25 August 2004
Art Of A Learning Curve
The Times
By Emma Burns
A NATIONAL COMPETITION AIMED AT ENCOURAGING ART IN SCHOOLS HAS HELPED TO TRANSFORM PUPILS’ INTEREST IN THE SUBJECT. IT’S ALSO PLAYING DIVIDENDS ACROSS THE REST OF THE CURRICULUM.
Tell most Year 6 teachers that as well as getting their 10 and 11 year olds through Key Stage 2 tests - those on which a primary school’s league table position depends - they will put them into a national art competition involving lots of work during and after school hours and they would think you’re barmy.
And it would seem impossible if you told them that the children will get better than average test results and win the competition, gaining £2000 for the school and the chance to exhibit their work at the Tate Modern four years in a row.
But Holme Hall Primary School in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, has managed to pull that off. Holme Hall, winner of the Artworks competition set up five years ago by the Clore Duffield Foundation to encourage art in schools, is not, at first sight, a remarkable place. Its community is neither deprived nor wealthy. The older children are taught in classes of 36: much larger than in most primary schools. Yet it is apparent that a genuine enthusiasm for art runs through the place.
Cas Sacco, the deputy head and Year 6 teacher, is the man chiefly responsible. A former architecture student, he has a passion for the arts that inspires the children. "The school, the children and I are taking a risk by pushing ourselves further than the norm and we couldn’t do it without the support of the head", he says. "Each year we do something different and new. I give the projects focus and direction and act as the technician but the children do the thinking. They get pleasure from the finished product and the appreciation they get back from their parents and friends. I believe they will remember it for the rest of their lives."
Sacco entered work that pupils had done on the Millennium for the 2001 Artworks contest, though he admits he was amazed when they won. After three more successes, art is entrenched in the children’s minds as a vital part of Year 6.
"The young children are already at a higher level than they would have been four years ago. They have seen the older children making figures out of cardboard boxes and paper-mâché, and sculptures out of plaster. They have the knowledge that they can do that too, and their imagination is already on a higher plane."
Although more than the one timetable session a week has been spent on art, the impact on all-round learning has been positive, encouraging the children to read harder books about their chosen artist than they might otherwise have done. Maths has been boosted, too, by all the measurements and calculations needed to make their artwork.
Not every school that is an Artworks winner is as academically successful as Holme Hall, although seven of the nine schools that have won more than once do exceed the average Key Stage 2 score. What they seem to have in common is inspiring teachers who manage to galvanise the pupils.
Sometimes it can be as simple as taking the children to an art gallery for the first time. Esther Harvey, a teacher at Heathlands Primary School in Bournemouth, was delighted by the difference art club made to the confidence of 20 pupils aged between 7 and 11 who attended it for 90 minutes after school once a week.
"Many had never been to an art gallery before and they really liked it," she says. "This is an underprivileged area and some of the children have low self-esteem. But after coming to art club for 17 or 18 weeks some children, particularly the 7-year olds, became less reserved, more willing to have a go, and it really got their imaginations going."
Meanwhile, at Biddick School Sports College in Washington, Tyne and Wear, after many visits to the new Baltic art gallery and workshops, students now feel so at ease that many of them use it as their meeting point for going out with friends on a Saturday. "They go back with their families and friends", says Susan Coles, an advanced skills art teacher at Biddick, who initiated the contacts. "They have become consumers of art and, as a result, they are better artists."
Teachers manage to put art at the centre of the school, so that it has a direct effect on other parts of the curriculum. At Trinity Catholic Technology College in Warwick, one of its two winning Artworks Awards this year was for a room entitled The Presence that is an Absence. It was inspired by a visit by 17-year-old students to a concentration camp in Germany. The room, which employed piles of shoes, spectacles and clothes dipped in plaster to evoke the horror of the Holocaust, was used to hold history and creative writing classes. It attracted 100 visitors a day when opened to the public.
During the process of making it, questions of identity, bullying, domestic violence, murder and mass killing were discussed by the pupils in the school. Now almost everyone making their GCSE choices has opted to carry on with art, some of the school’s work is being sold by a local gallery, and some A-level students are so enthusiastic that they are working in the school’s studios in the summer holidays.
Sheridan Horn, the head of fine art at Trinity, says, "It’s wonderful when you get a dialogue going with different departments in the school and everyone is tapping into everyone else’s creative energy. I think art is essential because it gives you a physical means of expressing yourself and your ideas about what is going on in the world and in life. It brings in all aspects of existence. It gives you a way of accessing what it is to be a human being."
