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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 220-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE
STRATEGIC SCIENCE PROVISION IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES
Monday 28 February 2005 PROFESSOR IAN DIAMOND AND PROFESSOR SIR KEITH O'NIONS MR NICK BUCKLAND, MR ED METCALFE AND DR BOB BUSHAWAY Evidence heard in Public Questions 209 - 317
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Science and Technology Committee on Monday 28 February 2005 Members present Dr Ian Gibson, in the Chair Paul Farrelly Dr Evan Harris Dr Brian Iddon Mr Robert Key Mr Tony McWalter Dr Desmond Turner ________________ Witnesses: Professor Ian Diamond, Research Councils UK, and Professor Sir Keith O'Nions, Director General of the Research Councils, examined. Q209 Chairman: Professor Diamond, Professor O'Nions, thank you very much for coming along and helping us. We are sorry we are late. There is something else going on downstairs and we are trying to keep in touch with that too. You are old hands at this game and you know most of the people here. If we concentrated research in a small number of excellent departments would you consider that desirable or are there disadvantages in it? Professor O'Nions: I think it is an important question, that research is highly concentrated in a relatively small number of departments without that being an explicit policy god, both in terms of the Higher Education Funding Council's allocation to the Research Assessment Exercise and the research councils. The numbers are something like 46 per cent of research council expenditure is within ten universities and just over 80 per cent of it is within 25 universities. The numbers for HEFCE are broadly comparable to that. That is an outcome of excellence in terms of the research councils funding the best people wherever they are, in terms of HEFCE supporting the best departmental strengths wherever they are. Your question is: is that a desirable situation? I think it is an inevitable situation in terms of the resources we have available and the very clear desire and indeed requirement within the ten-year framework that ----- Q210 Chairman: Does that mean though that academically it would not be the best way forward? You have picked on resources. What about academic discoveries, teaching and so on? Professor O'Nions: In terms of teaching, clearly teaching is taking place in most subjects in a much larger number than 25 universities where research is highly concentrated. I think your question could resolve into, is it possible to teach at a very high level without having a research intensive operation? As you know, that has been looked at to some extent by Professor Graham Davies and I do not think you can assume that it will just happen in a completely laissez-faire situation. With appropriate connectivity and so on I think high quality teaching can take place outside the research intensive universities. Can I just take an example - and apologies for the aside. In the United States there is some very high quality teaching in a large number of both private and state universities which does not go beyond masters level courses; they do not have a PhD programme. It clearly can occur and should occur. Whether we have the right encouragement for it to happen in a proper way here is an issue that was partly addressed by Professor Graham Davies. Q211 Chairman: What about research? The economy is a big thing. If we have these elite departments in universities is that going to make a difference to our science base? You know that we are doing a lot for the economy in terms of science and so on. If we are having elite universities doing this research relating to spin-outs or whatever it is, is that the way forward, do you think? Professor O'Nions: It has to be part of the way forward. Q212 Chairman: What is the other part? Professor O'Nions: Let me just say that part of the way forward is almost a précis of what you said. We need to have world class and internationally competitive research and science to be a player in what is a globalised scene and to understand what is going on elsewhere. The exploitation of that is clearly a very big part of the equation in a continually ongoing globalisation of research. The other part is the extent to which universities which are not research intensive, which are not getting a significant proportion of research council or Higher Education Funding Council money have a role in terms of innovation and working with RDAs and other businesses and so on. My personal view is that this is an extremely important and possibly under-developed role. I will finish by saying that on the Higher Education Innovation Fund, which we are in discussions on at the moment and which the Secretary of State has allocated, talking to universities that are not the research intensive ones, they enormously welcome the stimulus that the funding there has given them and hopefully in the future will give them towards making linkages with businesses and through the RDAs and so on. There is a lot going on there and we probably understand that rather less well than we do the research intensive ones. Q213 Chairman: Do you think that if you were young again and were in one of these elite institutions you would find it difficult to get funding and it might make you get on the first plane across the pond? Professor O'Nions: I was one of those people that got on the plane, without apology. I emigrated to Canada and I took a PhD in Canada. I came back to Oxford. I moved to Columbia in New York. I came back to Cambridge and have finally stayed. That was nothing to do with leaving sinking ships. It is the way in which many of my generation developed their careers and probably the present generation will also work in that scene. Q214 Chairman: When they come back will they get grants or are they still too young? Professor O'Nions: First class people are getting funded in Britain and have done for a long time. Professor Diamond: The best people are getting funded and I would also say that a number of research councils have also a view of the research career and are taking, if you like, a life course perspective on the research career and have, for example, first grant schemes for researchers who have not been funded, because sometimes it is important to get people on the ladder and started on their career. I am not quite sure if your question was about being a young person in one of the elite universities. Q215 Chairman: Yes. Professor Diamond: I think it is important that we do not miss the small pockets of real excellence that exist outside the 25 or so universities that Keith has highlighted. Q216 Chairman: So if elitism is removed tomorrow will there be less chance of them getting support? Professor Diamond: I do not think so. The research councils' perspective is very clear and that is to fund excellent research wherever one finds it. If you look at PSRC or ESRC you will find research funding in very many more universities, and indeed over 100 universities do receive research council funding. Where there are pockets of excellence and where there are particularly junior pockets of excellence we do try to enable there to be, for example, something like hubs and spokes models which have the best junior able to be part of some of the critical masses of larger centres, particularly where there is expensive equipment that is required to be used to take forward research. There are huge possibilities so long as we make that happen. Professor O'Nions: Can I take your question a bit more head-on? The measure for me is partly whether people do choose, for the right reasons, to develop part of their careers outside the UK. I think that should and always will be the case. The other side of the coin is the extent to which the UK is attractive to people from other countries to come and spend part of their career here. It is uneven but I think you can see quite a healthy situation. We are attracting some outstanding people to the UK in some areas of science. I am not saying everything is perfect but I think it is very useful now. Q217 Mr Key: But all this depends, does it not, upon growth in the research councils' budget? When the settlement following the spending review is announced, and we anticipate it within the next week, that will, will it not, show that there is going to be virtually no growth in the research councils' budget and if there is not any research council growth how can you achieve what you are now saying you wish to achieve? Professor O'Nions: Let me give you as good an indication as I can because obviously we are in a position of advising the Secretary of State on what the allocations to research councils will be. Within the next week or ten days I hope the announcement is made. I think you will see very substantial growth to research council budgets but I will address it a little bit in detail. The priorities that are set out in the ten-year framework are to sustain the infrastructure and the careers of individuals and research students and so on. Quite a large amount of the additional money going to research councils and through them to the universities will be to support full economic costs, ie, fixed volume, bringing more money in on the back of a particular grant. It will be to increase fellowships, stipends and so on. Q218 Chairman: You are addressing the problem? Professor O'Nions: There will be very considerably more money. Will the volume of research grow very greatly as a result of that? The answer is no, it will not. Q219 Dr Harris: I just want to explore more deeply the impact of dual support on the trend towards concentration. How much do you think the fact that there is this dual support system plays into this trend of research concentration in a few institutions? Professor O'Nions: I think quite greatly. Convergence of policies between the Higher Education Funding Councils to concentrate their funds selectively and to fund excellence, which I believe was the evidence that Howard Newby gave you quite recently, is that basically when you get to 5*/5 somewhere in four department he runs out of money. That in parallel with funding the best international quality research, wherever it occurs in the system, as Ian Diamond has enunciated, with the available resources and the availability of world class people, has driven it into quite a highly concentrated mode, as we have discussed. Q220 Dr Harris: If it was the view that this had gone too far or it was a bad thing to do for strategic reasons to have this