This paper aims to investigate how religious diversity has been integrated at school within religious education in England and Italy. To do so, the paper deals with three aspects, underlining the reciprocal connections between them and the wider social and political context, namely: religious education programmes, teaching aids and teaching practices. As far as the English context is concerned, we will focus more on paradigm shifts in syllabuses and the impact of such changes on textbooks from the 1970s – when multireligious teaching became structural (Copley, 2008; Jackson, 2019; Cole, 1972; Grimmitt, 1973; Parker & Freathy, 2012) - to today. Regarding Italy, we will focus on the implications of school autonomy since the 2000s (and the consequent redefinition of national curricula, which disappear to become locally defined, except for the teaching of the Catholic religion) for the IRC – Insegnamento della religione Cattolica/Teaching of the Catholic religion – discipline. This difference in focus depends on a diametrically opposite situation in the two countries regarding the status of religious education. In England there is not a national RE programme (so it becomes necessary to analyse the differences between syllabuses and their evolution over time, as well as their impact on teaching materials), whereas in Italy, since 2000, national programmes have been abolished, giving way to non-binding ministerial indications, except for IRC, the only discipline for which there is a national programme. Here, the legal basis of the teaching of the Catholic religion (IRC) dates back to the Lateran pacts of 1929, revised in 1984. However, IRC teachers are equally called to "adapt" to the new competence-based approach, like other colleagues. In this context, it becomes crucial to understand (as the programmes have not changed since 1984) how IRC teachers have responded to the new challenge of teaching by skills. The analysis of teachers' practices represents in the Italian context an indispensable element without which the state of the art of the discipline cannot be understood. In the English context, on the contrary, the analysis of the syllabuses and teaching materials, precisely because they are updated every five years, allows us to reconstruct the history of the discipline and the changes in approach and method. For those reasons, in the impossibility of tackling the question in its entirety, we will focus on some key aspects that have been little covered in the two countries, namely the influence of different approaches in RE teaching (exemplified by syllabuses) on textbooks in the UK and teachers’ practices in Italy in relation to school programmes. Some of the research questions are:

-          About RE in England: Is there consistency between RE programmes exemplified by the syllabuses and teachers' guides or textbooks for RE teaching? What was the direct impact of syllabuses on textbooks? How did school textbooks introduce the multifaith approach? How did they represent various religions and non-religious worldviews? If so, how has the representation of religious and non-religious worldviews changed in recent decades?

-          About IRC in Italy: Has teachers’ ‘freedom’ in structuring their own course favoured a greater inclusion of different religions, in addition to Catholicism? On what factors does the inclusion of religious diversity in the curriculum depend? What happens in class?

At the methodological level, the following sources have been analysed: - Scientific bibliography on locally agreed RE syllabuses during historical changes (1970-2020); - RE school textbooks: 25 textbooks on Islam or multiple faiths and 5 on Christianity; - 25 IRC school textbooks; - IRC programmes. As regards the practices of teachers in Italy, 320 questionnaires and 18 semi-structured interviews were carried out. For the analysis of the textbooks both a grid and the MAXQDA software were used. The selection and analysis of the textbooks have had the aim of not only understanding how the main religions are represented in these teaching aids, but also of reconstructing on a historical level how a paradigm shift occurred in the textbooks, from one approach to another, and what the consistency was like between the official requirements and the manuals themselves. For this reason, I have not only focused on the more recent textbooks, but also on some older ones, starting in the late 1970s for English textbooks (when multi-religious teaching became structural) and in 1984 for Italian ones (from the revision of “Patti Lateranensi”). As for RE, the comparison between textbooks dedicated exclusively to Islam, books on several religions, those which use a thematic approach (starting from various themes they see how the different religions deal with these issues) and books on Christianity can bring out data of considerable interest not only regarding the contents, but also about the approach used.

If in England the predominance of an approach in each historical juncture did not mark the overcoming of the previous models in the production of teaching aids – rather we notice a coexistence of these approaches – in Italy teachers’ autonomy did not coincide with a more inclusive approach on religious diversity because this has been limited by the lack of training. Although in general Italian teachers are well qualified (56% of them have a master's degree, 7% a Ph.D., among the interview sample), their mono-religious approach has significant repercussions in terms of the inclusion of religious diversity and even the identification and deconstruction of stereotypes, for example in the school textbook. Only 9% of the interviewed Italian teachers claim to have identified stereotypes about different religions in the textbooks they have used. This is not linked to the absence of stereotypes in IRC school textbooks, but instead to the mono-religious approach in initial and subsequent training, which does not give teachers the opportunity for a real and decentralized confrontation beyond the interpretive categories of Christianity on other religious realities and non-religious worldviews. The data highlights a clear gap between those who have taken training courses regularly and those who, on the contrary, have never attended. For example, on the topic of interculturality and the deconstruction of stereotypes in textbooks, we find that only Italian teachers who have received training on this subject succeeded in identifying and deconstructing stereotypes and prejudices. They are more aware of cultural diversity and are therefore more likely to promote it through an offer of plural educational content, culturally decentralized.

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