I have spent enough years in art schools to know that some of the most important things that happen in them are almost impossible to record. A student finally sees what is wrong with a drawing. A conversation changes the direction of a project. Someone who has spent weeks avoiding a difficult material suddenly begins to understand it. None of these moments arrives neatly at the end of a teaching session, and none of them becomes more valuable because we find a way to enter it into a spreadsheet.
Yet increasingly, the institution asks us to describe education through what can be planned, measured and evidenced. I understand why. Students deserve fairness, and universities need accountability. But I worry that we are becoming better at proving that education has happened than at protecting the conditions in which it actually happens.
There is a language that has quietly colonised education. Deliverables. Metrics. Outputs. Learning outcomes. Student satisfaction. Workload models. Key performance indicators. Progression data. Assessment grids. Evidence trails. We have become so accustomed to these words that we rarely question what happens when they begin to shape our understanding of teaching itself.
Some of this language is necessary. Institutions need structure. Students deserve clarity. Standards matter. I have seen how poor organisation and arbitrary assessment can undermine students’ confidence and trust. The problem is not that administration exists. The problem is that, somewhere along the way, administration can stop supporting education and begin to define it.
The art school should be a place of encounter, experiment, uncertainty, argument, care, making, failure, risk and transformation. It should be somewhere a person can arrive with one understanding of the world and leave with another. It should help students discover not only how to make something, but what they notice, what they believe, what they are capable of, and what responsibilities come with those capabilities.
Those things cannot always be predicted in advance. And they do not always happen on schedule.
What a finished piece of work cannot tell us
Consider a student who spends three weeks struggling with a drawing. The work is awkward. The proportions are wrong. They keep returning to the same problem, rubbing things out, starting again, becoming frustrated. At the end of the project, the drawing may still be unsuccessful by conventional standards.
But something may have changed.
The student may have learned to look rather than assume. They may have discovered that the first answer is rarely the only answer. They may have developed the patience to remain with something difficult instead of immediately looking for a shortcut. They may have learned that frustration is not necessarily evidence that they are failing, but sometimes evidence that they have reached the edge of what they currently know.
How do we assess that? More importantly, how do we make sure our systems do not discourage it?
Now consider another student who produces a beautifully finished piece of work. It meets the brief, satisfies the criteria and looks excellent in the final presentation. Yet the student may have taken very few risks, relied on familiar techniques and learned little that they did not already know. The object may be successful, while the educational experience has been relatively modest.
This is not an argument against quality. Of course the quality of the work matters. It is an argument against confusing the quality of the finished object with the entirety of the learning that took place.
As educators, we should be interested in both. What did the student make? And what happened to the student through the making?
The second question is often the more difficult one, but it may also be the more important.
The lessons we teach without meaning to
Every educational institution has a hidden curriculum. Students learn from what we do, what we reward, what we ignore and what we make difficult.
If we tell students that experimentation matters but penalise every unsuccessful experiment, they learn that experimentation is dangerous. If we tell them that curiosity matters but leave no room for questions outside the brief, they learn that curiosity is an interruption. If we tell them that process matters but only the final presentation appears to count, they learn that process is something to document afterwards.
We should not be surprised when students become strategic.
They learn how to satisfy the system. They learn how to read the rubric, produce the expected evidence and avoid unnecessary risk. Some become extraordinarily good at appearing to learn. They know how to present a process, how to explain decisions in the language the institution expects, and how to make uncertainty look as though it was part of the plan all along.
I do not blame students for this. They are responding intelligently to the environment we have created.
The same pressures affect educators. We may be encouraged to create ambitious, student-centred learning experiences while our own work is increasingly measured through administrative completion, standardised feedback, satisfaction scores and tightly allocated workload hours. We are asked to teach, mentor, prepare, assess, support, innovate and continuously demonstrate that all of these things have happened.
There are days when the choice feels painfully ordinary. Do I spend another hour talking with a student whose project has reached an important turning point, or do I return to the paperwork that must be completed? The paperwork is not necessarily pointless. But the student is there now, and the moment may not return tomorrow.
Nobody becomes a better designer because a spreadsheet has turned green.
The question is whether our systems are protecting the work or gradually consuming the time and attention that the work requires.
