Did Jesus have a big nose?

I'm recently appointed as a URC rep on Oxfordshire's SACRE (Standing Advisory Committee on Religious Education). My first meeting was a waste of time : neither the chair nor County RE Advisor were there, and the meeting ended an hour early having achieved little. Plus I got a parking ticket! At last week's meeting we learned that there are moves afoot to scale back the County RE Advisor's post.

State-funded Denominational church schools generally have their diocesan education advisers to turn to. (The URC has never run state schools, believing - until recently - that the powers of state and church should be separate, and therefore state schools should not be affiliated to religious institutions). For the unaffiliated schools, the County RE Advisor is it - all they have.

: RE is the only subject the County has a statutory obligation to provide for.

: 53% of RE teaching in England's schools is delivered by teachers with no specialist knowledge of the subject.

: RE teaching is no longer subject to OFSTED inspection. There is no mechanism for finding out what is going on in the classrooms.

: SACRE has no actual power other than offering general advice.

And they're proposing to cut back what little oversight there is?

A couple of years ago I sat in on a number of RE lessons in different schools around Oxford. In one lesson a child wanted to know why Martin Luther King "hated white people" - and the teacher didn't know how to answer. In another Year 9 class we were treated to a 10-minute rambling monologue on what Jesus looked like. Because he was Jewish, he probably had a big nose, apparently. I wanted to crawl under the desk in embarrassment and alarm, and many of the children seemed equally as amazed at what they were hearing. An RE textbook published by Heinemann was circulated approvingly round the SACRE meeting. In it, I learned that the URC has women 'priests'. Given that the constitution of most Reformed Churches (the biggest family of Christian churches in the world, with more adherents than Roman Catholicism) is based on the idea that priesthood should not be vested in individuals for life, but in the collective - i.e. we don't even accept male priests - this is an absolutely basic error.

But RE is only a Cinderella subject in the eyes of the education system. The demand for Philosophy of Religion with Ethics at AS level is rocketing. It's important because it teaches, not what to think, but how to think. As an example of what we're dealing with : in an AS group, after a careful exploration of Descartes' philosophy, one student dismissed it by saying "At the end of the day, it was only his opinion." The idea that you arrive at opinions only after weighing all other opinions and arguing your case is counter-cultural. Am I the only one who thinks it important?

Letters expressing concern in our denominational magazine and suggesting ways in which we might engage as a church just a little with these issues has produced no response at all.