It is important for religious education in primary schools to be inclusive, reflecting a broad spectrum of religious and non-religious worldviews. This is particularly crucial when considering a local community’s diverse beliefs and perspectives.

With this in mind, the Kapow Primary Religion & Worldviews (R&W) scheme is an innovative approach to religious education. Our scheme reflects the wide range of beliefs and perspectives across the UK, including major and lesser-known worldviews. 

Given the unique demographic mix of each local area, it is important to adapt your curriculum to better suit your community’s specific religious and non-religious makeup. This approach ensures that lessons are inclusive and directly relevant to the children’s experiences. 

By customising the Kapow Primary R&W scheme to reflect your local context, you can provide pupils with a more engaging and meaningful learning experience. Here are some strategies for adapting the scheme to reflect your local area. 

• Know your community

Understand your community by identifying the worldviews that are represented in your community – both within your school and within your local area. Start by gathering demographic information to identify the range of diversity and worldviews in your local area. This can involve simple surveys among staff, families and stakeholders, or reaching out to local organisations and places of worship. 

• Audit your school’s needs

Review your school’s requirements by assessing the worldviews represented in your community or if an assessment is required as part of a Locally Agreed Syllabus. Look at our R&W long-term plan to see which worldviews are covered in each unit. This will help you decide if any units need adjustments to reflect local beliefs better or to incorporate visits or speakers from the community.

• Involve your community

Engage your community by reaching out to parents, local religious leaders and other members of your community to discuss how they could support your Religion & Worldviews curriculum. 

Establishing a list of contacts willing to visit your school, host visits to their places of worship or community buildings, or loan artefacts is invaluable. It enhances Religion & Worldview lessons by bringing them to life authentically and respectfully, reflecting your community’s diversity. 

While Kapow Primary lessons are well resourced, incorporating visits and hands-on activities such as artefact handling and interviews with community members can further enhance the authenticity and representation of your lessons. Guidance on where lessons can be enhanced by these activities is provided in the teacher knowledge section of a lesson and includes support on respectful behaviour during visits or when handling artefacts.

• Consider concepts

When adapting lessons, focusing on conceptual substantive knowledge, disciplinary knowledge and personal knowledge is essential to ensure progression and coverage. 

Worldview-related knowledge plays a key role in helping children understand concepts, as outlined in the R&W long-term plan. When considering changes to a lesson’s worldview, it’s important to assess whether an example from an alternative worldview can effectively convey the same conceptual knowledge.

For example, let’s take the Year 5 unit Why doesn’t Christianity always look the same?. The lesson’s objective is ‘to consider the impact of Christian practices’. The conceptual substantive knowledge covered includes ‘reasons for taking part in religious practices including belief, culture, tradition, and obligation’.

In this lesson, a Quaker meeting is used as an example. To adapt this for your community, you could arrange a visit to a local Quaker meeting house or invite a member of the local Quaker community to speak to the children. Alternatively, you could explore a different denomination of Christianity prevalent in your community to illustrate the same concepts effectively.

• See what is suggested

Explore the suggestions provided in the unit overview videos for each Kapow Primary R&W unit. These videos offer insights into which lessons can be easily adapted by either shifting the focus to a different worldview or incorporating local visits or visitors.

For example, in the Year 1 unit How did the world begin?, consider substituting one of the creation stories with a narrative from a different worldview. In the Year 4 unit What makes some texts sacred?, if visiting a local gurdwara is not feasible for lesson 5, consider using an interactive presentation to provide pupils with a similar immersive experience.

Celebrate and share

Celebrate your efforts in customising the Kapow Primary Religion & Worldviews scheme to suit your local community! Every school is unique, and adapting your lessons ensures relevance and inclusivity. Whether you’ve conducted a community audit, engaged local stakeholders, or focused on key conceptual elements, each adaptation makes the learning experience more meaningful for your pupils.

Share and celebrate your experiences within the school, with the wider local community, and with us at Kapow Primary! Consider creating displays around the school to showcase pupils’ work, allowing parents and visitors to appreciate their learning journey. Reach out to local places of worship or community buildings, such as libraries, to explore opportunities for displaying your school’s Religion & Worldviews work. By sharing within the local community, you strengthen community ties, celebrate the uniqueness of your local area and raise awareness of the significance of Religion & Worldviews learning.