The intention behind our RS curriculum at Plymouth High is not to teach just for exam results, we teach to enable our students to begin to contemplate the interconnectedness of all our lives, “We teach to know we’re not alone”.

One of our favourite moments in KS3 occurs in the summer term of year 8 when we, in the context of investigating ‘Spiritual intelligence’, introduce our students to a discussion around a quotation from the film ‘Shadowlands’, the biographical film about C.S. Lewis. (We then watch and discuss this film and Lewis during year 9). The film is filled with memorable quotations, but the one we focus on is “We read to know we’re not alone.”  This is very similar to the intention behind our teaching of Religious Studies.

In Religious Studies we seek to help our students:

• Develop lively, enquiring minds together with a positive wish to learn, to question and to argue rationally and to apply themselves intelligently to tasks
• Respect the religious, spiritual and moral values of others, and to consider thoughtfully their own attitudes, values and beliefs and develop a sense of self-respect and individual worth, a capacity to live as independent, self-motivated adults with the ability to live and cooperate with others.
• Acquire knowledge about beliefs, ethics and morality, an understanding of concepts such as suffering, freedom, choice, as well as skills such as effective communication, justifying points of view, analytical writing, all of which are linked to, and relevant to, a rapidly changing world.
• Our curriculum very much supports, and links with, the work of the Personal, Social and Health Education and Wellbeing programmes in school and takes account of the Prevent strategy

Please find below the full details of the course in our: Religious Studies Curriculum and Assessment booklet