Jane Norrie reports from a school in West Sussex with a ‘whole art policy’, where Year 6 pupils make an annual pilgrimage to Monet’s garden and where Reception class children are taught to handle materials with respect. “The garden was beautiful and colourful.” “You will find colours such as yellow, pink, green, blue, purple, and orange. Opposite the bridge is another little Japanese bridge with weeping willows.” It is Monet’s famous Japanese garden at Giverny and the quotes come from a class of 11-year-olds who are there not on a geography outing or a language trip, but in an enlightened pursuit of art.

The school in question is Bosham Primary in West Sussex. Currently it has around 190 pupils from 5 to 11 with 7 teaching staff plus the head, making for an average class size of 27. Walking around the building - a pleasant semi open-plan structure - you immediately notice it is full of children’s art work. Scarlet poinsettias in the hall, sewn, printed or painted; pen and ink drawings of cone structures and wave patterns; banana-bright pictures of school-grown gourds in one classroom, imaginative clay monsters in another.

The next thing that strikes you is the impeccable way the work is presented, mounted on heavy paper then displayed against a hessian background. The display areas are changed every half-term. Over the year every child’s work will be on display in a “communal” as well as a classroom area. Headteacher Kevin Stedman explains that he operates “a whole art policy”. Some art work is done for its own sake, some in support of other subjects and to enhance presentation skills.

The pupils in Year 6, for instance, were engaged in “pure” art; working on winter landscapes. The previous week local artist Glenis Dudoney had come in to school to talk to them about watercolour techniques and they had also visited the quay at Bosham to sketch its prominent Church and common. Their teacher had photographed the scene and blown up the resulting snap on a colour photocopier as an aide memoire. Now, one group was working on watercolours of the quay while another had set up easels and, using a photograph to demonstrate a balanced composition, was using powder paint to produce some remarkably atmospheric snow scenes.

The previous term the same class had studied autumn harvests and painted “in the style of” Van Gogh. In June they in turn will visit Giverny as part of a five-day residency in France. A whole day will be set aside for Monet’s garden and will be spent soaking up the atmosphere and sketching. Judging by the vibrant watercolours of foxgloves and poppies from the 1994 visit, the day was highly profitable, giving the children a real understanding of Impressionism as well as the sense of being artists themselves.

Other classes were using their artistic skills in support of projects. Year 5, for instance, had just visited Anne of Cleves’ house as an introduction to a history project on Henry Tudor. Two girls had incised their own drawings of the house on to a polystyrene block and were absorbed in printing a repeat pattern on to fabric. Later they would overprint it in green, then in blue to create the impression of grass and sky. Year 3, working on the story of Egypt, showed bright pyramid-shaped books. Hexagonally shaped work on hieroglyphs was being folded into triangles and pasted to the sides.

According to deputy head Arthur Bain, himself a qualified art teacher, the raison d’etre for the school’s focus on art is first and foremost the emotional benefits for pupils. “We know children achieve most when they are happy and confident, working just ahead of themselves. Working with art they can gain confidence which can be maintained across the curriculum. This is particularly helpful for children with learning difficulties.

Drawing is an essential lifeskill enhancing children’s powers of observation and makes a major contribution to language development. Having art work to talk about helps the pupils to share what they have been doing with other pupils and with parents. It also gives them other ways than writing in which to respond to experiences.”

This autumn a study from the Thomas Coram Research Unit showed that time spent on art in primary schools has dropped dramatically over the past eight years. A 1994 survey by the Office for Standards in Educatio also highlighted a serious lack of equipment and resources for art in primary schools. So how does Kevin Stedman manage to operate such a comprehensive art policy?

“We buy quality materials that last. Paper, for instance, is purchased annually from a paper mill, high quality at a low price. To achieve quality we resource for five processes - drawing (pen, pencil, ink); painting (powder paint and watercolour); printmaking; and clay and fabric work. Rather than each teacher holding their own stocks of materials, all the resources to support the curriculum are available to the pupils at all times, laid out in workspaces which are generally shared between pairs of classes. Whole-school policies exist for the care of resources. The school also maintains a collection of artefacts for observational work.”

To avoiding waste, great emphasis is laid on teaching the Reception classes how to handle the materials and equipment with respect (which brush to use, how much paint to use, how to mix paints). As the children move up the school they are able to build on their knowledge of the processes. In addition, their work is carefully monitored to ensure all the media from sewing on fabric to working in clay are employed. In-service training days have been arranged for members of staff who had no art training themselves.

The policy seems to work very smoothly and to achieve high standards. Perhaps one might question whether working “in the style of” famous artists would not inhibit the children’s confidence in their own ideas and mark-making. Arthur Bain is emphatic, however, that the aim is to achieve “a balanced development” between personal observation and learning how artists have achieved their effects - a strand that is also necessary for the critical studies component of the national curriculum. “What we are looking for is a marrying of the two aspects. We are presenting pupils with exemplar forms from which they can develop their own style”.

At the Pallant House in nearby Chichester, 30 Bosham pupils had been asked to select an exhibit from the Gallery’s first-class collection of 20th-century paintings. This request gave them the opportunity to go through originals by Henry Moore, Klee, Piper, Picasso and Cezanne. Many children wrote about the colours, patterns and shapes in the paintings and the feelings they inspired. Others imagined themselves entering the narrative. A few made funny comments: on Norman Bluhn’s abstract “Green with Blue and Red”, “He has painted it very violently and let the paint run down like raindrops on a window” (James, age 10). Or, on Graham Sutherland’s jagged “Thorn Head”, “Ouch, it’s spikey” (Christopher aged 5).

* The exhibition is at Pallant House Gallery Chichester until April 1 1995. Tel: 0243 774557