Religious Education

In Religious Education at Glendower, our aim is to encourage pupils to acquire a knowledge and understanding of religious beliefs and practices and to adopt a reflective approach to living in a pluralistic society. This, we hope, will enable pupils to develop personal skills in forming reasoned opinions based on evidence and argument.

Religious Education forms a distinctive element in our curriculum at Glendower and it fosters a total development of the pupil. There are, of course, many cross- curricular links and RE has strong links with Literacy, Art, Music, History, Geography and PSHE though there are links in other subject areas too.

We strongly believe that the ethos of a school has a huge effect on pupils and we aim to create an atmosphere where it can be accepted that religion and a spiritual life can be a vitally important and genuine dimension of human life.

We approach the teaching of RE with the following principles in mind:

• We value and try to celebrate the religious beliefs and values of pupils and we hope that this will encourage pupils to share their own experiences in class.

• We convey to the pupils that all religions and communities are treated with respect and sensitivity.

• We enable the pupils to understand that all religions studied contribute to their general education.

• We aim to use religious artefacts, Music, Art, DVDs to share knowledge, raise awareness and reinforce understanding.

• Most importantly, we visit churches, synagogues, temples, art galleries, museums and exhibitions to add richness of experience and understanding for the benefit off all pupils.

By using many of the experiences outlined above, pupils will then be in a strong position to meet the requirements, as set out in the RE programme of study-and these are:

AT1: Learning about religion/s

AT2: Learning from religion/s

During the course of the KS2 experience, the pupils will cover programmes of study in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and we try, too, to touch on Sikhism and Buddhism.

Each pupil receives one lesson per week.

We hope that pupils will enjoy and learn from this course of study and we hope too that it reinforces the important attributes of respect, sensitivity, open-mindedness, critical awareness and, importantly too, wonder and curiosity.