St Andrews students and Art UK.

In January, St Andrews students created resources to support A-Level Art & Design students researching artists and artworks for their individual exam assignments. Students used Art UK’s Curations tool to make groups of artworks in response to the exam themes. The Curations tool allows users to pull together artworks from across Art UK. 

Exam boards in England, Northern Ireland and Wales release A-Level exam themes in February. Art & Design students select a theme and have a couple of months to develop creative responses to the theme, inspired by researching art and artists. They then use their research and ideas to develop a final ‘finished’ artwork for their exam (usually in May or June). Students often search (sometimes frantically!) online to find artists and artworks to inspire their projects – so Art UK set out to help them.

Art UK’s exam resources were developed in response to the Freelands Foundation and Runnymede Trust’s Visualise report. This report highlights the under-representation of artists from minority ethnic backgrounds in the Art & Design Curriculum in the UK. (Only 2.3% of artists referenced in exam papers are from Back or South Asian backgrounds, while 66% of secondary school students want to study artists from a wider range of ethnic backgrounds – this figure rises to 80% among Black students.) In developing their exam support Curations, Art UK aims to include a diverse range of artists to ensure the resources are inclusive.

Art UK, with the help of St Andrews students, plan to expand their resource provision to include Scotland’s SQA Nationals and Highers ahead of next year’s exams.

Explore the exam resources on the ART UK website.