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There is growing recognition of the need for pupils to have the opportunity to engage with both religious and non-religious worldviews in religious education (RE). This recognition is bound up with issues of social justice and equality, underpinned by a desire to ensure that all young people should have the opportunity 'to understand the worldviews of others and reflect on their own' (Commission on Religious Education 2018: 26). In thinking about how best to provide non-religious pupils with opportunities to reflect on their own worldviews, beliefs, and moral commitments, we should take into account their current experiences in RE. This article therefore offers original insight into the experiences and perspectives of non-religious primary school children in relation to RE. We draw on data from a qualitative study exploring what it means to be 'non-religious' for primary school children in three different areas of England. Through presenting how these children reflect on RE, we see that they care about social justice but also that their own experiences of RE can be seen as perpetuating a 'hermeneutic injustice' (Fricker, 2007) as they are not being given interpretive resources to make sense of their own experiences and worldviews. We argue that giving children the opportunity to explore the kind of 'emerging worldview' (Beaman, 2017) that they themselves express might be one way to overcome this inequality and provide them with a language to reflect on their beliefs and values and enter into meaningful conversation with others.

It is widely accepted that the growth of "non-religious" identification and "non-belief" in God(s) in many societies is linked to changing religious socialization. However, existing research mapping these intergenerational changes has largely focused on religious decline or the loss of belief—"push" factors—rather than exploring the distinctive non-religious forms of life into which children are growing up, which may operate as "pull" factors. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted with children, their parents, and teachers in England, we demonstrate how children come to inhabit a "humanist condition" through socialization processes in which "pull" factors toward humanism play a significant role and even shape the nature of "push" factors. The significance of new worldviews also helps explain how participants combine humanism with diverse religious and non-religious beliefs and practices. We argue that socialization processes at home and at school are interwoven and can be hard to distinguish in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a major evaluation project, this article presents an emerging theme from research on the activities supported by "Prayer Spaces in Schools," an organisation supporting 'pop-up' prayer spaces in schools across the UK and internationally. Evaluating the activities primarily in terms of their possible contribution to spiritual development, a number of important issues arose relating to policy on education and religion. This article focuses on how some engage with these prayer spaces as a way of reimagining and renegotiating educational policy. Based on data gathered from interviews with staff and students (aged 7-16) across seven schools in England, questionnaire responses from 555 students across 15 schools and feedback from two prayer spaces conferences, a hermeneutic approach is used to compare the interpretations of staff with those of students and the implicit positions of policy documents. This article explores various forms of policy implementation and how staff engagement with prayer spaces can be seen as a form of subversion, with staff tactically subverting policy implementation sometimes in order to promote the very intention of those policies -- a form of what we refer to as subversive obedience.