Higher Education

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, as the last speaker before the Front-Bench speakers, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on initiating this important debate.

In the brief time allotted, I will focus on how design and technology education contributes to national growth and productivity. In an era when innovation is the driving force behind progress, the role of art and design in shaping our educational landscape cannot be overstated. According to research from the Design Council, the design economy increased by 73% between 2010 and 2019, which is twice as fast as the UK GDP. It has 1.97 million workers and a gross value added of £97.4 billion, more than two-thirds that of the financial services sector in the UK. The design economy encompasses industries such as product and industrial design, advertising, graphics, fashion, digital design, architecture and urban planning, as well as designers working in finance and marketing. Design skills are also used by non-designers in jobs such as civil engineering. Its multidisciplinary approach benefits all sectors of society, especially those addressing larger challenges such as achieving net zero carbon emissions, where 80% of a product’s environmental impact is established at the design stage.

It is therefore hugely worrying that the pipeline of designers to industry risks running dry in the wake of the collapse in design and technology GCSE numbers. Over the past decade, the number of students pursuing a GCSE in design and technology, which the majority of designers have, has decreased by 68%, raising concerns about a potential shortage of talent in the profession. This trend was noted by the House of Lords Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee, chaired ably by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, which looked at secondary education more broadly. Its report observes that

“creativity is increasingly valued by employers across all sectors of the economy”,

and that

“the creative industries contributed £116 billion to the UK economy gross value added and grew faster than the economy as a whole”

prior to the pandemic. However, it goes on to note that there has been a

“general decline in opportunities to develop creativity across secondary education”,

as well as

“some academies … using the flexibility they have over their curricula to drop national curriculum arts subjects, such as art and design”.

According to several witnesses, school accountability policies that promote traditional academic study over more creative learning are mostly to blame for the drop in possibilities for students to study creative and artistic topics throughout the 11 to 16 phase. The committee’s recommendations include lessening the focus on the Government’s “knowledge-rich” approach, which it claims has led to

“an overburdened curriculum that necessitates narrow teaching methods such as rote learning and ‘cramming’ subject knowledge”,

and moving away from an excessive emphasis on “traditionally academic study” at the expense of creative learning.

A study in 2022 by the Education Policy Institute on the state of design and technology highlights many factors that have corresponded with the significant decrease in uptake. Between 2011 and 2020, the number of DT teachers plummeted by half, from 14,800 to 7,300, as the Government failed to reach their recruitment targets. The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Art, Craft and Design in Education found in its Art Now inquiry report that:

“Sixty-seven per cent of art and design teachers … surveyed reported that they were thinking about leaving the profession … Four out of five art and design teacher respondents reported that wellbeing and workload were … the two biggest disincentives to stay in teaching and that these had worsened since the pandemic”.


Equally alarmingly, students and parents often prioritise fields of study that are perceived to offer better job prospects and financial stability. The perception that design and technology may not lead to lucrative or stable career paths can discourage enrolment in such programmes. Because design and technology has proven to be a critically important GCSE subject for students to study at the 16 to 19 level, if we are not careful there will not be a talent pool ready to be developed at higher education level. This trend is underscored by the fact that fewer than 2% of people who did not study DT for their GCSEs went on to study the subject later in their education. For this reason, calls to update the curriculum to make it more engaging and relevant are to be encouraged. Children who lack the desire or opportunity to begin studying DT early in life are far less likely to pursue the subject at a higher educational level. Neglecting to nurture this significant talent could seriously threaten its future. As Minnie Moll, the CEO of the Design Council, says:

“We need to re-design nearly every aspect of how we live our lives to tackle the climate emergency”,


and therefore it is critical that we engage with this issue now.