Religion, Philosophy and Ethics
We believe that high-quality RE teaching supports our pupils' religious literacy. We follow the Norfolk Agreed Syllabus to teach our RE curriculum. The syllabus focuses on being religiously literate meaning that our pupils will have the ability to hold balanced and well-informed conversations about religion and world-views. We want our pupils to be able to make sense of religion and world-views around them and begin to understand the complex world in which they live RE is primarily about enabling our pupils to become free thinking, critical participants of public discourse, who can make academically informed judgements about important matters of religion and belief which shape the global landscape.
How do we teach and enhance children's knowledge in Religious Education?
The purpose of RE is to develop religious literacy. The essential outcomes for RE are therefore related to the knowledge and understanding of religion and world-views. There are many other desirable outcomes for RE. For example, the subject may also contribute significantly to the following broader educational aims but is distinct from and not reducible to these:
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- Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development
- Personal, social, health and citizenship education
- Reading and writing
- Vocabulary development
- Spoken language
- Numeracy and mathematics
- British Values
How do we ensure coverage and progression in Religious Education?
Pupils' progress is assessed in relation to the purpose and aims of the subject. Therefore, this primarily concerns how well pupils are able to hold balanced and well-informed conversations about religion and worldviews. Attainment and progress are therefore linked to the multi-disciplinary approach to RE advocated throughout our RE curriculum.
What is the impact of Religious Education at the Coastal Together Federation?
We believe that through our RE curriculum our children know about and understand a range of religious and non-religious world-views by learning to see these through theological, philosophical and human/social science lenses. Our RE teaching allows our children to express their ideas and insights about the nature, significance and impact of religious and non-religious world-views through a multidisciplinary approach. They gain and deploy skills rooted in theology, philosophy and the human/social sciences engaging critically with religious and non-religious world-views.
The Norfolk Agreed Syllabus
The Norfolk Agreed Syllabus 2019 charts a new way forward for RE, placing the subject within strong academic disciplinary traditions. This syllabus builds on the enquiry-based pedagogy advocated in 2012 but aims to raise expectations of both teachers and pupils in terms of the scholarly study of religion and worldviews.
This syllabus is part of an ongoing discourse within the RE community and provides a framework for continued discussion as teachers build their curriculum around this new approach. A school's RE curriculum should be set within the broader intent of the whole school curriculum. This syllabus is designed to support school leaders by clearly stating the intent, appropriate implementation and potential impact of RE on the lives of children and young people so that they can flourish in a changing world.
How do we understand RE as a multidisciplinary subject?
Our curriculum ensures that we assert that RE is rooted in three key disciplines or disciplinary fields. These are:
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- Theology
- Philosophy
- The human/social sciences
Subjects are re-contextualised from disciplines which are a society's primary source of new knowledge. The link between subjects and disciplines provides the best guarantee we have that the knowledge acquired by students at school does not rely solely on the authority of the individual teacher, but on the teacher as a member of a specialist subject community.
