Religious Education

Road Map

Skills Progression

End of Key Stage Expectations

How do we teach Religious Education?

Intent:

At Bromham Primary School, Religious Education has a unique position within our curriculum. As stated in The Church of England Statement of Entitlement, ‘Religious Education in a Church school should enable every child to flourish and to live life in all its fullness. (John 10:10)’. Religious education underpins the ethos of our school within the community and as an educational setting, alongside the school values and our vision, while striving to promote wisdom, hope, dignity, and community. Bromham Primary has strong local community links to local churches and charitable organisations who support and engage with supporting achievement in the subject and across the school more generally.

Religious Education focuses on the study of Christianity as a living and diverse faith through scripture and in exploring ‘The Big Questions’. Further teaching about some of the other major faiths practised in the world today are embedded and revisited to form links between religious teachings and beliefs in order to promote inclusivity and diversity to provide strong foundations for life in a global community. Our aims are to embed the knowledge of scripture and how this affects how believers live. We aim to build on this foundation of knowledge to respond to more complex key questions in line with the skill progression in The RE Agreed Syllabus, 2018-2023, Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire and Luton.

The aims of teaching Religious Education in our school are:

To inspire pupils’ curiosity to discover more about the world and its diverse community.
To develop religious literacy and explore their own spirituality.
To inspire pupils’ sense of courageous advocacy by learning about injustice, local and global issues.
To teach children about inspirational religious people from a range of faiths, throughout history and in the modern world; focusing on how their faith gave them the strength and courage to make a difference, often against adversity.
To explore ‘The Big Questions’ about the meaning of life, morality and mortality.
To learn about religion from different sources, and evaluate the value of wisdom from these sources, learning to agree or disagree respectfully.
To promote meaningful dialogue and cultivate ever improving articulate and respectful responses.
To interpret and evaluate texts as evidence, articulating personal beliefs and linking these to the beliefs of others.

Special Educational Needs Disability (SEND) / Pupil Premium / Higher Attainers

All children will have Quality First Teaching. Any children with identified SEND or in receipt of pupil premium funding may have work additional to and different from their peers in order to access the curriculum dependent upon their needs. As well as this, our school offers a demanding and varied curriculum, providing children with a range of opportunities in order for them to reach their full potential and consistently achieve highly from their starting points. Religious Education is unique because spirituality is a completely personal experience; all opinions and beliefs are highly valued. The activities in Religious Education lessons provide children with a range of ways to explore their own and others’ beliefs. This knowledge can be represented in a variety of ways, which can be tailored to the needs of the individual.

Implementation:

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in Religious Education, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Religious Education is taught discretely, but is woven through all aspects of school life through the school vision and values. At Bromham Primary, we follow The Agreed Syllabus, 2018-2023 from Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire and Luton, supported with resources from Understanding Christianity. We teach RE weekly in line with the statutory guidance given in both the National Curriculum and The Agreed Syllabus in order to provide children with adequate time to develop the skills and achieve.

(Source: The Agreed Syllabus, 2018-2023, Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire and Luton’)

Throughout the school, children learn predominantly about Christianity which is taught explicitly in every year group. In Foundation Stage, children learn about Christianity and other major world religions as part of the children learning about themselves and their community. Children in Key Stage 1 learn about Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Key Stage 2 learn about Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and compare these teachings to secular and humanist beliefs. Religious Education is distinctly different to Collective Worship but teaching is enhanced through worship and celebrations in the liturgical calendar. Skills from across the curriculum are utilised to support the teaching and learning of religion; areas such as: Music, Art, Design Technology, English, Reading, Drama, Geography, and History. The learning in Religious Education should be deeply reflective and inspire critical thinking; understanding traditions and rituals in the context of geographical location, culture, and within the societal norms of the historical period. Teaching from scripture should take the values and norms of that period into account and transport the core values of the teaching into a modern context to enable valuable comparisons to individual beliefs and lifestyle choices in the modern world. Thematic units, such as ‘What are the deeper meaning of the festivals’ in Year 3, enable children to make links across a range of religions to find similarities and distinct qualities in the Holy stories and traditions of each religion. Key questions and Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary is taught and modelled explicitly and feature on the knowledge organisers at the start of each unit of work. The modules are structured in half termly blocks across the year. Units build upon prior knowledge throughout the primary phase to revisit key scripture and deepen understanding of rituals and traditions from some of the major world religions. The teaching of Religious Education is enhanced through visits to local places of worship including, St. Owens (our parish church), Bromham Baptist Church, and places of worship on the Queens Park Faith Tour which includes: Guru Nanak Gurdwara, Jamia Masjid Gulshane Baghdad Mosque, and All Saints Church. Impact are a Christian charity who work closely with the school to provide prayer spaces and reflection opportunities for children. Year 4 also participate in a John Bunyan immersion day to enhance the learning about a local inspirational person. Children learn about national and global charities from a range of faiths to highlight the importance of how religious beliefs can have a positive impact in the modern world. This is enhanced by the school community donating to charities such as: Christmas in a Box, The Bishop’s Harvest Appeal and Utange Orphans Charity.

Impact:

Within Religious Education, we strive to create an inclusive and reflective approach to religious teaching in a personal, local and global context. The children are provided with opportunities to reflect on their own beliefs and the beliefs of others, promoting religious literacy and diversity. This is obtained by learning about one religion at a time in ‘systematic units’ and then including ‘thematic units’ which build on prior knowledge to compare religious beliefs and practices. The teaching and learning approach has three core elements that are woven through teaching to explore the depth and breadth of religious teaching and provide children with a fully rounded and embedded approach to understanding religious concepts; identifying key scripture, traditions, and rituals. Learning is deepened through key questions and reflecting upon how this links, differs and challenges their own beliefs and daily lives. Children will make links to their own understanding of religion, culture and society while learning about those that are different to their own. As the children’s understanding develops and matures, they will seek to appreciate and critically evaluate the impact the religious teaching has on the local and global community.

(Source: ‘The RE Agreed Syllabus, 2018-2023, Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire and Luton’)

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

Attainment in Religious Education is assessed against the learning outcomes in each unit.
Assessing children’s understanding of religious literacy throughout their learning.
Images of the children’s practical learning through prayer spaces and reflection.
Pupil book studies, where children are interviewed about their learning, and what they can recall. (Pupil Voice)
Learning walks of the environment.
Photographs of sequences of learning are taken.
Annual reporting of standards across the curriculum.
Marking of written work in books.
Developmental feedback marking and responses from tasks based around Art and Music and Drama.
Teacher comments about spoken responses.

Eternal measures are also used to moderate the learning taking place, such as attending CPD through the Diocese of St. Albans, to learn about different Religious Education curriculums in other settings, and use this to provide feedback to staff and continue to improve the Religious Education provision at Bromham Primary.