New diverse designers added to GCSE Design and Technology

Published: Monday 6 Jun 2022

We’ve added 12 new, diverse designers to our GCSE Design and Technology (8552) specification ready for first teaching in September 2022.

We’ve been working to improve the diversity of designers in section 3.3.3: ‘The work of others’. With help from organisations such as The V&A, The Design Museum, Part W Collective, Higher Education Partners and a fantastic panel of teachers, we’ve improved our specification to include a wider variety of names in this section. The list now includes the following designers:

  • Joe Casely-Hayford
  • Rei Kawakubo
  • Pierre Davis
  • David Adjaye
  • Yinka Ilori
  • Zaha Hadid
  • Elsie Owusu
  • Karim Rashid
  • Kusheda Mensah
  • Aljoud Lootah
  • Morag Myerscough
  • The Singh Twins

We’re working hard to make sure our qualifications represent the diversity of knowledge and human experience we value – as well as reflecting all the different communities of teachers and students we serve. The designers we’ve chosen represent a wide range of different people and challenge some of the gender stereotypes related to different areas of the subject.

Students have to study two designers from the specification, so we hope these additions will give you greater choice when designing your students’ curriculum. We haven’t removed any names from the original list, and you can still use the existing names if you prefer, but we’d encourage you to also consider the new names when planning what to teach.

To make sure you feel supported when considering which designers to include in your teaching, we’re creating a new supporting resource ready for first teaching in the autumn term. We’ll let you know when this new resource is available.

For now, you can find the updated specification (version 1.2) on our GCSE Design and Technology specification pages.

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