A report published by the House of Lords’ Education for 11–16 Year Olds Committee on Monday has called for ”urgent action” to broaden the curriculum, and help reverse the recent decline in pupils studying creative subjects, including design.

The report, titled Requires improvement: urgent change for 11–16 education, observes that “creativity is increasingly valued by employers across all sectors of the economy” and that prior to the pandemic, “the creative industries contributed £116 billion to the UK economy gross value added and grew faster than the economy as a whole”.

But it goes on to say that there has been a “general decline in opportunities to develop creativity across secondary education”, with “some academies… using the flexibility they have over their curricula to drop national curriculum arts subjects, such as art and design”.

…