- Professor Beverley Gibbs, Director of the Dyson Institute for Engineering & Technology, and Chair or the Engineering Professors’ Council’s Education, Employability & Skills Committee; and Johnny Rich, Chief Executive of the Engineering Professors’ Council
- Last Thursday 13 February 2025, HEPI published One Step Beyond: How the school and college curriculum in England can prepare young people for higher education. This piece considers how the school curriculum can be adapted to develop creativity, practical skills, and inclusive, real-world learning.
Engineering is a UK powerhouse sector, growing in all UK regions and impacting all economic sectors. Engineers design, build and maintain the infrastructure, products and services that our economy and society depend on, provide life-saving medical devices, and are the drivers in our transition to a more sustainable world.
It might be reasonable then to suppose that the school curriculum would be designed to prepare pupils for a sector that accounts for a fifth of UK jobs and a quarter of vacancies.[i] On the contrary, engineering is almost entirely absent from the school curriculum. To the age of 16, a pupil can pass through education blithely unaware that engineering exists, let alone what it entails. Its closest correspondent is the Design & Technology GCSE. But due to costs, equipment needs and teacher shortages, even that declined by two-thirds between 2011 and 2023.
Post-16, the BTEC pathways are also under threat. In the past they have provided a critical entry route into engineering for a diversity of students, particularly those from lower socioeconomic groups or who were keen to give engineering a try.
They are being displaced by the Engineering T-level route – courses which, because they cannot be combined in the same way as BTECs, require a full-time commitment to a single subject and subsequent career. That’s quite an ask to make of a 15-year-old with no prior educational experience in engineering.
Moreover, as a recent study by the Engineering Professors Council found, many universities feel that the mathematical content of T levels fails to meet the entry requirement for undergraduate Engineering courses.[ii]
But Professor Francis’s review of the curriculum and assessment is not about engineering. No doubt every discipline and sector would want to make its own special pleading, and while few would have as good a case as engineering might, we want to focus on wider benefits to the education system (that would also happen to serve engineering better).
Engineers are creative, but practical; analytical, but hands-on; dreamers, but problem-solvers. They often work in teams, crossing disciplines, especially with business and design. And often, their driving passion is to make the world a better place. Are these not traits we’d want to instil in every school-leaver?
One of the reasons engineering is neglected in the school curriculum is perhaps because it is (wrongly) considered analogous to applied sciences and mathematics. That’s a deeply reductive view. The approaches adopted by contemporary engineering have much to offer the school curriculum, with implications far broader than engineering’s own interests.
Creativity
Ours will not be the only voice calling for more creativity in schools. This would, of course, support the UK’s creative arts economy, but engineers also use their creativity to imagine, design, solve problems and challenge the status quo. Creativity in the school curriculum nurtures resilience and a healthy ability to be comfortable with subjectivity.
A skills-based curriculum
The tide towards a ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ in recent years has set up a false dichotomy with the development of skills. What is lost is the conscious focus on that development, and so the acquisition of skills becomes an accidental and devalued by‑product rather than a deliberate outcome.
For example, no one doubts the cardinal importance of mathematics and the sciences, but in learning about them, engineers synthesise these concepts to create reality. In an information-rich age it is critical that future generations can turn knowledge into know-how, discriminate between good and bad sources, and develop subject-specific and transversal skills along the way. This is not about becoming engineers, but twenty‑first‑century citizens.
One of the most effective ways to develop and assess skills-based approaches is through problem- (or project-) based learning (PBL) strategies. PBL comprises a spectrum of active learning techniques that ground (ideally, cross-subject) knowledge in relevant, real-world situations with students working in teams, learning to collaborate, reflect and accommodate one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Long‑standing critiques of the ‘work-readiness’ of engineering graduates have stimulated a growing implementation of PBL approaches in engineering courses, championed by professional bodies, employers and faculties alike.
We would encourage schools to consider what it would look like to adopt a similar approach: active learning focused on a project, acquiring the interdisciplinary knowledge to address the challenge. Could we replace pupils pleading, “Why do I have to learn this?” with stimulating their curiosity?
Assessment
Examinations are, generally, a poor imitation of the way in which knowledge is put to use in modern life and they rarely even attempt to assess skills or behaviours – except, of course, one: the ability to perform recall under high-stakes pressure. This shouldn’t be regarded as life’s pre-eminent performance metric, especially given the inherent sexism it involves.[iii]
In engineering education, we take inspiration from a raft of professional artefacts to create interesting and diverse assessment formats. Alongside tutorial sheets and examinations, we use designs, proposals, plans, specifications, portfolios, presentations, debates, and creative media. Students are assessed individually but also in teams, because teamwork in itself is a valuable attribute. This approach is not merely fairer and less anomalous, but we are also discovering how much more inclusive it is to draw on a varied assessment regime. Different intelligences are given the opportunity to shine, and diversity becomes an asset, not an incongruity.
It is not coincidental that these approaches that are common in engineering – creativity, skills-based orientation, learning through application, and diverse ‘authentic’ assessment – are also approaches that are inclusive of neurodiverse minds. Engineers are more likely to suffer from the symptoms of autism-related disorders than any other profession, and dyslexia is thought to be three times more prevalent amongst engineers than in the general population (30% compared to 10%). We know the great contributions neurodiverse minds make to engineering and recognise this diversity of thinking as the strength it is.
A school curriculum and assessment strategy that is overly compartmentalised and rigid is in danger of disenfranchising large groups of young people, kettling them into narrow career paths, when, given the right opportunities, they would become leading thinkers, doers, makers and entrepreneurs.
[i] EngineeringUK: https://www.engineeringuk.com/media/319071/euk-key-facts-and-stats-sept23.pdf
[ii] Makramalla, M., Atkins, C., and Rich, J., Engineering Professors Council, 2024: Maths for Engineering: Do T levels add up? https://epc.ac.uk/article/maths-for-engineering-do-t-levels-add-up/
[iii] During an exam period of around a month, half the students are likely to have to sit between a fifth and a quarter of their exams while menstruating. Two-thirds of girls report feeling less able to perform in time-limited assessments during their period (Plan International 2021, https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2024/01/22/period-poverty-in-uk-higher-education-addressing-stigma-and-empowering-students/) and accommodations are challenging to secure for an eventuality that – despite its ubiquity – carries much stigma.