School Projects

Bringing young people and community faith leaders together to explore questions important to young people today.  The event aims to recognise the voice of students in facing the challenges in their communities and the wider world today through dialogue with religious and non-religious community leaders.

Year 9 students will represent the views of their school peers by taking part in a number of morning workshops exploring themes they have identified as ones that matter to their communities.  The afternoon will be supported by SACRE members and other faith leaders in conversation with students about these issues.  Students will have the chance to discuss and question faith leaders and these interviews will be recorded for the participating schools and beyond to use in religious education lessons.

"Out of the Depths" is a three-phase art project that aims to empower young people to explore Mental Health and Wellbeing through the lens of faith using creativity. Phase one in moving beyond words will be a high quality, innovative residential program with resident artist, Janaya McCallum. Phase two will be a touring art exhibition in schools and parishes and phase three will be to digitise the artwork, creative fresh resources that will enable young people to deep dive into their own understanding and experiences of Mental Health.

Safe Spaces.
Southport & Area Schools Worker Trust (SASW Trust) is a Christian charity dedicated to supporting young people in Southport through faith-based programs in primary and secondary schools. With over 25 years of impact, SASW Trust partners with schools, churches, and youth clubs, offering safe spaces for students to explore faith, mental health, and resilience.

Our programs include engaging assemblies, interactive workshops, and popular Christmas and Easter events that have the message of Jesus and offer hope. Through initiatives like lunchtime Safe Spaces in secondary schools, SASW Trust provides trusted, supportive environments where young people can grow in hope and purpose.

Creative Learning and Discovery Programme.
Chichester Cathedral is embarking on a three-year education project to rebuild its once-thriving department, which engaged over 10,000 individuals annually before the pandemic. Supported by passionate and experienced education volunteers, the project will be led by two new staff members who will work with teachers to design curriculum-based programmes aimed at enhancing school and family learning, with a focus on underserved schools and low-income families.

These programmes will provide enriching, unique experiences within this place of wonder, fostering critical thinking and personal development. By cultivating a sense of belonging and focusing on the wellbeing of children and young people, the Cathedral aims to inspire our youth, support teachers and families, and re-establish itself as a leader in education and outreach.

St Peter’s is a dynamic church in central Brighton. Our iconic Grade II* Listed building is a significant and much-loved local landmark in the city and is used for various community activities. The 8th May marked 200 years since the laying of our foundation stone. Whilst much has changed around it, our building remains an iconic and consistent presence within the community.

A range of anniversary activities are running that will reflect both the city’s unique heritage and artistic culture, offering exciting opportunities for the community to engage creatively with our building and learn more about our incredible city.

God and the Big Bang has 10 years of experience engaging students with questions of science and faith. Initially, science-faith communicators used the ‘deficit’ model of communication, with a ‘we tell, they listen’ approach. The ‘deficit’ model results in a low-impact, distant interaction between communicator and participant, which results in the continued public perception of a conflict between science and faith.

This project helps young people develop new, meaning-related tools which will build their understanding that there are ways of connecting themselves and all the uncertainty they live with about the world, with solid knowledge from science and faith communities.

Since 2007, Prayer Spaces in Schools has been creating safe, creative spaces for children and young people to reflect and pray. We are working with RE Today to produce lesson plans and other resources for teachers and volunteers to deliver wraparound teaching supporting the prayer space experience. We’re also providing an updated multi-language ‘How to Get Started’ video course for volunteers, and updating our website to improve engagement and keep resources available!

Threads through the Bible’ is an astonishing and inspiring exhibition of textile art, touring cathedrals from 2025.  It consists of 44 huge silk panels re-imagining key parts of the Bible.  Christian artist Jacqui Parkinson has spent ten years creating the panels, making what is probably the largest ever textile art project by a single person.  The artwork is very attractive and accessible:  it speaks to people of all ages and backgrounds and gives them a closer and enjoyable view of the bible.

 

Let’s Go Time Travelling
Southwell Minster’s Time Travelling programme supports Religious Education teaching in Nottinghamshire. More than 1,500 primary school children visit the Minster each year to take part in pilgrimage days, where they learn about Christianity through lively workshops and creative activities. The programme is joyful and inclusive, focusing on the power of faith to transform lives.

There’s no better way to embed and deepen classroom RE learning than by taking part in workshops that bring faith and tradition to life. Southwell Minster is proud to work with teachers and schools across Nottinghamshire and beyond through the generous support of Westhill.

Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Community and Christ Church Bexleyheath
Since July 2022, the Project Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Community (UOAC) in collaboration with Anglican Christ Church Bexleyheath have created a vital lifeline for Ukrainians in South East London. This initiative offers humanitarian aid, wellbeing support, language classes, and crafts sessions to help community members integrate into the UK, whilst still preserving and practicing their cultural heritage. Additionally, the community has established a Ukrainian School.

The Faith Guiding Course

The Faith Guiding Course is for those wishing to be trained to lead high-quality educational visits to places of worship. The Faith Encounter Programme has extensive knowledge of the faith sector and involvement with a wide range of faith-inspired organisations which has helped them to successfully engage collaboratively with diverse faith communities in Birmingham, the Midlands and further afield.

Their aims include offering customised courses in Faith Guiding to train Guides of all faiths to receive visitors with confidence and openness at their places of worship in the Midlands Region.

Creative Arts Workshops
Wintershall Education uses the creative arts to bring the Christian story to life for children and young people, making connections between the Gospel stories and our world today. Themed workshops, run in beautiful outdoor settings, provide space and time to support the mental health and wellbeing of children and teachers and provide exciting and unique ways to access Religious Education.

Community and Schools Graffiti Project
The project will see a partnership between the church, three local primary schools and three different artists to create a new public art exhibition as part of the churches annual arts festival, but also leave an artistic legacy in one of the local primary schools. The project will see a mural painted as part of the churches work with that school, as well as a graffiti artist working with pupils in our three local primary schools to help them design, create and learn the skills to paint the work themselves.

Encounter Christianity is a Bristol based charity, staffed by Christian teachers. It aims to enrich the religious education of local pupils as they explore different elements of the Christian faith.

Our current project is delivering sensory based workshops in local Special Educational Needs schools. The three workshops we are developing focus on God’s creation and the Christmas and Easter stories.

All the resources used are highly visual and include auditory learning aids as well as tactile objects. By taking volunteers from local churches into schools with us, we aim to give children an experience of Christianity as a lived faith.

Prayer Spaces in Schools
Off The Fence's Schools and Youth programme offers wrap-around support to over 500 young people across Brighton & Hove in 6 local schools. They offer 1-to-1 mentoring, Prayer Spaces, lunch clubs and Summer Schools to provide respite from troubled home lives and aid educational and social development.

Through the generous support of Westhill, their programme has developed further sensory-enriching faith-based education through light, sound and textures in their Prayer Spaces - ensuring each child feels fully supported through extracurricular sessions.

In 2023, Art Beyond Belief partnered with Oxford Diocesan Council for Interfaith Relations in an event focusing on shared faith approaches to climate change and responsibility for the planet. In advance of this event, we ran sessions in four schools for KS4 students, which was funded by Westhill Endowment.

During the programme students from several schools took part in discussion and creation of artworks, which were the focus of discussion at a combined event to which other students and schools were invited - creating a joint exploration of students’ perspectives on environment and responsibility.

CROSS are a schools-work charity, working in secondary schools across the Wakefield District. Our Pastoral Project helps young people develop socially and emotionally and grow in self-esteem.

CROSS weekly clubs consist of a range of fun team and individual games, along with discussions on relevant topics, thus enabling students to make friends and grown in confidence.

CROSS mentoring groups consist of a range of games and activities helping equip young people to understand and manage the challenges they are facing, thereby enhancing their mental wellbeing. We run groups on a range of issues including self-esteem, bereavement and anger-management.

Stories of Hope and Home is a small Birmingham-based charity with dual complementary aims: to create safe space for people seeking sanctuary to find support, build community and creatively explore their stories and experiences; and to create opportunities for their stories to be shared and heard through facilitating encounters, especially in schools.

We believe in the transformative power of these encounters to share the realities faced by people seeking sanctuary in order to break down barriers, to challenge stereotypes and misconceptions, and to change the narrative around the subject of forced migration and help to develop empathy and compassion.

The Ladywood Interfaith Education Project (LIEP) is based in inner-city Birmingham. Initiated by St John & St Peter’s Parish Church, it is a partnership between four local places of faith and schools in the Birmingham area since 1999. Please see our page to find out more.

That’s how it really is

With over five decades of global experience in conflict zones, CHIPS is dedicated to fostering peace and reconciliation. We empower communities to instigate enduring grassroots transformations for restored peace. Since 2014, we've been actively engaged in Brixton, UK, focusing on countering youth violence through constructive avenues for young people. Filmmaking has proven to be a powerful avenue for Brixton's youth, teaching teamwork, collaboration, unity through the art of storytelling.

