Using the arts to support the development of language at Elveden Church of England Primary Academy

Elveden C of E Primary Academy is a small primary school based in Elveden (Suffolk), who received a prestigious Artsmark Gold Award earlier this year. Lorna Rourke, Headteacher, discusses how they used the arts to strengthen areas of improvement…

Artsmark has added an incredible spotlight on creativity at Elveden C of E Primary Academy and helped the arts to play a significant part in our whole school ethos, strategic leadership, and school development plan. During our Artsmark journey, creativity has become a vessel to support us in overcoming several weaknesses within our school.

One of these areas was spoken language and vocabulary. Particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic, our students were finding it increasingly difficult to express themselves, articulate their learning, and communicate their feelings. In my role as Literacy co-ordinator, I carried out a pupil perception survey and discovered that not one child across our whole school could name a single poet. I was completely gobsmacked! Despite the fact poetry regularly appeared in the curriculum, the children were not engaging with them in the same way they were with fictional texts. To overcome this, we implemented planned curriculum opportunities such as our ‘Poetry Project’.

During this time, a lot of our amazing teaching assistants (TAs) needed a performance management target, which focused on them taking responsibility and accountability for a specific area of learning. TAs were eager to support children in their development of language, and we decided that it would be a great opportunity for this to be poetry. To roll out the project, TAs received additional oracy training to identify quality pieces with Tier 3 vocabulary. With the support of the teacher, they would choose a different poem to be taught to the children in their class or year group each week. Every Wednesday, students would practice their poems together in class. They videoed themselves, recited them to one another, and thoroughly enjoyed the process of reading and speaking aloud. The pupils would perform each week’s poem in different creative ways, exploring communication through mime, singing, dancing, and even percussion. Over the period, it created an incredible love of poetry, a deeper understanding of language, and was a catalyst for huge improvements in students speaking and listening. Our teaching assistants were amazing and personalised the process throughout. They created special poetry books for students and poetry corners within classrooms to make the experience more immersive and interactive. Every child at Elveden Church of England Primary Academy can now proudly name a poet and recite poems – hurray!

Six young people stand on stage in pairs, dancing together. They are wearing colourful clothing and wearing crowns.

The success of this project as a tool to develop language and vocabulary is something we now use to develop oracy throughout the curriculum. Following on from the Covid-19 lockdowns, when students were at home and unable to interact with their peers in the same ways they would in school, we recognised the support that was necessary to make up for this lack of social interaction. From my Pupil Perception Survey, it was evident that students’ knowledge of artists, art movements, and the lives of artists was also very limited. Our partner school at the time had recently introduced ‘Artist Days’, where once a half-term, every class across the school studied a particular artist, and have the opportunity to recreate their artwork. This has had a profound impact on not only the student’s knowledge of art but also their compositional skills. The children were particularly inspired by the life of Frida Khalo, and several students even came dressed as her for World Book Day. When studying Jean-Michael Basquiat, pupils created an amazing graffiti mural which we hung on our school building. Students thoroughly enjoyed exploring the textile work of Faith Ringgold, and we created our own ‘Elveden Blanket’ made up of a handprint of each child sewn together. We often begin our year with a more religious-themed piece of art, to tie in with our church-school roots. This year, we looked at Michelangelo’s painting of ‘Adam and God’, which the children loved recreating themselves.

A young boy sits down at a desk, concentrating on the piece of paper in front of him. He is drawing a copy of Michelangelo’s painting of, ‘Adam and God'.

A young girl is sat at a wooden desk, looking up at the camera as she colours in on a piece of paper.

Due to the resounding success of these days, we have now introduced a project called ‘Musician of the Moment’, to raise the profile of music within the school. Just like the other art forms, we have a particular day in our calendar where children all listen to music by the same composer or artist, followed by activities to suit their different ages and abilities. We consider how the music makes us feel, what instruments we can hear, when the music was composed, and learn about the history of the musician. It is also an opportunity to teach students about important, diverse topics. For example, we listen to Lady Gaga and discuss LGBTQIA+ themes, and ‘Lead belly’ for Blues, to explore significant artists in Black history.

We want our children to leave Elveden with a profound love for the arts, and the tools to express themselves through these different mediums. Our Artsmark journey is far from over, but the impact it has made already on our children’s knowledge, skills, and well-being has been incredible.

You can follow Elveden Church Of England Primary Academy on Twitter, here.