Key Skills Enhancement for Students, Artists and Designers through Residencies in Education

In September 1999, the Glasgow School of Art ‘Artists and Designers in Education’ programme was accepted as an important component of the GOALS project, an ACCESS initiative funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council including students in schools as project leaders, tutors and mentors. This stable and long-term funding validates and ensures the future of an experimental key skills programme which has been carefully nurtured in Glasgow School of Art for the past ten years, often in the face of scepticism, voiced by those for whom higher education and especially higher art and design education is ‘only about engaging with, becoming expert in and in due course advancing the discipline itself’. [1] This paper suggests that key skills enhancement through supported and evaluated residencies in education is of demonstrable value to most emergent artists and designers regardless of their subsequent career trajectories.