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By Activity
Schedule workshops and term-time classes, take bookings and payments online, share progress and class photos with families, and run everything from messy play sessions to advanced adult courses.
From children's after-school art clubs and Saturday pottery classes to adult life drawing and mixed-media summer workshops, AMES keeps every format of creative class on one timetable. Whether you run a single studio or several locations, bookings, payments, registers and each student's progress share one record.
UK Governing Body
National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD)
Typical Pricing
£8-£18 per class
Class Size
8-15 students
Every class needs different supplies: paints, clay, canvases, fabrics. Tracking stock, building material costs into prices and making sure supplies arrive on time is a constant overhead. Kiln firing is a significant hidden cost, from electricity for each firing to element replacements and the need to batch fire rather than run half-empty kilns. Specialist materials such as metal leaf, resin or professional-grade oils need pricing in before students book, not after. Bulk buying saves money per kilogram of clay but ties up cash and storage for months. Supplies run short at predictable times of year, and waste disposal for solvents, kiln wash and contaminated water adds a cost many art schools only notice at year-end.
You offer weekly term-time classes, one-off workshops, holiday courses, birthday parties and adult evening sessions, each with different pricing, capacity and set-up. Pottery brings drying time between sessions that cannot simply be filled with another class, and work in progress takes up shelf space that limits how much you can run. Wet rooms for clay and plaster need different extraction and drainage from dry rooms for drawing and printmaking, and cross-contamination can ruin equipment and work. Exhibitions block studio space for days or weeks, displacing regular classes, and giving a visiting artist dedicated studio time alongside your class programme needs careful calendar management.
Parents want to see what their child is creating and learning. Without a system, artwork goes home in a bag and the learning journey is invisible. Arts Award at each level asks for structured evidence of research, creation and reflection, which is a significant undertaking for every participating student. Exhibition submissions need good photographs, and three-dimensional work such as sculpture and ceramics needs several angles to be shown fairly. Consent for sharing images must be handled carefully, particularly for children, where parental consent is needed before anything is displayed publicly or shared online. Poor photographs undermine the work and frustrate students who have invested hours in a piece.
Messy play for toddlers and watercolour technique for adults need completely different spaces, staffing and risk assessments, and managing both under one roof adds complexity. Younger children need more adults per child, which affects staffing costs and capacity. Sharp tools need age-appropriate policies and risk assessments, and kiln rooms need strict rules about who can enter and who loads and unloads. Adult evening classes can bring licensing questions if you serve alcohol at social art events, adding regulatory work to a creative business.
A well-implemented portfolio tracking system serves multiple purposes: it demonstrates student progress to parents, provides evidence for Arts Award assessment, builds a body of work for further education applications, and gives your art school a powerful marketing asset. This guide covers practical implementation.
Art schools employ staff with diverse specialisms and use rooms with specialist equipment that requires specific training and certification. Managing which tutors can teach which classes, who is certified to operate which equipment, and how rooms are allocated across your programme is a complex operational challenge. This guide covers practical approaches.
Parents want to see what their children are creating and how they are progressing. Students need portfolios for Arts Award submissions and further education applications. This guide covers digital portfolio systems, Arts Award tracking, exhibition management, consent handling, and sharing controls for art schools.
Art schools generate more parent communication than almost any other children's activity. Between portfolio updates, supply lists, exhibition invitations, schedule changes, and holiday course promotions, the volume of messages can overwhelm both you and your families. A well-designed parent portal centralises everything and keeps communication manageable.
Art schools rarely run a single class format. You are juggling weekly term-time classes, one-off workshops, holiday courses, birthday parties, and exhibition periods, all while accounting for kiln drying gaps and room turnarounds. This guide explains how to build a schedule that handles every format without descending into chaos.
Running an art school means managing a constant flow of consumable materials, from clay and glazes to specialist papers and printmaking inks. This guide covers supplier management, bulk ordering strategies, waste reduction, kiln firing costs, and how to build material surcharges into your pricing without driving families away.
Art schools consume a wide range of materials at varying rates, and without proper stock tracking you are either running out mid-class or sitting on expensive surplus. This guide covers per-class costing, reorder point management, waste tracking, and margin analysis to help you control your biggest variable cost.
Art school scheduling needs to accommodate realities that no other activity type faces: kiln cycles that span days, drying times that vary with humidity, exhibition periods that take studios offline, and a mix of formats from weekly classes to one-off workshops. This guide explains how to build a flexible, efficient schedule.
Chasing payments is one of the biggest time drains for art school owners. Between term fees, materials surcharges, workshop deposits, and one-off event bookings, the billing complexity quickly becomes unmanageable without automation. This guide covers how to set up automated payment collection that handles every revenue stream your art school generates.
Art schools face a unique grouping challenge: a child's chronological age does not always match their artistic ability, and different media require different safety considerations at different ages. This guide covers age-appropriate grouping, Ofsted ratio guidance, sharp tool and kiln access policies, adult class considerations, and risk assessments for art activities.
Starting a children's art school lets you combine creative expertise with genuine business potential. This guide covers qualifications, venue requirements (sinks, ventilation, storage), materials sourcing, curriculum design, exhibition opportunities, and the practical realities of running an art-based business.
Put term-time classes, one-off workshops, holiday courses and private sessions on one timetable, each with its own duration, price and capacity, and levels can carry an age range. Students and parents book and pay online in AMES Connect, new students can book a taster at the price you set, and full classes offer the waiting list, with a freed place offered to the next person automatically. Room set-up, drying time and kiln firings are planned by your team rather than by AMES.
Set up the skills and milestones you teach as levels, and let teachers record progress and notes in AMES Teach. Teachers can take class photos in AMES Teach, which alerts them to students without photo consent, and families see progress, teachers' notes and shared photos in AMES Connect. AMES does not build portfolios or track Arts Award evidence.
Collect term fees by GoCardless Direct Debit, and workshops, drop-ins and holiday courses by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay through AMES Pay. Charge per session, per term or with credits, sibling discounts follow the rules you set, and failed payments are retried automatically with the payer told. Material kits and other items can be sold through your shop in AMES Connect.
AMES Connect gives parents their child's classes, bookings, payments, progress and messages in one app. Noticeboard posts can share what to bring to a session or details of an end-of-term show, push notifications flag changes, and parents keep health and medical notes up to date. With the AMES events module, you can also sell tickets for exhibitions or open evenings and check guests in on the night.
List material kits, sketchbooks and other supplies in your shop, and students and parents buy them in AMES Connect with the same payment methods as their classes. Shop sales sit in your financial reporting alongside class fees. AMES does not track stock levels or reorder supplies.
Record each teacher's qualifications, DBS check, first aid and safeguarding training with expiry dates and the certificate uploaded as evidence, and require a qualification for the classes that need it, so an unqualified assignment is blocked or flagged. Teachers clock in, see their shifts and pick up open shifts in AMES Teach. If you hire out your studio, AMES facility hire handles bookings, rates and closures.
See how AMES can automate bookings, payments, and communication for your art business.
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