Our approach to the teaching of RE follows the Cumbria Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education and findings from Ofsted’s April 2024 ‘Deep and Meaningful? The religious education subject report’. RE is key to helping young people grow up in today’s multi-faith, diverse and connected world. Our school aims to give pupils opportunities to develop their knowledge and understanding of religions and beliefs which will then contribute to the development of their own beliefs and values.
RE is taught once a week in school. Subject knowledge is also backed up by extra learning opportunities including Prayer-Space days, weekly assemblies by local faith leaders and visits to local places of worship. People from both the local community and from further afield are invited into school to share their experiences, knowledge and views of their religions whenever possible.
The overriding aim of our teaching of RE is that pupils deepen their understanding, term by term and topic by topic, of 6 major Abrahamic and Dhamic world faiths and become confident in their application of the SACRE disciplines of Theology, Philosophy and Human Sciences. Our curriculum coverage has also been chosen to reflect the complex and diverse world we live in but are sometimes geographically detached from in our rurally isolated area.
By the end of EYFS, pupils will have developed the ability to talk confidently about their own lives and in the lives of family members. They will have begun to develop an appreciation that we are all different and will be able to discuss these differences, sensitively and respectfully, in the context of their own lives.
By the end of Key stage 1, pupils will be able to respectfully discuss their knowledge of a range of different beliefs and practices and the meanings behind them. They will be able to retell a variety of different religious and moral stories and will be able to discuss the meanings behind them. They will have a broad understanding of the differences in communities across the country and the world. They will have begun to ask their own questions to develop and express their own identity. They will be able to discuss with and responding sensitively to others as they explore their own identities.
By the end of Key stage 2, pupils will be able to make some connections between different features of religious and worldviews. They will be able to respond thoughtfully to a range of scenarios and will be able to confidently share and explore their own views, opinions and beliefs. The pupils will be able to respectfully and sensitively discuss, present and express their own ideas clearly and will be beginning to be able to provide thoughtful and well thought out reasons behind their beliefs, opinions and ideas.
