Hurtwood’s Art teachers are all highly-qualified, successful practising artists, and at the beginning of the year they put all their students through the Hurtwood foundation course - a comprehensive grounding in a broad range of skills in the areas of life drawing, painting, print-making, sculpture, computer-aided design, fine-art constructed textiles, digital photography and video work. Once they have developed the confidence to proceed they are then encouraged to develop their own ideas, take risks and experiment freely with a wide range of techniques.

The results are exceptional by any standard. Remarkably, in a large department of more than eighty students it is quite usual for every single one of them to achieve a Grade A in the A-level examinations, and for most Art College applicants to be given unconditional places on their first-choice Art and Design, Textiles and Fashion courses.