Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2004
PROFESSOR IAN
DIAMOND, MR
GLYN DAVIES,
MR ADRIAN
ALSOP AND
PROFESSOR PATRICIA
BROADFOOT
Q40 Dr Iddon: One or two of the seven
research councils fund research centres in quite a strong way
and yours is one of them. Does that inhibit you in any way funding
the rest of the research community?
Professor Diamond: Clearly we
have made a judgment with our centres to have around about 18
or so large groups which are addressing particular questions and
that is a priority decision to do that, but that still leaves
money to the rest of the community which can be applied for in
response mode, although I would have to say, such is the size
and strength of social science in this country, as I have said
in many fora, our success rates are not as high as we would like
them to be.
Q41 Dr Iddon: One of the things that
the evidence we have collected shows is that your research community
seem to be particularly upset by the decision to go towards `1+3'
studentships. Can you tell the Committee why you made that decision?
Has that not in turn led to the concentration of research which
I started my first question about?
Professor Diamond: One of the
great problems with recruiting social science students is that,
for example, economists often have an option, that is, shall I
go and earn a few thousand pounds as a PhD student or shall I
go and earn an enormous amount of money working in the City? If
we work it simply as a competition, we could only tell people
whether they had got an ESRC studentship after they had finished
their degree, which was often after they had had the opportunity
to have a job from somewhere else, and universities were saying
to us that they needed to be able to tell people early on that
they could have a grant. The universities also said to us that
they send us seven applicants and we choose the students that
they would have ranked three and five through their competition.
They could not understand why we did not have one and two. Our
view very strongly was that the quota system allows us to do that,
it allows us to say to universities early, "This is the number
of studentships you have got. You allocate them to who you feel
would be the best to do that." I have to say that while some
universities did find this difficult, others were extremely positive.
We did a survey in the summer of the outlets which received our
quotas to see whether the system was working and they are unanimous
that it is a much better system. I will just ask Patricia to say
a few words from the user community as to how it has worked for
them.
Professor Broadfoot: I would just
like to say two things. First of all, I think there was a frisson
when we intimated that we were moving to a quota system because
change is always uncomfortable and people had got used to the
old system. I totally agree with Ian that an enormous amount of
work went into preparing the cases that were not going to be funded,
so in terms of sheer efficiency this is much better. The other
point I would add to what he has already said, which broadly I
agree with, is that institutions themselves are becoming much
more focused and strategic in terms of their own research priorities
and so the existence of a known quota system allows them to decide
where they are going to invest their research studentships in
terms of their own priorities. So it is important from the ESRC's
point of view but it is also important from the point of view
of the institutional infrastructure. That does also suggest the
important point about critical mass which relates to the previous
question about research concentration. If somebody can do their
PhD study in a department where there are a significant number
of people working in a particular area and they are working on
that theme, that has got to be a better experience for them than
just the randomness of a particular individual seeking to be in
a particular place.
Q42 Dr Iddon: Is it not unfair to
the student who may be attracted to work with a particular researcher
in a university that is not receiving quotas? Does your quota
system allow for the broad coverage of research that would attract
students into the different pockets of research that they might
want to go into?
Professor Diamond: We are very
clear in our mind that in allocating quotas we retain a competition
for those places that do not have quotas so that the student that
you have just described, who wishes to work with a particular
supervisor in a place which has not typically had many studentships,
has the opportunity to apply in that competition, and if the student
is good, the project is excellent and the supervisor is excellent
then that project will get funded. That has been allowed for in
our process. I am going to ask Glyn to address the second part
of that.
Mr Davies: Sorry, could you repeat
the question?
Q43 Dr Iddon: It was about the breadth
of research that you are covering if you are allocating quotas
to certain universities. On what basis are you making the allocations?
Is it based on the research assessment exercise or something else?
