After stepping away from teaching for almost three years, I began to feel the pull to work with children again - specifically to teach art. This blog shares why I started The Teaching Artist Project and how Sketchbook Studio aims to offer children something different: a space to explore materials, develop ideas, and experience art as a creative process.

How process-led art projects allow every child to succeed, experiment, and create something entirely their own. As I reflect on my time as a teacher, particularly the art projects I delivered, one stands out. It remains one of my favourites and offers a perfect example of the power of a process-led approach. The aim of the project was to explore expression through the human figure and translate that exploration into a three-dimensional model using modelling wire and mod-roc.

Process- led, product-led - what does it all mean and does it really matter? I would say, yes, it matters a whole lot.

Why art provision matters - despite time, budget and accountability demands. I’m a former primary teacher. I loved teaching art - but I’ll be honest: most of the time, it was the subject that had to give. That reality really hit home after a recent conversation with a friend who is a secondary art teacher. We talked about Year 7 pupils - their confidence, their skills, and the anxiety that shows up as soon as they’re faced with a blank page. The overwhelming sense was that ma

Moving Beyond “One-Size-Fits-All” Art In many primary classrooms, visual arts can slip into a familiar formula: a single exemplar on the board, step-by-step instructions, and the end result? Thirty near-identical versions of a famous artwork. While these activities may look impressive on a display wall, they miss the true power of a high-quality visual arts programme - one that values the process  over the product and places creativity, exploration, and personal meaning at it

Sketchbooks are present in most primary schools and yet they remain one of the most misunderstood tools in Art & Design. According to the Department for Education’s National Curriculum for Art & Design , “pupils should be taught to create sketch books to record their observations and use them to review and revisit ideas.”  This statutory guidance emphasises not just what  pupils record, but the ongoing value of sketchbooks as a space for thinking, experimenting, and developin