Creative Education Conference
Keynote speeches transcript
Suzy Alderson: Introduction
2:47
Welcome to the NEC in Birmingham.
[you will need to edit out the housekeeping bit at the beginning of her introduction]
I am delighted to today welcome a number of colleagues both from schools, from colleges. I want to
say thank you to a number of AQA associates who work with us on developing our qualifications,
delighted that they are here with us today. We’ve got representatives here from Universities, from
Subject associations and also, and most importantly from the creative industries themselves. So we
should have with us 150 creative people in the room, we should have an exciting and fun-filled day.
No pressure [audience laughs].
I was lucky – at my school we actually had our own theatre at school so when I first tread the boards
it was when I was actually quite young, in my High school years. There was an orchestra as well at
the school and I also was part of the Leeds Jazz Orchestra. Even though my father is a Graphic Artist
by profession, I didn’t inherit that gene, so whilst I enjoyed art and, what I call technical drawing,
when I did it, I wasn’t any good at it. When I left University I started my career at the Guardian
Newspaper and then spent two very happy years at the Southbank Centre in London, so Europe’s
largest Arts centre. And I certainly know that I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t had all of that rich
creative experience and input into my own education and career.
So the aims of today’s conference – this is about bringing together educators, employers, about
stimulating discussion about how we shape and influence the future of creative education, it’s about
sharing some good practice. From some CBI data the creative sector currently employs 2 million
people and it contributes 6% to our GDP. But, this isn’t just about educating future employees at a
creative industry, I think it’s much broader than that. We want to ensure that every student has
access to a balanced curriculum that includes the creative subjects. It’s about enriching their
learning experience and irrespective of what they actually want to do when they leave school.
I am delighted to welcome our first speaker to the stage. It’s Tim Lindsay who is the CEO of D&AD.
Tim spent 34 years in advertising as joint MD of BPH becoming [INSERT FULL ROLES HERE the CEO
and European President, then worldwide President Loewe Howard…… before becoming chairman]
Can I welcome Tim to the stage [applause].
Tim Lindsay, CEO D&AD
[edit set up scenes at the start]
Good morning ladies and gentleman, sorry about that kerfuffle. I am delighted to be here, thank you
for that kind introduction. As you were told we have fantastic titles in advertising. I’ve spent my
whole career in advertising and as such I feel out of my depth in this distinguished company.
Fortunately, my colleague Katie Howe is in the audience. She works on our new creatives
programme at D&AD so she can answer any difficult questions. I think my role here today is to give
you an industry perspective, to talk about what industry requires of its recruits and to talk about
some of the things that we at D&AD do to help that process in our small way. Can I just ask who
here in the audience is aware of D&AD, just a quick show of hands? Good. I’m going to explain to
those that know again and say a little bit more about what we do to those that don’t.
Who are we? We are actually an educational charity and we promote, stimulate and award creative
excellence in business communication and we generate funds to support the creative community
around the world. Initially D&AD was a British thing and was founded in 1962 by a very distinguished
group of young creative people including David Bailey, Alan Fletcher a brilliant man called Colin
Millwood [???) and a guy called Bob Gill amongst others. They actually started it because there was
no way for them to display their work and get their name attached to it. There was a lot going on
across the creative waterfront at that time, advertising and design was not accepted. Their motto
was stimulation not congratulation. We’ve become increasingly international over the last 50 years
and we now serve a world-wide community in various ways.
So, what we actually do – there’s a competition for the best slides by the way, this is the first entrant
[audience laughs] – what we do is we generate profit from our commercial operations, pretty much
awards, membership, professional development, events and partnerships and these profits fund our
programmes of activity for creative people, mainly new creatives which we define as those in
Further Education, Arts Universities and Colleges through the transition into the professional
industries and then for the first 3/4 years in the industry.
So, in summary what we exist to do is to promote creative excellence in advertising and design in
business communication and design by awarding the best stuff and showing people how to do it.
That’s it in plain English.
