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

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

That this House takes note of the Report of the Science and Technology Committee on Higher Education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects (2nd Report, HL Paper 37).

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the members of the Science and Technology Committee for their superb contributions to this report, and the clerk and policy analyst for their excellent support. In particular, I thank Professor Sir William Wakeham, our specialist adviser, for his wise and expert advice, and David Willetts, the Higher Education Minister, for giving his time to meet the chairman and me to discuss a number of key issues arising from the Government’s response.

In their 2011 report, The Plan for Growth, the Government describe education as,

“the foundation of economic success”.

The report emphasised:

“Our economy needs to be … much more dynamic … and retooled for a high tech future, if we are going to create the jobs and prosperity we need for the next generation”.

As a committee, we agree, but the success of this strategy, as the Social Market Foundation report echoed last week,

“will depend crucially on the available STEM skills base”.

That is why we focused our efforts on examining whether the Government are using the available levers to support the higher education sector to meet the UK’s STEM skills.

We did not seek evidence on the recent higher education reforms, as we felt that it was too early to assess their repercussions. However, the committee recognised, in the absence of the expected higher education Bill, that there was an urgent need for the Government to set out their vision and priorities for higher education and for Parliament to have an opportunity to debate them. We hope that that will happen.

We start from a very strong base. We have an outstanding higher education system, with nine of our universities in the Times Higher Education top 100 world university rankings. In research, we are world-leading or a partner of choice in most areas of STEM, but there is evidence that we are not producing sufficient STEM graduates of appropriate quality to meet the challenges of economic growth.

Therefore, we began by attempting to define what was meant by a STEM graduate and we then considered the balance between supply and demand. Both proved to be very challenging tasks. The most common definition for STEM arises from the Joint Academic Coding System, or JACS. This is owned by UCAS and HESA and is a subject coding system across the whole of the higher education sector. However, the problem with the JACS system is that several subjects with little hard science, such as nursing, psychology, sports science, architecture and archaeological science, fall within the highest STEM bands and are given equal weighting to subjects such as chemistry, physics, engineering and maths, which are considered by most employers as the core STEM subjects.

The Government rightly claimed that there has been an overall increase in STEM qualifiers. However, despite modest increases in core STEM subjects, the majority of the increase has arisen from the popularity of so-called soft STEM courses. For example, forensic and archaeological science increased by 349% between 2003 and 2009, while engineering reduced by 3% and computer science by 27%. This trend towards soft STEM helps to explain why on analysis many STEM graduates face employment challenges in traditional STEM careers as core components of their degrees, particularly mathematics, have been studiously avoided.

The committee called on the Government to work with HESA and other stakeholders to apply a standard definition to STEM based on the competencies and skills a STEM graduate should possess and a STEM course should contain. Although the Government accepted the possibility of confusion, they proposed little action other than to discuss this with HEFCE and other stakeholders. Confusion over what constitutes a STEM course or degree is compounded by a lack of reliable data on supply and demand for STEM graduates. There is, of course, no shortage of data but they are often irrelevant, badly co-ordinated, difficult to interrogate and out of date. The principal source collected by HESA is difficult to access and expensive and confusing to interrogate.

LGC, a STEM employer, commented:

“We are not aware of any government-facilitated mechanism to feed our demands for graduate skills into the education system”.

The British Computer Society described HESA data as “misleading” and that,

“degrees with … little computer science content are bundled with true computer science degrees when calculating the statistics”.

The Academy of Medical Sciences commented that the,

“rules for collecting data on postgraduate students make no sense at all”.

Even the Home Office Minister, Damian Green, expressed surprise that it took HESA 18 months to provide statistics of degree starters. The Higher Education Minister, David Willetts, embarrassingly conceded:

“I accept that this is a problem; at the moment everybody is unhappy”.

Disappointingly, the committee’s recommendation for a single body to assume responsibility for the collection and analysis of data was dismissed. Perhaps the Minister could explain just what action is being taken to make data collection and analysis more effective.