In 2021-2022, our youth crafted the poignant short film, "That's How It Really Is," shedding light on subjects like young carers, self-harm, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and child molestation. With support from Westhill Endowment, we are able to orchestrate eight screening events nationwide, encouraging dialogue, support, and proactive engagement among young people. These screenings provide an opportunity for the youth involved in the film to shape, develop, and facilitate critical conversations on these complex subjects, ultimately offering a platform for vulnerable exploration of the contemporary youth experience.

Faces (Faiths Against Child Sexual Exploitation) are a Christian-Muslim charity with a mission to build resilience within faith communities against child sexual exploitation and other forms of harm. We view faith as contributing positively towards safeguarding, rather than being a risk factor as it’s often framed.

We offer training to faith communities and external organisations, including schools, police and local authority. Supported by our own research into young people’s experiences of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in schools, we’re providing training for educators to equip them to shape and deliver faith literate RSE.

Transforming culture through relationships education in Primary Schools

Thanks to Westhill Endowment’s generous grant, we will be developing a new relationships curriculum in primary schools. Our acclaimed Esteem programme has a significant impact in secondary schools, and following demand from both teachers and children, we are excited to be able to expand our work into primary schools.

We will pilot the new resources with 500 children in London in the first year, and then roll it out to 1000 children in the second year. We will train 108 primary school teachers to enable them to deliver the sessions confidently and effectively.

Creative Green RE in Luton

This project gives Luton pupils the chance to be artistic in RE about climate change and justice issues, informed by a multi-faith panel of speakers. Beginning with a conference in Nov 2022, 6-8 Luton secondary schools are leading the project and sharing creative RE ideas on green issues across the town. At the next stage, primary pupils will also be involved and there are plans for an exhibition of pupils’ green spiritual art in the town’s public gallery.

Prayer Spaces
 
The Christian Education Project is based in the London Borough of Redbridge, with the aim of: “Serving schools; Inspiring Minds & Exploring Faith”.  They provide a variety of free services to schools, including Prayer Spaces.

Prayer Spaces are set up in a hall or other large space where pupils and staff of all faiths and beliefs can come to consider and respond to the key questions of life. Pupils move in a carousel between a number of tactile, interactive bases set around different themes.  Students are included in the planning stage, when possible, to help shape their school’s space.

Tales of Wonder, Wisdom and Humour

Religious Education in many schools is not seen as a priority and some non-muslim parents feel concerned when it has anything to do with Islam. Using multi-faith storytelling, with professional award-winning Khayaal Theatre, we hope to build bridges in the primary schools and generate a better understanding of not just Islamic but of other faiths and cultures too, highlighting mutual links and crossover between all traditions. Means of storytelling does not confront orthodoxy of religion; it rather seeks to inform participants in a culturally acceptable manner.

Religion, Values and Ethics

Working with a wide range of stakeholders, this project seeks to develop teaching and learning resources to support and embed Religion, Values and Ethics (RVE) firmly within the Curriculum for Wales.

The project will offer strategy and leadership together with curriculum and pedagogical support to allow RVE to flourish as it takes on its new position within the Humanities Area of Learning, and support learners as they become religiously literate, ethical informed citizens ready to take their role within our multi-cultural, multi religious, multi secular world.

 

RE Matters is a Newham business that seeks to support, inspire, and transform learning in schools. Student RE Matters is a group of young people interested in moral and religious issues from different backgrounds and cultures who get together each half term from different Newham secondary schools. It gives an opportunity for these students to discuss spiritual and moral issues that are important to them.

SparkFish is a local collaborative Christian organisation that aims to inspire and encourage young people in faith, hope and love. We engage with young people in schools across Reigate, Redhill and Merstham, East Surrey.

Leicester Schools Peace Project

The Leicester Schools Peace Project is supporting the flourishing of our superdiverse city by creating a scheme of work for Peace Education from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 4.  This project is in partnership with Leicester SACRE and will be part of the New Agreed Syllabus for Leicester. 

Westhill Endowment’s grant will allow Transforming Lives for Good (TLG) to open 47 new Early Intervention centres across the UK from 2023-2024 in partnership with local churches. This will train 235 new volunteer coaches to get alongside 230 children in school, who are facing a variety of difficulties.

By letting them know someone cares and encouraging them to reengage with their education, we are able to combat the devastating impact of COVID-19 lockdowns and the cost-of-living crisis on these already-disadvantaged children’s emotional and mental wellbeing.

