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University of Reading, School of Arts and Communication Design

My name's Susanne Clausen. I'm a Professor of Fine Art, from the School of Arts and Communication Design. I work in the Reading School of Art, which runs our art courses. But I want to, before I talk about specific programmes. I just wanted to give you a warm welcome from our School of Arts and Communication Design. We're a school with three different departments and we're located across our green campus in different areas but what unites us is an interest in bringing together creative practice and academic study. What also joins us is, in offering our students of really a range of real world experiences. So they can study, but also at the same time experience what it means to work out there and prepare for work or for the creative industries that we think they will head into and we also as a school offer a really global curriculum.

We're very proud that as a University and the areas of our school, we've been able to rank third in UK and that's really testimony to all the great efforts from our staff and across the University. Art was one of the founding subjects and schools together with agriculture of the University of Redding. So we go back 150 years and we pride ourselves on a very interdisciplinary program. So students don't have to specify on the medium they want to study. So throughout their thre or four years with us on an undergraduate degree, they can work across mediums they can study painting, sculpture, multimedia work, they can work in education and this is, it's specific not only to us, I think most courses in the UK but I think as you'll see with the programmes that we offer, that works really well.

So the programs that we offer in art: a three year program Fine Art and a four year Fine Art program with an integration, with an integrated foundation and a range of joint degree programs, which are all four years and these are also very popular for our students in this particular, because they open up different career pathways. We have very large studio spaces, very bright, where students can really work to ambition and develop experimental work and our studios are open every day and weekend, which also gives the students a lot of flexibility and we have fully equipped audio visual studios. We also organise regular exhibitions, internally and externally for our students. We have partnerships with Modern Art Oxford, with the ICA in London, but also with corporate sponsors who've supported us and supported the students realise projects outside for instance, like Deutsche Bank, who supported or gave gave students empty office spaces to work in there. Modern Art Oxford, which is very close, each chooses and offers an award to our students every year and that actually can be seen at the Modern Art website at the moment. As a school we promote very much the opportunity to study abroad. This is an extremely popular option for our students and at the moment, we say we offer exchanges for three months for our students in all these different countries. We have partnerships with universities in all these countries, and we also receive students here in Reading in exchange. So this makes for a very kind of vibrant international community for our students.

We are also very proud to have set up and extended these partnerships and offer exhibition trips to students abroad. So in the past few years, we not only offer  module that takes students to study on site, for instance, in Madrid or Berlin, but our partnership also means that the students have opportunities to exhibit, not only in the UK, but also abroad and the students you see here, they took part in an exchange with our partner University in Tokyo. That's Musashino Art University, where they were working on an exhibition together. One of the kind of key pillars in our teaching is our guest lecturers who happen, once a week, where we invite international speakers to introduce their practice to our students and also give tutorials. So the students not only have lectures, but they have also the possibility to meet these artists. We also, as I said before, we offer a lot of real world experiences and that means work placements for our students, where we not only help students to find places for instance, in local schools or with local arts organisation, to do this across their studies or in the summer term to gain professional experience.

So our students, we're very happy that the employability of our students is really high and a lot of students have been able to work in the field, not only as practicing artists, but also work as curators, as educators, as art writers and the employability of our undergraduates who are in work or further study at the moment is 93%.

So yeah, that concludes my presentation of Department of art and I'd like to hand over to my colleague from the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, James Lloyd.