Religious education is often badly taught and out of date – but could lessons be reinvigorated with the help of one of Britain’s leading philosophers?

For a long time, religious education has been about as unloved and neglected as a crumbling old church. Several people and organisations (some, admittedly, with a vested interest in its continuation) have warned in recent years that it has never been more needed, and this week it emerged that the Welsh government is considering an overhaul of the subject.

Huw Lewis, the Welsh government’s minister for education and skills told the Cardiff parliament that RE should be renamed, “[transforming] it into the religion, philosophy and ethics element of the curriculum – where there is an explicit commitment to allowing children to ponder ideas around ethics and citizenship”. He added: “We really need to allow young people the space and the time, within the school curriculum, to consider fundamental issues of faith and of citizenship and of the meaning of freedom.”

RE, long seen by many pupils as being at the dossy end of school subjects, has suffered over the years. A 2013 report by Ofsted found that more than half of schools were failing to teach the subject adequately. A survey of 700 RE teachers by the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (Natre) found a quarter had done no RE during their teacher training, and nearly half had done less than three hours. Another study by Natre found a 15% drop in the number of pupils taking RE at GCSE in England between 2012 and 2014.

“It’s the only part of the school curriculum that hasn’t changed for 70 years, which is incredible,” says Linda Woodhead, professor of sociology in religion at Lancaster University, who wrote a recent report about religion’s place in schools, with the former education secretary Charles Clarke. She concluded that RE was important, but that an update was long overdue – schools, society and people’s relationship to religion has changed drastically since the 1944 Education Act which established, for instance, that every school should take part in a daily act of collective worship (an unenforced law that many schools ignore).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest AC Grayling: ‘It’s heading in the right direction.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian

The Welsh government isn’t about to scrap RE lessons, though Lewis hasn’t expanded on the details of his wish to see them reformed. There is no place for indoctrination, or uncritical instruction, says Woodhead, and atheism should be part of RE. She likes the idea of calling it “religion and ethics, so that the positions of everyone can be explored, because non-religious people have values and ethics”.

Dr John Taylor, project director of Philosophy in Education, argues that there is a place for some form of RE: “It’s vital in the modern age, when religious differences are shaping life in many parts of the world, that students are aware of that.”

Taylor is working with the philosopher AC Grayling on campaigning for the proper teaching of philosophy in schools. “It seems to me to be a very good move on the part of the Welsh government and it’s heading in the right direction,” says Professor Grayling. As it stands, Grayling believes that RE takes one small strand out of the history of ideas “and overemphasises it and privileges it against all the other strands”.

“The ideal thing would be to teach history of ideas rather than religious studies at all – you learn about mythologies and religions, but you also learn about philosophies and the rise of science, the development of ideas, civil liberties and democracy, the whole pageant of human progress towards a better and more just society,” says Grayling. “That’s what I’d really like to see happening in schools.”