RE Intent 

RE is a part of daily life at Brownsover Community School, with choral singing and prayers during assemblies and mindfulness moments of reflection in class. We want our RE curriculum to inspire curiosity and respect for others. We strive to help children identify similarities and celebrate differences between religions, preparing them for life in a diverse, multi-religious society. Our RE curriculum nurtures community relations, especially with Christchurch (our school’s local church) and we encourage visitors of all faiths to come and share their songs and stories from their religion. We also ensure our RE curriculum is reflective of the beliefs of our children and families and, as a school we strive to celebrate many important religious festivals with our community.

RE Implementation

At Brownsover Community School, we follow the Coventry and Warwickshire Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education 2017-2022. Children learn about the six major world religions. These religions include: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism.

Children in EYFS are often taught about these religions as they learn about religious festivals or holidays that are being celebrated at that time. Children will listen to stories, music and songs to develop their understanding of the religious celebration. The environment will include dressing up clothes, small world figures and artefacts for the children to explore. They are immersed in learning of the religious celebration.

Children in KS1 are taught RE weekly and units of learning are centred around a key question. Throughout our RE curriculum children are encouraged to share their knowledge and understanding through spoken language and class discussion. As our learning progresses, our understanding of the key question deepens. We may learn about different religions as part of one key question which helps us to identify similarities and common beliefs between different faiths. Where possible we use high quality texts to deliver our RE curriculum, which can include characters sharing their experiences of religious ceremony, festival or celebration. Religious artefacts are shared and explored with the children and we encourage children to share their own understanding of their religious beliefs too. We also use high quality videos to help children to begin to see their learning in a real life context.

RE Impact

The impact of the RE curriculum, that we deliver, aims for the children to be exposed to and to have an increased understanding of different religions and cultural practices so that they know about and understand a range of religions. They are then able to articulate their own beliefs, values and obligations clearly in order to explain why they may be important in their own and other people’s lives. We want pupils to develop their levels of religious understanding and express, with confidence, their ideas about religion and then to change their minds, if they choose to do so.