Religion & World Views
Intent
Teaching our pupils about different religions and worldviews is crucial to enable them to foster tolerance, empathy, and cultural awareness. Our curriculum has this goal at its heart. We aim to enable our pupils to appreciate diversity, respect the beliefs of others, and develop a more inclusive and harmonious perspective of the world, ultimately contributing to a more peaceful and understanding society. We also aim to provide our pupils, regardless of their background, faith and beliefs, with a religious and worldview education where they will develop a broad knowledge and understanding of a variety of religions, religious traditions and non-religious views. We achieve this by:
- Providing opportunities for all pupils to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, but also to be taken beyond their own experiences. Our religious education and worldviews curriculum teaches our pupils about diversity within and between beliefs, cultures and worldviews from across the world, and seeks to teach the skills and knowledge to hold respectful and informed conversations about religion and belief; to be religiously literate.
- Ensuring a conscious inclusion of vocabulary and substantive content that recognises the need to ensure teaching materials are broad and balanced in a meaningful and accessible way.
- Adopting a scholarly approach to the core disciplinary knowledge of ‘theology’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘social sciences’, developing pupils’ ability to hold the types of conversation and to apply the methods and processes of theologians, philosophers and social scientists.
- Ensuring that curiosity and open-mindedness is encouraged to the worldviews of others and a reflective consciousness of their own worldview.
- Structuring our curriculum into half-termly ‘Big Questions’ and three vertical concepts than run through each year group that have been selected to build pupils’ understanding of religions and worldviews represented in Britain and the wider world. These vertical concepts build a thematic narrative and provide context across diverse worldviews, as well as using small steps to help pupils gain a deep understanding of often complex, abstract ideas.
Religious Education & Worldviews is a multidisciplinary subject touching on many academic disciplines. In our curriculum, we focus on developing our disciplinary skills through the types of conversation and methods and processes required to be scholarly in the studies of Theology, Philosophy and Social Sciences. These are mapped out across each year group and have been sequenced so that the disciplinary content is also reviewed in subsequent units and developed as scholarly tools to access a wide range of substantive knowledge content.
IMPLEMENTATION
To ensure the successful implementation of our religious education and worldviews curriculum, we know that we must make the learning ‘sticky’ and ensure that it comes alive in our lessons. To accomplish this, we blend a variety of teaching and learning strategies and resources:
- Big Questions: Units are centred around a key question that pupils are asked to reflect on as they learn the knowledge and skills of the unit.
- Artefacts and Sources: Units include the use of artefacts and sources to support pupils in piecing together religious narratives.
- Visual Aids and Technology: Lessons include the use of digital resources to make abstract concepts more tangible.
- Group Work and Discussions: We promote group work, discussions, and debates to encourage critical thinking and expose pupils to diverse perspectives.
- Visits: Whenever possible, pupils visit local religious sites to learn first-hand about the practices of different religions.
- Explicit Vocabulary: This is taught to pupils at the beginning of lessons and referred to throughout lessons and units to ensure that they use and learn accurate terms.
- Critical Thinking: We teach pupils to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and develop their critical thinking skills. R.E. is not just about accepting facts but exploring the "why" and "how." Why do people believe this? How do people reconcile their differences?
Religion & World views Roadmap
Key Documents
Entire Religion & World View Curriculum - PDF Version
To find out more about our curriculum please contact the school office.