Our art and design curriculum allows our children to express their creativity. It equips them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art, craft and design. As pupils progress, they become analytical, develop their own style and identity and use art as a form of expression.

We study a range of artists and designers; learning about the artistic techniques that they use and influences on and from their work. Pupils take inspiration from this to create their own compositions. They also draw on their own experiences. Many of the artists studied have created abstract work. Pupils evaluate and analyse artists’ content, techniques and messages as inspiration for their own work. This ensures all children are successful as individual artists rather than trying to copy existing pieces of art.

Pupils develop:

Sketch books are used to experiment, practise and refine their ideas and the techniques they have been taught.

The content that pupils will learn:

We promote the cultural development of pupils by providing a range of opportunities to participate in and respond positively to artistic and cultural activities.

Overall Reading Enhanced Curriculum Intent

Our reading-enhanced curriculum excites pupils to ask questions and learn new knowledge and skills. Our curriculum builds pupils’ substantive and disciplinary knowledge progressively over time, from the moment they start school in the Early Years. It prepares them well for the Key Stage Three curriculum.

The reading-enhanced curriculum has reading for purpose built into all learning. Units of work have a high-quality, age-appropriate driving text assigned that is used as the catalyst to impart curriculum knowledge and promote questioning. These texts are carefully selected to engage, inspire and deepen understanding. Alongside this, supplementary texts and bespoke knowledge organisers enable pupils to enrich their knowledge, subject-specific vocabulary and curriculum skills. Every curriculum session includes reading for purpose, from either the driving book or a supplementary text. Pupils then use this as a stimulus to discuss new knowledge, deepen their enquiry skills and form links in their learning.

The long-term plan is devised so that there are clear subject links within a unit, enabling pupils to make connections in their learning. This is also the case with the subject strands, where skills correlate with other subjects. For example, the skills within similarities and differences in history work parallel with making comparisons in geography. 

Pupils learn subject content in the reading-enhanced curriculum prior to accessing the reading strategy texts. For example, in the Year 5 Democracy unit, pupils learn about the Gunpowder Plot. This prepares them with background knowledge for reading Black Powder in Year 6. This ensures that pupils have a further opportunity to demonstrate knowledge in a different context, build schema and reinforce retention of knowledge.

Pupils master knowledge progressively through each year, phase and key stage. The needs of all pupils have been carefully considered when setting this ambition. This ambition remains high but may be adapted by support and resources, for example, for those pupils with SEND.

The most important knowledge we expect pupils to remember is identified as take-aways in each subject. Reinforcing our strong belief in fostering enquiry, all units have an overarching Big Question as its title and each session has a threaded Big Question: all of which are used to assess pupil progress.

Influential people are also paramount to the curriculum and are used in all subjects. These are selected to span different eras and link directly to the unit of work pupils are learning. By incorporating a diverse range of people (e.g., historians, scientists, entrepreneurs), new learning is put into a real-world context, developments within a subject historically are seen and pupils are given an insight into how their learning impacts on the world around them and inspires them to pursue future careers.

Throughout the REC curriculum, we take every opportunity possible to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.