Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 359)
WEDNESDAY 2 MARCH 2005
PROFESSOR BOB
BOUCHER, DR
SIMON CAMPBELL,
PROFESSOR PETER
MAIN, PROFESSOR
SIR TOM
BLUNDELL AND
PROFESSOR AMANDA
CHETWYND
Q340 Mr Key: Does anyone wish to
comment on that?
Dr Campbell: I think the problem,
as Brian said this morning, is that the cliff is very steep between
five-star, five and fours and that is the problem, but we need
more money.
Q341 Mr Key: Do those institutions
that are at the bottom of that cliff have any hope realistically
of ever catching up or are they just condemned to receive less
funding?
Professor Boucher: When you say
"institutions", I think you mean subjects.
Q342 Mr Key: Yes.
Professor Boucher: Subjects within
institutions and the answer comes back to my point earlier about
cross-subsidy and collegiality. The guidance to R&D said there
were three things you could do if you did not have top class:
you could fix it, sell it or close it. That is what a vice chancellor
faces when looking at a department. So, if you have a chemistry
department that is a grade four for example and you are in a university
that seeks to be comprehensive, your first attempt is going to
be to fix, so you will cross-subsidise. However, as I said earlier,
it can only go on for so long. There is a limit to collegiality.
It boils down to a fine relationship at the end of the day.
Professor Main: Can I just add
something on the University of Newcastle because that was one
of the central factors in the University of Newcastle, that the
vice chancellor then felt that the physics department was not
capable of being taken up to a grade five with the sort of investment
money that was available.
Q343 Chairman: Just to challenge
Tom Blundell, there are other universities producing good spinout
companies as well: Newcastle, Dundee, Manchester and so on. That
argues that all over the country there is excellence. You are
perpetuating the myth that Oxford and Cambridge rule the higher
education system.
Professor Sir Tom Blundell: I
think that you need to talk to the venture capitalists and others
and see where they are actually investing funding. As it happens,
you have mentioned three of the very good universities which I
think in a way supports my point. Manchester and Dundee, for example,
have superb biological sciences with a lot of understanding of
translation but there is this question of critical mass. If you
talk to venture capitalists, I think you will find that they would
prefer to put in most of the funding in the other corridor.
Q344 Chairman: Is there any university
department anywhere in this country that does not have a five
or five-star that you know of? In my opinion, they all have one
or two or three or four. So, there is excellence everywhere.
Professor Sir Tom Blundell: Yes,
but I think what you need is critical mass because the way that
small companies work, as I said before, is that you have a community
of individuals who move between companies. I think you need the
whole range of activities to get that sort of culture. I think
that it can be done around Manchester and it can certainly be
done around Dundee, but I do not think you can do it around one
five-star department.
Q345 Dr Harris: The unit of funding
was criticised by the current Government for falling year on year
under the Conservative Government up to 1997. Have you seen a
significant increase in the unit of funding in your department
per student since 1997?
Professor Boucher: Unit of funding
for teaching?
Q346 Dr Harris: Yes.
Professor Boucher: That has first
stabilised and then increased by very small percentages, sometimes
level with inflation, sometimes 0.5% above inflation. Remember,
we are talking about an historically under funded system. The
reason that, from time to time, the emergency brigade comes in
with money to deal with capital and maintenance backlog is because
basically there is not full economic funding of teaching and we
conduct the exercise at a loss and it is not surprising therefore
that we are not able to steward funds to replace our equipment
and repair our buildings because it is chronically under funded.
So, yes, there has been a modest increase bit it is an increase
that is still in a situation where there is chronic under funding.
Q347 Dr Harris: In some of the evidence
we had, HEFCE stated that the resource for SET subjects actually
increased by 5.5% despite the weighting of the SET subjects changing
from 2% to 1.7%. Do you recognise that increase?
Professor Chetwynd: Mathematics
is not at that level, it has decreased, and HEFCE say that research
helps out the teaching funding, so it is not sufficient.
Q348 Dr Harris: Do you think that
is a problem with the mathematics and HEFCE in their calculations?
Professor Chetwynd: I do.
Chairman: Publish or be damned!
Q349 Dr Harris: Perhaps you can give
us a critique because that might be useful because there cannot
be two answers.
Professor Chetwynd: Also, in mathematics
cases, service teaching with mathematics does, that is not properly
funded and it therefore makes departments want to do their own
service teaching and that causes more problems again.
Professor Sir Tom Blundell: We
have done an analysis in our school in Cambridge and I think the
teaching looks as if it is about one third under funded and that
is actually funded through research activity. So, I think what
is happening in many universities is that the research funding
coming in through QR and other mechanisms is actually enabling
us to put on high quality projects and research program training
in the second and third years of degrees. Many people seem to
think that teaching has been funding research but it is clearly
the other way round and we need to, in our school, increase funding
for teaching. In Cambridge Biological Sciences the total funding
for teaching out of the £24 million we have is probably running
at something like a third and we need to increase it by £3
million.
