Intent

Our Art and Design curriculum allows children to learn, grown and achieve as we equip them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art. We value art and design at Radcliffe as an important part of the children’s entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum. We want to inspire, engage and challenge our children to allow them to express themselves, both visually and using art vocabulary, to make informed responses to their own work and the work of others. Children should know how art and design both reflects and shapes our history and contributes to culture and creativity of the world we live in. As we explore different skills and techniques through art lessons, the children will become familiar with a range of different artists from variety of backgrounds, time periods and specialisms. Children will use these experiences to enhance, develop and evaluate their own art work.

Implementation

The skills and knowledge that children will develop throughout each art topic are mapped across each year group and are progressive throughout the school. The emphasis on knowledge ensures that children understand the context of the artwork, as well as the artists that they are learning about and being inspired by. This enables links to other curriculum areas, including humanities, with children developing knowledge of individual artists, as well as individual works and art movements. A similar systematic approach to the development of artistic skills means that children are given opportunities to express their creative imagination, as well as practise and develop mastery in the key processes of art: drawing, painting, printing, collage, textiles, sculpture and digital art packages. Coordinated whole-school project work ensures that art is given high status in the curriculum. This includes children art work recorded on Seesaw and exhibitions of the children’s creations at school events. Last year a new, exciting arts celebration in the summer entitled “Carnival of the Creatures”, included creative costumes, singing and dancing.
The school’s high-quality art curriculum is supported through the availability of a wide range of quality resources, which are used to support children’s confidence in the use of different media. There are also planned opportunities for learning outside the classroom, as well as the involvement of adults with specialist skills from the local and wider community.

Impact

The structure of the art curriculum ensures that children are able to develop their knowledge and understanding of the work of artists and craftspeople from a range of times and cultures and apply this knowledge to their own work. The consistent use of children’s sketchbooks in Key Stage 1, means that children are able to experiment, review, modify and develop their initial ideas in order to achieve high quality outcomes. Children in the Foundation stage are given daily opportunities experiment with a wide range of mark making and crafting art skills. They learn though experience and repetition, to enable them to continue their development of art skills into Key Stage 1. Children learn to understand and apply the key principles of art: line, tone, texture, shape, form, space, pattern, colour, contrast, composition, proportion and perspective. The opportunity for children to refine and develop their techniques over time is supported by effective lesson sequencing and progression between year groups. This also supports children in achieving age related expectations at the end of their cohort year.
Classroom displays reflect the children’s sense of pride in their artwork and this is also demonstrated by creative outcomes across the wider curriculum. The school environment also celebrates children’s achievements in art and with outcomes across the school, including sculptures, paintings and collage work enhancing the indoor, as well as outdoor, environment. The Art curriculum at Radcliffe Infants contributes to children’s personal development in creativity, independence, judgement and self-reflection.