Our Future is in the Making: Educating and training craft

26^th May 2015

The huge talents of craft makers are incredibly inspiring, as we will see reflected in this week’s series of blogs from makers Rebecca Gouldson and Rosalind Wyatt, from the e-commerce platform Folksy and from the Crafts Council and Creative Skillset.

Yet there’s a growing clamour of protest about the state of learning for the next generation of makers. Alongside the Crafts Council, advocacy groups such as the Cultural Learning Alliance and the All Parliamentary Group for Art, Craft and Design Education are also making their voices heard about course closures and the declining opportunities for creativity in schools.

We know education and training in crafts is important: it produces makers of the future, prepares those with craft skills for the wider creative economy and beyond, and develops the haptic and creative skills so important for all young people and their learning. This is reflected in the big increase in the interest and value attached to the notions of ‘crafted’, ‘handmade’ and ‘authentic’. Evidence suggests that the contemporary cultural and creative economies are booming. Crafts Council evidence shows that craft skills alone contribute £3.4bn to the UK economy.

The Crafts Council decided to explore recent trends in craft education and training to get underneath what was happening. We were keen to secure a strong evidence base to drive debate about the importance of craft education and training. Findings in our series of reports, Studying Craft show that higher education courses have taken a bigger hit than any other stage of education. Almost half the courses available in 2007/08 were withdrawn by 2012/13.

Universities and colleges also depend on those young people whose creative appetite is whetted in school. But our findings show that there was a 25% drop in young people taking craft-related GCSEs between 2007/08 and 2012/13. Why is this happening? There is clearly a downward pressure on young people through the school performance framework to pick those so-called facilitating subjects that the Russell Group advises are more frequently required for entry to degree courses. At the same time, there is a disinvestment by schools in training and continued professional development for art, craft and design teachers, as well as in the necessary equipment (and mess!)

The question we need to ask is what kind of people do we wish to cultivate? Our evidence on the transfer of craft skills into other sectors shows that medicine, manufacturing, film and many other industries rely on the haptic skills of making. At the Crafts Council our new Learning and Talent Development team are putting in place an exciting range of formal and informal education opportunities for future and existing makers. These include Make Your Future, a new national schools programme that will connect traditional and digital technologies to ignite a passion for craft in young people. But the organisations offering these opportunities cannot alone reverse the worrying trends highlighted in our research.

On the back of our evidence, we launched an education Manifesto for craft and making Our future is in the Making. Working with partners within and beyond the craft sector, our calls for change are being taken up through campaigns, events and new learning opportunities. The top 3 manifesto calls we would like to see new Ministers address are:

• A review of the Ofsted criteria for ‘outstanding’ schools to recognise teaching and learning in art, craft and design.
• Reform of the school performance frameworks to remove the disincentives to studying craft subjects.
• A review of the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) funding for costly studio-based subjects in higher education.

What else do we need to do? Improved entrepreneurship education would encourage more young adults to feel confident in pursuing and setting up their own business ideas. Too many students are still anticipating that they will find a job with an employer, rather than through setting up their own businesses.

Above all, we would like to see greater emphasis on creativity in schools, the diversification of routes into craft and improved support for sole-traders and small businesses. If not, we may well be deprived of the very type of knowledge, skills and understanding to which we as a society are ultimately aspiring.