Intent 

At Phoenix Primary School our Art and DT curriculum is derived from an exploration of the backgrounds of our pupils, our beliefs about high quality education and our values. They are used to ensure we give our pupils appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities. Both Art and design and DT activities enrich children’s learning and enable them to communicate their thoughts, ideas and observations in a practical and expressive way. Through talking about their own creations and evaluating their own and others’ work, children are encouraged to develop their visual language, ideas and feelings. We aim to allow experiences of a variety of materials, tools and techniques children have the opportunity to record creatively the world around them. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards and backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, pupils return to the same concepts over and over, and gradually build understanding of them.

Implementation

Our curriculum design is designed based on evidence that learning is most effective with spaced repetition. Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long term retention. Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength. Our Art and Design content is subject specific. We make inter-curricular links to strengthen schema, including embedding art within some areas of the wider curriculum, such as P4C and PSHE.  

Inclusion

At Phoenix Primary we plan to provide for all pupils to achieve, including boys and girls, higher achieving pupils, gifted and talented pupils, those with SEN, pupils with disabilities, pupils from all social and cultural backgrounds, children who are in care and those subject to safeguarding, pupils from different ethnic groups and those from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Equal Opportunity

Care should be taken to give each child the opportunity to learn about the global community, regardless of race, Religion, language or gender.

Health and Safety

Children should be working in a safe environment both in and outside of the classroom. The relevant risk assessments must be completed when using any potentially dangerous equipment, such as scissors or craft knifes. When conducting fieldwork, children should be properly supervised and should be made aware of any potential dangers, such as busy roads or water hazards.

Wellbeing

Mental health and wellbeing is at the forefront of everything we do, from children to all staff across the school. We have an open door policy within our environment and we offer all the opportunity to express themselves appropriately and ensure that matters of concern are dealt with correctly and supportively.