Religious Education (RE)

As a Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School, Religious Education is taught in line with the Cheshire West and Chester Agreed Syllabus (July 2019). This is supplemented by material supporting our Christian Ethos from the Diocese of Chester which enables us to provide a rich and varied curriculum covering key concepts and ensuring that quality resources are used such as Understanding Christianity to reflect our school vision ‘Children are at the heart of everything that we do and Christ is the light that guides us’ John 8:12.

We teach Religious Education in a progressive and continuous way throughout school. The children explore key religious concepts (Creation, Discipleship, Incarnation, Resurrection, God, Christian Community, Salvation, Holy Spirit, Forgiveness and World Religions)  that start with a key question, encouraging oral discussions that value everyone’s contributions and puts the children themselves at the heart of everything we do. Our lessons support our children in developing their understanding of the concept through: making links to their own beliefs and experiences, exploring the bible and other important religious texts, asking questions and recording their responses. 

Philosophy for Children (P4C) strategies are often used to encourage children’s thinking about challenging questions, and teachers act as facilitators rather than knowledge-givers. Traditional P4C follows a series of stages. Children see or read a stimulus, think about the ideas in it, create questions, evaluate the questions, and then choose one to talk about, investigate and explore further.

We evaluate our children's learning against the key questions on our long term plan as they progress through a unit of work.

Trips out and visitors into school are carefully tailored to the current religious topic. Through pupil voice our children regularly say they love the trips and visitors because they are fun and exciting. 'Our weekly worships with 'Open the Book' are particularly popular amongst our children. 'I love to hear the Bible stories and get a chance to act out the story', I liked the story of the tax collector because it had an important message and was fun to act out', 'The Good Samaritan was my favourite story as I got to dress up'. Our children's work is valued and displayed in our individual RE books, around school and on Twitter. The very high standard of RE at Lostock Gralam has been recognised by the school achieving the Gold RE Quality Mark (2018).

Sex, Relationships and Health Education within our RE curriculum

At Lostock, the SRE curriculum we deliver is guided by our faith in God and our connection to the Church and the Diocese. The Church of England have developed a RSE programme for schools entitled ‘Goodness and Mercy’ and as subject leaders and SLT at Lostock we have consulted with the parents and governors of our school and decided to adopt this in our school, but with adaptations relevant to our school core values, our mission statement and the needs of our children and families.

The core principles of our policy and SRE curriculum

Guided by our statutory requirements as outlined in the DfE document ‘Relationships Education, Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education (RSHE)’, our policy and SRE curriculum aims to teach our children about relationships:

• Families and people who care for us
• Caring friendships
• Respectful relationships
• On line relationships
• Being safe

And about physical health and mental wellbeing:

• Mental Wellbeing
• Internet safety and harms
• Physical health and fitness
• Healthy eating
• Drugs, alcohol and tobacco
• Health and prevention
• Basic first aid
• Changing adolescent body

We teach about relationships in the context of the school’s aims and values.  It is important to build positive relationships with others, involving trust and respect. Children are taught to have respect for their own bodies. We promote health education through our curriculum and encourage children to make the right choices. The focus of children’s health education is on learning the characteristics of good physical health and mental wellbeing and the steps children can take to protect their own and others’ health and wellbeing. Daily exercise and fitness is a significant feature of our daily practise with children as part of this.  We consult with parents on all matters of our health education policy and look positively at any local initiatives that support us in providing the best relationships education programme for our children within a Church of England setting.

We are Christian Artists:

Files to Download