Engaging young people in craft is vital to encourage innovative and creative thinking and to open up career progression routes. Working with the hands is a skill that can be useful in all walks of life, from becoming a designer and maker, to being a surgeon or baker, and even to sewing on your own buttons. Vocational and practical learning are too often cited as the poorer relation to academic studies — practical hands-on learning is about much more than learning how to make a living and the brightest young people benefit as much as much as their peers. Haptic learning is stimulating to more of the senses and more of the brain, delivers more cognitive development than other types of learning and improves levels of achievement across all subjects. I believe so strongly about it I wrote a book on the subject with Charlotte Abrahams, Intelligent Hands: Why making is a skill for life.

Craft Club is a national project set up when working at the Crafts Council. Craft Club champions Craft in Schools, Galleries, Libraries, Community centres and anywhere else you can bring people together to pass on craft skills. The project was set up in collaboration with the UK Hand Knitting Association (UKHKA) and the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) in 2010 and after 2 years had set up over 680 clubs in the UK.

Firing Up is a scheme designed while at the Crafts Council and supported by a 3 year grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Established in partnership with 11 Higher Education Institutes in England Firing Up reached over 55 schools with creative and inspirational opportunities to work in clay.
Our champion Kate Malone has a passion for passing on clay skills and has gone on to star in The Great Pottery Throwdown on the BBC.

Origin Interactive: A series of participatory events commissioned for Origin: The London Craft Fair.  Crafting Space, 2008, by Alinah Azadeh, and Hybrid Basketry with Shane Waltener, below.

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef workshops at the Southbank Centre were so popular they went from 15 to 140 participants. At the Albert Hall AGM of the Womens Institutes we broke the world record for the number of people knitting simultaneously.