Professor Diamond: Maybe I could
come back on that. What we decided to do initially was to allocate
for two years on the basis of those places which have had success
previously, not just in the competition for `1+3' but that had
our students over a longer period of time, the previous four years,
so as to make sure that we kept studentships largely where they
had been. We then said we will do a large amount of modelling
over the next couple of years linked with a new recognition exercise
to allow places which did not currently have the recognition to
receive studentships to come in and that modelling has been going
on. We are looking at a whole series of possible inputs, such
as the RAE exercise, such as research income where income is appropriate
to a discipline, such as the size of the research student base
in a particular place, and we will be making our judgment not
only on the basis of those variables but also on the basis of
the need to have geographical coverage of studentships. Does it
affect the breadth? I think we can influence that in some way
through our priority studentships, but clearly at one level the
competition is providing us with the best students in the emerging
areas working on the best projects and I would submit that we
are still getting that.
Mr Davies: Two things on breadth.
We support 17 different subject areas across the social sciences:
psychology, education, sociology, social policy, linguistics,
geography, etcetera. One of the issues which we have to address
is whether we are getting the right balance between those subjects
and I think that is a real issue with the competition we have
run, namely that we are not getting the right number of people
into subjects, maybe perhaps in economics and more in other areas.
We need to be thinking about how we are covering the breadth across
those subjects. An even more important issue for us is then the
actual balance within those subjects. There is a real issue about
quantitative skills in the social sciences as there are in other
areas, but there can be an easy option, which is that the students
go for those issues within a subject which do not tackle those
problems. So we have to think that we can target and try and increase
the spread into areas where we really do need to develop highly
skilled researchers with quantitative skills and in some subjects
with the open competition we are trying to do that with one hand
behind our back.
Dr Iddon: The British Psychological Society
would not agree with you so you had better have a word with them.
Q44 Bob Spink: I am going to focus
fairly tightly on the research skill base and the problems of
recruitment and retention. I suppose Adrian will be the focus
of this, although Glyn has touched on one area that I will come
to at the end. The difficulties range from a problem with maths,
physics and chemistry through to absolute crisis on statistics,
computing and methodology, as we have heard. The stats show that
academic staff in higher education have changed over the last
decade. It has skewed up towards my age, which is pretty old.
Looking at the stats, I would say it has moved about four or five
years over ten years which is pretty frightening as a trend. That
is the background. Have you or will you in the future commission
international, independently based research into this problem,
research such as the EPSRC have conducted?
Professor Diamond: We showed you
in our submission the graph of everyone. If you subdivide that
into some disciplines, things get particularly scary. For example,
if you look at education research over the last ten years, the
distribution looks exactly the same. It has just shifted ten years
to the right and it now has a group in its early fifties and a
large proportion of that group will retire over the next few years.
We have to do something about that fairly urgently. We are very
conscious of that and that is why we are engaged in the sort of
research which properly allows us to target our resource at those
areas that need it most urgently.
Mr Alsop: We are going to introduce
a mechanism very similar to that already employed by the Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council to take an area and look
at it from the international perspective and engage international
experts to advise us on how that works.
Q45 Bob Spink: Where do you think
this springs from? Obviously it is multi-factorial. Is there an
element of chicken and egg where we cannot get the teachers or
we are using people who are not excellent, very enthusiastic teachers,
or is it that the subjects are just badly taught or too difficult
or what? What is your analysis?
Professor Broadfoot: Interestingly
enough, the undergraduate demand for most of the social science
subjects is enormous and there are particular areas of shortage
but there is no shortage of people coming from school wanting
to do social science subjects like geography, sociology or politics.
Education and other professional areas are somewhat different.
The problem has really been in universities as much as the Research
Council in not having a career pathway for people who go through.
Certainly they can do a PhD and then it has been very problematic
how the career develops after that. In the world of education
research which I am part of, it has certainly been the case that
you live a very hand to mouth existence on short term contracts
and so on—not very well paid short term contracts at that.
Q46 Bob Spink: The Committee has
addressed that and we agree with you unanimously.
Professor Broadfoot: The answer
is that that is going to change quite substantially with the new
kinds of employment contracts coming into universities and there
will be a more transparent career development ladder, if you like,
for people wanting to be academics.
Professor Diamond: I spoke only
yesterday to Julia Goodfellow from the BBSRC who is leading a
sub-group of Gareth Roberts's committee on research careers, which
will be about developing these kinds of career ladders and publicising
them widely both in schools and amongst undergraduates so as to
make research something that 14 year olds are saying they
want to do rather than something that serendipitously comes to
them later on in their lives.
