Art & Design
What is our approach to Art & Design?
At All Saints Multi Academy Trust, we believe in the importance of delivering a broad and balanced Creative Curriculum to excite and engage our pupils. Through our Creative Curriculum, we strive to provide a practical and cross-curricular thematic approach to learning through specific topics which are relevant and purposeful to our diverse and multicultural School community. We aim to inspire our pupils through creative and practical experiences and are committed to developing each child’s unique potential.
Our new thematic topics have specific subject focusses through the teaching of Art & Design, History, Geography and Design & Technology. They are carefully being planned and developed throughout each year group to ensure that we have a planned, progressive Curriculum which builds on prior knowledge and skills from EYFS to the end of KS2. Each topic has recently been designed so that pupils work towards applying the knowledge and skills they have learnt to achieve quality outcomes. We are developing better ways of assessing children’s needs so that teaching is carefully tailored to meet the needs of all children.
What does Art & Design look like in the classroom?
With the help of our new subject progression of skills documents and in-house training, teaching staff are developing their subject knowledge across the foundation subjects (History, Geography, Art & Design and Design & Technology) in our Creative Curriculum. The Foundation subjects within our topics are assessed against key objectives from the National Curriculum and our subject progression of skills documents. Each topic has been carefully developed to ensure that teachers plan their lessons following specific, progressive objectives which link with keys skills from our progression documents. This ensures that staff are able to identify prior learning and build on pupil’s knowledge and skills.
Within our topics, teachers ensure that cross curricular links are woven into our whole school curriculum. We understand that exposing our pupils to vocabulary rich topics play an important role in the development of reading, writing and communication. We are therefore in the process of implementing subject specific and topic specific vocabulary lists from EYFS to KS2, which will help pupils become more confident at talking about the knowledge and skills they are building on within their topics.
How do we measure success in Art & Design?
Throughout each topic, children’s work is evidenced in books which show a wide variety of engaging activities and experiences to support their learning. At the end of each topic, teachers assess pupil’s knowledge and skills through observation, questioning and a variety of outcomes they have worked towards, whereby pupils are given purposeful opportunities to apply the knowledge and skills they have learnt.
Our carefully chosen whole-School and Key Stage topics excite and engage our pupils, motivating their thirst for knowledge and success across the Foundation subjects. The implementation of our new thematic topics and progression of skills documents has seen an improvement in the quality of work and outcomes that are produced. Furthermore, our emphasis on challenging pupils in all subjects to respond in full sentences, using key vocabulary has shown an improvement in the ability for pupils to talk about the specific knowledge and skills they are learning. This has been evident in both informal conversations with the children as well as learning walks.
The recent changes that have taken place in our Creative Curriculum has meant that teachers are now more confident in their abilities to deliver quality lessons which focus on building on pupil’s next steps of learning.