Art in the National Curriculum

Your child comes home with a fantastic self-portrait made from recycled household waste. It looks great, but what exactly did he learn from doing this? Creativity. 

Art is a vital part of your child's education and involves exploring the properties of materials and their textures, experimenting with different effects, and generally having the freedom to create. It is an important part of the national curriculum.

 Exploring different materials

A pre-school class of three and four-year-olds bring in a range of materials from home. The pile they create resembles a rubbish dump with fabric and wool scraps, scrunched up foil, bubble wrap, cardboard, and sandpaper, but the children plan to put them to good use.

After a couple of days of cutting, tearing and gluing, their monumental art project is completed. It's a ‘texture wall' - a smooth-rough, soft-hard, glittery-dull patchwork collage of recycled materials. For the rest of the term the children stroke, touch, poke, and even press their cheeks against, the different textures created. One child is transfixed by the effect of light hitting a piece of winkled foil paper... all great fun, but what exactly do they learn?

They learn about the properties of the different materials. They learn how to manipulate them. They learn about the use of colour and space. The children also learn to work in a team, and by talking about what each other sees, feels and likes, they extend their vocabulary and learn more about themselves and each other.

Later, as the children's knowledge and understanding develop they will build on this, becoming much more critical and discerning in their ideas, choice, manipulation and making in art, design and craft. 

 Art explores times and worlds

Art also takes them to other worlds, cultures and times. Children explore ideas and meanings in the work of artists, craftspeople and designers and about the diverse roles and functions of art, craft and design. The art curriculum is based on the assumption that when children are able to understand, appreciate and enjoy visual arts they also gain the power to enrich their personal and public lives. Through art and design activities, they learn to make informed value judgements and aesthetic and practical decisions, becoming actively involved in shaping environments.

A teacher may teach her class about colours by asking the children to design packaging suitable for a healthy snack. They will have learnt that certain colours are associated with particular tastes or qualities, who a product is aimed at or how it is made (pink and red, for example, indicates sweetness; white and blue suggest purity), and they will need to demonstrate this understanding in their design.

Children learn more about how people lived in the past by looking at their art and artists. The Egyptians, for example, surrounded themselves with colourful buildings painted with scenes of everyday life and their gods. The paintings were meant to be realistic: in the tombs they represented the life which the deceased had led.

The hidden power of art and creativity

Art has another very important role to play in equipping young people to become the kind of employees that businesses increasingly need. Shaun Woodward, minister for the creative industries, says businesses need people ‘with the ability to think creatively', and because ‘art can fire young people's imagination and creativity', adds culture minister David Lammy, ‘it has an essential role to play in education'.

There's been plenty of work over the last few years to create an education system based on creativity. Creative Partnerships is a £150 million scheme run by the Arts Council to enable children from particularly deprived areas to enrich their learning and exposure to the arts by working with artists and craftspeople.

In a similar DfES-funded project run by the Sorrell Foundation, children at Abbeydale Grange School in Sheffield, South Yorkshire have redesigned the school's logo and uniform - its first change in the school's 47-year history. It is part of ‘joinedupdesignforschools', which links schools with professional designers in an aim to encourage pupils to be more creative.

Headteacher Catherine Bull says students have been able to pick up valuable business skills by working with professional designers. ‘It is very important that students have a sense of belonging to a community and I think that this is something that comes with having a uniform and in particular a less traditional one,' she said. ‘I believe that higher standards of dress lead to a higher standard of work and attainment.'

Nurturing creativity in young people

‘Creativity can help boost self-confidence and motivation and helps youngsters develop communication skills and self-discipline,' said schools minister Andrew Adonis at the launch of Nurturing Creativity in Young People. ‘It is important for pupils and students to gain the creative skills that will help them excel in their studies and their future working life.'