The Importance of Textiles

Dawn: 

To start, I’m Dawn Foxall, if you didn’t know, and this is Nicky Simpson. We are the Textile Skills Centre, and we’ve been supporting textiles in education for the last 11 years. We are very aware that the subject is disappearing from the curriculum. Andy didn’t mention textiles at all. Perhaps he doesn’t teach textiles in school, I don’t know, but his tie is definitely competing with my jacket today! *laughter*

So if textiles disappears, what do we lose? We lose a D&T discipline that every child can access, regardless of academic ability. We lose a subject that combines creativity, practical skills, problem solving and innovation. We lose opportunities to teach sustainability through repair, reuse and responsible consumption. We lose connections to one of the UK’s largest creative and manufacturing sectors. We lose pathways into hundreds of careers, from fashion, costume and theatre to technical textiles and medical textiles, which you can see up here, and product development. And we lose a subject that particularly engages the many learners who thrive through making and doing.

The reality is that although grades are always fantastic in schools when kids take GCSE textiles, entries are absolutely in decline. We’re losing specialist teachers by the day. In many schools, textiles is becoming diluted or disappearing altogether. Yet the need for textile knowledge has never been greater.

Look where we are: this amazing V&A Museum, which is a celebration of fashion and textiles. The UK fashion industry contributes £62 billion to the UK economy. The sector supports 1.3 million jobs and raises more than £23 billion in tax revenue. The UK fashion and textile industry is one of the largest sectors in the country, and its influence extends around the world.

Over to you.

Nicky: Okay. I used to teach in schools, and the first thing I taught, whatever the age group, was what we use fabrics for. I’m going to do that again with you, very simply, following on from what Dawn said. Why do we need textiles? Well, you’re not all sat here in the nuddy! *laughter*

A lot of you have gone to specific shops, online or in person, to choose what you’re wearing. So you do care about fashion. I can see a lot of you do, and obviously Dawn and I do. And it’s not just fashion. It’s your accessories, your bags, your shoes. You’ve chosen all of them.

I then go through every room in the house and what textiles are in each one. Yeah, you’d be very cold in your bedroom without your duvet. Then I go through transportation, which uses a lot of textiles. Then I go through film and TV, and all the costume designers, including my niece, who worked on Wicked. I’ve got to mention her! Then, as Dawn said, I go through medicine, and we’re not just talking about scrubs. There are buildings, engineering, and specialist clothing for our firefighters, our nurses and our army. And there’s space. If you haven’t seen it, Prada are making the next spacesuit. I wish it were an English company, but it’s not. It’s Prada.

On this video, we’ve got two people. We’ve been filming industry over the last month. One, Cassie, is doing a PhD in regenerative design, using sustainable techniques to create new fibres and reduce waste and water consumption. Dawn and I are so into sustainability, it’s unreal. It’s embedded in everything we do, and as you’ve all said already, it should be embedded in textiles.

We’ve also got Iona, who studied art, maths and physics at A level. She went on to do a textile degree, and she’s now working for a company that supports sustainability in fashion.

D&T is all about that combination of science and technology. Without students like these coming through D&T, you’re not going to get these innovators. So my closing comment is: they are the future. Without the combination found in D&T, there will be no textile innovators and future fibre pioneers. It’s D&T that makes the connection.

And that’s me, on time.