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.