Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
WEDNESDAY 7 MAY 2008
MS TERRY
MARSH, MRS
GEMMA MURPHY,
MS PAT
LANGFORD AND
FRANCIS EVANS
Q240 Dr Iddon: Nobody is going to
bite the hand that feeds them.
Mr Evans: We do not get money
from them. In fact, we fund a particularly good activity called
Formula Student run by the IMechE; I have to say I do not find
it a problem having so many because where they need to work together
increasingly they are doing so quite well and so they can act
as one where they need to has been my experience.
Ms Marsh: Where there is public
funding, if I might just say, we have to remember that there is
the whole gender duty in place now where you have actually got
to set and implement objectives and gather information about the
progress and the gender impact of where that public money is going,
and we would very strongly encourage any of the organisations
that are working in this field to examine the gender impact of
what they do by looking at their gender duty requirements.
Q241 Dr Iddon: Pat, is it a problem
for you?
Ms Langford: Not at all. We actually
have memoranda of understanding with several of the institution;
given that engineering is such a fantastically wide area it is
not surprising that there are so many institutions working in
the field. It keeps up the variety and the diversity which then
again makes it more attractive to young people.
Q242 Mr Cawsey: I want to move on
to the promotion of engineering. Gemma, the Smallpeice Trust raised
concerns that most public funding for the promotion of engineering
appears to be allocated to institutions and other organisations
who act indirectly rather than directly. Would you like to explain
to us what you mean by that differentiation between directly and
indirectly?
Mrs Murphy: When I say directly
I mean that we are a major deliverer of STEM activities, we interface
directly with schools and with students so we know whether we
add value by our existence in its own right and by what we deliver,
so we are looking at attracting more funding to do more of what
we do. It is as simple as that; we have a formula that we know
works, we have got now, for instance, a situation with a nuclear
engineering course where we have 106 students that we have had
to turn away because the course, unfortunately, is oversubscribed
and it filled up within three days. Our dilemma really is we know
what we are doing is working and we just want to expand and roll
this out even more widely.
Q243 Mr Cawsey: What do you mean
by indirectly then?
Mrs Murphy: Indirectly would be
through some of the organisations that are here today, so through
STEMNET or some of the institutions.
Q244 Mr Cawsey: What is the difference
then?
Mrs Murphy: Some of the institutions
do not actually deliver and promote STEM activities to students
whereas we are a major deliverer.
Q245 Mr Cawsey: Is it simply that
you are actually with the young people, doing things with them,
whereas they are just promoting it as an activity?
Mrs Murphy: Yes, that is right,
we give them a real learning experience.
Q246 Chairman: In your answer to
Dr Iddon earlier you said you do not know whether in fact you
are successful or not. The only criteria for success are the number
of people who come on your courses and the number on the waiting
list; they might get absolutely nothing out of it other than a
nice time.
Mrs Murphy: That is true, but
what we do is we do have a survey that goes out to every single
student who attends one of our courses and 67 per cent said that
attending a Smallpeice course has influenced them to consider
a career in engineering. We are also looking at making enhancements
to our database to further monitor and track our students post
the age of 18.
Chairman: It was worth you putting that
on the record, was it not?
Q247 Mr Cawsey: Although they still
have to make the final leap and actually do it. This is wider
than just you, Gemma, so anyone else who wants to join in, please
do so. What evidence is there that actually a direct approach
as opposed to an indirect approach makes a difference to the outcomes
in the end?
Ms Marsh: This is a wonderful
example of the complexity of the system that we are working in.