concentration - I am not asking you to agree; I am just asking you to assume it as a policy decision - do you think it is possible to reverse the trend to the degree to which it is considered necessary to do so, which may not be a lot, under the current system of dual support, or do you think new structures or new streams would be required to do that? Professor O'Nions: I think it is an extremely important question and one I would like to be taken very seriously, whether you are talking about chemistry, whether you are talking about physics or whether you are talking about modern languages. We have to look very carefully at the effects of this on autonomous decisions that universities take and view what the impact of that is on the national scene. Let me just look at two sides. I will not say very much about the Higher Education Funding Councils because you have probably got the information you want there and what the Secretary of State for Education asked the funding councils to do, and the committee that is looking into strategic subjects on behalf of HEFCE under Gareth Roberts. I will just move to the research council side and I think it will be very clear in the allocations in a week or so's time. Well before SRO report we were looking very carefully at what we called health of disciplines, ie, those subject areas which were going in the wrong direction for the perceived need of international quality or the national need. This has been addressed. We will respond in the allocations to the priorities of the research councils. To give you a flavour of where some of the very strong arguments were made, there were significant concerns around the areas of the physical sciences, some aspects of engineering and so on in health of disciplines, and I think you will see that that has been responded to and there are others too, in the allocations. The answer is, absolutely yes. Clearly my responsibility is more on the research side so we are responding there. I think there is both funding and structure in the Higher Education Funding Councils for them to take a considered view. That is the answer to a hypothetical question. Q221 Dr Harris: I just want to make sure I understood your answer. If it was considered that something would have to be done to reverse this trend towards research concentration do you think the structure is adequate despite or because of dual support and that there is enough flow of funding in the flexible pipeline you are describing of health of disciplines, not only flexible but supposedly tasked towards these issues in order to achieve a policy change in respect of concentration, if that was what was required? Professor O'Nions: As you repeated the question I have either understood it better or it had a slightly different twist to it. If it is a matter of reversing the concentration all the statements that I made about responding to health of disciplines in a research mode would not necessarily do anything about concentration into numbers of universities because we are responding to the health of that subject in a research centre across the nation, and it may or may not result in a distribution between numbers of universities. When one looks at it from a Higher Education Funding Council point of view, where you are looking primarily at undergraduate teaching and support of that, then their ability to intervene is I think really dependent upon views that ministers have yet to take and I would not like to second-guess the work that they have been doing. Is the machinery there on the Higher Education Funding Councils? Wait and see is my answer. Q222 Dr Harris: Let us say that ministers came to you, and I am not asking you to pre-empt that; I am giving you a hypothetical situation, what advice would you give them? Sir Keith, with the dual support system is it your view, and we will be asking HEFCE what they think of you as well, that the structure here is sufficient if you change policy to reverse this move towards research concentration or would you be advising - and obviously this is only general policy - that one would have to really change the structure if that was the path that ministers wanted to go down? Professor O'Nions: If the question was, do I think it would be a good policy to reverse the research concentration in our universities through the behaviour of the research councils such that - Q223 Dr Harris: And HEFCE. Professor O'Nions: Let me just deal with one. There is a disconnect. They are very much arm's length from one another - then my advice on research council funding would be no because I think a policy where you respond to the best people, wherever they are and wherever they happen to be in the system, is the right one and it is the only one that is sensible for the research councils. When you come to the Higher Education Funding Councils that are looking at departments and their performance and so on, obviously they have some different levers available to them. My answer would be no, frankly, on the allocation of research funds of research councils. In terms of Higher Education Funding Councils all sorts of other things are happening and without digressing some quite different things are beginning to happen in Scotland which are rather interesting. Q224 Dr Harris: My second question is around whether there is an vicious cycle. If again one takes the view that strategically we ought not to have such a concentration because we might want to broaden and deepen at some point, and we cannot do that if we are very concentrated already, do you see the danger that some institutions that are falling behind on getting funding from either arm simply do not have the critical mass ever to be able to catch up again because they just do not have the research infrastructure if they are not getting the RAE funding, such as the step? Again, if you were advising about the need to have flexibility in capacity would that be something that we would need to change on that basis? Professor O'Nions: I understand your point and I understand the question, but what this would be appealing to is, do we have the wherewithal or the desirability to move away from the situation where 55 per cent of our research active staff returned in research assessment exercises are now in 5*/5 departments in relatively large concentrations? To reverse that is I think very undesirable at the present time. A large amount of funds may be able to do that but to move away from the international excellence that that has achieved to distribute the things more widely is a policy which would be curious to follow after all the benefits in terms of international competitiveness and career structures that the selective funding and "concentration" have achieved. Q225 Dr Harris: The other part of this vicious cycle is that, given that many research councils, quite rightly, one might say, require evidence of multidisciplinary cross-departmental working, and indeed that is attractive and recommended, and that is clearly easier to do within an institution than across institutions, whatever anyone says, is it right that isolated departments that are excellent and are still getting the research council grants find it harder to do that at the same level of excellence because they do not have the mass of well-funded other departments around them with which to interact in a multidisciplinary way to attract these cross-cutting research grants that research councils are so keen on? Professor Diamond: I take your point but I do feel that many of the research councils have in place strategies which enable the opportunities for those kinds of links to happen. You simply do not great interdisciplinary research happening by enabling people to just get together in five minutes. You have to enable the conversations to take place over time. Research councils do fund seminar series, for example, which enable the best researchers, wherever they are from, to come together, to talk, to start to get these interdisciplinary conversations going. While I take your point that it may be easier to get that across the same institution, we are not in this country in a position where the geography is so enormous that we cannot enable conversations to start and we have, through for example the development of the e-side(?) the ability for councils to work together across universities and very many do. I think you will find a very high proportion of many of the research council grants go to colleagues from more than one university. Q226 Dr Iddon: Do you see any need for a strong regional research presence? Professor O'Nions: I turns out that most regions in the UK do have a presence of 5* and 5 departments. I do not think we have a full enough analysis of the situation to know whether it would have a deleterious effect on a particular region if it did not have one or two 5* departments in strategically important subjects. If you asked the question, is there a regional role for the university system to engage with commerce and innovation and so on, most certainly yes, and particularly when you widen it away from the so-called elite or non-research intensive universities, but I will not repeat the same points that I made to the Chairman at the beginning of this evidence. Q227 Dr Iddon: Professor Diamond, do you have any difficulty in squaring your commitment to the research councils funding excellence wherever you find it with promoting a regional research presence? Professor Diamond: No, we do not. We work very closely with the RDAs and I believe over the next couple of years we will be working more closely with them. Different councils sit on, for example, on the science committees of different RDAs and where appropriate regional activity happens. In some of the research councils research precisely on regional economy is a terribly important thing. I think it is important that we do have regional strategies. I think it is deeply important for this country that we interact with the RDAs and the regions but I think it is a real problem that that disengages with the policy that we really must fund the very best science work where we find it. Q228 Dr Iddon: Professor O'Nions, you were in praise of the regional clustering of universities and businesses in the innovation process as being good for the economy. What evidence have you got to demonstrate that this does actually work successfully and are you carrying out any investigations to justify this? Professor O'Nions: That is an important question. Given the very small number of years for which this innovation fund has been running, and it is only a