Leadership development as a missed opportunity in design and technology education

One of the purposes of Design and Technology Education (DTE) in schools has traditionally been the development of students’ technological capability. While this purpose remains valuable, I argue that there is a missed opportunity to make explicit the socio-technological leadership capacities already implicated in technological activity. Drawing on leadership theory, research in engineering education, and perspectives from the philosophy of technology, I examine how DTE is commonly framed through individualised designing and making, and how this framing can obscure the relational, value-laden, and collective dimensions of technological activities. I propose that leadership offers a lens for clarifying these dimensions, not as an additional curricular demand, but as intrinsic to technological capability understood as judgement, agency, and responsibility in contexts of uncertainty. A selective philosophical lens, drawing on Mitcham’s account of technology-as-volition alongside democratic and critical perspectives on technology, is used to argue that leadership is integral to how technological futures are imagined, negotiated, and directed.