Full download Primary huh: curriculum conversations with subject leaders in primary schools mary mya
Primary Huh: Curriculum Conversations with Subject Leaders in Primary
Schools Mary Myatt
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://ebookmass.com/product/primary-huh-curriculum-conversations-with-subject-le aders-in-primary-schools-mary-myatt/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Holocaust Education in Primary Schools in the TwentyFirst Century: Current Practices, Potentials and Ways Forward 1st ed. Edition Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann
Curriculum conversations with subject leaders in primary schools
Mary Myatt and John Tomsett
‘This book will be a valuable tool to help teachers and leaders to plan the primary curriculum in a coherent and sequenced way. It is thoroughly recommended for all those involved in planning primary children’s learning.’
Professor Sam Twiselton
Based upon conversations with 21 primary school subject leaders, supported by Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma and Emma Turner
Mary Myatt is an education adviser, writer and speaker. She trained as an RE teacher and is a former local authority adviser and inspector. She engages with pupils, teachers and leaders about learning, leadership and the curriculum. Mary has written extensively about leadership, school improvement and the curriculum: High Challenge, Low Threat, Hopeful Schools and The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to Coherence, Back on Track and Huh: Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders. She has also established Myatt & Co, an online platform with films for teachers, including teaching assistants, and leaders, including governors. Mary has been a governor in three schools, and a trustee for a multiacademy trust. She co-founded the RE Quality Mark, is chair of the board for the Centre for Education and Youth and a member of the curriculum advisory group for Oak National Academy. She maintains that there are no quick fixes and that great outcomes for pupils are not achieved through tick boxes.
www.marymyatt.com
Twitter: @MaryMyatt
John Tomsett taught for 33 years in state schools and was a teaching headteacher for 18 years. He writes a blog called This Much I Know, and has written extensively about school leadership. He has previously published six books: Love Over Fear: Creating a Culture for Truly Great Teaching; Mind Over Matter: Improving Mental Health in our Schools; Putting Staff First: A Blueprint for Revitalising our Schools (with Jonny Uttley); An Angler’s Journal; Cognitive Apprenticeship in Action (editor), and Huh: Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders (with Mary Myatt). He maintains that the best thing for our students is that our teachers are happy, healthy, well-qualified, highly motivated, hard-working, well-trained experts; consequently, he believes we should put staff first. He is now engaged in supporting the next generation of school leaders, with a resolute focus upon improving the quality of teaching and learning, and developing the school curriculum.
www.johntomsett.com
Twitter: @johntomsett
Primary Huh
Curriculum conversations with subject leaders in primary schools
Mary Myatt and John Tomsett with Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma and Emma Turner
Cover design by Madeleine Davies
First published 2022 by John Catt Educational Ltd, 15 Riduna Park, Station Road, Melton, Woodbridge IP12 1QT
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Opinions expressed in this publication are those of the contributors and are not necessarily those of the publishers or the editors. We cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions.
ISBN: 978 1 915261 15 1
Set and designed by John Catt Educational Limited
Testimonials
To do justice to the primary curriculum and the deep, conceptual thinking that underpins it is a mammoth task. This is because the curriculum needed to cover this hugely important age phase effectively is itself an enormous challenge. Primary children’s sense of self and their relationship to the world develops in a profoundly important way during this period. The learning journey they need to take therefore requires joined-up planning across time, and across and between disciplines. With its myriad authentic voices, Primary Huh is a hugely valuable tool to support teachers and leaders to such curriculum development work in a coherent and sequenced way. It is thoroughly recommended for all those involved in planning primary children’s learning.
Professor Samantha Twiselton, OBE Director of Sheffield Institute of Education
Once again, Myatt and Tomsett have struck gold! The primary subject leaders featured in this book are exceptional. When reviewing the secondary Huh book, I strongly urged primary colleagues to read it, knowing they would learn plenty. This time I urge secondary colleagues to do the same with Primary Huh. Do not dismiss it as an issue that is not important to the work of a secondary school. And I would especially recommend you read Julian Grenier’s inspirational piece about the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum – it is spectacular on every level!
