A Level Art and Design: Art, Craft and Design

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Key Facts

Level: 3

Attendance: Full Time (FT)

Duration: 2 Years

Course Code: A1ACAD

Start Date: September 2025

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Code: A1ACAD

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Improve your visual expression and your understanding of the creative process while building a portfolio of work for university interviews.

As well as developing your skills in visual recording through practical work including drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking and mixed media, you will also build your critical thinking and research abilities with contextual study of artists and their relationship to the world around them.

Your work will also involve an element of self-reflection, writing annotations to discuss your own work and its relation to briefs and artists studied, helping you to critique your own work and feed this into your future work.

Features & Benefits

There are four assessment objectives that are given weighted application to all parts of the course:

Visual Recording - objective and imaginative drawing, visual representation of ideas, collection of images and other visual information
Critical Thinking - verbal and written discussion and analysis of art works in their historical context
Practical Research - development of ideas, experiments with media and materials, and improvement of formal concept usage, including composition and use of colour
Personal Development - producing visual and written work which gives a clear, structured response to assigned tasks; you will be expected to explain not just what you have done but why, as well as which artists, designers, and craftspeople have influenced you.

Course Content

Year 12:

Skill Building
In the first and second term you will complete a variety of tasks that introduce you to different techniques and materials. You will also be introduced to and select a variety of different Artists to research and create a personal response to.

Unit 1 Personal Investigation
Towards the end of year 12 you will start to prepare for your Personal Investigation by selecting a theme to research and investigate.

Year 13:

Unit 1 Personal Investigation
You will continue to research and develop outcomes for your Personal Investigation. You will also produce a piece of written research that looks at some wider aspect of your theme. This will run from September to January.

Unit 2 Externally Set Task
From February to April, you will research one of the set themes from the exam paper and then have 15 hours to produce, unaided, your outcome.

Entry Requirements

Minimum Entry Requirements:
All Loughborough College Sixth Form courses have minimum entry requirements of at least five GCSEs at grade 4 or above, including English Language and Maths.

Subject Specific Entry Requirements:
Art or Design at grade 5.

Progression

A Level Art prepares you for degree-level study in art and design, and careers in everything from graphic design, illustration and typography to sculpture, fashion and photography.