Agenda item

Angela updated the committee as follows;

The following should be read in conjunction with the Development Plan in the Agenda Pack.

A. Core Business

1.    We have already covered membership in item 3 matters arising where we outlined efforts being made to ensure we have as full and comprehensive membership as possible.

2.    As a committee we get good attendance at our 3 meetings a year.

3.    As mentioned in item 4 above, the current situation does not allow for SACRE members to visit schools.

4.    The annual report is almost finished and has been produced in line with a new framework devised by NASACRE in partnership with the Department for Education. This new standard framework is designed to enable easy comparison of reports from the different SACREs, see national trends and offer SACREs appropriate support to enable them to fulfil their statutory duty and do the extras which enhance the experience of RE in schools. The report is due to be submitted on 30^th December 2021. We are on track for this deadline, and it will be emailed to SACRE members for comment and approval beforehand.

5.    Review of the action plan is currently being done during this meeting.

6.    We are paid-up members of NASACRE and we present NASACRE updates at each meeting.

B. Support for teachers of RE

Items 1-4

We have supported Wokingham Teachers comprehensively throughout the pandemic.

Every school received a free resource at the end of the summer term and training is being provided this term in the form of twilight sessions as a mini festival of RE.

We have dates for the primary RE network meeting in the spring term and for primary RE subject leader training.

We are thinking carefully and strategically of ways to support secondary schools during the rest of this year. The secondary federation INSET day is again not taking place this year. We have decided to have a network meeting for secondary school teachers in January. We will discuss with teachers at this meeting what further support they would like.

Pan Berkshire Hub

We are entering into the syllabus review. We will discuss this more later in this meeting.

‘Real People Real Faith’ project is complete. Recording of the launch has been made available to teachers. More funding has been made available allowing the opportunity to include more faith representatives talking about diversity within religious traditions.

Emily provided dates for the next planned RE sessions as follows:

Secondary Network – 17^th January 2022

This meeting is designed to allow secondary teachers to tell us what additional support they require and will be OFSTED focused. We have invited the RE leader from The Forest School, who have recently had an OFSTED, to attend and share her experience of being inspected. Invitations for Secondary RE Teachers have already been emailed out and Stephen suggested making sure Julian Bushell is aware as he can ensure the information is disseminated to the RE leads. He also suggested getting in contact with the Head of RE at Maiden Erlegh as they have recently had an OFSTED inspection with a deep-dive for RS..

Angela stated that we will ask the secondary teachers if they would like to continue having network meetings going forward. They may find it easier to attend meetings online.

Primary RE Subject Leader Training – 21^st March 2022 4pm – 5.30pm

Primary RE Network Meeting – 29^th March 2022 4pm – 5.00pm

If any SACRE member would like to attend any of these meetings, please email Catharine and she will send you the TEAMS link.

Budget

Emily talked through the budget as follows.

Following on from discussions at the last meeting about the money we carried forward from last year, we have sent every school a free resource and have provided 3 extra twilight training sessions.

We currently have around £600 in this year’s budget that has not yet been allocated. Normally we would pay an amount to the Secondary Federation to support the training for RE teachers on their INSET day but they are not planning to do that again this year. Depending on what support the Secondary RE Teachers request at the network meeting in January, some or all of that money could be used to provide additional training for secondary schools, providing the SACRE members agree.

Stephen reminded the committee that if anyone has a project in mind that feeds into our development plan, please let Emily or Angela know as there is this funding available.