Religious Education
We are the RE Ambassadors for 2023-2024
Religious Education at St. Antony's invites each child to enter into a personal and profound relationship with Christ. We are committed to allowing each individual to explore their own faith and develop their relationship with God and what HE wants them to be. It respects and promotes each child's innate capacity for wonder, awe, reverence and spirituality. Our teaching of Religious Education enables children to continually deepen their theological understanding and be able to communicate this effectively.
Curriculum
As a Catholic School we are committed to the Catholic Faith holding Religious Education at the heart of the curriculum. This allows our children to relate the knowledge gained through Religious Education to their understanding of other subjects in the curriculum.
It is allocated a total teaching time of approximately 10% of available curriculum time for each year group, as recommended by the Bishops of England and Wales. Planning and timetables take account of this. The 10% time allocation does not include collective acts of worship; it is specific RE teaching.
At St Antony's we strive to ensure that the children receive the best quality teaching across the curriculum as well as RE. All Religious Programmes are to be directed by the Religious Education Curriculum Directory (3-19) for Catholic Schools and Colleges in England and Wales.
The RE Curriculum is delivered primarily through the diocesan approved Religious Education Programme, ‘Come and See’ - central to this programme are three basic human questions and the three Christian beliefs that are the Church’s response in faith:
Where do I come from? Life-Creation
Who am I? Incarnation
Why am I here? Redemption
Within the ‘Come and See’ programme, these three big questions are considered, in the light of the Scriptures and Tradition of the Church; as expressed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council and the Catechism of the Catholic Church
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Come and See
Catholic Education Religious Programme which we follow and adapt for our weekly RE lessons.
Catholic Social Teaching
Catholic Social Teaching is: The underlying insight is that everyone has the right and responsibility to live in our world constructively, not destructively, and to ensure that we leave it in a better state than when we entered it.
At the core of Catholic Social Teaching are a number of key concepts and principles.
EYFS Workshop on Solidarity delivered by Bob Turner from Cafod (October 2024)
Class Saints
Each class has their own saint which they will learn about. This gives the children the opportunity to learn about a range of saints in great detail throughout their time in school. Through their learning, the children will celebrate the lives of the saints and take guidance from how they lived their lives to make Christ known to all. By learning about the life of saints, it is a constant reminder that we ourselves are called to be saints.
Year 3 writing about their class Saint, St. Lucy.
On the feast day of the class saint, the children will hold a special celebratory. Their learning is shared for all to see with a display in their classroom about their class saint.
Children will all celebrate the feast day of St Antony on June the 13th with a whole school mass.
Learning about other World Faiths
Learning about the religion and cultures of those who do not share the Catholic faith is one of the ways in which Catholic schools embody the call to love one’s neighbour. As the Church says, “The love for all men and women is necessarily also a love for their culture. Catholic schools are, by their very vocation, intercultural.” (Congregation for Catholic Education p61).
At St. Antony’s, as part of our RE teaching, there is an diocesan requirement that encourages us to celebrate other world faiths and teach our children about the similar values that can be found in the world faiths practised in our communities. Our children learn how members of that faith community live as a family and how they worship. Just like Jesus showed respect for those within and outside his own faith community, the children learn to respect the beliefs and traditions of others. This prepares our children for life in modern Britain, giving them an understanding of the beliefs of others. This in turn will improve social cohesion and contribute to the common good by increasing mutual respect between those of different religions.
As part of our RE curriculum children take part in two, week long Inter-Faith Weeks and have the opportunity to visit other places of worship and also listen to visitors talk about their own faith. We are very fortunate to work closely with the Blackburn with Darwen Inter-Faith Forum.
Key Stage 2 visited a local Mosque for a World Faith study of Islam. (June 2023)
It is always so joyous for our Muslim children to share their faith we us. They delivered a fascinating assembly. (June 2023)
