Chrońmy fundamenty brytyjskiej kreatywności...

London Fashion Week is coming to a close on Tuesday and the London Design Festival will really hit its stride in the next few days. By the end of the week, two events combined will be prepared over a million visitors to the capital, filling hotel rooms, restaurants and a lot of money besides. They are lured to London by his enduring reputation as one of the truly creative capitals of the world, and London ensures that there is not much for them to see.

Fashion Week, which this season moved from the elegant Somerset House to slightly more downbeat liquidated parking lot in the center of Soho, offered shows by 78 designers. It is envisaged that £ 100 of orders placed.

For its part, the festival design London (LDF) - the hub of Queen's Park in the north-west to Bankside river - helps ensure that the capital is still sponges project, the city in which people long to come to the studio, shop to open business business. This is the place to find new talent and skilled workers.

The mayor's office certainly thinks so. This gives the LDF 250,000 pounds a year, and supports Fashion Week and Film London. It's also just back in London festival-sanctioned games (video game design is big business and the position of London near the top game production recently dropped).

But while this is very good - and culturally and economically useful - on the occasion of the project, whether it's fashion or furniture, architecture and art, do not forget that it needs to be nurtured and supported, too. London's glittering creative reputation is not a fluke, but it is largely derived from its historically excellent art school system.

The system has produced people as diverse as the King James Dyson vacuum cleaner and creator of this year's documentary Amy Whitehouse, Asif Kapadia. Directors Porsche and Mercedes design studios, head of special effects at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, the best designers at Chloe, Armani, Chanel and Louis Vuitton - they all come from British art schools, as well as numerous significant creative "movement".

Schools are not only bricks and mortar, but students and teachers within them. And special types both lead to exceptional results. When I met the American artist Robert Irwin, who recently taught students including Ed Ruscha and Chris Burden in California in the 1960s and '70s, he said: "The good ones do not want any science. I just rub their brains."

From 1973 to 1988, it is an artist and writer Michael Craig-Martin has done at Goldsmith College in London, and his adventures methods of teaching art helped produce Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume and others marked with a young British artist, sheep floating in tanks , images taken Dulux gloss - the tabloids can have a field day, but the world woke up to London as a key place of art.

Over at the university of St. Martin, between 1992 and 2014, often frightening Louise Wilson guided by fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen and Christopher Kane under high talent - as well as producers of valuable exports. Posthumous McQueen exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York attracted 670,000 visitors; and another half a million when it came to London.

But the straitened financial times in education threatens to take away from our art schools exactly what makes them so unique and so effective. Teachers unions, for starters, where specialized knowledge is the key to good art education: knowledge is hard won and remains the basis for innovation. In the Royal College of Art, London's melting pot of post-graduate education design, practitioners are replaced by "educators" and scientists, and its courses are in danger of becoming a commodity to sell to those who can afford to pay. Free-wheeling creative journeys that have brought to designers such as Thomas Heatherwick are being replaced by more specific experiences.
Models at London Fashion Week show, Jean-Pierre Braganza

Fabio Piras, the successor Louise Wilson at Central St. Martin, said recently that the student needs at least £ 25,000 a year to the College of Fashion MA.

London art schools were the ultimate social leveler, where he graduated from Eton had no special advantage over a child of real estate advice. But it seems less likely that the artist Chris Ofili, who grew modestly in Manchester, you will be able to take in the Royal College now (he studied there at the beginning of 1990). His large-scale paintings glittery now sell for millions. In the same only in economic terms, a relatively small investment in their education is to be a rather handsome return.

But where once an art school was a meeting place of all classes - which created a special energy and a number of ideas and experiences - it is now a global meeting place, absorbing students from far and offers cross-pollination of cultures instead. It's also wonderful in a different way, but perhaps this is a temporary situation. Countries such as China, there will be cash-cows educational forever. In a fierce drive move from "made in China" to "designed in China", the country is setting up its own schools, sometimes with employees who have already thrown in the towel in London.

Art and design world being what it is - rebellious, inventive, innovative and bloody-minded - takes matters into his own hands. Alternatively Art College is set by the conceptual artist Ryan Gander in Suffolk; and an independent space launch from the former library in Hackney - Open School East - is supported by practicing artists and from time to time Tate curator who volunteer their time for free. The London School of Architecture, chaired by architect Nigel Coates, allowing students to work almost full-time, and have their employers pay the fees. And developers in south London looking for a place in which to carry out their educational dreams.

London Fashion Week in February, will return when he will share the city with BAFTA and the British, whose payment and film music, respectively. You may find Steve McQueen, the Oscar-winning director, in the first and musician Jarvis Cocker to another, both graduates of Works from London schools. Just look where it could all lead.