The same confusion abounds as regards demand, with the committee reliant on non-governmental sources for analysis. STEM shortages in IT, computer gaming, visual effects, the power electronics sector and nuclear engineering, as well as more specific in vivo technologies for the pharmaceutical industry, were presented to the committee. The 2011 CBI survey on mapping the future of growth reported that 43% of employers were having difficulty recruiting hard STEM staff and forecasted a demand for a further 600,000 professionally trained STEM staff by 2017, requiring a 40% increase in STEM graduates. Just a month ago, a Royal Academy of Engineering report, Jobs and Growth: the Importance of Engineering Skills to the UK Economy, again emphasised the mismatch between supply and demand. The recent SMF report estimated a need for an additional 40,000 STEM graduates to meet demand, adding, quite chillingly:

“Given the home-grown STEM skills shortage, it is inconceivable that the Government’s planned rebalancing can take place in the short-term without substantial levels of migration”.

These are serious demand-side issues, so can the Minister tell the House what steps are being taken more accurately to predict demand needs in order that HEFCE and our HEIs can plan provision?

Inevitably, any discussion of STEM involves addressing provision in our schools. However, investigations into that were being undertaken by the Education Committee in another place so we confined our discussion to the role of mathematics in preparing students as potential STEM undergraduates. Despite the laudable attempts of successive Governments to improve maths provision, we have insufficient numbers studying maths beyond the age of 16, and the levels required, even at A-level, are inadequate to meet the demands of academia or industry. The recent PISA study demonstrated just how far behind our competitors we are, with the UK 28th in the international league table for maths for 15 year-olds. However, despite this lamentable performance, 85% of students give up maths at the age of 16. Our children do not have some defective maths gene problem; this is a problem with our schools. The recent Institute of Education Report, published last month, found that:

“The highest-achieving pupils in England can almost match the most able children in Taiwan and Hong Kong in maths tests at the age of 10. But by the time they take their GCSEs they have fallen nearly two years behind their Far Eastern counterparts”.

We recognise that much work is needed to raise standards pre-16, but given that maths is a fundamental building block for STEM careers, the committee recommended that all children should study an appropriate maths course between age 16 and 19. For students wishing to study hard STEM subjects in higher education, maths to A2 should be compulsory. The Government’s response was disappointing, to say the least. Simply requiring students who did not achieve a GCSE at the age of 16 to continue with that failed pathway misses the point. To be fair, Michael Gove said in the Commons on 7 February that his reforms to the national curriculum are intended to ensure,

“that the building blocks of a mathematical and scientific knowledge will be there in order to ensure that higher-level engineering qualifications can be enjoyed and achieved by a wider group of pupils than ever before”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/13; col. 447.]

Hallelujah. Sorry, I should not say that.

Will the Minister explain what Mr Gove meant by this, and whether maths will, after all, become a mandatory component of all post-16 education programmes? Perhaps she can also clarify what progress is being made following Mr Gove’s announcement that he is committed to involving HEIs in the planning of the A-level curriculum. Again, I say hallelujah. That was a key recommendation in our report and resulted from a criticism by universities of the dumbing down of A-level maths standards which led Brian Cantor, the vice-chancellor of the University of York, to state,

“we have to give … remedial classes, often even to triple-A students”.

However, the recent Ofqual report concluded that there was a reluctance by HEIs to lead on any development of A-levels, so a clarification from the Minister would be helpful, as would an update on Professor Nigel Thrift’s discussions with universities in this key area. Our HEIs must also become more demanding about what they expect from students at entry. It cannot be in their interest to dumb down entry to hard STEM courses by removing the requirement for A-level maths. However, our report showed that in 2009 20% of engineering, 38% of chemistry and 60% of computer science undergraduates did not have A-level maths, while according to the ABPI 92% of bioscience undergraduate programmes do not require maths beyond GCSE. That is not acceptable.

Of course, the quality of what is on offer at our HEIs in STEM is not exclusively determined by mathematics, but it is a crucial ingredient in virtually every single STEM course. The committee was anxious to look at where other levers for quality lay and where the Government and the sector could do more to enhance quality.

On a positive note, there was significant support for the introduction of the KIS, the key information set, which, with continued improvement around areas such as data on destination, career paths, quality of teaching and skill acquisition, has the potential to help drive up standards and give students better information. We recommended that the KIS process be urgently extended to postgraduate study. Can the Minister say what progress HEFCE has made following its discussions to give postgraduates better information about courses and universities?

