Slides are a great unsung technology of the classroom and are sadly becoming difficult to find. They allow a whole group to discuss the same image at once. Used creatively, they can also become part of an art-making process: projected back to front, upside down, masked or through filters, to show how manipulating the image can affect it. The image can be magnified, diminished, de-focused, traced on to paper, projected on to different surfaces or over another picture.

The Portraiture and Landscape packs are aimed mainly at key stages 3 and 4. Each has 24 slides of works by British artists from various cultural backgrounds, and notes on each slide to help you give a coherent slide talk covering a range of relevant points, or group just two or three slides. Photocopiable pupils’ sheets provide a structured route through four imaginative “missions” (practical art activities). Extensive notes show how to relate activities to the national curriculum and help pupils appraise their own work.

The Portraiture pack is less varied and polemical in tone. Some images will stir controversy, and are not entirely admissible as portraits. The notes reiterate the issues of cultural identity, belonging and exclusion very frequently and it is worth pointing out that the author states the aim is to stimulate discussion and present the images in “new and thought-provoking ways”.