A Blueprint for Renewal Design and Technology Education

Industry is crying out for people with creative problem solving skills, critical thinking, adaptability and resilience. 1These are the skills that will enable us to build the green and digital economy of the future. Luckily, there is still a space in British school curricula where they are purposefully developed –design education.

Design and technology (D&T) is one of the few spaces in the school curriculum where science and creativity meet and students get to solve real-world problems in innovative ways. People who use design skills are 49% more productive.2 The UK’s design industry itself contributes £97.4bn in GVA and is growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole3 - it now needs new and diverse talent to lead us forward.

However, D&T is a subject in critical decline – it is a microcosm of wider tensions within creative, technical, and cross-curricular learning across the UK. Over the last decade, British D&T GCSE entries have fallen by 68%, and the number of D&T teachers has halved. The fall in D&T has destabilised the whole subject area, masking steep declines in all art and design subjects and cutting off a vital pipeline for creative and engineering talent into industry.

Without decisive action from government, industry, and education, the subject risks falling into the margins of the curriculum at the very time it is most needed. All young people must be able to access a great design education if they are to develop the creative problem solving, material intelligence, and systems thinking ability they need to thrive.