Education: Development of Excellence

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, apart from congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, I should like to congratulate the Government on their safeguarding of design in the primary school curriculum and on their support for Sir John Sorrell’s Saturday schools to encourage design experience. Design is a sure but not widely understood means of developing general excellence in education because it fosters many key proficiencies, not only the traditional ones of literacy and numeracy, but the ones we particularly need now for the success of our economy—the capability to realise a plan, innovate, collaborate and recognise what the user wants. I also congratulate the Government on commissioning Darren Henley’s excellent reports on musical and cultural education, which drew attention to the mysterious capacity of skill in one creative activity to stimulate confidence and achievement in another.

As for secondary education, I understand the need for a focus on core subjects, but a narrow grouping will not fit our children for the modern world. As a matter of fact, it betrays one of our mainstream British traditions, which is that although Britain is no longer the workshop of the world for all sorts of reasons, and nor is there scope now for the classically educated colonial developers of the world, we have always been and could remain the designers of the world. I am thinking of our inventors from Richard Arkwright to John Logie Baird, Ada Lovelace and Sir Jonathan Ive, to name only a very few, and of our pioneering architects, such as Inigo Jones, who brought Palladio’s designs for homes back to England, thus transforming our domestic architecture. Indeed the Palladian tradition emigrated to Britain with Inigo Jones and later the architecture of the Scottish enlightenment, at least as much a triumph of architecture and design as it is of philosophy and literature. Design was an integral part of that classical tradition.

But we have tended to neglect design in our ideas of the grand English educational tradition, unlike some of our European neighbours. Like technology, it does not figure in Thomas Arnold of Rugby School’s curriculum, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, pointed out. Indeed, most of our inventors were outside the classically educated élite tradition, and came from the non-conformist strand of our culture or from Scotland. But design excellence is nevertheless a dimension of our distinctive variant of European history. We have still a reputation for producing the most innovative designers and the best institutions for teaching design, but this is now vulnerable to intensive investment abroad in courses and institutions. To nurture and preserve our adult attainment, we need to maintain a stream of school participation and the explicit valuing of design as a discipline.

In sum, we are selling ourselves short if we do not include design in formal classical education, and that is quite apart from its close connection with economic growth.