Religious Education (RE)

The context of RE at Ramsden Infant and Nursery School is that of a small urban infant and nursery school, serving children in the age range 3-7.

We teach according to the ‘Revised’ Cumbria Agreed Syllabus for RE (2023.) Religious Education for the Future – Understanding religion and worldviews for life in a changing world.

We recognise the variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds from which our pupils come. We welcome diversity and we intend to be sensitive to the home background of each child. We actively seek the support of religious and non-religious members of our local community to support our teaching of RE.

Intent

RE at Ramsden Infant and Nursery School will be provided in line with the legal requirements. These are:

To enable pupils to make academically informed judgements about matters of religion and belief which shape the local and global landscape.

· To develop pupil’s religious literacy so children will have the ability to hold balanced and well-informed conversations about religious and non-religious worldviews.

· To encourage pupils to be curious and enabled to learn about the wisdom and beauty of religions and worldviews and to see that religion isn’t fixed, it is living, dynamic, changing, evolving throughout the world.

The time allocated for teaching RE at Ramsden Infant and Nursery school will usually be 40-60 minutes per week. This may well be through cross curricular topic work where the requirements for RE correspond and can be linked well.

Implementation

RE is a core area of the curriculum.

RE may be one 60-minute lesson a week or it may be used flexibly to enable cross curricular links, more sustained or thematic work.

Staff have planned RE in the light of the Revised Cumbria Agreed Syllabus.

Nursery/Reception: Pupils explore religious and non-religious worldviews in terms of special people, special times, special places, special books and special objects (Christianity and Buddhism)

Year 1 cover the Christian and Islamic Faiths (Islam is picked up again in KS2)

Year 2 cover the Christian and Buddhist Faiths (progression from Reception)

Our policy is to aim to ensure the use in RE of art, drama, thinking skills, speaking and listening activities, visits, posters, photographs, videos, ICT use, display work and other active learning strategies. Cross curricular work is encouraged as we recognise the importance of teaching RE in a creative, knowledge-rich, broad and balanced way. RE contributes significantly to the following broader educational aims:

· Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development

· Personal, social, health and citizenship education

· Reading and writing

· Vocabulary development

· Spoken language

· Numeracy and mathematics

· History

· Anti-Racism

· British Values

· The Prevent Duty

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Resources

We have a wide range of resources, to support our RE teaching, that we continue to develop. Physical resources are stored in cupboards in the Hall and in teacher’s own classrooms. There are various resources on the server also. We maintain an RE story shelf in the library, which offers many stories from different traditions. There is a range of RE ‘big books’ which can be used across the age range as well. The RE subject leader is responsible for carrying out an audit each year in order to update our collection.

Visits and Visitors

Ramsden Infants School has strong links with St Marks Church and all year groups visit regularly at significant times of year and when we are invited to special events like The Yarn Bomb. The Vicar of St Marks does assemblies in school for us and we are also visited by Open the Book on a regular basis who perform engaging stories from the Bible and get the children involved in taking parts, singing songs and discussing the morals of stories and how we can apply them in our everyday lives.

Reception visit Conishead Priory, the local Buddhist temple in Ulverston, as part of their ‘Buddhism’ topic and we hope to establish contact with, and arrange visits to, the Mosque when it is built in Dalton.

Impact

Pupils will be able to make sense of religion and worldviews around them and begin to understand the complex world in which they live.

Pupils will be able to talk about their personal worldview.

Withdrawal

We note the Human Right of parents to withdraw their children from RE and of teachers to withdraw from teaching the subject.

We aim to provide an open curriculum which can be taught to all pupils, by all staff.

Please come and talk to us about any concerns you may have about the teaching and learning of this subject.