Our aim at the RCA is to provide an experience that equips every student to succeed in their chosen professional career. Whatever their chosen discipline, our priority is to encourage each of our students to develop their personal brand of imagination and creativity, to help them acquire the knowledge, skills and experience needed to realise personal ambitions and to find their unique voice as an artist or designer. In addition, we provide the opportunities for students to engage in a broader postgraduate educational experience; we encourage them to explore contemporary themes that connect all the visual arts and enable them to acquire the basic business skills that success in any career demands.

The primary focus of all our teaching is on the individual. As such, a high level of responsibility is placed on each student to direct his or her own learning and development. The curriculum may vary from programme to programme, but learning and teaching is almost always project-led.

In fine art, students generally embark on personal, self-set projects from the start. In other areas, especially in the first year, there is a more structured programme with individual or team projects set by staff to encourage development of core skills or new ways of thinking.

During the second year of the MA the focus in every programme is almost completely on personal project work, which leads up to the final examination and the Show, the annual exhibition of graduate work.

Some students, especially those who have experienced highly structured and formally taught courses before they come to the College, may find the shift to self-motivated and self-directed study difficult, but all students need to be prepared to face this challenge.

Staff are there to help through meetings and regular tutorials and every student is assigned a personal tutor who is responsible for monitoring academic progress. This close, informal working relationship between students and staff is one of the qualities that students graduating from the College often remark on as having contributed greatly to their enjoyment of their studies.

The College provides a unique environment for postgraduate art and design students to reflect upon their own practice and to engage with students from their own and other disciplines. All first-year studiobased MA students study a Critical and Historical Studies programme which aims to encourage debate, understanding, intellectual confidence and selfexpression in the history, philosophy and criticism of the various disciplines taught at the College. The programme is designed to enhance each student’s experience at the College by engaging with important ideas that are relevant to their studio work in an exciting and challenging manner.

Every programme has a strong sense of identity and a particular vision of the discipline it teaches. Many students feel a strong sense of attachment to their own programme and concentrate their studies and practice within their own discipline. However, staff and students increasingly recognise the energy and creativity that can be generated by working across the discipline boundaries. Every year sees new collaborations on projects between disciplines as diverse as sculpture and architecture, for example, or textiles and vehicle design. The most valuable resource for every student is the community of amazingly talented students working around them. In the RCA ‘ideas factory’, everyone is learning from everyone else.