At Burnside Primary School, our Religious Education (R.E.) curriculum is designed to nurture resilient, mindful, accepting, and inquisitive learners. We believe that high-quality R.E. is essential for helping children understand the diverse beliefs of others while making meaningful connections to their own personal values.
Our R.E. curriculum is driven by big questions and the understanding that learning develops through shared experiences, conversations, and connections. It is explicitly structured around our school motto, be safe, be smart, be kind, ensuring every pupil is supported to thrive, achieve, and belong.
How R.E. Reflects Our Values
Be Safe: We create a respectful, non-judgmental environment where children feel safe to share their personal beliefs, ask big questions, and reflect on their own identities. This supportive space builds self-confidence and emotional resilience, allowing pupils to thrive.
Be Smart: Following the Northumberland Agreed Syllabus for R.E., pupils develop deep religious literacy, learning to engage thoughtfully with a range of world religions and non-religious worldviews. By building critical thinking skills, analysing religious practices, and understanding complex ethical issues, children gain the knowledge needed to achieve.
Be Kind: R.E. plays a central role in cultivating empathy, tolerance, and respect. Using an ethnographic approach, children relate to real stories, celebrations, and traditions of diverse families within our local community and across the globe, ensuring everyone feels a true sense of belonging.
Our Approach: An Ethnographic View of Faith
To help pupils connect authentically with world religions and non-religious worldviews, we use an ethnographic approach. Children explore faith through the lived experiences of real people—using stories, artefacts, visitor visits, persona dolls, and shared celebrations.
This journey of belonging develops progressively across the school:
Early Years: Children start by looking closely at belonging within their immediate family and home routines.
Key Stage 1: Pupils expand their understanding to see how people belong to our school and local community through shared traditions and places of worship.
Key Stage 2: Children explore wider regional, national, and global faith communities, examining how beliefs shape identity, culture, and issues of justice and truth in the modern world.
Syllabus Aims & Framework
Our teaching is grounded in the Northumberland Agreed Syllabus for R.E., which aims to ensure that all pupils:
Know about and understand a range of religions and worldviews, recognising their significance locally, nationally, and globally.
Express ideas and insights about the nature, impact, and questions raised by different faiths and beliefs.
Acquire and deploy skills needed to engage seriously and respectfully with religious and non-religious worldviews.
We welcome and celebrate the diverse backgrounds of all our pupils, ensuring our R.E. curriculum promotes spiritual, moral, social, and cultural (SMSC) development for every child.