Gail Brown CEO, Ebor Academy Trust
Mary and John have struck gold with the concept of Huh and the execution is magnificent. Following on from its secondary cousin, Primary Huh fills a significant gap in the educational literature, addressing the challenge many leaders and teachers face: building a sense of the full scope of the possibilities for the curriculum that is taught in their schools. It’s said that no one person knows how a computer works in every detail; there are too many interconnected specialist elements. Arguably the primary curriculum is similar; bringing all the elements together in a coherent whole requires a breadth of knowledge that takes time to acquire. The interviews reported in this book convey the passion and knowledge of genuine experts, linking broad concepts to detailed examples, bringing the elements of a primary curriculum alive, opening up a world of possibilities for anyone seeking to design or refine their curriculum or, like me, simply wishing to listen and learn as an outsider looking in. It’s really quite brilliant.
Tom Sherrington
Erstwhile headteacher and educational consultant
Many of the perspectives that attend the national development, and debates, around curriculum begin with secondary school voices. Primary Huh redresses the balance and rightly puts primary experts on a pedestal. Each chapter is packed with practical insights, while also eliciting some probing questions about how schools can approach curriculum development for the primary classroom.
Alex Quigley
Author and national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation
This is a significant anthology of critical conversations about curriculum design across the primary age range. A whole host of subject leaders take us into their world of curriculum development and reflect upon the challenges and pitfalls inherent in the process. Primary Huh is an absolutely essential read for every teacher and school leader in the pursuit of academic excellence for the children they serve.
Daniel Martin
Deputy headteacher, St. Michael’s CofE Primary Academy
We all know that some of the greatest teacher CPD happens, not from listening to the best education thought leader of the day, but through those incidental conversations with peers around the coffee stations. Educators chatting together, sharing their research, good ideas, top tips and wisdom – well Primary Huh is just as entertaining, thought-provoking and stimulating as that! Primary Huh’s collection of subject leader conversations allows us to listen in and learn from practitioners on the front line about what works well, what new approaches to try and what is going to make the most difference in the classroom for the teachers and for the children. There is something in here for every primary curriculum leader and every primary class teacher working hard to curate the best curriculum offer for their pupils. Primary Huh is simply a must-have!
Rae Snape
Headteacher/NLE and author of The Headteacher’s Handbook
This is an important book for primary education. It is a smorgasbord of generous educators who understand the complexity of the breadth of the primary curriculum as well as the depth within their own subjects. It is a valuable core text for practitioners, specialist teachers and leaders. Contributors explain their specialist subject knowledge, bringing their subject to life with inspiring examples of what children can produce, with a sensible nod to underpinning theory. Notably, Mary and John have a very good nose for what matters in education and have curated this to include powerful chapters on oracy and the Early Years Foundation Stage to supplement those on the national curriculum subjects.
Binks Neate-Evans
Erstwhile primary headteacher for 16 years, member of Headteachers’ Roundtable and senior leadership tutor at the National College of Education
This is a treasure trove of expertise shared with the warmth and compassion so typical of our sector. Primary Huh is a celebration of the knowledge and skill of our primary colleagues, and a blueprint for the careful consideration that brings about rich, ambitious curriculum design rooted in contextual wisdom. A must-read for senior and subject leaders alike!
Amy Bills Deputy CEO, Coventry MAT
In every subject we are privileged to see deep thought and connection making. It’s like listening in on a brilliant colleague holding court – real respect and real professional pride.
Ed Finch
Principal, Chagford CofE Primary School
Interviewer profiles
Lekha Sharma
Lekha Sharma is the head of the Lower School at The John Wallis Academy, Evidence Lead in Education, MSc postgrad student, Oxford University and author of Curriculum to Classroom
Emma Turner
Emma Turner FCCT currently works as research and CPD Lead for Discovery Trust in Leicestershire across 15 primary and special schools. She has worked in primary education for 24 years. She has been National Numeracy Strategy Consultant, assistant head, deputy head and from 2009 as one half of one of the UK’s first all-female co-headships.
Emma is a member of the advisory board for GEC (Global Equality Collective), Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching and founder of NewEd. She is a guest lecturer on ILSCITT and experienced facilitator specialising in early career development. She is also co-chair of governors of a primary school.
Emma supports multiple schools nationally as a school improvement partner and headship coach. Currently she is DfE East Mids and Humber regional lead for the national flexible working ambassador schools project. Emma has written Be More Toddler, which advocates flexibility in leadership thinking and structures, Let’s talk about Flex , which addresses the subject of flexible working within the education system and Simplicitus: The Interconnected Primary Curriculum & Effective Subject Leadership.
