Religious Education

Intent

RE at Weetwood provides our pupils with the knowledge and understanding of all world faiths and other world views to allow them to develop their own views, beliefs and identity in an accepting and diverse community. RE allows our pupils to learn from each other and their experiences and celebrate the differences in lifestyles and practices. At Weetwood, we encourage all children to apply what they have learned to their own behaviour to enable everyone to work alongside each other in a happy, caring and respectful environment.

 

Implementation

At Weetwood we follow ‘Believing and Belonging in West Yorkshire’, The Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education in Calderdale, Kirkless and Leeds. RE is taught weekly from Year 1 to Year 6 with the support of the accompanying units of work.  Although we do cover all 6 main religions through assemblies and other activities, we cover Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism in greater depth, allowing children to see similarities and differences across all religious beliefs. RE follows an ‘enquiry based approach’, giving our pupils key questions to answer, using a combination of their own experiences and religious facts to develop their knowledge and understanding and allowing them to apply what they have learnt to their own life.

At Weetwood, we embrace real life experiences for all our pupils and all year groups will visit at least one place of worship each year to experience what they have been learning about. We welcome visitors from all faiths and beliefs and believe this is crucial for developing children’s understanding, respect and empathy for different religions. Our pupils, of course, play a huge rule in sharing their own lifestyle, practices and beliefs and are always encouraged to share their experiences with others.

 

Impact

Through a clear progression of skills through each unit of work and across the whole school, all children should be able to answer key questions about the religion they are studying and how it impacts on their own lives. Although all children will be assessed against the key objectives for each unit in all years, the ultimate aims is to ensure that all children have a well-balanced and reasoned understanding of the different religions taught and the coherence of them in our community.