Talking Point: Back to school
Britain's schools need to keep design and technology to the fore if manufacturing and innovation are to take the country forward, argues Martyn Hale, a director of HME Technology, based at Saxon Park in Bromsgrove.
The government's review of the national curriculum in schools continues to rumble on, with only English, maths, science and physical education guaranteed to remain.
Currently design and technology, art and design, citizenship, geography, history, information and communication technology, modern foreign languages and music also have national curriculum status.
Both the National Association of Advisers and Inspectors in Design and Technology (NAAIDT) and the Design and Technology Association (DATA) have been campaigning to retain the subject.
Our business, the leading supplier and installer of design and technology and science equipment for schools, is one of the sponsors of the NAAIDT national conference and we believe it is absolutely vital to retain design and technology as part of the national curriculum rather than allow it to become optional.
It is important for our nation's future.
Indeed, design and technology should be an essential part of every school's curriculum.
We have a world leading design industry and it is critical we continue to rebuild our economy by majoring on our strengths. Our standing in design and technology is recognised at home and abroad and the work done in our schools is one of the building blocks for this success.
If we are to remain competitive in a global economy, with many challengers, then we need to develop our future design capability.
Dropping design and technology from the new national curriculum – due to come into schools in 2014 – would be a big mistake.
The campaign to save it has secured some high-profile supporters, including entrepreneur James Dyson.
He has highlighted how design and technology is often a child's only exposure to engineering – a vital component of the West Midlands economy. Dyson has bemoaned how design and technology suffers from a bad reputation, being wrongly seen as a soft subject. But he has called for a compromise, with a new slim-lined syllabus to focus on product design and engineering.
With people as eminent as James Dyson behind this, hopefully the government will sit up and take notice.
It is only with this government that a new realisation fully dawned that manufacturing, engineering and design must play a major part in our economy going forward. Post the banking collapse, the economy needs to be better balanced.
It would be a tragedy then, having recognised the importance of the sector, were design and technology to be downgraded in our schools.
There is no logic to that at all.
