Throughout my professional life, I have advocated a greater emphasis on learning about art and design in addition to doing it. I have also insisted on the need for rigorous assessment procedures associated with clearly articulated learning objectives. Not for me the hangover from discredited child-centred activities designed to encourage that most amorphous of conditions: “creative growth”. What we needed was a recognition of the importance of art and design in young people’s lives, underlined by its central importance within the school curriculum and all that that entails.

The emergence of “critical studies” in the art and design curriculum has resulted, in extreme cases, in the art room being a place where children write essays about “famous paintings” rather than create anything themselves. Of course, understanding the process of making, as well as knowing about and understanding others’ making, is part of a balanced education.

I have felt in the past, when knowing about art was not part of the curriculum, that we should be educating young people to be critical and informed consumers of art, craft and design. I would now assert that, in terms of an individual’s development, the physical act of production is more important than appreciation.

The gradual quasi-intellectualisation of art and design has taken away what have always been its strengths: facilitating creative, imaginative and expressive communication and developing ways of knowing the world which complement scientific rationalism.

Art and design has achieved more security within the past five years than at any other time; it is a foundation subject and is popular as an option at key stage 4 and beyond. It seems that art and design educators have been too successful in ensuring that their subject becomes “respectable”. It is now reduced to conforming to what Gormley referred to as the “clipboard mentality”.

Young people like being involved in creative activities, they value the sense of achievement inherent in this. Art and design teachers should be expected to teach practical skills, to show how to paint, draw and print, and how to use new technologies creatively. If nothing else, at the end of compulsory education, all young people should be visually sensitive, able to draw convincingly, construct soundly and be able to appreciate when such things have been done well.

Teaching will entail assessing the extent to which the learners have learned these things, and by implication the extent to which they as teachers have been successful. To do this, the work produced by students in their art lessons needs to be viewed as evidence of the learning which has taken place. This has the potential to reduce the enterprise to a deadening, mechanical and joyless set of activities which have little to do with intuition, expression, vision and experimentation; words which I associate with art.

Just as it makes sense to monitor schools’ achievements in terms of “value added” rather than through crude league tables, it makes sense to monitor young people’s progress in art by reviewing (not grading) a portfolio of how they have developed. It might be possible to measure a child’s self-esteem, but to assign a grade is silly.

I would hope that the fundamental reasons for including art and design in the school curriculum include: inculcating a sense of accomplishment and identity; developing self-esteem and the opportunity to experience the simple pleasure, sense of purpose and joy of making. The status afforded by formal assessment procedures such as public examinations is not worth the loss of the subject’s heart and soul.

Richard Hickman

Richard Hickman is senior lecturer in art education at Cambridge University’s faculty of education