Statement of Principles

Religious and spiritual life is about learning to live well, being reflective about this, and realising the highest good in life. Religious Education involves deploying the resources of religious traditions and faith to that end. Religious traditions and beliefs are a significant resource for humanity. They can influence art, ethics, morality and the well-being of pupils1 and society, and they are resources which children need to be able to access. A good religious education will challenge shallow forms of religiosity and secularism2, and provide a means of countering the many types of extremism that take advantage of ignorance, undermining the cohesion and solidarity of society.

A primary aim is to teach children to be reflective, to acquire the criteria for making critical judgements and to exercise judgement. Thus equipped they will have developed the capacity for a person to become responsible/answerable to him/herself, to others and to the transcendent. With this outcome of responsibility in view, the traditional attainment targets are reconfigured in this syllabus to give priority to learning from faith, in the sense of forming dispositions (whilst eschewing any teaching of pupils that is manipulative, bullying or deceptive), instead of learning about religions, which is largely a matter of acquiring information

The means of enacting these principles is to explore common interests different religious traditions have in supporting the cultivation of agreed values and dispositions, thereby demonstrating a significant degree of moral consensus. If the initial stages of Religious Education emphasise shared, universal values, later stages need to begin to explore the distinctive features of the religious traditions, how they underpin attitudes to family life, the community and the environment, and how they have led to the main cultural expressions and civilisations of the world. The latter considerations will lead to close co-operation between religious education and other subjects in school with the development of cross-curricular links.

Religious Education must address the whole child and not simply the intellect; it must therefore nurture the emotions and the spirit. In practice this may mean that lessons are expressive, creative and kinetic, not exclusively cerebral and/or literate. The balance of these aspects will shift with the phases of education, and with the consideration of key religious concepts and the acquisition of the characteristic languages of faith (in particular their metaphoric nature, the latter being an important means of nurturing creativity, widening the horizons of pupils and of helping them to take interpretative responsibility by defining the meaning of the metaphor under consideration.)

There must be depth, as well as breadth, of understanding of differing religious traditions. To attain rigour and depth of understanding it may not be possible to study too many religions identifiably and systematically. Religious depth is not attained through sheer quantity in the number of faiths addressed, or attained by that means alone. For this aspect of the syllabus the study of three religions (one of which will be Christianity) may be more appropriate than the study of six3 (a reference to more may well be required by subject matter and audience). It is, therefore, not appropriate to specify a definite number of religious traditions for the syllabus as a whole; an approach that draws purposefully on differing traditions will be richer and more rewarding.