exciting new Religious Education syllabus in primary and secondary schools across Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire. The successful candidate will use interviews, focus groups and site visits to explore the diverse religions and worldviews of our region. Using this research, they will develop culturally sensitive, locally specific teaching resources that centre real people and their communities.
Religious Education is a compulsory subject in all primary and secondary schools in England and Wales but has no national curriculum. Instead, each local authority develops a Locally Agreed Syllabus for use in the schools it maintains. This unique system of local governance gives each part of the country the freedom to tell its own stories in its own way.
A good syllabus invites schools to explore the religious and nonreligious diversity of their local communities in academically rigorous, culturally sensitive ways. As Ofsted has argued, “At its best, RE can help pupils to make sense of a complex world” (2024). In practice, RE teaching often falls short of these ambitions (Ofsted 2023). Pressures of time and finance prevent many local authorities from investing in high-quality resources or training. Schools also face geographical challenges: for example, schools in the city of Nottingham can easily arrange visits to a local mosque, while schools in north Nottinghamshire might have much further to travel. The quality and content of RE varies enormously between regions, and teachers without the right resources can struggle to accurately and sensitively represent the diverse worldviews they are expected to cover (RE Council 2023). For a pupil, seeing their own community or religion misrepresented in the classroom can be damaging to their sense of belonging and their engagement with education (Insight UK 2021).
The local authorities of Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire collaborate on a shared syllabus titled “Religious Education for All” (2021). This is being currently revised with the help of an expert advisory panel (including both the community partner for this project, Sally McDonald, and one of the academic co-supervisors, Dr Tim Hutchings). The new syllabus will be ready in Spring 2026, just before the start of the Collaboratory Placement Scheme. Exciting new units are being designed, including new material for the teaching of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Humanism. This project placement
will help support the launch of the new syllabus, promoting inclusive education that truly represents the communities of our region.
Project Aims
The project’s aims are:
To work with teachers to develop understanding of how the “religion and worldviews” approach can be implemented as part of the new syllabus to research the real stories of some of the religious and nonreligious communities in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire
To develop new teaching resources for primary and secondary classrooms based on these stories, to be used as part of the new syllabus.
To compare the new Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Locally Agreed Syllabus with the syllabi offered in other regions of the Midlands
Project Team
- Research Candidate: Alice Thomas
- Lead Supervisor: Dr Tim Hutchings (University of Nottingham)
- Co-Supervisor: Dr Michael Keenan (Nottingham Trent University)
- Community Supervisor: Sally MacDonald (Nottinghamshire Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education – SACRE)