First action: Provide varied opportunities for parents to attend worship in school and engage with curriculum events that give them a clear understanding of what is taught in RE.
What we did
For parents
- Parents prayer group every Friday open to the school and wider community
- Offer a morning community mass in school to parents and the wider parish community
- Parents invited into school for mass within the curriculum, for example Romero days
- Carol service – renewed push, particularly focused on getting parents to attend
- During Covid we provided worship opportunities by streaming Liturgies to the community and produced a carol service for the Diocese
- Support the Syro-Malabar Catholic Community by offering our school premises for their celebrations – a significant number of our students are members
- Hold memorial services and regular Masses for former students – families and friends are invited back to attend these
RE Curriculum
- We introduced book sharing week – students show their parents their books prior to a parents evening – show what is studied in RE
- Homework tasks that ask students to discuss topics with parents and then share their responses
- All RE curriculum content (Intent, Implementation and impact) is on school website
- RE to be given a prominent place in the curriculum section of the school website
- Parents involved in RSE survey
- Use of culture week events and celebrations to share with the community/parents what is done in RE, thus engage parents in our curriculum
The impact it had
- More parents are now aware of the liturgical celebrations we have in school – prayer, celebration of the word and liturgy.
- More parents involved in the school celebrations and thus support the school and their children’s faith formation.
- On line streaming was very successful with thousands of views.
- Oaklands seen as a faith community that recognises the diversity of Christian faith and enables members to celebrate their faith, thus enhancing understanding and inclusivity.
Second action: The RE department should continue to develop and monitor the effectiveness of strategies to improve progress in KS3 and 4.
What we did
- Implementation of new Eduqas GCSE September 2023
- Robust systems in place for book scrutiny across the department
- Creation and adaptation of GCSE revision materials with a focus on knowledge retrieval, e.g. grids, odd-one-out, use the word, etc
- Research on how to use online revision to engage and consolidate GCSE learning, e.g. Seneca, YouTube, Boost
- Targeted GCSE revision which begins earlier and focuses on smaller groups of students
- Implementation of new RED at KS3 (Year 7 2023, Year 8 2024, Year 9 2025)
The impact it had
- Students have engaged well with course to date (May 2024) and end of unit assessments have improved from term 1 (67% grade 4-9) to term 2 (77% grade 4-9) thus close to achieving school PM target of 80%
- Revision and homework tasks have been chunked more by using Seneca and short YouTube video tutorials (such as Eduqas 5-minute recaps or Mr McMillan topic overviews) which has been received positively by students, especially lower sets and has enabled them to review some ‘niche’ content such as the ‘Tree of Life’ mosaic in St Clemente. Although there have been some technical issues with Boost, the students that have accessed it (upper sets) have reported how rigorous the quizzes are in testing their knowledge recall
- In class knowledge retrieval has been developed further following Eduqas INSET. At each assessment point in KS4 there is now a dedicated PowerPoint with a variety of tasks to ensure all classes can access the same resources.
- New adaptive revision posters has been created which students find helps them focus on the correct content and work more independently.
- Targeted revision began earlier in September 2023 for Year 11, although attendance was not good (many parents either failed to reply or refused to allow students to attend). This was revisited after December mocks and uptake did improve a little with our weakest students. General after school revision was well attended each week. One student has chosen to go on and study A level RS in the light of the support she has received.
- New RED with Year 7 has necessitated much work to create schemes of work and assessments. However, this appears to be paying off as indicated by assessment data and student voice (term 2 = 66% reached ARE which was an improvement on term one.)
