Abstract
Readers will no doubt be aware that the religious landscape of Britain, like many other European societies, is undergoing profound changes. The growth of non-religious identification by 12 per cent since 2011 to a percentage of 37.2 per cent of the population, as shown by the 2021Census for England and Wales (Office for National Statistics 2022), is accompanied by both declining institutional religion and a growth in minority religious identifications due to high rates of migration into Britain and accompanying higher birth rates of migrant groups(Woodhead 2017). As ‘no religion’ comes to replace Christianity as the majority identity, especially among younger generations (Woodhead 2017, Strhan et al.2024), alongside the ongoing importance of understanding the growing diversity of faith traditions in contemporary society, there has been significant discussion among the RE community about how to respond to this changing religious/non-religious landscape. This is seen, for instance, in the Commission on RE’s (CoRE’s) proposals to reshape RE through a religion and worldviews approach that includes teaching about both religious and non-religious outlooks (CoRE 2018).
Although the question of whether and how RE might or should respond to these changes is something that the RE community is already engaged with, there has been relatively little empirical research exploring how these changing religious landscapes, and the shift towards a non-religious majority, and growing religiosity via migrant settlement, map onto or play out in (especially primary)school environments, or what this means for children’s belonging or exclusion in schools and wider society.