The King’s Foundation

The School of Traditional Arts. The School exists to ensure that traditional arts and skills enrich our changing world. We offer courses suitable for anyone interested in traditional arts.

The School of Traditional Arts pioneers contemporary education in the traditional arts, where an understanding of the theoretical knowledge underpinning them is united with the knowledge and skills of their practical application.

The work of the School follows the rhythmic pattern of virtuous, connecting circles. These can be felt in the open, generous exchange between students and teachers, and across cultures. They can be seen in the use of age-old techniques and materials to make new things. They permeate through the School’s respectful custodianship and reinvigoration of precious artistic traditions to its alumni who, in turn, hand them on to future generations.

At the School, whatever the level of study, education is traditional in that it follows and adapts the senior-junior practitioner model. Teachers are deeply knowledgeable and highly skilled, thanks to years of long, rigorous practice and to their own learning from previous masters. They bring profound theoretical and practical understanding to their teaching. Working alongside these teachers, students at the School experience education in the true sense of the original Latin word educare – as a drawing out of knowledge, understanding and ability leading to transformed practice and lives. Here you will find everyone practising and valuing education in its best sense.

At the School, research into the traditional arts is undertaken through creative and reflective practice, including inspirational engagement with exemplary works of traditional art. Artists’ encounters with traditional art from the past, and their work with others who engage in making traditional art today, open new pathways for practice and illuminate the depth of aesthetic and spiritual experience.

Working in this way, using natural materials and traditional techniques, researchers come to see how traditional knowledge might further understanding of today’s challenges both in and beyond the context of the contemporary art world. Over time, they come to understand the potentialities of traditional art to prompt transformative experience, to convey wisdom, and to positively impact people’s lives and environment.