Rachel Higginson
Rachel Higginson is an education consultant, has been a teacher for 18 years and is a qualified headteacher. She is the primary adviser for Uffculme Academy Trust, a collaborator for Myatt & Co, has written DfE approved curriculum for a South West free school, and is the education consultant for the children’s publisher, Redan.
Rachel designed the ‘Finding my Voice’ project based in Devon. This supports young people to physically and metaphorically ‘find their voice’. https://higginsoncreativeeducation.com/finding-my-voice-projects/
Acknowledgements
The first ‘thank you’ goes to Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma and Emma Turner. We are essentially secondary trained, so it was imperative that we had primary experts support us in the Zoom room when we were interviewing primary colleagues about the curriculum. They have been hugely generous with their time, on occasion interviewing on three consecutive nights in one week. Without their expertise, we could not have completed Primary Huh. We would also like to thank all those primary colleagues who volunteered their time to speak to us about their work. It has been a genuine privilege to engage in those conversations and to learn about the tremendous curriculum development going on in our primary schools. It would be wrong not to mention Philippa Cordingley, who provoked us to pursue a primary version of Huh before we had even finished the secondary version! Lastly, we would like to thank Fran Myatt who has been the operational genius behind Primary Huh, Natasha Gladwell who has proofread each chapter with incredible accuracy and efficiency, and Jonathan and Alex at John Catt for supporting the Huh project without equivocation.
John: For my dearest sister Heather, primary school teaching assistant extraordinaire!
Mary: In memory of Sharon Artley, educator and friend
Introduction
Mary Myatt
There’s plenty to do when planning the curriculum in primary schools. If it feels daunting, then one of the most helpful things is to talk to other people about how they have developed the curriculum for their particular subject or key stage.
This is what John Tomsett and I have done. After the secondary Huh: Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders was published, we were flooded with requests to produce a primary version, with the indefatigable Philippa Cordingley the chief cheerleader!
So, we enlisted the help of renowned primary specialists, Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma and Emma Turner, to support us as we had conversations with primary subject leaders and key stage co-ordinators who are doing great curriculum development work.
Each chapter provides insights into the importance of individual subjects and the unique contribution each makes to pupils’ cognitive and personal development. The subject chapters discuss the steps colleagues take to ensure that there is a coherent thread across the year groups, as the discrete subjects deliver, collectively, the primary curriculum.
These conversations show how the craft of creating a rich, challenging curriculum for every subject is not a quick fix. This is a nuanced piece of work, and there are many ways of approaching it. Most chapters also contain links to subject associations and helpful resources.
Primary Huh has been written for subject leaders and key stage co-ordinators; it has also been written for senior leaders, as they prepare to have supportive conversations with their colleagues who are responsible for curriculum development. This first Primary Huh book is offered as a prompt rather than the last word. Informed conversations are, as they say, the fuel of curriculum development.
And why have we called this project ‘Huh’? Well, John discovered that Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and regeneration, and we thought that was a pretty good metaphor for our work on the curriculum!
John Tomsett
Since Mary Myatt and I began the Huh project just over a year ago, I have felt increasingly ignorant. I have come to realise that for the duration of my two secondary headships – a full 18 years – I knew little about the content of what was taught in schools. Co-writing the first Huh book, which focused upon the KS3 curriculum, was a joy. Every subject leader interview significantly extended my very limited knowledge and understanding of the individual national curriculum subjects. As my Zoom-consciousness subsided, I grew increasingly engrossed by what our interviewees had to say, to the point where my ample nose was all but pressed against the laptop screen.
Indeed, we have gathered so much wonderful material from our most recent batch of interviews, that this Primary Huh book is the first of two books with a primary curriculum focus. When we reviewed what we had to share, we could not have crammed it all into one book without losing so much important material. This first one focuses upon the discrete subjects at primary, while the second Primary Huh book will explore wider issues of curriculum design at primary, such as the interconnected curriculum, how to design the through curriculum from 3 to 19, curriculum design issues for mixed-age classes, and so on.
If the KS3 Huh was fascinating, this second one on the subjects at primary has been revelatory. The more I heard from our primary subject experts, the less I realised I knew. I am not sure now how you can lead a secondary school effectively without a thorough understanding of what our pupils experience before they arrive in Year 7. From the first interview to the last, the expertise of our primary school colleagues has been remarkable. Our friends Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma and Emma Turner have been tremendous co-conspirators on the Primary Huh project, bringing their primary phase expertise to the conversations.
