In our school, EVERY child is an artist!
That is why we fill our curriculum with opportunities for children to be creative and to express themselves in artistic ways.
We look to existing artists for inspiration and explore new ideas and techniques to create our own artwork.
Intent
At Holy Family, we value art and design as an important part of our pupil’s entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum. We explore a wide range of artists and designers through our weekly art appreciation sessions and dive deeper into their styles and techniques in our art and design lessons.
The national curriculum for art and design aims to ensure that all pupils:
- Produce creative work, exploring their ideas and recording their experiences.
- Become proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques
- Evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of art, craft and design
- Know about great artists, craft makers and designers, and understand the historical and cultural development of their art forms.
Through our art and design provision, we provide pupils with the opportunity to develop and extend their creative skills, while using a wide range of media and exploring artistic styles. We also encourage children to creatively express their individual interests, thoughts and ideas through art. Our students are provided with the essential knowledge from art and design that will enhance their future success.
We intend for our students to gain cultural capital through art and design lessons and weekly art appreciation sessions. Our curriculum is thoughtfully designed to include a range of artists of different genders, ages, nationalities and ethnicities. This not only opens the eyes of our pupils to the world around them, but allows all children to see a glimpse of themselves, their families and cultures in the artists and artwork that they explore in school. We want the artists and artwork that we share with the children to spark inspiration and allow creativity to flourish in our classrooms.
Implementation
Art and Design is taught at Holy Family through formal art lessons and weekly art appreciation sessions. Across the school, children have a number of famous and local artists and their artistic styles that they focus on each term. We also see the importance of revisiting artists and exploring them and their styles in greater depth as pupils progress through school. In each year group, pupils have the opportunity to experiment with a range of materials to produce drawings, paintings, sculptures and other art, craft and design products.
From Year 1 to Year 6, children record their artwork in sketch books. These sketch books are taken with them throughout school. This allows children to see the progression that they have made in art from one year to another and inspires them to continue exploring their creativity. Our sketchbooks allow pupils to demonstrate their thoughts, ideas, processing and evaluations of work. Class discussions and analysis of their own and peers artwork both supports the evaluation and feedback process that we follow and helps to develop children’s oracy and social understanding.
In our weekly art appreciation sessions, children learn about an artist, designer or creator, then view and compare their work with their own and other artists. The impact of art appreciation is that children gain a wider scope of great and local artists and artistic styles and concepts through history. We also use art appreciation to explore relevant religious topics in order for our pupils to have their Catholic faith encompassed across the curriculum.
Impact
Our art and design curriculum has been created to ensure that children get an immersive, creative education that inspires their future success. Art and design does not ‘stand alone’ in our curriculum. We use art and design to make links across the curriculum and use our creativity as a tool to address both curriculum breadth and pupil wellbeing.
The cultural capital, explored through art and design, is crucial as it imparts the essential knowledge that children need to be educated citizens of our world. We explore important and often sensitive current and historical world issues in our curriculum. The knowledge and skills that our pupils gain from this exploration is essential and gives our pupils an advantage in social life.
As a school, we also deepen our understanding of the British Values – democracy, respect, tolerance, rule of law and individual liberty – through the artwork and artists that we explore throughout the year. This challenges pupils to not only consider their own beliefs and points of view, but those of others too.
We measure the impact of our curriculum by asking the pupils about their learning (pupil voice), sketch book moderation and we use verbal feedback during art and design lessons. Teachers use their knowledge of the students in their class to make judgements and inform future lesson planning, ensuring that children are supported and appropriately challenged in their art and design education. As children progress through the school, they also gain more skills to enable them to begin to analyse and evaluate their own and peers artwork, which gives them the tools to edit and improve their work.
Overall, we aim for our art and design curriculum to inspire and allow children to explore their creativity.
