The Arts

Art

The Art Department is a hive of creativity. Open to all during free time, evenings and weekends, the children have the freedom to explore ideas and processes to create works of art for the classroom walls, national competitions or more often than not, their boarding house.

During lessons pupils are given the opportunity to develop a wide variety of skills across a range of disciplines. We encourage pupils to build on their strengths and expand their ideas to develop a culture of confidence and independence. Our evening activities give pupils the option to discover new processes including enamelling, film-making, animation, fabric art and photography, as well as enjoying areas they are already more familiar with such as ceramics. Recently the introduction of the Art in Science and Maths in Art activities has introduced pupils to the wonderful world of cross-curricular links and has been hugely popular.

The Art Department runs a successful Scholarship programme where interested children from Year 7 and Year 8 have access to group tuition with a practising local artist. The focus here is on observational drawing skills and the development of a portfolio and sketchbook for senior school scholarship entrance. Every year Top Year enjoy a two-day trip to London, visiting galleries, museums and the theatre and throughout the school pupils are regularly introduced to new artists as part of their project work developing visual literacy. Children in the Pre-Prep enjoy an Artist of the Week discussion at the start of every lesson.

Our mission is to inspire confidence, individuality and courage in creativity providing a strong foundation for pupil’s progression on to senior school and beyond.