Meet the Leader:

"Every human is an artist."

 Don Miguel Ruiz

The value of Art within our Curriculum

Art provides educational benefits that other subjects cannot; it creates creative and visual thinkers. Art and Design fosters creativity, imagination and confidence: skills that are transferable to every other subject on the school curriculum, and critically, are indispensable in a wide array of jobs.

We are preparing our children for the future by giving them these skills:

• Imagination and creativity: Art allows children to explore and record their own creative and imaginative ideas. Children take their experiences and transform them through art.
• Expression: Art allows children to express their feelings and ideas as a means of self-expression. Children may use art as a therapeutic exercise, expressing their concerns or ideas.
• Visual thinking: Pictures encourage us to think about and understand the world visually, instead of restricting learning and knowledge to words and numbers alone. Visual thinking is a skill used in a wide variety of professions, including the sciences as well as the arts.
• Problem solving and analytical skills: With practice, our children will learn that concentration and persistence will allow them to create pictures in a similar style to artists. They will learn problem-solving skills when trying out new styles.
• Autonomy: A child’s at work is their own and has its own worth. It cannot be measured as right or wrong which gives the child the confidence to say what the picture is or represents.

Intent

Our Art and Design curriculum is designed to foster our children’s creativity, imagination and confidence: skills that are transferable to every other subject within the school curriculum, and critically, are indispensable in a wide array of jobs. Our curriculum is ambitious for all learners as it gives our children the opportunity to experiment and invent their own works of art, from the inspiration of a range of diverse artists. It is designed to give pupils every opportunity to develop their ability, nurture their talent and interests, express their ideas and thoughts about the world, as well as learning about great artists, architects and designers in history.

Implementation

Our Art and Design curriculum is sequential, allowing children to build on their skills and knowledge. Woven throughout the units are the Making Skills, including the formal elements of art. These key skills are revisited and repeated across all year groups with increasing complexity.

The four strands that run throughout our curriculum are:

• Drawing
• Painting and mixed media
• Sculpture and 3D
• Craft and design

Our Art curriculum develops our pupils’ skills from unit to unit and year to year, ensuring that the basic skills in art are revisited and embedded. Through this scheme of work, we are allowing our children to know more and remember more. Through purposeful, imaginative and creative activities, pupils learn to take managed risks, trying out new ideas and new ways of working without fear of failure. Our children develop their techniques, including their control and their use of materials with creativity, experimentation and an increasing awareness of different kinds of art, craft and design.  They work alongside a range of artists taking part in activities that focus on the seven elements of art, but that are also imaginative, purposeful and enjoyable. Children are able to describe the differences and similarities between different practices and disciplines, and make links to their own work. Through high quality professional development, our teachers are confident to develop pupils’ knowledge, skills and understanding when making and evaluating products. Pupils are given explicit teaching of the formal elements of art and skills to enable them to see and understand a new technique or process. They are then able to experiment creatively with increasing independence using these skills to produce their own pieces of art.

Impact

At Prestolee, our pupils should enjoy and value Art as a subject. They will understand why they are creating pieces of artwork and not just how. The curriculum is designed in a way that children are involved in the evaluation, dialogue and decision making about the quality of their outcomes and the improvements they need to make. Our pupils will understand and appreciate the value of Art in not only our school context, but the context of history, personal wellbeing, the creative and cultural industries and its many career possibilities. As children travel through school, children will improve their mastery of art and design techniques, including drawing, painting and sculpture with a range of materials.Our curriculum also contributes to the children’s personal development in creativity, independence, judgement and self-reflection. This will all be evident in their ability to confidently talk about their work and share their work through sketchbooks, where children will record their observations and use them to review and revisit ideas. Children will also celebrate their artwork within classroom galleries and displays.