Over the last year, a team of RSA colleagues, partners, educators, Fellows, and students and I had the privilege to steward learnings from the Students Design Awards’ 100-year rich history, to shape RSA Spark for even greater potential.
Our aspiration for RSA Spark is to inspire students aged 18 and above, wherever they are in the world, to grow and apply their agency, skills, and creativity to real-world briefs that do more good for people, places, and the planet.
In the spirit of working in the open with our community, this blog reflects on the design-led approach we’ve taken, what we’ve learned along the way, and why we’ve decided to take a moment to pause before we go further.
As we celebrated the centenary year of the Student Design Awards, we began reviewing feedback and consolidating the lessons we have learned over the past few years, alongside a horizon scan of external trends and signals. We worked closely with a ‘test and learn’ group of students, educators, and entrepreneurs to better understand, prioritise, and co-design for emerging needs and opportunities.
This helped inform a set of changes that we collated into an offer, which we tested with a cohort of students, educators, and entrepreneurs between September 2024 and February 2025.
The most significant learning was that we were trying to do too much, too fast, for too many audiences, all of whom had diverse needs and different learning contexts. For example, this private pilot included tracks for secondary school pupils, further and higher education students, adult learners and entrepreneurs.
We stripped the offer back to its minimum viable state, retaining successes from the Student Design Awards and the recent private pilot, while letting go of everything else. The higher education audience, where we had the most experience and traction, with over 200 universities in the UK and 30 internationally, was also prioritised.
We launched RSA Spark as a public pilot in March and are excited to be celebrating the most brilliant students and their ideas from that cycle at the September showcase.
It is impossible to summarise all we have learned from this rich and busy year of experimentation. But here is our best attempt at sharing how our learning has informed this latest evolution of RSA Spark.
These learnings are grouped under Student Design Awards successes we have retained and nurtured, new changes we have seeded under RSA Spark, and experiments we have composted.
Over our history, we have unlocked over 2,000 creative briefs with purpose-led industry partners. This remains the most valuable asset we offer to educators and students, supporting their innovative teaching and learning. For example, in just three months, RSA Spark briefs saw 507 downloads from 187 universities in 17 countries.
RSA Spark improved brief templates to start with an optimistic speculative future to inspire students, a clear set of learning outcomes informed by the Capabilities for Life framework, best practice examples, and a toolkit embedded within the brief. Explore 2024-25’s RSA Spark briefs.
We have continued to invite RSA Fellows experienced in the briefs to review submissions. However, we no longer position these roles as competition judges, but rather as reviewers who help longlist and shortlist submissions ahead of decision panels with our partners.
Reviewers are also responsible for sharing feedback with any students who request it to help them learn and improve their ideas. Meet the brilliant RSA Spark Reviewers from the public pilot.
As well as continuing to be open to design students, RSA Spark goes beyond a single discipline to welcome entries from students of any discipline and to encourage collaborative team entries from diverse disciplines. This opens up opportunities for over 600,000 students to participate in the UK alone.
For example, over the pilot period, we approached over eight business schools to gather feedback and iterate on the RSA Spark offer – all of whom were very positive about their students taking part to enrich their learning experience and offer their ideas for RSA recognition.
We have tried both September and April participation windows, and have learned that each will align with and appeal to different universities in different parts of the world. However, for the programme to be truly inclusive for a global audience, it needed to open submissions in September and close in May, allowing educators the flexibility to plan and integrate the RSA briefs into more than just one term of the academic year.
We trialled a range of different formats for learning workshops over the year. We found that although the creative processes, tools and examples were valuable to both educators and students, interaction opportunities were limited and participation was low.
Feedback indicated that many students were too shy to participate meaningfully, particularly in a mixed audience with educators. We observed that educators were essential facilitators, helping their students understand the tools, adapt them to their context, and constructively challenge their thinking.
It was clear to us that no one knows how diverse students learn better than their own educators. Therefore, the format with the most potential was Q&As with educators where they could find out more about the programme, draw inspiration from RSA methods and tools that could be applied to the briefs, and, most importantly, learn from one another – particularly across disciplines.
We scrapped competition fees, and the result was that just in its first public pilot cycle, RSA Spark improved financial inclusion threefold when compared with adjacent Student Design Awards data from previous years.
For example, 31% of RSA Spark participants this year receive financial assistance for their education, and 17% are the first generation in their family to go to university.
We diversified and opened up the benefits that students gain from a single winner per brief to a ladder of opportunities. The rungs on the ladder include RSA digital badges to recognise students’ learning (we awarded 326 digital badges this year), the option to get feedback from reviewers for all participants, showcasing up to 10 ideas per brief at RSA House and on the RSA website, and bridging into entrepreneur grants and mentoring for the 10 most viable ideas across briefs.
One of the most ambitious experiments that we composted was an online learning offer to accompany the students’ creative process on the briefs.
We developed a quick and dirty learning management system, and a series of online modules that students and educators could access to introduce them to different tools, methods and frameworks that help enrich their learning journey and improve the quality of their idea in response to the criteria.
However, what we gained in efficiencies in terms of opening up learning opportunities for the many, we lost in being authentic to the creative processes needed when growing Capabilities for Life. Creativity, critical thinking, curiosity and courage are not practised when ingesting online learning content; they are practised when students have the space to work on real-world briefs, in real-world places, with real people they are not often exposed to.
We learned only a few weeks into the private pilot that this was something we needed to let go of, while retaining the richness of the curriculum through the Q&A workshop format mentioned above.
We will soon be sharing the complete impact data from the public pilot, so watch this space.
Despite promising results from the public pilot, we made the difficult decision to pause for the coming academic year. We will not be launching new RSA Spark briefs in September 2025. We have kept our current four briefs and recorded learning workshops available on our website for educators to use freely in their teaching. Still, we will not be accepting idea submissions.
We know that the prime time to launch RSA briefs is in September. As we are just completing our public pilot cycle amidst what’s been an experimental year, it was simply not enough time, despite our best efforts, to establish brief partnerships for a new cycle, which are necessary to generate the impact and engagement that our students, educators, and partners deserve for the coming academic year.
We know this is disappointing news for many in our community. Yet, as the Student Design Awards had paused several times across their rich history, only to come back better than before, we have given ourselves the same grace with RSA Spark. We have done our very best this year to fly the plane as we’re building it, but it’s time to land and refuel.
For now, though, there is much to celebrate. We will be showcasing the best ideas submitted over the coming month. Join us on 23 September for the unveiling of the RSA Spark 2025 Showcase, and explore the students’ inspiring work either online on the RSA website or at RSA House in London between 24 September and 23 October. We hope to see you there.
A huge thank you to the skilled and passionate multidisciplinary RSA team who has led this work with so much courage in the last year. Thank you to our partners who have trusted us with this experimental approach. And to the educators, past and new, who have championed the RSA briefs and shared their wise feedback and suggestions so generously. Finally, thank you to the Fellows who have reviewed students’ submissions so diligently this year. And finally, thank you to the students who took part and who poured their creativity and commitment to shape original ideas in response to some of the most critical issues of our time.
Our commitments to the principles reflected in our century-old heritage of the Student Design Awards – to design better futures and to support the ideas and innovations of emerging talent – remain. This year has been an experimental year of RSA Spark, to build on this rich heritage, and we are proud of the improvements made – particularly around inclusion and accessibility – which have been commended by students and educators alike. We will retain all the learning and successes we have achieved with this important pilot.
If you’ve been part of RSA Spark this year and would like to share your feedback and ideas, we’re all ears. Get in touch with me at joanna.choukeir@rsa.org.uk.
So it’s not goodbye, it’s see you soon.
