Arts

	The Arts specialism, will provide a focus for curriculum development and innovation; for celebration; for high quality practice and for community involvement. The Arts specialism will be part of a wider group of the wide range of Arts “providers”, such as Wiltshire College and the Salisbury Festival, in the Salisbury area. As well as being an approach to learning, areas related to the Arts with their emphasis on team working and aspiration to excellence will also be seen as a potential career pathways. Pupils, where appropriate, will be encouraged to identify and prepare learning routes into careers in these areas.
		Mrs Hill-Parker Director of Specialism

The concepts that lie at the heart of the Arts specialism will inform the life of the whole learning community. The emphasis on excellence and participation for all within the Arts makes the Specialism even more relevant and pertinent to the young people and the wider community. These concepts can be summarised as:

• The Arts are a dynamic, forward-looking, collaborative human endeavour arising from our curiosity and interest about the relationship, among other things, between the self and others and the self and the natural and wider world.
• An emphasis on participation and performance helps the community engage more closely with its young and with itself in a variety of combinations for a variety of purposes.
• Each of the Arts has a distinct, discrete, yet related, way of thinking about and explaining events, attitudes, emotions and phenomena.
• The Arts use a series of inquiry, observational and expressive skills in a variety of collaborative contexts.
• The Arts encourage precise observation and a wide variety of interpretative skills.
• The Arts encourage the presentation of findings and impacts using a wide range of techniques, including increasingly, digital technologies to suit purpose and audience.
• The Arts encourage an approach that combines both process and outcome encouraging and developing confidence.

All staff will be encouraged to engage fully with the Arts both through involvement in the Academy’s taught Arts curriculum and related activities and through the pursuit of their own artistic interests; in each case, the staff will be encouraged to gain appropriate qualifications to enhance their professional effectiveness and well being

Maths

Mathematics will also suffuse the learning community. As well as the essential numeracy element, ensuring that all young people reach a level of numeracy that enables them to access and engage with the numerical requirements of society, mathematical approaches to the world and to learning across the curriculum will be essential elements of the distinctiveness of the Academy.

The concepts that lie at the heart of this approach to mathematics and which will inform the life of the learning community can be summarised as:

• Mathematical skills and knowledge, most notably in the combining of understanding, experiences, imagination and reasoning in the construction of new knowledge, are transferable throughout learning in and beyond the Academy and can be used in a wide range of contexts. Thus, existing mathematical knowledge can be used to create solutions to unfamiliar problems in, apparently, unrelated areas of learning.
• The posing of questions and the development of convincing arguments can be deployed and presented in a variety of different ways to suit the needs of an audience.
• “Real-life” situations can be modelled using mathematical and statistical tools.  Young people will be encouraged to have a critical understanding of the modelling process, including its limitations and those of statistics, and have the ability to construct appropriate representations.
• Mathematics has rich historical and cultural roots and is a thing of beauty; these elements reveal something of the journey of humankind and its shared values and beliefs.