ABSTRACT
The first and most obvious issue for creative work in multimedia is how to integrate such work into the present structure of the National Curriculum. Many of the projects described in this book argue in detail that the organisation of the school day with its narrow subject disciplines, short working periods, and heavy assessment workload is diametrically opposed to the principles of digital arts where there is an emphasis on group work, extended project-based activities and inter-disciplinary investigations. In primary schools especially, the recent and extraordinary attention to a restricted definition of literacy-focusing exclusively on the basic skills of print literacy-also seems at odds with the notion of multimedia literacies underpinning much of work described in this book. At the same time, as I noted in Chapter 1, it proved very difficult to find accounts of digital arts work in secondary schools. As Irene Ordidge suggested in her chapter on the NEMA awards, the emphasis on testing in Key Stage 3 and 4 has the effect of restricting opportunities for multimedia projects for this age range.
