Educating Engineers

Stephen Mosley Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

It is the first time I have served under your chairmanship, Mr Walker, so I welcome the opportunity to do so by addressing the Chamber on the Select Committee on Science and Technology’s report, “Educating tomorrow’s engineers: the impact of Government reforms on 14–19 education”. The Committee produced the report unanimously back in February. We dealt with the impacts of the English baccalaureate, university technical colleges and changes to the engineering diploma. I will also comment on the Government’s response to our report, and as we are in education mode, I will be generous and offer the Minister seven out of 10 for that response. It is a good score—I never got those sorts of marks in my classes.

Engineering is crucial to the economy. It has been estimated that the engineering work force produces a fifth of our GDP and half of UK exports. In 2010, the sector generated 25% of UK turnover—that is three times the size of the financial services sector. It is not just the economy that benefits from engineering; we also need to look at health care, energy, transport, construction, defence and many other sectors.

Despite engineering’s importance, the UK is facing a shortfall in the numbers and quality of engineers. About 820,000 science, engineering and technology professionals will be required by 2020, with 80% of those required in engineering. The engineering work force is ageing, and we will need around 82,000 engineers and technicians just to deal with the requirements up to 2016. That demand will not just be met by university graduates; we only produce 23,000 engineering graduates a year, and not all of them stay in engineering. The loss is a particular concern when it comes to women. Only 12% of engineering students in higher education are women, and it gets worse.

[Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)]

One of the most inspiring sessions that we did during the Committee’s inquiry involved three young ladies who came to speak to us. There was Kirsty, who is currently an apprentice at National Grid, Georgie, who was studying her A-levels, and Georgia, who was doing her GCSEs. They told us that a couple of things that were very important in getting ladies into engineering were having role models and having experience of engineering. Will the hon. Gentleman give us his thoughts on that?

[Andrew Miller]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. National Grid, in its briefing notes for the debate, quotes Kirsty, who said:

“I decided to do an apprenticeship as I could get qualifications and learn a trade at the same time; to do a job that means something; to be able to go into work in the morning and leave knowing I have made a difference to something.”

That young woman was an inspiring witness, as was a young lady from Novartis who spoke to the Cogent awards last year. She explained how she did a higher apprenticeship and was able to say cheerfully, at the end of it, that not only is she ahead of her peer group for her age, but she has a degree, and what is more, she does not have a student debt. She has done rather well. The hon. Gentleman is spot on in terms of the importance of women.

In the Queen’s Speech debate, I spoke about the importance of breaking the artificial barrier between vocational and academic qualifications. In the eyes of far too many people, there is a brick wall between vocational and academic. It is a continuum, and we need to support that continuum’s development.

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[Andrew Miller]

My hon. Friend will find some very talented students, inspiring teachers and fantastic equipment. It is worth examining whether we can develop that in other UTCs.

[Stephen Mosley]

As a Committee, we were really impressed by the UTCs, the students and the head teachers; we thought that they were a fantastic idea and that they should be rolled out. However, we had a little concern that that must not be at the expense of teaching science and engineering in mainstream schools. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could touch on that.

[Andrew Miller]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The Government must focus on good engineering education in all schools and colleges, and not just silo it in a few specialist institutions. That is hugely important, and it is one of the issues we all need to consider in relation to the success of UTCs. We must not silo them, but integrate them as part of the mainstream offer; indeed, in some towns and cities, we must look at how schools can collaborate to make possible a wider spread of engineering skills among students. That is an important point.

We have just heard about the Education Committee’s inquiry into careers guidance. Its report set out in detail the importance of face-to-face careers advice for young people and recommended that

“the Department for Education introduces into the statutory guidance a requirement for schools to publish an annual careers plan, to include information on the support and resources available to its pupils in planning their career development.”

We looked at careers advice from the engineering perspective, and we concluded that the duty on schools to provide access to impartial, independent advice was laudable.