What the studio knows
The traditional art school, at its best, understood something that contemporary education risks forgetting: learning is social, embodied and often unpredictable.
The studio is not simply a room in which students complete assignments. It is a living community. Students observe one another, overhear conversations, borrow techniques, challenge assumptions, make mistakes in public and discover possibilities they did not know to look for.
A student may learn something important from watching a peer struggle with a print. A conversation over a workbench may change the direction of an entire project. A visit to a museum may open a door that no lecture could have opened. An educator may notice, in an apparently incidental conversation, that a student is finally ready to confront a much larger question.
These moments are not distractions from education. They are education.
This is why I continue to believe in the importance of studio presence. Not attendance as a bureaucratic exercise, but presence as a commitment to a shared culture of learning. Students need time together. They need to see work developing, to participate in critique, to encounter ideas beyond their own projects and to learn that being a designer involves belonging to a community of practice.
The studio should be demanding, but it should also be generous. Students should be treated as adults, expected to arrive, work seriously, contribute and take responsibility. Freedom does not mean an absence of commitment. In fact, a strong studio culture can create the security necessary for genuine experimentation, because students know that their work will be seen, challenged and taken seriously.
The hand, heart and eye also participate in forms of learning that do not fit neatly into a sequence of predetermined outcomes. Drawing, cutting, printing, constructing, photographing, composing and revising involve a continuous conversation between perception, material and judgement. The student acts, encounters resistance, notices something, adjusts and tries again.
The material answers back.
A line does not behave as expected. A composition refuses to settle. A photograph reveals something the photographer had not consciously noticed. An idea that seemed convincing in the mind becomes more complicated when it has to exist in the world.
This is why making is not separate from thinking. It is one of the ways thinking happens.
If we reduce making to the efficient production of deliverables, we risk removing the very friction through which students develop judgement.
When efficiency becomes the wrong ambition
The arrival of generative AI makes this problem more visible. We now have tools capable of producing convincing images, text, concepts, presentations and research-like material at extraordinary speed. They can be useful, sometimes remarkably so. But they also make it easier to confuse completing a task with developing a capability.
A student can generate visual directions before learning to observe. They can produce an articulate rationale before struggling to articulate their own reasoning. They can receive immediate critique before developing the confidence to evaluate their work independently. They can produce something that looks like a portfolio before acquiring the experience that a portfolio is supposed to represent.
The question is not simply whether AI should be allowed in the art school. It is which parts of the process must remain the student’s responsibility, and when assistance genuinely supports learning rather than bypassing it.
If education is already organised around outputs, AI may appear to solve many of its problems. Work can be produced more quickly. Feedback can be generated more efficiently. Evidence can be assembled more easily. But efficiency is only valuable when we are clear about what we are trying to achieve.
If the purpose is to develop a designer’s ability to observe, think, make, judge and take responsibility, then the fastest route to a finished object is not always the best educational route.
Sometimes the part we are most tempted to bypass is the part we most need to experience.
Administration should support the art school, not replace it
I do not want to romanticise the past. Art schools have never been free of poor teaching, exclusion, hierarchy or arbitrary judgement. Informal systems can conceal unfairness just as formal systems can conceal mediocrity. Students need to know what is expected of them, and educators must be accountable for the quality of their work.
The answer is not to abolish assessment or return to a world in which everything depends on the personal preferences of the tutor. It is to design systems that are proportionate, intelligent and capable of recognising the different ways in which learning happens.
A learning outcome can provide direction without becoming a ceiling. A rubric can help establish fairness without pretending to describe every valuable quality of a piece of work. Assessment can recognise technical competence, historical understanding, conceptual development and the quality of a student’s decisions without requiring every moment of learning to become a separate administrative artefact.
We should also be willing to trust forms of evidence that are close to the experience of education itself. A live critique can reveal more about a student’s understanding than several pages of formulaic written feedback. A sustained studio conversation can expose misconceptions, ambitions and emerging capabilities that a grid may not anticipate. A portfolio accompanied by a reflective conversation can demonstrate both achievement and development without turning every experiment into another form to complete.
The objective should be better evidence, not simply more evidence.
