Higher Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of Cambridge University and as this year’s president of the Association for Science Education. I add my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for introducing this debate and for his superb chairmanship. His earlier incarnation as a headmaster not only gave him familiarity with the topic but skills in keeping order.

I shall highlight three distinct reasons why STEM subjects are so important. The first, and the prime motivation and focus of our report, is that an ever-growing fraction of jobs needs specific skills at levels ranging from basic technical confidence through to researchers, medics and engineers with the highest professionalism. Surveys show, as we have heard, a continuing undersupply of such people which will be hard to remedy without welcoming immigrant talent. We have heard about the own goals which this Government have scored on that front.

We are mindful also of the surging numbers of scientifically qualified young people in the Far East. That is, in itself, a welcome development for that region and for the world. What should genuinely worry us is whether we are matching their quality and level of achievement. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, reminded us of a recent study of competence in mathematics, which showed that our best 10 year-olds were level-pegging with those in the Far East, but that by the age of 16 they were two years behind. At university level, we should worry about whether students in other countries are working more intensively and achieving higher attainment levels. Sustaining the international standing of our degrees is a serious matter for colleges and universities. Our committee therefore addressed issues of accreditation, kite-marking and so forth.

The quality of secondary education, as opposed to higher education, was not the focus of our inquiry. However, it is of course crucial in preparing and motivating those who will embark on higher education in STEM subjects. However, science education is not just for future scientists, engineers and technicians. There is a second reason why it is important. Today’s young people, all of them, will live in a world ever more dependent on technology and ever more vulnerable to its failures or misdirection. To be at ease in this fast-changing world, and to be effective citizens participating in democratic debate, they will all need at least a feel for science, enough to prevent them being bamboozled by propaganda or over deferential to experts. Of course, they need a feeling for numbers to be comfortable in assessing probabilities, risk and uncertainty.

Therefore, school-level education should not be geared solely towards the training of specialists. Our committee, as we have heard, deplored the fact that so few young people study any maths beyond the age of 16. Some press comment berated us by asking whether it would really be appropriate for everyone to do A-level maths in its present form. Of course, it would not. We were not suggesting that. However, an appropriate curriculum, focusing on mathematical fluency and relevance, could be devised. We should therefore welcome the proposals from ACME, the Nuffield Foundation and, indeed, from my eminent Cambridge colleague Professor Tim Gowers.

To my mind, this downplaying of maths is just an instance of a chronic problem to which the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, has already alluded: the UK’s unduly narrow post-16 curriculum. We should surely keep pushing for more breadth. Back in the 1980s, the widely supported Higginson proposals were killed off by Margaret Thatcher with a mantra about not jeopardising the gold standard of A-levels. Tomlinson was likewise stymied, this time by the previous Labour Government, because it was perceived that his proposals would play badly electorally.

The post-16 overspecialisation is bad for the would-be scientists and engineers, too. They would benefit from language skills just as much as their humanities counterparts need more numeracy. However, in any broadening of the curriculum in the schools, the universities need to be supportive and not obstructive. At the moment, they are justly blamed by the schools for discouraging breadth by favouring applicants who have had a narrow focus. Indeed, our universities should follow the example of American universities in broadening their own degree courses and in introducing a more flexible system of credits to facilitate transfer between institutions and offer a second chance to those unlucky in their pre-18 education. A large fraction of young people have options foreclosed simply because they are unlucky with the teaching that they secure at the sixth-form level.

Even with the current narrow undergraduate curriculum, it is clear that a bachelor’s degree is not in itself a sufficient qualification and must be topped up for many purposes by a masters-level course. That is why it matters so much that masters courses are under special threat, in particular through a lack of funding sources for home students. Given that money is tight, what is the best solution to this problem? Distance learning and online courses have a huge role across all higher and further education, at least as a supplement to traditional methods, but it is surely at the masters level that MOOCs and the rest offer the most unambiguous benefits in terms of cost-saving and rationalisation. At that level, the students are more mature and motivated. Many would prefer to work part time to enhance their vocational credentials. There is surely huge scope for expanding the options and enhancing efficiency through use of IT by consortia of universities and colleges.

As the noble Lord, Lord Broers, pointed out, it is at the postgraduate level that we need to identify strategic areas. Having identified them, we need to offer incentives, from government or the private sector, to boost expertise in them. But let us not forget that it is no good educating more students in strategic areas if the relevant industries cannot attract and retain them and they are eventually seduced into the financial sector.

Finally, we should not overlook a third reason why STEM education is important right through the system. Science is part of our culture. More than that, it is the one culture that is truly global; protons, proteins and Pythagoras’s theorem transcend all boundaries of nation and faith. It is a real intellectual deprivation not to understand our natural world, and the insights stemming from Darwin, Watson, Crick, and so on. The BBC audiences for David Attenborough, Brian Cox and many other excellent expositors demonstrate the genuine hunger for such knowledge, even if it is as seemingly irrelevant as dinosaurs and the cosmos.

The modern world will feel bewildering, even frightening, unless people have some grasp of the basic principles underlying it—the biosphere and climate, and the artefacts that everyday life depends on. Achieving this understanding of the everyday things that we depend on is genuinely harder today. Fifty years ago, inquisitive children could take apart a clock, a radio set or a motorbike, figure out how it worked, and even put it together again. But it is different today. The gadgets that now pervade young people’s lives, smart-phones and suchlike, are baffling black boxes, pure magic to most people. Even if you take them apart, you will find few clues to their arcane miniaturised mechanisms, and you certainly cannot put them together again. So the extreme sophistication of modern technology, wonderful though its benefits are, is, ironically, an impediment to engaging young people with the basics, with learning how things work. Likewise, town-dwellers are more distanced from the natural world than earlier generations were. That is why an earlier report from our committee expressed concern about a decline in practical work, field trips and the like. So the issues addressed by our committee are crucial not only to the UK’s economy and environment, but also to education and well-being in the widest sense.