Religious Education

 

ACHIEVE - LEARN - FLOURISH 

The Aspire Learning Federation is made up of two schools - Elm Park Primary School and R J Mitchell Primary School in the London Borough of Havering.

At Elm Park Primary, we believe that a robust RE curriculum is central to pupils’ academic and personal development. The role that RE plays in instilling respect and empathy in our pupils is not undervalued, and it is vital to promoting social cohesion in our diverse society. 

Religious education contributes dynamically to our children’s education by provoking challenging questions about meaning and purpose in life, beliefs about God, ultimate reality, issues of right and wrong and what it means to be human. In RE, pupils learn about and from religious and non-religious worldviews in local, national and global contexts, to discover, explore and consider different answers to these questions. 

Throughout the year, all pupils visit a Place of Worship to give real world context to their learning from the classroom, and to allow them to further discover, explore and consider religions and world views. By exploring links and commonalities between religions, children really get to the root of the curriculum, and across their time at Elm Park Primary they develop a good understanding of how we are united as humans within and across religions and worldviews.

We follow the Havering Agreed Syllabus, taking units of work from the syllabus and implementing them using the guiding principles of CUSP. The curriculum is designed cumulatively so that knowledge and skills are built upon year by year, with pupils’ understanding of the concepts  ‘belief’, ‘belonging’ and ‘worship’ being deepened and developed as they move throughout their primary school journey. Frequent retrieval practice and spaced retrieval practice ensure knowledge is committed to long term memory, allowing for the working memory to make connections when new knowledge is introduced. 

Pupils at Elm Park Primary School learn about religious and non-religious worldviews by being exposed to authentic sources, such as holy books, artefacts and religious and non-religious leaders and believers. They interrogate surveys and carry out interviews. This gives them an insight into the discipline of RE and how theologians, philosophers and sociologists come to know what they know. Disciplinary knowledge is built on in every year group so that pupils become experts in the subject by the time they leave primary school.

Religious Education Overview