My daughter has offers to do a one year foundation in art at London City and Guilds and at University of the Arts London. She is torn! Any thoughts or experience to share? She would be living in the London for the first time. Thank you!
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Art foundation course - London City & Guilds or UAL?
marvellousjosie · 12/04/2024 15:41
ArtGarfield · 21/04/2024 16:38
I think the courses are the same at UAL and Manchester Met.
Most people do the FAD close to home so they can live at home as there are no maintenance loans for FAD. If money is no object I’m sure she’ll have a nice time in London.
artant · 21/04/2024 17:55
I’m sure she’ll have a great year and return to you more grown up than you ever expected!
The UAL courses have always been very big and will, I would think, be even bigger now they’re consolidating at Lime Grove. While it can be easy to get lost on a very big course, one thing that makes a difference is pathway group sizes and UAL has tended to keep those small enough for tutors to get to know the students properly (and, crucially for students to get to know one another) and for one tutor a day to be enough in the studio. The pathway groups are pretty tightly focussed (so for Fine Art, for instance, separate groups for different disciplines rather than a big group doing lots of different things).
I don’t know about the MMU FAD but I’d guess student numbers are in the low hundreds (bigger than a local FE college so a wider range of interests, opinions, facilities etc but smaller than UAL). She’d have a great time there too but this way she gets to find her feet in a new city.
artant · 21/04/2024 21:17
Ooh, didn’t know the move to Lime Grove was only for some. The other thing to factor in in terms of travel is that the UAL libraries are in various different parts of London. I know the foundation courses gave always been good but that doesn’t seem ideal to me.
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ArtGarfield · 21/04/2024 22:33
It took me a while to work out which type of foundation was which. I started out asking questions on the wonderful MN art HE threads and went off to dig about to learn about funding. It’s utterly confusing and I agree that some institution websites are more accessible than others. You’re right, UALs website makes a lot of assumptions about knowledge of the system.
@artant I swear the split between Archway and Lime Grove wasn’t published when I last looked.
If you live in Manchester and she’s got into Manchester then it’s a year at home to save but also a wonderful opportunity to explore and experiment. And maybe go to London for a degree.
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