Our strength in the creative arts reflects the Lake District's status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, through which our local area is recognised for its contribution to culture and the arts throughout the world. We take every opportunity to explore the world through art, drama, music and performance, developing our children's confidence, linguistic skills and self-expression.

We have recently created this huge piece of canvas art across the whole school working with local artist, Steve Rolls. The children all completed canvasses and these were all brought together to create this amazing work of art. 

We have recently been awarded the Silver Arts Mark. Our recent Arts journey has led us to a collaborative project with Keswick Museum and CDEC (Cumbria Development Education Centre) during the second lockdown of the global pandemic. The public exhibition we created, entitled “Afloat” threaded through all rooms in the museum and unfolded the metaphor of us all being in a storm, the coronavirus storm, but each of us being in our own boat, having varied experiences of the ride. The journey enabled us to explore visual art and poetry through the children’s experiences of coronavirus. Children and staff explored existing works such as Hokusai’s “Great Wave”, Robert Southey’s “Cateract of Lodore”, Michael Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom and Yoko Ono’s “Just add Colour” and created their own pieces to reflect their thoughts and emotions about the pandemic, including paintings, sculpture, animations, under sea scapes, large dioramas and a giant graffiti boat as the centre piece!

We are very pleased to be a member of Music Mark in recognition of the value we place on music education as part of a broad and balanced curriculum and our commitment to providing music education for all children. We currently have over 150 musicians singing and playing piano, violin, drums, guitars and woodwind.

Music Mark is a national network of leaders in music education which aims to improve the musical and social outcomes for children its members to deliver high quality music education.

Music mark recognises that the pursuit of learning to sing/play an instrument, learning to compose, learning to listen critically and the myriad of other musical skills are valuable in their own right and leads to increased behaviours for learning, boosting children and young people’s social development, fostering team work, building life skills, encouraging creativity and critical engagement and fun and for everyone.

Providing children with opportunities to perform is very important to us. During Early Years and Key Stage 1, all children are given the opportunity to perform as part of annual Nativities. Our Year 3 and 4 children lead a church Nativity at St John's. Our Year 5 and 6 children take the lead for our Harvest and Easter performances. In addition to this, our Year 6 children host an annual end of the year performance. Recent years have included Grease and Star Warts. Each year, all children from Year 1 to Year 6 are invited to perform in Poetry Slam, a performance poetry competition.