Designers Teach D&T

Hiya. Five minutes, so I’m going to be really, really brief, and what I’m covering is massive, so I want to make sure I hit all the right points as I go through it.

First of all, I’ve been teaching in schools for 34 years. I was a teacher, a trainee teacher, I was a head of department, and I was a deputy head. I missed the assistant head bit and jumped straight to deputy, God knows why. A shortage of teachers, I think it was. Then I was a head for 12 and a half years. So I’ve done all of those bits.

The key point is that the problems Dave alluded to this morning aren’t design and technology orientated. They come from the school system. That’s where the big problems are. Teaching is no longer an attractive profession. It’s no longer where people want to go or what they want to do, and until we fix that, we have a massive problem.

NFER released some data earlier this week that supports this. Every year, NFER assesses how many non-specialists are teaching in each subject, and we are third worst. Their research suggests that 20% of the teachers currently teaching design and technology are non-specialists in the subject. From what I see on a daily basis, I’d say 20% is probably a conservative estimate, but it’s definitely in the right area.

So let’s look at the data and where we’re at. In England, over the last 10 years, there’s been an increase of 12,851 teachers. If you just look at that data, you’d think it’s actually quite good, not too bad. We’re working with Wales as well, and Wales has seen a reduction of 400 teachers, or 2.4%. The numbers are much smaller, but a reduction is not where we want to be.

Now look at pupil numbers. In England, they’ve gone from 8.22 million to 9.03 million. I know we’ve got a demographic dip at the moment, so primary schools are being hit quite hard right now, but that number has gone up significantly. Pupil numbers in Wales have gone up by a smaller amount, but again, you’re looking at smaller numbers there.

It all sounds okay, though, doesn’t it? But let’s look at the data overall. Another way of looking at it is that pupil growth has been about 63 times teacher growth. When you do the maths, that’s staggering. No wonder there are more kids in classes, and no wonder we’re struggling to get teachers in. Teachers have gone up by around 1.2%, and pupils by nearly 10%. That’s where we are. The system is struggling.

So let’s look specifically at D&T. Back in 2009, we had around 15,500 teachers, just over, actually. We think we’ve now got around 6,300 teacher specialists. The latest data suggests it’s a little more than that, but we’re losing them at a rapid rate. So England has lost nearly 9,000 teachers in our subjects since 2009. Some of those we were going to lose anyway. We had an ageing workforce, and people close to retirement are retiring early. They’re getting out. But that’s a decline of about 58%, which is absolutely massive.

Everything we do with the national curriculum, it doesn’t matter if we haven’t got the teachers to teach it. That’s the key bit.

In contrast, the pupil population has grown over that time. We now have an opportunity, because pupil numbers are declining. If we grow the teacher workforce while those numbers decline, we can actually correct this. We can fix this. It will take 10 years. It took 10 years to get here, and it will take 10 years to fix it.

So let’s look at a solution. I don’t like throwing out problems without coming up with solutions.

There’s an initiative called Engineers Teach Physics. It’s only a few years old, but the idea is that there are a lot of engineers out there who, for whatever reason, might want to teach physics at some stage. It was launched in 2021–22, the DfE announcement came in 2022, there was a six-provider pilot in 2022–23, and it was rolled out nationally in 2023–24. Engineers Teach Physics gives you a bursary and a step into the classroom.

Part of my job is getting out into industry as well as into schools. I can tell you that at the moment, the design industry in certain sectors, graphic design and so on, is in recession. It is absolutely in recession. There are loads of designers out there who would step into the classroom tomorrow if the incentives were right. And they would make bloody good teachers, because they’ve got that background. They actually understand the subject. They know what design is. They would make excellent teachers.

One person said we can’t do this in design and technology because it would take teachers away from physics. I don’t want to take anything from other subjects, but make the offer available to everybody and let teachers decide which way they’re going to go.

So what we’re asking for, first of all, is a bursary to match physics. I’m fed up with the number of teachers who’ve told me, “I’m teaching maths, or I’m teaching physics. I don’t really want to. I wanted to teach design and technology, but the bursary is more if I teach physics.” So they go that way, even though they would make brilliant D&T teachers. We want that bursary to match.

You may say there’s not much in it. But if you’re in industry at the moment as a junior designer or something along those lines, you’re probably earning £35,000 to £38,000 a year. If you come into teaching, you’ll be getting £26,000. That’s quite a drop while you’re training, and it will take you a few years to get back to where you stood.

So what I’m proposing is Designers Teach D&T. We swap engineers for designers, manufacturers and so on. It would be much harder to recruit from engineering, and I don’t know that I’d want to, because engineering has its own issues at the moment. It would be much harder to recruit from the manufacturing sector but the design sector has people who would come tomorrow.

So we need marketing and funding for that. What I’m suggesting is: give the marketing to us as an association. We know the market. We know what’s wanted. We will market it for you.