Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 199)
WEDNESDAY 7 MAY 2008
KEITH READ,
PHILIP GREENISH,
ANDREW RAMSAY
AND SIR
ANTHONY CLEAVER
Q180 Ian Stewart: Who is the driver
then? Which of the bodies is the driver for deciding who should
make the strategy and who should oversee the strategy?
Mr Read: It is a very good question.
Mr Ramsay: It is down to individuals.
As we said at the beginning, these are private organisations,
funded by private money, run by volunteers. Getting them to work
together is enormously difficult, and we are, all four of us,
involved in trying to do that.
Q181 Ian Stewart: I have to say,
Andrew, to the lay person like me, it looks as though you are
fobbing the responsibility off.
Mr Greenish: But I would say that
there is a role for the Royal Academy of Engineering and that
we have over the last few years been working much harder at bringing
together the engineering institutions, the ETB and others who
are focused on the same objective, to target particular issues
where we feel that it really is critical that we have our act
together as a concerted whole. For example, the promotion of engineering
as a career to young people and helping young people improve their
understanding, or create an understanding, of what engineering
is about. A few years ago there was this vast and disparate range
of activities that was completely uncoordinated that took place
in and around schools. Over the last couple of years we as a group
have brought that together in a single suite of activities which
we have promoted to DCSF. They have now adopted it. It is called
Shape the Future. We have produced a directory of programmes which
is now being used by the education system to promote the activities
which we all contribute to which help young people to understand
what engineering is about.
Q182 Dr Gibson: It is not related
to what the country need, is it?
Mr Greenish: It is.
Q183 Dr Gibson: It is no use saying,
on the one hand, that each of you do your own thing and then you
say you mix it together occasionally. The times you have tried
to merge, the members have turned you down. Is not that the case?
I know, and you might know, several engineering groups have tried
to merge together and the members turned them down. We had the
same story from cancer charities, and within a year they have
merged. The biggest cancer charities in this country have merged
and they are still merging bit by bit—the same animosities,
but they have merged—because they see that the benefit for
the public and the people is to have that kind of complex, and
that is where you have real muscle power with government.
Mr Read: I think we agree with
all of that and I think we are trying to work in that direction.
Dr Gibson: You will have to do it faster,
that is all, because we are short of engineers!
Q184 Ian Stewart: How does government
assist you to move faster? How are we going to guarantee that
we have the engineering skills to deliver the Olympics, the new
nuclear build which is coming?
Mr Read: You can encourage companies,
industry, to actually provide training programmes for people going
into engineering, which do not exist at the moment—they
used to exist, they do not today to a large extent—and I
think that is hugely important. It not only brings people in,
but it retains them. You can encourage companies to actually view
registration that actually it is important for people's career
progression to actually be registered with the Engineering Council.
All of those sorts of things will do the things that we are talking
about.
Q185 Ian Stewart: Keith, that is
an important progression for the future. Have we got the capacity
now to deliver the Olympics and any new nuclear build?
Mr Greenish: I think that is a
very challenging question. I would have said, yes, but it is an
international economy and it will require the import of skills
in order to enable us to deliver it. I think it is fair to say
that this country over the last decade or two in the nuclear arena,
for example, has lost a substantial skill base and that if a new
nuclear build programme is recreated and created quickly, then
we are going to have to draw on the international market for a
lot of those skills. It also highlights the need for government,
and you did ask what government could be doing, to ensure that
the supply chain is really bolstered. So the Stem Programme which
the DCSF are running, which is focused on increasing the number
of kids doing science and maths at school, needs to focus much
more strongly than it does at the moment on engineering. Science
tends to dominate.
Q186 Ian Stewart: I am interested,
Philip, in the comment you made about the international market.
Will the Government have to make it easier for UK companies to
draw on the international engineering market?
Mr Greenish: I would have said
UK companies—
Q187 Ian Stewart: Do we need to alter
permanent rules, for example?
Mr Ramsay: Yes. There is an issue
right now, and we are talking to the Home Office about it. The
new regulations for immigration and migration into the UK recognise
academic qualifications but not professional qualifications, and
we think this is a mistake, but we think it can be corrected.
