Ms Arlene Forster:

I will look, first, at curriculum provisions in early childhood. Aistear which was developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, NCCA, is the early childhood curriculum for children from birth to six years. The framework describes early learning and development using four interconnected themes - well-being, identity and belonging, communicating and exploring and thinking. Through these themes, children have an opportunity to express themselves creatively and imaginatively, to explore ways to represent ideas, feelings, thoughts, objects and actions through symbols and to develop positive attitudes towards learning and dispositions such as curiosity, playfulness, resourcefulness and risk-taking. Aistear provides practical examples of experiences and activities through which children's creative expression can happen such as through story, song, sculpture, rhyme, play, music, dance, drawing and painting.

In more recent years, funded by the Department of Children and Youth Afairs and supported by the Department of Education and Skills, the NCCA has developed the Aistear Síolta Practice Guide which includes a variety of practical resources such as videos and podcasts on supporting the arts within the early years curriculum.

This year marks the 19th birthday of the primary school curriculum which aims to develop each child’s potential to the full, including his or her creative and artistic ability. In supporting children’s sense of wonder and natural curiosity the curriculum promotes guided discovery and active learning in all seven areas, including the arts. Comprising the visual arts, music and drama, the primary arts curriculum enables children to see and solve problems creatively through imaginative thinking and the development of their abilities. It strikes a balance between children having opportunities to explore and express ideas and experiences and having opportunities to experience and respond to music, drama and the visual arts. For example, the music curriculum focuses on listening and responding, performing and composing.

An interesting development in recent years in primary schools has been the further integration of education with the arts across the curriculum at infant level. Play and playful approaches to teaching and learning are now more prevalent, increasing children’s opportunities to engage in the creative and artistic activity referred to in Aistear and the primary school curriculum. For example, teachers use junk art, construction play and socio-dramatic play to support concepts that we find in the visual arts curriculum such as form, shape and texture or elements from the drama curriculum such as role, character, belief and tension.

In the post-primary curriculum education in the arts features across a wide range of subjects, including English, Irish, modern foreign languages, history and the new area of well-being. Creativity and problem solving also feature strongly in new short courses and subjects such as coding and computer science.

The arts also feature strongly in the transition year programme and the leaving certificate applied programme in many schools. For the purposes of this discussion we are looking, in particular, at the areas of art, music and the performing arts.

The arts have always been a subject included in the post-primary curriculum. Since September 2017, a new junior cycle visual arts specification has been introduced. A new leaving certificate programme specification for the arts will be ready by September this year. One of the interesting features of the new course is that it has been aligned with the common European framework of reference for visual literacy which has been of great benefit in designing and working on the specification.

Like art, music has also always been a subject included in the post-primary curriculum. A newjunior cycle musicspecification will be introduced in schools in September. The course has three elements: creating and exploring; participating and music-making; and appraising and responding.

An interesting development in recent years has been the provision of short courses at junior cycle. Schools can design their own short course. Organisations and bodies such as those in the arts sector can develop a short course for take-up in schools. The NCCA has developed a short course on artistic performance which has been available to schools since 2016. It also collaborates with a range of arts and culture bodies and agencies. We work the IMMA and the RIAI to produce examples of student work.

On visual thinking strategies, we havecollaborated with Dublin City Council's Arts Office and the organisation Visual Thinking Strategies, VTS, in the United States in researching and adopting the VTS methodology and curriculum. The NCCA is an associate partner with Dublin City Council for the Erasmus plus project entitled, Permission to Wonder.