Christianity’s place was never the problem in JR87: the test is how it is taught…

The Department says its revised Religious Education syllabus is objective, critical and pluralistic, and the draft is a substantial improvement on the 2007 arrangement. But the Supreme Court’s objection in JR87 was to how Christianity was taught, not to how much of it there was, so adding breadth does not by itself answer a confessional mode of delivery. Two difficulties remain unaddressed: a statutory question about teaching denominational difference in controlled schools, and a withdrawal circular whose wording still assumes that confessional content may be present. The draft deserves engagement, but on this record, it is defensible in design and unproven in delivery.

The Department of Education published its draft Religious Education Core Syllabus for public consultation on 1 July, with responses invited until 30 September. Professor Noel Purdy of Stranmillis University College, who led the drafting group with Joyce Logue, former principal of Long Tower Primary School, has said the draft is “objective, critical and pluralistic” and that retaining Christianity as its core element is “in line with” the Supreme Court’s ruling in Re JR87. Both claims are defensible, and neither settles how the syllabus will be taught in classrooms.

Breadth was necessary, not sufficient

The draft does something the 2007 syllabus conspicuously failed to do. It introduces Judaism or Islam, together with an awareness of non-religious worldviews, from the Foundation Stage rather than deferring religious plurality to Key Stage 3. That addresses one of the clearest defects the Court identified. But breadth alone does not answer its complaint, which was also qualitative: religious propositions were presented as truths to be accepted rather than claims to be studied.

The Court accepted that Christianity is the most important religion in Northern Ireland and did not require the revised syllabus to pretend otherwise. What it held unlawful was the teaching’s confessional character. In Lord Stephens’s account, the working party behind the 2007 syllabus had treated its task as the development of Christian faith in young people rather than the imparting of knowledge about Christianity, and the examples the Court gave were pedagogical rather than proportional: a Foundation Stage instruction that prayer is a way of talking to God, and a later instruction on the respect owed to creation as the gift of God. Teaching pupils to accept those beliefs as true is confessional formation rather than education, and that is what the Convention standard, drawn from Folgerø v Norway, forbids the state from compelling.

Teaching about Christianity, not teaching Christianity

That distinction is why the draft’s account of its Christian content deserves closer attention than the headlines have given it. Pupils will continue to study the Bible, the life of Jesus and, according to the Department, the main Christian denominations in Northern Ireland. Educationally, objective teaching about denominational differences is an improvement, and the Supreme Court itself observed that the prohibition in controlled schools on teaching the tenets distinctive to any denomination had left pupils untaught about the diversity of Christian traditions. There remains a separate statutory question about how a requirement to teach that difference sits with Article 21(2) of the Education and Libraries (Northern Ireland) Order 1986, which provides that religious education in controlled schools shall be undenominational and shall exclude education as to any tenet distinctive of a particular denomination. Even if that tension is resolved, compliance cannot be read off a list of topics. It also turns on how those topics are taught: as knowledge of what traditions believe and why, which is the objective material the judgment requires, or as formation within a tradition, which reproduces the defect the Court condemned. A drafting group’s assurance of objectivity does not, on its own, establish which of the two it will be.

A contradiction in the Department’s own guidance

The second difficulty arises from the Department’s own paperwork. Circular 2026/09, issued on 3 February, sets out how parents may withdraw a child from RE and collective worship. Its provisions on partial withdrawal invite parents to specify particular topics, and the examples the Department chose are telling: miracles, prayer and, in terms, “confessional elements”, alongside activities such as saying prayers, singing hymns and taking part in liturgical acts. The circular may be defensible as interim guidance for the arrangements it was written to regulate, since it preceded the draft syllabus by five months. But unless it is revised before the new syllabus takes effect, the Department will maintain withdrawal guidance that assumes confessional elements may remain within RE while presenting the revised subject as objective, critical and pluralistic. A syllabus delivered in the manner the judgment demands would contain no confessional elements from which a parent could withdraw a child, because it would teach about prayer rather than lead pupils in it.

Design is not delivery

The draft is nevertheless a marked improvement. It expressly requires school-level flexibility to remain balanced, objective, critical and pluralistic, and it could support lawful RE in which Christian and other materials are treated as objects of study rather than beliefs to be absorbed. The problem is that schools will still determine sequence, depth, examples and pedagogy, while detailed guidance and a functioning inspection regime, which the Minister has said he intends to legislate for within this Assembly mandate, remain to come. Certifying the syllabus as objective is not the same as securing objective teaching.

The questions the consultation should ask

The most useful question, then, is not whether Christianity should remain central, because the Supreme Court did not require its removal and pressing that argument concedes ground the ruling never took. The useful questions are how the syllabus ensures that Christianity, and everything else, is taught about rather than simply taught, and why a Department presenting its revised RE as objective, critical and pluralistic is maintaining guidance that permits withdrawal from “confessional elements” within RE. For now, the draft makes lawful RE possible without ensuring it. The decisive choices about how the subject is taught, which is where JR87 located the breach, rest with individual schools, and the syllabus does not yet constrain them sufficiently.

Sources: Department of Education (2026) draft Religious Education Core Syllabus, published for public consultation on 1 July 2026; In the matter of an application by JR87 and another for Judicial Review (Northern Ireland), UK Supreme Court, 19 November 2025 ([2025] UKSC 40; UKSC 2024/0095); Education and Libraries (Northern Ireland) Order 1986, Article 21; Education (Northern Ireland) Order 2006, Article 11; Department of Education Circular 2026/09, Arrangements for Withdrawal from Religious Education and Collective Worship, 3 February 2026; Terms of Reference, Review of the RE Core Syllabus (Department of Education, February 2026); Department of Education (2026) ‘Givan responds to Judgment on Religious Education and Collective Worship in schools’, 3 February 2026; Meredith, R. (2026) ‘Religious Education: Christianity still “core element” in new syllabus’, BBC News NI, 1 July 2026; Folgerø and Others v Norway [2007] ECHR 546.