Design Education and Growth

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I welcome this report and the interesting debate that we are having today. It must not just be one debate; we need a long debate about this nationally if we are really going to solve some of these problems.

In a way, design finds itself in an unusual position: I have never known anyone who was against design. There is no army of people out there making a case against it. Sometimes when that happens, because there is no core to the debate, you find that everyone thinks that it is a good thing but no one really fights for it to be as good as it could be. I suspect that in this debate today we will all agree with each other on the whole, and there is a danger that we will be left thinking, “So what are we going to carry on campaigning about and striving for after this?”.

Design has often been seen as a very nice optional extra. In the past, if you could afford something and it had good design, all to the good, but if you could not afford the “good design” bit, never mind—you could just get on with the basic version. To some extent, the best thing about this report is that it shows how wrong that attitude is.

There has been something of a revolution in design in recent years, and the report puts that very powerfully. It talks about the ability of design to unlock the commercial potential of the United Kingdom’s research base, and then it has a lovely quote, mentioning that all the essential services,

“all the things that make civilised societies function well … are”—

here I would add, “in part”—“dependent on good design”. However, I am not sure that that is what the British public think. If you polled that, I am not sure that they would say, “That’s terrible”, but they would not say, “Absolutely, that’s what drives my life day in and day out”. Part of the challenge is to win the argument in a much more powerful way than we have done so far.

The roots of design might be seen to be in craft, technical and creative skills. There was national pride in that in the 1960s, the 1970s and into the 1980s. There was a national context and a national culture in which they flourished and were understood and welcomed by the education system and society in general. We were a nation that could make things. We knew what an apprenticeship was. There were vocational routes from school into higher education. We had the polytechnics, which—I did not think this when we abolished them, but I realise it now—were great advocates for providing that route for design and vocational skills. My argument is that design has changed. It has progressed, as everything does, but I am not sure that we have captured that national context and culture in which it can truly take its place. It is an in-between land; it still thinks that it is in the context and culture in the past, but in fact those who know a lot about design—I would not put myself in that category—understand that it has moved on.

There are some problems with that culture at the moment. First, there is that lack of understanding of the role and importance of design in the 21st century. Secondly, the education system now is not as understanding and in praise of interdisciplinary work as it was two decades ago. We have gone back to straight subjects in silos without making the joins between them, and with polytechnics now being part of universities we do not have that clear route through apprenticeships, BTECs and HNDs into vocational and design degrees. Since the introduction of the national curriculum by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in 1988, the subject that has had the greatest turmoil is design; the curriculum has been rewritten time and again. I do not think that this is a political issue at all, but some of the things that are around at the moment, such as the emphasis on a traditional curriculum, an apparent lack of empathy with creative subjects—particularly through the English baccalaureate—and the higher education funding of design are not helping the case for design.

There is probably general agreement across the House that more needs to be done, but what? My perhaps contentious contribution is that it is all too easy to say that if we made it compulsory for every child in every year of schooling the problems would be solved, but I am not sure that that is the case. The more difficult task is to win the case and make it so good that schools want to teach it and children want to learn it. Sometimes, giving something the hook of compulsion actually makes you take your foot off the accelerator in making it a very good subject. The Government can show some leadership and begin to oil the wheels of making that happen. The work that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is doing with university technical colleges is excellent, and I welcome a chance to say so again.

If you look at where design and schools have worked effectively together—where the pedagogy has been right—it has been where we have invited the world of design to work with teachers and come up with something completely different. The Joined Up Design For Schools work done by the Sorrell Foundation was a perfect example of that. My plea would be that in design, more than in any other subject, the use of time, skills and space in our schools must be innovatively engineered and used in a different way. Let us make it exciting and new but, most of all, something that we can do between us: reclaim the culture and the context in which 21st-century design can flourish.