Religious Education

RE Department: Curriculum outline 2010-2011

Students receive two hours of RE per fortnight across all year groups and the programme of study follows the guidelines contained in the City of York Locally Agreed Syllabus for RE.

Key Stage Three

The aim of the KS3 RE curriculum is to enable students to study the different aspects of religion – the nature of God, Prayer, Worship and Sacred space – and then apply this knowledge to some of the major world religions and famous religious figures.
Therefore in Year Seven there are three units of work; Beginning Religion, Sikhism and the Life of Jesus. Year Eight also has three units of work; Islam, Hinduism and Christianity through Bible Stories. Year Nine has one unit of work: Buddhism.
Students do a baseline assessment in RE when they join the school, and then seven further levelled assessments; three in Year Seven, three in Year Eight and one in Year Nine. The new programme of termly homework tasks in RE link to these assessments.

Key Stage Four

Students follow one of two accredited courses in RE which they start at Christmas in Year Nine and which follows through into Year Ten and Eleven. These courses enable students to achieve a GCSE grade in the subject whilst also fulfilling the statutory nature of RE in the curriculum.

Most students will follow a GCSE Short Course entitled “Religion and Life”. This has four units of study and has half the content – but not half the difficulty – of a GCSE Full Course. The four units are Believing in God (religious upbringing, arguments for Gods existence, problem of evil and suffering), Matters of life and death (Life after death, Abortion, Euthanasia), Marriage and the family (Attitudes to marriage and family, sex and contraception, marriage, divorce and homosexuality) and Religion and Community Cohesion (equal rights for women, living in a multi-ethnic society, racial harmony). Students sit one exam at the end of Year Eleven; there is no coursework option.

Some students will follow a GCSE Full Course. This includes the short course detailed above plus a further course entitled “Religion and Society”. This extra unit also has four units of study: Rights and responsibilities (conscience, Situation Ethics, Human rights, democracy, genetic engineering); Environmental and medical issues (Stewardship, infertility treatment, transplant surgery, Pollution and global warming); Peace and conflict (United Nations, Just War theory, attitudes to war and bullying) and Crime and punishment (theories of punishment, capital punishment, problem of drugs and alcohol). Students sit two exams at the end of Year Eleven; there is no coursework option.

Students will also sit exams in Year Nine, Ten and Eleven to assess their progress and to give them experience of formal exams; these do not count towards their final grade.

RE

RE Full Course