St Andrew's C of E Primary School

RE

 Growing respectful and reflective learners to Live in God’s World

Intent

At St Andrew’s CE Primary School, our RE curriculum is underpinned by our school principles: Wisdom, Grace and Hope, which are rooted in the Bible. Our aim is to grow confident, reflective and respectful learners to live happily in God’s world, underpinned by a strong focus on emotional health and wellbeing.

 GROWING:  It is our ambition that every St Andrew’s pupil is able to develop a deep understanding of their place in the world; starting with their role at school, within the local community and beyond.

We strive to do this by delivering a high quality RE curriculum which enables all children to learn about Christianity as well as a range of other world faiths including Hinduism, Islam and Judaism.

 

RESPECTFUL AND REFLECTIVE LEARNERS: Throughout the school day we encourage our children to make positive choices and to be respectful towards the views of others, particularly within the RE curriculum. We seek to enable pupils to know about and understand Christianity as a living world faith, by exploring core theological concepts and engaging with biblical texts.

TO LIVE IN: We want to provide all children with the potential to thrive, not just survive in God’s world, making positive contributions to their immediate, local and global community. Our RE curriculum develops pupils’ abilities to connect, critically reflect upon, evaluate and apply their learning to their own growing understanding of religion and belief (particularly Christianity), of themselves, the world and human experience.

GOD’S WORLD:

Our RE curriculum is adapted to meet the needs of learners in our school. We develop learners that feel inspired and motivated to reach their full potential in God’s world, successfully putting into practice key life skills.

 RE Intent Implementation and Impact Statement

Photo Gallery

RE

 

CURRICULUM

The above aims can only be achieved through effective teaching and learning in RE lessons and in the wider curriculum. RE is taught through the ‘Understanding Christianity’ resource; the Emmanuel project, a resource from the Diocese of St Edmondsbury and Ipswich is used to supplement these units and to support our teaching of other faiths.  All units approach RE with enquiry based teaching. The key skills taught are:

  • To develop skills of questioning, reading and interpretation; understanding how believers interpret, handle and use religious texts and making sense of the meanings of texts
  • Examining ways in which people respond to religious texts and teachings, and how they put their beliefs into action in diverse ways within the community and in the world
  • Connecting the texts and concepts studied, and discerning possible connections between these and pupils’ own lives and ways of understanding the world.

Understanding Christianity Concepts

  

Understanding Christianity

Frieze

 

 Impact of RE

As a school, we measure the quality and impact of our RE curriculum in a variety of ways including: looking at pupils' books, talking to pupils, observing pupils at work, scrutinising planning, considering pupil progress and attainment, and meeting with other schools to compare standards. 

Below you can read a summary of the strengths of our RE provision as evidenced in a recent Learning Walk and Book Look (June 2022):

 

Strengths

  • All children were on task, well behaved and engaged in their RE learning. They could describe what they were learning about and the wide range of content they’d covered over the year.
  • Teaching and learning was consistent through the school in terms of: creative approaches, assessment opportunities, content covered, and interactive tasks/pupil talk.
  • RE is clearly treated as a core subject
  • Children could explain how at the start of a topic they show their teacher what they already knew so that the teacher knew what to teach them and what they wanted to find out. Most children could identify their own progress through their RE books and the pre-unit/post-unit assessments or cold/hot tasks.
  • LOs and lesson steps made skills and knowledge clear; tasks were adapted either through levelled lesson steps, differentiated or personalised activities or through questioning and extension.
  • Progression was clear within phases with deeper levels of reflection and prior knowledge evident in upper classes e.g. children were accessing the same content at a higher level.
  • Children’s depth of knowledge clearly indicated the strengths of RE teaching and learning over time, not just in the learning walk. Governors were ‘extremely impressed’.
  • The vast majority of children took great pride in their presentation and RE books also demonstrated writing in the wider curriculum
  • All classes had an RE display which showed: key vocabulary, key content, the topic title and in some cases had pupil contributions (it is the start of a new unit for most classes).
  • Pupils with additional needs were included in the classroom and supported by: mixed ability seating, levelled tasks, prompts, visual guides, teacher guidance.
  • Teachers have begun to consider different methods of assessment including: creative word understanding assessment task, hexagons linking key words.
  • Teacher use of vocabulary was consistently good.

 Next steps:

Our next step is to ensure that children are consistently aware of not just the RE content they are learning about, but the RE related skill from knowledge and skills progression. This is clear in planning, LOs and in teacher talk (as it has been a focus) but has not yet been embedded in pupils' own understanding. 

Pupil Voice

(Collected March 2022)

  • Children love RE and can talk confidently about what they are learning
  • Children across the school can discuss Christianity and other faiths (more in KS2)
  • Children love things like: drama, role play, art, double page spreads, learning about holy texts
  • Children articulate (in particular UKS2) where they have learned about religions through the school and identified that they were now learning about a different part of the religion
  • Children are really proud of their work, especially creative and written outcomes showing off their learning

Areas for improvement

  • Children said if anything, they would like even more art and creative tasks, more drama and generally more RE!
  • Staff to regularly remind children about how they know they are making progress in RE, explicitly referencing strategies such as marking, self-assessment and hot/cold tasks.

Whole school RE curriculum