Art Design and Technology at Southery Academy
Intent
Art, design and technology, allows children to express visually their understanding and meaning of the world around them. Visual art is an essential part of a child’s education since it equips a child with ability to make attempts, without fear of making a mistake. The design and technology elements, teach a child to face challenges without focusing on the wrong or right answer. Pupils develop and extend their skills, and consider their own ideas, interests, and thoughts through practical development, analysis of existing designs and problem solving. As a result, art and design is greatly valued here at Southery Academy, viewed as an important part of a child’s entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum. Therefore, it is our intention to provide children with experiences which allow them to access a range of media, materials, and techniques as well as exposing them to an expanse of artistic movements, ideas and designers both present and past to encourage, inspire and enthuse them.
Implementation
An effective art and design curriculum should challenge and arouse interest in children, providing them with the knowledge and skills to investigate, create and develop their own work. Children will be presented with challenges and problems to solve, be given a design brief to work with and look into the world of product design. To ensure this is successfully implemented here at Southery Academy, we endeavour to provide children with access to a variety of resources and different media in school with the intention to sharing ideas with each other; we hope to be working with other academies within EMAT, in the near future. Our well-established and broad curriculum, aims to introduce more art-based events, working alongside our Art and Design Associates to implement fun, diverse and meaningful experiences where children can learn about a specific artist, designer, technique or movement. Our recent whole-school art competitions at Easter and the Eco awareness sea creature design competitions this Summer term, have been very successful and have encouraged the children to use a variety of materials, as well bringing their own ideas to life, with the support of their parents and carer’s at home.
Impact
By the time children leave Southery, they will feel proud of what they have achieved. They will have a breadth of knowledge of different medias and techniques, learned, improved, and embedded a range of artistic skills and will hopefully have been able to take some of these piece’s home to share with parents and carers.
They will have developed the ability to think critically about the work of past and present artists, their own work, and their peers, as well as a growing understanding of how art has shaped history and has been engraved in the culture of people around the world. Teachers will formatively assess the work the children produce, encouraging them to make good attempts to improve where they can and explain reasons for the materials, ideas and processes they have included. They will be confident at, experimenting and taking risks, encouraged to think about the process they take when creating a piece of art, not just on the finished product. However, we have a keen eye on standards for design where the ‘finish’ is an important element worthy of attention. Above all, we want children to discover a creative outlet, look for design opportunities and discover methods of expressiveness and delight.