few, I think it is too early for us to hold out great successes of innovation and green shoots and so on. Probably what we are looking at, and I am talking a great deal to universities in various parts of the country at the moment, is evidence of a high level of activity and also enthusiasm for that engagement. Rationally at this stage it is that level of activity and the enthusiasm with which that is taking place on both sides, the university side and the business side, which is what we would appeal to. Yes, I agree. At some point, after sustained investment in these areas, we actually have to be very clear about what it is delivering. On this particular one we are still a few years away from a reasonable expectation of seeing measurable economic benefit. Professor Diamond: There is some really interesting ESRC research from the University of Nottingham on the best practice for spinning out, so there is research going on about it. I absolutely agree with what Keith is saying, that it will take a few more years before we can properly judge the economic impact of that. One can see initially a number of high profile successes. Q229 Dr Iddon: Given that the regional programme is successful are you convinced that there are enough jobs, proper graduate jobs, in the regions for graduates that emerge from those universities? Professor O'Nions: I can speak on a couple of subjects where I have information but I am not sure how long the Chairman wants to persist. Q230 Chairman: One example will do. Professor O'Nions: Perhaps I can take physics and chemistry as a combined example. I was anticipating that this may be where you would focus. We know a lot about the supply side and all the statistical information on that, but on the demand side by business, ie, are there enough people in those areas and are there jobs, again, we do not have absolutely thorough demographic analysis. As a centre we have not considered doing this, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence through the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Physics and a recent report which PricewaterhouseCooper did for both of those organisations and there is no question that they are employed very quickly. If anything there is occasionally on an anecdotal basis a shortage of supply of people of the right calibre. Given the percentages of graduates from that who go purely into physics or chemistry type employment, I do not think getting jobs is any problem and in fact their lifetime salary is very substantially higher than in any other area of graduates. If you would like more detail I am very happy to write and give you the information. Q231 Dr Iddon: The introduction of top-up fees has provided something of a price barrier to students and something of an incentive to study closer to home if they can. Do you think that the regional undergraduate science provision is sufficient to cater for this possibility or do we have to accept that students are going to have to leave their region if they want to do chemistry or physics or whatever? Professor Diamond: I think we very simply have to look at the demographics of what the demand will be. It is not absolutely clear at the moment that there will be large numbers of students who will be forced to travel who would not have been forced to travel in the first place. You would need to study that in further detail. Q232 Paul Farrelly: Variable tuition fees have just been mentioned. I have got a concern about the possibility that the pressure which is already within the system from the research assessment exercise that we are already seeing may be reinforced by the introduction of a limited market. For example, those institutions best able to command the top fees of £3,000 or more in the future are likely to be the ones that succeed even more in the future rather than those that are able to charge lesser amounts. Do you have any concerns that there may be self-reinforcing effects or have you seen any evidence in the way that scientists position themselves in the future market that this is already taking place? Professor O'Nions: I do not have a deep analysis but if you ask the question have I seen any evidence of that, at this stage no, I have not. Am I concerned about it? Taking my research council hat and all the rest of it, I am quite concerned as to what sort of behaviours this may drive. We have to wait and see. My experience in most things to do with education and science is that when you change the rules a little bit it may be totally well-intentioned and so on but one often induces some behaviour which one might not have anticipated. All I can say is that we have to look at this and watch it very carefully. Q233 Paul Farrelly: At which point do you think it might be appropriate to take stock and produce some kind of meaningful analysis? At what point in time? Professor O'Nions: Within the United Kingdom we have several games in play at the same time. We have a different game in England than what is going on in Scotland so we will have the national comparisons there. I suspect that two or three or four years down the road we should start to see some of the trends emerging through applications and we will have to watch it very carefully. Professor Diamond: I suspect this is an area which is going to be researched fairly heavily by funders to ensure that there are some things like milestone check times just to see how things are going. Q234 Dr Turner: To what extent should skill shortages be taken into account when the government sets its higher education policy? Do you think skills shortages justify the intervention of the government in the affairs of individual universities? I do not have to remind you of recent examples. Professor O'Nions: I think skill shortages are something governments have to take seriously. As I said, in effect we have been looking at skill shortages and health of disciplines in a number of areas. Let me again allude to one that should appear and I expect will appear in the allocations of funding councils. Research councils have expressed their concerns as to whether we have an adequate skill set to support the present White Paper on energy, Keeping All the Options Open, across the piste. I think that is a legitimate area not to intervene in but to respond to those skills. That is relatively easy and proper to do with research councils. Intervening in the affairs of an individual university and maintaining their autonomy is obviously a much more sensitive area but if the collective decisions are autonomous decisions and are driving things not within the national interest, we have to have a response there. I think everybody would want to stop short of intervening in the affairs directly of a university. That would be a very big change for us, but I think there are probably other ways of loading the dice and shifting the playing field. I think that is a responsibility of government. Q235 Chairman: But have we got target numbers in mind? How many plumbers do we need? How many doctors do we need? I can never find figures. Do you know figures? Professor O'Nions: Even on physics and chemistry where you might have expected I had done a reasonable amount of homework in advance of this meeting, I come clean and say that we cannot go very much beyond the anecdotal evidence of whether supply is meeting demand and what the demand is. It is not bad news but we do not have from those particular areas that sort of analysis. Those numbers go up and down but I do not think we have good trend numbers. Q236 Chairman: So we do not have a national plan of how many physicists and chemists and medical students we need or what? Professor O'Nions: Not that I have noticed. I believe we should look at the very least at the feasibility of doing research in that area which gives us an outcome that is robust and has any meaning. Q237 Chairman: Do you not find this very worrying, that you do not know why you are educating people for jobs? Professor O'Nions: With respect, I think we know why we are educating people. Q238 Chairman: Yes, but I mean for jobs. Professor O'Nions: There is not a one-to-one correlation between what people do in a degree and what sort of job they do. People in particle physics and astronomy go off and do other sorts of things and are much welcomed by their employers. There are numerous employers who will say, "We actually quite like hiring somebody that has come out of an astrophysics undergraduate degree" or this, that and the other. I think it is a very difficult thing to do. Q239 Chairman: There is a real contradiction here, Ian, is there not, because you believe in telling me numbers, do you not? I thought I saw it in your evidence. Professor Diamond: We are very comfortable that at a research council level if our task is to ensure the future health of the research base then we can start to make some estimates of the numbers of researchers (or academics more broadly defined) that would be required to maintain a healthy research base. We have given you the paper which RCUK has put together. That is one aspect of this entire question. We do have a pretty good handle on the demand for the academic research end. That particular paper which you have seen is being extended and over the summer we will be taking into account the business and industry demand for research level people so that we can talk about that. That is at the PhD level. I do believe that there is potentially a need to take this question further forward and to ask some questions about whether you have likely demand for people with different skills. That is a different piece of research and a piece of research that would need to be done. That is taking, if you like, the demand for undergraduates with particular skills. At the higher level that is work that has been done for researchers and is currently being extended for industry. Q240 Dr Harris: Keith, you said that the evidence from employers about skill shortages was anecdotal even with physics and chemistry. Are you taking too narrow a definition of employers because I would have thought that a group of employers would be all secondary school science departments where there is very clear data evidence for skill shortage. Should we not be thinking more widely than industry when looking at the health of science and is there not good data to suggest that we are desperately short of science graduates? Professor O'Nions: I accept that criticism totally and I was taking that more narrowly. Where we have got evidence which is a bit beyond the anecdotal we have talked to