Religious Education 

Intent

The National Curriculum states that every state-funded school must offer a curriculum which is balanced and broadly based, which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society and which prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. All state schools must teach RE to pupils at every key stage. This RE Syllabus for Derbyshire and Derby City establishes what shall be taught in RE, providing teachers with practical support and guidance about how to teach RE effectively. The new Derbyshire and Derby City Syllabus for RE aims: • To ensure that every pupil’s statutory entitlement to RE is met, irrespective of their faith or belief, and within this to encourage pupils to explore questions of spirituality, identity, ethics, discrimination and prejudice. • To enable pupils to develop religious literacy and conceptual understanding of what it means to be a person of faith or no faith. • To encourage pupils to articulate their own ideas and experience of religion, belief and spirituality. • To encourage all pupils and teachers to experience RE as an exciting subject that feeds into an understanding of what it means to live in Derbyshire and Derby City and our wider world communities and to promote harmony and good community relations. • To encourage teachers to produce RE lessons that are challenging, inspiring and engaging to everyone. • To assist pupils to engage critically with ideas and understanding of religion and belief systems, given the nature of our society, its speed of change and growing social media influences. RE studies how religions and world views shape and are shaped by the societies in which pupils live, promoting deepening understanding of those belief systems. • To promote interactive, creative and experiential learning that promotes social and ethnic accord alongside the endorsement of fundamental British Values, so that schools will be supported in visiting places of worship, community meeting places and communicating with different social groups across the local community.

(Taken from the Derby and Derbyshire RE agreed syllabus 2020-2025)

Implementation 

The Henry Bradley Re Curriculum has been designed with three threshold concepts in mind. These underpin all the children’s learning in RE through discovery and exploration.

These are;

• Believing

• Expressing

• Living.  

The R.E. curriculum reflects the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian, while taking account of the teaching and practises of other principle religions represented in Great Britain. The time spent teaching R.E. will be a total of an hour a week, this can be split into 2 half hour sessions across the week. It will be discussion based and will include handling and exploring religious artefacts and visits to places of worship. At the start of each lesson children will be reminded to respect the opinions, thoughts, ideas and suggestions of others and that it is ok to be different and that it is an opportunity to listen to different ways of living and believing. There will also be whole school collective celebrations for Harvest, Christmas and Easter. This will happen alongside and in addition to school assembly but links will be drawn from the RE themes.

For further information, please see the Long Term Plan below.