By Dr Will Grant, Associate Director of the School of Arts, UWE Bristol, and ECRG member
This blog post is a brief, informal introduction to the report School Art: Where Is It? (Fursman, Grant, & Wild 2024), which I recently co-authored with colleagues from UCL and Birmingham City University. The report revisits work undertaken by Dick Downing and Ruth Watson in their 2004 School Art: What Is It? report, and asks what has changed in the pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment of the visual arts in secondary schools over the preceding 20 years.
In 2004, Tate Gallery and the National Foundation for Education Research did something unusual. They decided to fund research into the substantive content of secondary school art classrooms, with a particular concern for engagement with contemporary arts practice in the sector. Given the brevity of the National Curriculum entry for Art and Design at the time (2003), it was very difficult to otherwise guess, without taking the time to ask, what rationales, pedagogies, and curricula art teachers across the country might be activating.
The resultant report, School Art: What is It? (Downing and Watson 2004), while adopting a loose methodology that might best be described as illustrative, became a defining record of practice typical in secondary art education that has persisted as a reference point across the decades following. Among its many observations, the report tells of very high levels of teacher agency, where individuals or collegiate departments of art teachers might take inspiration from a local gallery exhibition or their personal artistic practices, and others who centred curriculum on celebrating pupils’ opinions, creating safe spaces to build pupils’ self-belief. It also suggested that canonical artistic references were commonplace, predominately early 20th century sources assessed on technical accessibility. These references were very narrow, with only one non-European/American artist mentioned at all (Ana Bella Geiger), and only two further female artists noted in conventional school curricula (Georgia O’Keefe and Bridget Riley) across the interviews. In one comment especially memorable from my first encounter with the report (as a progressively-minded pre-service teacher), the authors note that:
“One of the more experienced teachers explained that she/he hadn’t the faintest idea what post-modern art was about, and doubted that anyone else did either, while another corroborated that view by admitting that she/he didn’t understand contemporary art.”
Downing and Watson 2004, 61
Having referenced this report in our work in pre-service teacher education and within our individual research activities for many years, Carol Wild (UCL), Jo Fursman (Birmingham City University), and I decided it would be a worthy exercise to repeat the School Art report twenty years after its original publication. We wanted to both pay homage to this rare example of empirical data collection in art classrooms and simultaneously explore the changes that may have occurred over the preceding decades. We knew, from our own experiences in the classroom, that a lot of contextual factors remained the same in 2024 as in 2004 – a National Curriculum (2013) of limited operational value, a lack of expendable art materials, and a tension between artistic freedoms and increasingly conformative pedagogic and assessment policies (Grant 2023). However, there had clearly been huge political, technological, and disciplinary shifts over this period, and we knew research into how these changes have impacted on English secondary school art education was extremely limited. It felt somewhat ridiculous that pre-service art teachers were still being asked to reference source material on ‘contemporary’ classroom practices published before they were born!
We replicated the methods of Downing and Watson as accurately as possible – not for the sake of scientific rigour (the data set too small and rich to bear out any meaningful statistical comparison), but to create reflective connections between then and now. Therefore, we went about interviewing 36 secondary school teachers of art from over 30 different schools, asking identical questions of their curriculum, its content, and influences. In our writing, we directly borrowed structure and phrasing from the first report, producing a palimpsest that could be considered an iterative companion piece to the 2004 publication.
In our report, School Art: Where is it? (Fursman, Grant & Wild 2024), we present in a dispassionate voice a record that we hope other researchers, writers, advocates and practitioners will assess as fair reportage on the nature of secondary school art curriculum content in 2024. We followed in the philosophy of the first report – seeking not answers, but ‘questions that might be worthy of addressing’ (Downing 2005, 275). Given some of our findings – the ahistorical persistence of ‘formal elements’ as uncontextualised framework for normative curricula, a collapse in professional agency (especially among early career art teachers), and a significant decline in sculptural practices – it was tempting to err into commentary critical of policy, paradigm, or practitioners’ priorities. This was especially true where our own research assumed a critical stance on school orthodoxies (Grant 2020, Wild 2013) but we knew the enduring value to the field of Downing and Watson’s (2004) report was its subtle, observational neutrality.
Aside from the concerns that might be drawn by some readers of School Art (2024), there was also much that might be celebrated in the voices of our interviewees. We found a deep, unanimous sentiment among art teachers that curriculum diversification was an urgent mission, and evidence that this intent was starting to manifest in classrooms (in 2024, 35% of the artists mentioned by interviewees as featuring on their curriculum were female). We also saw photography and digital media emerging, and an interest among teachers to employ contemporary artworks to open paradigmatic questions about the nature of art practice with their pupils.
As authors, we have been delighted to receive so much public interest in a report that was initiated from personal curiosity. It has been used, directly, as evidence of contemporary arts provision in the DfE’s ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review, and we will be discussing the report further at a panel event during the National Society for Education in Art and Design’s annual conference on 19 June 2025.
References
- Department for Education (2013) Art and Design Programmes of Study: Key Stage 3, National Curriculum in England. Department for Education; London.
- Downing, D. (2005) School Art – What’s in it?, in The International Journal for Art and Design Education, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 269-276. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2005.00450.x
- 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 here: https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/school-art-whats-in-it-exploring-visual-arts-in-secondary-schools/ (last accessed 10th 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 here: https://www.nsead.org/resources/research-reports-and-reviews/school-art-where-is-it-2024/ (last accessed 10th April 2025).
- Grant, W. (2020) Liberal ideals, postmodern practice: a working paradox for the future of secondary school art education in England?, in The International Journal for Art and Design Education, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 56-68. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12228
- Grant, W. (2023) Protecting Transformative Optimism in the Art Classroom: Exploring Aspirant Art Teachers’ Shifting Ideals. EdD Thesis: University of Glasgow. Available online here: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/84006/ (last accessed 10th April 2025).
- Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (2003) The National Curriculum Programme of Study: Art and Design Key Stage 3. QCA; London.
- Wild, C. (2013) Who Owns the Classroom? Profit, Pedagogy, Belonging, Power, in The International Journal of Art & Design Education, vol. 32, pp. 288-299. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2013.12029.x
