Art & Design · KS3 to A Level · £6.99
Skilled Artists,
Confident Schools
Secondary art department handbook — KS3 to A Level
One book for the whole department: the head of art who has to lead it and the teacher who has to teach it on Monday. Built on what AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas actually require, not on what everyone assumes they require.
£6.99The whole playbook, 93 pages
- A4 PDF
- first 14 pages free to read
- instant download
One purchase covers the school that buys it. Print it, copy it, hand it round your department. Not for passing to other schools or uploading anywhere.
PDF download, ready straight after payment. Downloading it ends the 14-day right to cancel; a file that is faulty or not as described is always refunded. Refunds
Read before publication by serving senior leaders, in school.
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Schools that have bought from Empower Educators include Nottingham High School, Northampton High School GDST and Sutton Valence School.
Everything else this site has for Art & Design: Art & Design teaching resources
- 1 Curriculum
- 2 Craft
- 3 Independence
- 4 Evidence
- 5 Standard
£6.99 PDF · instant download
Art is assessed holistically, by the people who taught it, against four objectives that carry equal weight. That single fact makes it unlike almost every other subject in the building. It is why a whole-school marking policy arriving in the art room so often measures the wrong thing.
This booklet is written for the whole department at once. A head of art can read it as a curriculum and quality-assurance document; a teacher can open it at the page they need on a Monday. The four boards are compared from their own specifications rather than from summaries, and where they differ, the difference is stated rather than blended away.
- Written to
- AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas specifications & the Ofsted art and design research review
- Intended for
- heads of art, subject leaders and every teacher in the department
- Extent
- 93 pages · 88 sections
Watch
The Art playbook in thirty seconds
A quick look inside: the five daily non-negotiables, twenty artists with method diagrams and AO links, and the four exam boards compared from their own specifications.
Artist reference
Twenty artists, and the one idea to teach from each
The handbook gives each of these artists a full page. This is its index: find the artist whose idea matches the problem a student has, then turn to the page. Four pages (van Gogh, Cézanne, Kandinsky and Lange) carry real reproductions that are public domain or CC0; the other sixteen carry original diagrams made for the book.
Portraiture & identity
| Artist | The one idea to teach | Best used for |
|---|---|---|
| Frida Kahlo 1907–1954 | A symbol repeated until it carries meaning | Identity, heritage, the body |
| Lucian Freud 1922–2011 | Time is the technique — paint built over months | Portraiture, observation, paint |
| Cindy Sherman born 1954 | It is staged; the viewer supplies the story | Identity, media, photography |
| Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–1988 | Layer, name, cross out. Never cover your tracks | Identity, history, text in art |
Nature, environment & still life
| Artist | The one idea to teach | Best used for |
|---|---|---|
| Vincent van Gogh 1853–1890 | The mark is a decision you can read | Mark-making, colour, landscape |
| Georgia O’Keeffe 1887–1986 | Crop until the subject stops being nameable | Natural form, scale, abstraction |
| Paul Cézanne 1839–1906 | Build form with warm and cool, not shading | Still life, structure, landscape |
| Giorgio Morandi 1890–1964 | Fix the objects; compose the intervals | Still life, restraint, tone |
Architecture, urban & abstract
| Artist | The one idea to teach | Best used for |
|---|---|---|
| David Hockney born 1937 | One viewpoint misrepresents how looking works | Place, perspective, digital |
| Rachel Whiteread born 1963 | Cast the space, not the object | Space, memory, sculpture |
| Wassily Kandinsky 1866–1944 | Abstraction has a route you can walk | Abstraction, colour, music |
| Mark Rothko 1903–1970 | The edge is the painting, not the colour | Colour, scale, feeling |
Photography & sculpture
| Artist | The one idea to teach | Best used for |
|---|---|---|
| Man Ray 1890–1976 | A photograph needs light and an object, not a camera | Light, process, Surrealism |
| Dorothea Lange 1895–1965 | Work the subject; the caption is part of the picture | Documentary, people, ethics |
| Henry Moore 1898–1986 | A hole is a shape — design the void | Form, void, landscape |
| Barbara Hepworth 1903–1975 | Pierce it, then string the space you opened | Carving, tension, place |
Mixed media & contemporary
| Artist | The one idea to teach | Best used for |
|---|---|---|
| Pablo Picasso 1881–1973 | Several views at once, not one view done badly | Viewpoint, collage, protest |
| Robert Rauschenberg 1925–2008 | The found object keeps its history | Found object, mixed media |
| Banksy active since the 1990s | Decide where before you decide what | Protest, site, stencil |
| Yayoi Kusama born 1929 | Repeat past the point of counting | Repetition, installation, pattern |
Look inside
Real pages, straight from the PDF
Click any page to see it full size.
Contents
All 88 sections
Taken from the book’s own contents page, so the page numbers are the real ones.