The SACRE - Standing Advisory Council for RE

SACREs (Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education) are responsible in law for advising local authorities (LAs) on religious education and collective worship. They are statutory bodies and every local authority must have one. There are over one hundred SACREs in England and Wales. Each SACRE is composed of four representative groups (three in Wales): Christian and other religious denominations, the Church of England (except in Wales), teachers' associations and elected councillors.

Members of your school staff may be representatives on the SACRE under any of the four categories.

In practice the kind of advice and support offered by SACREs varies, often depending on the quality of advice given by the LA officer whose job is to keep SACRE informed of local and national developments. Effective SACREs carry out a range of responsibilities from providing support to implement an Agreed Syllabus for religious education to monitoring local schools' OfSTED (the Office for Standards in Education) inspection reports on RE.

Each SACRE is required to publish an Annual Report that is sent to QCA (Qualifications and Assessment Authority). Each year QCA publishes a report that provides an overall analysis of the work of SACREs during the previous year.

Primarily, the SACRE has an advisory role, but it also has two particular responsibilities:

  1. It can require the LA to review its Agreed Syllabus for RE. The LA must constitute an Agreed Syllabus Conference to undertake this task. This group should reflect the same four groupings of a SACRE, but without provision for co-opted members, and in practice it often involves the same people.
  2. SACREs can consider requests from schools to lift the legal requirement to hold an act of collective worship of a broadly Christian character. Such requests come from schools with a large number of pupils from religious backgrounds other than Christian. If the SACRE agrees to the request, then the school is granted a 'determination' for five years, after which time the school can reapply if it so wishes.

SACREs have a very important role to play in supporting RE, and in contributing to the raising of standards in the subject.

The main meetings of SACRE are public and open to all. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, all SACRE documents are required to be available for public scrutiny.

Any faith community wishing to take part in SACRE’s work must make a written application to the LA officer responsible for education.

In this application the group must establish:

(i) their ability to define themselves as a faith community

(ii) why they have a legitimate interest in the work of SACRE; and

(iii) how their interests are not currently being adequately represented.

Working in partnership with churches