There’s hundreds of reasons why Headteachers and school leaders choose Artis to support creativity in their school, but we thought we’d give you ten to start with:

Linking the arts to curriculum areas

Artis provides schools with professional performing arts educators, or Artis Specialists, who support children’s engagement with maths, literacy and topic-work on an ongoing basis. We look at your school’s priorities and curriculum maps, and develop creative activities that link to your teachers’ planning. This deepens children’s engagement with the curriculum by creating a magical space to explore classroom topics.

Enhancing creative skills

In Artis sessions, children sing, dance and act the curriculum, developing their knowledge whilst gaining creative skills in performance. Children learn first-hand from artists who are in the creative industries and masters of their craft. Our Artis Specialists are highly qualified performing artists who have taken part in Artis’ award-winning residential training. They are mentored by our experienced team and attend over 45 hours of training per year to assure quality delivery.

Demonstrating impact

Monitoring the impact of arts in schools and evaluating our work is core to Artis’ values. All Artis schools have use of our learning tracker so that you can demonstrate the impact of Artis in your school. We also have a learning framework which shows how an Artis session is supporting the development of pupil’s core skills. Your school also has a dedicated Manager who is your main point of contact for anything you’d like to discuss with our central team.

Supporting Arts Mark and Arts Award

Artis can support your Artsmark journey as a school. As an Artsmark Partner, your school’s commitment to Artis demonstrates that you put arts at the heart of your school. Artis is also an Arts Award Centre and can help your children obtain the Discover and Explore qualifications.

Developing children’s confidence and supporting whole-school wellbeing

Our Artis Bounce programme supports whole-school wellbeing and can be run as a six-week programme, or embedded into your whole-year delivery. The programme uses creativity to explore how we express our emotions and how we recognise emotions in our friends, family and peers. It has been designed to improve resilience, confidence and self-esteem in children and young people, as well as improve their understanding of what mental health and wellbeing is.

Supporting EAL Learners

Artis’ Language programme is specifically designed and tailored to support EAL children. We encourage children to find their own voice through listening and imitating, and then responding with their own words and sentences. Inclusivity is central to our programme. We make the meaning of words explicit in clear and contextualised activities to enable EAL children at all stages to participate in a meaningful and active way.

Developing your teachers

We offer INSET training to support the professional development of your staff. We offer workshops in Creative Approaches in the Classroom, as well as specific sessions around different art disciplines, and focused creative approaches to wellbeing, SEN provision, supporting science and maths through the arts, and many more…

Covering PPA in an exciting and impactful way

We can cover your teachers’ PPA time through our ongoing Artis Learning programme. Our Artis Specialists are confident delivering creative work from Early Years to upper KS2. Our sessions support curriculum learning and engagement, whilst also being a fun, physical and creative lesson.

Supporting pupil premium and sports premium objectives

Artis is a great use of pupil premium and sports premium funding because our physical and creative sessions are designed to support every child’s learning needs. We have given you lots of reasons why in our blog post here and our pupil premium case study here.

And finally,

An ongoing partnership

At Artis, one of our core beliefs is that an ongoing interaction between children and the arts is the most effective way to support creativity in schools. Over the past 15 years, we have seen first-hand the long-term effects that a week-in, week-out engagement with the arts has on a child’s learning. On a daily basis, we see how building relationships with the whole school and integrating creative activities into the curriculum means that there is a culture change in how arts is embedded within a school.

Artis is about making magical, creative opportunities part of the everyday school experience, to excite children with classroom topics – whether that be numeracy, literacy, topic work or PSHE.

There is significant value in one-off experiences that wow children and young people, whether that be in the school setting or outside of the classroom. We run Sparkly Starts, Arts Weeks and Transition workshops that do just that – but to create a lasting change on a child’s cognition, the arts need to be built into everyday school life.