By Catherine Pepinster
The study of religion is in danger of being erased in Wales, with the nation’s last remaining full theology department facing closure and increasing numbers of schools cutting religious education.
Cardiff University’s announcement that it is considering cutting its theology department, has caused alarm across the churches, and in an open letter to Welsh vice-chancellors and Welsh Assembly political leaders, Churches Together in Wales (Cytûn) expressed “deep concern” at the possible closure, repeating a warning from the renowned theology professor, D. Densil Morgan, that it would be a “disaster” if closure goes ahead.
Meanwhile the directors of the National Centre for Religious Education have said religious education in Welsh schools is becoming marginalised following recent curriculum changes, with disillusioned RE teachers quitting, including some abandoning the profession altogether and others crossing the Severn Bridge to work in England.
Gethin Rhys, Cytûn’s policy officer, said: “There will be no serious study of theology in Wales if Cardiff University goes ahead with its plans. Theology will have come to an end here. This is a watershed moment”.
Cytûn is urging a rethink on Cardiff’s plans, with its open letter saying: “We firmly believe that a good understanding of religion is extremely important in terms of fostering mutual understanding from the local level to the global level, and academic studies in all areas of theology and religious studies are essential to create such an understanding.”
Cardiff University has confirmed that it needs to cut 400 full-time posts because of a funding shortfall and says the university will become untenable without savings. Other subjects are being cut, including nursing, music and languages.
Of Wales’s eight universities, only two others offer any study of religion, with Bangor and Trinity St David offering philosophy, ethics and religion. Trinity also offers the Bible and theology online. Theology is no longer taught at Lampeter, which offered the subject for 200 years in Wales.
According to Cytûn, the planned cuts are particularly worrying for Welsh culture, given that losing education in all these subjects “would weaken our identity and imperil the ability of future generations to use the language in these fields of learning, as well as losing the necessary pipeline of qualified students who could teach humanities and languages in Welsh medium schools.”
Cardiff University has said that any remaining elements of religion after the cuts would be merged into the School of Global Humanities.
This would reflect what has happened in Welsh schools with religious education replaced in 2022 in the curriculum with a new subject called religion, values and ethics (RVE) which in turn forms part of a general humanities course.
According to the National Centre of Religious Education for Wales, based at Bangor University, this has led to a dilution of the study of RE which makes up on average only a third of the RVE course, with some schools offering only an hour of RE during the course.
Teachers have contacted the centre, reporting that combining RE within RVE and in turn with humanities, which includes geography and history, has led to RE teachers having to teach geography and history and more often, history and geography specialists with no knowledge of religion having to teach RE.
A survey by the national centre revealed that a significant proportion of the respondents said that their institutions did not offer education about religion, values and ethics to pupils to the end of Key Stage 4 (14 to 16 -year-olds) but only up to Key Stage 3 (which goes against the Welsh government’s edict that the subject is mandatory). A lack of resources for teaching RVE was also mentioned by teachers, especially for teaching in Welsh, because there is only one English-medium textbook available, and no plan to publish a Welsh translation of it.
According to Dr Joshua Andrews, one of the national centre’s co-directors, the freedom that schools have been given by the Welsh government to decide on their teaching of RVE according to the needs of their pupils has led to very different provision in schools.
“It has led sometimes to almost the discarding of religion”, he said, citing the Centre’s research which revealed that 58 per cent of teachers surveyed said their school was not providing it.
“Schools have effectively marginalised RVE. It was supposed to be about having ethically informed citizens and it did have the potential for that, yet it is often missing.”
RVE has been gradually introduced, age group by age group in Wales, while religious studies GCSE and A-level are still being taught. But there has already been a decline in the number of Welsh pupils taking A-level religious studies. Figures from the RE Policy Unit reveal that the overall trend in A-level entries for religious studies over the past five years has been steeply downward in Wales. Since 2020, entries in Wales have fallen by 37 per cent from 1,126 to 702 but entries in England had a fall of just under 0.45 per cent from 14,564 to 14,499.
With teachers reporting a lack of resources for teaching RVE, the Bible Society in Wales has stepped in to produce two bespoke sets of materials to help primary schools, including one focused on how the Bible was translated into Welsh and its impact on Welsh culture.
However, one sign of green shoots for Christianity in Wales is the success of the Church in Wales’s project, Faith Alive, which has seen 160 children in three coastal parishes in the Diocese of Bangor engage in youth ministry — up from two children a year earlier.
A further boost for Wales has been a big donation for repairs to churches in the Church in Wales diocese of St David’s, based in Pembrokeshire. An anonymous benefactor has offered £250,000 towards repairs. With the National Churches Trust, which is administering the scheme, and Dorrien Davies, the Bishop of St David’s, the donor has selected five churches to receive £50,000 each, which they have to match with their own funds. Most of the funds will be used to help with one of the biggest problems for ecclesiastical buildings: leaking roofs and water ingress.
Gareth Simpson, the National Churches Trust’s support officer for Wales, described the £250,000 gift as “a significant moment”. “It is unusual to see a philanthropist picking a far corner of a small country,” he said.
The gift is a lifeline at a time when the Diocese of St David’s is facing difficult questions about the future. At a session last July for clergy about its latest strategy, Pruning for Growth, the Archdeacon of St David’s, Paul Mackness, said: “Costs are going up and the only way we can reduce the costs of ministry in the diocese is by the reduction of stipendiary clergy. Diocesan finance has been subsidising ministry share. We are in the rainy-day period and the water is up to our necks.”
