Religious Education

 RE Leads: Miss Garnham and Miss Madge

Governor Lead: Joanne Tillinghast

We believe that our RE curriculum should engage, inspire, challenge and encourage pupils. Our aim is for our children to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to answer challenging questions, explore different religious beliefs, values and traditions and develop a more rigorous understanding of different religious traditions, beliefs and practices. The knowledge and skills that the children will acquire will enable them to challenge prejudice and prepare them for adult life, employment and life-long learning.

RE Progression

• RE Overview 
• RE Strands (Religions)
• RE Strands (Themes)

 Our Approach to RE

Our approach enables learners to understand what drives people of faith to live the way they do. This builds each child’s ‘religious literacy’ helping them understand the nature of religion and belief in the world in which they live. Pupils then have the opportunity to learn from this religious belief - e.g. reconciliation and put this into practice in their own lives. 

We build a bridge between the children's own experiences and the world of a religion to help to engage the children: linking a concept to a child's own experiences before the religious content is introduced helps the children to 'crack open' the key concept in a way that they understand.

We enquire by looking at what a concept means to the followers of a faith.

We then explore by looking at:

• Where beliefs come from, how they change over time and how they relate to each other.
• The different ways that people practise their beliefs.
• How an individual's faith impacts on their everyday life.

We provide opportunities for the children to express and evaluate what they have learned.

We welcome visitors from different faiths into the school to help to enrich our curriculum and to celebrate diversity.

Our key themes are:

• Community
• Prayer and Worship/Sacred Places
• Leaders and Teachers
• Stories and Books
• Festivals and Celebrations
• Symbols and Artefacts

Key questions are used to provide focus and depth to the learning.

Knowledge organisers, knowledge maps and low stake quizzes are used to help embed the knowledge learned into the long term memory.