I have spent much time considering the purpose and place of what I teach at the sixth-form college I work at, and the value of the qualifications it leads to.

The more I consider the structure and requirements of art A levels, the more I believe (perhaps unsurprisingly) in their value and that many more students should study art due to the unique opportunity we have to shape young people’s approach to and engagement with learning.   

Recently this thought process has led me to a further question. Why is art and design not a facilitating subject?

A facilitating subject is an A level that is presented as being preferred by most universities for most courses. They are subjects that, if you are unsure what route you will take post A-level study, are held as most likely to keep your options as open as possible. They are biology, chemistry, English, geography, history, maths, modern and classical languages and physics.

The idea was introduced in the Informed Choices guide published by the Russell Group of universities, and subjects were chosen based on how often they were listed as required or preferred for any of the Russell Group’s listed degree courses. Therefore, a facilitating subject is a subject most commonly asked for in entry requirements to a Russell Group university degree course. The list of subjects was reached by crude data collection and not through a value-focused approach.

The case for art

Let’s stick with the short list of subjects above for comparison. Each is made up of content. Things that need to be absorbed, that is to say understood and remembered, and then to be presented at the exam for assessment purposes. The sciences and maths require equations to be learned; the humanities, dates, facts and opinions; and the languages, grammar and vocab.

The content for art is, well, nothing. There is not one piece of information that a student needs to remember and there is no formal exam at the course’s conclusion. Instead, we offer an approach to learning that is so different from any of the facilitating subjects that to include this way of working and learning into every 16-plus student’s education should surely be a tremendous benefit to their way of thinking.

Unlike content-based subjects, we offer a space in the curriculum for students to learn about their world, their interests and experiences, and to make their discoveries.

In place of content, we have assessment objectives that measure skills. These can be looked up on any exam board’s subject page, but in order to keep things simple they are (truncated to the extreme): research, explore/experiment, review/refine, conclude. Now consider that list in the context of any project.

Research and experiment 

Consider you are a town planner looking at your city’s bridge network across a major river, or a business manager looking at expanding your range of products or streamlining your manufacturing process, or perhaps a civil servant working for the Department of Health reviewing a hospital’s A and E department.

In each context, would you not want to research around other similar projects? Would you not want to understand and compile key findings from that research, then explore the ideas that your research throws up and experiment with some possible outcomes to assess their value or appropriateness to your desired outcome? And would you not want to review your findings, refine your decision making and conclude the project at hand? Put like that, it reads like business school advice rather than the basis for A-level art.

But it gets better. Think about that process. Consider a project lasting for several months, and consider the assessment objectives not being points on a journey but elements that blend and interact with each other; points that can be revisited as many times as needed. Now consider the student assessing for themselves every week of that project the value of what they have discovered so far and where their efforts should be focused next. Consider that, because that is what 16- to 19-year-olds are doing up and down the country in art studios. Project managing their own lines of enquiry.

Consider now how the constant review of findings encourages the delaying of a concluding work. Often with first projects, ideas are limited or a desired final piece is mapped out before the end of session one. The joy of the art assignment is the removal of a known outcome for the better, allowing students to move forward not knowing the destination but learning to trust in their ability to not only take them to an outcome but also one much more exciting, revealing and considered than if they had simply worked towards their first idea and achieved it.

I don’t want to denigrate those subjects listed as facilitating, but I want to argue that art should be sitting there alongside them. Its value should be recognised and many more students should have the opportunities art A-level offers so abundantly.

Hannah Day is head of visual arts, media and film at Ludlow College