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

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Willis of Knaresborough, for introducing the report in such a good way and for giving us an insight into the thinking that went into it. I also thank the noble Lord and his colleagues for the report itself. This has been a very high-level debate indeed and one that will live long in the memory. However, I still never get answers when I raise this so I have to ask: why has it taken since July 2012 for this debate to come forward today? These are important and crucial issues. As was mentioned, they are also rather timeous in the sense that they stem out—sorry for the pun—from the debate earlier today in your Lordships’ House on the Budget. There are points in the report that could have been picked up earlier by the Government, but in the way that this has been handled, we will be unable to see what has happened because the timing has been so long.

The question that I shall focus on largely comes from an interest that I must declare, which is that I am a STEM graduate. I studied chemistry at university and two of my three children are about to go to university to study STEM subjects, and one is about to complete an HE course. That does not, sadly, follow me into the sciences but she opted for a social science degree. Her case is exemplary in terms of what has been said in this debate. She had strong GCSEs, including triple science and maths, and then switched at A-level to maths, further maths, economics and history. However, she then decided to take economics and politics at university, and will graduate this year with a degree in those topics.

The context to the report, as has been said, is the Budget debate in your Lordships’ House today and the Budget yesterday. UK economic output is flatlining, with GDP still below 2007-08 levels. In addition, projections of future growth look anaemic, raising questions about where future growth is to come from. In the wake of the financial crisis and subsequent recession, the coalition Government set out to “rebalance” the economy away from financial services and the south-east towards other sectors and regions, including manufacturing, life sciences and green energy. However, as the committee’s report makes clear, this path to growth is heavily reliant on building and sustaining the health of the STEM industries in this country. It is common ground that the success of this strategy will depend crucially on the available STEM skills base, and it is on this issue that I wish to centre my remarks. How will we ensure that there will be sufficient home-grown talent to satisfy the employment requirements in this sector?

According to the report by the Social Market Foundation, which has been referred to by several noble Lords, there are already shortages in the supply of UK-domiciled STEM-qualified labour. STEM-qualified individuals are in demand across the core STEM sectors, but also across the wider economy, which means that the supply of STEM-qualified individuals actually has to be higher than the number of STEM jobs to ensure that demand from the STEM sector is met. The UK has a long-running home-grown STEM skills deficit and in recent years has tended to rely on migration to make up the shortfall in domestic supply. This has effectively been stopped by the current Government’s immigration policy.

So, how many new workers do we need out of the system? The key message on the numbers seems to be that if we are to fulfil the estimated employment requirements and make progress in rebalancing the economy, the UK will need to increase substantially the number of individuals taking STEM subjects at school. It was therefore worrying to read in the report, and to see in the Social Market Foundation report, that there are several points at which potential future STEM employees are lost to other subjects and sectors. Of those who have achieved good science GCSEs two years earlier, only around one-fifth go on to take science A-levels. Just under 60% of those who take science A-levels actually graduate in STEM subjects. Even of those who graduate in STEM, between 18% and 29% go on to work outside STEM occupations.

One way of addressing the shortfall is for policymakers to focus on reducing the proportion of students lost to non-STEM subjects at each educational transition point. It would be interesting to hear the Minister’s views on that point.

As we have heard, there may be some scope to increase A-level STEM take-up among those who do well at GCSE and by reducing disparities in GCSE achievement between different groups of students. Raising the performance of all groups to the level of the best could help make some inroads into the shortfall across STEM. Bearing in mind my personal experience, it was interesting to read that if boys did as well as girls at science GCSE, and girls took up A-level science at the same rate as boys, the number of pupils doing A-level science in England and Wales in recent years would have been higher by an average of between 11,000 and 13,000 each year, or between 14% and 16% higher per year. If the proportions of A-level students taking science in England and Wales had been as high as that in Northern Ireland in recent years, the number of pupils doing A-level science in England and Wales would have been higher by between some 13,000 and 17,000 each year, or between 16% and 22% higher per year. To change tack slightly, but still on the same point, if those on free school meals in England had done as well in GCSE science in recent years as the rest of their cohort, the number of pupils doing A-level science in England would have been higher by an average of between 3,000 and 4,000 each year, or between 4% and 5% higher per year. If you do the maths, I think you will find that the numbers will increase substantially if all these matters come to pass.