Having begun my career, for selfish reasons, in a sixth form college – if I had to get a job, a job where I talked about Shakespeare with young adults who had chosen to be there seemed a decent way to earn a living – I am now in awe (in the truest sense of the word, ‘a feeling of great respect sometimes mixed with fear or surprise’) of what Early Years practitioners achieve with a room of seemingly completely autonomous 3- and 4-yearolds! The Julian Grenier interview, which kicked off our Primary Huh project, is golden. An Oxford graduate, Julian has dedicated his life to improving the lives of families in the East End of London and his wisdom underpins how we structure the primary curriculum. When I visited the Cottesmore Primary School in Rutland recently, I sat there in the EYFS classroom bewitched by the expertise of the teacher and the teaching assistants as they swooped upon potential learning moments among the seemingly unstructured play. It was genius. It made me reflect that teaching Year 10 GCSE English literature is a breeze in comparison.
And the comparative challenge does not stop there. When I come upon a new literature text to teach which I have never taught before, that is a treat. Researching, say, Arthur Miller’s Tragedy and the Common Man in preparation for teaching his play Death of a Salesman is a pleasure, and it builds upon my degree subject. Unlike primary teachers, who have to work hard to be the expert in the room for every national curriculum subject, I only ever have to research English texts. Knowing the essence of all the subjects is a huge demand upon individual primary colleagues. This book’s focus upon the subjects will hopefully help all those primary practitioners who need a pithy account of what comprises a primary geography or science or computing curriculum.
Lastly, there are the mathematics and English curricula, subjects which, for good or ill, are allocated significant time on any primary
school timetable. The mathematics chapter outlines the incredible complexities of teaching children the foundations of a good mathematics education. Emma Turner’s wisdom on this subject is boundless; her primary mathematics chapter is a brilliant accompaniment to Chris McGrane’s on KS3 mathematics in the first Huh book. It would behove all mathematics teachers to read both chapters to get a sense of how to order a mathematics curriculum and how it is not just what you teach but how you teach it that matters.
Then there is the challenge of teaching children how to read, write, listen and speak. English has several strands which are woven together beautifully by Mary Myatt in a series of related chapters. We felt it important to go beyond the texts which might populate an English primary curriculum; consequently, we have two approaches to teaching writing, a detailed account of how to teach children to read and a wonderful exposition on the merits of developing oracy in our primary schools.
The conversations that form the heart of this book have been genuinely inspiring. Gadamer said that, ‘No one knows in advance what will “come out” of a conversation ... a conversation has a spirit of its own, and the language in which it is conducted has a truth of its own so that it allows something to “emerge” which henceforth exists’ (Gadamer, 1991). In the spirit of Huh, we hope that the subject chapters of this book form the fuel for endless, creative, fertile and regenerative curriculum conversations in myriad schools across the country, and that from those conversations clarity and truth emerge as we all work to provide our young people with rich, challenging, ambitious curricula.
Gadamer, H. (1991) Truth and method. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Corporation.
Foreword
When I initially learned about the first Huh book, which focused upon the secondary curriculum, I fell in love with the idea of systematically listening our way into curriculum realisation through the perspective of expert practitioners whose thinking and practices were being explored by expert leaders and listeners, Mary and John. When I read the book, I loved the reality too. But, I thought, this would be even more important and interesting in the primary phases. There, teachers and leaders have to create a whole bigger than the sum of the parts; a whole that anneals broad and deep KS2 curriculum content that enables young people to navigate their way around the world they encounter, with the KS1 curriculum, which lays down the foundations for that journey by providing them with the fundamental skills that enable them to access that cornucopia. Primary practitioners in England, somewhat unusually internationally, all have to engage with every aspect of this curriculum journey. The depth and range of knowledge and understanding that fuels a wonderful primary curriculum is every bit as demanding as that required of secondary colleagues – but for primary teams they need to inhabit the fields occupied by all of their secondary colleagues put together. How wonderful then to have the primary curriculum purposes and stories so skilfully elicited and collated in Primary Huh!
