2023-24 My Community, My Newham

Our project this year has been based around photography. The students had the opportunity to meet a range of people from different religious and non-religious worldviews and visit different places of worship and places of interest around Newham. Students worked with a professional photographer to learn how to frame and take high quality images that capture an idea of theme. Student then went on to write questions and comments against their best images for teachers to use in RE lessons as starters.

2022-23 Challenging Religious Stereotypes

It was great to be able to meet again face to face every session this year! The Students chose to look at the theme of 'Challenging Religious and Worldview Stereotypes'. It was fantastic to welcome guest speakers , including representatives from  local religions and worldviews, and one of our local MPs! The Students enjoyed making films as part of the project and we have now produced a Toolkit that is available for use in schools everywhere!

2021-2022 Talking Faith

Our project was slightly different this year because of COVID but our students were amazing! We met with representatives from faiths and worldviews and asked them 'What makes a great Teacher?' we then used our learning to plan a Primary RE lesson. One of our Students said “You should join Student RE Matters as it is a unique opportunity to explore a plethora of ideas, faiths and new to old concepts. Student RE Matters encourages us to strengthen and change ideas that we may share. It also tests us in many ways, but it is always a pleasure to partake in”

2019-2020 Our world Project

Our project was based around the environment and what different relgions and world views believe about how we should treat the natural world. The students won an award to work this year with an artist to express what they want to say about the enviroment from Hockerill Foundation. Due to COVID we continued to work on this project in 2021 and finished with an online conference in June that we all enjoyed. The artwork features in a new resource for schools on Ecology and RE

2018-2019 Living well Project

Our project for the new year is to work with local faith leaders to create more small films that can be used inclassrooms nationally answering questions like how do we live well with others? How do you know who to trust in a religion? What views are extreme and why?

2017-2018 Bullying and Belief Project

Our project was a joint project between our Adult, Student and Junior SACRE, which has come out discussions at all three meetings over the previous 12 months. We wanted to produce some on-line supports that deal with the topic of religious bullying. This would include an on-line book of poems that young people themselves write about how to overcome this form of discrimination and inspire greater levels of solidarity and resilience in children and young people facing such issues, as well as raising the issue for people to think about.

We have created a number of 3-5 minute films that could be used in RE, PSHE or citizenship lessons at primary and secondary, which investigate stories of those who have suffered from religious bullying in Newham. We think these films would then provide teachers with small stories focusing on facts and effects of different people’s experiences. We would embed within them questions for classes to consider and discuss helping to educate pupils into greater appreciation diversity. We believe that providing materials that help pupils to talk well around religion is essential in our schools.

2016-2017 Religious Legacy Project

Our new project for the year is being funded by NASACRE and Westhill as we won a national competition for inter-faith work by young people. We will be creating 8 short on-line webinar’s that any teacher could access for free. A professional development resource for schools and professionals.

We know there is a real need in our primary schools to help teachers feel more confident about teaching RE, and these webinar’s (master classes) in different religions and world views would give answers to commonly asked questions around religion. They would also give our SACRE members a chance to participate and share their expert knowledge with teachers across Newham (and beyond). We would like to include our student SACRE members to also be filmed in the project talking about their faith and what is important to them as young people. This would give the students time to learn from one another about similarities and differences within and between their faiths and enter into interfaith dialogue.

We would also like to produce two additional webinars around sacred text passages to support our secondary teachers with the new GCSE specifications, looking at how they are understood today, unpacking issues around interpretation and context.

2015-2016 Religious legacy project

We have worked with a local Newham artist to create canvases showing the students beliefs about the purpose of life. The students visited a Gurdwara, Mosque, Church and Buddhist meditation centre. They also met  Hindu and Humanist visitors to interview them about their beleifs

2014-2015 Primary school lessons project

Our project for the year was about creating some lessons that Students can deliver themselves in local primary schools about religion.  For this project we have started by spending time with ten different faith leaders, improving our knowledge and understanding about differnt faiths. Students went on to create lessons that then trailed and then led in local Newham primary schools. Some students attended the national RE advisors conference and led a workshop there around what they had done and learnt from this experience.

Click below for our final pictures and words that we created from this project in March 2014

2013-2014

At present we are working on a photography project, as the students are seeking to take photographs that present religion in a positive light.  To do this we are visiting different places of worship around Newham as well as London, along with working in partnership with the British Museum.

2012-2013

Student RE Matters has been awarded a national grant from Westhill to continue to work on it's 'Does the media stereotype religion?' project. It will be filming the 'dragon den' pitches in October, and hopefully putting together a DVD of resoruces around this topic for schools in Newham to use.

2011-2012

Student RE Matters has been awarded a national grant from 'Near Neighbours' to work with a media team to investigate and make a DVD around the question does the media sterotype religion? We met at Stratford Circus on 19th January 2012 to formally start this project work, present were 65 students from eight Newham secondary schools. Here are some pictures from our afternoon together:

The Student's elected their new executive group for 2012.  They are pictured below with Ruth Gledhill, the religious affairs correspondent from 'The Times' newspaper, who came to talk about journalism.

The group then met again for a whole day confernce in March 2012 at Stratford Circus and had the opportunity to meet with and discuss the issue of how religion is presented in the media with 10 local faith leaders (Sikh, Muslim - Sunni & Shi'ite, Jewish, Chriustian, Pagan, Hindu, Sikh and Humanist).  The students then went on to create 'Dragon Den' type pitches around their idea to overcome stereotypes portrayed in the media.  The winning two pitches we hope will be made into real programmes.

2010-2011

During 2010-11 the students have been working with Middlesex University on a research project entitles 'Youth on Religion'.  The students have helped the researchers to examine how religious identity and a sense of belonging is developed in young people.

The National Association of SACRE's funded the students to produce some artwork around these ideas, working with a local Newham based artist. Below are some of the display boxes the students produced over the course of months working in groups to show how they feel they belong to their faith and how their faith belongs to them.

Stratford school                                    St Bonaventure's school

Kingsford school                                    Rokeby school

Plashet school                                      St Angela's school