the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry and organisations of that sort which are representing the professions, and you are absolutely right: if you look at where these graduates go at PhD level and so on, teaching and schools and that sector does have a very big demand and clearly there are not enough people. That goes beyond the anecdotal. That is fact. In terms of employment outside that sector, whether it is people who are employed as a chemist or a physicist or a pharmacist or go into sectors where those skills are welcome, then I have nothing to add to what Ian has said. Professor Diamond: I think we would all agree, for example, that in the IOP data that 60 per cent of all physics graduates should end up as schoolteachers to fill the demand is hard level data that we should accept. Having said that, there is more than just a supply issue from the higher education system that we are going to have to address. It has to be attractive to become a physics teacher in a school and there is a whole set of questions there that we really do have to get on board. Q241 Mr Key: Chairman, we know that 46.1 per cent of academic staff in civil engineering, 45.6 per cent of academic staff in mathematics are aged 50 or over. Please can you give us your take on the retirement time bomb? Professor Diamond: I have spoken to you twice before on this. It is something we take extremely seriously. Anyone who gives a presentation on just about anything at the moment sees my graphs on this. It is a critical issue and it is one where I suspect the allocations process will see a number of initiatives which are being aimed at addressing this. I can speak for the SRC where it is likely that our strategic plan will particularly say things about areas such as economics or social science where the sorts of percentages are not unlike those you have just described. Q242 Dr Turner: There is evidence that suggests that the UK does have sufficient science graduates but what it does not have is a business sector that has created sufficient demand for them. What do you think government could take to encourage demand for science graduates for employers? If there is no demand for science graduates then the incentive for students to enter science degrees is clearly undermined. Professor Diamond: That is a fair point. If there were streams of science graduates in the unemployed queue then we would have to worry but I do think it is important that government and indeed the research councils engage with industry to identify what the demand is and to encourage it more. I think Keith probably will agree that the science investment framework, the achievement of which does require an increased engagement with industry and the funders' forum, has meetings with industry to ensure that starts to happen, is an essential part of this agenda. Professor O'Nions: I am looking at the precise numbers. Looking at production of graduates in the UK, both graduates in the various sciences and PhDs, the numbers have grown very considerably. We have gone back just over the last ten years and our total number of science and engineering graduates has grown very substantially. I can give you the precise numbers if you want them, and so have our PhD graduates also grown. It is a fact though that most of that growth is in the life sciences with a very big increase in the biomedical and life sciences, which has been very healthy, and a large number of women have also gone into that which is good news, so there is a very strong perception that there are jobs opportunities both in the public and private sectors. There has been a relative decrease in physical sciences and engineering over the same period and so I think probably your interpretation of that is correct. Also, in terms of PhD output, there is an overall decrease in chemistry and it is fairly even in physics. We have seen a big growth overall but it is very strongly concentrated at the biomedical/life science end. The point you made certainly applies to the physical sciences. Q243 Dr Harris: Another point that has been made by industry is that although there are ample science graduates as far as they are concerned, they do have concern about whether they have the right practical skills for their purposes. What do you suggest universities can do about that? Professor O'Nions: Where practical education is deficient in both research and vocational mode, whether it be in life sciences or whether it be in laboratory chemistry, then I think it is for universities to listen very carefully to that and respond accordingly. Q244 Dr Iddon: We saw some students recently who felt that science careers were not as lucrative or presented as stable a prospect as some other careers. Do you think they are right? Professor O'Nions: You could ask for that in all sorts of ways. If we look at the biomedical and life sciences end of the prospects in the pharmaceutical industry in this country, which is one of our very powerful sectors, that might not be true. If you go to some other areas probably people realise that the way to the top in many business is not to try and build up a scientific career but to shift to the management side quite quickly. I think perceptions probably differ a great deal from one area to another, depending upon their view of where the UK economy is going, and over a generation we have seen a pretty big shift from manufacturing to services. The services sector offers very many exciting careers for many people. With some exceptions it is rather less R&D intensive than aerospace or pharmaceuticals. Q245 Dr Jack: On the other hand the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry have recently published a survey which they have carried out which shows that science graduates earn more than their counterparts in the arts and humanities. Why do you think that is the case? Professor O'Nions: I hope they are comparing like with like. I have also seen that and I think that over a career it is something like £187,000 higher overall salary for a PhD graduate in physical sciences relative to an arts and humanities graduate. Assuming that they are comparing like with like, I think it probably shows the salary differentials that are often the case. At least half of our physical science graduates go into business and into industry and salaries there have become more competitive. Professor Diamond: That was at PhD level. A very high proportion of the arts and humanities graduates go into academia. I think you commented that there are relative differentials there and elsewhere. Q246 Dr Iddon: Do you know what percentage of science graduates enter into a career in science as distinct from going elsewhere? Professor O'Nions: I do, but if you will bear with me and ask a different question, I will come back to that and find you the number. Q247 Chairman: Professor O'Nions, you can send it in to us if you like. Professor O'Nions: Okay. Q248 Dr Iddon: My last question is do you think it is possible for science graduates to earn as much in a science career as they can by going into a city career, for example? Professor Diamond: There is a fundamental caveat which you have to ask and that is to say how successful are they going to be? If you go into the city and if you are hugely successful, you might make more than in a science career. Then there is the distribution, if you look at the average scientist who is going into a decent career, for example the pharmaceutical industry, then I suspect the career earnings would be similar to the average person going into the financial sector and they may even have a more secure job. I think I have to say we need to look very carefully at the data, but it is not necessarily the case that the differentials are huge. I am happy to see what data exists. Professor O'Nions: Of all the PhDs who graduated in physical science and engineering in 2003, 79 per cent of them were in jobs in 2004, which is very good news, and 42 per cent were in jobs where they were in research roles and of those about half were in the educational system. Q249 Chairman: Professor O'Nions, I have seen dozens of figures like that, but they only last for one year, then students disappear into the world and we do not have a second year, a fifth year or a tenth year. Professor O'Nions: You are absolutely right. That is first destination data, but it is the data which we have. It is extremely difficult. What I would love to have is second and tertiary data and see how people's careers develop and see what value added they have. It is very, very hard to get that information, but it is the sort of thing we must collect progressively. Professor Diamond: There is some research by Peter Elias, at the University of Warrick, which I do not have the results of on the tip of my tongue, but I will let you have them, which uses some of the very rich cohort data that we have to answer some of those questions. Chairman: If you think it is worth going into science, then prove it to us from the data you have got. Q250 Dr Iddon: We were talking earlier about the concentration of research in a fairly limited number of universities. Is there any evidence now being accrued that students coming out of those particular universities attract higher career salaries than students coming out of the other universities? Professor O'Nions: If there is data on that, with apology, I am afraid I do not know the answer to that question. Q251 Dr Iddon: It does not exist at the moment? Professor O'Nions: If it does, I have not come across it. I think we should drop you a note to say yea or nay on that. Q252 Paul Farrelly: The issue of science departments closing landed right on my doorstep in Newcastle-under-Lyme, before Christmas because Keele University became one of those that is proposing to close its physics department and had some difficulties in sustaining its chemistry department previously. My concern is not research, although it would be lovely to have lots of five-star rated research departments at the universities, my concern is teaching. There was a possibility that the students in my area, who wanted or had to stay local, were not going to have, in North Staffordshire, any courses where they could learn physics as well as other subjects. I want to touch on an aspect of the White Paper, which has not been developed, which is the creation and the obstacles of the creation of teaching-only departments in science. What is your view on that and how does the system work? Is it stacked for or against the creation of good teaching departments? If the system can be improved, particularly in terms