I began writing this foreword thinking I would garner a few choice quotations from the book to begin and end with – but the document I created had reached three pages after reading only the first four sections! That clearly wouldn’t do; every section is worthy of its place and needs reading in full. But not, I think, linearly. In the end, what I treasure about Primary Huh is the way each section begins with passion
and clarity about why learning in that arena matters – not just to society but also to our pupils and the communities served by our schools. I value, too, the way we can find the anatomy of the curriculum explored carefully and systematically through similar questions, so that we can read our way through how expert practitioners leading different subjects approach related questions. Last but by no means least, I deeply appreciate the voice this book gives to primary expertise. Like the god Huh, this is a never-ending book in that we can learn our way through it cyclically, coming back in each succeeding wave of Bruner’s spiral, to how an expert and deeply reflective school leader sets out to make the whole coherent, meaningful and purposeful; not least by recognising, developing and weaving together the skills and expertise of the school’s teachers. Indeed, Primary Huh surely exemplifies Lawrence Stenhouse’s claim that curriculum development relies, primarily, upon the expertise of our teachers, whose inquiring voices ring clear and true throughout this book.
Professor Philippa Cordingley, CEO of CUREE
Art
A conversation with Sophie Merrill
Sophie Merrill is an assistant head and class teacher. She has been art lead at her school for many years and has spent time teaching art across the school. She has also worked with schools on developing the use of sketchbooks to support progression in art.
When you get to the end of Year 6 and have taught a rich, challenging, ambitious primary art curriculum, what do you think Year 6 children should be able to know, understand and do in art?
In primary schools, there hasn’t been an emphasis on art within the curriculum historically, and the primary national curriculum is so brief and vague. Not all schools will necessarily have a subject specialist. Consequently, schools have had to think hard about what they want from an art curriculum. So, I would like our children to have experienced a wealth of art materials and processes throughout their time at primary and have formed, through the practical experience, a foundational understanding of what those materials and processes are. I want them to leave Year 6 with a solid knowledge and understanding of the formal elements of art and design – line, tone, shape, space, value, colour, all those things. They need to be grounded in those elements. I want them to have encountered a breadth of art and design, multiculturally and
historically, so that they have a wealth of art knowledge to draw upon for themselves to create their own artwork. They need to be proficient in drawing as a way of representing ideas or designs or other things that they might want to work on. One of the important things that we’ve worked on as a school is pupils’ confidence in art. It’s easy for children to be disheartened with art and say, ‘I can’t draw!’ One of the fundamentals is getting children to be brave and emphasising that making mistakes is okay and that to try and experiment and have a go is a basic aspect of the artistic learning process. They need to feel they are in a safe space where they can express their ideas through different media, without being wounded by adverse criticism.
While we want them feeling safe, we also want them to feel challenged. We have to avoid too much copying. Too often expression turns out to be replication: ‘We’re all going to draw this exact piece in this exact way using this exact media and we’re all going to produce exactly the same picture.’ It becomes art by numbers. Sometimes I feel we need to ban the sunflowers, because it seems that every primary school has 30 versions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the wall. It makes me uncomfortable physically to see that that’s the limit of the children’s experience of art.
Five myths surrounding primary art…
Myth 1: You need expensive materials. Art does not have to be expensive. Of course, once you’ve used the materials, they’re gone, but there are ways that we can resource art cheaply and sustainably. We begin by teaching the children to use materials sustainably. Part of that training is to train them to think about how much they’re using and why they’re using it.
Myth 2: Teachers need the skills of Da Vinci to teach art. Many teachers fear art because they have their own anxieties around their own level of proficiency within the subject, so we avoid aspects of art that we don’t feel confident in.
Myth 3: We only do art at the end of term. Too many times art is blocked at the end of term as a nice thing for the pupils to do.
Myth 4: Art is a reward for children behaving well. Too many times art is scheduled at short notice on a Friday afternoon, in the guise of a reward: ‘Everybody’s been really good this week, so let’s get the paint out.’ It’s always art or PE as a treat. It devalues art. It’s not just
an extension of playtime. Taught well, art is rich and interesting and intellectually stimulating. It’s not just something to do because you’ve all behaved well in assembly. At our school, we value art and privilege its position in the curriculum. It’s about giving it a purpose. Getting the paint out on a Friday afternoon is craft, it’s not teaching the children the principles of art.
