Religious Education

At Drapers’ Brookside, we understand that RE plays a significant role in the development of pupils’ personal spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, helping them to learn about themselves as well as about those around them.

“When I speak about learning from religion, I am referring to what pupils learn from their studies in religion about themselves.”

Michael Grimmit

RE at Drapers’ Brookside gives pupils the opportunity to explore and understand a range of religions and worldviews. Drawing on both resources provided by teachers and the experiences of their peers, pupils develop the skills to express ideas and insights about the nature, significance and impact of the religions and worldviews studied during their time at our school. RE teaching inspires children to be creative and ask ‘big’ questions, whilst also engaging with different beliefs and perspectives in a respectful and sensitive way.

Our Religious Education Curriculum Implementation

We use the Discovery RE lesson planning resource to explore RE through an enquiry based approach. Christianity is taught in every year group, with concepts around Christmas and Easter revisited every year to build towards more complex understanding and thinking in these key areas.

Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism are included, and the programme provides flexibility so the demographic of the school can be considered. Each unit has a theme and a ‘key question’ for pupils to consider, which demands that they weigh up ‘evidence’ in order to reach a personalised conclusion. Pupils use a mix of learning ‘about’ and learning ‘from’ religion in order to form these answers, and the programme focuses on important aspects of critical thinking, personal reflection and spiritual development.

Key Skills

Pupils will be supported to:

• Learn about religion
• Learn from religion

They will do this through the four step enquiry method, which includes:

• Engagement
• Investigation
• Evaluation
• Expression