Recommendation 4 - Put design at the heart of a reformed, broad, balanced and creative curriculum.

Put design at the heart of a reformed, broad, balanced and creative curriculum.

All children should be able to benefit from a world-class design education, developing valuable material intelligence, applied creativity, problem-solving, and systems thinking abilities. However currently design suffers from exclusive delivery as a subject when many of the concepts and skills it develops are cross-curricular and cross-disciplinary in nature. Designing brings other subjects alive through applying a creative, hands-on, problem-solving approach to real-world challenges.

As part of a holistic curriculum and assessment review, policymakers should put creativity at the heart of a reimagined learning experience for students:

– Develop design as a foundational skill woven into all subjects. Like oracy, design is a ‘skill for life’ and needs to be practiced across multiple subject areas. Examples of this in practice include Daydream Believers’ Creative Thinking qualification offered in schools across Scotland; Fixperts by Forth that uses open schooling methods to enable students to solve real challenges for real people using design; and Crafts Council’s ‘Make First’ pedagogy uses materials to develop and test ideas.All these approaches demonstrate creativity with context and purpose –enabling students to use design to bring alive multiple subject areas, build relationships, and develop new skills and knowledge. Policymakers should explore how these approaches can be mainstreamed in England’s schools.

– Pilot and evaluate a range of additional, cross-curricular design-based educational approaches. Building on existing best practice, the government should work with industry and the sector to fund and evaluate a series of pilots. For instance, a module on design thinking within the physics curriculum; or a design-led, cross-curricular challenge students solve each term, in collaboration with a local business or community organisation. These should supplement and not replace specialised design education pathways like D&T.

– Complement a core of design skills with specialist design and technology routes. More incremental changes could be made through exploring design’s role as a ‘minor’ subject (for instance, a ‘design thinking’ minor) as well as a D&T equivalent ‘major’ in the proposed Advanced British Standard. It would be beneficial to formalise a core of design skills and knowledge from a diverse and epistemologically inconsistent set of design A-Levels and T-Levels. This could involve creating a consistent and innovative design ‘core’ to all four design T-Levels, or re-imagining the subject categories more holistically.

The purpose of this approach would be to enable all children to access the best design education This type of design focused on creative problem-solving and material intelligence over set outputs is highly relevant to modern design practice equipping students to address complex global challenges and drive the green transition. Implementing this fully would require a fundamental shift in England’s educational policy approach.