Art and Design GCSE is a course aimed at devel­op­ing your visual percep­tion and under­stand­ing. You will be encour­aged in your creat­ive, imagin­at­ive and prac­tical skills and you will work in a wide vari­ety of differ­ent media includ­ing draw­ing, paint­ing, sculp­ture, ceram­ics, print­ing, photo­graphy video and many others. You will also study the work of other artists who are import­ant in their fields of work.

Assess­ment is in two parts:

Unit 1: Port­fo­lio of work
This is a controlled assess­ment – set and marked by centre and moder­ated by AQA. It is worth  60% of your GCSE. Your port­fo­lio is selec­ted from work under­taken during the course and must include more than one project.

Students will be required to offer work relat­ing to two or more areas of study (Draw­ing and Paint­ing, Graph­ics, Photo­graphy, Textiles and Three-dimensional Stud­ies). The units of work may be inde­pend­ent of one another or inter-related.

The purpose of course­work is to provide students with an oppor­tun­ity to demon­strate their abil­ity to invest­ig­ate, explore, modify, develop, and real­ise their ideas in a vari­ety of differ­ent media.

Students will complete a number of projects during the course, from which the selec­tion will be made for assessment.

A project is anything produced from the concep­tion to the submis­sion of the final item. They must produce stud­ies in support the final outcome and they can be presen­ted in any form such as sketch­books, study sheets, exper­i­ments or maquettes.

Unit 2: Extern­ally set task
This extern­ally set task is marked by centre and moder­ated by AQA. It counts for  40% of your GCSE.

Towards the end of the course the students will sit an exam­in­a­tion. There is unlim­ited prepar­a­tion time followed by a ten hour period of sustained focused study in which they are expec­ted to develop their own unaided work informed by their prepar­at­ory studies.

If you are consid­er­ing a career in any area that involves creat­ive visual think­ing, such as archi­tec­ture, design­ing, theatre, TV, computer soft­ware, or you just love draw­ing and paint­ing, then a GCSE in Art and Design is for you.

Specific­a­tion: AQA  Art and Design 4201
Click here to down­load the current specific­a­tion for this GCSE course.