of funding, what can we do to create good teaching-only departments? Professor O'Nions: I completely share your concerns and I worry as much as you do about only being able to teach if you have a simple connectivity to world class research. I believe that is going to mean teaching will take place in about the same number of departments where research is going on, which is a couple of tens at that sort of level, and it is extremely important. I think when we moved to a system of 130 universities, which we have at the moment, very often it took some time for universities to figure out where they were going to go and whether the whole thing had to be academics spending 50 per cent of the time doing research and 50 per cent of the time teaching. It is absolutely clear that is not a situation which exists or, indeed, could be sustained into the future. Your question as to how we have good teaching in departments which are not research intensive at the international or even national level, in some cases, is immensely important. There are many good worked examples in the US. I think it is an area where we have to focus very hard and we need very good quality teaching in universities which are not research intensive. It is the way forward. Graham Davis had a look at that, but there is a lot more work to do. I really think it is a key point. Q253 Paul Farrelly: Clearly in this respect, following the White Paper we have to focus on the variable tuition fees and the rest of the White Paper, certainly in the public eye, in terms of creating good teaching standing alone from good research to my mind is not being pursued. Do you agree the Government must do more to pursue this? Professor O'Nions: I do and I think there is a cultural thing here. Looking at some of the private and state funded universities in the US, they are very proud to attract an extremely good core bench across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and so on. They have first class teaching, they attract good staff and they stop at the Masters level of teaching. They hold their heads high and are proud of what they do and in no sense do they feel they are second rate because they are not research intensive. I do not think we are quite at that point yet in the UK, where, being a non-research intensive university which has a very high quality of teaching, all of those are simultaneously holding their heads high and confident in the way they are going forward. You may find many exceptions to that, but culturally I do not think we are quite at that point. Professor Diamond: I believe what we have to do is be able to celebrate those departments and ensure the proper links exist between those departments and the research intensives so it is perfectly possible and perfectly acceptable for students who have gone through their initial training there to then move to the research intensive universities, for example to do a PhD or whatever, and the links exist and there is a kind of interaction. Where there are academics who wish to develop a research activity, even though they are working in a teaching intensive university, those links exist as well to enable that to happen. There are many examples of how that can happen. I would agree with Keith about the United States of America and I believe there are some examples here if we search for them. In my view, what we need to do is make the point that there are not just some examples they have been searching for, but there are a number of examples. Q254 Mr McWalter: Thank you, Chairman. Apologies to you and to our witnesses for an afternoon where I have been scudding in and out. I have a particular interest in mathematics, as Professor Diamond will know, and if I may, I would like to ask you a question. Professor Diamond, you know in your area there are simply not enough people with the appropriate mathematical statistical skills to be able to do some of the work which you would like to see going on, yet, at the same time, we read that the mathematics department at Hull University is about to shut. The reason why is because the Dual Support System has somehow not come up with the funds to allow that activity to subsist and yet, if that was being provided and if people were going to a department like that, which historically has always had a very good record, that might be providing us with just the people with the skills that could then integrate their work with social science and do some of the work which, Professor Diamond, you acknowledge to be absolutely desirable. There is a direct contact between losing these departments and losing the capacity to do the sort of research we need. I am very surprised to hear from the two of you that you are fairly laid back about departmental closures in this sort of system. Professor Diamond: I would not say we are laid back about the departmental closures, what we say, very clearly, is we have to be able to attract the right number of students and the right number of graduates. I would submit that the whole issue of mathematics is a very, very complex system. At the beginning we need to make sure there are students in schools and so mathematics has to be taught properly and taught in an exciting way that people want to do it at an undergraduate level. Within the undergraduate arena, many mathematic departments, in an intra-university funding public system, have never been able to fund themselves off their own students, the way their funding has existed is through service teaching; service teaching to biology or to economics or to somewhere else. If that increasingly is drawn away, then it becomes very much more difficult for an individual mathematics department to fund itself and then the funding looks precarious. We must work to ensure that kind of opportunity still exists. It is not just a simple matter of saying, "...therefore mathematicians must teach service courses ..." because there has to be ownership of the mathematician to make that exciting because it has to be seen to the social scientists being taught their mathematics by the mathematics professors that it is a really exciting and important thing and there is ownership there. Then at the research council level there is the question of making priorities and highlighting the need for really exciting research challenges which will bring mathematic graduates in and for the mathematic students in schools to see this as exciting. You will find the research councils in a number of cases are now moving into schools to try and develop activity and to make it exciting to young people and to say: "Look, a career in mathematics research is an exciting thing". When the applications run out you are likely also to see a number of prioritising activities from a number of councils, potentially including my own, which will prioritise some of these areas to try and make a mathematics career in research broadly defined "extremely exciting". It is absolutely crucial we do that. Q255 Dr Harris: Do you think university science departments are closing or are threatened with closure by a shortage of student demand to go there? Is there a lack of applicants? Professor O'Nions: I think there are two things: in some cases it is very clearly a lack of applicants, and just to go to mathematics, Ian is right, the problem is primarily in schools in mathematics. It is 25 per cent down in the last four or five years of candidates taking A levels and when you have got a backdrop of such a reduction and the demand is dropping, clearly it is going to have a big impact. In other areas it may not be just demand, there may be other questions about perceived affordability of teaching that subject within a university, where it is making decisions about the amount of income it has got and the cost of teaching particular subjects and its aspirations for research assessment type exercises and so on. I think it is two drivers, but in mathematics it is demand which is a huge problem. There is an enormous drop in the number of people doing A level mathematics. Q256 Dr Harris: Do you share the view that the absence of teachers in secondary schools with science degrees makes it more difficult and has the effect of having less encouragement on students to do sciences, particularly women teachers or women students in the physics and chemistry subjects, whereas if there were as many women going into science degrees as men, you would not have the shortage that you postulated? Is that a particular problem in your view? Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: It is a problem, I agree. Professor Diamond: Absolutely no doubt. I would just say that it is not just in physics and chemistry but it is also in mathematics and subjects such as economics. Q257 Dr Harris: What would you say to the view, if you were again advising people, that graduates with higher levels of debt are more likely to go into well-paid jobs than less well-paid public sector jobs, particularly if they think their career earnings may be reduced because of family commitments, and therefore they will be paying off debt for longer? Let us assume these are sensible people who can count and work out the impact of debt and the impact of higher salaries and paying off that debt. Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I think I have to give you a completely honest answer and say I will see what evidence we have got, and what analysis there is. Professor Diamond: We really need an evidence base to answer that question. Q258 Dr Harris: Are you saying it is your understanding that the system of increasing debt has been introduced without that evidence on public sector jobs, particularly in science, being produced? Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: You cannot have the evidence within the UK because we have switched from one regime to another, so you have to go outside the UK and look at that situation. Once you go out of the UK where students are accumulating large amounts of lifetime debt, you really have to go to the United States, comparing people in America, relative to their income, expectations and lifestyles, and how employees deal with debt situations. I hope it was looked at carefully by politicians here in the UK, but it does not necessarily mean that even the US experience will directly translate into this country. Q259 Dr Harris: Let us say you are bright - and this is hypothetical now ----- Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: It is totally hypothetical just for the occasion, I accept! Q260 Dr Harris: You are a top student and you end up having paid for fees and having £12‑15,000 of debt, and you are offered a salary in the City, with your maths degree, of £25,000, with a joining-up fee of a capital amount to pay off the debts, or they say, "no, go and teach another year on whatever student teachers get and then go and be a maths teacher in the public sector or even a maths lecturer, Heaven forfend! What would you do, if you are bright? Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The playing field is so tilted - and I accept that - that you would need a pretty strong power of conviction that teaching was the right thing to do with your life, rather than going the alternative route. Q261 Dr Harris: Finally, what about the question of incentives? Do you have any evidence that the incentives that are Government-sponsored, for example with bursaries and post amelioration schemes, if you like, are working? Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Only anecdotal. I do not have analysis of that. Q262 Dr Harris: It is not your direct responsibility, but I thought in policy terms you would have an interest as someone looking beyond anecdote for the debt. Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I certainly have an interest, and all of my good colleagues sitting here in the one-and-nine-pennies will get some information to you. Chairman: The answer I often get is, "get a well-paid job and you do not have to pay anything back". That is the Government line. Q263 Paul Farrelly: It is clear - again on my doorstep, taking Keele as an example - that closure is not just affecting science departments. In my area students locally cannot be taught the classic French and German combination, and therefore that will impact on the people coming to do French. Given that, is there any reason why science should be a reason for special pleading? Are science departments, because of the system, under more pressure than other departments; or is the problem across the board? Professor Diamond: It is worth remembering that Charles Clarke, the former Minister of Education, sent a letter to HEFCE on strategic studies, which included modern languages. It is our understanding that the HEFCE board have added, in addition, quantitative social science to those strategic subjects. The prescription of the research councils is that that is entirely appropriate, and I would also have to say that AHRB, BBSRC, EPSRC and ESRC are all currently in conversations with the funding councils about ensuring that there are initiatives to ensure the health of disciplines in their areas. Those with AHRB, BBSRC, do include modern languages, as you describe, because it will be important - not just modern languages, but languages more generally. It is important that we have that base if we are to compete in the global economy that we find ourselves in. Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I agree exactly with that: modern languages is just as important as sciences. The only point I would add is that in relation to teaching in engineering and physical sciences, if you are going to respond to the point made earlier and have the practice part of it properly taught in laboratories and so on, it does quickly become very expensive when you add in the extra infrastructure required. Q264 Mr McWalter: You say it is very important but students are just going in the market now, and they do not want to do any subject that involves difficulty - if they cannot read it immediately, whether it is maths or German. Is it not about time you took a much more strategic view of these things and were more emphatic about the skills that are needed and make dispositions to ensure that our universities respond not to the market but to the needs of the country? Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I am very content that we should respond to skills requirements and so on, and we have had a to and fro on that which has been extremely healthy. However, I would toss the ball back and say that you can do so much of that demand end of things in terms of jobs, but the problems we are talking about here are really pretty deeply rooted in the schools and the system of education. In terms of mathematics, we cannot deal with that at this end of the world, with a 25 per cent drop in people taking A-Levels, and there is a real question whether mathematics has to be taught more broadly as part of a system. There are fundamental questions about A-Levels. Q265 Chairman: If there is an ailing science department, should the Government bale them out - yes or no? They are going to close it: would you bale them out? Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: In general, no, but if there is a specific need that is identified and there is a context of a national need, then one may make a strategic choice, but as a general rule, no. Q266 Chairman: Why should we not bale them out Ian? Professor Diamond: Firstly, universities are autonomous and make their own decisions, and, secondly, we would say we have to simply ensure that there is a real national provision, and that is what we are trying very hard to do. Where we can identify that there are disciplines that require first aid or in emerging disciplines where there will be a need for demand, that is where we must take strategic decisions to ensure happening, and in so doing I cannot see that baling out that department, unless there are contextual and real reasons ----- Q267 Chairman: So what are you going to do if more departments are closing? It is predicted that lots of departments are going to close. This is not the end of it. We are getting into a crisis situation with science departments, or am I exaggerating? Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: You might be exaggerating slightly Chairman, at the risk of disagreeing. If we look at chemistry and physics, there are two closures in chemistry that are quite exceptional in the long term, i.e., grade 4 departments, King's Cross and Exeter. The other departments that have closed over the years are mostly physics departments that have been grade one and grade two departments. We must fully accept that we have not got the deeper demographic analysis to give a response to the simple question ----- Chairman: Come on, Keith, the pattern is happening across the country. There is Newcastle; there is Hull. Mr McWalter: Swansea, Hertfordshire. Q268 Chairman: It is growing, and you are staring at it and doing nothing about it. Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I do not accept we are doing nothing about it because where levers are in my hands or Ian's hands, we are actually doing quite a lot. We are looking very much at the research end, and I think we are behaving in a proactive and very sensible way. I would not accept that we are doing nothing about it. Are we concerned about departments closing and not understanding fully the implications of the continuation of that trend? Yes, I share the concerns, and I would join your appeal and prepare to play a full part in seeing whether we can make robust, sensible analysis forecasts around the continuation ----- Q269 Chairman: Okay, well, we will see you on the next picket line in that case. Thank you very much. Memoranda submitted by Research Councils UK, South East Regional Development Agencies, Association of University Research and Industrial Links Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Bob Bushaway, Association for University Research and Industry Links, Mr Nick Buckland, Vice Chair, South West of England Regional Development Agency, and Mr Ed Metcalfe, Head of Science, Technology, Entrepreneurship and Management, South East England Development Agency, examined.
Chairman: Thank you very much for sitting through the last session. Thank you for coming. Q270 Dr Harris: What evidence do you think there is for a link between the volume of science and in a sense the volume of science graduates - assuming that is associated with the volume of science-based work in industry being done in the country - and economic performance? Mr Metcalfe: If we compare ourselves with other countries, and we aspire to have a stronger research and development base in the country, there seems to be quite a direct correlation between the R&D investment in the country and the number of researchers in the country, so we do not have as many researchers as other countries maybe. If we do not have as many researchers as other countries do, then it does raise a question as to whether we are going to continue to be competitive. Q271 Dr Harris: So do you believe that having more researchers and therefore more research is a prerequisite or important component of economic growth? Mr Metcalfe: I think it would be dangerous not to assume that. Q272 Dr Harris: So RDA money is best spent in respect of economic growth on science and research investment than say arts and museums simply from a measure of economic growth? Mr Metcalfe: We have both a regeneration and sustainability faction and also a need to promote the knowledge of funding within the region. If you like, it is left hand and right hand and we have to do both those things. Q273 Dr Harris: You heard the previous session where it was not clear whether there was any good data, as opposed to anecdotes, which is not really data and certainly not information; but there is not good evidence about what the shortage is. There is a feeling that we do not have enough. Do you have, from your knowledge, what the appropriate proportion is? Mr Metcalfe: We know when we ask our companies that they will not make predictions. They will not say how many workers they will need in five or ten years' time. The best evidence we have is comparing ourselves with our international competitors. The OECD data, which we quoted in our references, suggests we are quite a long way behind. One interpretation of that is that we need about another 50,000 researchers if we are going to match a 2.5 per cent GDA target of expenditure in R&D over the next 10 years, so we need another 5,000 researchers per year on that measure. It is not just a question of standing still, it is a question of increasing the number of researchers. Mr Buckland: We are looking at trying to get that data, and looking at the various key sectors that the RDAs are working with. We are asking those companies who are engaging in those sectors what their requirements are. It is extremely difficult to get exact data from them. Q274 Dr Harris: The second part of my question is about the role that government should play, because government has an interest in economic growth, and you have just agreed