The willingness and capacity to take up opportunities for spiritual and moral development is central to the best work in RE. Teachers need to use their professional judgement sensitively when weighing up pupils' responses to these opportunities. Some of the most effective models for differentiation in the RE curriculum are based on a spiral of revisited concepts, attitudes and skills. These are then understood, applied, linked and evaluated in increasing depth by pupils.

Pupils who are gifted in RE require particular pedagogic skills from their RE teachers. Teachers should:

• use a variety of challenging questioning strategies to encourage pupils to explore religious phenomena and questions (for example 'Why?', 'What if?');
• set extension tasks that avoid repetition and extra work, but encourage greater depth of understanding or reflection (for example 'What might it mean to a Muslim to miss Hajj?');
• use authentic materials from a faith, such as liturgical and sacred texts or artefacts, to provide a complex stimulus for learning (for example the Adhan);
• use carefully planned self-assessment instruments with gifted pupils, to involve them in identifying their own learning needs. This is most useful if it includes a focus on learning from religion, as well as learning about religions (for example pupils analyse their knowledge base, skill at research, ability to explain meaning, skill at application and response to issues);
• encourage ambitious work by the most able pupils by using target-setting strategies (for example studying a religion as practised in a different culture or community, noting variations in belief and practice);
• focus on the interpretation of symbol, metaphor, text and story, and the ways in which these stimulate reflection on meaning and discernment (for example the Word of God, the significance of Shabbat);
• challenge and develop gifted pupils' use of spoken and written religious language, with both sacred texts and general literature (for example the Psalms, and the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins);
• teach pupils the terminology and language that they need to handle sophisticated religious, spiritual, ethical and philosophical questions, ideas and materials, and provide opportunities for them to develop and use that language (for example the use of concept, theory, belief, faith, fact, opinion, proof);
• focus on the application of ideas and learning in new or unfamiliar contexts (for example Christianity in Latin America, Islam in Europe);
• use the ultimate or fundamental questions that lie below the surface of religious practice to open up the ways in which pupils might learn from religion (for example funeral rites and issues of purpose in life);
• provide particular challenges for gifted pupils with regard to learning from religion (see the recent non-statutory guidance on RE);
• use questions and tasks from later key stages and stimulate responses through difficult tasks (for example involve argument, analysis and prediction);
• model RE problem-solving/problem-centred activities from the world class tests (for example use inter-faith issues or arguments about the value of prayer, or questions about God);
• encourage gifted pupils to make connections between their work in RE and other subjects (for example with cosmology in physics, worship in music, ethics in PSHE and inequality in geography).

Teachers can also use a range of general strategies with pupils who are gifted in RE across a variety of age groups and learning contexts, both within and beyond the formal curriculum. These include:

• providing challenging reading materials in a topic-related, classroom book collection related to a particular RE unit;
• providing a short list of tough topics for each unit, to encourage gifted pupils to respond to RE themes such as worship and authority;
• providing extension tasks in groups, to encourage the most able to challenge each other;
• tasks and activities that emphasise evaluation of religious diversity;
• linking with local faith communities whose children bring particular experience, nurture or quality to their RE, and opening the frontier between the education offered by the community and the school;
• using approaches such as the community of enquiry method for exploring ultimate questions (use special needs staffing allowances to enable some small group work);
• using ICT and internet or intranet links to enable pupils to work with other schools and to learn from members of religious communities in an authentic way;
• planning opportunities for pupils to engage with story, symbolism, metaphor and analogy. Links between RE and philosophy should attract the interest of many RE specialists;
• including higher-order language skills, such as the nuance of words and the use of analogy in RE. Strategies to challenge the most able language users are part of enabling the highest achievement of gifted pupils.

It is particularly important to plan to avoid repetitious work -- the learning diet of gifted pupils must not feel like 'more of what we did before'. Gifted pupils may need less reinforcement than many other pupils, but they often get more! Offer the most able pupils a new context in which to apply their understanding of belief, or an additional concept around belief (such as 'belief in ... ' as well as 'belief that ... ').

Managing provision in the general guidance

Matching teaching to pupils' needs in the general guidance