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Church welcomes tenth annual increase in GCSE Religious Education entrants with special prayers for those considering options

21 August 2008

 

Religious Education has grown in popularity among GCSE students again this year. A further increase in entrants means more than 179,000 GCSE students are opening envelopes to reveal their grades in the subject today. Among subjects with more than 100,000 entrants, RE has remained at the top of the charts for increasing entrants (when changes to the science curriculum are taken into account), with a 4.7 per cent increase since last year, following a 7.2 per cent increase between 2006 and 2007.

The number of entrants for the GCSE RE full course has now risen each year for the past decade.

Today's results also show that more students took the GCSE short course in Religious Education this year than last, with an extra 1,265 students taking the total to 293,756. 56 per cent of students taking short courses chose to take Religious Education as one of their subjects.

The full course, usually studied over two years, was taken by an extra 8,016 students this year. 72.5 per cent of students achieved a grade between A* and C (compared to 71.5 per cent last year).

Nick McKemey, the Church of England’s Head of School Improvement, puts the continued rise down to students’ appreciation of the importance of the role of religion in modern society: "This further increase is evidence that more and more young people are fascinated by what they and others believe, and that they can see that the world is more fully understood by seeing past the various secularist claims that religion is mad, bad or extinct.

"Overall this year’s GCSE results strongly suggest that schools – particularly church schools – that work hard to raise the attainment of pupils of all abilities and backgrounds are achieving the greatest success at GCSE."

The Church of England has posted prayers on its website for all those receiving exam results this summer and considering their future options, such as whether to continue through to further education or to seek employment, or a mixture of the two through an apprenticeship scheme. The prayers can be accessed at www.cofe.anglican.org/prayers.