Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - Design Crafts

BA (Hons) Design Crafts trains contemporary makers across materials: ceramics, glass, metal and jewellery, wood, and mixed media, with design thinking, drawing and digital fabrication taught alongside hand skills so that graduates can move between one-off commission work and batch or industrial production.

The workshops are the course — kilns, hot glass, metalworking, casting and digital tools available for sustained material experimentation — and the pedagogy insists on making as thinking, with students developing a personal material language through iterative studio practice rather than theoretical projects.

Applicants sometimes assume craft degrees are gentle; this one is materially demanding and technically exacting, with workshop inductions, safety certification and sustained making across unfamiliar materials from the first term. That rigour is the point — employers and galleries can tell trained makers from enthusiastic ones instantly. Materials costs vary considerably by chosen specialism and should be budgeted alongside the £16,800 fee, while the recorded January windows across all cycles offer admission flexibility unusual for a workshop-based course.

Professional practice is threaded deliberately through the degree: costing and pricing work, exhibiting at fairs, photographing objects for sale, and the realities of commission and gallery relationships, culminating in a final body of work shown publicly and, for many students, sold.

Craft incomes are modest and portfolio-shaped — making, teaching, technical work and commissions mixed together, typically £18,000–£23,000 equivalent early on — while the material skills also serve product design, prop-making and heritage sectors. The completed honours degree carries Graduate Route rights at the 18-month post-January-2027 length, with dependants excluded on taught undergraduate study.