What! He’s alive?

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Ruth Greaves, the arts lead teacher at Rufford Primary, was remembering the way the year 3 children responded to visiting the Djanogly Art Gallery. “They were almost crackling when they came back into school,” she said. “It really was Awe and Wonder in the Gallery.” They’d been to see Saad Qureshi’s Something About Paradise, an exhibition of ‘mindscapes’ that bring together elements of architecture, landscape and fantasy. The children’s own mindscapes - complex and delicate constructions of paper, card, sticks and string - were on the shelf next to us, ready to exhibit in school. 

One of the things that had amazed the year 3s was finding out that Saad Qureshi is still alive. They’d assumed that all artists were dead. Ruth was mortified. “We couldn’t believe that we’d never picked up that they thought that,” she said. “They were thinking that art could never be a route they could take. We changed our curriculum straight away to include more contemporary artists and we want to try to get all the children to a gallery every year.” 

From the outset, Rufford’s SLT had decided that improving the art curriculum would be their focus in the Creativity Collaborative. The first year of the project helped them clarify some of their understandings about what would work best in their context. As a school they had a longstanding commitment to creative approaches. They were ready to review their art teaching, in particular to think more about process, which fitted well with their whole school improvement focus on task design. They’d also been talking about a change in the children that they’d observed since the pandemic: they were concerned that the children seemed less confident, more risk-averse and more inclined to give up when things got difficult. So when staff looked at the Creative Habits of Mind wheel, at the planning stages of the project, they were particularly interested in how teaching for creativity in and through art might help their children develop greater resilience.

For the last two years, the resident creative practitioners at Rufford have been Elaine Winters and Jane Stockley, visual artists who often work together. In the first year, the focus was on 3D work. They looked at Sophie Ryder’s work and the children made foil models of animals, then wrapped them in clay. They looked at Barbara Hepworth’s work and, in groups, the children made their own large abstract floor sculptures outside and then some smaller, individual, paper sculptures indoors. The Year 3s kitted themselves out in paper togas, tunics and cloaks to fit with their study of the Romans. Year 4 made statuettes, with limbs that move, from wire, newspaper and tape. Year 5s learned about relief sculpture, making relief tiles from cardboard and carving tablets of soap as part of their work on the ancient Greeks. The teachers and artists worked together to plan the sessions. They used relatively cheap, readily available materials and hands-on techniques. The teaching staff tried things out alongside the pupils. They could see how engaged the children were and they wanted to make sure that, when the current project was over, Jane and Elaine’s ways of working could be sustained. With this is mind, the school re-engaged Jane and Elaine for the third and final year of the project, asking them to focus on drawing, printmaking and collage; to extend the range of classes and teachers they worked with, and to work on the theme of ‘place’ in preparation for Rufford’s imminent 50th year school birthday celebrations.

So, what has been learned from this three year project? The impact on pupils is abundantly clear to everyone involved. The children have thoroughly enjoyed the work, ask to do more of it, want more visits to galleries… Ruth’s scrap book, overflowing with photos and verbatim quotations from the children at work, is testimony to their levels of sustained engagement and to what they’ve achieved. As for the teachers, on the practical level, they’ve revamped the school’s art curriculum, learned some new techniques, got some good ideas for new art lessons and arts-based tasks in other subject areas. On a more philosophical level, the project has reignited a long-held passion in the school for developing sustained relationships with creative practitioners. Staff have seen how these relationships can extend and enhance children’s education.  

But they’ve also seen how these relationships can extend and enhance thinking about pedagogy.   Ruth gave a simple but very powerful example. Working together, she’d noticed how often Elaine gave the children opportunities to practise a task before committing to a way of doing it. Ruth could see this had a positive effect on how well the children managed the task, but also on their self-confidence and readiness to try out new ideas. Thinking about the time pressures she faced as a teacher – to cover the curriculum, to focus on outcomes – pressures that are sometimes passed on to the children, Ruth decided to make some changes to her own teaching, to prioritise giving children enough time to try out ideas, to practise and rehearse. “I do it every lesson now,” she said. “Learning to be resilient is about being willing to have a go.”