The impact of the decline

The impact of the decline

With little or no published evidence for the causal link between taking GCSE or A Level D&T and an individual’s income, career, or educational progression, it is hard to truly understand the impact of declining D&T numbers. More research is needed.57

However there are early signs that the decline in D&T is:

– Impacting universities. Universities report a significant and growing gap between what they expect from firstyear students and what A-Level students entering courses are able to do. In Kingston University, they have recently introduced ‘learning to learn’ courses for all undergraduates to bridge the gap. In Nottingham Trent University, they are noticing that hand drawing skills of new product design students are worsening. Anecdotally, academics believe this is connected to the reduction in students taking D&T, a subject where many key design skills in HE such as problem-based and self-guided learning or freehand-sketching are, or used to be, taught well.

– Impacting industry - skills. Design, craft, architecture, and engineering firms report significant skills shortages. Anecdotally, we hear that students are coming into first jobs with a lack of experience in hands-on making skills, perhaps to the decline in D&T and shift away from workshop-based making in the subject. Industrial design firm PriestmanGoode describes exposure to creativity and creative problem-solving at school as being essential for the interns they work with, along with physical making ability - while much of their design work is done digitally, creating large-scale physical models is still essential to their practice, and something interns increasingly struggle with. This requires further research.

– Impacting industry - diversity. Industry leaders report finding it “harder and harder to recruit the diversity of talent we need”. The industry-led Creative Industries Alliance notes an “ever-increasing proportion of applicants from fee-paying school backgrounds where it is possible to study and gain qualifications in subjects like art, craft and design, and fewer from state school backgrounds where these subjects are increasingly rare. This restricts not only the potential talent pool but also the diversity of design teams. An industry like ours depends on diversity of background, perspective, and ideas.”

Further research is needed to quantify the impact of declining D&T and to understand how it has impacted other parts of the education system.