Religious Education

Pupils enjoy their learning in Religious Education and achieve well.

From September 2024, we are moving towards using the new Religious Education Directory which is not yet statutory.

The new curriculum has 6 ‘branches’, each lasting approximately 1 half term.

Intent

 In our holy family, we all thrive socially, academically and spiritually to our fullest potential.

As a Catholic school, understanding the Catholic faith is key to everything we do.    Religious Education, as a subject, is a core subject at Holy Family.  It is the foundation of how our curriculum is structured.  We intend to provide the highest quality Religious Education for all, creating confident and knowledgeable individuals, who have a clear understanding of the Catholic faith and the faith of others, so that they can thrive socially, academically and spiritually as they continue their development journey into successful adults.

Implementation

 From September 2024, we moved to the new Religious Education Directory.

In the year September 2024 to July 2025, we rolled out the programs for Early Years, Year 1 (for Year 1 and 2), Year 3 (for Year 3 and 4) and Year 5 (for Year 5 and 6) to provide children with the opportunity to build up a strong foundation in skills and knowledge.  In September 2025 onwards, all year groups will move to their own year group objectives.

Teachers plan units together over the two years to support teacher knowledge and skills and to support workload and make the most of staff expertise.

A working party will continue their work to develop the Catholic Life of the School alongside the development of the Religious Education Curriculum.

Each unit begins with an adult led Celebration of the Word but will end with a pupil planned, led and evaluated Celebration of the Word for a range of audiences.  Each unit contains scripture, which is sourced from the Bible but supplemented with other sources depending on the age and needs of the children.

Within each unit children apply their reading and writing skills, mirroring the teaching and learning methods within the English curriculum.  At least one piece of extended writing is included within each branch.

Art, music and drama has a high focus to celebrate the joy of faith and to provide engaging and creative ways of learning and expressing ideas.

Children are encouraged to think more deeply about their learning through prompts during each unit that are tied to the key words relevant to the year group.

Pupils are assessed against the objectives for the branch on assessment sheets which are used to create accurate summative assessments on a termly basis.

Each lesson begins with a form of prayer, this may be in the form of a gather song (each year group allocated a hymn relevant to their age and the content of the branch)

Each lesson also begins with a memory meeting, focusing on the vocabulary sheets that are relevant to the branch and year group.  These are colour coded and show where pupils should have met vocabulary before, raising expectations and reigniting previous knowledge.