Religious Education

At Ham Dingle, we believe that a high-quality religious education will help pupils’ gain a coherent knowledge and understanding, where they can articulate clearly and confidently their personal beliefs, ideas, values and experiences.

RE is taught following the Dudley Agreed Syllabus‘which covers Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism, meeting the needs of the curriculum and deepening understanding. The carefully selected content of the Agreed Syllabus enables us to provide a consistent whole school approach to RE as well as supporting British Values, Anti-radicalisation, critical thinking and Growth Mind-set and Personal Development

Progression is evident through building upon the pupil’s prior knowledge, allowing them to follow the steps of engaging, enquiring and exploring the different religions, leading to the process of evaluating and expressing to ensure understanding and progress is made. This should inspire and build each child’s ‘religious literacy’, helping them to understand the nature and diversity of religion and belief in the world in which they live and the relationships between different groups of society.

RE offers distinctive opportunities to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development allowing time for reflection, discussion, dialogue and debate.

At Ham Dingle we always aim to include all children. However, we recognise that parents have the right to withdraw their child from Religious Education, which forms part of the school’s basic curriculum. For any requests to withdraw your child from religious education, please contact the school to arrange a meeting wiht the Headteacher in the first instance. The Headteacher will invite parents into school to discuss their concerns, clarify the nature of the RE provided by the school and set out the options open to the parents as set out in education law. Where a pupil is withdrawn from RE and they do not take part in alternative religious education they will be supervised by an appropriate member of staff whilst doing work set by their parents which will seek to further their knowledge and understanding of their parents beliefs and values. At Ham Dingle this will normally take place in the child's classroom whilst the other children participate in the RE lesson.