Education
112. Witnesses were unanimous about the importance
of education to the Scottish economy, both in terms of attracting
inward investment and of the indigenous industrial base.
113. There is no doubt that the excellence of Scotland's
educational system has been a major factor in attracting inward
investment in the past; many witnesses told us that a major factor
determining where foreign direct investment went was the availability
of a skilled work-force; HIE among others told us how Scotland
had benefited from people's interest in 'quality of labour and
reliability of labour and educational and skills level of labour',[179]
while it was claimed by the CBI Scotland that, 'Scotland leads
the way at all levels from vocational qualifications to degrees.
Indeed, one of Scotland's major exports has been highly-skilled
graduates'.[180]
Education is also vital to the success of Scotland's indigenous
industrial base.
114. It is not enough to have excellent universities
unless their output can be harnessed for the wider benefit of
Scotland. This is not a uniquely Scottish problem; we heard in
Virginia of the problems of bringing together to their mutual
benefit a university culture whose roots are in the middle ages
and whose time-scale is based on university terms and a technological
one which thinks in web-hours and in which 'instant gratification
is too slow'. The Republic of Ireland has also faced the need
to link university excellence to foreign investment.[181]
To its credit, Scottish Enterprise has faced this problem through
its inquiry into the commercialisation of the science base. Ray
Macfarlane explained: 'we recognised that in Scotland we have
very successful very important universities responsible for world-class
research, but that world-class research is not carried through
to the [Scottish] economy... We took an inquiry approach again
by trying to find out how this was more successful elsewhere ...
It is important to the universities to be successful in research
but it is not so important to them—or it was not then—that
the research should be commercialised here... There was also a
feeling that while the universities were rewarded for their research
per se they were not rewarded for the commercialisation of that
research ... academics and business people had very different
views of each other... Finally there were felt to be various infrastructural
and financial inhibitors to moving forward'.[182]
115. Following the commercialisation study, Scottish
Enterprise has evolved a strategy for encouraging the commercialisation
of university research. In the first instance, they have tried
'to raise awareness of commercialisation as an issue' and the
opportunities that exist for the universities. They are encouraging
Scottish companies to employ graduates because if they are not
used to doing so 'then they are not used to working with universities
and using university research'. Work is being carried out, too,
on the infrastructure for collaboration between universities and
business: 'one organisation which has been set up is Connect which
works to bring together the academics, business people, financial
advisers and so on. Just by creating that collaborative environment,
that does spin off ideas and get a lot of energy working, driving
towards commercialisation. We have done a lot to improve spin-outs
of university by encouraging the teaching of entrepreneurship,
management studies and so on in colleges and universities so that
people who start up in business out of universities are more capable
of succeeding... We have also done a lot of work to, for example,
fund research studies, fellowships and so on in particular areas'.[183]
Scottish Enterprise feel that their strategy has so far been successful
in raising awareness and they now feel able to move on to do more
work with companies. Other initiatives include University Challenge
and a programme designed to introduce children to the idea of
entrepreneurship.[184]
We hope that these initiatives will help to address not only the
failure to profit from research but also the low rate of business
births referred to in paragraph 15).
116. The ever-changing world demands an ever-changing
range of skills and also an unprecedented degree of adaptability
of the workforce. As The Scottish Office put it 'the issue is
not so much about having a stock of the appropriate skills, but
having a workforce that is able to adapt and add to its skills
and a culture in which people are prepared to do that and have
a kind of expectation of changing careers two or three times in
their life ... and the kinds of institutions that are able to
provide it. I think the extent to which...the education institutions
have been able over the last few years to respond to industry
needs by producing new training courses adapted to particular
skills or even to the needs of particular companies and to do
that at very short notice has been very impressive'.[185]
In this context, the example of Cadence, where four universities
have combined their resources to introduce an MSc in system on
a chip design, is very encouraging.
117. Despite Scotland's past success at providing
a skilled work-force, there is no room for complacency, and we
were warned that 'skills shortages are already evident in IT,
management, engineering and construction and could impact on the
prospects of Scotland in the future'.[186]
Language skills are also in short supply. The relatively high
proportion of the economically active population (in Scotland
as in the UK generally) which belongs to the older age groups
presents significant problems of training and re-training.
118. We hope and expect that the Scottish Executive
will continue to attach great importance to education for economic
development.
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