The curriculum at Carcroft School is three dimensional. In short, our students achieve academic success which is enhanced through character growth and is expressed through the beautiful work they produce. RE at Carcroft encourages children to explore and ask big questions about life, to find out and celebrate what people believe and what difference this makes to how people live. Our curriculum is designed to engage and enthuse learners, therefore empower our students to act and impact on the world around them.
We believe that it is an essential area of study which ensures that children are well prepared for life in a world where there are a multitude of viewpoints. We enable the children to make their own informed decisions and to have the confidence to voice their views. We strive for our children to be well informed about the different religions in the world and in our closer community.
As the children move through the school they reflect on their past learning and build on their knowledge from previous years, enabling a deeper understanding and consolidation of religious views, teachings and ways of life. We aim to develop pupils’ understanding of world faiths and other beliefs by exploring their commonality and diversity. There is both depth and breadth of study.
We want our children to enjoy RE and develop resilient responses to misunderstandings, stereotyping and division. We want to offer the children a place where difficult or ‘risky’ questions can be tackled within a safe but challenging context.
RE nurtures SMSC development and pupils’ understanding of diversity. The children discuss challenging questions about meaning and purpose in life, beliefs about God, ultimate reality, issues of right and wrong and what it means to be human. A holistic approach to Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development (SMSC), British Values, and Community Cohesion focuses on preparing pupils for life in the 21st century.
We aim to provide our children with religious literacy where they will develop their knowledge and understanding of Christianity, other religious traditions and world views and explore their responses to life’s challenges. This gives pupils the knowledge and skills to flourish both within their own community and as members of a diverse and global society.
We shall help our pupils prepare for their future by:
- Developing awareness of the fundamental questions raised by human experiences, and of how religious teachings can relate to them;
- Responding to such questions by referring to the teachings and practices of religions and other belief systems, relating them to their own understanding and experience;
- Reflecting on their own beliefs, values and experiences in the light of their study.
Implementation
As an expeditionary school, themes are at the core of how we sequence our curriculum. It’s the same for RE, fostering the same approach to this academic subject, answering the guiding question, working inline with our Local Agreed Syllabus for Doncaster. RE is delivered fortnightly and through expeditionary learning. For example, in KS1, their Summer Term expedition – ‘Diverse Doncaster, where do we belong?’ has strong links to religious denominations in Doncaster.
RE is planned and sequenced to develop breadth and depth, preparing children for their next stage in their school career. By developing the breadth of the children’s knowledge, we are able to support them to use research skills to draw conclusions, therefore developing and building referencing skills that will take the children into higher education and beyond.
During each Key Stage, pupils are taught knowledge, skills and understanding through learning about Christianity, Islam and Judaism through KS1, adding Hinduism and non-religious denominations in KS2. Each unit of work identifies prior learning and shows how this is built upon.
The following skills are used, in order to strengthen the skills and deepen the understanding and knowledge taught: investigating, reflecting, recalling and retelling, exploring, discussing and empathising. Children can discuss and compare the lives of people they have studied from a variety of different religions.
Attitudes which are fundamental to RE are: curiosity and wonder, commitment, fairness, respect, self- understanding, open-mindedness, critical mindedness and enquiry. These work alongside the SMSC links and British Values implemented within school as a whole.
Visits to places of worship, and visitors representing different religions provide a variety of first-hand experiences for our children, to spark their interest and relate new learning to their own experience.
Impact
Our RE curriculum is planned to demonstrate progression, the breadth and depth of the primary curriculum, imn order for children to develop critical referencing skills which will take them into further education.
The children make progress by knowing more, remembering more and being able to do more. They need to transfer and embed key concepts
into their long-term memory and apply them fluently.
We measure the impact of our curriculum in the following ways:
- Children demonstrate a positive attitude towards people of any religion and show an understanding of cultural beliefs different to their own.
- They demonstrate respectful behaviour to all and this is transferable outside of school in the wider community and beyond.
- Assessing children’s understanding of each unit’s linked vocabulary before and after the unit is taught.
- Images and videos of the children’s learning.
- Interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice).