Intent

At St Ethelbert’s, art is fully inclusive to every child. Our aims are to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for art and design, provide a broad and balanced curriculum and make sure that creativity is an integral part of a child’s education. In Art, we aim for children to be curious, reflective and adventurous, experimenting with different media and resources. Art at St Ethelbert’s allows the children to study a variety of artists and make cross-curriculum links, particularly with DT, Science, History, Geography and R.E. Art is an inclusive subject, which contributes to children’s personal development and celebrates excellence, through harnessing talent in this area. The subject is also used as a tool to engage children who might find the more academic subjects challenging. Its focus is to develop proficiency in art skills: drawing and sketching, painting, printing, collage, understanding colour, tone, shape and form, exploring and developing skills in sculpture and mixed media approaches and studying artists work both critically and as inspiration. Children develop their understanding and appreciation of Art and Design through effective teaching delivered by welltrained, passionate staff and carefully planned sequences of lessons and experiences.

Implementation

We teach a skills-based art curriculum, which allows children to express their creativity as well as providing them with opportunities to practise and develop mastery in the key processes of art: drawing, painting, printing, textiles and sculpture. Each of our artists has their own sketch book, in which they can record ideas, practise new techniques and further refine their skills. These sketchbooks give our artists the opportunity to study an existing piece of art, create a constructive and reflective critique of this work and to use these ideas to develop their own piece of related artwork, enabling pupils to show resilience and dedication to complete any project to the best of their ability. Artists from different eras are studied throughout the school to give our artists a balanced knowledge and understanding of Art concepts and skills. Where possible, explicit links to the Cornerstones topics / themes are made to make learning experiences as cohesive as possible and school visitors and trips are facilitated where appropriate/possible to enhance the children’s understanding and skills further.

Impact

Through their Cornerstones topics, the children will have knowledge about the work of a range of artists, craft makers and designers, describing the differences and similarities between different practices and disciplines, and making links to their own work.

Within Art, we strive to create a supportive and collaborative ethos for learning by providing a range of learning opportunities using a variety of mediums. Emphasis is placed on investigative learning opportunities to help children gain a coherent knowledge of understanding of each unit of work covered throughout the school.

Our art curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. We focus on progression of knowledge and skills and discreet vocabulary progression also form part of the units of work.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

• Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary before and after the unit is taught.

 • Summative assessment of pupil discussions about their learning.

• Images and videos of the children’s practical learning.

• Interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice).

• Moderation staff meetings where pupil’s books are scrutinised and there is the opportunity for a dialogue between teachers to understand their class’s work.

• Annual reporting of standards across the curriculum.

• Evaluation of sketch books.