If we are talking about engineers, let us take an engineer's approach
to this and actually try and analyse what the levers are and what
it is that is cause and effect. At the same time we know probably
we have got to the stage in the development of engineering where
we might need some disruptive technology to come in and might
need to do things a little bit differently, so to actually monitor
what we are doing at the moment, let us set in place some agreed
standards of perhaps going back to kids a year later, two years
later, five years later maybe to see whether interventions have
had effect and, at the same time, that would be interventions
not only from those people going in and out of school but interventions
in terms of what schools are doing and the amount of effort that
they put in. But at the same time as doing that we have just got
to start thinking differently; we have to change sufficiently
to know that we have to change, you cannot just change overnight,
you have to change sufficiently to know that we need some better
change, we need to think more creatively about this, because just
keeping on doing the same old thing is getting us the same results
which might be incremental, but that is something that STEMNET
would say and they have completely changed how they are going
about things, they are doing much more quality control et cetera.
Ms Langford: Wherever it is possible
to do so. The whole issue of effective evaluation is a very tricky
one because to really evaluate the impact, particularly on young
people, you need to do a ten-year study. That is extremely expensive
and I have not yet come across anybody who has put their hand
up and said they would like to pay for that so we are always going
to be in this business of to some extent doing what we believe
to be the right thing. We get tons of anecdotal evidence; with
the science and engineering ambassadors programme we are awash
with quotations from schools saying this is great, I have seen
the young children change markedly, but we cannot then tag those
young people and say what happens five years on, so we kind of
have the happy sheet situation, yes I had a great time, it was
brilliant, we built the car, we raced it, it was a lot of fun.
Whether or not that actually changed their mind about engineering
is a whole different thing and it is going to be a perennial problem
until somebody says here, there are millions of pounds to evaluate
what difference some of these things really do make.
Ms Marsh: Careers Wales in Cardiff
is actually tracking what courses the youngsters go on. It has
just started doing that and it has got money from the Welsh Assembly
Government to make sure that there is some sort of looking at
outcomes, but it is the beginning of a long road and we know that
the youngster going into school today, from my perspective, full
of the gender stereotypes aged five, how we can influence that
little girl who has got lots of pink marketing bows in her hair
in terms of what happens when she is 25 and established in the
engineering community is a long project. We throw down the gauntlet
as it were to government to fund something that looks at that
sort of thing.
Q248 Chairman: We have taken that
on board.
Mr Evans: The industry representatives
who initially set up the Learning Grid decided to ask for the
funds to be allocated in the way that Gemma has described, to
direct delivery rather than indirect, for two reasons. One is
they believed that engineering is an applied science, so when
you do it you understand it and the kind of skills that they are
after are best acquired by actually doing something, so on a Smallpeice
four-day course, for instance, the youngsters actually do practical
projects with industry, they are making and designing and refining
their projects. The second reason was that in employing young
graduate engineers they often found that, for example, the formula
student programme that I mentioned previously made a big impact
on the capabilities of those engineers, not necessarily technically
but their ability to work in teams, to communicate, to present,
which are all skills that industry really values. As one of the
customers for all of this, I guess they were convinced that Gemma's
point is right, that spending money on direct work with kids,
actually doing things in schools, is where the investment should
go.
Q249 Mr Cawsey: It strikes me from
the answers of all of you really that the missing link in all
of that is that you all have your ideas and theories as to why
that might be the case, but no one has actually done a rigorous
analysis on whether any of it is true.
Mr Evans: For the reasons that
Pat said to track someone over several years is not something
that, as small voluntary organisations, we have the capability
to do. It is probably just as well that you cannot track people
in that way, it is a rather forbidding thought.
Q250 Mr Cawsey: As far as this Committee
is concerned, if we wanted to make a recommendation on this area
at all should we be saying that it should be more direct ipso
facto less indirect, or should we be saying actually somebody
in the department needs to do some serious and credible work on
this to make better longer term funding decisions, whether that
ends up being directly or indirectly. Which of those two do you
think?
Ms Marsh: You are going to be
able to go straight to market, which is what you are doing, you
are going straight to the consumer; you cannot hit the whole cohort
of 700,000 or 800,000 so you are always going to have a minor
impact, but if you are thinking strategically you are perhaps
learning some basic truths that are going to support what you
are doing and actually encourage you to be doing and getting more
of that effectively perhaps. You are going to have a longitudinal
bit of research, which is great, but if you also do the snapshot
through all the years for year 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 or whatever,
you get early information because although they are not the same
kids that are going through you start to get information on what
is happening at each of those stages in life. The first one would
be a snapshot and then you would move on and do that longitudinally
and start to build up a real matrix of understanding of what is
going on.
