Design Education and Growth

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

I welcome this report and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, on being the inspiration behind it, with her enthusiasm and dedication. Without it, I do not think that the report would ever have appeared.

The essence of the report is that our recovery as a manufacturing country depends on innovation and invention throughout our society, from aero engines down to carpet sweepers. That is really what the report is saying—and it is quite right to say that if we are going to have that sense of innovation it must be bedded into the education system of our country. It has to start in our schools, further education colleges and universities.

When one talks of design, one is often tempted to think of the one or two geniuses in design. These geniuses, rather like the 24 bus service, do not come in pairs—and, rather like the 24 bus service, there is a long gap until the next one appears. Innovation and design depend on hundreds and thousands of people in companies large and small, in any economy. We should be very proud of the fact that in our history we have a tremendous record of this. If you study the industrial revolution—although it has dropped out of the school curriculum almost totally, so it is almost impossible to do so—from 1730 to 1830, you would know the great names. There was Thomas Newcomen’s beam engine, Arkwright’s spinning jenny, Watt’s first steam condenser and Joseph Bramah’s lock. You would study all those—but behind them were tens of thousands of people. If you look at the patent registrations in the 18th century, it was happening day after day. When Hargreaves published his own patent application in 1740 for a spinning jenny, he referred to,

“much application and many trials”.

What those great names were all recording was not a great breakthrough in invention but a series of micro-inventions. The history of the industrial revolution is a history of one gadget after another that made the spinning jenny better. First, there was Kay, who realised that you could use a mechanical means to take the warp through the weft. After that there were endless changes by people who, working with their hands, discovered a slightly better way in which to do it. We would not have had the ultimate spinning jenny of Arkwright until he decided that two rollers were better than one, because two rollers made the thread a bit stronger and longer. We would not have had the rocket of Stephenson unless we had micro-inventions such as a dial on a steam boiler, or indeed the need for it to run on reverse fumes. The point I am trying to get over is that these are micro-inventions by people who had worked on those early machines and made them better. The hand-working is therefore very important.

This is where the report is a bit inadequate, if I may say so, because it does not recognise the importance in education of doing things with one's hands. I am a strong believer in doing as well as seeing in education. Perhaps that comes from my own education, because I attended a grammar school in Lancashire at the end of the war and the only lesson that I remember from that school was the three hours of carpentry that I had, where I learnt to do tenon joints and dovetail joints. If pushed I can still do them, and it made me handy in life, as it were. I have a great belief that all our children, in all our schools, should experience doing things with their hands. That is not the same as doing things on your computer; it is actually making and fashioning things.

I recommend to the House a book that was published in America last year by an American professor of philosophy who also runs his own motorcycle repair workshop in Virginia, where he repairs motorcycle engines. It is The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. That is very much the essence of the university technical colleges that I am seeking to establish across the country, which are based very much on practical hand-work. I am glad to say that while all of them do engineering, some are specifically doing design engineering. The one that opened in Walsall last year, in the Black Country, is doing design engineering alongside the STEM subjects, and its particular courses are going to be on new product design and development. Siemens is helping it by coming in and devising the teaching modules that are needed in those courses. This is something that industry has never done before in the education system.

We asked the companies not just for day release or apprenticeships but to come in and design the actual courses. Rolls-Royce apprentices came over from Derby and in the UTC in Staffordshire set up courses to design piston pumps and to make them for eight weeks. When youngsters have done that, they have used their hands and got to know the use of metals and the effect of mechanical changes. The one in central Bedfordshire, which is opening this year, is going to do design engineering with BAE and with Cranfield, the postgraduate university. My time is almost up, so I must design the end by saying simply that the practical hands-on work in education is essential for innovation and design, and for the future growth of our country.