Religious Education
‘Personal and shared prayer is thoroughly integrated into individuals’ lives and is spoken of as a natural and individual response.’ – SIAMs 2019
At St Faith’s, Religious Education is a core subject. We centre our teaching around our school vision, enabling children to live life to its fullness and that every child will flourish and reach their full potential. As a church school and part of the Southwark Diocese Board of Education, we promote RE as not just an academic subject but as one that lies at the heart of our curriculum and holds an important role in promoting values across the school.
We follow the Discovery R.E syllabus throughout the school, focusing on both Christianity and a range of other religions. Each RE topic has a focus question that is reflected upon throughout the term, with children learning both about and from different religions. Through the consistent high quality teaching and delivery of RE, the pupils at St Faith’s feel inspired and are encouraged to explore their own and others beliefs and cultural traditions in a positive and constructive way, showing respect for all faiths. This is supported with opportunities to visit local places of worship, such as a Hindu temple or the synagogue. We also invite visitors from different world faiths to come and share with us stories or traditions from their religions. We are linked with St Anne’s Church and attend special services there throughout the year, as well as our own collective worships regularly being led by Reverend Cecile.
Curriculum Intent:
The curriculum intent for RE at St Faith’s is:
- To apply an understanding of Christianity so that children can make reasoned and informed responses to life issues and moral choices;
- To help pupils reflect upon their own needs, experiences and questions and to confront what are sometimes referred to as ‘ultimate questions’;
- To enable pupils to understand the nature of Christian beliefs and the Anglican tradition through a study of: Creation, Prayer and Worship, the Life and Teachings of Jesus, Old Testament Characters, Living out the Faith and Christian Festivals; To enable pupils to understand the beliefs and practices of other world faiths;
- To teach tolerance and challenge prejudice towards people of different faiths through providing opportunities to develop an understanding of the value of living in a multicultural, multi-faith and multi-lingual society;
- To encourage pupils to develop open minds to new and different concepts and to form their own opinions based on evidence and argument;
- To maintain links with local churches and other religious communities;
- To learn from religions in addition to gaining knowledge and understanding about religions.
Curriculum Implementation:
How we teach RE in our school
| What will you see in our RE lessons? | What does it look like? | Why is it important? |
| Ping- pong style teaching | Ideas and activities regularly moving from teacher to children and back again. | By using short tasks and discussions children will work through key ideas independently/ in pairs rather than being led primarily by the teacher. This encourages peer discussion, providing the opportunity for children to explore and develop their ideas. |
| Challenge for all | All children will be challenged through differentiation challenge questions linking to greater depth assessment criteria. | Through carefully thought out questions all children will be challenged throughout the lesson. Children will be supported in developing a deeper level of understanding of concepts and ideas linked to that lesson’s learning. |
| Stem sentences | Stem sentences will be included in most lessons to encourage children to use key vocabulary and… | Use of key vocabulary links to long term memory and retaining key ideas from each lesson. |
| Referring back to ‘Big question’ in each lesson | Each lesson will begin with reflecting on the key question for each unit. | Link to long term memory - retaining key question and ensuring that children reflect back on this within all of their learning. |
| Variety of resources | Books, stories, art, artefacts | Engaging children in their learning, catering for a variety of learning styles, encouraging enquiry. |
| ‘Hook’ at the beginning of each topic | 1st lesson (ideas in Discovery/UC)- use stimulus to engage/elicit prior knowledge/make personal links | Engaging children in their learning, linking their learning to their own experiences, discovering prior learning to inform planning of future lessons. |
| Questioning | Planned open-ended questions in each lesson | Developing enquiry in lessons, encouraging and scaffolding children’s deeper levels of thinking. |
| Trips/visitors/workshops | Trips to places of worship/locations linked to the unit e.g. Hindu Temple, National Gallery. Visitors to come in to share their experiences and knowledge with the class. | Children are able to gain a variety of points of view. Engaging learning. Exposing children to different faiths and experiences. |
| Reflection | Individual reflection at the end of each lesson. Pupils use sentence stems to make personal reflection to lesson ‘I now understand/I know more about/I think...' | Developing an enquiry approach, Supporting children to become reflective learning – identifying and reinforcing new knowledge and how this has changed or added to their understanding and prior knowledge. |
| Continuous recap of learning linking to key question | Dedicated time at beginning of lesson to recap on what has been learnt (use RE working wall) Encouraging pupils to make links with prior learning/learning in other units of work in each lesson. | Developing long term memory strategies. Linking to concepts and understanding from prior lessons – progressive and sequenced curriculum. |
| RE Working Wall (separate to Let’s Reflect Wall) | Supports pupils understanding of unit: Key question- child friendly Key vocabulary Religious symbol Flip chart- ‘recap map’ Pupils’ work/pupils’ reflections | Supports children’s understanding and becomes a key reference point for our key question, key vocabulary and reflections that children can apply in their class work, |
| Key Vocabulary | Key vocabulary identified for each unit from Discovery scheme of work. Written on handwriting strips. Introduced and referred to throughout each lesson. Some displayed on RE working wall. | Enables children to access curriculum fully with greater understanding of key vocabulary. Long term memory developed with continuous referral back to key vocabulary and linked understanding. |