Myth 5: Van Gogh’s Sunflowers series is the pinnacle of artistic achievement. It does feel like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are on the wall in every school I visit. It is unhelpful to reinforce subliminally in the children’s minds that Sunflowers is what we’re aiming for.
Art needs to be given time and it needs to be valued, and by valued, I mean it needs to be celebrated. It needs to be up on the walls. It needs to be given gallery space in celebration time. It needs to be sequenced so that the pupils progress in their learning and within that sequencing things need to be repeated in terms of key concepts, so that the children can build on their prior knowledge and understanding of those concepts, such as colour. They need to revisit things the same way they would revisit other areas of mathematics, areas of English, with the expectation to produce artwork to a higher level of proficiency each time they make art or encounter new aspects of the discipline.
We begin in EYFS which prepares the children for the national curriculum. When we planned our art curriculum, we also looked at the KS3 curriculum for art, which implicitly presumes that the level of art teaching in primary schools isn’t going to be very good. It repeats many elements of KS2 art which suggests the expectation that children will not receive much in the way of an art curriculum in primary. There’s next to nothing at KS2 in the national curriculum and at KS3, the only difference is that the pupils are expected to evaluate – which they should be doing in primary anyway – and there is an increase in the amount of art history they’re expected to know. They’re also supposed to be ‘proficient’. Beyond that, the KS3 curriculum is essentially the same as KS2.
You never walk into an EYFS setting and find a child who tells you that they’re rubbish at art. They’re absolutely convinced that they are the greatest artist ever. But by the time you get to Year 6 there are children in primary who believe that they can’t draw, that somehow you’re either in the ‘good at art’ camp or the ‘not good at art’ camp. As the curriculum progresses their confidence decreases. So how do we mitigate that? A
lot of that is to do with the quality of teaching of art, and not just doing art on a regular basis, but being shown how to do it, teachers modelling the messy process of creating art – the stop-start process, the trial and error, the inevitability of getting it wrong before you get it right. In my school every teacher has a sketchbook, and in their lessons they go round to each table and join in, modelling the different skills and techniques that the children might try, but within that modelling they model getting it wrong. ‘This doesn’t quite work. I’m just going to start again over here, but that’s okay. I haven’t quite got that line right,’ or ‘The value of that colour isn’t quite right, I’m going to change that… I haven’t quite got the space between these two shapes quite right, so I’m going to try that again.’ It’s allowing that freedom but also getting rid of the rubbers. If you make a mistake, draw over it. We aren’t looking for perfection.
The sketchbook is everything in art, especially in primary art; if there’s a splash on the page, it doesn’t matter, draw over it. We have sketchbooks from Year 1 to Year 6; our Year 1 children get them in spring/summer term depending on the readiness of the cohort, and then they take the sketchbooks with them all the way through to Year 6.
Art needs a purpose within the curriculum. Art should reinforce what is being taught in other areas of the wider curriculum to give it that purpose. Children need to see art in relation to something, so that art can appear in history lessons, art can appear in RE lessons. It’s not just about bringing art out to do the skill itself. For example, if you’re studying World War I, you’d look at the paintings of the brothers John Nash and Paul Nash, who were commissioned as war artists as well, or John Singer Sargent to see those responses to war, the same way that you would look at the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. If we’re learning about the Victorians, we should be looking at Victorian artwork. We might look at the arts and craft movement. We might even be looking at the Pre-Raphaelites as well within that context. You need to think about where pupils are going to re-encounter art and how art can provide a wider context for other curriculum disciplines.
When we focus upon developing the pupils’ artistic competencies, we emphasise the importance of drawing, which underpins the art curriculum. Hockney would say that being able to draw is at the absolute centre of the whole thing and even if you become Tracey Emin and you’re making tents and beds and installation art, she still needs to have been
able to draw. She spent years learning how to draw and she developed her own style, which is idiosyncratic and unique. It’s interesting how we might view that. Our Year 6 had a conversation about which is the more interesting piece of art, which is the most valuable piece of art. There was a painting by Picasso, a painting by Van Gogh and they had another painting. They all said the Picasso was worthless because it didn’t look like what it was supposed to. Challenging that fidelity-to-reality concept of art is important. We sent home discussion points for our families to engage in conversation about different topics and one of them was art. I sent home a picture of Cornelia Parker’s Exploding Shed [Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View]. Parker had the army blow up a shed. She then collected all the pieces up and then hung all the fragments back together and there’s a light shining in the middle of the wreckage. I asked the children whether they saw this as art and they said they didn’t because to them art is a painting that hangs in a gallery. If the painting merely replicates its subject precisely, you might as well take a photograph or order a canvas version of a photograph. There is a common-sense view that the greater the fidelity to the subject, the better the art. But look at Picasso’s Guernica for instance. It’s extraordinary. When you analyse Guernica, it’s just phenomenal, but initially it wouldn’t satisfy my pupils because it doesn’t look like the real thing. It is interesting what they perceive art to be. Children in Early Years have an idea of art that is so much broader than an older child. They will create things with sticks or stones and natural materials outside; they created that artwork. It’s almost like the younger the child, the broader the nature of their understanding of art. But that awe and wonder seems to disappear as children get older. That is why teaching art and introducing pupils to a range of artists and media is so important.
