The Board met at the REC Offices from 12 noon until 5.45pm.
Formalities were first conducted, including:
- Noting of apologies for absence from Aliya Azam and Kathryn Wright.
- Passing a vote of thanks to Jon Reynolds for his invaluable contribution as Project Manager to the Commission on Religious Education. The Chair was also instructed to write to Amira Tharani expressing the Board’s great appreciation of her contribution as the Report drafter.
- Welcoming members of the new Board to their first meeting.
- The correction and then approval of the minutes of the 23rd May 2018 meeting and discussion of a few matters arising.
- Declaration of potential conflicts of interests.
Then I gave a brief oral report of my activities as Chair. This focused on the work associated with the Commission on RE and with the planned work on the sustainability of the REC, which I made clear was my focus for this three-year term. I commented briefly on the highly successful 20:20 conference the previous weekend and underlined the continuing challenge of workload in the REC office.
The CEO took the Board through his extensive report. The amount of information was due to the five month gap since the last meeting and the activity on projects such as the Commission, the Youth Debate and the political party conferences. During the course of the report the voted unanimously to adopt two documents:
- The REC Privacy Policy
- The REC Workplan for 2018-2019.
In addition the following elections were made to REC committees:
- Kathryn Wright to chair the Education Committee
- Andrew Copson to join the Finance and Fundraising Committee and the RE Policy Unit
- Sarah Lane Cawte to chair the Governance Committee
- Two Board members are considering whether they are able to join the Governance Committee. Deborah Weston will be a corresponding member of this committee.
It was also agreed to adopt a three-year term of service for patrons as from 1st September 2018.
The Treasurer presented the financial report for 2018-2018, which is currently with the auditors. He then presented the budget for 018-2019, which was unanimously approved. Finally it was agreed to freeze the subscription fees for 2018-2019.
The main item for discussion from the Company Secretary was membership criteria and applications. It was resolved to ask the Governance Committee to review these.
The main discussion item was the Commission Final report. The Board agreed a public statement on the report (below) and to authorize work towards securing the full implementation of the report. It was resolved to make this the main item at the SRGM. Joyce Miller was to be invited to speak to explain the Report to members.
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Board statement on the Commission on Religious Education’s Final Report.
The Religious Education Council –
- Fully and wholeheartedly endorses the vision of the report
- Affirms the usefulness of all 11 recommendations, phased as suggested in the timeline
- Intends to engage urgently with the DfE, all our member organisations, and other RE stakeholders in implementation.
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Professor Trevor Cooling
Chair of the REC
01.11.2018