Vision
Rivers Academy Art department aims to encourage students to develop skills required to enable them to take pride in their creativity, embrace their imagination and realise their potential.
Our students come from a wide range of backgrounds and cultures, bringing with them a variety of skills and talents. We aim to help them realise their true potential by keying into their strengths. By exploring a range of different artistic techniques and original artist’s work, we aim to inspire and encourage students to engage with Art on a variety of levels and a range of mediums.
Intent
Our KS3 curriculum integrates and incorporates themes from other subjects, creating Transdisciplinary links, with the intention of helping students to understand the values of their learning by justification. July 2020 saw the first cohort of our BTEC Art students graduate. This new curriculum aims to better prepare our students for working in the Arts fields. In addition to Fine Art we offer a wide range of practical specialisms including printmaking, photography, textiles and 3 dimensional design.
Our 6th form students study the more specialist pathways of Fine Art or Photography. The curriculum devised allows these students to focus on contextual aspects and the medium in further depth and detail.
Implementation
We offer our students an environment of creative spaces with two general teaching rooms, an area solely for our sixth formers to display/work, and a Mac suite for Photography (these Macs have a number of programs dedicated to creative interpretation of images, research – both historical and analytical studies). We support our students by offering lunchtime drop-in clubs and afterschool sessions, including focused year 11 and A Level afternoons.
Our Arts curriculum is designed to stimulate creatively, engage and inspire our students to produce high quality artworks, but also to gain a love and passion for refined skills and appreciation. This we do by:
- Providing students with a broad range of art, craft and design skills
- Developing creative, adaptable and entrepreneurship skills
- Delivering a range of skill based activities in drawing, painting, printmaking
- Ensuring students develop and become confident in literacy and analytical skills within art history context
- Ensuring all students develop good presentation skills and consistently work to ‘personal best’
- Ensuring students have opportunities beyond the classroom as educational visits, engaging with inspirational speakers in the fields of Art and Design
Art and Photography CURRICULUM OVERVIEW
Art and Photography AGE RELATED EXPECTATIONS
Art and Photography ASSESSMENT JOURNEY
Impact
All of these courses allow our students to pursue general or specialism art and design fields. We invite our students to afternoon portfolio review sessions, where we focus on helping them prepare their portfolios for interviews. Many of our students moved on to university to study in areas such as architecture, fashion, interior design and beauty.