Art and Design...The Albourne Way

At Albourne we celebrate a culture of creativity! We boast a staff team who have a diverse range of expertise in areas such as graphic design, illustration, fine art, music, dance and drama. We have collaborated to develop a broad and ambitious Art and Design curriculum for our young learners.

​

Art – Intent, Implementation and Impact.

​

Intent:

​

At Albourne Primary School, we value the importance of Art and Design. It is our children’s entitlement to be able to share and express their individual creativity, independence, resilience, and self-reflection. We will deliver a curriculum that enables children from EYFS to year 6 to experience, and participate in a range of creative activities and events. Children get to develop their knowledge and skills within a wide range of arts activities (through lessons and extra-curricular clubs); they develop an appreciation of a mix of diverse cultures, including the use of those within the school and Trusts community.  

It is our intent to provide all children with the fundamental skills, techniques and knowledge needed to independently create their own unique drawings, paintings, sculptures, and crafts. We want the children to have a natural sense of wonder and curiosity when studying a wide variety of artwork. We empower children to discover great artists. We want the children to realise that art goes across the curriculum and should be seen as an additional skill and enhancement to work produced in other curriculum areas. We aim to provide opportunities to meet and work with artists, visit galleries and create special shared events within the school.

​

Implementation:

​

We teach a skills-based art curriculum, which allows the children to express their creative imagination as well as providing them with the opportunities to practice and develop skills in the key processes of art. This is supported through the studying of key artists and movements, and through identifying arts role in everyday lives, through history and differing cultures.

We ensure that progression is being made in children’s skills and knowledge of drawing, printing, painting, colour, sculpture, texture, and pattern, by following a skills progression document. In EYFS the children have daily access to a variety of media and materials which they can explore to produce their own creative work. Planning links to the year group curriculum topics and integrates appropriate schemes of work from Kapow. All planning links to the Art and design programmes of study for key stages 1 and 2.

Art is promoted throughout our school through a variety of platforms:  we hold after school art clubs, we have themed art weeks, we have shared learning with parents and we have changing display boards around the school and on the school grounds. We will continue to develop our links with Artsmark and with the other schools within the Trust, sharing resources, skills and ideas.

​

Impact:

​

When children leave Albourne they will have a love of art.  They will have experienced a broad, balanced arts curriculum, with an emphasis on the development of understanding and skills in art and design, creative dance, music and drama. These experiences will have happened in all areas of the curriculum, and through extra-curricular clubs. Children leave Albourne having been exposed to a wide range of artists, including meting local artists, which will have developed their knowledge in a range of areas. Most importantly, we want children to have found and enjoyed a creative outlet – a means of self-expression and enjoyment.

 

We seek opportunities to work with artists and designers to enrich the subject knowledge of staff and pupils.

 

Art and Design is taught discretely through the year groups which allows for progression and enables pupils to revise, build-upon and extend key skills and knowledge taught in previous years. Our staff always find exciting ways of weaving Art and Design into other curriculum areas, where appropriate, making links with topics.

 

By the time our pupils reach Year 6, they will have explored and gleaned skills across a range of disciplines including: drawing, painting, 3D modelling, printing and crafting.

 

Sketchbooks are used for research of artists and their work; experimentation of design ideas; exploration of techniques and they are annotated with evaluations of their own work. As children transition through the school years, their sketchbooks journey with them, becoming precious working documents that the pupils love to flick back through and reflect on what has been recorded within.

 

Our children have commented on how they value Art and Design as one of the many highlights of their school week, as they love having opportunity for self-expression and creativity; they say they find art therapeutic and many enjoy the freedom of being allowed to get messy!

 

We are an inclusive school and we know that many children who find some other curriculum subjects challenging, feel that they are able to excel in Art and Design and it gives them that sense of success which is vital for their personal well-being.