Talking to the Fixperts
Education everywhere, disappearing disciplines, the planet is burning and 'I can't use scissors' are key themes for Forth CIC. The Green Edge found out why.
On 4th January, when Rishi Sunak laid out his priorities and ambitions for the year ahead, his statement that he is “now making numeracy a central objective of the education system” reopened – not for the first time – the can-of-worms debate on the demands for an increasingly number-savvy society1. In our humble opinion though, the debate so far has had a rather chain-reaction feel to it: Rishi was using the word numeracy which, to some ears at least, implies familiarity with good, common-sense numbers management and arithmetic, perhaps more along the lines of what was taught all those years ago in the classical Quadrivium. To make the jump made by many commentators from – again quoting Rishi from his speech – “the skills to feel confident with your finances [or] to find the best mortgage deal or savings rate” to mathematics, with all the fear that instils in many people, and then further into that much-bandied acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is, perhaps, missing Rishi’s point here.
We’re not seeking to be apologists for Rishi here, mind you. This is just our opinion, a prerogative we maintain on The Green Edge. But, since we have observed the tendency for the media narrative to move at lightning speed from numeracy to STEM, we were reminded of the 2018 revisit of the Perkins Report, which reported ‘a worrying stagnation of young people opting to study post-16 the subjects that lead to engineering careers’ and suggested ‘[t]he historic focus on STEM as a concept may be part of the issue here, as the broad term has masked specific challenges related to subjects such as physics, design and technology and computing.’
Into this alarmingly engineering- and design-lite education zone step organisations like Primary Engineer - on whom we posted in 2022 - and Forth CIC, whose co-founder, Dee Halligan, we had the pleasure of talking to recently.
Forth CIC (Community Interest Company) was founded in 2021 by Dee, who has a background as an architect, and Daniel Charny, Professor of Design at Kingston School of Art. Dee tells us that she and Daniel worked together for 15 years before launching Forth, as a creative consultancy frequently involved in engagement projects like exhibitions and galleries. Then, with a strong joint interest in social sustainability2 and seeking to widen their involvement in exploring and shaping new models, formats and programmes for engagement in a changing world, Forth came into being because, in Dee’s words, “the answer always seemed to be about learning”.
Dee describes some of the work the team has been doing over the last few years, both pre- and post- the launch of the CIC itself: leading the content and interpretation part of the Design Museum’s move from Shad Thames to High Street Kensington; broad-based programmes like the British Council-commissioned Maker Library Network; and a Horizon 2020-funded exploration of open schooling formats, resulting in the ongoing development of an actionable framework called Make It Open.
To explain Forth’s agenda a little more, Dee describes an event they convened in 2019 which looked at the future of designing and making in schools. With delegates from industry, sector organisations and institutions like the V&A and Royal Academy of Engineering, the four key themes were Education Everywhere (learning not restricted to institutions); Disappearing Disciplines (the blurring of boundaries between, say, designers and engineers and moves towards interdisciplinarity); The Planet is Burning (prompting a response); and I Can’t Use Scissors. We found this last theme to be particularly interesting: a quote from Ofsted Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman3, it alludes to kids starting school who can't hold scissors or use a pencil because things like that are no longer part of many people’s lives. Dee comments, “that's our agenda. It's as valid for doctors as it is for engineers, to understand the physical reality of a material or the possibilities and potential of a tool in order to be ingenious.
“So these four pillars and the interactions between them are our starting point for the projects that we're interested in”.
Image: Forth CIC / Fixperts
Forth’s ongoing remit includes commissioned consultancy and research, but Dee tells us that an increasing number of its projects are now self-initiated. One of the key drivers for this trend is a programme the team launched in 2013 called Fixperts. Fixperts is an open learning programme which ‘serves to engage learners, teachers, policy makers and a wider public in the value of channelling creativity for social benefit’. Made available initially to universities and now tried and tested across a range of educational settings and levels, Dee tells us that Fixperts has been run in 50 universities and in over 25 countries and maintains an archive of over 1,000 short ‘fix’ films for use as educational resources. Further, spin-outs from Fixperts have included projects like Fix Camp, a summer camp funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering that challenged 300 young people in South London to apply their creativity and ingenuity to some of today’s biggest problems like housing, education, transport and living together.
