Our main entry points.
Four ways in, from eleven through to a post-eighteen portfolio year. Every one of them starts in a studio in the first week.
Ages 11 to 13
Foundation
Ages 13 to 16
Middle School
Ages 16 to 18
Sixth Form
Post 18
Portfolio Year
Studios, not classrooms.
Every student works in a real studio from their first term. Ideas get made, tested, taken apart and rebuilt in front of people who will tell you the truth about them. It is how practising artists work, and it is how we teach.
There are no lecture halls. A week is built around long working sessions, a weekly critique where you stand next to your work and account for it, and open studios that anyone in the school can walk into unannounced. Nothing is marked in private.
Studios open 7am to 10pm, seven days a week
The school in four figures.
Numbers only tell you so much about a school. These four are the ones that change what a week here actually feels like.
1:8
Studio ratio
Every studio is capped, so a tutor knows what each student is working on that week.
24
Disciplines taught
From ceramics, print and metalwork through to sound design and moving image.
92%
To first-choice course
Of last year’s leavers, placed at the institution they named first.
40
Visiting practitioners
Working artists and designers teaching short courses across the year.
MEET THE HEAD
We do not teach students to follow a brief. We teach them to write one.
“At the Academy we treat making and thinking as a single act, an idea carried in our motto, manu et mente: by hand and by mind. It is what our founder built the school on in 1974, and it still decides how every studio here runs.
Since then, curiosity and individual voice have sat at the centre of this place. We ask students to work from their own questions rather than somebody else’s brief, to show unfinished things to people who will be honest about them, and to keep going once the easy version has been ruled out. That habit is what they leave with.”
Adam Holloway · Head of School since 2019
More about the academy.
The buildings, the people who teach in them, and the practical business of applying.
Since 1974
Our history
Facilities
The studios
How to apply
Admissions
Open mornings
Visit us
The best way to understand this place is to hear it from the people in it.
Each year a group of students take over our films, our open mornings and parts of this website. They choose what gets shown and what gets said. What you read in those places was written by them, not by us.
The group is elected in September and holds the brief for a full year. They sit in on open mornings and tell us afterwards what rang false. They decide which work goes into the film and, more usefully, which work stays out. Twice a year they publish something the school has not read in advance, which is the part of the arrangement we take most seriously.
The student editorial group, elected each September
Four steps, one portfolio.
We do not interview and we do not set an entrance exam. We look at what you have made and we talk to you about it.
01
September
Enquire
Register your interest and we will send you the portfolio brief.
02
October
Visit
Spend a morning in the studios and meet the people who teach in them.
03
January
Portfolio
Show us fifteen pieces and talk us through how you made them.
04
March
Offer
Offers are released and studio places confirmed.
Applications for September 2027 open on 1 October.
Bursaries cover up to full fees and are assessed separately from the portfolio. Ask us about them at any point in the process.
STILL NOT SURE
Ask us directly.
Admissions is two people and a shared inbox. They answer everything themselves, usually the same day, and they would rather hear from you early than late.
admissions@enfoldacademy.ac.uk
+44 20 7946 0102
Questions families ask.
The five that come up at every open morning, answered plainly. If yours is not here, the panel on the left is two people who answer it themselves.
Do we need a portfolio to visit?
No. Come to an open morning first and see the studios. The portfolio only matters at step three, and we will tell you what we are looking for well before then.
What if my child works in one discipline only?
That is common and it is fine. We ask for fifteen pieces, not fifteen disciplines. Depth in one medium tells us more than a tour of six.
Is boarding compulsory?
No. Roughly half the school boards and half are day students. Studios stay open until ten in the evening for both.
How are bursaries assessed?
Separately from the portfolio, by a panel that never sees the applicant’s name. Awards run from a quarter of fees to the full amount including materials.
Can students transfer in mid-year?
Occasionally, where a studio has space. Talk to us early; the answer depends more on the discipline than on the date.
BEYOND THE ACADEMY
I arrived here already able to draw. What I left with was the judgement to decide what is worth drawing at all, which is by far the harder thing.
Nobody here ever asked me what I wanted to be. They asked what I was working on, and then they took it seriously.
The studios stayed open late and so did the people in them. Someone was always around to tell me the truth about a thing.
Radio Longfield
“The only timetable in the school set by seventeen-year-olds.”
Morning Shift
7:30 – 8:15AM
MONDAY TO FRIDAY
The Crit
8:15 – 9:00PM
TUESDAY & THURSDAY
Long Player
3:00 – 4:00PM
SATURDAY & SUNDAY
From the studios.
What is on the walls, in the kiln and on the timetable this term.
Come and spend a morning in the studios.
Open mornings run every second Tuesday through the autumn term.