Should anybody doubt the importance of design and technology, there is an excellent video on the Design and Technology Association’s website.
Featuring such luminaries as the chairman of JCB, the chief technical officer of Williams F1 Racing, and the inventor Sir James Dyson, it shows the importance of design and technology in giving young people the knowledge and skills vital in nurturing the innovators and entrepreneurs of the future.
Many of us would agree it is a subject which has tremendous value in helping pupils to learn powerful knowledge related to advanced mechanical and electrical systems, computing and the use of electronics.
Pupils also develop important logical, practical and creative skills, as well as applying what they learn in science and mathematics.
It is a STEM subject which is due to be part of the GCSE reform programme and is part of a rigorous academic curriculum.
Why, then, has the uptake of design and technology at GCSE (and AS/A level) dropped so sharply? In this year’s GCSEs, it suffered the biggest year-on-year UK-wide fall in entries for any subject, and this is part of a long-term trend going back to the early 2000s.
There will be various factors behind this decline, but the fortunes of this subject are unlikely to have been helped over the past few years by the government’s drive to steer more and more young people in England towards the EBacc suite of subjects.
Many educationalists – including us – have long warned that this would lead to creative and technology subjects being crowded out of the curriculum. The government’s view is that there is enough room for pupils to take GCSEs in both the EBacc and these subjects.
The reality however is that there is a finite number of hours in the timetable. Many schools had already increased the time allocation for English and maths following the introduction of the five A* to C including English and maths performance measure. The EBacc has further filled up the timetable at GCSE leaving less room for other subject options. In this year’s GCSE entries, there are also drops in the uptake of art and design, music and drama.
We are arguably then already seeing a narrowing in the curriculum and if the government presses ahead with its aim for 90 per cent of pupils to take GCSEs in the EBacc suite this pattern may become more pronounced.
Nobody would argue with the importance of the EBacc subjects for the life chances of young people. This is a question of balance; that is achieving the right balance between EBacc and other components of a rigorous academic curriculum and doing so with the interests of each individual pupil in mind. EBacc as it is currently framed gets this wrong, but with more flexibility in subject choice and in the target for take-up, it would achieve a better balance. This is the case ASCL has been making to ministers.
It is also important to recognise that EBacc is a performance measure and it should not overwhelm the school curriculum. Given the shortage of time and money which is available to schools, it is no easy task to preserve breadth of subject choice but it is essential to do so as far as that is possible.
ASCL’s blueprint for a self-improving system defines the curriculum as everything that a young person learns in school. It sets out steps for the government and ASCL to take to develop a new approach to curriculum design which gives greater freedom for schools to innovate. It also sets out steps for school leaders.
One of these is to “develop a bold curricular vision and pedagogical model that will suit the school context – not a pragmatic or instrumentalist response to qualification reform and accountability measures, but rather a curriculum which builds character and resilience, inspires and enables young people to achieve and be successful, rounded people”.
- Malcolm Trobe is the interim general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. Visit www.ascl.org.uk