Swaffield School

Art topics are explored all through the school year but are particularly studied during our annual Arts' Week in June. Visit our Curriculum page which gives details of Swaffield's 2024/2025 curriculum for each year group.

We value our link with local schools and arts organisations, where we are invited to join them with their Art Projects.

We're delighted to welcome specialist training from professional artists who visit from different arts organisations including Tate Britain, and the Totally Thames Festival "Ship of Tolerance". Children also have opportunities to experience and learn from the artwork on display at galleries such as Tate Britain and the Saatchi Gallery.

Arts Mark Gold Award

Swaffield Primary School has been awarded the national award of ‘Arts Mark’ at Gold Level four consecutive times.

We're very proud of this outstanding achievement and shows the high level of commitment the school and staff have towards Art, Music, Drama and Dance. Read more about us receiving the award here.

Intent

Our intent for Art at Swaffield is that our children will:

Experience
Our children are given the opportunity to experience and engage with a wide range of art techniques, materials, and artists from diverse backgrounds, historical periods, styles, and movements. Our curriculum ensures that each year group will experience four core skills: drawing, painting and mixed media, sculpture and 3-D, craft and design.

Express
At Swaffield, we want our children to develop the tools they need to express themselves artistically and confidently. Our curriculum is based on the EYFS Framework and the National Curriculum for Art and is designed to nurture each child’s creative process and artistic expression. It achieves this through teaching our children the generation of ideas, use of sketchbooks, developing skills for formal artistic elements (line, shape, tone, texture, pattern, and colour), knowledge of artists, and evaluation and analysis of work, including self-evaluation.

Create
We want our children to understand and be inspired in how and why art is created, in order for them to develop their confidence and passion for their own artistic creations. Our curriculum follows a progression in artistic skills and knowledge, enabling our children to develop their abilities, confidence, and imagination to meet a range of purposes. Our Arts Week focuses on a different theme each year, allowing all children to have the opportunity to create unique and meaningful work.

Implementation

Each unit of work in the Kapow scheme of work for Art incorporates the following:
● Generating ideas
● Using sketchbooks
● Making skills, including formal elements (line, shape, tone, texture, pattern, colour)
● Knowledge of artists
● Evaluating and analysing
We follow a spiral curriculum where our children revisit and develop the same core skills as they move up in the school, encountering a progression in creative challenge and autonomy.
This document shows which units cover each of the National curriculum attainment targets as well as each of the strands:

Impact

We monitor the impact of our Art curriculum through ongoing assessment of the creative process documented in children’s’ sketchbooks, as well as through the work produced by the children at the end of a unit. Additionally, our children are taught to evaluate and assess their own process and work as part of our curriculum. Using the skills catcher from Kapow, our children are able to record the development of their artistic skills and knowledge before and at the end of a unit.

By the time, our children leave Swaffield at the end of Year 6, we want them to be able to:

★ Produce creative work, exploring and recording their ideas and experiences.
★ Be proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques.
★ Evaluate and analyse creative works using subject-specific language.
★ Know about great artists and the historical and cultural development of their art.
★ Meet the end of key stage expectations outlined in the National curriculum for Art and design.

Arts Week

Every year at Arts' Week, children from Nursery up to and including Year 6 enjoy creating pieces inspired by the theme for the year.

Visitor Comments from Arts Evening:

This was a wonderful Arts' Evening! So diverse, so colourful! It really shows
what a well-rounded education Swaffield to give our children.

Without a doubt, the most talented, arty, brilliant, impressive,
and fantastic children I've ever seen! Bravo!

Arts Week Creations

One of our Arts Weeks focused on the theme "Positive Planet" during which our children created stunning pieces of art by items which may have otherwise been put in recycling.

Art is a very much loved subject at Swaffield and this is evident as soon as you enter the school grounds with artwork displayed in the playgrounds and throughout the school building.