Religious Education at New Park

At New Park Primary School, we believe that Religious Education contributes dynamically to our children's education and their all-round personal development. We recognise RE's leading role in promoting our pupils' spiritual, moral, cultural, mental, and physical development whilst also preparing our children for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. 

Our Religious education curriculum provokes 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. 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. 

The teaching and implementation of the R.E. curriculum at New Park Primary School is based on the Liverpool LEA Agreed Syllabus for RE (2020).

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.

The locally agreed syllabus for RE aims to ensure that all pupils:

• know about and understand a range of religions and worldviews.
• are able to express ideas and insights about the nature, significance and impact of religions and worldviews.
• acquire and deploy the skills needed to engage seriously with religions and worldviews.

Opening Worlds 

In Year 3 and Year 4, we follow a knowledge-rich humanities programme for teaching Religious Education. The ambitious curriculum is characterised by strong vertical sequencing within subjects (so that pupils gain security in a rich, broad vocabulary through systematic introduction, sustained practice and deliberate revisiting) and by intricate horizontal and diagonal connections across terms and subjects. 

Features of Opening Worlds:

• 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;
• rapid improvement of teachers’ teaching through systematic training in the Opening Worlds evidence-informed, high-leverage techniques.