A Model for Religious Education
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How we behave and live our lives affects other people and the world we live in.
This is why our behaviour and ways of living are important issues.
Our behaviour is influenced by our attitudes.
Our attitudes are influenced by our experiences and beliefs.
RE is the opportunity to reflect on our experience of the world and the beliefs, values and attitudes that guide us through life.
We do this by exploring the beliefs, values, practices, and ways of living from the principal religions and different worldviews.
We all play a part in creating the world and society we live in.
What we believe, whether religious or not, contributes significantly to this.
RE helps pupils (and the school as a whole) to reflect on the ways in which beliefs influence how people live their lives.
Although RE is statutory, it justifies its place in the curriculum on purely educational grounds.
Buckinghamshire SACRE believes that religious education contributes to a wider vision for education in which the core purpose is human development. Knowledge and skills are of central importance, they are manifestly necessary, but not in themselves sufficient. Education is also about the development of people, their attitudes, and dispositions and how they relate to themselves, each other, and the world they inhabit. It is part of our development as human beings. All subjects in the curriculum should contribute to this, some more and some less so. Religious education has a particularly significant contribution to make because it is about a person’s way of experiencing, responding to and understanding the world. (see the Commission on Religious Education, Religion and World Views The Way Forward, A National Plan for RE 2018 page 4)
As with the previous versions of ‘Challenging RE’, experience is at the foundation of our approach. This experience is at an individual, an institutional and a universal level and it enables pupils to reflect on their own sense of value and identity through an open, critical, and academic exploration of Christianity and other faiths and worldviews.