Q188 Dr Gibson: There are no points
for professional—
Mr Ramsay: No points for being
professionally qualified in any branch of any discipline, quite
apart form engineering.
Q189 Chairman: Do you all agree—just
give me a yes for the record—that that issue that Ian Stewart
has raised about easier access to overseas engineers has really
got to be addressed by us soon.
Mr Ramsay: Definitely.
Mr Greenish: Yes.
Mr Read: Yes.
Sir Anthony Cleaver: Yes.
Chairman: The panel all indicated yes.
Q190 Mr Cawsey: I want to move on
to the bit about the longer-term solutions in engineering; what
we do to encourage younger people to join the profession. We have
had a list of a whole series of initiatives that exist—engineering
clubs, challenges and competitions and courses and all the rest.
However, by its very nature, there must be a considerable time
lag between inspiring a young person perhaps at school and them
eventually becoming an engineer working on their first project.
Out of this plethora of initiatives that are ongoing at the moment,
is it too early to be making judgments about whether they have
been successful or not and when might we start to see them bear
fruit?
Sir Anthony Cleaver: I think there
are a lot of very recent initiatives. For example the engineering
diploma, which clearly is something one would hope would address
some of these issues quite significantly is just starting and
it will be about five years before that is going to bear fruit
in that sense. Again, I emphasise, at the graduate level we do
not have a supply problem in general. It is at that intermediate
level, and that is where I think we have got to continue to focus.
The other important point to make is that things move so fast
in engineering areas that you cannot expect to get people trained
at the cutting edge by academia; industry has to develop them;
and so it is important that we focus again on what industry is
looking for from academia at all levels. The ability to have a
team-working capability, to communicate well, problem solving
and so on—those are the things that I think we have to make
sure get built in, and I think those are the things in the curriculum
we can expect to see more focus on as we go through in time. I
think those are the important things.
Mr Greenish: I think there is
a really important point in your question, which is that we need
to work really hard to understand how interventions at different
stages of a young person's life actually make an effect in terms
of their decisions and where they end up at the end, and there
is a huge amount of work that does go into encouraging young people
to pursue science at school and then to go on to study engineering
at whatever level. Asking them, measuring numbers and identifying
the effect that these interventions do have is something that
we have all put a lot of effort into. The evidence is that actually
it does have a significant effect. You heard a week ago a panel
of young people, and some of them were quite clear that their
understanding had changed; their minds had been changed by things
that they did at school as youngsters that made them recognise
what this was about.
Q191 Mr Cawsey: I think one thing
that came across, though, was that that was often driven just
because that school had a particular teacher who personally was
interested. In other words, it was a consistent pattern, it was
just if you were lucky to be in a school where a teacher was willing
to do that?
Mr Greenish: That is absolutely
right, and that is why it is so important that we do succeed in
getting a science and engineering club in every school so that
every school child has the opportunity to benefit from this. We
are running a project in South London—in fact, the kids
you saw last week, most of them came from the London Engineering
Project—and that is demonstrating, it is not conclusive
yet, that when you open up these opportunities, by opening young
minds in disadvantaged areas their lives can be transformed, they
understand, they realise.
Mr Read: I wanted to make one
point, and that is the importance of mathematics in schools, which
is the one single thing that drags people through into engineering
and keeps them in engineering, and at the moment there is not
enough and it is not good enough. I just wanted to make that point
because I think it is very relevant to the questions that are
being asked there.
Q192 Mr Cawsey: On these initiatives
that you have tried, hopefully successfully, given that there
is this time lag between inspiring and results, is there a danger
that initiatives get pushed to one side too quickly because you
want to move on to something else and you do not allow things
to reach fruition through their own natural course?
Mr Greenish: I think it is important
to focus on the ones that work and to build on success. It is
dead easy to start something new and it is dead difficult to close
it down, and so building on the successful ones is critical.
Q193 Mr Cawsey: Who assesses that:
because they are not quick fixes, are they? Who assesses what
is working?
Mr Greenish: They are not. Actually,
it is best assessed by the users. So if the schools find that
they are successful and they like them, then they will naturally
grow, and to encourage those ones is the key.
