Art and Design
The Intent, Implementation and Impact of Art and Design at Victoria School
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”
– Vincent Van Gogh
The “arts” include:
- Expressive arts and design
- Visual arts – drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking
- Graphics – digital art, photography
- Theatre and film, performing arts
- Music – see under its own heading
- Dance – see under PE/games
- Creative writing/storytelling
Intent
It is our intent at Victoria School to provide pupils with a high-quality art curriculum, which develops creativity, sets challenges, engages and inspires children and equips them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art, craft and design.
We see art as a vehicle for creativity and individual expression. It is important to the development of pupils’ well-being, appreciation of the world and understanding and empathy of others. We aim to give all children the confidence to express themselves through a range of chosen mediums. Our curriculum provides children with an opportunity to experience all art forms: drawing, painting, 3D designs and print making, and pupils are encouraged to experiment with a range of different materials and techniques to bring their ideas to life. Opportunities to practise art and design techniques when using colour, pattern, texture, line, shape, form and space are embedded across the Art curriculum through the use of individual sketchbooks.
We want our children to know how Art & Design has contributed to our culture and understanding of our history and the world. They explore a variety of artists and their styles, which is enhanced with visits and visitors. Our children will focus on a variety of key artists and they will begin to understand the development of their particular art forms. The children will have opportunities to take inspiration from these key artists and create their own artworks in their particular styles.
We also expect children to be able to look at an image or a piece of art and to have an understanding of it, not just react to it. We equip them with the skills required to have an understanding of the language of art and design. This enables them to describe what they see in detail and to provide evidence for their observations
Implementation
Throughout their time at Victoria School, the children are given a range of opportunities to explore a wide variety of materials and techniques, developing their skills and thinking as young artists, using the ‘Kapow Primary’ scheme to form the basis of our Art and Design curriculum.
The curriculum is progressive and so allows the children to build on skills, knowledge and techniques year on year. Throughout each unit, the children build on previous understanding through five areas of content: making skills, generating ideas, formal elements, knowledge of artists and evaluating their work.
Various media types are explored within each unit to give the widest possible range of experiences for all children. The materials and media used are revisited throughout units and year groups to ensure progression of skills previously developed. Children have access to key knowledge, language and meanings, through the use of knowledge organisers, in order to understand and readily apply new terminology to their work in Art and across the wider curriculum.
Impact
Through following a clear and comprehensive scheme of work in line with the National Curriculum, it expected that teaching and learning will show progression across all key stages within the strands of Art and Design.
Subsequently, more children will achieve age related expectations in Art at the end of their cohort year and Key Stage. It is our aim that children will retain knowledge and skills taught within each unit of work, remember these and understand how to use and apply these in their own art work, whilst beginning to understand what being in ‘artist’ means.
At Victoria School, we are able to measure the impact that Art and Design has had for all children by:
- Determining the extent to which objectives are met within each lesson and overall, at the end of each unit.
- Summative assessment of pupil discussions about their learning.
- Images 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.
By the time children leave Victoria School, we want them to have developed a passion for art and creativity, working both independently and collaboratively. They will have grown in confidence when using a range of tools and techniques, becoming artists that can apply the skills and knowledge that they have developed throughout the years and respond critically to their own and other’s work
