Future minds
The Interactive Digital Magazine from CLEAPSS
CLEAPSS NEWS
Welcome to the Autumn 2023 edition of Futureminds.
As always, we have had a busy few months at CLEAPSS since the summer edition.
Firstly, we would like to welcome Trudi into the CLEAPSS fold, as a part-time D&T Adviser, she has been working with us, most notably on developing the digital version of this magazine, for the past year, but has now taken on a permanent role.
We have continued to develop our facilities at Chesham, and over the summer had the opportunity to put our D&T skills to the test with a whole range of minor works around the building, as well as designing and using our 3D printer to make rockets for a Physics guide – which really is rocket science!
At the end of the summer term, we had our staff BBQ, which was a bit damp! It gave us a chance to use our new D&T room as a food prep area, the design of the room is that it is entirely flexible, the furniture all moves, and is kept clean, so that we can swap from a full workshop to a clean space for working with food.
One of the highlights of last term was a meeting we held at Chesham. You may have seen in the summer edition, that we finally managed to hold our opening ceremony in March. At this event, we had invited some of our colleagues from the Awarding Organisations (AOs) and we noticed that they genuinely seemed to enjoy the opportunity to meet with their opposite numbers from other organisations. This led us to invite the four AOs; AQA, OCR, Pearson, Eduqas, to come along in June and meet with the Design and Technology Association, and the ‘Academics’ who are working on various D&T activities in HE.
We convened the meeting in June and, apart from Eduqas, everyone was able to come along. The meeting did not have a formal agenda, but it gave everyone a chance to discuss some of the issues facing the subjects, D&T, Food and Art.
We will be holding a second meeting in October and have invited a number of others to come along and join the discussion, including the DfE, a primary STEM consultant, the Food Teachers Centre and the Textiles Academy.
We will report back on the meeting through Futureminds, and any other initiatives to support the subjects.
We also continued to visit schools with our colleagues from the Department for Education, looking at different types of D&T facilities, some that were more ‘traditional’ but doing some innovative activities, and some that were less traditional. It was good to see such a variety of approaches. The findings from these visits will help the DfE to provide a range of offers when schools are having new facilities developed.
This summer saw another year of hopeful candidates sitting their GCSEs, A Levels, T Levels and BTECs, and we wish them well in their next endeavours.
Other agencies have already given their comments on how well the results went for these areas, and we congratulate all the candidates and their teachers and families for all their hard work.
On a slightly less positive note, the entries for GCSE D&T continued to fall in comparison to 2019 (the last year of ‘normal’ GCSE entries), however there was a slight increase over 2022.
The chart below shows the relative entries across all GCSEs, D&T is around 87,000, Food Preparation and Nutrition is not far behind at 57,000 and Art is still holding up well at around 198,000.
D&T is on a par with Computing and PE.
This edition of Futureminds has some fantastic articles from a wide range of contributors. If you would like to provide something for future editions or have an idea for something we could do some further work on, please get in touch: dt@cleapss.org.uk or use the comments box, or Helpline.
Don’t forget that we have a wealth of past editions of Futureminds, all available from the Futureminds tab on the website.
