Tolerance and mutual respect: what do they mean and why does it matter?

A large body of research has been inspired by a line on page 14 of the Teachers’ Standards in England, which requires teachers not to ‘undermin[e] fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs’. The statement was later reformulated as a request to ‘promote’ fundamental British values in the Department for Education’s 2014 guidance to schools. The political and securitising implications of this requirement, which originate in the UK government’s counter-terrorism policy Prevent, have been widely examined, including in this BERA Blog post (see also Busher et al., 2017; Vincent, 2019). My PhD research built on this literature through a close examination of two concepts: tolerance and mutual respect. I have a religious education (RE) teaching background, and in all my years promoting mutual respect and tolerance I have never had a discussion with a colleague about what these terms mean. However, my experiences suggest tolerance and mutual respect are not clear-cut and uncertainty exists about what should be tolerated and what should be condemned. In my research study, I used a multiple case study approach to examine how seven in-service RE teachers in three schools across England constructed and promoted mutual respect and tolerance. The data, which comprised semi-structured interviews and document analysis of schemes of work, were collected in 2020–2021 and analysed using critical discursive psychology (Wiggins, 2017), a form of discourse analysis. This facilitated a close analysis of teachers’ constructions of the concepts.