For too long, education has been drifting in the wrong direction. We continue to measure success by the number of exams sat, grades achieved and facts memorised - yet none of these things reflect the complexity of the world our students are about to enter.

Employers repeatedly warn that the gap between what young people learn and what the workplace demands is widening. As automation accelerates, the skills that remain truly human - creativity, problem-solving, collaboration - have never been more valuable.

This is why design thinking is becoming so important in education. It’s something we have always done at Bede’s, but since the 2024-2025 academic year, it has expanded right across the curriculum, and the D-School initiative is the framework that brings it all together.

Design thinking in our school

D-School is built around design thinking: a structured approach to creative problem-solving that asks students to empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. It is not a standalone subject or a single lesson on a timetable.

Instead, it is woven into existing subject schemes of work across the school, challenging teachers to identify and create opportunities within their own disciplines to embed design thinking principles into everyday learning.

The central mechanism is the “Design Sprint” - a structured, time-limited challenge where students work in teams to tackle a real problem, learning to iterate their ideas and grow comfortable with uncertainty.

What this looks like in practice varies by subject, but the specificity of each task is what makes design thinking tangible rather than theoretical.

For example, in geography, Year 10 students acted as crisis management teams responding to the Japan tsunami of 2011.

Through encouragement to engage in collaborative, long-term thinking about the situation, they were able to focus not just on human safety but also the importance of aspects such as the restoration of water and electricity over coastal reconstruction, justified through the lens of long-term community resilience.

It is the kind of intellectual pivot that a traditional mark scheme would rarely reward, but which reflects precisely the thinking employers say is missing from new recruits.

In English, meanwhile, a practising barrister presented students with a genuine legal case in which a café customer consumed a slug and suffered an allergic reaction. Half the class prepared a case of criminal negligence against the owner; the other half prepared the defence.

Even the school’s most unique asset, the zoo, is viewed through this lens.

Bede’s is an educational associate of BIAZA (the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums). Through D-School, students move beyond animal management to tackle complex conservation challenges, applying a design-thinking framework to research, prototype and implement real-world ecological solutions.

They are the kinds of decisions that students will face one day, and the classroom is where they are learning the skills and language to navigate them.

We’ve seen, too, that students benefit from these approaches, and how they open up new opportunities. For example, one student who joined as a drama and swimming scholar is now studying nuclear materials science and engineering at Imperial College London.

They made this change after taking part in a Stem challenge run by the UK Space Design Competition (which Bede’s subsequently won) because of their experience and enjoyment of solving problems and working with industry professionals.

Upskilling teachers

The shift to the D-School model is supported by a change in staff development, moving from top-down training to teacher-led research groups called Curiosity PIPs within our Professional Inquiry and Pedagogy (PIP) framework.

These groups provide time for staff to collaboratively experiment and find ways to integrate design thinking into their subjects. This enquiry-based approach ensures that design thinking enriches the curriculum without increasing workload.

By including these goals in the annual professional development record (PDR), teachers drive innovation and align their pedagogical aspirations with the school’s mission to solve real-world problems.

The future of D-School

D-School is still developing. We are continuing to refine how it is delivered, deepen staff expertise and extend the range of challenges and external partnerships available to students.

And, of course, academic rigour remains central to our curriculum offering - underlining that this sort of development does not have to undermine core classroom activities.

Yet we are keen to demonstrate that the D-School approach has definable outcomes, too, and are working on the best ways to measure and articulate this - not just skills developed but also longer-term trajectories.

For other schools considering how design thinking might sit within their own models of education, our experience suggests that it does not require a wholesale restructuring of how a school operates.

It requires a willingness to look differently at what learning can involve - and to trust students with problems that do not have predetermined answers.

Peter Goodyer is CEO and head of Bede’s Senior School in East Sussex