RE and Worship

Subject Lead: Mr J Bull

Link LAC Member: Rev Claire Gibbs

Our School Vision

As a child of God, made in his image and likeness, every member of our community is loved, valued and respected. Being generously hospitable, we enable all to grow and nourish their God-given talents; developing curiosity in order to flourish and embrace life in all its fullness.

Aims and Intent

At Bishopton Redmarshall CE Primary School, Religious Education is at the heart of our curriculum. We follow the Durham Diocesan Religious Education Syllabus for Church Schools which offers three broad aims:

To enable pupils to know about and understand Christianity as a living faith that influences the lives of people worldwide and as the religion that has most shaped British culture and heritage.
To enable pupils to know and understand about other major world religions and non-religious worldviews, their impact on society, culture and the wider world, enabling pupils to express ideas and insights.
To contribute to the development of pupils’ own spiritual/philosophical convictions, exploring and enriching their own beliefs and values.

We also aim:

To develop a clear understanding of Christian values through day to day life in school and through teaching effective Religious Education.
To recognise that faith is based on commitment to a particular way of understanding God and the world.
To become responsible and caring citizens, showing love and respect to all.
To experience Christianity as a living faith through our work in school and with our local Church and community.
To plan and teach the units of work as set out in the Durham Diocesan Syllabus.
To enable children to achieve and progress in terms of learning religious concepts, skills and attitudes
To maintain our distinctive Christian ethos through our teaching of Religious Education.

Implementation

In order to deliver the aims and expected standards of the syllabus, the Diocesan Boards of Education for Durham and Newcastle strongly recommend a minimum allocation of curriculum time for RE based upon the law and the Statement of Entitlement 2016: Schools should aim to be close to 10% of curriculum for teaching RE, but must be no less than 5%.

In practice, this means a starting point of 60 minutes per week for Key Stage 1 and 75 minutes per weekfor Key Stage 2.

RE can be delivered in flexible ways and need not be confined to a lesson per week. Further opportunities could come through RE days, RE weeks, visits and other projects.

Given the difficulty of allocating time to particular subjects, any percentage might be assessed on a yearly basis, rather than term by term. At least 2/3 of teaching time is devoted to Christianity with the remaining 1/3 devoted to other religions.

Our teaching is based on three core elements:

Making sense of beliefs

Identifying and making sense of core religious and non-religious concepts and beliefs; understanding what these beliefs mean within their traditions; recognising how and why sources of authority are used, expressed and interpreted in different ways, and developing skills of interpretation.

Making connections

Reasoning about, reflecting on, evaluating and connecting the concepts, beliefs and practices studied; allowing pupils to challenge ideas, and the ideas to challenge pupils’ thinking; discerning possible connections between these ideas and pupils’ own lives and ways of understanding the world.

Understanding the impact

Examining how and why people put their beliefs into action in diverse ways, within their everyday lives, within their communities and in the wider world.

This teaching and learning model has been developed to incorporate the teaching approach taken in Understanding Christianity: Text, Impact, Connections (RE Today, 2016). This enables us to meet the requirements of the Statement of Entitlement 2016, which states that:

‘…in Church of England schools the students and their families can expect a Religious Education curriculum that is rich and varied, enabling learners to acquire a thorough knowledge and understanding of the Christian faith: for example through the Understanding Christianity resource.’