Q251 Dr Turner: I would like to ask
all of you how serious a problem do you think for engineering
is diversity or rather the lack of diversity, both in terms of
gender and ethnicity?
Mrs Murphy: Very serious, and
that is something that the Smallpeice Trust is actively supporting
at the moment. We are running a number of residential courses
as part of the London Engineering Project which are specifically
focused on attracting ethnic minority groups and females into
the engineering sector. We are also working with Aim Higher Nottinghamshire
to deliver a residential course based on widening participation,
so it is an issue and it is something that we are trying to address.
Ms Marsh: The current culture
with engineering has corporate and cultural norms that are essentially
male. If you think of the analogy that I might say about what
it feels like to be a woman in engineering, it is like walking
in high heels across cobbles. Some people in this room will understand
what I mean but an awful lot of you will not understand what I
mean, and that is a really good example of how we come from different
cultures and how the culture of having a variety of different
people with a variety of backgrounds—some of you walk in
heels and some of you do not, I make a trivial point—makes
a broad and creative difference, quite apart from the sheer demographic
necessity that if you do not go for some women and some of the
non-traditional people coming into the arena the demographic turndown
of 12 per cent over the next 10 or 15 years is going to hit engineering
really hard at a time when engineering is stepping up and making
more and more impact on our daily lives.
Ms Langford: I agree absolutely
with everything that Terry says. There is a perception out there
in the same way that there is about other stereotypes that engineering
is not well-paid, but in actual fact many jobs in the engineering
and manufacturing sectors are extremely well-paid. Some of you
may have seen Sir John Rose from Rolls Royce the other day talking
about this, and he said the difference between manufacturing and
engineering is that a much higher proportion of jobs tend to be
reasonably well-paid whereas if you look at service industries
you will often have a very, very wide dichotomy of people who
are extremely wealthy and those who are being really lowly paid.
The point I would make is if these jobs are well-paid why should
they be denied 50 per cent of the population? That is a key point.
I am very encouraged by the fact—and Philip Greenish talked
about this as well—that the community now recognises that
it is important to work with a much broader spread of people on
this, and that includes a much broader spread of schools. There
has been a tendency in the past to work with those schools that
are the most easy to work with, where the perception at least
is that they are the most easy to work with, but you actually
will get the most rewarding results if you work with a very different
cohort of schools. The only other point I would say, and I think
it echoes what Terry says, is that any team works best if it is
made up of a very creative, different and diverse number of people.
All the best teams on which I have worked in the public and private
sector have been very, very diverse indeed and any engineering
project by its very nature these days is immensely complicated
and requires very different input and very different kinds of
people; you will get those drawn from all different parts of the
population, so it is absolutely vital that we do take this particular
issue very seriously. Terry has quoted the statistics about the
doubling of numbers of women going into engineering courses but
it is still only 14 or 15 per cent; it is not good enough.
Chairman: Could I ask you all to be very
brief because we are very tight on time.
Q252 Dr Turner: We will pass on asking
Francis the point on white middle class males.
Mr Evans: They are very eloquently
made points so I will not add anything.
Q253 Dr Turner: Terry, you have praised
the government for funding the UK Resource Centre for Women in
SET but you equally lament the lack of a co-ordinated strategy;
can you tell us what you think that strategy should look like?
Ms Marsh: I am for 19 and under
so I am really pleased that 16 upwards is now being looked at
and very well-co-ordinated by the UKRC where facts, figures and
best practice is being spread. I feel that the equivalent does
not exist for the under-19s and if you look at the ring-fenced
money that government has for science, for every £999,990
spent on other things, £10 goes towards thinking about how
to get more females through school and into engineering, so that
is a very large difference and it means that nothing is being
looked at from a more strategic perspective. Why do only seven
per cent of girls who get an A* or an A in physics or double science
go on to A-level whereas 26 per cent of boys do, what is happening
all the way through? We do not know enough about it.