Q47 Bob Spink: You have answered
the question from the back end. I thought you might have approached
the front end of it as well. I am surprised to hear you say there
is no shortage of students interested in going down the route
initially. My perception was that perhaps students were not interested
in these things. They found it too difficult or they were turned
off science and maths or whatever at the school level.
Professor Broadfoot: I do not
disagree with that. Maths is still a very popular A level but
I think it goes back to what Ian was saying earlier. We need to subdivide
the social sciences between the quantitative ones and the more
qualitative ones. Economics, including mathematically driven economics,
is still very popular but broadly speaking I think it is those
quantitative areas which are short.
Q48 Bob Spink: To what extent do
you use your research centres, research programmes and priority
networks to address these weaknesses? Are you proactive in this?
Professor Diamond: We are very
proactive. Each centre has to have an engagement strategy which
is about publicising and making very clear the excitement of these
areas and also we prioritise some of our studentships into centres
because we see these as being really power houses of social science
taking forward critical social science agendas and the right sort
of place where a student can really get invigorated in a research
career.
Q49 Bob Spink: As a society, we have
talked about increasing the pressure of our focus on how we can
get kids enthused in science, maths and these more difficult subjects
right at the beginning and then keep them hooked as they go through.
We have found sometimes that they are very enthused at primary
school and when they go through puberty something turns them off.
What is your analysis of this and are you able to do anything
to promote these more difficult subjects at school level and to
get people on the right tracks in the first place?
Professor Diamond: Firstly, our
job is to provide some research evidence on what works. Our teaching
and learning research programme produced a document about a year
ago which was, the evidence on how to make science exciting in
schools. That received a lot of publicity and a lot of thought.
DFES took that very seriously. Andrew Pollard, who is the director
of our TLRP programme, is actively engaged at the moment in taking
forward not only that science agenda but also how we take the
results of our research on primary school teaching and on secondary
school teaching into the policy agenda to make the teaching of
these areas more exciting, more relevant and to grab the agenda
again.
Q50 Bob Spink: Assume that you have
them in the loop and trained them as good scientists, statisticians
or whatever. How do we hang on to them and stop them going to
these more lucrative careers in the City and all the rest of it?
You have already said that you are looking at the career paths
in academia which is the right way forward. Do you have any other
clues as to what to do?
Professor Diamond: Three things.
Career paths are one. The second thing is, as the government has
rightly said in its ten year framework, we have to make the UK
the place that people want to do science in. In other words, the
infrastructure within higher education has to be such that you
absolutely want to be in that laboratory; you absolutely want
to be at that computer with that large data set analysing fabulous,
new things about social phenomena. The infrastructure to want
to do it must be there. Thirdly, we have to do something about
salaries because at the end of the day you have to pay the mortgage
and you only have to look very simply at the sorts of salaries
that junior researchers are being offered to know that some of
them will have to make difficult decisions.
Q51 Dr Harris: Do you consider it
a rational move for a student leaving university with £15,000-worth
of debt to take a lucrative job in the City or continue to be
saddled with that debt while trying to find a place to live on
a relatively low salary in academia? Would you be astonished if
there was evidence out there that suggested that that was a factor
for people choosing careers?
Professor Diamond: Astonishment
would not be the first word that came to mind. That is why we
really do have to work at this. We have to be creative in some
of the ways in which we encourage people into academia. While
we have not formally discussed this, certain things like golden
hellos for people coming into academia are the sorts of things
we ought to start thinking about.
Q52 Dr Harris: Your empirical view
seems to match mine. The government said that their policy which
rejected the idea that you and I seem to think is not unreasonable
was evidence based but could not produce any evidence. In respect
of your answer to one of my first questions, do you think this
is an area the ESRC might subject early on to some research for
evidence?
Professor Diamond: The question
is: does the evidence exist. We have certainly funded recently
a couple of projects which have looked at the research careers
of new graduates. Those have reported in the last couple of months.
