Creativity is the focus of the course. Learners develop knowledge of art and design practices by studying artists and designers and their work. They also develop an understanding of expressive and design processes.
The Flair Exhibition features candidate work in Art and Design, Fashion and Textile, and Photography.
For session 2024-25 onwards, we've reduced the length of the National 5 Art and Design question paper, and the number of marks available in the question paper, while ensuring it continues to assess the required skills, knowledge and understanding.
The updated question paper is worth a total of 40 marks, which will be scaled to 50 marks to retain its 20% weighting in the overall course assessment. The length of the exam will be reduced to 1 hour and 20 minutes.
Mandatory questions
We've reduced the number of marks available for each of the mandatory questions (question 1 and question 7) from 15 to 10.
Optional image questions
There is no change to the number of marks available for the optional image questions, which will continue to be worth 10 marks each. However, we’re splitting each optional image question into part (a) and part (b) to better reflect how marks are awarded for these questions.
8 marks will be available for part (a), where learners will comment on three given prompts for their chosen image, and 2 marks will be available for part (b), where learners will give their opinion on their chosen image.
Updated documents
We’ve updated the National 5 Art and Design course specification and specimen question paper to reflect these changes. The updated course specification is dated May 2024 and the updated specimen question paper is dated June 2024. Both documents are valid from session 2024-25.
See also: