Worked example · RE · Year 10
DCF: Citizenship → Identity, image and reputation
A secure Year 10 response, annotated. There is no single correct decision in any of the three cases — what is being assessed is whether the pupil names the cost of their decision and writes rules that could actually be broken. Show this after pupils have drafted their own charter.
| Case | Decision | Strongest objection | Answer to that objection |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Capel Bethel — the camera angle | Narrow the shot to the pulpit, and offer a second camera on the congregation only to anyone who signs a consent sheet in the porch. | The chapel will look empty on screen, which makes a small congregation look even smaller and weakens the chapel’s witness. | That cost is real, and I am accepting it. A stream that makes one member feel watched has already lost a member in the room to gain a viewer at home. The consent sheet gives the wide shot back to anyone who wants it, and consent that is asked for once is worth more than a camera angle nobody agreed to. |
| 2. The synagogue — notices and Shabbat | Keep the Thursday deadline. Nothing is posted that needs a reply during Shabbat, and the volunteer’s live chat group can exist for the people who want it, with a written rule that nothing important goes only in the chat. | Thursday deadlines are slow, and a live chat is where the younger members already are. Information that arrives too late is no information at all. | The community is not choosing between fast and slow, it is choosing whether a quarter of its members can take part at all. A system that assumes everybody is reachable on Saturday morning excludes people by design. If something genuinely urgent happens, it is a phone call, not a notification. |
| 3. The mosque youth group — the clipped sermon | Publish the full recording of the khutbah with the eleven-second section timestamped, and one short factual statement. Add a rule against clipping, and make the moderators the only people who post recordings. | Publishing the full recording gives the clip more attention, and the people resharing it were never going to watch forty minutes of a sermon. | True — but the full recording is not aimed at them. It is aimed at the person who sees the clip next week and searches for it, and at the imam, who is entitled to have the whole thing on the record. Saying nothing leaves the clip as the only version that exists. |
Each decision states what was given up, and answers the objection instead of dismissing it. That is the first criterion, and it is what separates a decision from a preference.
Code of conduct — Cardiff and the Valleys Interfaith Youth Space
1. No photograph or video showing a recognisable face is posted in this space unless that person has said yes. If you cannot ask them, crop them out.
2. Nothing posted here is shared outside here. That includes screenshots, forwards, and reading it out to someone else with the person’s name attached.
3. Recordings of worship, teaching or prayer are posted in full or not at all. Clips of under two minutes are not posted by members; if a clip is useful, ask a moderator to post it alongside the full recording.
4. Notices that everyone needs are posted by Thursday at 4pm and are also emailed, because some members are offline from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall and some do not use this app at all.
5. Two named moderators are listed at the top of the group. Anyone may report a post to them privately, and they answer within two days, in the group, saying what they did.
6. Breaking clause 1, 2 or 3 means the post is removed and the moderators speak to you. Doing it a second time means you are removed from the space for a term, and you may ask to come back.
Every clause is testable — you could point at a post and say “that broke clause 3”. Clause 1 protects a person’s image and clause 3 protects the context of what they said, which covers the second and third criteria.
Tested against Case 3: clause 3 would have stopped it. The eleven-second clip was made by a member, and clause 3 says members do not post clips at all. Clause 2 would also have caught the reshare out of the group. Clause 6 says what happens next, which the original group’s pinned rules did not.
The charter is checked against the case that generated it rather than left as a list of good intentions.
Keeping one account where your faith is obvious and one where it is not can be a reasonable thing to do. Religious hatred online is real, and someone applying for a job, playing an online game, or posting about football may simply not want every stranger to have a fact about them that could be used against them. Choosing which parts of yourself are visible in which room is something everyone does offline too.
The cost is that the split is hard to hold. The two accounts get connected eventually — a mutual follower, a reused photograph, a phrase you use in both. And there is a quieter cost: if you only ever say the religious part of your life in the private account, you can start to treat it as something that needs hiding, which is not the same as choosing privacy.
Explains the choice, gives a real benefit and a real cost, and does not judge the person making it — the fourth and fifth criteria.