The Foundation Diploma is designed to prepare students for specialist undergraduate degrees in art and design subjects. It’s a year of exciting projects, new faces and experiences that will inform your future study, career and creative life.

Foundation is widely considered the best preparation for progression to an undergraduate degree in the creative arts in the UK. On this dynamic course, you’ll try different disciplines from across art and design while being supported to fulfil your creative potential and ambitions.

If you successfully complete the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, you’ll receive at least 1 offer to a UAL undergraduate course, to start the following September.

We cannot guarantee that you’ll receive an offer for each course that you apply to. In some instances, you may receive an offer for an alternative course or mode of study that you didn’t apply to. The offer or offers you receive will depend on your portfolio and will be made after careful review by College course teams and Admissions Tutors. Find out more about offers in our 'Careers' section further down this page.

When you apply to the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, we’ll ask you to choose from 2 modes of study: Diagnostic or Specialist.

With over 100 undergraduate options available at UAL alone, it can be hard to know which is best for you. The diagnostic mode helps you understand where your skills and interests fit within art and design.

Diagnostic mode is the best option if you want to consider a wide range of disciplines before committing to a specialism.

If you decide to study in diagnostic mode, you’ll start the course by trying out some techniques from of each of our 4 curriculum areas. After that, you’ll progress onto a specialist pathway. Our teams will guide you towards the pathway that will give you the best chance to develop a distinct, individual body of work.

The specialist mode is best for you if you’re already confident about your future direction. This mode allows you to apply directly to one of the 4 curriculum areas: Fashion and textiles, Art, Communication and Design.

If you decide to study in specialist mode, you’ll tell us which curriculum area you’re interested in as part of your application. During the first 8 weeks of study, you’ll take part in workshops across all the pathways in that curriculum area. Then you’ll be guided, through tutorials and assessment, to the pathway that best suits your interests and skills.

The course is divided into 4 curriculum areas, each with their own specialist pathways:

We encourage a playful, experimental, and fearless approach to the exploration of materials, techniques, and processes in relation to social, political, and industrial contexts. Fashion and Textiles combines colour, texture, and pattern with structures for the body and explores innovative material investigations, large-scale spatial installations, or conceptual art-led outcomes.

We will support you to develop your own individual visual language or voice. A series of projects will encourage you to learn by doing across a range of different media. You will also develop greater awareness of the link between research, theory and practice, and the importance of experimentation and open approaches.

We place an emphasis on the development and communication of ideas, creative thinking, and storytelling, encouraging a practice which engages with and responds to society, culture, politics, and the environment. Work is often in the public domain, where it is the role of the communication practitioner to persuade, provoke, inform or entertain their audience.

We encourage thinking, making, and experimentation across a broad range of subjects including architecture, jewellery, product, performance and film design. In this area you will explore functional, craft based, and conceptual approaches to design. We encourage the exploration of process and materiality through the developments of digital and analogue making skills.

We may offer you a place on the course, but in a different mode of study or curriculum area to the one on your application form. This happens when we think your application is really strong but believe your strengths and skillset are better suited to a different mode of study or curriculum area.

From September 2024, we'll teach this course at our UAL Pre-Degree Studies site at Lime Grove, west London, and our Archway campus in north London. Your main location depends on your chosen pathway and mode of study. This may change in Part 2 of the course, depending on which specialist pathway you choose.

Wherever you're based, you'll have access to facilities on both campuses as well as having library access at our other Colleges across London.

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