Ancestors

Tom's starting his GCSE Art prep. At his school they do one (school) year intensive GCSEs which works fine for languages where the compressed timeframe can be advantageous, but it's not great for Art where ideas and techniques need time to develop.

Still, nothing we can do about it. Children in the UK education system are just guinea pigs - I can't remember how many new initiatives they've been through in the past decade, with very mixed results. When Josh did his Art GCSE in what is essentially 9 months he got a lower grade than expected, it was just so hard to build up a really good portfolio in that time. So we're starting early with Tom, visiting our amazing Pitt Rivers Museum here in Oxford to look at masks and representations of humans in life and death.

This is a Nigerian ancestor skull.