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Gathering Ideas for KS3 RE

Gathering Ideas for KS3 RE

Endoxa Learning is designing a new course for Key Stage 3 (year 7 – 9) Religious Education. Making and structuring the content requires knowing the curriculum. But at KS3 there is no standard for this. Instead, each county has its own committee called a SACRE which aims to produce a curriculum that matches the religions represented in the area and meet certain learning outcomes determined by the government and local leaders.

So we set out to find and read as many of these documents as we could. In all, we found 40 different lists of questions that would be appropriate to our critical thinking software. After deduplicating and rewriting many questions to be neutral, so as to provoke discussion, we now have a bank of 170 questions split broadly into three categories: Philosophy, Studying Religion, and Religion and Society. This will form the basis of the KS3 RE course.

This exercise has been time-consuming, but also very interesting. The variety of questions being posed to students around the country is impressive. And the representation of religions is not as you might expect. For example, Sikhism is the second-most represented religion in our study (after Christianity, which is compulsory for all regions), even though England census data shows it is the fourth-biggest religion.

The course will be ready by September. We are looking forward to a successful summer of KS3 content creation and more interesting discoveries!