Religious Education

Religious Education Department Curriculum Intent

The overriding ambition of our RE curriculum is to support the school vision of enabling every child to achieve more than they think they are capable of achieving – a vision which is at the heart of everything we do as a school. We see this as reflecting the words of Jesus, “I have come so that you may have life and have it to the full.” John 10:10.

The outcome of Religious Education at Sacred Heart is:

“religiously literate and engaged young people who have the knowledge, understanding and skills – appropriate to their age and capacity – to reflect spiritually, and think ethically and theologically, and who are aware of the demands of religious commitment in everyday life.”

Religious Education Curriculum Directory

We therefore seek:

To present engagingly a comprehensive content which is the basis of knowledge and understanding of the Catholic faith
To enable pupils continually to deepen their religious and theological understanding and be able to communicate this effectively
To present an authentic vision of the Church’s moral and social teaching so that pupils can make a critique of the underlying trends in contemporary culture and society
To raise pupils’ awareness of the faith and traditions of other religious communities in order to respect and understand them
To develop the critical faculties of pupils so that they can relate their Catholic faith to daily life
To stimulate pupils’ imagination and provoke a desire for personal meaning as revealed in the truth of the Catholic faith
To enable pupils to relate the knowledge gained through Religious Education to their understanding of other subjects in the curriculum
To bring clarity to the relationship between faith and life, and between faith and culture

We also aim to address the following trends that affect the teaching of Religious Education:

rapid developments in communication and information technology that have led to a web based proliferation of competing sources of ‘authority’
the privatisation of morality and a focus on personal choice rooted in feelings has increased the domination of the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in moral reasoning
the influence of the ‘New Atheism’ and the rejection of the supernatural
the widespread yet fallacious view that science and faith are opposed to one another
the rich diversity of religious practice found in modern Britain, including the growth of Islam

The primary purpose of Catholic Religious Education is to come to know and understand God’s revelation, which is fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.

GSO Test

Religious Education