At St David’s school, we aim to promote tolerance and international awareness amongst our pupils. From early consideration on how we are all different in Foundation Stage, to later, in-depth discussions on the features of religious and non-religious worldviews in Year 6, we aim to provide societal understanding, through study and practical exploration. 

Through a range of teaching approaches (including text study, art, drama, music, speaking, listening and writing), we provide our children with clear insight into religions of the world and through memory checks and quizzes, we ensure knowledge is retained successfully. With themes centred on key questions, we aim to inspire our children as lifelong learners through interpretation, debate and evaluation. We strive to maximise connections within our international community to provide first-hand explorations into religious traditions, as well as focusing carefully on faiths outside of our context, thereby empowering our pupils as informed international citizens. 

Pupils’ inquiry, exploration and study is centred on the Service Children’s Education, ‘Religious Literacy for All’ syllabus. This provides the content that children at St David’s school learn in RE.

The programme is implemented in a number of ways. Pupils learn about Christianity in each key stage. In addition, pupils will learn about the principal religions represented in the UK. These are Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Judaism. This also supports the population representation across our MoD families and within our European locality. Furthermore, children from families where non-religious worldviews are held are also represented in our classrooms. These worldviews (including Humanism, for example) are also a focus for study.

In the Foundation Stage, children encounter Christianity and other faiths, as part of their growing sense of self, their own community and their place within it. In Key stage 1, beliefs, expressions and ways of life in Christianity, Islam and Judaism are examined. In Key stage 2, these faiths are studied further and non-religious world views are introduced. Research, reading, drama, writing, discussion and exploration of real-life experiences, provide the mechanisms for learning, which are underpinned by individual overarching key questions across a unit of study. (For example, Why do people pray?) Knowledge retention is a key aspect of the implemented programme, with quizzes to elicit and build on prior learning, prompt spaced recall and review the knowledge explored. Knowledge check assessments take place at the end of each unit of study to ascertain exactly what each child has learnt.