The Course

The course aims to provide a bridge between your academic training and your professional career. It is designed to help you build up your stock of objects, make contacts, to start to establish your reputation and to prepare for setting up your own workshop.

You will need a business plan and will want to understand the procedures for selling to shops and galleries, for making appointments, and for keeping delivery dates. Post-college professional success requires you to grasp these areas.

Bishopsland will help you focus on these professional skills. There are no exams here, and teaching is by tutorial with few set-piece activities. However, this is not a year off – very much the contrary. It is a year when you should be training yourself to be a professional craftsman and laying the foundation of a rewarding and satisfying career.

You may be considering an MA, and eventually teaching, if so you should regard that in addition to your professional career, not in place of it.

The Bishopsland course is demanding, but you will leave with an above average chance of making a go of it.

If you are eligible for Housing Benefit, and most people are, the net cost including accommodation and full workshop facilities is likely to be around £70 per week, less if you succeed in getting a bursary. Food is on top but with earnings from your sales (you are self-employed as soon as you arrive) and perhaps a part-time job, most people at Bishopsland can get by with minimal help from outside.