Horwich Parish CE Primary SchoolReligious Education
RE is taught as a discrete subject at Horwich Parish.
Intent
At Horwich Parish, we intend to offer a broad and rich RE curriculum, which will
- enable pupils to know about and understand Christianity as a living faith that influences the lives of people worldwide and as the religion that has most shaped British culture and heritage.
- enable pupils to know and understand about other major world religions and world views, their impact on society, culture and the wider world, enabling pupils to express ideas and insights.
- contribute to the development of pupils’ own spiritual/philosophical convictions, exploring and enriching their own beliefs and values.
As a Church school, RE makes a significant contribution to the Christian ethos of the school and is rooted in the message of the Gospel and the living faith of the school. However, it must be made clear that it is not the role of RE to indoctrinate or evangelise.
Our mission statement ‘With God’s help, lighting the way to love and respect’, underpins everything we do within school, and our teaching in RE provides opportunities for pupils to further explore how this relates to our everyday lives.
Implementation
The amount of time allocated to RE should be at least 5%. This is the minimum recommended in national guidelines. Christianity should occupy up to a maximum of 80%. Therefore, 20% RE Curriculum time should be devoted to non-Christian faiths and pupils will study aspects of the practices and beliefs of the other five major world faiths. (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism.)
Our RE curriculum follows the ‘Questful RE’ the Blackburn Diocesan Board of Education RE syllabus. By embracing the explicit teaching of Christian concepts and God’s big salvation story, it is hoped that the content of this syllabus will give pupils a deeper understanding of Christianity. Through an open investigative enquiry approach the pupils will be given the sense of being on a quest of discovery. A key feature of the syllabus is the large number of questions included in each unit. The purpose of these questions is to give pupils opportunity to investigate, reflect, evaluate and make meaning. In doing so they will discover more about themselves, their relationships with others, their relationship with the world around them and their relationship with God. In Church schools this quest for discovery takes place within a living and active faith community, where questions about faith and belief should be encouraged. The faith school community naturally guides pupils to discover answers to their questions. In addition, pupils need to have experience of a range of mainstream worldwide Christian denominations and other world faiths. Pupils are given as many first hand sensory experiences as possible. They need to see, hear, touch, taste and smell authentic Christianity and the other world faiths as they study.
Impact
We seek to ensure that all children in our school are encouraged to develop spiritually, academically, emotionally and morally to enable them to better understand themselves and others, and to cope with the opportunities, challenges and responsibilities of living in a rapidly changing, multicultural world. Regular collective worship and celebrations of learning help to celebrate the diversity of the school community and promote positive images of people in the wider community, including their beliefs, traditions, culture, language and history.
Our close links with Holy Trinity also enable the pupils to further develop their understanding of how important religion is to individuals and communities, and observe how it impacts their daily lives.