Art and Design

'Art is not what you see, but what you make others see' – Edgar Degas

Through art and design at Adel St John, we aim to engage, inspire and challenge pupils by introducing them to a broad range of experiences, techniques and knowledge with a focus on featured artists, craftspeople and designers. We aim to equip pupils with the confidence to experiment, explore, take risks, invent and create, enabling them to be themselves and explore their own identity, as well as to respect and connect with others. We aim for our children to foster a positive, life-long relationship with art and design, have fun and know that they themselves are all craft makers, designers, architects and artists!

At Adel St John, the foundation of our art, craft and design curriculum is derived from our Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum and the National Curriculum. For our school, we have chosen to build our curriculum using the ‘AccessArt Primary Split Curriculum’, designed to inspire and enable high quality visual arts teaching and learning. Believing that art is far more than a series of technical skills, AccessArt’s holistic curriculum nurtures creative thinking skills and helps ensure pupils learn through art, as well as about art. As learning is built through weaving, layering and a revisiting of experiences, their many ‘Pathways’ follow a repeated rhythm of progression. This provides lots of time to balance repeated practice with new experiences, creating energy and momentum throughout the year as well as throughout our pupils’ time at Adel St John.

From Year One, our children use sketchbooks to document their individual learning and creative journeys; where they have the opportunity to record, review and revisit their ideas and experiences. These play a vital part in developing our children to work as artists, craft makers and designers and are effective in providing evidence of what art looks like within our school. We use these sketch book learning journeys as part of our gentle, on-going assessment, where pupils can reflect upon and talk about their learning to show their understanding. Discussion and conversation surrounding our sketchbooks enable teachers to discover intention, as well as providing opportunities to observe outcomes of the journey and end result. Each Pathway contains ‘I can’ statements, which can provide support in monitoring progress and successes.

Assessment in the art curriculum is a holistic process and should teach pupils: how to become independent artists, craft makers and designers, to know and understand the creative process, to ask themselves the right questions and to be able to both take advice and accept praise.