Jewellery Studios, UCA Farnham

Learn by making

Get practical and stuck in – spend most of your time in studios and workshops.

At UCA, the way you learn is the way you'll work. Your timetable is built around studios, workshops, and real creative projects. You'll develop technical skills, test ideas, and build confidence through making, experimenting, and trying again. We don’t teach theory and practice separately; they’re combined into everything you do. That means you're not just studying your subject – you're doing it, every day, from the start.

Most teaching spaces at UCA are studios, workshops, or labs.

Student working on concept art in a games studio

See your place in the bigger picture

Understand history, culture and context to give your work depth.

Every creative subject has a history – social, political, cultural – and at UCA, you'll engage with it as a key part of your learning. You'll explore where your craft has come from, what's shaping it now, and how your own work connects to wider conversations. It’s the kind of understanding that sharpens everything you’re doing – your ideas get stronger, your work gets more interesting, and you start to know why you're creating what you're creating.

Your tutors are a mix of passionate industry legends, who were there at the beginning of many emerging art forms, as well as cutting-edge practitioners, who are driving its future.

Interior Design studios, UCA Canterbury

Find your people

Collaboration is built into the curriculum, where you’ll make friends and future creative partners.

Creativity gets better when it's shared. Collaborative projects across different courses are a big part of how you learn at UCA. You'll contribute to something bigger than your own work, work with other creatives other uni’s wouldn’t have you cross paths with, and discover what you're capable of when you're part of a supportive community that creates together. Our Schools are compact and collaborative by design – the kind of place where you feel part of something early on, and discover that the creative community and people around you are one of the most valuable thing about your degree.

Major shared modules, like Festival, link work from students from up to 15 courses. This module is assessed on how you collaborate, not what you deliver. Setting you up for success in a creative community.

Business School Computer Suite, UCA Epsom

Gain career confidence for the long game

Build skills, resilience, and industry awareness that prepare you for the reality of a creative career.

Creative careers don't follow straight lines. They move through freelance work, employment, entrepreneurship and reinvention – and we’ll prepare you for all of it. From your first year through to your final project, you'll build professional skills alongside your creative practice: industry awareness, real-world project experience, and the confidence to position yourself in a changing world. Long before you graduate, you’ll be ready for your first job. And the one after that, and the one after that.

You’ll start your professional pathway from your very first lesson. And in your final year, you’ll learn about grant applications, self-employment, filing tax returns, and how to nail creative job interviews.

Student working in a film production studio

Learn in a way that works for all

Responsible and inclusive innovation that positively impacts you and the planet.  We’ve redesigned our entire curriculum around how creative students actually want to live and learn.

That means embedding environmental and social responsibility into our creative and professional practice.  Our courses have ethical decision-making at their core, focused on equitability for our students, our community and environment.

That means learning and working with sustainable processes and understanding the environmental impact of your creative work.

That also means inclusive assessment that removes unnecessary barriers, synchronised deadlines so you and your friends finish at the same time, and flexible feedback designed around how you learn best – not one-size-fits-all.

Our students are diverse, including many who are neurodivergent, and we've built our teaching, assessment, and feedback around that.

More information

Thanks to our new Creative Learning Framework, and with industry partners, we’ve deliberately redesigned how undergraduate courses are structured, taught and assessed – built around the things we know matter most to creative students like you. 

To reassure, there is no change to your course name, level of qualification, expected length of study or tuition fees.

Your course simply just got better.

Our courses are now built around the things we know matter most to creative students:  

  • Learn by making: spend most of your time in studios and workshops  
  • See your place in the bigger picture: understand history, culture and context to give your work depth 
  • Find your people: collaboration is built into the curriculum, where you’ll make friends and future creative partners 
  • Gain career confidence for the long game: build skills, resilience, and industry awareness that prepare you for the reality of a successful creative career 
  • Learn in a way that works for you: inclusive assessment, synchronised deadlines, and a student experience built with real life in mind  

At this stage we have only redesigned how undergraduate courses are structured, taught and assessed, not postgraduate courses.

Our BA (Hons) Architecture course is also being presented to RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) for its formal approval – we anticipate RIBA’s approval at the end of April, after which we will be able to provide full details about the updates and improvements to this course. 

Yes, courses go through revalidation cycles, where existing academic programmes are redesigned and reapproved, every three to five years..

We have used this opportunity now to deliberately redesign how our undergraduate courses are structured, taught and assessed – built around the things we know matter most to creative students.   

If you are hoping to join UCA then there is no impact on your offer to study on your chosen course. If you have already received an offer from us, the details contained in your offer email are correct.

If you have an offer to study elsewhere, but are now considering studying with UCA you can make an additional application via UCAS (add in dates/process)

Yes, it's not too late to apply to UCA for September 2026.

If you have not yet applied to University, you can apply through UCAS today. The deadline for this is 30 June, but don't worry if you miss this date. You'll still be able to apply through Clearing, which opens in early July and runs right up until teaching begins in September.

If you've already applied to other universities you can still apply to study at UCA this year, regardless of if you've been offered a place elsewhere. Depending on what time of year it is you can do this either through UCAS Extra or Clearing.

How to apply to UCA