Two issues were constantly raised during our inquiry—postgraduate STEM education and immigration. STEM postgraduates play a significant role in driving innovation, undertaking research and development and providing leadership and entrepreneurship, and yet the Government have failed to convey to students or indeed employers the importance and the value of postgraduate study. It appears that postgraduate education has been the casualty of the higher education reforms, has resulted in a decline in STEM qualifiers in some key subjects, a decline in funding arrangements, particularly for taught masters, and confusion in the minds of many HEIs about the future of their postgraduate programmes, a situation compounded by uncertainties caused by perceptions over immigration.

While we were disappointed that our recommendation to set up an expert group to co-ordinate a postgraduate strategy with key stakeholders was rejected, we noted that HEFCE has been asked to consult stakeholders, including employers. Can the Minister say what progress has been made with those discussions and what outcomes have been agreed, particularly with regard to taught masters degrees, which appear to be being phased out despite their importance in up-skilling and retraining the UK work force.

However, the committee was supportive of the move to establish doctoral training centres and the research councils are to be warmly congratulated on maintaining and, in several cases, enhancing their support for doctoral training. There was some concern about a possible negative impact on the breadth of research, and in particular research that takes place outside DTCs. We also received evidence that there were problems in areas where no DTCs existed. For example, there is not a DCT for physics in the south-east and only one DTC for synthetic organic chemistry in the whole of the UK. How do we get round that and ensure that universities work together? What advice does the Minister have for HEFCE and to RCUK.

The committee was deeply concerned about the negative impact of the Government’s immigration policy, in particular the perception that the UK was hostile to overseas students, particularly from India and the Far East. There has been welcome movement. We welcome the support for our recommendation to make a distinction in the immigration statistics between HE students and other immigrants and the improved ONS methodology that will now allow a rational debate about student numbers, their programmes of study and their impact, although we were disappointed that they are not to be fully disaggregated.

We welcome the recognition that a lack of reliable statistical data, particular in-year data, is hampering both the effectiveness of the Border Agency to do its job, which creates some of the problem, and the higher education sector to promote and monitor good practice. We welcome the acceptance of our recommendation for the Migration Advisory Service to review its tier 2 codes and to consult employers on appropriate rates of pay rather than the £20,000 minimum level. The Prime Minister’s letter to Select Committee chairs still maintains the £20,000 figure. Can the Minister clarify whether we are going to consult employers about appropriate rates or stick to a £20,000 limit which, frankly, is nonsense in a number of areas?

However, we welcome the statement made by Mike Harper in another place when he confirmed that changes will be made to tier 4, which is what we had asked for in our report, to allow,

“talented graduates to stay and work after their studies. All completing PhD students will be allowed to stay in the UK for one year beyond the end of the course to find skilled work or set up as an entrepreneur”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/3/13; col. 24WS.]

That is a very welcome addition and we should support it.

Following the Prime Minister’s visit to India, the battle to reverse the perception—we accept that a great deal of this is about perception—that the UK is unwelcoming to students is now under way. However, it will take more than a charm offensive to correct the current perception. While David Willetts’s pledge that there is no cap and that there are no plans to introduce a cap on student numbers is extremely welcome, the tough language coming out of the Home Office to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands continues to give the impression that, while students may be welcome to study here, they are not welcome to work and settle.

I am sure that noble Lords will wish to explore other aspects of the report in greater detail. Meanwhile, I commend it to the House. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply and, indeed, for the very comprehensive way in which she has dealt with many of the core issues. We look forward to having individual responses to some of the specific questions which were laid down. I also thank all noble Lords for their contributions this evening. It was a late debate, and I am very conscious that Members wish to get away to other engagements, so will be particularly brief.

Having spent 13 years in the Commons, I can say that one of the great joys about this House is that when we have a debate about higher education, particularly on science and technology, the number of Members who come along not simply with great intellect but with great insight into the way in which science, technology, engineering and maths can really impact on society as a whole rather than a very narrow field is really quite inspirational. Although I hear what the Minister says in terms of there being no higher education Bill, the importance of the Government being able to set out their plans and to analyse the impacts of their current reforms is fundamental to us moving forward. I trust that the Minister will take that on board and that we will have an opportunity to have not simply a debate tagged on at the end of business on a Thursday evening but a full debate, where we have a whole day to look at this key issue of how we generate growth through science, technology, engineering and maths.

Motion agreed.