Pearson approached us to explore a new approach to design education in the UK, then to test it with 50 stakeholders from across schools, industry, and design thinking. The work contributed directly to Pearson's published plans for a future-focused 5-19 design and technology curriculum.
We were approached in summer 2022 by Pearson, who were considering a programme of activity to explore a potential new approach towards design education in the UK.
Pearson wanted to run some advisory panel sessions with 50 key stakeholders from education, industry and the world of design thinking to collect their ideas and refine potential frameworks.
Between September and December 2022, we conducted a large-scale set of 1:1 interviews, collaborative workshops and focused development activities to help draw together a proposal for the future of design education in UK schools.
The process involved teachers and school leaderships, industry leaders, higher education lecturers, and design thinking experts, along with key organisations working to promote and improve design, engineering, and food education in UK schools.
We ran the workshops on Zoom, and used the collaborative whiteboard software Miro to enable participants to collaborate visually during the sessions.
The work contributed to Pearson's plans to drive forward a new, future-focused design and technology (D&T) curriculum that inspires children and young people to become the creative problem solvers of the future.
Supporting both the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development goals and the Department for Education's vision for the UK to be “the world-leading education sector in sustainability and climate change by 2030.”, the proposed plans lay the foundations for a 5-19 curriculum that has at its heart themes such as sustainability, design thinking, systems thinking, collaboration creativity and innovation.
The most useful framing for a stakeholder consultation programme at this scale is that the role of facilitation is to create the conditions for honest, structured contribution from people who would not normally be in the same room. Teachers, industry leaders, higher education lecturers, and design thinking experts each bring a different professional language to the same question. The job is to translate without flattening.
Running the workshops on Zoom with Miro as the collaborative surface, rather than in person, expanded the geographic reach of who could contribute without diluting the depth of the conversation. The lesson I am carrying forward into similar curriculum or sector-level consultations: combine 1:1 interviews for depth with collaborative workshops for collision and synthesis, and use the visual whiteboard as the durable artefact that travels back into the commissioning organisation.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
