Religion and World Views

Vision

At Thomas Reade, our vision is to cultivate a learning environment whereby every child, regardless of background, discovers the beauty of diversity, fosters a deep respect for all religions and worldviews, and develops a strong moral compass. Our religious education lessons seek to ignite curiosity, nurture open-mindedness, and instil a deep sense of empathy in line with our school vision ‘every child matters’. In addition to this, we aim to instil values of kindness, tolerance, and empathy, preparing our students to contribute positively to an interconnected world with wisdom, compassion, and a profound appreciation for the rich tapestry of religious beliefs and world views.

Intent

The purpose of this RE Scheme of Work is to give pupils from EYFS through to Year 6 a coherent picture of Christian worldviews and a range of other worldviews as appropriate to each Locally Agreed Syllabus. It will take pupils on a journey through a range of concepts driven by three core strands: Beliefs and questions, Community and identity and Reality and truth. These strands will create connections between substantive and the disciplinary knowledge, and the units will include opportunities for the development of personal knowledge. The aim is to develop curiosity in pupils and equip them for future learning about, as well as enabling them to make sense of, the complex world of religious and non-religious worldviews.

Implementation 

The scheme of work has units of work written by teachers, working in collaboration with RE experts and funded by Bayne Benefaction. The units will focus on the core content and the disciplinary lens appropriate to that unit. Prior learning and future learning will be included to ensure that every lesson is clearly part of the overall aim. Depth will be developed largely, but not exclusively, through the teaching of Christian worldviews. Within each year group the concepts explored in the worldviews units will link with the Christianity units as well as developing ideas from the previous year’s teaching. Many schools have invested in the Understanding Christianity resource, so each Christian worldview unit could be replaced by a unit from that resource. Suggestions have been made in the scheme, but schools will need to be mindful that Understanding Christianity has a strong theological focus, so some adaptation to include the social science and philosophy strands will be needed.