A century of innovation
From its ‘Industrial Designs’ competition in 1924 to the Student Design Awards of 2024, the RSA has long celebrated innovative solutions to social and environmental challenges. Now enter RSA Spark.
The RSA Pupil Design Awards is a free, national challenge-based programme for secondary school and sixth form pupils aged 11-17.
Pupils are encouraged to use their creativity and imagination to tackle real-world challenges to enable people, places and the planet to flourish in harmony.
2024 celebrates a decade since the awards were established in partnership with the Comino Foundation. 2024 is also the last year of running the Pupil Design Awards in its current iteration before we transition to RSA Spark.
RSA Spark will bring together the Pupil Design Awards, Student Design Awards and Catalyst Awards as one programme. Both the PDAs and RSA Spark share the same ambition to be inclusive and impactful, ensuring all pupils have the chance to unleash their creativity for positive change.
We set key areas of focus that would help us to move forward on those ambitions in 2024, as well as provide opportunities to capture learnings that support the shaping of RSA Spark. Across the three areas of focus, we established indicators of measurement, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data to provide an insight into the extent of success of each.
These areas of focus were:
In this report, you will read key findings to four questions which frame our evaluation of the 2024 Pupil Design Awards. Those questions are:
Download the Pupil Design Awards 2023-24: End of Year Evaluation Report (531KB).
Inspiring social change through design thinking.
RSA Spark helps you find your creativity, igniting ideas into action for a positive impact on the world. Through real-world missions and learning fuelled by innovation, you’ll grow life skills and lifelong connections.
From its ‘Industrial Designs’ competition in 1924 to the Student Design Awards of 2024, the RSA has long celebrated innovative solutions to social and environmental challenges. Now enter RSA Spark.
The RSA Student Design Awards 2023 shortlist has been announced. Across nine briefs, 70 students are working to bring positive social change to people, place and planet.
Sophie Hague, a 2022 Student Design Award winner, explains how design helped to identify the learning techniques that worked for her.