Bringing the Industry to the Classroom
My research question:
How does early industry exposure in the first year prepare students from diverse backgrounds for later collaborative units and professional expectations in years two and three, and how can its impact on confidence, belonging, and readiness be observed over time?
Creative arts education must prepare students not only to make work but to belong within an industry shaped by uneven access and power. The creative sector is often framed as meritocratic, yet research shows that class, race and financial security influence who enters and thrives. Early industry exposure therefore becomes a pedagogic strategy rather than simple professional enrichment.
Bodley-Scott and Oymak argue that university–industry partnerships are most valuable when they move beyond transactional recruitment and become shared learning environments. For first-year students, this distinction is crucial. If industry appears only in the final year, it arrives as a high-stakes audition. Encountering it earlier allows students to experience professional contexts as spaces for learning, dialogue, and experimentation, not judgement alone.
Pringle’s concept of the “artist as educator” reinforces this view. Artistic practice and pedagogy are intertwined; learning occurs through situated activity and critical conversation. Applied to industry engagement, the educator’s role is to help students interpret briefs, decode expectations, and understand that professional norms are constructed rather than natural. Early projects can therefore function as rehearsals of professional identity.
However, Brook, O’Brien and Taylor demonstrate that the creative industries remain structured by social inequality. Students do not arrive with equal familiarity with professional cultures. Some possess networks and confidence; others experience industry as distant or exclusionary. Without careful design, early exposure can reproduce these hierarchies. The task is to mediate industry so that it becomes accessible to those with least prior capital.
Sabri’s research on UAL industry projects shows that engagement improves confidence and attainment when experiences are transparent, supported, and connected to learning. When selection processes are opaque or overly competitive, students can feel demoralised and alienated. From this, three aims for first-year exposure emerge:
Confidence to participate
learning to speak about work and ask informed questions.
Belonging
seeing multiple pathways and identities represented in industry.
Critical readiness
understanding that industry conventions can be negotiated.
Evaluating such outcomes requires more than counting placements. Sabri’s longitudinal approach suggests tracking how students describe their agency and future selves. In practice this could involve structured reflections after live briefs, monitoring who volunteers for later collaborations, and comparing confidence levels across years two and three. Attention must be paid to difference: if only the already-advantaged benefit, the intervention has failed.
Early industry exposure should therefore be designed as a belonging intervention. It can help students rehearse collaboration, understand professional rhythms, and recognise the value of their perspectives, while also exposing the inequalities they will encounter. The responsibility of the institution is not simply to deliver students to industry, but to equip them to enter it with confidence, critique, and a sense that they have a rightful place within it.
References
Bodley-Scott, T. & Oymak, E. (2022) University-Industry Partnerships for Positive Change. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Brook, O., O’Brien, D. & Taylor, M. (2018) Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries. London: Create London / Arts Emergency.
Pringle, E. (2009) ‘The Artist as Educator’, Tate Papers, Issue 11.
Sabri, D. (2012) Students’ Engagement in Industry Projects at UAL. University of the Arts London.
Sabri, D. (2017) UAL Students’ Engagement with Industry and Communities of Practice. UAL / King’s College London.