AccessArt Primary Art Curriculum FAQ

Mixed and Split Curriculum

• My school is organised differently to the norm and I need some advice on the best way to plan progression and which pathways to include.

  Find videos to help you adapt and tailer your curriculum here. 

  • Choose pathways from the years which make up your rolling years – so for instance if you have a mixed class yrs 3 and 4, choose pathways from those years.

  • Choose pathways you think your pupils will like/respond to and which the teachers will enjoy teaching. Once you have chosen pathways, look back over your selection to ensure you are happy with your balanced curriculum. 

  • Don’t worry if they do a year 4 pathway before a year 3 pathway. The reality is that progression in art is never strictly linear and so you can pick and choose the pathways you like the sound of and its ok to introduce them to children in a slightly different order. Think of it more as layering opportunities. Many key concepts such as line, colour, shape, form etc are revisited in different disciplines/pathways so there will still be progression.

  • In your DT half terms, try to keep some drawing going – even if it is just a fifteen minute transition exercise (eg after lunch) once or twice a week. This can take place in their sketchbooks and can be standalone activities (ie not linked to a topic). This will help keep drawing skills developing and means when pupils return to an art “half-term” they ease easily into it. See this post which shares lots of drawing exercises you can try in your non-art half terms. 

• Does AccessArt cover DT?

  We don’t aim to cover the D&T curriculum. The resources we share do help build skills in many other areas of the DT curriculum, especially when it comes to construction, using tools, understanding structures, intention, review/reflection etc.

  In many cases it is a subtle change in language – DT requires you to talk about iterative processes, prototypes, intention in relation to a design brief, function, and product.

  When we use the making skills we talk about them from a visual arts perspective – where the role is often not to create something with a functional purpose in response to a brief, but instead is to make a personal creative response to a stimulus. These are important differences. Explore the Projects on a Page created by the Design and Technology Association.

  There are resources on AccessArt though, which straddle the line a little bit – and which you could introduce into your curriculum to help meet some  curriculum aims: 

  • Tool Box Resources for Supporting D&T

  • The ABC’s of Tools PDF

  • Tool Tips

  • Redesigning Food Packaging

  • Wave Bowls

  • D&T resources

• I need to create an overview of the artists each class will follow. However, I am not sure which ones to suggest to staff to teach alongside your planning.

  The artists featured in the Talking Points area of the AccessArt website refer to the artists used in the pathways in our Primary Art Curriculum. So which artists you and your colleagues want to explore will probably depend on which pathways in the Curriculum you are using or thinking about might use.

  As a teacher/school, you are free to pick whichever artists, designers, craftspeople etc that you think will help expand the children’s experience of what art is. Of course as well as trying to include a diverse range of contemporary artists, the most important thing is that you choose artists who help your pupils build their understanding of a particular topic or discipline. So in this sense, the topic/discipline comes first, and then you find an artist to fit.

  If you haven’t seen them yet, have a look at our section on pedagogy articles and in particular which artists should we look at in primary school.

• Which documents should I be looking at for 'skills progression' to support with delivery of the Split Curriculum?

  Take a look at our video here to help you edit the progression plan.

• We have to follow a four-year cycle in KS2, and I was wondering how easy it would be to adapt the planning and teaching to all four year groups at the same time?

  Because our pathways don’t follow a strict linear progression, adapting the pathways and teaching they way you described should work well. If it helps, most of the activities which are now being used in schools in specific year groups started out as activities first tested in community groups which always contained a mix of ages spanning 4 or 5 years.

  Each activity can be adapted and children will enter the activity with their existing knowledge and develop what’s right for them at the time that they do it. We feel its more about layering opportunities (whenever they happen and in whatever order).