Religious Education

Our worldviews significantly influence how we navigate our lives and how we respond to life’s unanswered questions. At Portfield, we have chosen to help our pupils explore these views by implementing Kapow’s Religion and Worldviews scheme which has been designed to cultivate open minded and reflective individuals. It encourages pupils to engage with challenging questions while drawing connections between different worldviews. 

Our Curriculum Coverage at Portfield

The Kapow Religion and Worldviews curriculum aims to ensure that pupils:

• know and understand a range of religions and worldviews and the diversity that exists within them

• can explain their ideas on how worldviews influence people and life's big questions

• have the skills to investigate key concepts 

The scheme is designed around three significant areas of learning: substantive knowledge (core facts about religion and worldviews), personal knowledge and disciplinary knowledge (how to think when studying religion and worldviews). Although they serve different purposes within the curriculum, these three strands work together to help build pupil understanding. Each strand weaves throughout the scheme using a spiral curriculum approach where knowledge is sequenced so that, over time, it is revisited and built upon with increasing complexity. 

Through the substantive knowledge strand, pupils learn about a range of organised religions and worldviews. They examine some key religious concepts related to beliefs, practices, wisdom and morality, and community and belonging by looking at specific worldviews in more detail. They begin to recognise that some concepts are specific to particular religions, such as ‘incarnation’, but that others, such as ‘prayer’, are common across a variety of belief systems. The scheme also ensures that pupils explore real examples of expressions of faith to highlight diversity within the same religion. 

It is also important for pupils to develop a sense of their own worldviews or ‘personal knowledge’, becoming aware of their own ideas about life’s meaning and purpose. As they advance through the scheme, pupils should come to appreciate how their values, beliefs and experiences shape their interactions and perceptions of different worldviews. 

Through the disciplinary knowledge strand, pupils become increasingly competent using a variety of methods to make sense of the worldviews they study. They investigate by observing religious practices, reading case studies, questions followers, interpreting data, exploring historical artefacts and analysing texts. By investigating in this way, pupils practice a number of disciplines related to religious studies.

Each unit of work is structured around a thought provoking question like, ‘What happens when we die?’, ‘What is a prophet?’ or ‘Is scripture central to religion?’. Pupils follow a process of inquiry to answer these and in doing so develop their understanding of religion and non-religious methods and practices further.