Examination of Witnesses (Questions 840
- 845)
TUESDAY 18 MAY 2004
NORTH EAST
WALES INSTITUTE
Q840 Hywel Williams: Gathering together
whatever you have here can be quite burdensome for SMEs so how
can we give SMEs easy access to that? How do you do it?
Professor Thomas: We can arrange
distance learning open mornings through ICTs, which means serious
investment by the government in copper lines, etc, which we need
in particular for the rural areas, for small companies there.
We also need peripatetic staff to come and advise people. That
again needs investment. It may be that if you are looking for
some investment model the funding should not look just for the
number of students you get but also for a donor company for other
activities which is local to the economy. Manufacturing costs
have to be incurred but also costs are incurred on activities
with the local economy and there are also the costs compared with
other activity such as research activity. There is little money
coming from outside the teaching programme for research to help
academics so it is very difficult without additional funding.
Mr Howard: We need to be a one-stop
shop.
Professor Thomas: As long as the
funding budget is funding the number of students, the staff/student
ratio, it will always constrain staff for other activities.
Q841 Hywel Williams: You mentioned
that you have been active in an initiative to introduce graduate
skills into SMEs. How successful has this been and could you tell
us what impact it has on SMEs in Wales?
Professor Thomas: There is a drain
of intellectual property in Wales. The differences in salaries,
for instance, means that very good graduates from Wales are being
easily tempted across the border. Big cities like Manchester,
Leeds, London and Birmingham make it difficult to keep good graduates
in Wales. We do keep a sufficient number but we would love to
keep more. Conversely, those who do go to England are very difficult
to get back to Wales and their expertise is lost to the Welsh
economy. It is not a comfortable thing.
Mr Tatler: From the engineering
point of view the links we have with the graduate reduce after
their final year. They may stay one or two years and work for
the small SMEs here but they eventually move on. There are rich
pickings.
Q842 Hywel Williams: They move on
when they are at their most productive and active?
Professor Thomas: We work here
at NEWI with the Welsh Language Board and the Welsh Media Board.
I strongly believe that the North East Wales Institute is the
perfect place to bring up Welsh language issues, for instance,
in Welsh law and about what the Assembly is doing. I want to look
at Welsh and what it means in open local business studies and
health care. We would like to start to bid in for that for the
Welsh media. We think that if we had Welsh speaking modules relating
to the business and commercial area that would encourage micro
companies and sustain SMEs in Wales.
Q843 Hywel Williams: The wider language
issue is something that can be replicated anywhere. That is just
a comment.
Professor Thomas: Wrexham has
a big population. I have a Manchester accent and my family live
in Caernarfon and so we have an ear for accents, Welsh, foreign,
Europe citizens Welsh and English citizens. No other population
in the world carries such a wide diversity of accents, so we are
well placed to take advantage of the opportunities that that offers.
Q844 Hywel Williams: My last question
is on devolution. Responsibility for further and higher education,
like other parts of the devolution settlement, is shared between
Westminster and Wales. What assistance can the UK Government give
to create a prosperous environment in the Welsh academic sector?
Mr Bird: There is a series of
things. One is student numbers. We are in the worrying situation
of English universities being able to come across the border and
teach our students on our doorstep and get funding for it. It
would help cross-border cultures, and I said earlier about KTPs,
if we could have an increase in cash funding so that we could
become sustainable and make it even bigger than the 30 million
going to the local economies.
Q845 Mrs Williams: There is a school
of thought which says that we are producing too many graduates.
How does that fit in with what you have just said? I do not agree
with that view.
Mr Bird: I know the government
has a 50% target in higher education. We do not see that as a
problem on the ground here.
Mr Tatler: From an engineering
point of view if you said that to the major employers they would
say they cannot get enough good quality engineering graduates.
Professor Thomas: I came into
higher education in my mid twenties, so I came in via the mature
entrant route. Being an undergraduate teaches you to be more disciplined
in the way you learn and analyse and you also apply the same philosophy
to other interests. You can then transfer those skills into other
programmes and it allows your motivation to roam free so you can
transfer from one subject area to another. We find it difficult
to accept that a country does not need graduates.
Mr Tatler: We have come full circle
now on where we spoke about SMEs, where they need to be more smart
now with better qualified, better trained staff if they are going
to be competitive against the degree imports that can be brought
in from China and all the other places. We can do this by giving
a better trained workforce, by having graduates with degrees and
undergraduate qualification coming on board now who are helping
the competitivity of the SMEs within Wales and also they tend
to be more worldly wise.
Mr Bird: In my enterprise and
entrepreneurship area I try and teach people how to learn and
I also try to teach about growing graduates for high value, high
skill jobs. It will come full circle after the EU enlargement
to put it on an international basis growing these high value,
high skill jobs where people do not have just to go to Eastern
Europe for their skilled workforce.
Chairman: We have exhausted the questions
we had. Thank you very much for your answers.
| 