However, even those measures, taken together, will do only a modest amount to close what appears to be the gap. The SMF report estimates that there could be an increase of about 18,000 STEM graduates per year, but the shortfall is at least 40,000 and may be as high as 100,000. This means that the real solution to the UK’s huge STEM skills deficit lies in starting much earlier to boost GCSE STEM attainment across the board. At the moment, too few students achieve good GCSE grades. We need to do more on that, we need to do better in the EBacc, and we need to make sure that the transition across to A-levels is sustained and made permanent.

The broader challenges that that raises have been addressed by the committee and there have been a number of initiatives which we have woven into the report and which I should like to bring together. Obviously, teaching has a major impact on achievement. Therefore, as has been mentioned, expanding the supply of science and maths teachers is vital if we are to avoid a vicious cycle of self-perpetuating skills shortages. The Government should therefore explore methods to make the teaching profession much more financially attractive relative to the other employment options that are open to science and maths graduates. For instance, the number of STEM teachers on the Teach First programme could be further expanded, perhaps building on support from the STEM industry. More radical measures might include relaxing the initial eligibility criteria for teacher training and encouraging more international recruitment of science and maths teachers in the short term. It would be interesting to get the Minister’s views on those proposals.

Turning to other points in the report, it was right for the committee to pick up the continuing failure to sort out the postgraduate course in STEM areas. It is important that this is tackled. It was also right to recognise the difficulty of projecting future employment requirements, but this is absolutely crucial to developing policy in this area. Therefore, I strongly commend the recommendations in the report concerning the importance of gaining a lot more understanding of what influences students’ course choices; the quality and consistency of the independent careers advice that they have access to—or, increasingly, do not have access to; the need for longitudinal studies of careers and flows in and out of the STEM industries; and the holding and analysing of data on postgraduate entry and take-up. I particularly echo the call in the report for a,

“robust, long-term tracking system for postgraduate provision and destination data”,

and draw attention to the rather limp response from the Government to recommendation 10, which has already been mentioned.

Other areas where the Government’s response to recommendations is less than satisfactory are quality assurance and standards and scrutiny, as well as how they are going to afford Parliament a chance to take a view on their radical reforms to the organisation of our HE system. Certainly, the report did not go into very much detail on this but, time having moved on, the case for it is now rather urgent. Can the Minister confirm whether there is to be an HE Bill in the Queen’s Speech this year? If not, we will wait even longer for what is obviously a very important issue. It is noticeable that whenever we have a higher education issue on the agenda, we have a very high-quality debate, and this is obviously something where your Lordships’ House would like to make a contribution. We cannot get information on that at the moment but, in the interim, the committee has made a very good job of pointing out what little power the department has to shift the focus and direction of the higher education institutions now that HEFCE has effectively been sidelined and students have been placed at the heart of the funding system.

Finally, there is the question of funding. As the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, recommendation 29 invites the Government to explain their thinking in this area. However, in their response, they do not give much detail and they certainly do not come up with a good explanation of how they intend to protect STEM subjects. Indeed, this whole section seems to be unnecessarily defensive and in no way rises to the challenges presented in the committee’s report. You know that the game is up when you read in the response that the only thing that the Government can come up with is to trumpet rather vacuously that the HE sector,

“will continue to receive substantial direct public funding ... both for teaching and research”.

Well, that is good.

However, one phrase, in particular, caught my eye. Perhaps the Minister can explain, either today or in writing, what precisely is meant by the concluding phrase in this section of the government response. It says:

“Putting together HEFCE teaching, research and capital grants and the BIS upfront costs of graduate contributions, total BIS investment in HEIs in England could rise from around £9.7bn in 2010-11 to around £10.3bn in 2014-15, while broadly maintaining existing levels of participation”.

Well, well, well. Isn’t that interesting? I suppose the sun could rise in the west tomorrow, but that might be considered a little unlikely. So let me try another tack: are we really hearing here that more students could fail to repay their student fee loans than is currently planned? That would certainly raise the BIS RAB charge. Of course, the HEFCE teaching grant will also be disappearing. There seems to be a bit of a double whammy here.

Therefore, will the Minister explain what this sentence precisely means? Will she confirm that it is the Government’s intention that the levels of funding to institutions, net of the upfront cost of graduate contributions, will increase, as implied by that sentence, in real terms by the suggested 6.2% by 2014-2015, or can we assume that this is just a coded warning to higher education institutions with significant STEM subject courses that the cuts are on their way?