Q254 Dr Turner: There are problems
with mixed gender activities. If you try to encourage engineering
with enrichment activities in schools it fails to achieve a 50-50
participation of boys and girls and the girls participate rather
less than the boys. Do you think this is general with mixed gender
activities and what do you think can be done to promote girls
especially as opposed to boys? Have you got any research backing
that can help?
Ms Marsh: A number of initiatives
are really pushing forwards to expect to get virtually equivalent
participation. I was talking to a major engineering company recently
about how they were trying to run their apprentice recruitment
days and the schools just sent kids who were interested. I said
"Why don't you tell the schools to send a good representative
mix of their school?" and they said, "That would be
different because you would probably get the same number of girls
as boys" and suddenly they realised they would have a different
recruitment scenario. Actually starting to push down the line
and say to schools you offer up representative proportions of
your schools to these initiatives I think would be a really interesting
approach to take.
Q255 Dr Turner: At the same time
it is quite a common experiment across education where female
participation is lamented as being limited to work on a girls-only
basis; how do you reconcile this with the desire to get enrichment
across the gender equality?
Ms Marsh: The girls-only courses
are very useful when there are small proportions of girls in the
mixed courses because if you are one of the ten per cent of girls
in your school that are seen to be good at physics and maths,
and then you go along to one of these courses and there are only
two other girls there, then you feel peculiar, you do not feel
it is the norm for a girl to be one of these, so if you went to
an all-girls event you would feel that you were amongst peers.
If you are going to a mixed course where the girls are being treated
with the same respect as the boys and they are getting the same
equitable outcomes—in other words they are getting the same
sort of results following on from these courses as the boys did—then
the girls-only might not be so important, but at the moment we
are in a mixed economy.
Q256 Dr Turner: Focusing on women
is obvious but do you think they should also make a lot more effort
to reach out to other groups, other ethnic groups obviously. The
problem with women obviously becomes even more acute if you look
at the gender problems within ethnic groups, so do you think we
should be making more effort there?
Ms Marsh: That is true. Pat made
the point that some of the initiatives are going to the easy win
schools and those schools that are up for everything and you need
to be actually starting to go to schools that have not used you
before. London Challenge publishes families of schools, let us
look at a breakdown via families of schools of where your initiatives
are going, are you all up in the top one, two, three families
or are you down in the 26 and 27 families, so looking at the different
types of schools you go into will automatically mean that you
are starting to reach some of the more hard to reach kids, and
those hard to reach kids are important, the Government is prioritising
them at the moment.
Q257 Chairman: Can I just ask you
finally, Pat, do you feel as far as your organisation is concerned
that you place sufficient emphasis on looking at the groups that
Des has been talking about in terms of women and particularly
under-represented ethnic minority groups?
Ms Langford: I believe that we
do.
Q258 Chairman: Are you required to
do that as part of your grant?
Ms Langford: We are strongly encouraged
to do so, shall we say that? We do not have any targets and we
would resist having targets because therein lies the path to failure
in many ways; however, we have just re-tendered all the contracts
to manage the science and engineering ambassadors programme and
within that our evaluation framework says it is important that
you start to recruit people from different groups, and that means
people from different economic backgrounds, people who work in
careers from STEM as well as in STEM, make sure you are making
strenuous efforts to recruit women across the piece, black minority
ethnic, and it is something that we will have as part of our contract
evaluation framework with the people, how are you managing to
do this. We will hold their feet to the fire if you like to say
we need to see a positive trend in there because there is huge
untapped potential.
Q259 Chairman: From an employer's
point of view, Francis, the Learning Grid, is this conscious criteria
within the work you do?
Mr Evans: Certainly within the
quality standard, the panel for which has a majority of teachers
but also employers on it, it would be something we look at.
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