Our school believes that art offers a valuable opportunity for children to express their individuality while deepening and developing their skills. At Elburton, we prioritise exposing children to cultural diversity, and United Learning provides avenues for them to engage with artists and cultures from a variety of backgrounds, enhancing their understanding of their place in the world. Art empowers students to challenge the world around them and inspires them to communicate their unique ideas and thoughts.
Our aim is to engage, inspire, and challenge pupils to express themselves through a range of materials and processes. We want our pupils to not only acquire the skills needed to experiment and create their own art but also to think critically about art, challenge concepts, and examine what art means to them. With effective teaching and carefully planned sequences of lessons and experiences, children will deepen their understanding of the visual language of art. By developing a broad knowledge of art and artists, our children will learn how to express opinions about the impact of art and understand how it can reflect and shape our history.
Implementation: What our art curriculum looks like and how we teach it.
The skills and knowledge that children will develop throughout each art topic are mapped across each year group and throughout the school to ensure progression. The emphasis on knowledge ensures that children understand the context of the artwork, as well as the artists that they are learning about and being inspired by.
The United Curriculum for Art provides all children, regardless of their background, with:
Entitlement:
Regardless of their starting point, the curriculum allows pupils to produce creative work, explore ideas, and develop the confidence to excel in a broad range of artistic techniques while learning about artists and cultures from across history and the world.
Coherence:
Taking the National Curriculum as its foundation, the curriculum is sequenced to gradually build pupils' practical knowledge—including formal elements, the use of various materials, and artistic techniques—while deepening their theoretical and disciplinary understanding across key stages.
Mastery:
All children will be explicitly taught the formal elements—colour, form, line, pattern, shape, texture, and tone—and other aspects of art knowledge in small steps, revisiting and developing their skills with increasing technical proficiency.
Adaptability:
Our art curriculum is designed to give teachers flexibility, allowing them to select and adapt resources to suit their specific context.
Representation:
The art curriculum provides children with opportunities to explore historical and contemporary artists and artworks, representing various cultures, values, beliefs and considering the context in which the art was produced to appreciate the full breadth of human experience and expression.
Education with Character:
We aim to build and maintain pupils’ confidence in their artistic abilities, developing aspects of character such as resilience, confidence, and risk-taking, while providing opportunities to share, reflect, and learn about each other’s experiences and commonalities through the curriculum.
Art is taught in 6-lesson units, once a term. The United Curriculum is sequenced so that meaningful links are made between subjects, and the order of units allows these connections to be made. The United Curriculum for Art & Design has been adapted for Elburton Primary School by considering the context of our pupils and the community. For example: Children learn about local artists and their work, both past and present e.g. Brian Pollard and Barbara Hepworth.
This includes:
Sketchbooks and Pupil-ConferencingPupils should use the same sketchbook over multiple years to record their progress. Discussing their sketchbooks helps assess their understanding of practical knowledge and how well they link new content to previous learning.
Use formative assessment opportunities in lesson slides to adapt teaching, address misconceptions, and ensure pupils are keeping up.
Use multiple-choice questions or low-stakes quizzes at the end of units to check core knowledge. These should be used to fill gaps and address misconceptions before moving on.
How you can help your child at home:
