Designing an art curriculum: Part One

I recently tweeted about a skills progression map that I created for art. A few people asked for more detail about the art curriculum I’ve developed over the past year so I thought a blog would be easier!

The national curriculum’s coverage of art and DT in primary feels very vague. It barely covers a page and some of the statements are so broad it can be difficult to think about how that looks in terms of progression and learning.

After initially feeling overwhelmed I began to find the process freeing. By being so vague and broad it actually meant I could develop the curriculum into whatever it needed to be for our children. After sitting with it and thinking about the statements, some clear aims quickly formed for me that fitted within the ethos of our school.

I wanted the children to have an overview of art history and felt it was important that they had both a knowledge rich and creative curriculum in equal measure. I wanted the curriculum to enable children to develop their critical thinking skills when engaging with works of art, by looking at a work and formulating an opinion on it based upon how it makes them feel and react, as well as using their contextual knowledge to deepen their understanding about a work.

When we teach reading, we explicitly teach reading skills to enable students to fully enjoy and understand a text. I believe we owe the same to our children in regards to works of art and art movements. Of course they should be physically creating and being imaginative but they should also be given the contextual codes and understanding to fully experience art works.  

I wanted to give children the tools to develop their human creativity. I firmly believe that broad overview of art history gives them the knowledge and alongside this they are taught the skills to experiment, invent and create (which I will talk about in lots more detail in a separate blog).

When thinking about linking key artists/movements I wanted to ensure that a variety of 'greats' were being covered and within that a diversity of artists so that children were not only being exposed to white men. However, as we know in western art history particularly, this is not always possible! A thread that runs through the entire curriculum is the 'why'. So when looking at pre 19th century western art for example a teaching point will be why the artists are white men and there are few BAME artists or female artists. However, in that regard what I've done is far from perfect will be something that continues to be improved upon continuously.

I did briefly consider attempting to design the curriculum in some sort of linear art history fashion however I quickly moved away from that. It wouldn’t make sense for our children and art history is too complex to follow a simple straight line!

As a staff we also talked about linking the art curriculum to the history/geography lessons for that term but what was ultimately decided was this would mean making tenuous links that wouldn’t enrich learning. It would mean that lots of incredible artists and movements would be left out as they wouldn’t fit the theme. I feel very strongly that art should stand on its own and shouldn’t be there to prop up a Stone Age topic.  The children deserve more than one week of designing a shield and calling it art.

What was decided upon as a school is that all year groups from 1-6 would all be working on the same theme/skill at the same time (EYFS is slightly different and I will blog about this at some point). So, for example, as a school everyone is studying ‘Sculpture’ in Autumn 2 term. This was for many reasons both logistical and curriculum design.

Logistically it made sense for us in terms of ordering supplies. It also builds school community as the plan is to have a whole school Art Exhibition at the end of each term to showcase what every single child has made (We were due to have our first exhibition this summer but Covid stopped that from happening). In terms of building a curriculum it has also helped with cohesion, each year group has coverage in key skills areas and these skills are built upon in each year group. There is a clear progression of skills that moves across the school (skills will be discussed separately in later blog) and final outcomes were designed to allow these skills to be showcased and used.

Below you can see how coverage has been divided across the year.

Within each term/half term there is an artist focus. From the artist focus further learning is incorporated. For example, learning about Degas in Year One means that Impressionism is learnt about, as well as early photography and Muybridge. From there children begin to learn about the role photography played in painting and how it dramatically changed the purpose of painting for Impressionists (if you don’t know about this please do research as it is very interesting!). This knowledge is further developed within their schema in Key Stage Two when the artist focus is Monet and is discussed in more depth.

Our LTP consists of the theme of the term, artists covered and skills to be covered. From there the medium term plans were created for each year group.  I was very inspired by St Matthias primary (the amazing Clare Sealy’s old school) and their MTP layout because I felt it encompassed all of what I wanted to achieve at my school and allowed the pre-teaching of context, followed by the 'doing' and finally evaluation. 

When designing the medium term plan I wanted it to be comprehensive for teachers as I am very mindful that art and art history is a huge passion of mine and not everyone knows the absolute minutiae of an artist’s life. However, I also wanted it to be broad enough to give teachers the freedom to teach as suits them. I was very clear that I didn’t want it to be a script.

I’m going to delve more deeply into the medium term plans in the next blog!