We support the next creative generation in the following ways:
We are in the process of giving free membership of D&AD which gives you access to a lot of material,
a lot of inspiration and a lot of events, discounts on important things like Apple Macs and we are
giving free membership to all students in creative education in this country for free. It’s not entirely
disinteresting, we want them to provide, if you like, the funnel for paid for membership as they
come into the industry. We also provide an interface for the creative industries and creative
education. It’s called ‘New Blood’, it happens in Spitalfields and it happens alongside our student
awards. We put sponsored briefs, as I’m sure some of you will know and perhaps some of you use
them, into colleges and universities for course material and out of that comes student entries and
student awards. The 100 top students then transit into the Graduate Academy which is a boot
camp, it teaches them what to expect from the professional industries and what is going to be
expected of them. We provide guaranteed placements for those people, hopefully avoiding the
exploitative nature of many placement schemes, and then we carry on training them in their early
years in the professions.
We slightly pompously, I guess, describe this as a circle of learning. We’re very, very fortunate that
D&AD can access the creative greats from around the world in advertising and design and we find
that when we ask people to teach students, mentor students, do a lecture, whatever it happens to
be, they always say yes. So, it’s about industry putting back into education and reaping the benefits.
I’m just going to show you a very short film because it’s quite fun. It shows last year’s Graduate
Academy at work.
[shows a video - 2012 Graduate Academy at work]
What’s the context here? Suzy has mentioned some of my stats. Fortunately they are not far away
from each other but this is the context. This is the context into which the people that you’re busily
equipping are headed towards, and it is, make no mistake about it, a great British success story. I
think the Government defines 13 creative industries but we think the implications of creative
education in this country go far beyond the creative industries. Most of the business in this country
is stimulated, served, partnered with creative people of some sort and in some guise and British
industry itself depends on creative innovation for it prosperity. This is not an over-claim I don’t think,
we believe the future survival of the British economy and its prosperity depend on entrepreneurship
and creative services.
So the industries we are talking about here turnover more than £36bn a year, they generate
£70,000 a minute for the UK economy and our figures say they employ 1.5m people, depending on
which data you look at. They count for 10.6% of British services export and for those of you not so
good at maths that’s about £1 in every £10 of UK exports. They count for 6% of GVA, which is kind
of the same as GDP, and in the last few years the employment sector has grown double the rate of
the economy as a whole.
I think the important point here is it’s not just in advertising and design, it’s in television, it’s in film,
it’s in music, it’s in drama, it’s in textiles, it’s in fashion. Britain leads the world in many of these
fields and we feel, and I’m going to talk about this a little more, politely, that these things are under
threat in some ways at the moment. And we lead the world because of our creative education
system and it would be a shame if that was to be damaged in any way.
D&AD has awarded a creative person elected as its President every year and this year it’s a fantastic
Graphic Designer called Neville Brody who designed The Face magazine amongst many other things
and is currently Dean of the school of Communication Arts at The Royal College and he has
redoubled, if you like, D&AD’s commitment to education. Part of our remit has become
campaigning and we were beginning to marshall co-operation amongst the creative industries
against the Ebacc proposals. Now I’m expressing a very personal view here, but in our view they
would have been disastrous for the creative economy if they had gone through. One of the problems
that the creative industries have is that they don’t have any coordinated voice so there were lots of
people standing up and expressing degrees of outrage, for very good reasons, but no one was really
expressing the whole argument, and in particular the economic argument we felt was being over
looked. As we’ve established, and I’m sure we all agree, British business needs creative partners to
thrive and agencies, graphic designers, strategists, product designers, craft practitioners provide that
stimulation and impetus. So as I say it’s not just advertising and design, it goes far beyond that.
We’ve started this thing called the D&AD Foundation to clarify how we deliver our charity remit, and
we’ve done it because we thinks it’s important, as I’m sure everyone else in this room does, helps us
to clarify our revenue generation through our partners. I’m going to talk about one further thing
here. It sort of goes beyond the economy and it goes beyond our social and cultural environment.
We’ve talked about our economic outcomes but D&AD exists to lead and to stimulate and we are at
a very interesting point in terms of the creative industries and in terms of business at the moment
and I just want to talk about Unilever who are a partner of D&AD. They sponsor a thing called the
‘White pencil’. We have for years given out black pencils occasionally and yellow pencils quite
occasionally and in our 50th year, last year, we established the ‘White pencil’ and this is for
advertising campaigns and design projects that have a purpose beyond profit. We did this because
want to stimulate and lead what we see occurring at the moment which is a convergence of global
business dynamics, the needs of the planet and an internet empowered generation of consumers.
