Our Education strategy
Last updated:
24 September 2026
The strategy
Our students personify the creativity the world needs. Our role is to ensure they can thrive.
We want all UAL students to experience a distinctive creative education that is student-centred, practice-led and engaged with the challenges facing our societies and planet.
Through our Education strategy, we aim to build on our strengths and improve how we work, so that our students can live creative lives, do good work and make a positive impact in the world.
Our foundations
Our Colleges and courses are known for distinctive approaches to creative education. But over the past decade our student body, and the world around us, has changed significantly.
We know students face increasingly complex challenges, from rising cost of study and living to employment futures shaped by accelerating technological change. Our emphasis on student agency, reflection and process means we are well placed to adapt our curriculum.
We’ve made progress in reducing degree awarding gaps and barriers to participation and success. We now need to take bolder action to become consistently inclusive.
We have embedded principles of climate, racial and social justice into all our courses. Our students tell us they need to complement their critical, creative capabilities with practical skills that support them to secure good work — be that employment, starting a business or sustaining a portfolio career.
Our ambitions for students
Based on what students have told us, we will focus on 4 qualities of education and 4 attributes, defining what success looks like at UAL.
We believe that education is best at UAL when learning is:
- student-centred — it values and celebrates every student’s prior experience, distinct creative ambition and their role in shaping their learning
- practice-led — it happens whilst bringing impactful things into the world
- world facing — it is structured around engagement with complex questions affecting our disciplines, our societies and our planet
- relational — it is enriched through encounters with others within and beyond our community, with technologies and with place.
And our students are supported to become:
- life-long learners — capable of sustaining a creative and professional practice and reflecting on their future learning needs
- highly skilled — capable of describing and demonstrating the skills they have acquired in their disciplines as well as the essential cross-cutting competencies needed for their futures
- impactful — because they can work in creative and ethical ways with others no matter where they are in the world
- networked — through supportive and diverse communities of practice and friendship.
Our ambitions for our staff
Our staff are committed to creating transformational experiences for our students and equipping them with the tools they need to succeed. But realising that ambition for students depends on the right conditions for staff.
We believe that if the support for our staff is:
- relevant and accessible — aligned to our ambitions, recognising what different staff need to succeed and actionable in day-to-day teaching practice
- focused on enabling equitable opportunities and outcomes for students — prioritising inclusive approaches to the signature features of creative education at UAL
- evaluative — supporting staff to learn from what works in supporting educational excellence.
Then our staff are better able to:
- excel — in teaching, research, industry and community partnerships that address global challenges
- deliver — education that is student-centred, practice-led and inclusive
- innovate — on creative education, building a culture of evidence-led change.
Our theory of change
Our theory of change sets out how we believe we can go from where we are now — our foundations — to realising our ambitions for our students and staff.
We believe:
- if we adapt our educational environment so that it is more relevant and accessible, evaluated and nurturing
- our students will receive an education that is consistently student-centred, practice-led, relational and globally minded
- enabling them to become highly skilled and impactful life-long learners, and networked graduates
- who go on to enjoy good work and creative lives.
3 strands of our strategy
1. What we teach
We'll equip our students with the skills they need to succeed in the creative and cultural sectors, building on our distinctive approaches to creative education. Our students will develop critical, ethical and adaptive capabilities to navigate the interconnected challenges of our complex world with confidence.
Objective 1: Deliver the skills our students need to succeed
We’ll bring our existing skills and attributes frameworks into a single Creative Skills Framework to articulate our curriculum and the support services we offer. Building on our work to embed climate, racial and social justice across our curriculum, we’ll extend this to include critical digital skills and practical knowledge for employment and self-employment.
Objective 2: Recognise learning wherever it occurs in our students' lives
We'll reward our students for learning that occurs beyond their course whilst studying with UAL, both within the University and in their wider lives. We’ll begin by developing our approach to Learning Recognition to support more people to access and benefit from creative education.
Objective 3: Support our students to secure good work and creative lives
We'll provide clear and consistent support and advice for our students and graduates as they embark on their careers. We’ll do this through a re-visioned Careers and Employability service and a Skills Hub where students can build cross-cutting skills and knowledge alongside their course.
2. How we teach and support student learning journeys
We'll develop a more consistent and equitable student journey, grounded in an understanding of our students’ diverse needs, ambitions and experiences. We'll ensure that support surrounding the curriculum is clearly structured and easy to navigate. Building on our commitments to justice, we’ll embed inclusivity as a core design principle of our education and learning spaces.
Objective 4: Employ inclusive approaches to creative education consistently
We'll develop Principles of Inclusive Creative Education, grounded in the work of UAL staff and students. We'll build practical and actionable approaches into the development of both our curriculum and our staff. We'll begin by focusing on assessment, while actively reducing unnecessary costs of study and inequitable access to resources and technologies.
Objective 5: Make it easier to access information, resources and support
We'll develop simpler ways for students to access our specialist support services, both on campus and online, starting with an online Student Centre. To better support each student's journey we’ll move from varied approaches to personal tutoring. We'll develop consistent approaches to academic mentoring (staff to students), peer mentoring (students to students) and success coaching (professional services to students).
Objective 6: Strengthen our partnership with current and future students
We'll partner with Arts SU to create a clear and responsive Student Voice Framework to better align how we work with students on education. We’ll pilot youth panels with our education partners to better understand future students' hopes and needs as part of a wider approach to using student journey data.
3. How we support educational excellence
We'll improve support for our staff to deliver and sustain educational excellence. We'll recognise the contribution all staff make to student learning and success. This includes building a culture of reflection, evaluation and continuous improvement to ensure our creative education continues to evolve.
Objective 7: Learn from the best of what we do
We'll provide our staff and students with structured opportunities to engage with educational research, prioritising innovation and the sharing of excellent practice. We want this to develop our capacity and empower our course communities. We’ll begin by developing an Evaluation Framework that evidences what we do well and supports us to make impactful change across UAL.
Objective 8: Recognise everyone's contribution to student success
We'll recognise the contributions that all staff make to student learning and success and include them in our processes and strategies for the design of our curriculum and the wider student journey. We’ll begin by signing the Technician Commitment. We’ll use it to drive a strategic approach to recognition of technical education at UAL, alongside career development and the visibility and sustainability of technical skills.
Objective 9: Become the leading university for creative education
We'll harness the expertise across our Colleges to generate, share and apply new knowledge about how creative education works and why it matters. Recognising our strengths in enquiry-led practice, we’ll develop the capacity of our staff as practitioner-researchers. This will create pathways for research, knowledge exchange and enterprise insights to flow directly into curriculum design. We'll show and share our impact at local, national and global levels.
Download the strategy
Our University strategies
Our Education strategy and Research and Knowledge Exchange strategy work together to shape specialist knowledge and creative skills for the future economy. Both strategies support our UAL strategy pillar ambitions.
