Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 299)
MONDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2005
DR BOB
BUSHAWAY, MR
NICK BUCKLAND
AND DR
ED METCALFE
Q280 Chairman: That is postgraduate;
tell me about undergraduates and what any of these agencies do
with them. Do you know an undergraduate when you see one? Do you
ever meet undergraduates?
Mr Metcalfe: Keeping them in the
region?
Q281 Chairman: Yes. That is your
job.
Mr Metcalfe: Some regions have
schemes for keeping graduates in the region.
Q282 Chairman: I am talking about
undergraduates, young people who are in the main being trained
and are worried about getting jobs.
Dr Bushaway: In the West Midlands
there is a grad-link scheme aimed specifically at undergraduates
who then graduate from the universities of the region to retain
them as far as possible.
Q283 Chairman: Does it work?
Dr Bushaway: It has only been
running for two years, but it is supported by the Advantage West
Midlands (AWM), the regional development agency for the West Midlands,
and the jury is out on whether it will be a success. Certainly
it is recognised as an issue that must be addressed at the regional
level.
Mr Buckland: We are doing similar
sorts of things in the south-west. We have a website that is useful
for employers and graduates, to retain them in the region. If
you look at before undergraduate level, through the Year in Industry
programme we have seen it working quite well in the south-west,
whereby we encourage people to go into engineering. We have worked
with SMEs in that area and that programme has started to get SMEs
that would never think of taking graduates, or sponsoring people
through university, to start approaching that, and there have
been some success stories there.
Q284 Dr Turner: Do any of you know
what proportion of new graduates take up jobs in the region in
which they studied, and are there enough graduate opportunities
in each region to enable that to happen?
Mr Metcalfe: I do not have the
data to hand. I am sorry, I am trying to think, but I cannot remember
what—
Q285 Chairman: This is surprising,
is it not? You knew you were coming to answer questions about
development of higher education, for goodness sake!
Mr Metcalfe: I am not sure whether
that data exists.
Q286 Chairman: Ah, you do not have
the data.
Mr Metcalfe: Yes.
Q287 Mr Key: I just wanted to ask
how on earth does a regional development agency know what the
employers want in terms of science graduates, or indeed what is
available? Do you have that data?
Mr Buckland: We have evidence
of what is available in the disciplines. We know, for example,
how many chemists are produced in the region. But it is very difficult
to understand what the employer demand is. We can ask individual
employers and we cannot get hard evidence.
Q288 Mr Key: I entirely understand
that. In my own case I am right on the periphery of the south-west
regional development agency, and we have excellent staff in Wiltshire
who are focused on the Wiltshire issue, but as far as I can see
they spend an awful lot of their time talking to other agencies,
people like Business Link and the South Wiltshire Economic Partnership
and all these people; and nobody can get their hands on what the
employers really think, especially the SMEs. Do you think that
is fair?
Mr Buckland: We do work with the
various sectors. We are trying to get that information, but it
is extremely difficult to get the information from the employers
and employers' organisations. We do have that problem.
Dr Bushaway: One of the problems,
which has not been touched on, is the one about a lack of longitudinal
data. Even though we have first destination returns, we do not
necessarily know what happens in five or ten years in a graduate
career, post-graduation.
Q289 Dr Iddon: If we produce more
scientists in any one of your regions, do you think that would
lead to an increase in employment of scientists within the region?
In other words, would it expand the economy?
Mr Buckland: There are examples
where that has happened. In north Cornwall there are quite a number
of companies in the pharmaceutical arena and those companies have
grown up and have actually imported graduates and postgraduates
into those companies. There are examples where that has happened.
These clusters can encourage those people.
Q290 Dr Iddon: It is very expensive
to train a medic or a dentist, and there are arguments to say
that perhaps the state should require people trained in those
highly expensive disciplines to give so much time back to the
state before they go into an alternative career or go into private
practice. To a lesser degree you could say the same about scientists.
Are you happy that we train scientists expensively and then allow
them to flutter all over the place into the City? Does that matter
in other words?
Mr Buckland: There are some companies
in the private sector that apply handcuffs to people who they
train, so that is an example of where one could do it. That is
a matter of policy rather than something—
Q291 Dr Iddon: Would you agree that
it is a good idea to encourage expensively trained scientists
to stay in science at least for a limited period before they expand
their horizons a bit?
Dr Bushaway: That used to happen
of course in a very commonplace way through private sector industrial
sponsorship of students. What seems to have died is that market-side
engagement with students at either individual levels or within
subject areas or within universities, actually to provide those
golden "hellos" or whatever you want to say, to encourage
that loyalty link. Somewhere along the line in the last twenty
years, on both sides, that link was broken in the decline of those
kinds of sponsorship.
Q292 Dr Iddon: I do not want to put
words into your mouth but would you not agree that it is rather
sad that those universities that have done things like sandwich
courses are now disappearing because they are not seen to be the
kind of universities where we should concentrate research?
Dr Bushaway: I am not sure that
I know the answer for the particular individual institutions you
might be thinking of, but again in sandwich courses there has
to be the demand-side support for the placements and the engagement
that again goes on, and that is increasingly difficult to engage
with.
Q293 Dr Iddon: I was thinking of
Salford, the largest chemistry department in the country in the
seventies, which has now gone completely, the department about
which AstraZeneca spoke very highly, and many of its graduates
in Cheshire have come from that now extinct department.
Dr Bushaway: Anecdotally, Salford
is an example of a university that has experienced the ups and
downs of the demand-side support over the years, and has therefore
had experiences that have not made it very easy for them to see
exactly which way to go in the future as regards their investments
and which courses and subjects to do, because it has not been
clear what industrial demand-side take-up there will be.
Q294 Dr Iddon: Or is it the fact
that universities like Salford—and there are many of them—I
just choose that because that is where I used to teach—that
engaged with industry very heavily in the past—their academics
for example were doing reports that were never publishable and
therefore not accountable in the research assessment exercise,
are the very ones that have suffered in the present climate.
Dr Bushaway: You are thinking
with respect to the assessment of research and therefore the funding
flowing from that. That has been a well-recognised omission in
the way the research assessment exercise has been conducted in
the past, and we are assured for the exercise forthcoming in 2008
that that will be addressed so that so-called applicable research
in that form, in reports to companies and so forth, will be eligible
for return and for assessment.
Q295 Dr Iddon: It is a bit late,
if I may say so.
Dr Bushaway: Well, yes, I probably
would agree with you.
Q296 Chairman: In terms of regional
development and the economy, is there a strict correlation between
these science departments? Does a strong local economy depend
on a strong university science input in your opinion and experience?
Mr Buckland: I would say yes.
Q297 Chairman: How do you know that?
Mr Buckland: If you look at some
of the links between the areas, in Bristol for example in the
south-west, there is a very strong link there between the computer
industry, with Hewlett Packard's laboratories there, and Motorola's
laboratory in Bristol, based on the strength of the university
departments. There is evidence.
Dr Bushaway: If you move from
the micro to the macro, all the evidence that is available from
OECD countries indicates that that correlation is there.
Q298 Chairman: In the world that
you guys move in, are you envious that in some regions they have
got this right and you are still trying, or just poking about
doing a little?
Mr Buckland: I think all regions
are trying hard to do this. Some have had more success than others,
but we are not starting from a level base.
Q299 Chairman: Do you have a committee
of science/technology/engineering in your region that puts the
boot in to universities and businesses and so on to get it together?
Mr Buckland: We have a shadow
science and industry council, but other regions already had science
and industry councils set up and we are the second generation
and are looking at what they have done to succeed.
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