Religious education lessons in England's secondary schools are worse now than they were three years ago, inspectors have warned.
Teachers are uncertain about what they are meant to achieve when teaching the subject, and some pupils gain only a basic understanding of religion and beliefs, according to a new Ofsted report.
It warns that in schools where the quality of RE was poor, pupils were more intolerant of other faiths, and some schools were unsure how to teach Christianity, leaving pupils "confused".
The report looked at RE in 94 primary and 89 secondary schools, excluding faith schools, between April 2006 and March 2009.
The findings show that the quality of RE lessons in secondary schools is worse now than it was according to an Ofsted survey published in 2007.
Achievement in almost a fifth of schools visited overall was "inadequate", inspectors said, compared with one in ten schools in the earlier survey.
In the last year of the new survey alone (2008/09) achievement was "inadequate" in nearly one in three of the secondaries visited.
Recent changes to the secondary school curriculum are partly to blame for having a negative impact on RE, the study says.
It says: "Despite the very considerable commitment and energy which many teachers bring to the subject, in many of the schools visited the provision was no better than satisfactory quality, or in some cases inadequate, and the effectiveness of much of the RE observed was not good enough."
In primaries, the report found that in many schools the quality of RE lessons was "not good enough", with achievement only rated "satisfactory" in six out of ten schools.
