Is art education running out of Steam?
Statistics show that the UK’s creative economy is a shining light – and so agrees chancellor George Osborne, judging by his comments on the economic importance of arts and culture in last year’s autumn statement.
According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the creative economy was worth £133.3bn in 2014, accounting for 8.2% of the overall UK economy and 2.8m jobs. More than half (1.9m) of these jobs are in creative occupations – a varied group including artists, design professionals and computer programmers, but who all tend to be highly educated, skilled and drivers of innovation.
To ensure the creative economy continues to thrive, we cannot rely on today’s talent; we need to have the right education system in place to produce tomorrow’s creative minds. But a recent survey of teachers by the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) worryingly suggests that the UK has taken steps backwards.
More than a third of the 1,191 teachers surveyed said they have had less time to teach art and design over the past five years (across all key stages), with 93% pointing to the English baccalaureate as a major contribution for the sidelining of these subjects.
The recommendations from NSEAD are clear: “Schools should actively promote and strengthen links with other subjects to build on the value of the contribution of art and design to the Stem subjects.” Essentially, they should provide Steam: science, tech, engineering, art and maths.
Most often, Steam is interpreted as encouraging students to take both Stem and art and design subjects, but it’s also about all the subjects coming together more holistically and organically. Schools can do this through multidisciplinary teaching practices, such as those devised at last year’s inspiring 24-hour Steam hack at the Science Museum, hosted by the Cultural Learning Alliance. Suggestions that came out of the event included crowdsourced Steam object library databases and Steam journals for students and teachers to explore the crossover between subjects through specially designed notebooks.
Progress in English schools, however, has been slow, despite digital technology increasingly aligning traditionally disparate areas of learning.
Art and design make unique contributions to the development of creative skills that are crucial to jobs in a growing number of industries. DCMS estimates suggest that there are roughly as many creative jobs outside the creative industries as within. These numbers should help counter the idea that the arts are “soft” options that compromise career options for students.
But as with policy more generally, initiatives to promote Steam in schools must be based on rigorous data. At Nesta, for example, we published an interactive data visualisation that explores the combinations of subjects that Scottish Highers students took over the past three years.
It shows that the percentage of students taking at least one Stem subject ranged from 57% (for those taking three subjects) to 94% (for those taking five). Students taking Steam combinations ranged from 13% (three subjects) to 31% (five).
The data visualisation further shows that the most popular Steam combination in Scotland is physics, maths and graphic communication. English makes up the fourth most popular combination among students taking four subjects.
Students who take at least one Stem subject are also more likely to take an arts subject than a foreign language. However, those who take five Highers are slightly less likely to take one arts subject than those who take four.
Over the coming year, we plan to provide a more historical and in-depth examination of Steam qualifications in Scotland and of the take-up in secondary schools in England. As well as providing objective evidence on the numbers opting for a Steam education and how this varies over time, which is important for assessing policy, we also hope to measure how the take-up varies by student characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity and level of deprivation.
Building this evidence base is not an academic exercise. It will give policymakers a valuable means of ensuring that schools are equipping young people with the multidisciplinary skills that creative Britain needs to continue to thrive.
Hasan Bakhshi is director of creative economy at Nesta
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