Sketchbooks are everything in primary art. In Year 3 we do work on the Stone Age. We look at the artwork of John Piper and Henry Moore and we look at their images of Stonehenge and we use that as a stimulus for drawing and for sculpture work as well.
We also look at Richard Long in terms of environmental art, and we connect that to the thinking about art inspired by Stonehenge and make artistic and thematic connections between the artists. In Year 4 we study the work of Joseph Cornell as part of our work on rainforests. They develop their work by experimenting with drawing rainforest flora and fauna. Thematically, they encounter rainforests in geography and in science and then they encounter them again in art, which makes meaningful cross-curricular links.
Then finally, because we’re a Manchester school, it makes sense for us to look at the Industrial Revolution. As part of that, they look at the industrial landscape and how the landscape around Manchester has changed geographically, but they also represent those changes through art by looking at the city’s architecture.
When it comes to industrial landscapes, we obviously look at Lowry, but if you’re a Manchester school you have to roll out Lowry. It’s a bit of a Van Gogh thing. It’s, ‘Oh you come from Manchester, let’s roll out Lowry.’ Do you know what I think one of the biggest shames for Lowry is? Lowry’s portraits are phenomenal. Some of his portraits are harrowingly beautiful, and yet they are rarely studied in schools. We’re rolling out his Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs along with the song, which is fine, but we’re ignoring some of his most beautiful and thoughtprovoking pieces of work as well.
At our school, the artist comes first. But it’s not about the children experiencing one artist at a time. Many schools focus upon one artist per year: ‘In Year 4 we do Van Gogh, so we look at all of Van Gogh’s artwork; in Year 5, we look at Frida Kahlo; in Year 6, we look at Banksy.’ Then they just look at all their artwork and just reproduce, whereas our approach is quite different. When we encounter our Stone Age art within the Stone Age context, there’s not a lot you can get from drawing cave paintings.
It doesn’t really develop the children’s skills. When you’re doing that period in history, it makes sense to look at rocks and soils in science as well. Then we also look at artists who have used the land as inspiration, such as John Piper and Richard Long the environmental artist. So, they encounter these different artists who have all been inspired by this one idea. The same with rainforests. Yes, they look at Joseph Cornell, but they also look at Henri Rousseau. They get this breadth of artistic styles. They see how different artists can inform their work and they try different things and find what works for them for their desired outcome. I want to emphasise the importance of that joined-up thinking within the primary curriculum. Art can’t really be a stand-alone subject in primary because it needs to be informed by so many other aspects of the curriculum, from the history, from the geography, from RE. All these things feed into the understanding of art. We study early Islamic civilisation in Year 4, so we look at geometric design and geometric patterns with a link into mathematics. Then, we look at a variety of artists who have used that to inform them both historically, but also how contemporary artists have used those pieces of artwork as well to inform their own artwork now, work by artists such as Joyce Kozloff. This gives art within the primary curriculum genuine purpose and importance.
And sketchbooks are so important, because they give the children something they’re proud of and you can track their progress. A sketchbook is no different to an English or a mathematics book. It’s where the children try out their ideas. It’s where they experiment like they do in a mathematics book. They practise their formal methods. They’re practising their skills and their knowledge of those art skills and applying them. So, in your English book you practise your grammar and your sentence construction and your punctuation. It’s exactly the same. If you’re doing that on to scrappy bits of paper, it’s not going to work.
Is there a toolkit you use to teach the children how to draw?
We re-encounter drawing within every art unit; you can see below an example of how art is structured across our school:
