Art

The National Portrait Gallery has an extensive permanent collection from the 16th century to the present day as well as temporary exhibitions, making the Gallery an exciting and relevant learning destination for secondary students. The gallery offers a range of FREE discussion and practical drawing sessions and workshops designed for Key Stage 3 to Key Stage 5, and post-16 courses, and Extended School sessions including After School Art Club and Summer School.

The broad range, portraiture approaches, themes and techniques spans painting, photography, sculpture to video and cross-media, offering learners huge scope for evaluation, response and discovery. The Gallery becomes the ultimate classroom, providing a stimulating context of historical and contextual references for exam work focusing on critical and contextual studies.

All our taught sessions are delivered by our specialist team of artists and trained educators who are highly skilled with an extensive knowledge of the Collection, as well as an awareness of the relevant current curriculum requirements. We also provide a range of CPD sessions to support teachers and introduce our Collections and temporary exhibitions as resources for the classroom.

All equipment and materials are provided, and we encourage students to bring their own sketchbooks or work journals to all sessions.  

For each school we can provide a maximum each term of three taught sessions at different times for different classes per school. We can supply teachers' notes to help you run up to three further sessions yourselves.  A wide range of useful supporting digital resources and information is available, see Digital Resources.