News

Abigail Moore from The Henry Box School is one of the winners of national art competition ‘Spirited Arts’ held annually by the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE). Over 1800 students were selected from schools from across the UK and entered into ‘Spirted Arts’ this year, to get people thinking about Religious Education (RE) through art.

In its 14^th year, this competition has attracted over 300,000 participants averaging 20,000 partakers per year since 2004. Hundreds of UK schools get involved, and it gets entries coming from as far afield as Cyprus and Australia, Indonesia and South Africa.

The annual competition starts at the beginning of every school year and runs through to 31 July, in order to enable teachers to incorporate the art competition into their RE lessons. Many schools have an ‘Art in Heaven’ unit of work, or a special learning RE/arts week.

Abigail Moore comments:

I enjoyed being able to do RS in the way we want to. I liked how we only had to choose a set topic then create the piece without any limits. It links to RS because we can explore different religions to choose the topic we want. The way I thought of my design was that most people use a phone or sat nave to show the way when they are driving. I thought this would be a good way to make my artwork modern.

Cathryn Clarke from Henry Box school gives her thoughts on the competition:

‘We are delighted that Abigail has been recognised as a winner. I was really impressed by the standard of entries we had from Year 7 last year and hoped that one of them would win. I am so proud of all the work the students did, but especially proud of Abigail and what she achieved with her thoughtful and imaginative entry. The students and I look forward to the Spirited Arts competition every year, because even though this is an art competition catalysed by the RE subject association it not only provides an opportunity to think critically about current affairs and values but it also provides a great platform for cross-curricular activity combining subjects like Art, RE, Literacy and even History, which allows our students to explore different ways of learning.’

https://www.natre.org.uk/about-natre/projects/spirited-arts/spirited-arts-2018/