Art & Design at Fawbert & Barnard’s
Intent
At Fawbert & Barnard’s Primary School, our Art & Design curriculum is rooted in our motto Learning for Life and our values of Kindness, Respect, Resilience, Trustworthiness and Responsibility.
We believe that high-quality art education inspires children to think creatively, experiment confidently and express themselves with originality and purpose.
Our curriculum ensures that all pupils:
- Develop artistic skills using a wide range of media, including drawing, painting, printing, collage and 3D work
- Learn key artistic techniques progressively and apply them with increasing independence
- Explore and evaluate the work of famous artists, craftspeople and designers
- Use art as a tool to deepen understanding across the curriculum - for example:
- Sketching historical artefacts
- Exploring landscapes through geography
- Expressing emotion through colour, line and form
- Understand how creative processes link to mathematical ideas (pattern, shape, structure and symmetry)
- Produce purposeful art, with clear outcomes and opportunities to reflect, evaluate and improve
We want our pupils to think like artists - to take risks, experiment, and reflect on why certain techniques and ideas work effectively.
Implementation
Art & Design is taught through a carefully sequenced curriculum that ensures clear progression in knowledge, skills and techniques from EYFS to Year 6.
Teachers implement the curriculum by:
- Focusing on one artistic discipline at a time to secure depth
- Planning progressive sequences of lessons that build skills progressively
- Ensuring that not all art disciplines repeat each year, allowing for breadth, variety and mastery
- Using comparative assessment tasks at the end of each unit to demonstrate progress
- Providing challenge questions that promote reflection, reasoning and creativity
- Offering trips, workshops and visiting artists to enrich the curriculum
- Showcasing pupils’ work through displays, exhibitions and celebrations of learning
- Delivering whole-school Art Weeks and sculpture-focused projects to strengthen creativity and cultural development
Reflective practice is embedded throughout: pupils evaluate their work, make improvements and explain choices using age-appropriate art vocabulary.
Impact
Our Art & Design curriculum is designed to be high-quality, progressive and inclusive.
We measure its impact through:
- Pupil outcomes compared to planned knowledge and skills
- Comparative assessments linked to our progression grids
- Displays and exhibitions showing clear progression across year groups
- Pupil voice: discussions about ideas, techniques, inspiration and evaluation
- Evidence of risk-taking, creativity and resilience in artistic processes
When pupils keep up with the curriculum, they are making good or better progress in Art & Design.
Our aim is that the strength, richness and progression within our Art curriculum continue to position Fawbert & Barnard’s for success in achieving and maintaining Artsmark recognition, celebrating our commitment to creativity across the school.