Supporting your MAT: meeting your RE needs
Everything your MAT needs for exceptional RE all in one place. With over 60 years of experience supporting more than 10,000 schools and reaching 3.5 million pupils, RE Today offers a complete ecosystem of RE support. From strategic leadership and curriculum development to professional learning, departmental reviews and ready-to-use classroom resources, our services work together to help your trust deliver high-quality, legally compliant, and inspiring Religious Education across every school.
RE Today Who we are RE Today is an education charity that supports Religious Education (RE) and teachers of RE. We are committed to the teaching of values in all our work and focus on worldviews, including the major world faiths. We promote high-quality, accurate and fair representation of their teaching and practises in all our materials and services. Recent conversations with SLTs across the UK have highlighted the following needs and priorities in many MATs and schools: Understanding the legal requirements for RE provision and curriculum coherence Keeping up with changes in RE; for example, the Syllabus changes, balancing diversity with both religious and nonreligious worldviews, and ensuring ways of knowing in RE and personal knowledge Improving teachers’ subject knowledge Ensuring RE is inclusive and provides ample learning opportunities Teaching sensitive topics and difficult questions, and facilitating respectful discussions Implementing meaningful and manageable assessment in RE Managing the right of withdrawal Being prepared for inspections and deep dives into RE Achieving consistency in quality and content across MATs Anticipate forthcoming changes to the National Curriculum and prepare your school for what’s ahead.
How can RE Today support you? We can support your MAT through a combination of the following services for your RE leaders and teachers: Expert consultancy and training Agreed Syllabus consultancy review Substantive knowledge Ways of knowing / disciplinary knowledge Personal knowledge Primary + Secondary phase middle leader training 1-2-1 and/or small group consultancy Development of quality assurance using a variety of sector specific frameworks Support for new RE teachers and leaders, including ECTs, middle and senior leaders Subject knowledge enhancement for religious and nonreligious worldviews GCSE and A Level pedagogy and practice across all boards and specifications
Building better Primary RE: a trust-wide journey of curriculum renewal. Case study by Russell Gray, Regional Director of Schools, Astrea Academy Trust Faced with high levels of disadvantage and inconsistent subject expertise, Astrea Academy Trust used the end of local Agreed Syllabus cycles as an opportunity to reimagine primary RE. Russell Gray reflects on building subject knowledge, leadership capacity, and curriculum coherence across 18 schools. What did Astrea need? Astrea Academy Trust is a thriving group of 26 academies across South Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire. Eighteen primary settings are located within the Barnsley, Doncaster, and Sheffield local authorities. These schools serve communities with high levels of deprivation. Forty-six per cent of primary pupils are eligible for the government’s Pupil Premium, compared with 25 per cent nationally. The proportion of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities is also above average. During the autumn term of 2023, our South Yorkshire primary schools were in the final years of three different Agreed Syllabus cycles and were expecting imminent relaunches from their respective SACREs. In many of our schools, RE had taken a back seat post-pandemic, as staff focused on the academic and pastoral recovery programmes so desperately needed by our young people. Recognising that the end of the current Agreed Syllabus cycles provided a natural opportunity to strengthen our curriculum and approach, we decided to adopt a single Agreed Syllabus across the Trust. Our aim was to build on our academic and pastoral strengths and better prepare our young people for their futures within their communities and beyond. We wanted to meet the ambition of RE being both ‘intellectually challenging and personally enriching’. With one school year to prepare for a Trust-wide launch, our first task was to establish shared, fundamental principles. Trust leaders believed that, to be both inclusive and meaningful, religious education should be grounded in the experiences of the pupils, families, and communities we serve. However, contexts across our schools differ significantly. In some, Islam represents the pedominant religious worldview among pupils. In others, worldviews broadly rooted in a white British, Christian heritage prevail. This challenge led us to engage deeply with research, guidance, and national reports in order to shape a more holistic approach. The 2018 Commission on Religious Education Final Report helped us refine our thinking. We wanted to ensure that the teaching of RE: Reflects the changing religious and non-religious diversity of the UK and the wider world Is inclusive of, and relevant to, children and young people whose worldviews may span religious and non-religious perspectives Approaches the subject through the lens of worldviews, incorporating religious and non-religious, Personal and communal, individual and organised, plural and diverse perspectives, to help pupils navigate a complex world of religion and belief The National Content Standard for Religious Education, published in September 2023, provided our agreed Purpose of Study. Our strategic reading highlighted the complexity inherent in both curriculum planning and classroom delivery in RE. We suspected that this complexity might not be fully understood at school level. A survey of our school leaders confirmed this. Across eighteen settings, we identified just one leader with formal training in RE and only one school where the RE subject leader had engaged in significant subject development since 2016. In effect, we had only two individuals with substantial subject knowledge across the Trust’s primary phase. Whatever we did next, building capacity and capability would be essential. We recognised that our Agreed Syllabus would need to be supported by a fully resourced, high-quality scheme of work. Our non-specialist teachers, supported by nonspecialist leaders, needed confidence that the curriculum they delivered would be both academically rigorous and coherent. We wanted to avoid any disconnect between the Agreed Syllabus and classroom materials. In January 2024, we formally partnered with RE Today.
