UK Creativity leads the world in originality, quality and innovation. Film, Fashion, Music, Advertising, and Design have all been driven forward by outstandingly original, entrepreneurial and determined British talent. We can all list them, so broad is their impact that they are household names. Brand new figures published in the recent Warwick University Report: ‘Enriching Britain’, tell us that UK Creativity is worth £76.9 bn and accounts for 1.71m jobs (5.6% of all employment in the UK). Research from Cebr suggests that this will rise to be more than £100bn by 2018. It’s an incredible success story, but it’s one that continues to defy the odds.

Today, UK creative talent of the future is subject to an un-natural selection: wealth, education and ethnicity. Just when we need diverse creativity more than ever to progress as an economy, we are doing our utmost to turn off the supply. 

We’re in a race to compete with emerging economies. Driven by fear, China is coming and we need to be ready. The powers that be say that we must be strong academically. We need more engineers, more scientists… and we need them fast. The solution? STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. STEM is Nicky Morgan’s 2014 re-brand of Micheal Gove’s hugely unpopular Ebacc proposals – an educational policy which sidelined the creative subjects for ‘more’ academic qualifications – which was successfully destroyed by a vast public uprising in 2012. 

Over the last decade, secondary Schools have been in a rush for academy status to secure funding, those that didn’t have the resources began to reduce investment in creative subjects in preparation for Gove’s Ebacc proposals. Ebacc never came, but huge damage has been done. Warwick University’s report cites a 50% fall in Design & Technology participation at GCSE, with Art, Design & Technology teachers in schools falling by 11% since 2010. Many head’s were focussed on building a curriculum and facilities around the Ebacc proposals, only for them to completely disappear after Gove stepped down.

After a period of underinvestment in preparation for Ebacc, Art and Design now risks relegation to the status of a recreational subject, via the new STEM proposals. I recently searched Surrey for a secondary school that truly valued creativity for my own daughter. Private and state, the answer was depressingly similar; “Oh yes, we do do ART here’, but its not a real Degree is it?”, one Headmaster risked his life in telling me.

Just what kind of grey future are we designing? Where will we be in a generation’s time? Creativity is the central spine of a successful economic future for the UK. The creative skillset should be thought of as fundamental to an explosion of progress in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Creativity should partner each subject in bonding pairs, not as either/or enemies of academia. This approach is the very DNA of progress. How will our young people make leaps, think laterally and problem solve without creativity? Do we want to create a generation of ‘cut and paste’ practitioners? This is not about right versus left brain children, this is about ‘one brain’ thinking.

STEM needs to evolve into STEAM fast. The Arts are fundamental to our nation’s educational future, and its ability to fulfil its potential. Education Minister Nicky Morgan’s vision of the UK’s future is a myopic view that one must make way for the other. She recently stated, “…the arts and humanities were what you chose because they were useful for all kinds of jobs. Of course, we know now that couldn’t be further from the truth”.

I was once a young boy in a home broken by divorce. My mother struggled to bring up three children on State benefits, and I needed free school meals and uniform grants to get through school. I escaped via Art and Design, but I needed Local Authority Grants to get to College. Back then, they were there. Creative Industry charity, D&AD’s New Blood Award bought me confidence when I won in 1992, and again, grants funded my progress from degree to masters level. Somehow I made it, despite the odds. Today, I’m President of D&AD. 

Sadly, the support has almost all gone, but the talent is still there. We must design a future where creative ability can be amplified by education, regardless of privilege.

As ‘Creativity Crisis’ campaigner, Seth Godin says, “Stop stealing our dreams. What is school really for?”.