Joyce Miller retired in 2007 from the post of Head of Diversity and Cohesion at Education Bradford where she led a team promoting community cohesion, race equality and respect for diversity. This included responsibility for religious education and the Interfaith Education Centre.

She is now vice chair of the RE Council of England and Wales and she chairs the executive delivery group of the REsilience project. She chairs Bradford SACRE, is Vice Chair of the Schools Linking Network and is a former Chair of the Association of RE Inspectors Advisers and Consultants (AREIAC).

She was in the first cohort of B.Ed students to graduate from Warwick in 1969 and was the president of the students’ union. She completed a master’s degree by research in 1992, The Forest Hermitage: an ethnographic study of a Buddhist community in Warwickshire. Her Ed.D degree was completed in 2010 and included studies on religious education and the arts, community cohesion and a practitioner research study in which she applied key concepts from the interpretive approach to teachers’ continuing professional development. She was a member of the community of practice, based at Warwick, that formed the English part of the European-wide REDCo project. In 2009, she conducted two of the qualitative case studies for the major report on RE resources, commissioned by the DCSF, Materials used to Teach about World Religions in Schools in England.

For seven years, she edited REsource, the journal of the (then) Professional Council for RE, on whose executive she sat for more than 10 years. Prior to working in Bradford she was a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton after having taught religious education in secondary schools in Coventry and Northumberland.

Selected publications

2000-6 Editor, Resource, The Journal of the Professional Council for Religious Education

Miller, J and McKenna, U (2011) ‘Religion and religious education:comparing and contrasting pupils’ and teachers’ views’, British Journal of Religious Education, 33 (2)

Ipgrave, J, Miller, J and Hopkins, P (2010) ‘Responses of Three Muslim Majority Primary Schools in England to the Islamic Faith of Their Pupils ’Journal of International Migration and Integration, 11 (1) 73-89 http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1007/s12134-009-0119-7

Miller, J (2010) ‘The contribution of local authorities and their SACREs to promoting community cohesion through religious education’ in Michael H. Grimmitt (ed) Religious Education and Social and Community Cohesion: Challenges and Opportunities (Great Wakering, McCrimmons) 232-246.

Miller, J (2009) ‘Community cohesion and teachers’ professional development’ Race Equality Teaching, 28(1) 30-36

Miller, J (2009) ‘Raising humanities teachers’ understanding of their pupils’ religious and cultural backgrounds’ in J. Ipgrave, R. Jackson and K. O’Grady (eds) Religious Education Research through a Community of Practice (Munster, Waxmann) 119-138

Miller, J (2009) ‘So, what do the Toledo Guiding Principles have to do with me?’Resource (31, 2) 6-9

Miller, J. (2007) Education and Learning – a Buddhist Perspective’ Resource 29 (3), 12-16

Miller, J. (2007) Ethnography for Pupils, Resource 30 (1), 18

Full publications

Each year, Redbridge SACRE hosts a lecture which is designed to contribute to the ongoing debate about the relationship between religion and education. Joyce gave the lecture in 2010, titled ‘Community cohesion: some questions for RE teachers’