How did RE Today help?
RE Today has been involved in writing locally Agreed Syllabuses for more than 30 SACREs across England and has a strong reputation for high-quality school support and subject-specific consultancy. This was the ideal opportunity to adopt the RE Today fully resourced ‘Primary RE Curriculum’ aligned to the Agreed Syllabus that met our needs. Within six weeks of our initial engagement, we had secured our first Trust-wide Agreed Syllabus, adopted a fully resourced Curriculum for learning, and registered all primary teaching staff as NATRE members. With clear goals and appropriate curriculum structures in place, we allocated six weeks for leadership training. Astrea principals drive school improvement, so our initial training focused on them. We wanted RE to be understood at a strategic level. Each principal needed to grasp the academic, social, and personal dimensions of the subject, and the principles underpinning the new syllabus and scheme of work. If principals understood this complexity, implementation would be guided by more than simply delivering a scheme. This understanding prompted careful consideration of RE subject leadership. We were clear that this could not be a matter of automatically reappointing the existing subject leader. Principals were asked to identify staff who could lead a significant implementation project involving new content, expectations, and approaches. The chosen teachers needed to engage with a subject that is both academically demanding and personally enriching. They also required sufficient knowledge of their local community context to map the curriculum meaningfully and adapt resources to reflect pupils’ starting points. By Easter 2024, eighteen teachers had been selected and retrained alongside their principals to lead the implementation of the new Agreed Syllabus and scheme of work. The summer term of 2024 was devoted to schoollevel training in preparation for full implementation in September. Many subject leaders trialled new units, explored lesson structures, and considered how these would translate into classroom practice. Others refined their approaches to INSET and considered how pupils might respond to a curriculum that shifted from predominantly social aims to a more knowledge-led model. Leaders also debated how to balance formal academic recording with learning that might be socially constructed, community-focused, or personally reflective. In the autumn term of 2024, two implementation challenges quickly emerged. In Years 5 and 6, teachers found it difficult to deliver a more ambitious curriculum to pupils who had not previously secured the necessary foundational knowledge. In Early Years, teachers struggled to engage four-year-olds from largely culturally Christian, non-religious backgrounds who had limited prior religious experience. Our partnership with RE Today proved invaluable. Consultants delivered targeted training for Early Years teachers, helping them identify everyday experiences that could provide meaningful entry points into the RE curriculum. For RE subject leaders, deeper training on core concepts and progression strengthened their ability to scaffold learning effectively for older pupils. As we reached the end of the first full year of our journey towards better primary RE, subject leaders were sharing implementation experiences and reviewing the work and voices of staff and pupils. Our provision had shifted from being disparate and largely led by non-specialists. Today, RE has regained a secure and valued place within the curriculum across our schools. While Ofsted is only one measure of impact, its feedback has been encouraging. At Byron Wood Primary Academy in Sheffield, where 92 per cent of pupils speak English as an additional language, inspectors undertook a deep dive into RE in January. They reported: ‘Pupils are respectful in the discussions they have with each other. They have a secure understanding of difference and discrimination. They learn to respect cultures and traditions other than their own. One pupil stated, “Everybody can believe in something different, and that’s okay.”’ Russell Gray is the Regional Director of Schools at Astrea Academy Trust. Alongside his school improvement and quality assurance responsibilities, he holds strategic responsibility for primary personal development. Astrea is using the RE Today – Systematic Agreed Syllabus and the Primary RE Curriculum.
The RE Today way A framework for RE professionalism: A shared language for excellence
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