RE
Religious Education
Religious Education is the core subject in the curriculum and influences all that we teach and enables us to develop the whole person, in partnership with you, our parents, as the first educators of your children.
Through religious education teaching and learning we aim to:
- Provide each child with the opportunity to develop their relationship with God.
- Promote knowledge and understanding of Catholic faith and life.
- Develop awareness and understanding of the impact of faith upon our daily lives.
- Foster attitudes of respect towards all who live in our society.
- Develop skills linked to the reflection upon and practice of religious belief.
- Engage with difficult questions of meaning and purpose, to enable children to think critically about their own questions.
- To offer children a real sense of worth by belonging to a caring Christian Community.
To deliver Religious Education, we use the ‘Come and See’ programme, recommended by Liverpool Archdiocese only in Years 5 and 6.
For the teaching and learning of RE, from EYFS to Y4 currently ( September 2025) we follow the Religious Education Directory entitled, 'To Know You More Clearly' as recommended by Liverpool Archdiocese. By the end of the academic year 2025-26 all year groups throughout the school will follow this curriculum.
The programme of study for Religious Education in Catholic schools presented in ‘To Know You More Clearly’ has a framework with four structural elements:
- Knowledge Lenses
- Ways of Knowing
- Expected Outcomes
- Curriculum Branches
Knowledge lenses set out the object of study for pupils; they indicate what should be known by the end of each age-phase. They are referred to as lenses, since they are the areas that we are looking at and they divide the content of the programme of study into four systematic subsections for the study of Catholicism and two additional lenses for the study of religious and worldviews.
The study of Catholic religion lenses are:
- Hear
- Believe
- Celebrate
- Live
The study of other religious and worldviews lenses are:
- Dialogue
- Encounter
Ways of knowing set out the skills that pupils should be developing as they progress through their curriculum journey. Whenever we know something, we always know it in more than one way: we remember it, we critically assimilate it and we put it into practice. All three are ways of coming to know the things that are the object of our study. The Ways of Knowing are an evolution of the age-related standards in Religious Education. The three Ways of Knowing are:
- Understand - head – see – what will I see and hear to help me understand?
- Discern - heart – judge – how will I discover more?
- Respond - hands – act – what can I do now?
Expected Outcomes are a synthesis of the content outlined in the Knowledge Lenses and the skills described in the Ways of Knowing. Each age-phase will have a prescribed set of outcomes that will indicate what pupils are expected to know, remember and be able to do, using the language of the Ways of Knowing and applying it to the discrete knowledge within each lens.
Curriculum Branches are the way this programme of study presents its model curriculum. The model curriculum presents the expected outcomes in six curriculum branches that correspond to the six half-terms of a school year. The model curriculum is rooted in the narrative of salvation history and leads pupils on a journey in each year of schooling that gives a sequence to the learning. As they revisit each branch in each year of school they come to a deeper understanding of its significance for Catholic belief and practice, which allows them to make links between the four Knowledge Lenses within the context of the narrative of salvation history. The six curriculum branches are:
- Creation and Covenant
- Prophecy and Promise
- From Galilee to Jerusalem
- From Desert to Garden
- To the Ends of the Earth
- Dialogue and Encounter
Religious Education in all Catholic schools must be taught for 10% of the timetable, as set out in guidance from the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales. In EYFS and Key Stage 1 this equates to 2hours and 10minutes per week and increases to 2 hours and 30 minutes in Key Stage 2.
All policies relating to R.E, Collective Worship, Spiritual and Moral Development, as well as Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) can be found under the Catholic Life section of the website.
A note from our Subject Lead...
I have been the RE Lead Teacher here at St. Anne's since 2006. I have a deep passion to provide exciting, meaningful and spiritual experiences for our pupils, allowing them to develop their own identity, no matter what their own faith and background is.
As a Catholic School, we are regularly inspected for our standards and provision of Catholic education. In our past 4 Section 48 inspections we have been graded as 'Outstanding' in the Catholic education that we provide for our pupils. Our last graded inpsection by the Catholic School's Inspectorate was in May 2023.
Sophie Volynchook - RE, Collective Worship & RSE Co-ordinator