What is the quality of religious education and is it effective?

Our RE curriculum is based on the Hertfordshire Agreed Syllabus.  It uses the ‘Understanding Christianity’ and ‘Emmanuel’ resources to help plan for clear, progressive learning opportunities for pupils across the school.  This is a new model from September 2023 and has been changed to ensure that pupils can develop strong understanding of different world religions.  We have sequenced the curriculum to ensure that pupils revisit key learning in order to help them to remember more about world religions.  Those religions taught reflect the backgrounds of pupils within our school.

More information about our curriculum can be found on our RE page.

Teachers have all received training in how to deliver different parts of our curriculum, including in the Understanding Christianity resource.  This, alongside our religion-based knowledge organisers, help to ensure that fundamental knowledge is revisited and that we check for learning and misunderstandings.  

In class, pupils record their work in a number of ways.  Particularly in EYFS and KS1, class floor books are used to record reflections and to share points from group discussions.  For individual work, books are used or pupils participate in activities to aid memory and learning.  Each year group will attend at least one RE-based trip each year to enrich their curriculum learning.  

In the last few years, we have entered the NATRE Spirited Arts competition, where each class spent time exploring the idea of spirituality and how different things made them feel.  They then looked at the following quote and created their work.  Below are some of our winning entries, which were sent for judging nationally.

“We have far more in common than that which divides us”

Jo Cox.

Sunflower - by Evie

What If? - by Unnum

Holy Words - by Blake