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Art and Design

At Holywell we love art! You'll notice this the moment you arrive because the children's art is everywhere, filling every (or nearly every) display board.

At Holywell, we use our school vision, Flowing, Strengthening, Deepening, to guide our art and design curriculum:

  • Flowing – developing fluency in a range of different techniques, an understanding of key concepts, such as colour theory and composition, and a knowledge of great artists.
  • Strengthening – combining developing technical proficiency and conceptual understanding to critique the works of great artists and use this as inspiration to create art works that are unique and high-quality with a clear critical understanding of the artistic choices they make.
  • Deepening – drawing on purposeful cross-curricular links to enrich our understanding of art, artistic movements and their contribution to culture and society, as well as applying our art skills in different subjects, such as observational sketches in science, or exploded diagrams in DT.

We follow the principle that ‘less is more’, recognising that there are many different ‘types’ of art, such as drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles, printing and digital art, but that we can’t do all of them justice in the time available to us. We are therefore cognizant of our stage in our children’s artistic development and focus on drawing, painting, and sculpture using clay, as we feel that by focusing on fewer areas in more depth they will be better equipped with the key skills and knowledge they need to further develop their skills at secondary school and flourish as artists.

The intention of our curriculum is that children’s key skills are built up over time, and the same taught skill is applied across different units to develop competence. The ‘progression of art skills’ section of the curriculum overview document sets this out in more detail. This same principle applies to the children’s knowledge of key artistic concepts such as colour theory and composition that are also highlighted in the same section. Additionally, we aim to introduce children to key great artists, their important works of arts, and the artistic movements they represent to provide children with the cultural capital they are entitled to.

This link to the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) has lots of useful information about Primary Art: https://www.nsead.org/

For more information about our art and design curriculum, please explore our overview below. Additionally, you will find the National Curriculum for Art and Design.