Popping-in?

Our studio is filled with light and music.
There are multiple meeting rooms, a well stocked kitchen, and an indoor garden (with fishpond). Talk to us about access needs, environmental factors and any accommodations we might make to enhance your visit. Pop-in for tea and stay to use a spare desk for as long as you need.

11 Greenwich Centre Business Park,
53 Norman Road, Greenwich
London SE10 9QF

Cog is a Certified B Corporation

Public transport

We’re next to Greenwich train and DLR station. We have a door right on the concourse but it’s different to our postal address.
what3words.com/hungry.means.author

From Greenwich rail platform

This video shows the route to take from the train that will arrive at Greenwich rail station from London Bridge. There's a gentle slope next to the staircase.

From Greenwich DLR station

This video shows the route to take from the DLR that will arrive at Greenwich DLR station from Bank. There's a lift at the platform level if that's useful.

By car

If you have to come by car, we have a couple of parking spaces. We have a charging point that you are welcome to use if you have an electric car. Call ahead and we'll make sure the spaces are free. Use our postcode (SE10 9QF) to guide you in.

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you. Use whichever medium works best for you.

11 Greenwich Centre Business Park,
53 Norman Road, Greenwich
London SE10 9QF

Cog is a Certified B Corporation

New project enquiry

It's exciting to chat about potential new projects. We don't have a ‘sales’ team or a form to fill in. Call us or give us a little detail via email and we'll get straight back to you.

enquiry@cogdesign.com

Website support

If you're a client then you'll be best served by calling us or contacting us via ClickUp, otherwise you can use this dedicated email that reaches all of the digital team.

digital@cogdesign.com

Finance questions

This email hits the inboxes of the people who deal with our bookkeeping and finances.

accounts@cogdesign.com

Just want a chat?

Sometimes enquiries don't fall neatly under a heading, do they?

hello@cogdesign.com

Cultural Calendar

A round-up of recommendations and reviews, sent on the first Friday of each month, topped-off with a commissioned image from a talented new illustrator. Sign-up and tell your friends.

Sign me up Cultural Calendar

Cog News

An irregular update of activity from our studio. Showing off about great new projects, announcements, job opportunities, that sort of thing. Sign-up and tell your friends.

Sign me up Cog News

The Bacc is back. We need to stop it.

The Bacc is back. We need to stop it.

The Government has announced its intention to introduce the EBacc, a performance measure for schools that will not include creative subjects (like music, art, and design and technology). I urge you to join the campaign to change their minds (as they did previously).

I can understand it, I really can. After years of hard work in good schools and a top university, and into your career as a politician, you have climbed the poll and become Secretary of State for Education. You are one of a succession of incumbents on the tail-end of decades of under-investment and grand social experiments.

You really want to make a difference, a difference that pushes English schools up the world rankings in subjects that can be measured and are valued by the sort of people who matter, the sort of people who change the world, people like your advisors, friends and colleagues, people like you. Those subjects are science, technology, engineering and maths, the STEM subjects.

So, what do you do? Entirely understandably you look for ways to focus resources on those core subjects, to build up competencies in what you think are proper academic subjects that will get students into good universities where they can happily pursue any peripheral subjects as extra curricular hobbies. You tell people that “arts subjects limit career choices” and “that the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock the door to all sorts of careers are the STEM subjects”.

In the past few weeks, Nicky Morgan, the Secretary of State for Education has announced the Government’s intention that ‘…every child starting in year 7 in September will be expected to study core academic subjects that make up the EBacc right up to GCSE.

The EBacc (English Baccalaureate) is a confusing term because it has no real relationship to either the French Baccalauréat (essentially a university entrance exam) or the International Baccalaureate that many English schools had been pursuing, which is a well-rounded programme of education, covering a broad range of subjects.

The EBacc is a performance indicator, a league table that measures the percentage of students in a school who achieve 5+ good grades in the core GCSE subjects selected by the government.

Those subjects are English, mathematics, history or geography, the sciences and a language.

The intention of focusing on those subjects is, I’m sure, well-intentioned. But there are consequences, huge consequences that will resonate for generations.

Measuring school performance against that limited pool of subjects will necessarily mean that other subjects will become literally worthless – art, music, design and technology, and performance. Each school’s decreasing resources and tightening budgets will have to be focused on the STEM subjects; arts subjects will be less resourced and drift into extracurricular activities. For the best schools, there will be enthusiastic teachers, prepared to volunteer their time to enthuse a handful of students but for most the opportunities will be lost, those doors will swing shut.

This marginalisation of arts subjects indicates a lack of understanding of the education ecology. Deliberately dividing subjects in a regimented way is outdated and destructive in itself, the best schools (and I include most of the fee-paying schools where most of our politicians studied) see the benefit of pursuing themes that span all areas of study, and pursue a joined-up approach that allows pupils to understand the context and relevance of what they are studying.

Very few of us are privileged enough to benefit from the breadth of teaching enjoyed at our elite public schools, the vast majority of us are subject to dictates of a state system (I suspect that if we were all part of that system then it would be less dictatorial but that’s a topic for another time).

Bacc_FatSkyscraper_Orange_1We risk a society where only those with privilege will study the arts. We risk generations of creative poverty, of engineers, scientists, teachers, and politicians (those who come through the state school system) who lack the basic understanding of how to make creative connections; regimented thinking produces incremental results not the great leaps of imagination that transform societies and solve world problems.

We risk the huge benefits that our creative industries brings to the UK economy – currently £76.9bn per year.

We all benefit from a grounding in the STEM subjects and, for those that are inclined to study them further, we should want nothing less than the best teaching and pathways to further and higher education. We all want better schools and each generation to benefit from a successively better education than the last. But that shouldn’t mean excluding the arts.

Particularly in a digital age, where facts are at our fingertips, we don’t just need our children to learn by rote, schools should also be teaching students to think, to explore, to questions, to dream, to pursue, to understand… the arts unlock these areas for us.

The plan to force schools to pursue the EBacc is educational vandalism. Even the previous Education Secretary, Michael Gove, not known for his liberal views, was forced to admit that the EBacc was a step too far. Under intense pressure from lobbyist he pulled back from the EBacc and put in place ‘a more balanced and meaningful accountability system’ of eight subjects.

I urge you to join the Bacc for the Future campaign against these new proposals.

Please sign the petition in the hope that Nicky Morgan will listen to views from beyond her circle of usual influence.
http://www.baccforthefuture.com/sign-the-petition.html