The secondary curriculum review
Brighouse High School is an 11-18 Specialist Business and Enterprise School with 1,300 pupils. It serves the town of Brighouse and the surrounding area.
The art department runs an applied art GCSE as well as other GCSE courses. The revised programme of study provided the opportunity for staff to extend their curriculum at key stage 3 to take greater account of vocational context. This would widen the curriculum in line with school aims. Staff felt this would provide better recruitment to, and progress in, vocational courses beyond key stage 3.
The department found that many units could be modified to enhance the 'enterprise and business' focus of the school. However, staff decided to reshape one unit in each year to explicitly develop pupils' knowledge, skills and understanding of working in vocational and work- related contexts. These have become vocational units, with vocationally orientated assessment criteria and a clear learning sequence through the key stage.
The school modified this unit into a brief to create a sensory garden using sculpture, sound and music as well as planting for colour, texture and scent. To fulfil the brief pupils worked with pupils from the science and music departments, pooling their ideas and expertise in order to respond to the needs of the people who would be using the garden.
The department developed an architecture unit leading to work in ceramics. Staff put together a programme of visits to the school by professionals in the building world, including the architects that designed the school as well as a parent who is an independent architect. Other visits were made by professionals in construction, interior design and town planning. As part of the unit pupils studied local buildings, visiting them to see at first hand their impact on their settings. After the visits, pupils were asked to produce a set of decorative tiles that took account of their surroundings. Pupils explored how decorative ceramics relate to a building or a room and produced tiles for a range of purposes including for outside cladding, a mosque, a path and several domestic purposes.
For year 9 staff modified a unit on illustration and murals to incorporate applied learning. Pupils worked in groups to create an A3 storybook with full-page illustrations inspired by the film Jumanji. The pupils did all the marketing and promotion for the book, which is to be produced and soldSome of the pupils extended their work by developing and painting large murals based on their illustrations for the walls of the school dining hall. Pupils also worked with the school's senior management team who acted as the commissioning agency for the work.
'The remodelling of the key stage 3 art and design curriculum to include a greater vocational focus supported learning in the college in several ways. It has provided greater continuity between art and design and other subjects and the creation of a vocational pathway through key stage 3 has supported and defined progression well.'
Angela Vickerson (advanced skills teacher)
'I like buildings now...before they were just boring. I look at them a lot, they are all different and I wonder who made them and if they like them.'
(Billy)
'My dad says our garden's great, He works at the quarry and he gave us some stone from there for free. He wants to know if we need anywhere else to do our designs because lots of places around us could do with it.'
(Zoe)
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