Changing the tin - a curriculum change journey

Sometimes fortune favours the bold – and sometimes it lands in your lap. Looking back on the last two years of transforming my school’s RE curriculum into a Religion & Worldviews curriculum, I’ve had a bit of both. 

I volunteered to take over as the (then) RE lead in January 2019. It seemed like a good challenge taking on RE in a Church of England school. I had seen the importance of good knowledge of religions whilst traveling the world with the armed forces and the chaos that can be wrought upon the world when religion is twisted to political ends. I was always a little aggrieved at how important knowledge could be reduced to “some colouring in on a Thursday afternoon” as one child described it.   

What was clear was our curriculum needed a major overhaul – but where to start? 

It just so happened that I had picked a brilliant time to want to change our curriculum: Norfolk was about to get a new Agreed Syllabus (AS). The new AS introduced a multi-disciplinary pedagogy (which they call lenses) alongside a number of other recommendations for the 2018 CoRE report (It was in that new AS that I first read about this idea of Religion & Worldviews). This was the knowledge rich, engaging and downright meaty learning that I wanted to see in our curriculum. The 2019 AS also gave a lot of freedom for schools to design their own curriculum to suit their school.  

Now there was an opportunity – but how to realise it? 

Where are we? 

I now had a new pedagogy and a great resource to make a start with but what to do? Well, a bin bag and a blank sheet of paper. The old curriculum could not be bodged to fit the new AS and it would be a disservice to try. Therefore, it was time to start afresh.  

I audited our old curriculum and found a few major issues: 

1. There was little rigor or knowledge. A lot of Learning from RE (to use the old terminology) but little learning about religions. Pupils could go a whole term without reading a religious text or other source of authority.  

1. “Our stuff and their stuff” That phrase kept coming up: children saw RE as either “their stuff” meaning Christianity and “other stuff” meaning any religion that was different. This also led to another issue... 

1. “I don’t believe in God so why do I need to learn this?”. RE lessons were polorised: either children grumbled as they saw Christian RE lessons as some sort of collective worship/indoctrination, or learning about “other” religions as some sort of geography come PHSE lesson. I never got to the bottom of this, as it was nothing to do with the old curriculum or how it was taught. This also gave me my biggest issue with our current RE... 

1. Children did not see religion as part of a shared human experience. Children saw religion as a way of dividing people; a way of marking difference rather than shared ideas show in different way. The idea that Allah and God were one and the same amazed pupils. That Jesus was in the Bible and Quran even more so.  

These were 4 big issues that meant a new approach was needed. My school is a typical rural Norfolk school: over 95% White British and Christian or of some sort of Christian heritage even if identifying as No Religion. Problems 2-4 could be met by finding connections, starting our learning in Christianity and then branching out following thematic similarities. We would no longer do a Christianity unit and then a Hinduism unit, we would do some Christianity and then link on to a similar concept in Hinduism.  Equally, I wanted to embrace the complexities of religion whilst doing this. To talk about worldviews and denominations and dispel the idea of monolithic religions. To my pupils ‘Christianity’ was the Church of England – most thought Catholicism was another religion entirely.  

You can do things the easy way, or you can do them the right way. I could slap a new name on RE (calling it Religion & Worldviews) give staff the Understanding Christianity resource and then fudge about around the edges of our old curriculum trying to mash them together. It would probably keep staff happy (because no one likes change) and might eventually come good. Yeah, no. Time for a proper plan.  

My plan appeared straight forward: introduce a multi-disciplinary pedagogy with fresh units that started with Christianity and then linked thematically to one or more religions or worldviews. Simples. Sort of.  

Staff were excited for a new curriculum and a new way of teaching and were mostly enthusiastic to embrace the change. With Change Management (or any good leadership) you need to set the direction and then provide the resources. So, what did staff need? 

1. Training in the new pedagogy. As a primary teacher you might get a few hours training in RE on your PGCE or be lucky to find a 1-day course during your NQT year.  

1. A new curriculum. If you want people to believe in a change, they need to build it themselves. Me dropping lessons from upon high was going to be a ridiculous amount of effort on my part for minimal return.  

