Religious Education 

At Ashby Hill Top, it is our intent that all children will know about and understand a range of religions and worldwide views as well as developing an empathy and understanding of how people are different to themselves.

We have designed our own RE curriculum to reflect the demographic of our current cohort of children. Our school is predominantly white and non-religious with a small minority of children being Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and a slightly larger demographic of Christians. In Leicester and Leicestershire, the most recent census in 2011 stated the following data regarding the amount of people who identified as different religions or non-religion.
With this data in mind, as a school, we follow the Leicestershire Agreed Syllabus for RE and have ensured that the specific topics and units within this Syllabus, that we feel the children will need to develop the most knowledge and understanding in, have been selected as our core questions to be taught across our two-year rolling programme e.g. Who is a Muslim and what do they believe? (Year 1/2)

The Leicestershire Agreed Syllabus ensures that we cover a wide variety of religions and aims to ensure that the children:

• know about and understand a range of religions and world views
• express ideas and insights about the nature, significance and impact of religions and worldviews
• gain and deploy the skills needed to engage seriously with religions and word views.

We provide our children with a varied RE curriculum, focusing on those religions they are most likely to encounter outside of our immediate town and village locations. For example, in Year 1/2, we focus predominantly on Christian and Muslim faith (with a much smaller focus on Judaism), Lower Key Stage 2 introduce Hinduism and Upper Key Stage 2 explore non-religious beliefs such as atheism and hedonism.
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We have also ensured that the knowledge the children develop from EYFS onwards is revisited and expanded on throughout a child’s journey through our school. For example, the Early Years RE question of ‘What times are special and why? is revisited and expanded on through each subsequent year group with ‘How and why do we celebrate special and sacred times?’ in Year 1/2, ‘Why are festivals important to religious communities?’ in Year 3/4 and ‘Is it better to express your beliefs in art and architecture or in charity and generosity’ in Year 5/6.