Skills and Tutors

A range of support is available to students, including:

Book an appointment with a librarian
Royal Literary Fund Tutors
Academic Skills Tutor
Adjustments for Neurodivergent Students
Classroom Library Workshops (Lecturers book these with the library)

If you have any questions, please get in touch: library@courtauld.ac.uk

Book a Librarian

We offer one-to-one support for Courtauld students looking for assistance with finding books, articles, images, scholarship, or art. Learn how to become a powerful library researcher and other digital and information skills. To book a 50 minute appointment:

Check availability through our online calendar. Bookings open on Wednesday afternoons for the following Monday-Friday.
Book the session that suits you. The booking system shows the next available appointment. If no appointments are shown, please check again later.
Tell us how you would like us to help you.
We email you to confirm your booking. The session will take place through Microsoft Teams unless you specify an in-person appointment is your preference. Please make sure that you are signed into Teams ahead of your appointment.

If you need assistance please contact us.

Royal Literary Fund Fellows

Students can enlist the support of our Royal Literary Fellows, Jane Rogoyska, Ella Frears and Lucasta Miller. All three are professional writers and offer support to Courtauld students thanks to the Royal Literary Fund’s Fellowship Scheme. The RLF website has a very useful guide to writing essays.

Students can book an appointment to see them by emailing Jane.Rogoyska@rlfeducation.org.uk, Ella.Frears@rlfeducation.org.uk or Lucasta.Miller@rlfeducation.org.uk. Please email only one RLF fellow at a time as they operate independent bookings.

Jane is on campus at Vernon Square on Friday; Ella is available Wednesday and Thursday; Lucasta is available on Monday.

The Royal Literary Fellows can help you to improve your academic writing skills, reading strategies, and organisation of material. If you would like to improve your style, clarity of argument, if you need help with structure, tone, or simply getting to grips with the writing process, please do get in touch with them. (Note: this is not an editing or proofreading service).

Ideally, they will look at some of your written work in advance and then discuss it with you in person at the meeting. It’s best to book well in advance, if possible. If you leave it until the week your essay is due, you may find there are no free slots.

If you find you can’t make the appointment, please email them as soon as possible so that they can use your time for someone else. Students can book one or two tutorials per semester, and sessions are available for any Courtauld student, from BA to PhD.

Academic Skills Support

One to one support is available for students who feel they need some additional assistance with academic writing conventions, speaking for presentations, or any other academic skill.

How to book an appointment:

Email our Academic Skills Tutor, Anjali Thakariya (Anjali.Thakariya@courtauld.ac.uk), outlining the course you are studying, assignment details, and what you would like to focus on. You can choose to have your work looked at via email or if the appointment is in person send no more than two pages three days before the appointment. Please note appointment requests and support via email must be made no less than a week before deadlines. If you have a quick question this can be answered via email at any point in the writing process.

What to expect:

The aim is to help you to improve your academic skills. If you wish to focus on your written work, you will need to send a sample of your writing. This should be a maximum of 2 sides of A4. The tutor will be happy to look at your work or discuss any skills issues with you. At the end of the session they will try to summarise the areas in which you can improve future pieces of work. Please do not expect the tutor to simply correct and proof-read your essay or to improve the subject content.

What you can do before your consultation:

Please check your written work carefully before you come. For example, use your spell-check and grammar-check facilities on Microsoft Word. If you have lots of careless grammar and spelling mistakes, there will be no time left to discuss more important aspects of your work such as academic conventions, structure and your writing style. Also, try to identify areas of academic skills or language you have particular problems with, and come with some specific questions if possible.

Support for Neurodivergence

The Courtauld also offers confidential appointment-based specialists, for students who are seeking adjustments based on their diagnostic report and/or medical evidence. This includes students with specific learning differences, mental health concerns, and autistic spectrum conditions.

If you have (or suspect that you have) a specific learning difficulty (Spld), such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia or dyspraxia, or if your diagnostic assessment is more than five years old, you can contact wellbeing@courtauld.ac.uk or reasonable.adjustments@courtauld.ac.uk for advice about assessment and support. If appropriate, we can refer students to a partner organization for assessment and the cost of the test will be covered by The Courtauld.

How can the Adjustment Specialists help?

The support offered is designed around individual academic needs.

Our experts can help with:

Understanding: how you approach challenges, how you learn best, and how you can succeed
Strategies: techniques to be effective in reading, writing, planning, and all other aspects of study
Assistive technology: how you can make the most of technology designed to make you an independent and effective student
Communication: develop the confidence to ask the right questions, stay in touch with people who can help you, and respond when you need to
Organisation and planning: learn to organize your time well so you have time for studying, writing, and wellbeing

Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA)

You can apply for Disabled Students’ Allowances and more information about the application process and the evidence you need to submit is available on the government website.

Personal Tutors

If you want to address an academic or pastoral issue, you can also speak to your Personal Tutor. Please email them for an appointment.

Citing and Referencing

The Courtauld’s recommended referencing style is the Chicago Manual of Style Online. The Library team and the Academic Skills tutor can support you in using this style guide. Other humanities referencing styles may also be acceptable, but please check with your course tutor and ensure that you are consistent.

It is important that you keep track of the sources that you use. This helps you remember which ones are authoritative and retrace them when you need so. Most importantly keeping a record of the sources will be useful when you are referencing them on your assessed works.

While it remains essential to understand the principles of citation there are also tools that can help you organise the process. Reference Management Software can help you integrate the research process with the compilation of a bibliography, rather than treating them as separate tasks. Even if you don’t need to write a bibliography, they are a powerful way of keeping track of the literature you have consulted and allow for annotation, tagging, note-taking, creating relationships between documents and sharing documents among research groups. There is a range of software packages, some are free or low cost such as Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, et al. The Library can help you start on Zotero.

Library ‘Top Tips’ short videos on key library skills

You might find our short 3-minute videos below very helpful:
Primary Sources, Introducing Open Access Resources, Developing and Refining Search Strategies, Evaluating Information.