that the number of people feeding through into science active areas is important, and government funds in this country the bulk of the level 4 training and higher of scientists, so you would have thought that government has an important interest in managing the system. Certainly, for medical graduates there is a quota, meaning there is a controlled number, and then there is a controlled number through. Yet whenever anyone mentions having more control of how the Government spends its money in universities in order to achieve government policy, which it has been voted to do, people say, "get away; it is university independence; how dare you!" What is your perspective on that debate? Mr Metcalfe: The evidence of history on teacher training is that it is very difficult to predict what we will need, so control must not be over prescriptive. I think we probably have to use carrots rather than have very specific targets. It is not just asking the universities to take on more science undergraduates; the problem is much earlier and is about getting 11-year olds engaged in being interested in science, and 16-year olds beginning to make the right career choices, and all the way through to graduates. There are a number of choices that they will make. Just saying to universities "you must produce more scientists" is not really going to answer the problem. Q275 Dr Harris: Is that right, because I still have a very good argument to say that government should not say to the people it funds almost 100 per cent for a policy that everyone is agreed with, that they do not want more places for - I do not want to pick on media studies, but let us use that - they want more places for scientists. They will pay, and they will pay for scientists, not for media studies. A company, when it has a training programme for the shop floor does not say, "we will let our employees choose what they want to do, and if they want to do something that is less useful to us that is fine because we want our training department to be autonomous and independent". No, they do not say that. They say: "This is what we want; this is what we have paid for and we are going to measure you on these outcomes. How you deliver it may be up to you, but that is what we want." Please argue with that! Mr Metcalfe: I can understand the argument, and it is very tempting, but I think it needs to be done through influence and encouragement rather than giving very specific targets, because I am not sure that we know what the targets are. Q276 Dr Harris: I did not mention targets. I just meant that you require them to do it more. Mr Buckland: A good example is in answer to the closure of Exeter's chemistry department. Across the region in the south west we have worked with HERDA and HEFCE in looking at the level of chemistry provision across the region, and that has been taken up by Bath and Bristol; so the level of offer within the region is still at the same level. It is also the fact that the level of offer from Exeter in terms of its science base is about the same because the biosciences, medical sciences and physics are available there. It is done through working together and in partnership. Q277 Dr Turner: There is some evidence to suggest that employers are not making the best use of graduates that are available to them. To what extent do you think this is the case? Do you think there is a problem there? Mr Buckland: I see no evidence of that. Q278 Dr Turner: It would be consistent with the criticisms of the Lambert report that businesses are not making enough potential connections with universities. If they are not doing that, you would not be surprised to find that they were not making the best use of graduates either. Dr Bushaway: We would certainly agree, in AURIL, with the Lambert conclusions that there were demand-side problems on graduate recruitment and employment particularly in the science/technology areas as far as employers were concerned, and particularly, as Lambert identifies, there is a problem with the smaller sized business where, if they are not already a hi-tech spin-out, there simply is not the experience of graduate recruitment. Q279 Chairman: In the States, when they recruit students, industry fund the open days, put the mums and dads up in houses and so on, and their whole emphasis is to try and keep those people that go through their system in that region so that the skills do not migrate elsewhere. In every county I go to, they are always complaining about skills migrating to London or somewhere. What do you say about that? What are you doing about that? Mr Metcalfe: It depends whether you are talking about undergraduates or postgraduates. We lose undergraduates to other regions, but we have a net in-flow of postgraduates. Some of the regions have developed graduate retention schemes, which are to encourage graduates, particularly with SMEs, which are the most important group to get to. There is evidence from work that East Midlands have done that that has been quite beneficial. It is still at early stages. There are schemes in place. The multi-nationals by and large will recruit wherever they can get ----- 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-linked 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 AWMB regional development agency, 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, in industry 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 longitudinal data. Even though we have 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, to actually provide those golden "hello's" 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 one of its graduates in Cheshire has 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 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. Q300 Chairman: But do they do anything? Has anything happened because of it that you can point to and say, "that only happened because there was such a committee"? Mr Metcalfe: It is still early days, but our science council is a little bit older. Interestingly, the large companies in the region cite skills supply as one of the reasons that they are there. If you ask them for the top three reasons why they are there, supply of skills is usually in the top three. One of the things that the science industry council agrees on unanimously is the need to maintain and increase the skills supply. We had a bit of debate in the early days about what we meant by the skills supply, and it became clear that we were talking about different kinds of scientists. Some companies want out-and-out researchers with firsts and PhDs, and other companies want more technical graduates. They were talking different languages, but once they understood one another, there is a need for ----- Q301 Chairman: Is not the real truth that universities do not know who the hell you are, or care? They make their own autonomous decisions - several of them have closed their science departments for other reasons - and they do not consult you, and you are left with the draught. You have a region without chemistry or physics or whatever and you just have to suck it and see. Is that not the reflection of what is happening? Mr Buckland: I disagree with that because all RDAs have a vice chancellor on their board, so there is a linkage there; and we have linkage with the regional HERDAs as well. Q302 Chairman: Is Steve Smith on your board? Mr Buckland: I know Steve Smith very well, but we have Eric Thomas, who is the Vice Chancellor at Bristol. We work with vice chancellors. We were informed by Steve Smith just prior to their announcement, but that was obviously an internal university ----- Q303 Chairman: What did you say - "too bad"? Mr Buckland: No, we ----- Q304 Chairman: Did you say, "This is going to really, really hurt our interaction with business and universities"? Mr Buckland: We work with the universities in the region, so, as I said earlier, we have the same level of provision of chemistry within the region and they have pushed into their strengths, and are at roughly the same level of capacity. Q305 Chairman: Do you really believe, Nick, that regional development is the big idea that is bearing the fruit of science development, irrespective of the odd department closing? Mr Buckland: I think there are difficulties with these departments closing, and we have to make sure that we have the balance in the region to take up the requirements of the region; so we have to look at it on that strategic level across the region. Q306 Dr Turner: How worried would you be about the economy of your region if one of the core science subjects became extinct in it, like chemistry? Would you feel the need to try and intervene? Would you be happy to contemplate that? If Exeter has gone, what if Bristol closed its chemistry department as well? You would not have any chemistry for 100 miles. Mr Buckland: It would be further than that. I live on the Devon/Cornwall border and we are further away from Bristol than Nottingham is. If you go further down into the peninsula the distances get greater, so there are issues on that. We have to look very closely at that and work with the vice chancellors and ----- Q307 Dr Turner: How drastic would the circumstances have to be before you would want to intervene? Mr Buckland: I think we would monitor that very closely and work closely with the vice chancellors. That is all we could do. Q308 Dr Turner: Do you think it would be better to preserve lower quality university courses rather than lose them altogether at the regional level? Where would you set your limits? Mr Metcalfe: I am not quite sure what you mean by "lower quality"; it is quite a loaded question. Certainly, there was a debate earlier about teaching-only departments, and it may well be necessary to have some form of outposts or hubs and spokes associated with some of the main universities where subjects are taught locally and feed in at a higher level, perhaps final year or postgraduate level into larger universities. There have been some very good successes. Certainly Plymouth, with its foundation degrees out in local FE colleges and then feeding it to the centre, has worked extremely well. That is a very successful programme. Q309 Dr Turner: What about the sector skills councils? How much influence do they have over university courses in particular? Do you think they should have more influence? Mr Metcalfe: The Lambert report was quite specific, that they should have more influence on curriculum development and course delivery. Of course, they are still fairly new, but we have worked with some of the sector skills councils, and e-Skills