Religious Education
The Purpose of Religious Education at St John’s CE Primary School
Religious Education creates challenging questions about the 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. It develops children's knowledge and understanding of the nature of religion and belief including Christianity, principal religions, other religious traditions and world views, in the context of a diverse society.
RE offers chances for reflection and spiritual development. It enables children to flourish individually, within our community and as citizens in a diverse society and global community. RE has an important role in preparing children for adult life, employment and learning through their life. It enables them to develop respect for and sensitivity to others, and enables children to challenge prejudice. In these ways it contributes to the wellbeing of children and promotes ways in which they help contribute to communities so they can live and work together.
The RE Curriculum
At St John’s Walham Green we aim to teach a Religious Education Curriculum accessible to all pupils that will maximise the outcomes for every child. We intend that our students have the opportunities to gain knowledge about Christianity and the other principal religions represented in Great Britain so that they understand the effect that faith and spirituality have on shaping an individual, a community and cultural life around the world.
We inspire our pupils to demonstrate both their knowledge about faith, and their skills in religious literacy, in the way that they interact with others in the classroom and the wider community, both now, and in the next stages of their education. We intend to teach RE throughout the school in a way that helps the children to make links with what they are learning in other subjects, and to build on their knowledge and understanding of faith whilst exploring our three Key Values, and how these underpin the choices we make and the ways in which we behave.
These Key Values are courage never to give up and to persevere even when the learning is challenging; compassion to help create a shared understanding of how to treat each other both inside and outside of the classroom and to appreciate that we all learn in different ways and at different paces; and wisdom to learn from our successes and our mistakes to help us make even wiser choices the next time. We use the London Diocese Board of Schools Religious Education Syllabus as the basis for our curriculum.
Collective Worship
At St John’s Walham Green, we aim for collective worship that is inclusive, invitational and inspiring. We aspire to give children of all abilities, all backgrounds, all faiths, or none, the opportunity to grow in spirituality. We do this through a variety of experiences: stillness, worship, prayer, reflection, story, festivals, singing and listening to music. Through collective worship we are encouraging children to appreciate the relevance of faith in today’s world, and to understand how it is lived out in the local church.
Through this experience they are encouraged to apply that learning to show compassion not only to those in our school, but to let those values spill out into the wider community, and to look beyond Fulham to the world at large. From the beginning of a child’s journey at St John’s Walham Green we intend to encourage a sense of awe and wonder, with a growing understanding that there is something or someone “more” than us. By the time a child leaves St John’s, we want their developing spirituality to enhance their development into well-rounded individuals, enriching their relationships with everyone they meet.
All of this is done with our three core Christian Values at the heart of everything: courage, compassion and wisdom. Courage never to give up and to persevere even when the learning is challenging; compassion to help create a shared understanding of how to treat each other both inside and outside of the classroom and to appreciate that we all learn in different ways and at different paces; and wisdom to learn from our successes and our mistakes to help us make even wiser choices the next time.