Dundee’s V&A is out to play its part in closing the attainment gap
The plans for the ambitious design musum extend far beyond displaying items, rather assisting schools, says Joanna Mawdsley
hat is the attainment gap and how can we close it? How can we encourage young learners to be more confident, become creative thinkers and enable them to solve problems?
These are big questions for educators in Scotland, particularly when we know that the attainment gap between children from low-income and high-income households starts early. By age five, it is about 10 months in problem-solving and 13 months in vocabulary. A significant and persistent gap remains between groups. Low attainment is strongly linked to the choices and opportunities after school, with long-term effects on job prospects.
A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2014 shows that certain approaches do work.
For example, parental involvement programmes have shown that encouraging parents to support their children’s learning is promising.
But how can a design museum like V&A Dundee help to close the attainment gap?
Museums are an excellent resource for teaching and learning. They offer learners opportunities to gain inspiration and improve skills in problem-solving, higher order thinking skills and visual analysis. Looking at objects from different times and places helps students to understand the cultural significance and impact of design, both historic and contemporary.
V&A Dundee aims to be a leader in design education, inspiring creativity and developing future skills for design and business innovation. Our schools programme, which is already active before the museum is open, will extend the reach and impact of the museum through deep engagement with schools, both locally in Dundee and nationally across Scotland.
The design process we have adopted for our school programmes has four steps – explore, imagine, develop and solve.
The programme will play a key role in raising confidence and aspiration in pupils throughout Scotland and build an awareness of the significance, relevance and importance of Scotland’s design heritage. We are collaborating with Education Scotland and SQA to facilitate this offer for schools both locally and nationally. This will extend and embed the impact of the museum and its collections, and help increase understanding and aware- ness of Scotland’s design heritage.
Our current Bonnetmakers project is building confidence and pupils are collaboratively working to solve problems. We are seeing pupils who started the project with low levels of engagement becoming much more vocal and confident, and developing a real sense of personal achievement. They are now presenting their design ideas with great imagination and fluency.
We were approached by Grant Lindsay, convenor of the Nine Incorporated Trades of Dundee, who were keen to support a local project that would make the past come to life.
We wanted to encourage pupils to engage with their local design heritage, linking Dundee’s traditions with the future of the city. The project challenged Primary 4 pupils to design and re-imagine a bonnet for the 21st century, making the experience more relevant and meaningful to them.
The two schools involved – Rosebank Primary School and Our Lady’s RC Primary School – are both based in the Hilltown area of Dundee, historically known as Bonnet Hill, because local people designed and sold the traditional style of hat from outside their houses.
They began by researching local design history around the city, and worked with professional milliners Sally-ann Provan and Pea Cooper in their schools. Both schools came together at a recent design jam where they worked through the design process and transformed their ideas into 3D prototypes. As problems arose they were encouraged to persevere and design a
solution – not always easy, but well worth the effort! Encouraging our pupils to learn and value creativity skills is not only of huge benefit to them as an individual learner but to Scotland’s economy.
It has been a pleasure to watch pupils grow throughout this project and we hope to continue to work with and successfully engage more and more schools in the run-up to opening V&A Dundee in 2018 and beyond. Joanna Mawdsley is Learning Manager for Schools, Families and Young People at V&A Dundee. Find out more at www.vandadundee.org