“Creativity is now as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.” ~ Sir Ken Robinson 

“Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results that they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.” ~ Loris Malaguzzi 

“Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else” ~ Sydney Gurewitz Clemens 

At Streetsbrook Infant and Early Years Academy, we value the teaching and skills learned in Art and Design & Technology and aim to teach our children to think like artists and craftmakers. Children develop their knowledge, skills and understanding of generating ideas, making, and evaluating in Art, design, making, evaluating and using their technical knowledge in Design & Technology, and using their knowledge of healthy eating, prepare dishes and understand where food comes from in Food and Nutrition. Our children are supported to know more, remember more and be able to do more whilst questioning and evaluating existing work of both famous and contemporary individuals.

Art and Design & Technology is a fundamental of our school life, being entwined into the whole school curriculum with many topics being cross-curricular as it can support learning in a range of ways. We value the positive effect Art and Design & Technology has on children’s physical, social, emotional, mental, intellectual and cultural development, which can contribute to the quality of our children’s lives both within and beyond our school.

A wide range of opportunities are planned into the Art and Design & Technology curriculum for children to develop and expand upon their understanding and appreciation of their own culture and that of others. Throughout our Art and Design & Technology curriculum we intend to introduce children to the best artwork, craft and products that has been created by a wide range of people including both males and females from both Britain and other countries around the world and those from the BAME communities.

At Streetsbrook Infant & Early Years Academy, we pride ourselves on being an inclusive setting that promotes and celebrates the benefits that inclusion brings for all children. We are committed to identifying and removing potential barriers to learning across the curriculum for a diverse range of individuals and groups, and strive to ensure all children make progress. Staff are highly skilled in adapting the curriculum, the learning environment, their practice and the resources used in order to meet the needs of all children. Examples of inclusion strategies in Art and Design Technology include, but are not limited to, the use of alternative resources such as wider pencils and paintbrushes, loop scissors and high contrast resources. Additional adults and support staff are deployed effectively and support the class teachers in ensuring children are able to make progress in each curriculum area. Pre-teaching of key vocabulary is used to support children with English as an Additional Language.