1. The subject knowledge. The new pedagogy was rigorous, only problem was none of us – including me - had any learning in RE past GCSE or A Level (bar one who had been an RE teacher before changing to Primary). 

Needs identified it was time to hunt out the resources. Well, to cut a long story short, they didn’t exist. At that point there was no training in mutli-disciplinary pedagogy. Nor did there appear to be any guidance on teaching theology at primary (well, not that I could find!). Nor was there a fully-fledged curriculum close to what I envisaged.  

What I did have thought were some starting resources: Understanding Christianity, a colleague who had been an RE teacher and (now this was some luck) our school vicar – who also used to be an RE teacher.  

Getting going 

Sometimes you have to start in the middle and work from there. Understanding Christianity was a good crutch. It gave themes within Christianity that we could then work outwards from to link to another religion. And by “we” I really mean my incredibly humble former RE teacher colleague who did all the link mapping. An absolute hero who refused any form of public thanks.  

To start with, I could either get staff using the new pedagogy or the new curriculum content, but not both. Too much of a challenge, too many new ideas to juggle in an already packed school curriculum. It was time for a trial run using the new content. Staff had a term (or two units) to have a practice and feedback. I did no monitoring during this time unless invited in. We had staff meetings where staff shared their success and I shared how I’d made a mess of it and what I thought was needed to be better. This gave staff a chance to discuss their CPD needs using my mistakes as their examples.  

We then needed staff CPD for the new pedagogy and to enhance subject knowledge, especially in theology. But none existed that I could find. So, I decided to design and deliver my own. Boldly naive, but I was given a lot of help and support by our school’s vicar. He patiently spent many hours helping me build training and guiding me in understanding the Religion & Worldviews research I was reading. Although this proved invaluable effort: I knew where the pitfalls in the training were – I'd fell into them first.  

I rolled out the training in phases every half-term. Each time a new feature of the pedagogy or curriculum was added in. Over the course of 2019 the staff and I built our curriculum. We fed back each half term, sharing successes and adding in CPD and coaching sessions where needed. Colleagues were enthusiastic, taking on the next step without grumbling. I was grateful many times over for the advice from Dr Kathryn Wright and staff from the Norfolk SACRE who read over my curriculum plans and gave their much better-informed opinions.  

2020 didn’t completely de-rail our plans either. RE was now seen by children as a rigorous and engaging subject. They carried on with our new curriculum during Home Learning. “You have to think, and not find the answers and we don’t do any colouring in” as one child enthused during a pupil voice interview in November 2020.  

It was during this round of staff and pupil voice interviews that I concluded the change we had been leading had been realised. Our old RE curriculum was gone, the new Religion & Worldviews pedagogy and curriculum was in place.  

There was only one thing left to do: change the name of the subject.  

I presented the idea to staff, explaining that we were already “doing” Religion & Worldviews so it was time to change the name of the subject and the labels on the books. This seemed monumental, I expected lots of questions and maybe some resistance to such an overt change. What I received were smile and OKs. The contents of the tin had been changed; we were now putting the right label on it. The only request from staff: “Please can you print the labels out for us? The colour copier is so slow.” 

My fiancé was in that meeting. Driving back, I asked her how she though the meeting had gone. It had all seemed too easy; too simple. All the way through this change staff had been positive, supportive and engaged. I had expected a final hurdle. Was it really that easy?  

“Yes, everyone gets it. We are just putting the right name on it now.”  

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What have I learnt from this 2-year process? 

• If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing properly and in a suitable amount of time.  

• It is worth getting out of your depth and asking the stupid questions.  

• Find the experts and ask for help. As a primary teacher, you are unlikely to be an expert in the subject (or even have an A level in it). Connect with Secondary or HE colleagues. Find your local NATRE group and join in.  

• Plan, plan and plan some more. I had a 3-year plan for our curriculum transformation (in the end it took only 2). 

• Communication. Keep everything important written down and in one place. Listen to staff and integrate their input. Our curriculum document is now in its 6th iteration.