RE

National Curriculum aims and purpose 

Our RE Curriculum at Peak Dale Primary School is based on the Derbyshire and Derby Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education (2020-2025). It provides the legal framework for a syllabus and all of our RE lessons follow the broad aims:

• To encourage pupils to explore questions of spirituality, identity, ethics, discrimination and prejudice.
• To enable pupils to develop an understanding of what it means to be a person of faith or no faith.
• To encourage pupils to articulate their own ideas about religion, belief and spirituality.
• To experience RE as an exciting subject that feeds into an understanding of what it means to live in Derbyshire and Derby City and our wider world
• To promote the endorsement of fundamental British Values, so that schools will be supported in visiting places of worship, community meeting places and communicating with different social groups across the local community.

(Based on the Derbyshire and Derby Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education (2020-2025)).

We feel that to do all of these things the children need to have confidence in themselves and the belief that what they have to say is important.  Alongside this is the importance of listening to other people’s viewpoints and recognising the importance of them to others without feeling it must be followed; we believe these are life skills for children especially in today’s modern world. 

Although spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (SMSC) is at the heart of all of our teaching, we do recognise that RE lessons offer more opportunity to develop children’s SMSC development than other subjects.

School curriculum aims 

We want our children to develop their individual knowledge and understanding of religions and beliefs in order to become open, principled and respectful citizens in contemporary society. In order to do this, it is vital that our children build-up both a rounded understanding of major faiths and the confidence and curiosity needed to form their own personal opinions. To that end, we have built on the Hertfordshire Agreed Syllabus for RE to provide an education that reflects the beliefs and needs of our diverse community. 

At Peak Dale Primary, children in every class are given opportunities to ask and answer provoking, challenging questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, beliefs about God, the self and the nature of reality, issues of right and wrong, and what it means to be human. We want to develop pupils’ knowledge and understanding of Christianity, of other principal religions, other religious traditions and worldviews that offer answers to questions such as these.  

Our children also have opportunities for their own personal development and wellbeing, by being taught to have mutual respect and tolerance for the diverse society we live in. This is also reflected in other parts of the curriculum such as Personal, Social, Health and Economic education (PSHE), geography and history. Children are given opportunities for personal reflection and spiritual development which allow them to deepen their understanding of the significance of religion in the lives of others – individually, communally and cross-culturally.