Gold Award Primary

We are a small, Norfolk Primary school and I am delighted to say that we were awarded a Gold REQM. We decided to go for the REQM to celebrate the completion of our Religion & Worldviews curriculum. We had been told that it was an innovative way of designing a curriculum, so this was a great opportunity and method for having our work and ideas externally validated. What happened next was surprising and very encouraging.

When we were making the application we actually discovered that the teaching of RE in our school was of a much higher standard than we had realised. We had hoped to achieve Bronze, maybe Silver, yet working through the assessment grids and checking with advisors from our Diocese showed that we are at the Gold standard. As a primary school, there are few ways to check how you are performing against neighbours or nationally. Therefore, REQM helped us see how we compared in a subject that does not normally produce performance data at KS1 or KS2.

The process hugely improved our confidence as a team and mine as subject lead. When discussing our curriculum before we went through this process, there was the ever-present feeling of impostor syndrome. While we knew our RE was helping our children learn and grow, we had little idea as to how I compared to other high performing schools. With an REQM, you have the badge, but also a sense of a national standard.

Since achieving the award, I have been invited to speak at conferences and schools have made contact asking for advice. As a subject leader, earning the REQM has certainly improved my profile!

The experience of being assessed was surprisingly pleasant! Our assessment was in 2021, so we spoke via video calls and submitted evidence electronically. It was very much a professional discussion with the assessor doing their best to help us show off our RE. The student voice activities were very insightful and ones we will be repeating in 2022.

We received the support we needed from our leadership team and this is essential. Our leadership liked the idea of external accreditation to showcase our RE, especially as a church school. The REQM process provided validation to the previous 18-month process of curriculum improvement that the whole school, including the leadership, had firmly supported. The REQM is an opportunity for each school to highlight their unique contribution to education at a local and national level.

Our pupils were very involved in the process and this was particularly pleasing. They hugely enjoyed the pupil voice interviews: at times I couldn’t get away! They were proud to share their work as part of our assessment information. Giving pupils the sense that the adult world cares about their progress is so important.

Achieving a Gold award was my professional highlight of 2021, showing that the hundreds of hours spent developing our curriculum was well worth it. I would really encourage teaches to jump in- the process is friendly and professional, and aids teachers in the critical reflection of their practice that is so essential for growth and development.