Pupil Design Awards information and support
Find out how the RSA Pupil Design Awards work and what support we offer to help you run the design challenge in your school.
About the Pupil Design Awards
The Pupil Design Awards’ vision is one in which young people develop creative confidence throughengaging with real-world challenges facing people and the planet and leave school with capabilities which enable them to flourish in their personal lives and contribute to the flourishing of their communities. We do this by:
- Broadening teachers’ and pupils’ understanding of how design can be applied and understood
- Introducing design thinking to teachers and pupils
- Connecting schools to their local communities and enabling pupils to design solutions to local and global contemporary challenges
How to run the Pupil Design Awards in your school
Once you’ve registered, you can decide how you want to design and deliver the RSA Pupil Design Awards in your schools
Some schools choose to make the Pupil Design Awards part of classroom teaching: previous entrants have incorporated the competition into Design & Technology, English, Science, and PSHE.
Other schools have run the Awards as part of an extracurricular design club. See the ‘teacher insights’ page in this year’s teacher resource pack for information on how other teachers have run the Awards in their own contexts.
Whichever way you choose to deliver, the process is there to help you to raise the profile of design and technology in your school and to develop important capabilities such as collaboration, confidence, and creative and critical thinking among your pupils.
Then, support pupils to choose one of the three briefs and make sure they have read the pupil brief pack. Each brief contains a real-world problem for pupils to solve, and some ideas to get them thinking about the challenge.