This also requires institutional leaders to ask difficult questions about the systems they introduce. Does this process improve the student’s experience, or does it primarily reassure the institution? Does this reporting requirement provide information that someone will genuinely use, or does it duplicate information that already exists? Does this workload model recognise the time required to think, prepare, mentor and develop meaningful teaching, or does it only count the activities that are easiest to record?
Every new administrative requirement has a cost. That cost is not always financial. Sometimes it is an hour that could have been spent in the studio. Sometimes it is the energy required to prepare an ambitious workshop. Sometimes it is the confidence of an educator who feels that their professional judgement is no longer trusted.
We should be much more careful about what we ask educators to sacrifice in the name of efficiency.
Making room for what we cannot predict
A curriculum needs structure, but it also needs breathing space. Students require clear expectations and a sense of direction, yet they also need periods in which they can explore without knowing exactly what they will produce.
An educator should be able to change the direction of a session when a productive discussion emerges. A student should be able to discover that the original brief no longer contains the most interesting question. A group should be able to spend longer than planned on something that has become important, rather than being forced to move on simply because the timetable says so.
This is not a rejection of the curriculum. It is an understanding of the curriculum as a framework for encounters rather than a production schedule.
In my experience, the most memorable educational moments are rarely the ones in which everything went exactly according to plan. They are the moments when something unexpected entered the room: a question, a disagreement, a material problem, a connection to history, or a student who suddenly saw their work differently.
Good teaching requires preparation, but it also requires the freedom to respond.
We need to protect that freedom. Not as a special privilege for educators, but because students benefit from teachers who are able to exercise judgement, care and imagination in real time.
What happened to the person through the work?
Perhaps the most important question an art school can ask is one that does not fit easily into a spreadsheet: what happened to the person through the work?
Did the student become more observant? More capable of independent judgement? More willing to take responsibility? Did they discover a new relationship with materials, history, society or their own imagination? Did they learn to work with others, to disagree constructively, to remain with a difficult problem, or to recognise when a seemingly successful solution was not good enough?
These questions do not replace technical standards or professional expectations. They give those standards a human purpose.
A designer who can produce excellent work but cannot question its consequences is incompletely educated. A student who can satisfy every learning outcome but has never developed an independent relationship with the world has learned to perform competence rather than fully exercise it.
The art school should prepare students for professional life, but it should not be reduced to a simulation of professional production. Its responsibility is larger than employability, even though employability matters. It should help students develop the capacities to shape a profession, question its assumptions and imagine alternatives — not merely enter it.
That responsibility becomes even more important as technology makes production faster and easier. The value of education cannot rest solely on teaching students to produce outputs that machines can increasingly generate. It must cultivate the human capabilities through which we decide what is worth making, why it matters, and how we ought to live with the consequences.
Keeping the art school alive
The art school did not die because someone introduced a learning outcome or an assessment grid. It died a little whenever an educator was prevented from following an important question because the schedule was too full. Whenever a student learned to prioritise the appearance of completion over the experience of discovery. Whenever an institution treated evidence of education as more important than the conditions that make education possible.
It died a little whenever we forgot that education is not simply something delivered to students, but something they participate in becoming.
And it comes back to life whenever a student is given the time to look again. Whenever a teacher trusts the emerging direction of a conversation. Whenever a studio makes room for failure without treating failure as a defect in the system. Whenever making becomes a way of thinking, critique becomes an act of care, and education becomes something more than the efficient delivery of predetermined results.
We do not need to reject administration. We need to restore its proper place. It should be the infrastructure beneath education, not the philosophy above it. It should make the institution more capable of supporting teachers and students, not require teachers and students to become more like the institution.
That means defending time in the studio. It means reducing duplicated reporting requirements and trusting educators to exercise professional judgement. It means designing assessment that recognises process as well as outcomes, and giving students the freedom to take meaningful risks. It means asking, before introducing another system, whether it will genuinely improve learning or merely make the institution feel more in control.
The living spirit of education cannot be protected by another metric designed to measure how alive it is. It is protected through the decisions we make about time, trust, space, attention, assessment and human relationships.
The art school must be accountable. But it must also be allowed to be an art school.
Because the purpose of education is not merely to produce evidence that learning has occurred. It is to create the conditions in which a human being can become someone they could not have become otherwise.
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