Lord Bilimoria
Main Page: Lord Bilimoria (Crossbench - Life peer)(3 days, 10 hours ago)
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Lord Leong (Lab)
My noble friend is absolutely right. Most of the graduates at Russell group universities will probably spend more time doing research than those going to the new universities, where teaching is the main curriculum. Only some 5% of those who go to Russell group universities end up as teachers. We have funding for recruiting teachers but we also need to retain them, which is very important, so the Government have initiatives to retain these teachers.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, 1.5 million school leavers apply to the Indian Institutes of Technology, the IIT; 130,000 make the first cut and 15,000 get places. These graduates are now running some of the biggest companies in the world. What more can we do to make maths and STEM subjects as popular as they are in India, and get the brightest and the best to go for them? When I was chancellor of the University of Birmingham, we set up a joint AI and data science degree with IIT Madras. Surely we should make many more collaborative degrees like that one.
Lord Leong (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a very interesting point. We have to compete globally for maths graduates, but at the same time we need to have a pipeline of students going through universities, studying maths and coming out to teach it. I will give some figures. We are spending some £233 million to try to recruit teachers, and giving graduates a £25,000 tax-free scholarship to take up teaching. We are spending some £6,000 each to encourage them to stay on as maths teachers.