RE at Manor Wood

 

At Manor Wood, we believe that our world is enriched by a wide and profound diversity of cultures and beliefs. Human beings are strengthened and empowered by learning from each other. Engaging and stimulating RE helps to nurture informed and resilient responses to misunderstandings, stereotyping and division. It offers a place of integrity and security within which difficult or ‘risky’ questions can be tackled within a safe but challenging context. Religious education contributes dynamically to children’s education in schools by provoking 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.

Intent

In RE pupils discover, explore and consider different answers to these questions, in local, national and global contexts, through learning about and from religions and other world views. They learn to appraise the value of wisdom from different sources, to develop and express their insights in response, and to agree or disagree respectfully.

Our curriculum equips pupils with knowledge and understanding of a range of religions and other world views, including: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Sikhism alongside paganism and non-religious views; enabling them to develop their ideas, values and identities. Our teaching develops in pupils an aptitude for dialogue so that they can participate positively in society with its diverse understanding of life from religious and other world views. Pupils gain and deploy the skills needed to understand, interpret and evaluate texts, sources of wisdom and authority and other evidence. They learn to articulate clearly and coherently their personal beliefs, ideas, values and experiences while respecting the right of others to differ. 

Implementation

Our children explore faith and world views through six different Pathways:

	The nature of religion and belief	Beliefs, practices and values, and the diversity within religion: sacred things including buildings, festivals, rituals and books.
	Expressing Beliefs	How beliefs are expressed: words and other forms of communication like art, music, drama, dance, texts and poetry.
	A Good Life	How people treat each other fairly and live together without upsetting or hurting each other or the environment.
	Personal Journey	How people find wonder and awe including pilgrimage and life experiences.
	Influence and Authority	How religious and non-religious communities interact with the wider society and cultures.
	The Big Picture	Making sense of our world and our place in it.  Big questions of the grand narrative e.g. origin of the world.

 

Each pathway provides learning around three principles:

Substantive Knowledge

Substantive knowledge is subject-specific knowledge of faiths and beliefs and is guided by the ‘Believing and Belonging’ Curriculum developed and endorsed by our regional SACRE, which focuses on Big Ideas. We ensure pupils develop a rich knowledge of the following religious and non-religious worldviews over the course of KS1 and KS2 building on their knowledge of different religions as well as through the concept pathways.

Our curriculum reflects our local context and therefore includes a wide range of religions including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and Hinduism. These are introduced and their understanding is developed incrementally so that all learners build their substantive knowledge sequentially. In this way, all learners experience the breadth of faiths and beliefs in this country.

Teaching explicitly includes the study of both religious and other worldviews at every key stage. This recognises that one of RE’s most important contributions to education is enabling all learners to explore questions of meaning, purpose and value. This is important from a perspective of faith or non-religious understanding and recognises that many people do not adhere to formal religious structures.

 

Disciplinary approaches

Alongside subject specific substantive knowledge, the syllabus is designed to enrich other forms of learning. An education in religion and worldviews will be rooted in several distinct, but

complementary, academic disciplines, including study of religions, theology, philosophy, history,

sociology, psychology, literary criticism, creative arts, media studies and natural sciences. There will be an emphasis on a particular disciplinary approach depending on the area of study or key question concerned. 

We have chosen to focus on being:

Theologians – someone who studies the nature of God, religion and religious beliefs

Philosophers – someone who studies the most basic questions about human life.

Sociologists – someone studies the influence of groups on human behaviour and examine how societies develop and change.

Expressionists – Artists that create art that refers to the expression of subjective emotions, inner experiences and spiritual themes, as opposed to realistic depictions of people or nature

 

Personal awareness

Our RE curriculum provides rich and varied opportunities to develop personal knowledge and perspectives, both reflecting on the context of a pupil’s own background and offering space to evaluate and learn from the views and experiences of others.  This is achieved through discussion, debate and meeting a range of different people from across our community.  Our curriculum focuses on the concept that ‘Nobody stands nowhere’ and aims to encourage children to begin to understand and express their own worldviews.

 

Impact

At Manor Wood, our curriculum is built around our three Golden threads:  Alfresco, Read and Research and Believing and belonging.  Our RE curriculum provides opportunities to integrate opportunities for all three: building shelters to represent holy places or festivals, researching traditions and important people of faith alongside understanding what we believe as a community and how we can work together to belong through celebrating faiths from across our community in assemblies, performances and one-off events.

Interrupting the ‘Forgetting Curve’:

At Manor Wood Primary School, we are committed to interrupting the forgetting curve and ensuring that key knowledge ‘sticks’ with them as they move throughout school. 

We prioritise knowledge that is most important for our children to know and include it within each topic’s ‘sticky mat’ which is an integral part of all RE lessons and is a tool for pupils to refer back to as they move through a unit. We also embed key knowledge from units which children have studied in prior year groups through the implementation of our ‘Super Six’ and ‘Fantastic Four’ half termly iterative tests.