AS A principal sponsor of the Design Commission’s independent enquiry into design education, the Design Council welcomes their recent report: Restarting Britain – Design Education and Growth.

The report highlighted the importance of design in schools, and the recognition that design education is fundamental to national prosperity through maintaining the UK’s world-leading design industry. As the Design Council also highlighted in our new Design for Innovation report, high-quality design and technology teaching in schools is vitally important in maintaining and growing a pipeline of students entering design, architecture and engineering, HE courses and on into related professions. It’s this flow of well-trained graduates which has grown the UK’s world-leading reputation for design excellence over the last half-century.

However, we need an approach that enables a much broader spectrum of students and graduates to have an appreciation of the role and value of design in order to secure the UK’s future innovation capability.

To create tomorrow’s innovators, our education system needs to learn from the best businesses in the world.

Companies like Apple, Dyson, and JCB integrate design as engines of innovation. It’s time for our education system to follow suit.

We need to shift from a system that encourages discrete specialist subjects to mix but remain unchanged, towards an integrative system that promotes adaptability as skills needs change.

Put simply, our High Schools need to be “iSchools”.

DAVID KESTER is chief executive of the Design Council. For information on its Design for Innovation report, visit www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/ Insight/Growth