“The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.”

Mahatma Gandhi - political and social leader

What do we want our religious education curriculum to achieve?

At Woodlands, our religious education (RE) curriculum aims to support children through their journey of understanding and in the process build their knowledge and skills. We aim to inspire pupils’ curiosity for delving deeper and asking questions. Children will learn about many different types of religions across their time at Woodlands, not just Christianity, to broaden their concept of diversity in religion. Our aim is to also answer thought-provoking questions that surround religion in the world, e.g. ‘What makes some places sacred?’ (Year 2), ‘Why is Jesus inspiring to some people?’ (Year 3), ‘What can we learn from religions about deciding what we think is right and wrong?’ (Year 4), ‘If God is everywhere, why go to a place of worship?’ (Year 5) and ‘What matters most to Christians and Humanists?’ (Year 6).

Why is RE important to us?

We think RE is a ‘key stone’ subject. It feeds understanding and knowledge into other subjects across the curriculum. The key to a solid RE curriculum is balanced breadth and depth of religious and non-religious worldviews studied, therefore we have chosen specific areas to focus on in-depth. Our two big ideas – diversity and culture – are a constant feature in all RE lessons. For example, in Year 4, children learn about festivals being important in different communities. For this, they study Easter, Diwali, Ramadan and Pesach and look at their individual stories.

How does the curriculum structure support our aims?

Our structuring of the RE curriculum enables each year group to spend time teaching a sequence of lessons, which underpin a key question. Understanding RE for our pupils begins in Reception within the ‘Understanding of the world’ band. In Key Stage 1, children explore different religions through texts, stories and artefacts. At the beginning of Key Stage 2, in Years 3 and 4, they start to delve deeper and really explore their key questions, looking at a wider range of religions and their significance. Towards the end of Key Stage 2, in Years 5 and 6, pupils approach more open-ended and subjective key questions.

How do we make RE real and meaningful for our children?

We aim to bring rigorous, challenging but thought-provoking elements to our RE lessons. This means that our teachers are skilled in the beliefs and culture of each religion, helping our pupils to understand the importance of showing respect to other religions. Wherever it is possible and relevant, we make links with our local religious communities – for example, in Year 2, they visit the Tonbridge Baptist Church. Year 5 will also have a visit from the Islamic Centre in Maidstone.

How do we develop skills in RE?

All our units of study begin with a key question, which overarches all lessons. We come back to this frequently and often finish with a composite task, which brings the children’s learning together to answer the key question. Vocabulary teaching is a critical element of good RE teaching at Woodlands; we choose the words we want pupils to learn in each lesson and teach these discretely. A lot of the skills we teach children through RE are around asking questions, suggesting answers and expressing their own understanding. We nurture these skills in every lesson, devising ways to allow plenty of discussion e.g. through conscience alleys, debates and hot seating.

How do we use assessment in RE?

Assessment is used in RE in a variety of ways. In all lessons, we create meaningful tasks for the children to complete, provide feedback on these, ask thought-provoking questions, facilitate opportunities for in-depth discussion and help the children activate and connect prior knowledge to new learning. If we discover important gaps in learning, we may decide to remodel the learning or task, use visuals or an analogy to explain a concept, provide additional scaffolding or update future planning. In Key Stage 2, during and after learning, we check if the children have learnt what we want them to by adding their answer to a mind map at the beginning of each unit. At the end of each unit, the children will have an opportunity to reflect on their lessons and mini questions to enable them to answer the key question. Teachers bring all this knowledge formed over the course of the year to make an overall judgement as to whether each pupil is working at the expected level for RE or not and this is reported to parents. Our year group leads and RE subject lead will also conduct pupil voice sessions and scrutinise pupils’ books to ascertain how well vocabulary and knowledge has been retained and demonstrated over time. Having triangulated monitoring, the RE subject lead may decide to update planning, support teachers with planning or pedagogy, involve the Inclusion team if issues pertain to pupils with SEND, review curriculum sequencing or possibly review the effectiveness of the retrieval activities used.

How do we promote inclusivity and challenge in RE?

It is important that all our pupils' access and learn effectively in our RE lessons across the school. This involves us setting suitable learning challenges, responding to pupils’ diverse needs and overcoming potential barriers to learning and assessment for individuals and groups. Teachers utilise a range of adaptive strategies to meet the needs of our pupils, which work well in all subjects. In addition to this, we utilise further adaptations specific to RE, which support pupils with SEND. For example, we use practical activities to spark the interest of children and allow them to explore these first-hand e.g. looking at resources including artefacts, photographs and videos. Using pictures and images wherever possible helps enormously and for many pupils it is their main way into the subject. Repetition and reinforcement is an important way for us to help pupils with SEND retain key concepts in the long term. Our consistent use of updating of mind maps in lessons is an example of this. In order to challenge our pupils in RE, we aim to set the expectation high for all and provide scaffolding for those who need it in order to access the learning. More specifically, we have a range of strategies, which require a significant intellectual challenge throughout all our units. This includes using our oracy strategies where children use actions when speaking to show they want to build upon, or challenge another's idea.

 

             

 

Right of withdrawal - This was first granted when RE was actually religious instruction and carried with it connotations of induction into the Christian faith. RE is very different now – open, broad, exploring a range of religious and non-religious world views. However, in the UK, parents still have the right to withdraw their children from RE on the grounds that they wish to provide their own religious education (School Standards and Framework Act 1998 S71 (3)). This will be the parents’ responsibility. If you would like to withdraw your child from RE, please speak to Mrs Lonie.