Christian RE in schools

Working with 60 schools across Bristol and the South West, we visit classrooms to deliver high-quality, interactive and engaging RE workshops. As qualified teachers we design professional resources for each lesson, to increase the engagement of pupils and inspire school staff in their own RE lesson planning.

Many of our primary workshops involve a craft element to consolidate the learning of pupils and to take home as a reminder of the Bible story they've heard.

Boro Cereal is an exciting initiative, designed to equip and empower Primary School aged children to engage with and improve their local culture, making a big difference in Middlesbrough.  Working with schools and churches, BiG KIDS will deliver a series of creative lessons, focussing on servant leadership, entrepreneurial and presentation skills, giving children opportunities to innovate social action community projects; inspiring them to change the negative cycles they often find themselves in. We believe that God has placed each of us in our localities and situations for a purpose – we hope to allow the children to find theirs.

Hand to Mouth work in schools predominantly in West Yorkshire and Lancashire.  Much of our work is part of an HTM RE day, where collective worship may begin the day, with our popular puppet tales. 

Our puppets have been telling Bible stories now for over 20 years!  We then go on to lead lessons and Godly Play, allowing the children the opportunity to think about world issues and the life they lead.

Bristol SACRE aims to bring together people from various worldviews and communities with its Bristol Minds project. This will introduce KS3 students from ten secondary schools to ‘Bristol Minds’ (BMs), who are adults of diverse worldviews working in creative, intellectual, scientific, non-profit or professional fields. 

The students will interview their BM, asking how their worldview informs their professional lives and day-to-day activities and experiences. The students will create a range of visual resources to share understanding of the BMs and what they have learned through their direct interaction. In Spring 2023, a conference will bring together all the participants to share outcomes.

Kids Alive International is a Christian charity serving some of the world’s most vulnerable children through a number of projects. This includes Hall Mead School, a Christian primary school for 500 impoverished children from challenging backgrounds in one of the poorest regions of Kenya.  But the school has had no library and very little Christian literature. Thanks to Westhill Endowment, we can refurbish one of the classrooms into a library, where children can go to read Christian literature and classroom study materials (none of them have any book or toys at their home!). Thank you Westhill Endowment!

REQM Sparklers

The RE Council’s RE Quality Mark is pleased to announce this new project 'REQM Sparklers'.  Working with Westhill Endowment, we are compiling case studies of schools that benefited from grant support from Westhill between 2016 and 2019.

Interviews with teachers, pupils and students will be published here in 2022.  During the remainder of 2021, we will be organising events bringing teachers together online, and in local areas where feasible, to celebrate the REQM and to share the ‘fizz’ with others! If your school was involved in achieving an award during this period we would love to hear from you…..

The REC is working with Birmingham-based RE Today on a project to support the RE Syllabus writers, and curriculum developers, in their work on interpreting a Religion and Worldviews approach.  The Westhill grant will help fund the cost of an Expert Advisory Group.

Enabling Encounter Project

Stories of Hope and Home’s Enabling Encounter Project has two interdependent aspects. First, to create safe, welcoming and mutually supportive space for people with lived experience of seeking asylum to come together to build community and to explore and process their experiences. And second, to bring them together with others, facilitating encounters particularly with children and young people and those who work with them. Story-sharing and first-hand encounter have the power to transform understanding, to challenge stereotypes and misconceptions, and to develop empathy and compassion, which are the foundations for building relationships across diverse cultures and experiences.

What is Life?’ Science Spectacular Sound and Light Show

A Son-et-Lumiere experience transforming the internal space of Worcester Cathedral.

Visitors to the event are immersed in the soundscapes they hear and walk through the light artworks that are all around them. On an explorative journey they can contemplate the contributions of science and human understanding of the physical world around us. The event offers reflection on the ways in which science and religion neither prove nor disprove the other; exploring how wisdom and beauty both serve to kindle our imaginations and enlarge our capacity for wonder.

The Faith & Belief Forum exists to create a connected and supportive society where people of different faiths, beliefs and cultures have strong, productive and lasting relations. We work towards our vision by implementing three interconnected and strategic goals. Equipping Learners, Building Movement, and Projecting Voice.

Our Encountering Faiths & Beliefs workshops model interfaith dialogue and co-operation in action, whilst avoiding essentialisation through contextualising personal identity, faith and culture.

‘Multi-faith Approaches to Diversity and Racial Equality’ is a student led project which aims to develop pupil and teacher understanding of the approaches to diversity and racial equality across different religions and world views. Through pupil/teacher conferences a bank of high quality resources for all secondary schools in Wolverhampton are being developed.