Religious Education Curriculum

At St Mary’s, our identity as a Church of England school strongly informs our intent for our RE curriculum.    We aim for our children to learn, understand and embody our School Christian Values (known as the Sunshine Six) of: Honesty, Forgiveness, Compassion, Courage, Perseverance and Respect.  We want our children to be well informed in their knowledge of Christianity and other world faiths so that they can speak with knowledge, understanding and empathy about faith.  We want our children to develop a respect for faith through learning about and from world religions and for this learning to engage pupils in exploring questions, reflecting on their learning and developing their own spiritual, moral, social and cultural awareness. We aim to prompt pupils to consider their responsibilities to themselves and to others, and to explore how they might contribute to their communities and to wider society encouraging empathy, generosity and compassion.

Religious education is used as a driver for all of our learning projects.  Our curriculum uses values to link learning so that children can make connections between different areas of the curriculum and retrieve knowledge well. We begin every learning project (one per term) with an RE unit of learning where the project values are explored.  For example: in Y3 they ask the Project Question: ‘How does food bring us together?’ and study the values: ‘Community, Sharing, Choice, Happiness and Compassion’. Sikhism is used to launch this project and the children explore: Why is there a kitchen in a Gurdwara?

Three times a year, we also study an ‘Understanding Christianity’ unit, which follows the liturgical calendar: Incarnation at Christmas; Salvation at Easter and God & Gospel at Pentecost.  These units are special as they are a time when children have the opportunity to learn about the faith that is the foundation of the school; they learn about Christianity and from it, making links to their own lives and the life of the community.

All of the RE knowledge and skills is mapped out in our ‘Religious Education Progression Document’ and our medium term planning for RE.  Instead of ‘Aims’ as learning intentions, we use questions to introduce the learning in lessons and measure their success based on how well children can answer them at the end.  RE units are planned by our RE leader, Senior Leaders and with the support of the incumbent at St Mary’s Church.  Throughout our RE learning sequences we use ‘Deeper Thinking’ questions to enable children to demonstrate their understanding and link our RE learning to their own lives.