STEM education is writ large on Forth’s agenda, but there is a caveat here. While pointing out that ‘[e]ngineering continues to remain largely invisible in the school education system, other than in specific provision such as university technical colleges (UTCs), which are currently inadequately supported’, the aforementioned 2018 revisit of the Perkins Review went on to say:
To address the general issue of school engineering engagement the professional engineering community and wider engineering sector have been delivering well-intentioned school inspiration activities for many years and this has led to a complex and confusing landscape. A 2015 Royal Academy of Engineering report highlighted over 600 third sector organisations supporting STEM engagement in schools.
Source: E4E/Royal Academy of Engineering
Dee points out that Forth is very clear on where it sits in this landscape. “We work in Design and Creativity. Everyone is doing great things, but they're also reinventing the wheel, duplicating it, inventing new things all the time, and it's confusing. It's disruptive. But that's not our role; we don’t knock on doors. What we can do, though, is build demonstration models, which is a different thing. We’re saying does this work? Can we contribute? If we evaluate it then we can say, hack it, work it into your schemes of work and then other providers can take it.
“We're pipeline developers. We connect people with ideas”.
Forth’s positioning seems to be working well. The successful delivery of the Make It Open project – initially won on the strength of Fixperts - is in turn leading to a second European-funded project which Forth is hoping to launch in the Spring. And, while Fixperts is all about socially-responsible practices in design and engineering, and Make It Open builds on open schooling, maker education and citizen science, we learn that the new project – christened Levers – will look at climate education within a community context. The Green Edge will be watching with interest as the Levers project develops.
Through many of its projects and with more to come in Levers, Forth seems to us to be well positioned to help fill an important green skills gap. The ‘mainstream’ green skills are, of course, broadly documented and pretty well understood. UNIDO, for example, describes the main types as it sees them: engineering and technical skills; science skills; operation management skills; monitoring skills. But there are also the citizen and community skills for people both big and small; skills associated with building and operating in cultures of ingenuity, resourcefulness, collaboration, generosity and responsibility; skills that make change happen, build trust, build and share common agenda, and empower communities. These skills all sit in the realm of social sustainability and this is where organisations like Forth contribute in terms of both resources and narrative.
As we talk with Dee, the rather obliquely-named Meta-skills Progression Framework from Skills Development Scotland comes up. Dee says: “I hadn’t heard the term ‘meta-skills’ [neither had we] and I’m always resistant to new terms like these, but if I’m pushing any message at the moment, this is what we‘ve been looking at. Almost everything we’re doing can be talked about in terms if collaboration and connexion: design, creativity, innovation, storytelling, critical skills, reflective practice, iteration and improvement, listening skills. Some of these might be described as softer skills, but there are hard skills and practices in there and we’re really focused on those.
“I'm also interested in in how that gets equal consideration and doesn't get left behind. Because that's how you recruit people in. That's how you engage people. That's how you get buy-in from a broader public which is getting a factory coming in next door.
“Let alone the C-Suite who needs to be convinced of what this kind of fuzzy stuff is going to give them.”
We do think, though, that Simon Pegg’s YouTube response (link not included here, for obvious reasons) was somewhat unnecessary and overblown. May be better to stick to your acting in future, Simon.
Definitions of social sustainability vary. The UN defines it as ‘identifying and managing business impacts, both positive and negative, on people’. Other definitions extend it to include all organisations. Community engagement is a key element of social sustainability.
After our conversation, Dee provided this additional background to Amanda Spielman’s research, which we include here verbatim: ‘the original research which indicated that some children indeed cannot use scissors at school entry is from a report from 2011 called Meeting Technological Challenges which [Amanda] referenced again when launching the Innovate programme at the V&A, offering a pretty fair assessment of the status quo at that point (2019). While we’d favour a broader consideration of these skills rather than tethering them to Design and Technology as a subject, the fact that D&T has declined from close to 450,000 GCSE entries in 2004 to 77,530 last year says so much’.