Education: English Baccalaureate Certificate

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to make one point in the gap and to apologise that an amendment in the Moses Room made me miss the first sentence of the noble Earl’s excellent speech.

I take arts subjects to include design, which of course straddles art, technology and often engineering. That conjunction explains why design is so important. It is a subject that teaches how to turn an idea into a functional object which serves a purpose. In short, it is a prime example of creativity itself—a kind of creativity which typically includes collaboration between different disciplines, interaction with the end-user and the individual satisfaction of making something that can work. All of them are skills we need.

I need not rehearse the economic and export importance of our world-famous designs, nor, I hope, the contribution they make to the quality of life in countless ways, from hospital care to smartphones. But I must stress again the educational value for all of learning design. We should celebrate our traditional strength here and include design in the EBacc before it loses its place in our culture.