Steve McQueen to capture portrait of every Year 3 pupil in London for Tate Britain's 'most ambitious artwork'

Steve McQueen is enlisting thousands of schoolchildren to help create perhaps the most ambitious artwork ever seen at Tate Britain.

The artist has invited primary schools to join his project to create a unique portrait of every single Year Three pupil in London. Photographs of some 115,000 pupils will be taken by 30 Tate photographers over the next nine months.

McQueen— whose film 12 Years A Slave won three Oscars including Best Picture in 2013 — said the pictures would offer an overview of an entire age group “and to some extent our future”.

The pupils, aged seven and eight, would be at “the point where you are getting to some extent to understand your surroundings”, he added.

“At some point in one’s life you tend to look backward and you ask where is so-and-so and what’s happened to them. It was one of those things I wanted to reflect on, how I got to where I am”.

McQueen, 48, said he had recently started thinking about old classmates. “Where are they, what happened? People have been lost, have died, people are doing well, people are not doing well.”

He said he felt “an urgency to reflect” on the city he was born in: “We all think we know London and we don’t”. McQueen, who grew up in west London and went to Little Ealing primary school, first won acclaim for his video art, and was awarded the Turner Prize.

His directorial debut in the movies, Hunger, came out in 2008. He said he had chosen not to take any of the pictures himself as he did not want to become “a distraction” for the children.

Tate director Maria Balshaw said the project would put “a collective portrait of London’s future” at “the heart of our national art collection”. She added: “This may well be the most ambitious artwork we have ever shown at Tate Britain.”

The project has echoes of the Seven-Up TV documentary series which began in 1964 and has followed a group of children from the age of seven, revisiting them at regular intervals.

The class photos will be shown at Tate Britain from November next year until May 2020. Arts group Artangel will create an exhibition of class photos across London. More than 100 schools have already signed up and others can do so at tateyear3project.org.uk.