Art and design

Curriculum

We follow the National Curriculum in all year groups. 

Rationale 

Our vision at Windwhistle, through the teaching of art and design, is to provide children opportunities to develop confidence, self-expression and become independent artists, whilst showing enjoyment in their creative journey.  We believe that a high-quality art and design education should engage, inspire and challenge pupils, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art, craft and design.  

Throughout their journey, children will be encouraged to experiment, design, create and think critically about well-known pieces of art and artists, as well as their own creations. Children will explore the work of great artists both historic and current and will discover how these reflect and shape cultures, creativity and the wealth of our nation. 

The Early Years: Pre-school and Reception curriculum is available here. 

Children in Year 1 follow the ELAN Year 1 curriculum.  At the heart of our approach is a deep respect for the developmental stages of young children. We recognise that attention spans in Year 1 are limited—typically around 15 minutes—and our timetabling reflects this. 

Our pedagogy is based on the simplest model.  It is a sophisticated blend of modelled, shared, guided, and independent learning—each stage carefully designed to support progression and mastery. 

Years 2-6: the Access Art curriculum 

Access Art is an online scheme, designed by teachers to support non-specialist teaching staff to teach a high-quality art and design curriculum. 

We have organised the curriculum so that Art is taught over 4 ½ terms of the year.  To facilitate quality work, we will initially follow the three term units and prioritise which units we will add if additional teaching is needed. 

The key adaptation that we have made to this curriculum, is to identify one outcome from each unit that will be a quality final outcome, and to then spend additional sessions redrafting the outcome to ensure that this is the case.  As a school, we have focused on the pedagogical approach espoused by Ron Berger, utilising the video Austin’s Butterfly with both staff and children to explain the approach.