RE
Within our academy, we believe that all children should receive an education that supports their development into mature, knowledgeable citizens who are ready to engage in productive relationships of all kinds in society.
Our curriculum is inspired by a range of RE syllabuses that we believe best achieve this goal. We want children to hold ‘balanced and well-informed conversations about religion and worldviews and make sense of religion and worldviews around them. We want our pupils to be free-thinking, and participants of public discourse whereby religion and belief shape our society.
Another key aim of RE, like much of our curricula is to build global awareness. When designing the RE curriculum, one thing that was really important was to consider the balance of religions which are studied. Based on the context and demographic of the pupils, we felt that it was really important they learnt about different religions in order to ensure they are learning about beliefs, places and people outside of their own experiences. The local syllabus at the time was very heavily focused on Christianity, and while this is important, we felt that for our pupils, they needed a stronger focus on other world religions. Like most of our curriculum we use R.E to expose children to ‘windows’ and ‘mirrors’. We want to ensure that the curriculum not only allows pupils to look inwards, reflecting on their own lives, communities and beliefs, but also provide insight of the lives and beliefs of others globally – we believe through this we can help build our curricula aim of global awareness.
In KS1, pupils begin by learning about the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity & Islam. This progresses to KS2 whereby these are expanded upon alongside the explicit teaching of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Alongside these religions, pupils will learn about Humanism, morals, philosophy and spirituality without religion. These areas felt important to broadening our pupil’s world views, but also links to other areas of the curriculum – for example philosophy in Ancient Greece.
Like history & geography, children explore key questions each term around themes of religious tradition, spiritual identity, ethical principles, diversity of faith and belief, alongside the contributions of faith to society; these questions and terms fall into 3 lenses: Theology – questions about belief; Philosophy – questions about the nature of reality, existence, morality and knowledge; and Human/Social Sciences- questions about way that religion and beliefs impact individuals, community or society. Just like PSHE, we strive for questions to also allow pupils to develop a sense of self through the RE curriculum, giving them opportunity to reflect on and question their own beliefs.
