One of the most telling reasons for the introduction and development of the National Curriculum in schools was to rationalise the content of the teaching of the different subjects and through this to eliminate unnecessary repetition and overlap in teaching the knowledge and skills that are characteristic of each subject.

In primary schools, there has been widespread concern that in planning cross-curricular work, teachers did not have a sufficiently clear framework of subject content to ensure that there was a reasonable progression in the teaching of the different subjects from year to year.

Traditionally, art has always had a high profile in crosscurricular work, albeit that this has frequently been because making images has been seen by teachers as a useful way for children to illustrate what has been learnt in other subjects!

An important part of your work as art coordinator is to establish the right balance in your school between the teaching of art as a discipline in its own right and the use of art as an important agent of learning in cross-curricular work.

In good practice, it is self-evident that those schools that demonstrate very high standards in the teaching of art to children are equally those schools where art is used skilfully to enrich and extend learning in cross-curricular work.

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