Rationale

Our vision at Bournville, through the teaching of Art and Design, is for our children to become confident, independent artists who can articulate and value their own creative journeys. Our art curriculum fires their imagination. Children are encouraged to take creative risks, develop personal expression and to learn from their journey. 

We equip our children with the knowledge and skills needed to experiment, invent and create their own works of art. They should know that art and design both reflect and shape our history and contribute to the culture, creativity and wealth of our nation. We highly value taking inspiration from our local community in order to discover personal interests and talents. We want our children to be able to identify and appreciate the work of other artists which reflect diversity and develop an understanding of different cultures and styles within art.

Subject organisation:

Art and Design is taught for at least one hour per week in KS1 and KS2, every other term.  Each unit of learning has 6 lessons planned to deliver knowledge and develop skills that are progressive from year to year.

Pedagogical approaches: 

Our curriculum is planned coherently for children to acquire both knowledge and skills, matching the requirements of the National Curriculum.

Within our planning, a structure of generating ideas, making, evaluating and knowledge gained is considered.

We plan learning opportunities to enable:

• Traditional skills to be balanced with experimental work;

• Small scale work to be balanced with large scale work;

• Quiet reflective study to be balanced with active, dynamic work;

• Individual work to be balanced with group work;

• Two-dimensional work to be balanced with three-dimensional work;

• The study of historical “great” artists to be balanced with contemporary artists;

• The study of both female and male creative role models, as well as a range of ethnicities and time periods (including visits from artists/visits to galleries/artists’ studios).

We recognise that we have children of differing confidence, experience and backgrounds in our classes and so we provide suitable learning opportunities to enable all children to progress and feel accomplished from their art. We can achieve this through a range of strategies:

• Setting common tasks that are open-ended and can have a variety of responses;

• Providing a range of challenges with different resources;

• Using quality questions to enable the children to consider how they progress their art further;

• Extending the curriculum beyond the classroom in clubs, visits and competitions, offering further opportunities for children to discover personal interests and talents.