In this first of three blog posts shining a light on detail from within the recent report School Art: Where Is It? (2024), co-author Dr Will Grant focuses on the ‘stuff’ participants reported as the content of their curriculum, explores the experience of talking with art teachers and asks some provocative questions for readers to reflect upon.
In School Art, we asked 36 art teachers how their curriculum is structured. Then they kindly provided the particulars of a single project or module from Key Stage 3 or 4 – its name, the materials used, artistic and cultural references employed, and the skills and thinking processes that featured. Our intentions were to replicate the work of Downing and Watson (2004), who produced a similar report 20 years earlier, and look for changes that may have occurred in this period. It felt faintly ridiculous that, in our work as art teacher educators, we were still directing students to a decades-old document for data on contemporary practice! The outcome is a current, illustrative record of the work taking place in secondary school art classrooms across London, the Midlands, and the South West.
One theme that surfaced repeatedly across our conversations with art teachers was that of agency, and indications that this has diminished over the last twenty years. Downing and Watson were able to claim that art teachers held ‘very considerable control over what they include in their curriculum content’ (2004, p.112). For many 2024 respondents – albeit not all – there was frustration that the ownership of lesson content was moving further from their personal interests and expertise. Among early career teachers, the curriculum was sometimes described as externally imposed.
This dynamic was also evident when discussing the artistic media used by pupils; in 2004, a quarter of the projects teachers described provided learners with free choice in the media they might apply – none of the 2024 interviewees mentioned such optionality. However, projects today were more typically multimodal (introducing learners to more than one artform) which might suggest that if art lessons are increasingly teacher-directed this has not limited the range of media learners ultimately encounter.
On reflection, I would ask art teachers to consider:
Another theme we observed on the ‘stuff’ of the curriculum was a passionate intent across the profession to diversify the artistic and cultural references that populate materials employed in the classroom. We encountered some brilliant examples of contemporary, inclusive curricula. There is an evident, disciplinary enthusiasm to ensure art curricula better connects to the lived experience of contemporary learners – a priority considerably less prevalent in 2004.
This correction is in motion; in 2004 just 11% of artists cited by art teachers were female or non-binary, while in 2024 this was 37%. While Downing and Watson did not record the ethnicity of artists mentioned by teachers, they did note only one reference to an artist outside of the European (and American Pop) tradition, Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (an artist of Polish decent). In 2024 we did record the ethnicity of artistic references, and 18% can be described as minoritised ethnic. However, with an English population that identifies as 51% female, and a 37% demographic of minoritised ethnic school-age pupils, the curriculum still has some way to go before it might be described as representative.
After holding our conversations, we felt that while art teachers clearly want to respond to the needs of their pupils, that willingness does not guarantee them the means to do so. Indeed, while some strong work has taken place to provide more inclusive, culturally-rich and representative artistic references, much content described by our participants remained similar to that of two decades prior.
The question raised here:
Last, I want to briefly touch on the pupils’ ‘skills’ and ‘thinking processes’ that art teachers described as central to their curriculum design.
Of interest here was the way in which skill was interpreted by our interviewees. We were surprised, for example, that the skills of artistic self-expression or meaning-making did not feature more frequently in conversation (at just 3%). Instrumental, technical, or craft skills were significantly more likely to be the focus of art teachers’ attention, with manipulation of materials the most common – particularly regarding the ideas of accuracy and mark-making (25%). This is perhaps suggestive that more quantifiable, or measurable, skills are prioritised in formal classroom settings.
Thinking processes that were mentioned frequently included analysis, evaluation, creating, and investigating. However, to shine the spotlight on one interesting phenomenon: 15 responses suggested interviewees did not feel ‘thinking processes’ an active priority at all – some arguing that time constraints required all activity focused on practical skills, at the expense of theoretical knowledge and/or cognitive development.
For art teachers reading this blog, I ask the question:
Much more detailed data and analysis on each of the categories above can be found in the School Art: Where Is It? (Re)exploring Visual Art in Secondary Schools report, which is available for free.
Undertaking this research against a backdrop of crises in teacher retention, school funding, and arts education, we were delighted to meet with so many creative classroom practitioners who remain passionate advocates for the subject. We ask critical questions here, and in our report, as a means to support the development of the discipline - to ‘set out some of the questions that seem to be exercising teachers, in the hope of stimulating further debate’ (Downing and Watson 2004, p.103). If you want to join that debate, please do come along to The National Art & Design Education Conference 2025 where we will be discussing the report.
The next blog in this series will be authored by Dr Carol Wild and will examine the factors that influence the choice of art curriculum content. The third and final blog post will be authored by Dr Joanna Fursman, who will share findings on teachers’ perceived impact of the art curriculum they deliver.
About the author
Dr Will Grant is Associate Director of the School of Arts, at UWE Bristol. His research interests are focused on sustaining prospective art educators’ idealism when faced with technocratic classrooms, and reimagining means for initial teacher education to provide authentic, disciplinary induction.
School Art: Where Is It? (Re)exploring Visual Art in Secondary Schools (2024) was co-authored with Dr Joanna Fursman, Leader of the PGCE Secondary Art and Design programme at Birmingham City University, and Dr Carol Wild, Leader of the PGCE Secondary Art and Design programme at the Institute of Education, UCL.
Image
‘Balls and Stools Series (White and Pink x 2)' by Billy McGregor.
References
Downing, D. & Watson, R. (2004) School Art: What’s In It? Exploring Visual Arts in Secondary Schools. National Foundation for Education Research, Slough. Available online: nfer.ac.uk/publications/school-art-whats-in-it-exploring-visual-arts-in-secondary-schools/ (Accessed 10 April 2025).
Fursman, J., Grant, W., & Wild, C. (2024) School Art: Where Is It? (Re)exploring Visual Arts in Secondary Schools. National Society for Education in Art and Design, Corsham. Available online: nsead.org/resources/research-reports-and-reviews/school-art-where-is-it-2024/ (Accessed 10 April 2025).