System change: The student teacher as agile curriculum designer

Since at least art educator Arthur Efland’s (1976) influential description of a standard ‘school art style’, art and design curricula has been criticised as perennially disconnected from contemporary artistic practice, the creative industries, and the cultural interests of learners – instead reproducing an orthodoxy unique to the classroom. This is a problem for those of us who hope for a timely, diverse, and relevant art and design curriculum. Where it is seen, who might we blame for institutionalised, recurrent curricula? Given the ubiquity of school art orthodoxy, this is clearly not attributable to individual teachers (typi-cally deeply committed to promotion of our subjects’ many marvels) but rather a systemic glitch fundamental to the fractious relationship between school and art. One demands con-formity and measurable predictability, the other transgressive iteration and ambiguity. Without careful stewardship, the result is Efland’s school art: where superficial student agency presents the illusion of free play in otherwise regimented systems. To break systematic orthodoxy system change is required, and Ofsted’s (2019) recent impe-tus to show care for the sequenced substance of curricula presents opportunity for radical reform. Here we suggest that authentic art practice will only be achievable in a school con-text if tradition is turned on its head, and curriculum in entrusted to those who will inherent the content – the student art teacher