At Swillington Primary School, our mission is to provide a transformative cradle to career education that allows our children to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity.
Our RE learning is based on the The Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education in Calderdale, Kirklees and Leeds 2019-2024. Believing and belonging.
This syllabus is called Believing and Belonging because it includes two key elements. First, it is about beliefs and values. It aims to develop pupils’ understanding of world faiths and other beliefs, exploring their commonality and diversity. A good curriculum will ensure that there is both depth of study (some areas investigated in detail) and breadth (an overall general understanding of the faiths and related philosophical and ethical questions). Secondly, it is about ‘belonging’. It aims to nurture pupils’ awareness of the treasury of diversity as well as sensitivity to the questions and challenges that different views and cultures can present. Ultimately, we all share a common humanity and we share this patch of the Earth.
Our world is enriched by a wide and profound diversity of cultures and beliefs. Human beings are strengthened and empowered by learning from each other. Engaging and stimulating RE helps to nurture informed and resilient responses to misunderstanding, stereotyping and division. It offers a place of integrity and security within which difficult or ‘risky’ questions can be tackled within a safe but challenging context. Religious education contributes dynamically to children and young people’s education in schools by provoking challenging questions about meaning and purpose in life, beliefs about God, ultimate reality, issues of right and wrong and what it means to be human. This supports our value of staying safe and respecting our environment.
In RE, pupils discover, explore and consider different answers to these questions, in local, national and global contexts, through learning about and from religions and other world views. They learn to appraise the value of wisdom from different sources, so that they can develop and express their insights in response, and to agree or disagree respectfully. This supports our value of tolerance.
Teaching should equip pupils with knowledge and understanding of a range of religions and other world views, so that they can develop their ideas, values and identities. It should develop in pupils an aptitude for dialogue so that they can participate positively in society with its diverse understanding of life from religious and other world views.
Pupils gain and deploy the skills needed to understand, interpret and evaluate texts, sources of wisdom and authority and other evidence. They learn to articulate clearly and coherently their personal beliefs, ideas, values and experiences while respecting the right of others to differ.
Collective Worship
The school complies with the 1988 and 1993 Education Acts in providing a daily act of worship which is ‘wholly or mainly of a Christian character’, reflecting the broad traditions of Christian belief without being distinctive of any denomination.
We are in agreement with the Leeds Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education’s suggestion that the ‘broad traditions of Christian belief’ should include such themes as forgiveness, justice, love of one’s neighbour, festivals, the moral and spiritual dimensions of human experience as well as the teachings of Jesus.
Collective worship aims to promote those values which we believe a caring parent would wish to adopt. For example, kindness, compassion, understanding, honesty, consideration, empathy, encouraging respect for religious and moral values, and tolerance of other religions, races and cultures.
We take account of the family backgrounds of pupils and at times Assemblies will be held which embrace relevant themes shared by Christians and non-Christians alike. An Assembly is a valuable occasion when all can gather together to reflect or celebrate.
We hold a range of different types of Assembly throughout the week:
- Whole School Assembly every Monday. This may reinforce PSHCE themes relating to values and attitudes and include information about school events and organisation, a reminder of school rules and codes etc.
- Birthday Assembly KS1 every Wednesday KS1 celebrate the uniqueness and worth of children who have recently had a birthday.
- Key Stage 2 Assembly every Wednesday. Focuses on similar themes to the Whole School Assembly but can be more focussed on the older children.
- Celebration Assembly Fridays at 3.00pm. Parents are invited on a rolling programme (see newsletters for dates).
On days when the hall is being used, teachers hold a class assembly.
Parents have the right to withdraw a child from RE and/or Collective Worship. All such requests should be made in writing to the Headteacher. A provision will be made for any child so excused; a child cannot be excluded from the school for exercising this right.
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