We follow the ‘Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education’ for Derbyshire and Derby City.

All state schools must teach RE to pupils at every key stage. This RE Syllabus for Derbyshire and Derby City establishes what shall be taught in RE, providing teachers with practical support and guidance about how to teach RE effectively.

The Derbyshire and Derby City Syllabus for RE aims:

• To ensure that every pupil’s statutory entitlement to RE is met, irrespective of their faith or belief, and within this to encourage pupils to explore questions of spirituality, identity, ethics, discrimination and prejudice.

• To enable pupils to develop religious literacy and conceptual understanding of what it means to be a person of faith or no faith.

• To encourage pupils to articulate their own ideas and experience of religion, belief and spirituality. • To encourage all pupils and teachers to experience RE as an exciting subject that feeds into an understanding of what it means to live in Derbyshire and Derby City and our wider world communities and to promote harmony and good community relations.

• To encourage teachers to produce RE lessons that are challenging, inspiring and engaging to everyone.

• To assist pupils to engage critically with ideas and understanding of religion and belief systems, given the nature of our society, its speed of change and growing social media influences. RE studies how religions and world views shape and are shaped by the societies in which pupils live, promoting deepening understanding of those belief systems.

• To promote interactive, creative and experiential learning that promotes social and ethnic accord alongside the endorsement of fundamental British Values, so that schools will be supported in visiting places of worship, community meeting places and communicating with different social groups across the local community.

The threefold aim of RE

The curriculum for RE aims to ensure that all pupils:

1. Know about and understand a range of religions and worldviews, so that they can:

• describe, explain and analyse beliefs and practices, recognising the diversity which exists within and between communities and amongst individuals

• identify, investigate and respond to questions posed, and responses, offered by some of the sources of wisdom found in religions and worldviews

• appreciate and appraise the nature, significance and impact of different ways of life and ways of expressing meaning.

2. Express ideas and insights about the nature, significance and impact of religions and worldviews, so that they can:

• explain reasonably their ideas about how beliefs, practices and forms of expression influence individuals and communities

• express with increasing discernment their personal reflections and critical responses to questions and teachings about identity, diversity, meaning and value, including ethical issues

• appreciate and appraise varied dimensions of religion.

3. Gain and deploy the skills needed to engage seriously with religions and worldviews, so that they can:

• find out about and investigate key concepts and questions of belonging, meaning, purpose and truth, responding creatively

• enquire into what enables different individuals and communities to live together respectfully for the wellbeing of all

• articulate beliefs, values and commitments clearly in order to explain why they may be important in their own and other people’s lives.

Content and sequencing

Progression

Our progression document for RE maps out the key concepts and aspects that children should know throughout each phase of school.  From EYFS to Y6, children are exposed to a range of religions and non-religious world views from the agreed syllabus. Key questions for each topic focus on one of the 3 areas: ‘believing’, ‘expressing’ and ‘living’.

 

Strand and unit mapping

The Derbyshire and Derby City syllabus has units that fall into three strands. These strands are believing, expressing and living. The religions suggested for the units are noted under the units.

 

Long-term overview

Our long-term overview maps out the coverage of each unit across KS1 and KS2.

Knowledge organisers

· Skills are dependent on specific knowledge. A skill is the capacity to perform or discuss and in order to do this a deep body of knowledge needs to be acquired and retained.

· This knowledge should be what pupils retain forever. In other words, this knowledge is within their long-term memory and will be retained.

• Knowledge organisers contain the key sticky knowledge for each RE unit and map out the key tier 3 vocabulary that will be taught and learnt within the unit.

Retrieval practice and schema development

• Children will regularly revisit taught content at the start of each lesson. This will ensure that new knowledge builds on previously taught knowledge and concepts, ensuring that children make links between what they have learn and develop coherent schema.
• Flashback Fridays are held once every 4 weeks. Children will revisit knowledge, concepts and vocabulary taught within previous RE units and year groups to ensure that not only do they know more, but they also remember more.

Click on the image below to see an example of an RE Flashback quiz. 

Subject on a page 

Click on the button below to view our RE 'subject on a page' document which summarises our curriculum intent and implementation.