Religious education postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

For the past two years I have run a table at a Saturday homework club in the library where I work, and it is there that I noticed how often religion surfaces in questions children have no obvious place to ask. A Year 8 pupil wanted to know why her cousin fasted and she did not; another asked whether Buddhists believe in God, then argued with himself about what believing would even mean. These conversations reminded me how much I enjoyed studying religion, and convinced me that I want to teach it properly rather than answer it in passing at a library table.

My degree in Theology and Religious Studies gave me the subject grounding I will need. My final-year project looked at how modern pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago describe what they are doing, drawing on published accounts and travel writing. What interested me was how many walkers used religious language while denying religious belief, and how uneasy the categories of sacred and secular became under pressure. That project taught me to take people's own words about their practice seriously, which seems to me the heart of good religious education: pupils should meet Islam, Sikhism or Judaism as lived traditions with internal debate, not as tidy lists of beliefs to be revised and forgotten.

Graduating in 2015, I went into local authority customer services because I needed work and stayed because I found it more interesting than I expected. Explaining council tax reduction or a housing decision to someone who is worried and short of time is a skill in itself: you have to find out what they already understand, choose your words carefully, and avoid the jargon that makes people nod without following. I also learned to keep my footing in difficult conversations without becoming defensive, which I think will matter in an RE classroom where topics such as marriage, death or the existence of God can touch pupils personally. Moving to the library gave me more contact with young people, including running two story sessions a week for primary-age children and helping teenagers navigate reading lists and revision guides.

To prepare for returning to study I have been reading and observing. I spent four mornings in an RE department at a local secondary school, watching a Year 9 lesson on Christian responses to suffering and a Year 11 revision session. I was struck by how much the teacher planned for disagreement: she gave pupils sentence starters to challenge one another's views, which kept the discussion sharper than the free-for-all I had imagined. I have also been reading Jonathan Sacks's The Dignity of Difference and returning to the Qur'an in Abdel Haleem's translation, partly to strengthen areas my degree covered less thoroughly, and I follow the debates about whether RE should be framed as religion and worldviews, which seems to me an honest response to classrooms where several pupils hold no religious commitment at all.

Being a mature applicant has its practical advantages. I am used to shift patterns, deadlines that belong to other people, and being the person who has to keep calm when a system fails. I know that training to teach will be harder than my degree and that subject knowledge alone will not carry a lesson. What I bring is a genuine interest in the material, experience of explaining complicated things to people who did not choose to be interested, and patience built up over several years of ordinary work. I would like to spend the rest of my career helping pupils think carefully about questions that will not go away.

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