Intent

Frome Valley’s Art and design lessons aim to nurture pupils’ creativity, imagination and visual literacy, encouraging them to think like artists and designers. The intention is for pupils to develop the confidence to experiment, express ideas and communicate meaning through visual and tactile media.

The lessons promote an appreciation of art as a powerful form of human expression, helping pupils to understand its role across different cultures, time periods and creative industries. It encourages children to value originality, take creative risks and reflect critically on their own work and that of others.

The curriculum is designed to be both inclusive and ambitious, ensuring all pupils are equipped to enjoy, create and respond to art in meaningful ways.

Implementation

The learning is structured around five strands that run through each unit:

• Generating ideas.
• Using sketchbooks.
• Making skills (including formal elements).
• Knowledge of artists.
• Evaluating and analysing.

Our children at Frome Valley build their skills and knowledge, applying them to a range of outcomes. The formal elements, a key part of the national curriculum, are also woven throughout units. Key skills are revisited again and again with increasing complexity in a spiral curriculum model. This allows our children to revise and build on their previous learning. Units in each year group are organised into four core areas:

• Drawing
• Painting and mixed-media
• Sculpture and 3D
• Craft and design

The units are fully scaffolded and support essential and age appropriate, sequenced learning, and are flexible enough to be adapted to form cross-curricular links. Creativity and independent outcomes are robustly embedded into the units, supporting students in learning how to make their own creative choices and decisions, so that their art outcomes, whilst still being knowledge-rich, are unique to the pupil.

Impact

Children are involved in the evaluation, dialogue and decision making about the quality of their outcomes and the improvements they need to make. By taking part in regular discussions and decision-making processes, children will not only know facts and key information about art, but they will be able to talk confidently about their own learning journey, have higher metacognitive skills and have a growing understanding of how to improve.

Our children should leave Frome Valley equipped with a range of techniques and the confidence and creativity to form a strong foundation in art and design.