I have a proposal on my desk from the National Centre for Social
Research to start a longitudinal study for graduates to address
some of those very questions that you are asking, which would
enable us properly to get the evidence.
Professor Broadfoot: I think it
is very important not to think that there is one, single explanation.
Clearly, the salary issue and the security issue and the job progression
are central for most people, but I am in a way very encouraged
too by the number of people who do want to pursue a research career,
despite the attractions of jobs elsewhere and this includes economists.
I think it would be very desirable to have a better evidence base
to know exactly what prompts the decisions people take. One of
the worries I would add is the difference between different kinds
of subjects and what it is that makes some people want to stay
and be an academic. There is a change taking place in that, in
the recent past, it was very individualistic and people had to
pursue their own career as an individual, whereas now I think
increasingly subjects and communities are taking more responsibility
for their own future survival almost. That should help because
at the moment the economics community, for example, is not encouraging
people to stay on to do PhDs.
Q53 Bob Spink: Is there any evidence
that shows the proportion of people that make their minds up early
during their school career and those that are still prepared to
change their minds or do change their minds later on, once they
have taken their professional qualifications?
Professor Diamond: None that I
am aware of.
Q54 Bob Spink: My view, for what
it is worth, is that inspirational, really good teachers at secondary
school level are key to enthusing people, getting them on that
track, and I think that is an area that really does need to be
addressed as well as the areas that you mentioned, so we come
back to the way that I opened this section. That was that it is
multi-factorial. There are many, many factors and they are all
important.
Professor Diamond: We are very
clear in our minds that this is not something that can simply
be solved by a research council. A research council has to be
engaged with the education community of schools and at undergraduate
level in order properly to see this as a long term issue.
Professor Broadfoot: The inspirational
teacher is incontrovertibly important and a lot is being done
to make that better but the other thing is the engagement activities
that universities are carrying out with local schools. For example,
our own chemistry department at Bristol is very actively engaged
with local schools and that has produced huge demand for undergraduate
study in chemistry so I think there is a lot that can be done
of the same type in social science.
Q55 Mr McWalter: You told us on 22
January 2003, Professor Diamond, that one of the things that is
absolutely key is the extreme difficulty in recruiting numerate
undergraduates into this area. From what I have heard in your
responses to Bob Spink, the reality is that nothing is being achieved
in this regard because the problems are too deep seated.
Professor Diamond: It is not an
overnight, quick fix. We have been engaging right across research
councils in the UK in this whole agenda of how we engage both
with school teachers and schools to start in schools. Secondly,
we have been engaging with universities to start to talk about
how we move the quantitative agenda in universities and then there
is a question of encouraging people to do research.
Q56 Mr McWalter: Is not the truth
that, if you require heavy skills and statistical influence from
your students, you turn them off social science? They would go
and do other subjects instead where those skills were not demanded
of them because it is too tough.
Professor Diamond: If I could
speak from the evidence of having taught the methods course at
undergraduate social sciences for many years at the University
of Southampton, if you teach people in a really relevant and proper
way and explain to them very clearly why you need the statistical
methods in order to answer the very important, in this case, social
science questions, people will engage with it and sit down and
put the effort into understanding the statistical techniques they
need. I can show you any number of examples of that. If you simply
walk in and say, "Statistics equals the following 25 blackboards
of algebra that I am going to put down and at the end of it you
ought to understand something about social science" I think
you are on a different planet to the one that teaching should
be on.
Q57 Chairman: What you are saying
is that a lot of people are teaching who should not be teaching.
Professor Diamond: What I am saying
is that we have to properly think through the way in which we
teach statistics to social scientists in exactly the same way
as we have to properly think through the way we teach statistics
to chemists or engineers.
Q58 Chairman: Let us move on to your
success rate. I notice in your memorandum you require £20
million to support all the proposals in the top half of the alpha
range. When are you happy? What percentage would you like to deliver
to the nation?
Professor Diamond: That £20
million would fund at the level at which we used to fund in the
late 1990s when Patricia and I in former lives sat on that grants
board.
Q59 Chairman: What percentage is
that, roughly?
Professor Diamond: That would
be about 30% of the applications that we receive.
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