• Welcome to Art & Design at Thamesmead School!

Your teachers: Miss Morgan, Miss Maslin and Miss Bowie

Over your time with us we aim for you to become highly engaged creative individuals by studying and responding to the world around you.

Take a look at the Art Gallery  to see some of our student's work.

Within specialist art rooms you will be given a broad experience of Art & Design by looking at techniques and making processes including drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles, print making and collage. You will become adept in handling media such as acrylic paints, clay, oil pastels, inks, watercolour paints, wax crayon, fine liner, biro, chalk and charcoal. You will study both contemporary and historical artists and learn how to understand the context of their work and how it can inspire your own ideas.

If you decide to study our subject at Key Stage 4 you will be guided through an equally broad course in small classes with a high level of individual support. Within these groups you will gain a wide range of material experiences and travel to London locations such as the Tate Modern and Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to further develop your ideas first hand. At this level of study we have boasted excellent results for a number of years and seen students progress onto a wide range of art-based courses in further education.   

Below is a taster of some of the projects you may study with us over Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4. Enjoy reading and don’t forget to go to our online gallery for a closer look at what we’ve been making!

YEAR 7

- Still Life Project

- Cultural Project (studying cultures such as Indian, Islamic or Egyptian).

- Fantasy Landscapes

- The Best Of… Portraiture Project

 YEAR 8

- Natural Forms

- The Green Man: Gargoyles and Grotesques (a sculpting project)

- Kandinsky Music Project (learning to draw sound).

- Putting things in Perspective

 YEAR 9

- The Ugly Bug Ball (a sculpting and print-making project).

- Surrealism (a drawing project)

- Oriental Art

- War and Peace (a 2-Dimensional mixed media project).

YEAR 10 AND YEAR 11 = GCSE OPTION

- Art & Design (unendorsed) with exam board EdExcel.

- A two year course marked at 60% Coursework and 40% Externally Set Examination.

YEAR 10

- Natural Forms

Your first GCSE project in which you will revise, improve and extend the many skills you have developed at Key Stage 3. You will explore artists such as Henry Moore, Dale Chihuly, Anish Kapoor and Barbara Hepworth and also visit the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to help with the development of your ideas. 

- Multi-Cultural Project

A project in which you will visually study three highly contrasting cultures through a wide variety of media. You will explore both historical and contemporary artists in developing a large scale mixed-media final piece based on a culture of your choice.

YEAR 11

- Food and Drink

Your GCSE Mock exam in which you will explore the many issues and themes surrounding this complex subject.

- Externally Set Exam

A different theme is set annually by the exam board. Previous examples include ‘Work, Rest and Play,’ ‘Similarities and / or Differences’ and ‘Wraps.’