Increasingly great work for brands, done for profit, done to generate shareholder value has this
purpose beyond profit, I’m not talking about charity advertising or public service advertising, I’m
talking about brand building stuff that also seeks to do some good in the world. Because I’d like to
put this out there because it is something that creative industries, advertising in particular has to
concern itself with at the moment, we have to develop a whole new set of capabilities, a new
language in fact, to talk about this because it’s a client requirement right now, clients are actually
leading this agenda at the moment when agencies should be. I guess it knocks back to today’s
agenda because people should be being sensitised to this these new programmes in schools. I just
want to play you a commercial, it’s actually done by Unilever for a Lifebouy brand and done in India
and it exemplifies what I’m talking about. Just bear with it because it pays off nicely….
[shows video commercial]
So, it might seem slightly perverse to end a conference on British creative education but that’s the
direction that our part of the creative industries are headed in and I personally find that very
encouraging and as I say that has implications for education, arts universities and schools as well.
I’m not going to summarise that, I hope you can see where we’re coming from. The creative
industries are incredibly important, they don’t get cut much slack in this country particularly
compared with financial services, but they are important in their own right and as a stimulus for the
wider economy. We need to mobilise in order to make sure that attacks on creative education in
this country are repulsed by the industry.
Thank you very much indeed. [applause]
Suzy Alderson [introduction to Andrea Robertson, keynote 2]
Thank you very much Tim. It’s really great to see just how much our employers are contributing and
are involved in education as far as inspiring young people, and they play such an important part.
I’m going to introduce now our second speaker and I’m delighted to welcome to the stage, Andrea
Robertson. Andrea is the Director of Implementation at UCAS. So, having taken a key role in the
recent Admissions Process Review carried out by UCAS, Andrea is now leading the implementation
of the agreed changes to both the admissions process with the objective of improving the customer
experience for applicants, advisers and institutions. Prior to her current role, Andrea held the
position of Director of Customer Operations at UCAS.
I’d like to welcome to the stage, Andrea [applause]
Andrea Robertson, Director of Implementation, UCAS
I have to say right at the start I’m not going in for the competition for most creative presentation. I
hope this is going to give you some food for thought during the day but I certainly couldn’t claim that
it was anywhere near as creative as Tim’s, which I thoroughly enjoyed, thank you.
I’m looking today at creative education as a whole, I think it’s fair to say, but particularly the
movement of applicants from pre-HE Education into HE and those in particular with the creative arts
subjects as part of their portfolio. I put together a short presentation which I hope highlights some
of the areas that we are looking at UCAS, and how we are thinking about education and it does link
in very well with other topics that we are going to be discussing throughout the day and so we may
well come back to some of the aims that I’m presenting here as we move forward through the day.
Looking very much at the applicant profile I’ve got some figures on applicants and where they are
and what they’re doing and slightly more detail about creative studies and how that plays in. Very
much on the agenda at the moment the qualification reform and this is a big area of consideration
for UCAS and we have some very specific thoughts on that which I’m very happy to share with you.
But also the impact of qualification reform on higher education because we are the interface for
applicants going into higher education.
Cross –border challenges, I’ll spend a little bit of time on that, I’m very aware we have a very English
audience today, is there anybody from outside England here at all? No…
And finally what we are doing to support our members, the HE institutions who are members of
UCAS.
So, looking at the applicant profile, now this is a piece of data we presented as part of our
submission to Ofqual in their recent consultation on A-level reform and very much highlights, this is
looking at English applicants I hasten to say, aged 17-19 so not looking at mature applicants in any
way, but highlighting the two key qualifications that we have being presented by applicants going
into higher education through at the moment UCAS.
[Andrea refers to a presentation to demonstrate statistics]
Over the 5 years you can see that A-level and BTEC maintain their place as the 2 leading
qualifications as those held as entrants as they work through their final year of school or college. Alevels on the right hand side there in 2012 still 2/3 of the applicants pretty much applicants with
pending qualifications holding A-levels and taking those in their final year but equally you can see
other qualifications are coming up in their usage, and BTEC being the prime one in that particular
example. There are in total over 3000 level 3 qualifications now that students can present as they
move into HE and that in its own right is a challenge to both HE provision and of course those HE
providers looking at qualifications as studs move on.
