Design Education and Growth

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, on enabling this debate and thank her for it.

It is true that many people regard design as largely concerned with aesthetics or with products such as furniture or ceramics. As a result, they regard it as a marginal issue—something that is good and desirable but not essential. However, as we have heard today, design has the power to restart Britain and, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has pointed out, not for the first time. Design has the power to help us answer some of the big questions that we face today: how do we stimulate growth; how can we make our businesses more profitable; how can we be more competitive in international markets; how can we provide improved public services at less cost; how can we realise the potential of our great scientific and technological innovations; how can we be more creative and innovative as a nation; how can we deliver the benefits of our engineering excellence; and how do we build places and buildings in which people can thrive?

I am not a designer, but I am convinced that design is key to answering those questions, both in the private sector because it is clear that, as the noble Lord, Lord Cotter, has said, design-led companies are more successful, but also in the public sector because surely by now we must realise that redesigning and reshaping our services is the only way that we are going to deliver better services at less cost and that just restructuring the bureaucracies will not prove successful.

We need design. We need service design as well as product and industrial engineering design. Indeed, we need a national design strategy and outstanding designers. This report is about trying to ensure that our education system continues to deliver the talent that we need at the moment. Not surprisingly, the report emphasises the need to protect design in higher education, where we are undoubtedly world leaders. Less obviously, it highlights ways in which the further education sector could play a much greater role in developing design and designers in this country.

Crucially, the report stresses the need to ensure that design has a place in the school curriculum too. There are very good reasons why it should, and those reasons go well beyond the need to inspire potential great designers of the future. Design education in schools provides opportunities for students to develop the generic skills that will be useful to them throughout their working lives, as well as the employability skills that employers now need. As we have heard, design education in schools can help to produce young people much better able to work in key growth sectors such as engineering, advanced manufacturing and the creative industries—and let us not forget that the creative industries are now the largest economic sector in London.

Design education in schools provides the opportunity for many young people who do not excel in traditional academic subjects to realise their own special talents. It has always seemed to me that the major purpose of education must be to enable every young person to liberate their potential to fulfil their talent. Design education can provide for many a clear pathway to a range of careers at craft and technician levels that are too often undervalued and too often seem unattractive to both young people and their parents.

It is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, said, encouraging that the Government are prepared to review the way in which IT is taught in schools, and to recognise the critical importance of computer literacy for our economy and society. However, many of the same arguments apply to design but are nowhere near as well understood and well articulated. I hope this report goes some way to redressing that balance.

It is always a complete delight to have the Minister responding to our debates. I hope that she will lend support to the need for a national design strategy. However, it is also important that the Department for Education acknowledges the importance of this issue and looks for ways not of requiring, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, but of encouraging schools to feature design on the curriculum. That should happen not just in specialist schools, excellent though they are, but in all schools. Design education, like design, is not a desirable extra; it should be a key part of education for all young people.