Inventor and manufacturer James Dyson has announced plans to develop the Dyson School of Design (DSOD), ‘a new kind of school to encourage Britain’s next generation of entrepreneurs, engineers, designers and inventors’.
Located in Bath, the school will have 2500 students aged between 14 to 18 and is due to open in 2008. The DSOD will be both a state school and a National Centre of Excellence. Half the £22m needed to build the school will come from the James Dyson Foundation, with the remainder coming from the government. Pitched as the engineering equivalent of London’s Fashion Retail Academy (sponsored by Philip Green), the DSOD seems at odds with the government’s National Skills Academy programme which was launched last July. This is where a network of National Skills Academies like the Fashion Retail Academy (and one for manufacturing) were to be created, with employers working in concert with their relevant Sector Skills Councils. Several other major engineering companies including Rolls Royce, Airbus, Rotork and the Williams Formula One team will be involved. So far the designers working on the project are Wilkinson Eyre (architecture) and Buro Happold (engineering).
Mr Dyson’s sponsorship has been motivated in part by his perception that engineering and manufacturing need a higher profile in the UK and to try and increase the number of engineering graduates in the UK. Current figures show that the UK produces just 24,000 engineering graduates each year; this is less than 10% of the number of similar graduates each year in India and China. While this looks dire, and the newspapers have been highlighting this statistic in every article about DSOD, their scaremongering seems to overlook the fact that proportionally the UK actually produces more engineers per capita than India or China. The difference lies, not in the number or quality of graduates, but in the spending by government and industry on R&D and as a result the low number of patent applications by UK companies. Unfortunately, spending on R&D is a cultural issue for UK businesses and a taxation issue for the Treasury.
We applaud Mr Dyson’s ideas and philanthropy, but if he really wants to make Britain’s engineers as well known as their predecessor Brunel, then perhaps he should enlist the engineering enthusiast Jeremy Clarkson. Hated by environmentalists, Mr Clarkson has an honorary doctorate from Brunel University, ‘for outstanding service to the memory of the University’s namesake, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’ and in 2005 received an honorary doctorate of engineering from the School of Technology at Oxford Brookes University (along with a pie in the face from an environmental activist).
Together they could knock the popularity of Jamie’s School Dinners into a cocked hat! The result might not be the legion of svelte citizens our current government wants, but at a legion of beer-swilling engineering beasts, whose brains and skills might go some small way to stopping Britain becoming an organic theme park for tourists!
