Art

Why our Art Curriculum looks like this? 

At St Mary and St John, we aim to provide a high-quality Art curriculum from EYFS to Year 6 which develops children’s artistic and cultural awareness and supports their imagination and creativity. Our Art curriculum 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. The curriculum has appropriate subject knowledge, skills and understanding to explore and investigate, create and evaluate artwork as set out in the National Curriculum and so will enable the children to reach and exceed their potential at St. Mary and St John’s Primary School. It will enable pupils to create art work with a real sense of purpose, self-expression, displaying and sharing the work they create and showcasing the skills and progress they have made.

How Art is taught at St. Mary and St John Catholic Primary School? 

• Our art curriculum provides a clear and comprehensive scheme of work that will show progression of skills across all key stages within the strands of Art. The children are given an opportunity to present their sense of vision through observation, experimentation and illustration. Pupils are encouraged to use their imagination through a wide variety of media and manipulative skills are developed as well as an awareness of colour, texture, design and dimension. Because the children will have access to key knowledge, language and meanings, they will be able to apply this to their work in Art and across the wider curriculum. There will be, where applicable, links to develop the children’s learning experiences, which could take the form of workshops or be linked to a wider cross curricular project.

• Art at St Mary and St John Primary School is taught in discrete half termly units throughout the year, with all classes teaching Art at the same time. This allows the children to achieve depth in their learning and teachers are able to see clear progression across school.

• The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) follows the ‘Development Matters in the EYFS’ guidance which aims for all children in reception to ‘Develop Expressive Arts and Design’: Creating with Materials, Being Imaginative and Expressive by the end of the academic year. 

• Planning is informed by and aligned with the national curriculum. In addition, staff have access to the PlanBee planning tool and resources, however, teachers lesson design is not limited by this and teachers and pupils display creative flair in their topic choices. 

• Teaching should plan for a final piece of artwork to be produced/displayed at the end of each half termly topic. 

• Subject Sharing Assemblies are planned in at the end of every half term and each year group is given the opportunity to talk about and share their work/project with the whole school. 

• Regular work in sketch books in all classes throughout the year takes place. Sketch books are passed up to the next year group to show progression and monitored by the Subject Leader. Children should be using their sketch books frequently as a place for them to experiment and try out techniques. 

• Across school we use a range of materials and media to develop art and design techniques in the style of the subject studied and produce a piece of work in the style of the artist studied 

• Pupils will be taught about great artists, architects and designers in history with equal attention being paid to men as well as women artists. 

• Artists and visits to art galleries are widely encouraged across school.

How will we measure the impact of our Art Curriculum?

• At St Mary and St John Catholic Primary School, we have devised a subject specific Assessment Tracker that determines children’s development of skills, understanding and informs teachers planning. This is completed on a termly basis by the class teacher, and is shared with Subject Leaders and SLT. 

• Subject Leaders also carry out regular learning walks, Book Looks, lesson observations and pupil discussions. Book Swaps are a regular feature in our Staff Meeting time and give us valuable opportunity to review the curriculum and quality of teaching and learning.

• Action Plans are reviewed termly by Subject Leaders and shared annually with Governors

By the time our children leave St Mary and St John’s Primary School we hope that we have instilled creativity in all our children and given them a breadth of knowledge, skills and art experiences. We feel confident that our whole school Art curriculum will teach children not only the necessary skills to be great artists but also imbed a lifelong love and understanding of Art. Our learners are ready to embrace Art with a positive outlook during their next stage of education and in later life