Intent

It is our intent that Religious Education creates opportunities to engage, inspire, motivate and encourage children through enquiry based learning.  Religious Education teaching will equip children with both the knowledge and skills to explore different beliefs, reflect on their own spiritual values, and celebrate diversity and equality, as well as enable pupils to combat prejudices. Our Christian values: honesty, love, forgiveness, respect, thankfulness patience and service, will be at the heart of what we stand for. It is our aim that our Religious Education teaching explores modern day issues and will prepare students for adult life, employment and life-long learning.

Implementation

The RE intent will be delivered through two different ways:

Learning about religion includes enquiry into and investigation of the nature of religion, its key beliefs and teachings, practices, their impacts on the lives of believers and communities, and the varying ways in which these are expressed. It also includes the skills of interpretation, analysis and explanation. Pupils learn to communicate their knowledge and understanding using specialist vocabulary. It also includes identifying and developing an understanding of ultimate questions and ethical issues.

Learning from Religion is concerned with developing pupils’ reflection on and response to their own experiences and their learning about religion. It develops pupils’ skills of application, interpretation and evaluation of what they learn about religion, particularly to questions of identity and belonging, meaning, purpose and truth and values and commitments, and communicating their responses.

Impact

To monitor impact, teachers are required to undertake both formative and summative assessment to ensure that the children are making sufficient progress and work is provided for their level. The children record their work in various ways and evidence is kept in the pupil workbooks throughout each key stage.

Work can be in written or pictorial form or verbal discussions and teachers use this as evidence of understanding and achievement. RE is enquiry based learning. Therefore, the children spend the first lesson thinking about what they already know, what they think the topic will be like and thinking about any questions that they may have. Each topic will have a main enquiry question, with each session broken down into smaller questions to investigate. On the final lesson, the children will independently answer the main enquiry question they have been investigating. This can be done in a range of ways: writing, art work, music etc.

Teachers highlight the skills the children have learnt throughout the topic. The skills for each topic can be found at the front of every unit of work on a title page. The last session of each unit the teacher will mark in depth, highlighting what the children have done well according to the skills.