STEM Subjects: Science and Discovery Centres

Steve Brine Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

I welcome the debate and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) on making the running and on his excellent opening remarks.

I will not detain the House for long, but I want to make a few comments about the Winchester Science Centre, which I am very fortunate to have in my constituency. It is an independent educational charity that receives no statutory funding from local authorities or Government and raises more than £3 million every year to supports its core purpose of sparking curiosity in STEM. Many of your constituents will no doubt have visited it over the years, Mrs Miller.

It is all the more disappointing, then, in the context of the debate, that the Winchester Science Centre will lose an expected £2.5 million in revenue because of this dreadful pandemic. I place on record how incredibly grateful we are to the Government for their support with the furlough scheme and the many other support packages for businesses, which, it is no exaggeration to say, have prevented what could have been a much worse outcome. The Winchester Science Centre charity, however, has been excluded from applying for additional Government support—namely, the culture recovery fund, which I have spent a lot of time scrutinising as a member of the DCMS Committee. Other organisations in the local area that do similar activities have received large grants, which has created an uneven playing field.

Some excellent research published by University College London in 2017 clearly states that informal science education must start at primary school age, which is good, because the Winchester Science Centre has been focusing on five to 12-year-olds since 1986. That means that almost 4,000 children, who might otherwise not have had the opportunity, have taken part in free, informal science activities this past year, thanks to the centre’s widening participation in STEM outreach programme.

The facts speak for themselves. Some 170,000 visitors enjoy live science, hands-on activities, and an immersive 360° planetarium show each normal year—it is a fantastic show. Forty-five thousand school visitors engage with the activities every year, from 16 different counties across the south-east. That includes, of course, constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge.

Just to touch on the careers part of what we are discussing today, we in Winchester have strong STEM relationships across the extremely sci-tech rich M3 corridor, including a multi-year partnership with Airbus, memorandums of understanding for public engagement with the University of Southampton and the University of Surrey, which is in Guildford, and many collaborations with industry through, among others, the Enterprise M3 local enterprise partnership.

Going back to covid—as, regrettably, we always must—I know that the BBC gets all the plaudits for singing its own praises for its home learning work in the past year, but I would argue that science centres have more than done their bit. Winchester’s digital Science@Home campaign reached over a million people during a crisis where many organisations were not able to operate at all. Almost a quarter of a million children from across the UK watched a digital Christmas coding pantomime—it sounds such fun. That was developed as part of our “Get with the Program”, and promoted through Winchester’s schools network in last December.

We have heard today about the Association for Science and Discovery Centres, and I suspect that the Minister will be aware of that organisation. Winchester is, of course, a respected member of it, regularly participating in special interest groups to share best practice for the things they are doing. I know that, during the first lockdown, the Winchester team co-created a new website offering other science centres around the country best advice on how to make their experiences more accessible to all.

The future should be very positive and strong. We have not come this far to go down now. I know the team at Winchester, led by the excellent Ben Ward, are determined to move on from covid and come back stronger.

The truth is that, whatever the restrictions say, the school trips are not coming back any time soon, possibly not even in September—no matter my view on the over-caution that that would represent—so I would like the Minister, when she sums up, and colleagues across Government and at the Department for Education, to make the positive case for school trips later this year, and to give school leaders the confidence to get back out there.

As we have heard today, science centres will benefit from that because their main customer base is back, but the country will also benefit because of their obvious support for education and careers in STEM subjects—and boy, has the past 12 months shown how much we need them.

[Mrs Maria Miller (in the Chair)]

We now move to the Front-Bench speakers. I remind the Minister that, when she makes her contribution, she will need to wind up by about 3.58 pm to enable Dr Spencer to make his winding-up speech.