D&T Association launches ‘Protect and Promote Design & Technology’ campaign

The D&T Association is launching a campaign aimed at getting the Department for Education (DfE) to reconsider its decision to drop all bursaries for D&T teacher trainees.

The DfE made the decision to “concentrate on the core academic subjects that make up the EBacc”, but the ‘Protect and Promote Design & Technology’ campaign from the D&T Association is asking the DfE to reinstate the D&T trainee teacher bursary for 2022.

The D&T Association’s campaign looks to:
– Recruit business leaders to voice their support of design and technology publicly and to back our demands to reinstate the D&T trainee teacher bursary.
– Increase existing communication with key personnel at the DfE to demonstrate how vital the subject is and the consequences of reduced teacher recruitment
– Work with industry partners and other funding sources to attempt to raise bursaries for three design and technology ITT trainees for 2021.
– Engage higher education on a marketing campaign to promote the benefits of a career in design and technology teaching.

“I am trying hard not to single any subject out, but I am personally struggling to see why Classics, with the highest recruitment against target figure of all subjects, holds a tax-free bursary of £10,000 in the 2021-22 funding round while design and technology is removed?” said Tony Ryan CEO of the D&T Association.

“If this were a one-year blip it would be bad enough, but D&T has not reached target figures for ITE trainees going back years. The result is that secondary headteachers, keen to promote the subject to their students, are finding it increasingly difficult to find the leadership and teacher workforce required to make the subject successful in their school. We also now have an increasing number of schools where a non-specialist is leading the subject; this at the same time as the introduction of a new GCSE in 2017 that requires an even greater depth of subject knowledge.

“This subject matters, and never more so than in the current health and economic crisis. As the leader of your Association, I cannot and will not sit idly by while the subject slowly bleeds a slow death through a lack of recruits. We will be doing everything within our power to gather a collective voice behind the subject and the need to build our teacher numbers to help create the innovators, problem solvers, designers, engineers and creatives of the future.”

The D&T Association has outlined four ways that you can support the campaign:
1. Join the campaign by signing the petition
2. Write to your local MP (download a template letter) and explain your concerns.
3. Write to the Secretary of State and MP for South Staffordshire – The Right Honourable Gavin Williamson.
4. Explain the value of the subject to parents, local employers, school governors and head teachers and ask them to join the campaign

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