NCEA L1 Visual Arts

In 2024, new NCEA Level 1 standards are being introduced. There will be four standards, two assessed Internally and two Externals, each worth 5 credits.

Visual Arts students explore, refine, and communicate their own artistic ideas by responding to how art expresses identity, culture, ethnicity, ideas, feelings, moods, beliefs, political viewpoints, and personal perspectives. Through engaging in the visual arts, students learn how to discern, participate in, and celebrate their own and others' visual worlds.

Visual Arts literacy is developed through creativity and connection, inquiry and production, challenge and invention, and transformation and empowerment. Students create and respond to works using curiosity, collaboration, courage, critical thinking, and creativity. They confidently use iterative and cyclical processes of practising, selecting, reflecting, editing, and refining to create a cohesive and fluent artistic expression or body of work. By learning to identify Visual Arts conventions, students will also understand how these conventions communicate meanings through intention within established practice.

Students at Levels 6-8 of The New Zealand Curriculum engage with contexts that are typically broad, deep, and large in scale, and extend beyond personal experience. The contexts involve multiple interacting elements, contested ideas, provocative or nuanced interpretations, and require sustained engagement to understand. Students need to make sense of theoretical models and frameworks in order to make sense of the context(s) and apply them to their own work.

Level 1 Art portfolio