Mr Read: Developing the statistical
evidence, which the ETB is doing, I think it is very important
that we have this hard evidence on a year-by-year basis so we
can actually see what is working and what is not.
Q194 Mr Cawsey: Can you tell us about
the Shape the Future initiative. Indeed all of these industries:
would they benefit from better co-ordination and would something
with greater strategic oversight yield better results or be impracticable?
Mr Greenish: Yes, and the Shape
the Future initiative is heading in that direction. It started
off really with the positive encouragement of the then Science
Minister, Lord Sainsbury, who wanted us to work to improve the
promotion of engineering to young people, and the first and most
tangible thing that we have done is, first of all, the major engineering
institutions have all agreed that at GSCE level and below they
will not promote their own branch of engineering, they will promote
engineering generically. The second thing is the creation of a
directory of schemes which are all the principal, national level
schemes which enrich science education with engineering projects
and the like, and that has been extremely successful to the extent
that the DCSF have taken it over from the engineering community
and they have led a contract to create similar directories of
schemes for science and for maths. The latest I heard is that
they will all be called Shape the Future, which I think is a huge
success, and that came out of the engineering community working
together from two to three years ago.
Q195 Mr Cawsey: That is quite interesting.
My final question on this section was going to be that. If there
is going to be better co-ordination on all of this, is it best
done by engineers perhaps through the Academy or is it a job for
the department?
Mr Greenish: My personal view
is that the engineering profession have to stand up and be counted
and we have to do it ourselves. If it is a case of creating something
and persuading government to take it over, that is a good way
forward.
Q196 Ian Stewart: Are we teaching
engineering graduates and school children the right things?
Sir Anthony Cleaver: This is where
we need to make sure that we understand exactly what industry
wants and to work from that backwards with the academic community.
So at the ETB we have recently formed an education and skills
panel which has people from Vice-Chancellors of Cranfield, for
example, right the way through to representatives from the school
level, from FE, and so on, to try and bring together a focus across
the range there which we can work with our business and industry
panel, representing industry, to try and make sure that this interface
is as tight as possible. I think it is very clear that at the
schools level, as my colleagues have said, the basic requirement
is fundamentally maths and then science, physics, et cetera, as
far as possible; but increasingly things move so fast in this
area. The areas where the UK is ahead in engineering are areas
like nanotechnology, bioengineering, advanced materials, plastic
electronics, and so on. All of those areas we are actually leading.
They are all areas that move very, very fast; so what we need
is people coming out who have got the fundamental understanding
of the maths, and so on, who have got the ability to work together
and have those inter-personnel skills that the industry can then
take forward into those areas.
Q197 Ian Stewart: Sir Anthony, you
have identified the areas of interest, the development areas for
the country for the future, you have identified the importance
of the interface, but would you actually change the curriculum?
Are there issues in the curriculum that you would wish to see
made compulsory, for example?
Mr Greenish: May I pick that up?
The academy produced a report last year called Educating Engineers
for the Twenty-first Century, and it was based upon a substantial
body of work, working with industry, talking to industry, to identify
where they see the requirements, where they see the need to improve
the skills for engineering graduates. We then went to the universities
to talk them about how well they were meeting the industry's aspirations.
Out of that report there was definitely a case to be answered,
because it is patchy. Lord Sainsbury in this report Race to
the Top has actioned government, and government has accepted
the action, to review the nature of engineering degree level education.
Q198 Ian Stewart: Can I stop you
there. I want to come on to universities in a moment. Could you
just concentrate a little bit about the school level first? You
seemed to move away from that very fast.
Mr Greenish: Okay, back to the
school level. The science curriculum has been changing. The maths
curriculum has changed. There was a bit of a disaster about four
years ago when the AS level maths was introduced and the numbers
taking it plummeted. The introduction of the engineering diploma,
I think, is critical, because it brings engineering into the school
timetable for the first time, and there is a huge volume of work
going in now to preparing the ground—it is going to be rolled
out in September—to make sure that it starts well and does
not start limply, which is always a risk when such a huge new
initiative is created.
Q199 Dr Gibson: How many specialist
schools of engineering are there in this country? You are an expert.
Mr Greenish: Not enough. It is
not many.
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