Over the past couple of months I’ve been thinking about the impact of lockdown on design and technology. There is some good news and (potentially) some bad. On the positive side, the numbers applying for D&T teacher training (at LJMU at least) is rising, after a period of decline over the last decade, or more. On the negative side, the erosion of the subject in the school curriculum seems to continue with suggestions that everything other than English, mathematics and the sciences should take a back seat!

Thinking about the apparent growth in applications for teacher training, the number of offers made and accepted on UCAS from the last statistical release (15 June 2020) as 410, with 30 offers waiting to be accepted. The UCAS end of cycle report for the previous year was 400, with 10 offers to be accepted, compared with 418 recruited at the start of 2019/20, according to the ITT Census published on 28 November 2019. There doesn’t seem to be a huge difference at first glance. So maybe it is a local blip at LJMU? Or there may be a late surge in applications? The latter seems to be the case here at LJMU, but only time will tell if it is a national trend.

If it is a trend, it may be growth caused by lockdown, with employers furloughing staff or even making them redundant (not to mention the self employed). When I became a teacher educator, back in 2009, we had over 40 student teachers on our PGCE Design and Technology and PGCE Engineering courses. Since then numbers dwindled year-on-year for five or six years, until we had none one year. Fortunately, we weathered the storm and retained our capacity to train D&T teachers and the numbers are slowly recovering. I’m looking forward to working with 17 beginning teachers of D&T on out PGCE School Direct and PGCE LJMU Core programmes from next week, when we have a subject knowledge focus.

There will be challenges posed by lockdown, with D&T being an inherently hands on subject, but it is encouraging to see numbers rising. In addition to the challenges of limited face-to-face and hands-on teaching, we also need to get to grips with online learning and the temporary changes in how the subject will be taught and assessed in schools. Who knows what D&T will look like in 12 to 24 months, let alone the whole school landscape!