If I ruled the world, I would create a society that would revere creativity at all levels. Not just children experimenting at school but right the way through. Creativity should be nurtured, admired and encouraged throughout the education system and into life. We are born into the world to improve it.
What always depresses and surprises me is that if you go to schools anywhere in the world and see children aged up to 14, they are interested and engaged in things, are unafraid to be creative, they have wonderful imaginations, and then, certainly in England, the system smacks it out of them. When I say the system, I don’t just mean schools, I think it’s society. It’s probably their parents saying being a designer or being creative is not what life is about, you have got to pass exams, go to university and get a sensible job. And society in the form of the Department of Education that doesn’t think that design and technology or being creative is important, so it’s not part of the English Baccalaureate.
There is then, in this country, the cultural prejudice against engineering and manufacturing. You have only to read Charles Dickens to see his views of industrialists. If you think of Danny Boyle’s 2012 Olympic Ceremony, it opened with the beautiful green fields of England, then there were these chimneys put up everywhere, these vast Satanic Mills with smoke, these women with huge hammers toiling away and then Isambard Kingdom Brunel comes in looking a bit lost, in his top coat. Boyle’s theme was definitely that England was wrecked.
And when it comes to deciding about power generation or fracking, the political issues are discussed publicly by the government and the newspapers, but no-one discusses the engineering issues, such as why, from an engineering point of view, one is better than another and what the impact is on the environment.
This is important because engineering, invention and creativity create wealth. We were very good at this in Victorian times and we have got steadily worse. We are suffering because of it. It is a pity, because we have got the talent and good universities but not enough people studying design and engineering. Every country can make anything now. So to compete, we have got to be way ahead. That means that we need to treble our engineering workforce every year. We are 340,000 engineers short now, in this country, and we will be about a million short of what we need by 2025. It starts with politicians in my view. We must talk about engineering at a political level.
Schools should be an environment that celebrates creativity. There should be more creative subjects and they should be given the same status as other subjects. In fact, creative people are often treated as less intelligent than people who pass exams. But often the ultimate lateral thinkers are not exam passers. They don’t quite follow what you are taught at school. They question it.
My own view is that you don’t need to be brilliant across a huge sphere of any subject to be a good engineer. Engineering courses usually demand mathematics and physics and chemistry, and some people are not good at one or the other but it doesn’t stop them being good engineers. We should be asking for a broader intake. The new course at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, at Imperial College, London, does not require students to have done physics, for instance.
In 2010 we presented the government with a report: “Ingenious Britain: Making the UK the leading high tech exporter in Europe.” George Osborne did the fiscal things well. We have much better tax arrangements today for anyone who wants to put money into new ventures, this has upped the people giving money for research and development. And if you are selling a patented product developed in England you only pay ten per cent corporation tax on those profits.
But other ideas were not implemented. I believe that if someone from Britain reads science, maths or engineering at university, they should not have to pay fees. If they stay on to do research, they should be rewarded generously for doing so. I also think that rather than giving non-EU students a visa that runs out two months after graduation, unless they land a job, we should encourage anyone who comes here to read engineering or science to stay. We want them, they are welcome, you finish your degree you can have a permanent visa. Australia does it. At the moment post-doctoral researchers go back home with all their ideas. What you have to do of course is regulate the degree courses.
I would require governments to fund research properly. If we don’t have to give money to Europe, post-Brexit, we must ensure universities receive more money.
Creativity is this very fragile thing. You can find a hundred reasons why a new idea would be a bad idea and there is probably only one reason why it is a good idea. So the person with that idea has got to have the courage and the determination to carry on with it. And to develop it so that it becomes a really good, robust idea. I would rule a world which valued and supported this process.
