Tower Hill Primary School
R.E. Policy
At Tower Hill Primary School we believe Religious Education enables children to develop knowledge and understanding of major world faiths and to investigate fundamental questions in life. Children reflect on what it means to have a faith and to develop their own spiritual knowledge and understanding. We help children learn from religions as well as about religions in order that they reflect upon and formulate their own beliefs, values and attitudes.
At Tower Hill we aim:
- For our children to be able to reflect on their own experiences and to develop a personal response to life’s questions.
- To develop empathy and respect for other people’s views through learning about other cultures.
- To celebrate the diversity in society.
- To develop an awareness of spiritual and moral issues in life experiences.
- To develop knowledge and understanding of Christianity and other major world religions and value systems.
- To develop an understanding of what it means to be committed to a religious tradition.
- To develop investigative and research skills and to enable children to make reasoned judgements about religious issues.
- To develop an understanding of religious traditions and to appreciate cultural differences.
Teaching and Learning:
Our Religious Education curriculum is formed using Hampshire’s Agreed Syllabus, Living Difference III which states that, ‘It is intended to provide the basis of good teaching in religious education and, as a result, be open to the plurality of ways in which people live within our local and national communities and the world’.
Engaging with concepts:
Through Living Difference III, we introduce units to pupils through engaging with and enquiring into concepts. This concept led approach acts as a tool for providing a ‘way in’ to each unit, based on pupils’ prior experience. The concepts are divided into three broad groups. As pupils move through the school, they progress from the simpler Type A concepts to the more complex Type C ones:
Type A concepts are common to all human experience -
For example, remembering, specialness, celebration, rights, duty, justice
Type B concepts are shared by many religions and are used in the study of religion -
For example, God, worship, symbolism, the sacred, discipleship, stewardship, martyrdom
Type C concepts are specific to particular religions: For example, dukkha, Trinity, tawheed, redemption, Khalsa, moksha, Torah.
The requirements of our curriculum are met through:
- discrete curriculum time;
- teaching through and in other curriculum areas;
- enrichment of the curriculum through visitors and events based on religious education activities such as celebration of festivals from a range of religions and cultures;
- school assemblies;
- visits to places of worship.
Monitoring and Assessment
Teachers assess children’s progress throughout the unit of work. This assessment and monitoring is achieved by work sampling, pupil interviews, displays in classrooms and lesson observations.
Resource Management
We are continually reviewing resources in our school to be able to teach all the RE units of work. In the library we have a supply of RE topic books and links are made on the planning to specific books for use in each unit as well as useful websites. Religious artefacts to support topics are labelled and stored in the resources cupboard and the Hampshire RE Centre provide topic boxes which the school can loan.
The Role of the R.E. Leader
The R.E. Leader is responsible for all medium term planning which is then given to class teachers. He /She will monitor the planning and delivery of the curriculum. The R.E. Leader will ensure that resources are up to date and that staff are aware of the resources which will support the delivery of their units.