In principle, we support greater autonomy for schools to provide careers advice. However, the duty poses problems in practice. First, there are resource implications for schools, which are given more responsibility but no additional budget to secure careers guidance. Secondly, there is little guidance on the quality of careers guidance that should be available to students. That partly comes back to the fact that there is insufficient time in the school day for teachers to have the continuous professional development training that would enable them to be on top of what is happening in the economy and in the area surrounding the school. There is a gap, and successive Governments have tried to wrestle with the problem, but we must address it.

The quality of careers guidance can go up only if those giving it have at least some understanding of what being an engineer means. An interesting discovery that we made in research for another Committee report, entitled “Bridging the valley of death”, on the economics of developing small high-tech businesses, was that Lloyds Bank had found time to send some managers on engineering training courses. If a busy commercial bank can do it, it is not beyond the wit of Ministers to develop a similar scheme that would work for teachers, to try to help them to understand a bit more about the jobs available in the communities where they teach.

[Stephen Mosley]

The hon. Gentleman has not yet touched on the value of experience in getting people interested in engineering. One witness went to a lecture on the Bloodhound supersonic car. That young lady said that for her it was a turning point: she had to study engineering, build cars and race them across the world. Opportunities for people to get experience in engineering are hugely important, whether they happen through work experience or education field trips. Does the hon. Gentleman have any thoughts on that?

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[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Walker, and to speak in this important and timely debate.

Why is a debate on educating tomorrow’s engineers important, and worthy of a report by the Select Committee on Science and Technology? There is no doubt that the country faces huge challenges. None is greater than the economic challenge; and our future is by no means certain, so we need to carve out a new future for our nation—one that is not based just on financial and other service-based industries, which perhaps we have come to rely on too much. They are valuable industries, but we need to rebalance our economy.

We need also to recognise that we will not return to the heavy metal-bashing industries of the past and that we need to play to our strengths; perhaps we had forgotten what they were. For too long, we abandoned—or at the very least undervalued—our skilled industrial and engineering heritage, in favour of other sectors. The time has come for that to change, and I hope that the report will instigate and support that change.

What lies behind the Government’s reforms in education must be widely and generally welcomed. There is a deep-seated belief that we need to give young people the best possible opportunities and skills to enable them to get access to the jobs that will exist in future. Some of the reforms that we considered will achieve that. We may collectively have underestimated the value of engineering, but let us not undersell ourselves.

As the Committee Chairman, the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller), said, engineering and manufacturing are still hugely important to the country. They are also important to me personally in my constituency. The UK is home to more than 500,000 engineering companies, employing, as we heard, 5.4 million people, of whom 2.3 million would consider themselves to be skilled engineers. That accounts for 8% of the work force. As we heard, it accounts for one fifth of GDP and half of all our exports, and turns over £1.15 trillion. We should not underestimate the importance of the sector, but we sometimes do, and we therefore seem to have created an ever-widening skills gap, which has consequences for the economy and for the rebalancing of our national wealth.

[Stephen Mosley]

I am the co-chairman of the parliamentary ICT forum, and one of the things that companies always tell us is that the No. 1 thing they look for when considering investing in any country is not tax or any such factor but whether the skills that they need are available where they are thinking of locating a factory or development lab. The report ties into that.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

My hon. Friend is right. Skills are a major factor when people are deciding where to invest. Something that I found surprising, or perhaps even shocking, was that when the CBI conducted a survey of companies, it found that 42%, across all sectors, reported a skills gap when recruiting. That skills gap is as true in my local context as it is nationally.

South Basildon and East Thurrock has a long and rich industrial heritage, and I shall, if I may, blow my constituency’s trumpet for a moment. For example, one in 10 of the world’s large tractors are built in Basildon, at Case New Holland, generating £7 billion of exports. The personal IED-blockers that our servicemen wear in Afghanistan are built, designed and programmed in Basildon by Selex. Gardner Aerospace is a medium-sized engineering firm, employing more than 200 staff in my constituency. It is a tier 1 supplier to Airbus—there is not an Airbus A380 that flies without a part made in Basildon—and it competes with firms in cheaper-cost-base countries such as India and China, and why is it able to compete? Because of its quality and because it delivers on time.