Q350 Dr Harris: Are teaching only
departments viable professionally and could it be done financially,
though clearly not now?
Professor Sir Tom Blundell: My
analysis of it in our subject is that you can certainly teach
very well with some lecturers just doing teaching and little research
but I think it is going to be very difficult to put on high quality
honours degrees without having the research-led environment. I
think we are therefore going to have mainly teaching universities
in some areas, but there will have to be some arrangement between
institutions, perhaps on a regional basis, so that people can
move to the research-led part perhaps in the third year to make
it a proper degree.
Professor Main: One possible model
that you might look at is to look at things in a different way
and have perhaps institutions that could teach you degree level
science and physics in my case say for the first couple of years.
Most departments really share the first two years of syllabus
and curriculum and the research tends to enter in the third and
fourth years and it might be possible to have institutions teaching
the subject to this sort of common basic level and then people
could leave those teaching only institutions and possibly become
school teachers—it might be another route to improve school
teachers—whereas the ones who wanted to go off and do professional
research and become professional scientists would move to the
research institutions.
Q351 Dr Harris: Is there anything
good you can say about the decision to go from 2% in the waiting
to 1.7%? It was described by someone yesterday at the Royal Society
of Chemistry meeting as effectively vandalism, the stroke of a
bureaucrat's pen, threatening the viability of departments. Can
you see any reason why that should have been done?
Professor Boucher: No.
Q352 Chairman: So, here we are. Suddenly
there is a TV programme and everybody gets keen on science and
they flood in there, so all departments will be saved. Will they
just because the student demand has increased? Do you have the
confidence to believe that?
Professor Main: I am fairly confident
that the reduction or at least the lack of increase in student
demand has been the main reason why physics departments have closed.
I am absolutely certain that the bigger departments, having seen
the fall of the unit of resource just referred to, in order to
keep their finances stable, have taken more and more students.
I can point to some universities that have almost doubled their
student quota as a result of that, including Nottingham.
Q353 Chairman: Has that saved their
bacon or not?
Professor Main: It has preserved
their bacon for the time being.
Q354 Chairman: But you have no confidence
in the future then?
Professor Main: I have no confidence
that, if the situation remains as it is now, we will not just
keep—
Q355 Chairman: So science in higher
education is in a mess.
Professor Main: We will keep losing
departments off the bottom.
Dr Campbell: May I just come back
to the point about Exeter? The number of students applying for
chemistry at Exeter went up by 20% last year and still the department
closed.
Q356 Chairman: That is a point, yes.
Dr Campbell: The numbers of students
in Kings went up and in Queen Mary College went up. So, even when
there is a healthy student demand, finances are forcing closure.
Q357 Chairman: So, the answer that
we have more students going in and we have more people doing the
subjects at schools is a simplistic analysis of what is going
on in our higher education system. Is that not true?
Dr Campbell: The simplistic analysis
is that where we have healthy student demand, finance is forcing
closure of departments.
Professor Boucher: However, Chairman,
it has to be said that, if you look at the university as an entity,
if the university wants to expand its chemistry department by
50%, that would presumably be, without additional funding, at
the expense of psychology and history, it would be at the expense
of a lower cost entity. So, the university would now be running
more expensive courses with the same funding.
Q358 Chairman: Come on, think out
of your box just quickly. Should the kind of university you want
be determined by these factors? What do you really believe in
for higher education in this country? Where is your vision? What
do you want? You are struggling to keep departments open, to get
students. What a life! What a misery!
Professor Chetwynd: We want well
taught students in school who can see the value of science and
enjoy and have the thrill of the subjects which all of us did
have and who will then go on to study them at university.
Professor Boucher: A supply of
educated students who perhaps are assisted in making appropriate
choices for their careers.
Dr Iddon: I have a declared registered
interest which involves my relationship with the Royal Society
of Chemistry.
Chairman: Thank you, that will be recorded.
Dr Iddon: I want to talk about something
that I think Simon raised earlier, the autonomy for universities.
I put it to the panel that the numbers coming out of medical schools
have been carefully controlled, the numbers coming out of dentistry
schools have been carefully controlled, there has been a cap-on
undergraduate numbers in universities in the past. Come on, is
this autonomy of universities not a myth?
Q359 Chairman: You do as you are
told! Come on! Top-up fees? Yes, we will have them.
Professor Boucher: Plainly it
is not a myth because you can see for yourself how universities
have diversified in the courses they offer to students coming
to them over the years. So, there clearly is a high degree of
university autonomy. The fact is of course in medicine and dentistry,
the ones you quote, what you have done there is to cap over-demand.
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