Our Curriculum Intent for Religious Education

At Fleet Infants School we follow the Living Difference IV syllabus, the agreed syllabus for Hampshire Schools.

“Living Difference IV seeks to introduce children and young people to what a religious way of looking at and existing in the world may offer in leading one’s life, individually and collectively.  It recognises and acknowledges that the question as to what it means to lead one’s life with such an orientation can be answered in a number of qualitatively different ways”. Living Difference IV December 2021.

The children are taught RE through concepts that are familiar to them and that they have already met through their own life experience so far. We follow a 5 step Cycle of Inquiry (Communicate, Apply, Enquire, Contextualise and Evaluate) and explore concepts with the children from their first-hand experience before applying them to religious ideas. Concepts such as Welcoming, Thanking, Light, Celebrating and golden thread concepts such as Love, Belonging, Special and Community are explored in our curriculum. We teach the Christian and Hindu faith at Fleet Infant School but do not limit our pupils' learning to these religions. Our school community has a large range of different cultures and faiths and we welcome opportunities to learn about these from the children. We also celebrate festivals and important days from other faiths and cultures such as Diwali, Christmas, Chinese New Year and Easter.

In addition to class based learning, we also hold a weekly Christian assembly to share Christian bible stories and to reflect on how Christian’s use these to support them in living a Christian life. These are either run by staff or by the ‘Open the Book’ team from a local church. The children also visit our local church each year to support their understanding of the Christian religion.

Inclusion

The RE curriculum is planned to be precise and appropriately adapted and meet the needs of all learners.  Every child is entitled to an RE curriculum, that is adapted to meet their individual needs and allows them to be successful.  Teachers consider the barriers of the individual children and the key learning of each lesson; identifying the specific new learning. Teachers consider how to: 

• present new vocabulary with accompanying images to help embed specialist vocabulary

• Break down ideas into bite size pieces which a learner can master before moving onto the next idea. 

• Make links between topics and lives of learners

• Use photographs, video clips and artefacts to help learners visualise and understand practices which may be outside of their day to day experience

• Focus learner’s attention on the new content ensuring that all children are able to communicate their ideas and beliefs through the arts and technology.