Move over, stuffed teddy. Our children today need more to stimulate their minds | Tristram Hunt

Here is a curious tension. This month, the government announced an extra £77m to support new “creative clusters” across film, fashion, TV and gaming. With the creative industries supporting more than 2m jobs and bringing in £108bn a year to the British economy, it makes sense.

Yet at the same time, we are throttling the pipeline. The last 12 years have witnessed a 60% collapse in the number of young people taking art and design GCSE – alongside equally terrible falls in music, drama and other creative subjects. And, to no one’s great surprise, this is accelerating the longer-term trend of shuttering arts, languages and humanities departments across British universities.

At the very moment when the “fourth industrial revolution” – the advent of quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI) – demands the unique attributes of human craft, we are stripping out those skills from the education system. For the next generation to have any chance against the algorithms, we need so much more creativity in the teaching and training of Generation Alpha.

This is a particularly poignant challenge for the UK, since fine art, music, film, fashion, publishing, gaming and TV are some of the few sectors where our global reach remains resolutely impressive. But there is a growing inequality in provision, as private schools keep their theatre lights on, ceramic kilns warm and design studios are well stocked, in contrast to the state sector where budgetary pressures and exam accountability measures incentivise head teachers to close down arts courses. Museums across the UK are stepping up to support schools and teachers in the face of this creative crisis. The newly reopened National Portrait Gallery has a dedicated focus on family painting and making. At Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire, the National Trust has reconfigured the Vernon family seat into a Children’s Country House, using the historic collections to develop children’s visual connections with patterns, shapes and colours.

Indeed, it extends internationally as museums seek to connect with younger audiences nurtured on a digital diet. At the CSMVS Children’s Museum in Mumbai, curators hope to build “meaningful engagement with the arts”. At Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Children’s Museum, kids can discover the secret world of feelings in art works, and “explore emotions by playing, listening, drawing or acting”. And in Doha, the government of Qatar is building Dadu, Children’s Museum, dedicated to “open-ended self-led play”.

The need is there, and this week the Victoria and Albert Museum is reopening its old Museum of Childhood as Young V&A – championing creative confidence and cultural capital from toddlers to teenagers. Many Observer readers will fondly remember the old “Toy Museum” (as it was known) in Bethnal Green, east London, housed in what were once the boiler rooms of the 1851 Great Exhibition. It was a magical, creepy place of baby houses, Victorian table settings, and cots. But, truth be told, parents and grandparents always enjoyed visiting it more than children.

So, we have stripped it out to create a museum centred around play, imagination and design. Rather than displaying just toys, Young V&A has mined the entirety of the South Kensington collection – from ancient ceramics to contemporary jewellery to the Joey the Warhorse puppet (from the National Theatre production) – to stimulate creative thinking.

With ever greater evidence affirming the importance of birth to age five in the cognitive development of infants, we have curated a dedicated space for play. The more serve-and-return interaction there is between children and parents – through talking and touching – the richer the growth of brain functions. Through free play in a beautifully designed environment, we hope children can develop their understanding of shapes and structures, form, balance and material. And as the Princess of Wales has shown at her Centre for Early Childhood, this age range is critical for good mental health and socioemotional resilience.

Part of the cruelty of the Covid lockdown was the way it undermined children’s ability to communicate, collaborate and explore their extrovert selves. Our Imagine gallery tries to unpick that harm with pantomime costumes, life-size puppets and lots of space for paracosm – those wondrous, intricate, never-ending imaginary worlds which flourish beyond the boundaries of key stage 2 and personal, social, health and economic education. We have a dedicated stage for storytelling, poetry readings, film screenings, and lots of dressing up.

Since our foundation by Prince Albert in the mid-19th century, the V&A has had a didactic mission to train the designers, engineers and creatives of the future. So, our Design Gallery helps 10- to 14-year-olds think about how objects are made, gain insights into the workings of design studios and encounter essential topics from sustainability to new digital processes. The collection, and its interpretation, is here to instil the ambition of our young visitors to be the David Adjayes, Stella McCartneys, Steve McQueens, and Rachel Whitereads of tomorrow.

For this surely is the route through the coming AI storm: an education system and upbringing ethos that appreciates how the digital age demands more, not less creativity in schools and families. It is through play and imagination that we can rise above the robots. It is good for wellbeing and GDP. So, come and play at Young V&A.