Looking then at an end of cycle report, and this is back to the 2012 cycle, the cycle has just finished
and we published a big report back in January. A-levels are, as we have just seen on a previous slide,
the main offering for applicants coming through the process, but equally this slide shows the
acceptance rate, so the percentage of applicants who are presenting with a certain qualification,
their actual acceptance rate. And within this you can see that applicants presenting with A-levels
have an 85% chance of actually being accepted in HE based on last year. A considerably higher rate
than the two closest qualifications – BTEC and in Scotland SQA???? So prime A-levels are of prime
importance as far as our processing is concerned at UCAS and also the HE sector the qualification
that is still regarded as the qualification for HE.
I’ve pulled out a few slides on the creative subjects, as in the degrees that students are applying for.
Now I haven’t analysed the data of the A-levels held and then the degrees that have been applied
for, but I think it is very obvious from research we’ve done in the past the degrees that those
students presenting with creative subjects do tend to apply for the degree subjects in their field. I
won’t go into detail through all of these slides. I do find it very interesting Tim just commented on
the decline in presentation of the subjects to applicants at pre-HE level and are certainly
represented very strongly here as we move through the years. I’ve done for each slide 2010/11 and
12. 2012 as I’m sure many of you are aware was the input of the start of the new fee regime in
England which had a big impact on applications as a whole. Now just to give you some example on
this first slide we have applications as a whole in 2012 through UCAS went down by 6.6% and
acceptances went down by 5.5%. However if you look at the Creative Arts, [sorry I have to go back
to my notes to get the percentages] this is the slide presented here before you without Dance,
Drama, Music and imaginative writing, the applications are down 15.8% and acceptances are down
by 11% so that’s a considerable difference to the UCAS application and acceptance rate as a whole.
This certainly plays out across the other subject areas. I’ve pulled out Dance and Drama here, as two
of the prime subjects we can pull out on an individual basis. Again, numbers are very much down in
2012 and again well below those of the overall acceptances and applications. Drama for example,
applications are down by 15% and acceptances down by 4%, which is pretty good, but with
applications down by 15% one has to ask why I think on that one.
For Music of course we have not only the UCAS main scheme but we also have CUCAS which is the
scheme that we run exclusively for Conservatoires within the UK. Unfortunately the 2012 data is not
available at the moment it is a very small scheme but I thought it was worth putting the figures up
there for 2009/10 and 11 for interest. Again Music acceptances are pretty similar to 2011 so looking
very good as far as acceptances are concerned but applications a drop there of 3000 which from
29000 is a sizeable percentage.
Finally looking at the Computer studies and media studies, which are the two other areas I’m
particularly interested in, Computer Studies is a very interesting area as far as UCAS is concerned.
We have for many years classified this as a science rather than a creative art so only for 2012 have
we pulled out the Computer Studies area into a separate subject field. So unfortunately without
going down to the individual course level, I can’t actually give you comparable stats from the
previous 2 years.
For Media Studies though, very interesting, looking slightly healthier I have to say than the other
areas that I’ve pulled out for you, in that the applications although down, were only down by 10%
and the acceptances overall down by 8%. So again, a drop, but pretty comparable though to the
overall figures for that particular area.
Moving on then to look at the reforms that are taking place, and I know that Suzy is going to talk a
little later about the overall reforms and how they are moving forward, but for UCAS this is of prime
importance to our schemes as we move forward into the next 5 years really. How we are going to
involve ourselves with this, how we are going to pave the way both for applicants and advisers, and
ultimately for HEIs who accept applicants with an ever more changing portfolio of qualifications.
We had some key questions about the reform and I’ve highlighted some here. There are some key
areas that we are particularly concerned about. The HE involvement in the development - that’s
been a key point for discussion going forward and we do have some thoughts on that; IAG issues in
particular - we have been very concerned over the last few years with the amount of information,
advice and guidance that students receive as they are moving into HE and we can’t help but think as
we move into new curriculums both for GCSE and A-level that there will be an increasing need rather
than a decreasing need and we are very concerned about how this will be provided.
Decoupling of the AS Level – we highlighted that as a particular concern it is a standalone
qualification at the moment, regardless of your personal opinion on that as half the content of an Alevel, how will that be looked at going forward.
First admission to HE in 2017 – that isn’t very long off, I have to say, and we are now in 2013 and
we’re about to launch our products for apps wanting to apply to University in 2014. Everything has
to be planned a long way ahead in education as you are well aware and 2017 has a very short lead in
period to it.
