RE at Birchfield School

“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” – Dalai Lama XIV

Intent:

At Birchfield Primary School, our Religious Education curriculum aims to enhance children’s understanding and appreciation of their own faiths and beliefs, whilst developing their understanding and respect of other religions. Our curriculum intends to help children develop a knowledge of world religions and to appreciate that religious beliefs shape life and behaviour and enhance their moral, social and cultural development.
Our RE curriculum aims to promote the Birchfield values of respect and curiosity. We encourage our children to ask questions and reflect on their own values and experiences. As well as this, we promote and include the British Values, ensuring that children are aware of their rights and responsibilities as UK citizens. Our curriculum is progressively mapped out so that children’s learning is appropriately demanding in terms of the age-related expectation. Through our curriculum, children will understand the importance of religion to the people of that faith; that people believe different things and that these beliefs are all acceptable and are all to be respected.

Implementation:

At Birchfield, our curriculum is implemented through 24 dispositions as set out within the Birmingham syllabus. R.E. is taught as a spiral curriculum with progression of faith knowledge in which the dispositions are taught with ageappropriate questions at each Key Stage. This means that by the end of Key Stage 2, our children will have developed their understanding of how different religions display these dispositions simultaneously and will be well equipped to draw upon similarities rather than differences between the faiths.
Lessons are planned and delivered in a variety of ways ensuring that all children can access and participate in lessons. Interactive, practical activities encourage the children to discuss their ideas, extend their understanding of difficult concepts and challenging questions and reflect on their own faith and thoughts.

Impact:

Children at Birchfield Primary School enjoy learning about other religions and demonstrate a positive attitude towards people of any religion or worldview. They demonstrate respectful attitudes towards different cultural and religious practice, symbols, and languages as well as having understanding of complex values such as friendship, trust, equality, tolerance and many others. This is not only measurable in the work produced in class and books, but also through the behaviour displayed by our children within the school which is transferable to the wider community.
At Birchfield, children feel confident in sharing their views and opinions with their peers and teachers. We learn about many different religions, as well as visit places of worship, this creates tolerance, develops better cultural awareness of the diverse society in which we live in as well as developing respect for all people at school and those that live in their community and beyond.

The impact of the curriculum is measure through:
• Ongoing assessment of children understanding skills and knowledge.
• Learning walks and book monitoring.
• Informal lesson observations.
• Pupil Voice.