Intent

At Roman Hill Primary School, we believe that a high-quality religious education will help pupils’ gain a coherent knowledge and understanding, where they can articulate clearly and confidently their personal beliefs, ideas, values and experiences. RE is taught using the ‘Discovery RE’ scheme. It adapts an enquiry-based approach to teaching and learning. Religious Education is a key player in engendering knowledge and understanding however, does not teach children to passively accept, but rather encourages evaluation and critical thinking, equipping them to consider beliefs and positions they encounter. Progression is evident through building upon the pupil’s prior knowledge, allowing them to follow the steps of engaging and investigating the different religions, leading to the process of evaluating and expressing to ensure understanding and progress is made. This should inspire and build each child’s ‘religious literacy’, helping them to understand the nature and diversity of religion and belief in the world in which they live and the relationships between different groups of society.’ RE offers distinctive opportunities to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development allowing time for reflection, discussion, dialogue and debate. The Discovery RE scheme contributes to the British Values agenda.

Our curriculum uses a 4-step enquiry process ‘The key question for the enquiry is such that it demands an answer that weighs up ‘evidence’ and reaches a conclusion based on this. This necessitates children using their subject knowledge and applying it to the enquiry question, rather than this knowledge being an end in itself. Discover RE focuses on critical thinking skills, on personal reflection into the child’s own thoughts and feelings, on growing knowledge and nurturing spiritual development.’

Implementation

The knowledge in R.E. is taught across each year group in half termly modules that enable pupils to study in depth key understanding, skills and vocabulary. Each module aims to activate and build upon prior learning, including EYFS, to ensure better cognition and retention. Each module is carefully sequenced to enable pupils to purposefully layer learning from previous sessions to facilitate the acquisition and retention of key scientific knowledge. Each module is revisited either later in the year or in the following year to ensure pupils retain key knowledge and information. Planning All modules have a sequenced overview outlining recommended number of sessions, key concepts, knowledge and vocabulary to be taught. Teachers use this overview to plan individual sessions. All planning is based on the Discovery RE plans and then produced using our Discovery Planning template which incorporates cooperative learning techniques, key vocabulary, core concepts and a class profile to enable all teaching staff to effectively plan and support the needs of all pupils.

Impact

A combination of teacher, self and peer assessment is used to evaluate pupils' success at the end of each unit against the learning questions. Opportunities to revisit are built in to the spiral curriculum, ensuring key concepts are revisited when not secured.