As far as the GCSEs at KS4 was concerned there was a proposal for the English Baccalaureate now
being focused on reforming the GCSEs which I think again we’ll discuss during the day I’m sure
So, our response to the consultations. We had some key points and we do feel that A-level is the
main currency and I certainly showed that on the slide earlier for the 2012 statistics and we are very
concerned that the A-level remains with some consistency. We don’t feel that it’s appropriate to
have different standards or sizes within a qualification with the same name, if an A-level is called an
A-level then it should have consistency across the sector.
AS within the UCAS scheme is seen as very valuable. The UCAS scheme those of you who are
involved on a regular basis, we do still operate the scheme on predicted grades. Applicants apply
with qualifications that they hold and they have predictions against the qualifications they are still
taking. Since the introduction of the AS levels, it’s certainly been very evident that a number of
Universities, not all, but a number of Universities and colleges do take very high regard of the AS
achievements when applicants are presented their application. We have also felt, along with many
other people I’m sure, that the breadth of study that was promoted as part of the AS introduction
might be lost if AS levels are removed.
We are concerned about the involvement of the sector. We think it’s very important that the sector
is involved in the development of the curriculum but equally feel it should be representative of the
whole sector not one key area.
Un-phased implementation and no piloting – we feel this may cause some confusion certainly for
HEIs who are recruiting students but also for the implications for information, advice and guidance.
So those were the high level concerns that we responded to in our response.
On KS4 we had some additional points as you would expect. GCSEs are very important to recruiting
institutions. A number of them will give within their requirements their actual requirements at GCSE
level at any subject area. And we are also concerned that there needs to be some alignment
between GCSEs and A-levels in the reform timetable.
Statement of achievement was pulled out - obviously their concerns are it only applies to a particular
type of student, again we are very keen for the fairness of applicants and their treatment if they go
into higher education that all students present with similar qualifications are treated fairly and
transparently.
So how is this likely to impact on higher education? 2015 a big year of change – the first teaching of
GCSEs and new A/AS-levels, potentially; we’ve had the last January assessments, they’ve happened.
That is going to make a change, as far as applicants are concerned, to the ability to re-sit going
forward through the years nevertheless that change has definite ???
A and AS levels being de-coupled I’ve already covered to a certain extent we do feel this is going to
have a big impact on the recruitment of students. for students in Wales the revised Welsh
Baccalaureate.
The GCSE reforms, although not directly relevant to HE nevertheless do impact applicantss as they
move forward. Those students will obviously be impacting higher education that little bit later.
There needs to be considerable information available to HEIs, Universities and Colleges so that they
can assess applicants going forward to make sure assessments are done comparably to students in
previous years where they have historical data on natural attainment. Again a phased introduction
we feel is potentially confusing.
We’ve pulled together our thoughts on how this is going to impact on higher education. We are
concerned about the lack of historical evidence base and a great degree of university admissions are
based on historical evidence. Moving to a new qualification and structure, new assessment will
inevitably have an impact on that. We will need to ask HEIs to assess their entry requirements and
their offer-making strategies and again this will potentially impact on students as they go through
the process.
We are always concerned about widening participation, the impact of that, again the information,
advice and guidance but also the ability to obtain information at a very early stage certainly as far as
changes to GCSEs are concerned that affects applicants who are considered normally outside our
normal area of influence and how would schools accommodate any new qualification.
We do hope that we have suitable advice to give applicants and that is part of our remit as they
move to HE but for us far more appropriate is the information we give to HEIs that’s key to moving
forward.
We do have cross-border challenges, qualifications are changing across the whole of the UK. In
Scotland we have a move to the Curriculum for Excellence which is a complete change to all pre-HE
quails and in NI and Wales they are assessing their A-levels. We are concerned that if A-levels are
called A-levels across the UK then that will impact on how the particular applicant is treated if for
example they are assessed differently in Wales than in England.
And finally, what are we doing to support entry levels? We are a membership organisation and we
do support our universities and colleges to every extent we are able to. Part of this remit is keeping
track of these changes and keeping them informed. We’ve also launched a qualification information
review, that was launched last year, and we’re now putting that into application by introducing
qualification information profiles which will hopefully provide information on qualifications as they
exist and allow offers to be made appropriately, fairly and transparently.
[Applause]
Melissa Romaine – Digital Programme Makers, NESTA