Religious Education 

At The Meadows Primary, we believe that Religious Education contributes dynamically to our children’s education and all-round personal development. We believe through the uses of distinctive language and informed conversation, Religious Education develops children' skills of enquiry and response. Religious Education encourages children to reflect on, analyse and evaluate their own beliefs, values and practices and communicate their responses thus promoting mutual respect, tolerance and understanding across different cultures and communities. We recognise the variety of religious and non-religious families from which our pupils come. We welcome and celebrate this diversity, are sensitive to the home background of each child and work to ensure that all pupils feel and are included in our R.E. programme.

Our Religious Education curriculum provokes challenging questions about meaning and purpose in life, beliefs, issues of right and wrong and what it means to be human. The knowledge and understanding pupils acquire of a range of religions and worldviews from EYFS to Year 6, enables our children to develop their ideas, values and identities.

In EYFS, KS1 and UKS2, we follow the Stoke Agreed Religious Education syllabus, which covers Christianity, Islam, Judaism, the Hindu faith and Humanism. We do through Jigsaw RE.

In LKS2, we follow the Opening Worlds curriculum for RE, this involves:

• Thoroughness in knowledge-building, achieved through intricate coherence and tight sequencing;
• Global and cultural breadth, embracing wide diversity across ethnicity, gender, region and community;
• Rapid impact on literacy through systematic introduction and revisiting of new vocabulary;
• Subject-specific disciplinary rigour, teaching pupils to interpret and argue, to advance and weigh claims, and to understand the distinctive ways in which subject traditions enquire and seek truth;
• Well-told stories: beautifully written narratives and the nurture of teachers’ own story-telling art;
• A highly inclusive approach, secured partly through common knowledge (giving access to common language) and partly through thorough high-leverage teaching that is pacey, oral, interactive and fun;
• Efficient use of lesson time, blending sharp pace, sustained practice and structured reflection.