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Recent studies have increasingly favoured contextualisation of religious education (RE) to pupils’ home faith background in spite of current assessment methods that might hinder this. For a multi-religious, multi-ethnic sample of 369 London school pupils aged from 13 to 15 years, this study found that the participatory, transformative and dialogical activities of church visits, computer use and classroom debate improved attitude to RE. It revealed more readiness in girls to apply RE to their own religiosity and particularly negative attitudes to RE in pupils with no religious background. Besides indicating the validity, reliability and unidimensionality of a new short quantitative measure of pupil attitude to RE which acknowledges pupil experience and home context, the findings suggest ways to move beyond ‘banking’ paradigms to which RE remains prone. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]