UK particularly. The problem is perhaps the supply of graduates in a certain area. They are saying, "we are not getting the right kind of graduates" and the university was saying, "of course you are; we are producing firsts and 2.1s and good degrees and you are employing them, so what is the problem?" When we got involved we understood that the employers were looking for a certain kind of graduate, and we helped them develop a degree that is now being developed within the university, so there is a grouping. Q310 Paul Farrelly: We have mentioned the teaching debate, which we had earlier, and perhaps you will forgive me for mentioning Keele University for the third time. We have a nice little science park developing next to Keele and it is particularly developing a medical cluster, based on a lot of NHS investments going in, and that indeed is part of the RDA's economic strategy and fully supported by Advantage West Midlands. However, many people argue that that sits ill with Keele - not expansion of science in terms of research or teaching but actually a contraction that we have seen. It does not provide the best narrative or advertisement for developing a science capability. The question is not what RDAs can do to stop this, because I think it is very limited at the moment, but what would be the one way in the future in which you would recommend that we might consider for you to improve your level of influence over what is happening and what is supported at an RDA level in terms of the economic development of the region? Mr Metcalfe: One of the things we are beginning to do in our universities is to encourage people to work together more closely. If universities worked at a sub-regional level, certainly in a larger region like mine as a cluster, collectively - we are coming from the business support end, but there are other indications for this, so collectively they produce what the region needs. They can perhaps agree amongst themselves; there is a chemistry department, a physics department, and as long a the travel times between the universities and businesses are not too high, you can see how the model might work. There is the beginning of such a model in the West Focus Consortium, which is based in West London, going out along the Thames; we have six universities coming together, initially around the HEPI proposal, but we see no reason why that should not extend to subject provision. Mr Buckland: In Exeter, for example, the RDA there has been investing with them and developing an innovation centre, and relating that to some of their strengths. Certainly, Exeter Medical School is developing that area and activity, so we are working together. Dr Bushaway: The problem really is the sub-regional question. If regions are to be cohesive, then you must play your assets as a team and you must look at what you have got to do. The problem for the RDA is that you are really asking them to be counter-intuitive. If the reasons for closure are because funding levels are insufficient to sustain the activity, and that is because the quality levels under a selective system are not bringing in enough resource, it is surely then counter-intuitive for the RDA to effectively support what is then a sub-regional lame duck and to go against the policy of national selectivity? We can argue - and you were doing that with the previous witnesses - whether that policy is correct, but as long as it is there it seems to me that it is very difficult to see the RDA having to come in and pick up the baton on almost a counter-intuitive basis. Q311 Dr Turner: How much of this is chicken and egg? Obviously, it must be more difficult to sustain a department either an undergraduate or research department, if there is not a strong science-based industry presence in the region as well. What happens in your regions? Which do you think is coming first? Dr Bushaway: There are four legs to this particular stool. The one is national policy, as reflected in the research councils and HEFCE, or the councils generally; the second is the demand-side that is coming from employers and businesses, whether they are within the region or nationally or whatever; the third then is the supply-side stimulation at the primary and secondary level, and is there a flow through to universities of the right kinds of students with the right kinds of backgrounds at primary and secondary level; and then the fourth is the university leg where you have got to then deal with all three and make sure that you are able to respond as effectively as you can; but you are an autonomous and independently financed organisation whose job, through its own governing council, is to sustain its business. It is a complex interaction between those four issues. It would be wrong to suggest that I know the answer as to when that balance got out of kilter, whether it was at national policy level or the law of unintended consequences, or whether somewhere along the line we have lost the demand-side, or we have problems lower down the supply-side chain; but somewhere there, in all four of those issues and their inter-relatedness, has to be the answer to the question. Dr Iddon: The Medical Research Council, thank God, say that in order to address the inequalities of health which exist across the regions of the United Kingdom, there should be a key medical school in each of those regions. The northern regions have suffered badly in the decline of major manufacturing industries in those regions, and just as the inequalities of health are greater up there, the inequalities of regeneration and the science base are less up there than they are in the south. Nothing annoyed the north-west more than when the Daresbury Synchatron disappeared almost and became the Diamond Synchatron Project in Oxfordshire. It just seems to people who live in the north that there is a greater and greater concentration in the red-hot economy of the south, when we should be regenerating the northern regions by preserving a high standard of science bases. Q312 Chairman: If I can paraphrase that, why do the universities like Cambridge do better than Bolton? Is it something in the water? Is it the soil? What is it? Mr Metcalfe: There is quite a few hundred years' history in that. The northern RDAs have invested quite heavily in supporting the universities and industrial R&D support, so the north-east for example has set up centres of excellence, which have had quite substantial investments in supporting universities and helping them work more closely with business. The RDAs are very aware of these disparities; in fact, it is the northern RDAs that led the way ----- Q313 Dr Iddon: Is the science establishment supporting them? Mr Metcalfe: I am not quite sure what you mean by "the science establishment": do you mean ----- Q314 Dr Iddon: I am talking about the power of Oxford, Cambridge and London, as the Chairman implied. Are we not losing out to the golden triangle, because that is where the academic power lies? Mr Metcalfe: I think the golden triangle sees a lot more investment from the RDAs in the north going up there, and they say to us, "why are you not investing as much as in the north?" There is a lot going up there to try and help redress the disparities. I think you have to do both; you have to invest to support science development in the north, and also you have to keep the triangle going. Dr Bushaway: One of the most important things that has not really been touched on, as far as I can see, in this debate is the business of regional retention of intellectual property and its management. That seems to be where Cambridge does particularly well. If you take elsewhere, the Synchatron example, it was true that for the old-style public sector research establishments the package around how intellectual property was generated and how it was retained and how it was commercialised was very, very unclear, and I suspect most of the Interpretation that would generate from that kind of activity would simply lead the way either to other regions or outside the country. One of the things that Lambert really hit on was the business of better management of intellectual property. We do need to endorse what that was saying and create the Cambridge phenomenon all over the country, all over the other regions. There does not seem to me to be any inherent principles that should prevent that. This is three hundred years of history. Q315 Chairman: The Cambridge phenomenon gets this name, and we can ask how it started; it was three guys in a pub actually! It is not very sophisticated science, getting the small businesses going. That could happen in Bolton or in any place really. What are you doing to encourage that to happen, is what we want to know. Dr Bushaway: I think in all the regions, as far as the universities engaged with RDAs are concerned, we are all looking at how we can commercialise IP more effectively for the benefit of the region. It is now embedded in regional economic strategy. It is encouraged, for example, in the AWM area- investment in strategic funds for drawing out IP and commercialising, and ----- Q316 Chairman: Bob, while you are looking at it, the Chinese and the Indians are doing it. They do not mess about with committee after committee after committee, and report after report, coloured and beautiful as they are; they get on and do it. Dr Bushaway: Everything is new in the current situation as far as the England regions are concerned, and from the university perspective there is a perception that the regional development agencies are working out a wholly new set of procedures and administrative arrangements. They are relatively immature bodies in the best possible sense of the word. Mr Buckland: We are investing. I have mentioned the innovation centres that we are investing in with universities, and science parks as well. Again, in the south-west, there are some very good examples of that, like Tamar Science Park in Plymouth. There is some science park activity going on in Cornwall, and some of the activity has been in train or on the books for something like 10 or 15 years. In Bristol we are now investing in that and making that happen, so there is investment happening there. Q317 Chairman: Your confidence comes through but we are doubtful. Mr Metcalfe: That will grow because from April this year we will have a new role. We will be measured on how well we have got business and universities to work together, and we will be investing in that. Chairman: We will watch and wait. Thank you very much indeed.
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