Pupil Design Awards 2023-24: End of Year Evaluation Report

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:

• Setting targets for diversity, inclusion and representation.
• Equipping pupils with skills and capabilities for life.
• Providing teachers with the opportunity to develop their skills.

In this report, you will read key findings to four questions which frame our evaluation of the 2024 Pupil Design Awards. Those questions are:

1. Have the diversity, inclusion and outreach targets for the project been met?
2. What has been done differently in recruitment, communications, support and judging to work towards meeting the targets?
3. How does the project align with the three key areas of focus identified, particularly with our capabilities for life?
4. How can the successes and challenges be incorporated into RSA Spark?

Download the Pupil Design Awards 2023-24: End of Year Evaluation Report (531KB).