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

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for introducing this debate and I thank the members of the Science and Technology Select Committee for the very substantial report that we are considering today. The Government have responded to the report at length, which suggests that they fully recognise its importance.

The reason so few students pursue the STEM subjects in universities is that they are unpopular. Given that students have the freedom to choose and the lack of incentives that might direct their choice, this amounts to a mere tautology. A vicious cycle which has diminished the popularity of these subjects has been operating for many years. A lack of knowledge or experience of the STEM subjects among adults limits the perspective of students. A lack of teachers who are properly trained in science and technology prejudices the quality of STEM education in schools, which exacerbates the problem. One could ask how this vicious cycle has developed, but it is more important to think about its consequences and to wonder how it might be broken.

Britain has a peculiar cultural and social history that has militated against the survival of its scientific and technical competence. The members of the managerial classes in the UK have rarely been educated in science and technology, and often they have shown a palpable aversion to such matters. Even in the early post-war years, after Britain’s prowess in science and technology had done much to contribute towards the Allied victories, managers and workers were endeavouring to place restraints on technological innovation. Such innovation threatened the power of trades unions in entrenched positions. On the managerial side, the logic of cost accountancy demanded that in order to spread the overheads of investment in fixed capital, production should proceed without the seemingly gratuitous interruptions that tinkering technologists are liable to cause. The deleterious consequences of this managerial attitude were becoming all too apparent in the 1960s when one after another of our industries that ought to have been at the forefront of technological innovations were overtaken by foreign competitors.

The problems associated with a lack of industrial investment continued throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, which was the era of mass destruction of British industry as well as a time of severe economic recession. The lack of opportunities for technically trained graduates was exacerbated by the growing tendency of firms to resort to contracting out when in need of technological or scientific services. The inevitable consequence of the lack of technically trained employees within business organisations was a failure to perceive the opportunities for technological innovation. The closure or curtailment, during this period, of many government scientific research establishments also had a negative impact on the pursuit of technological innovation in industry.

The 1960s had seen a marked increase in the number of students graduating from British universities as a consequence of the so-called Robbins expansion of higher education. However, the expansion was spearheaded by the liberal arts and social studies. This emphasis accorded well with the ethos of the time, which was decidedly libertarian. It was to a gentlemanly education that many of the recruits to universities aspired rather than to a technical education. This was doubtless a reflection of the way in which education has served, in this country, to signal and buttress social status. The continued relative decline of British industry also diminished the attractiveness of a technical education.

The University of Sussex, which was the first of the new Robbins universities, embodied the ethos of the times, and it adopted a novel multidisciplinary approach to the social sciences. It placed each of them in a wider context that was provided by one of several schools of studies: African studies, American studies, European studies and so on. However, it is perhaps ironical, given the emphasis the university has placed on social sciences, that it developed a greater reputation in the mathematical, physical and material sciences. The mathematics department in the University of Sussex was under the guidance of Walter Ledermann and led the way in a programme of applicable mathematics. Ledermann had developed a liking for concrete mathematics and a distaste for abstraction for its own sake. His attitudes were a reaction to what had gone amiss in the teaching of mathematics at the undergraduate level. Abstraction for its own sake had been the hallmark of much of European mathematics throughout the second quarter of the 20th century.

That tendency was exemplified by the work of a priesthood of French mathematicians who compiled a mass of literature working under the collective pseudonym of Bourbaki. The Bourbakistes were aiming at a completely self-contained, axiomatic treatment of the core areas of modern mathematics, based on set theory. In the main, they despised applied mathematics. Their rigorous approach, which is greatly impressive to professional mathematicians, permeated the discipline in a way that rendered many of the undergraduate courses virtually inaccessible to their students. It is this legacy that has been responsible, in part, for the demise of undergraduate mathematics in Britain. Noble Lords can imagine my dismay when, on visiting the University of Sussex a few years ago to give a lecture in the maths department, I discovered that the department had been virtually reduced to two men and a boy, who were housed in a broom cupboard. That this department should have suffered in the general demise of university mathematics in Britain seems to be singularly unfair, given the manner in which it had championed accessible mathematics.

Nowadays, departments of mathematics in universities treat their students in a very emollient way that differs greatly from their practice in the past. They need to do so on account of how ill prepared the students are on arrival at university, which is largely the fault of their education at A-level. I am not sure who has been teaching them but, in the main, they have learnt their mathematics in a way that is seriously lacking in conceptualisation. At school, the students are taught mathematics in an operational manner as opposed to a conceptual manner. That is to say, mathematics is taught as a series of recipes and, instead of learning a language, which is what mathematics is, they are learning the content of a phrasebook. Their memories are overburdened and, for most of them, the distinction between learning and understanding is lost. Examples of recipe-book mathematics are provided by the courses in statistics that are nowadays taught to many A-level students. This part of the syllabus has replaced the traditional diet of kinematics and dynamics, with the effect that many students are ignorant of Newton’s laws of motion, which renders them scientifically illiterate, in my opinion.

I welcome the proposal to make the study of maths compulsory for all post-16 students but am wary of a proposal that higher education institutions should introduce more demanding requirements for students intending to study STEM subjects. The fulfilment of that particular nostrum would require an enhancement of the maths education in schools, which is of course a primary objective. An enhanced provision of in-service training for maths teachers via colloquia and seminars would be helpful in this respect. It has been asserted, in particular by our colleague, Professor Winston—the noble Lord, Lord Winston—that children should be exposed to good mathematics teaching in their early years. That claim warrants some serious investigation.

Mathematics taught as an adjunct to a scientific subject tends to be unpopular with undergraduate students. It is seen as difficult and demanding and it gives rise, invariably, to what is nowadays described as a “bad student experience”. It should be clear that, when great emphasis is placed on the quality of the student experience, and when the testimony of the students themselves is how such experiences are assessed, the teaching of mathematics is under severe threat. It is in this connection that I find some of the things being proposed in the report which fall under the heading “Quality, standards and benchmarks” to be misguided and unhelpful. The report has repeated many of the nostrums of the Government’s higher education White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System. In order to mollify students who will be paying for the costs of their education, the Government have proposed to put them in the driving seat. The degree of their satisfaction will be measured in respect of all their taught courses. If this satisfaction is insufficient, sanctions will be applied to teachers and their departments. An inevitable consequence of this will be the curtailment of the unpopular technical modules that form an essential part of many undergraduate courses. Given that the discretion in such matters now resides with the administrators of universities as opposed to the academics, little attention will be paid to the circumstances that explain this unpopularity.

The report is most effective, in my opinion, when it is describing the hazards that have arisen from recent government policies. The effect of their policies on student visas will be to knock away the props that support many postgraduate courses in technical subjects. The lack of substantial financial provision for British postgraduate students to address the effects of the heightened university fees threatens to diminish their numbers even further. It would be difficult to exaggerate the deleterious effects that these policies will have if they are allowed to prevail for any length of time.

It is difficult to be optimistic when one believes that the effective remedies have little chance of being applied. The remedies would require raising the status of education and employment in science, technology, engineering and maths to a level that has not been reached for at least a generation. This would entail some generous expenditure. First, substantial bursaries should be granted to university students to pursue STEM courses, at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Employers could also sponsor their technical employees to attend university courses, as many did in the past. It should be acceptable to them to indenture the persons whom they have sponsored in this way for a significant period so that they could derive a benefit commensurate with their outlay. They might thereby acquire the in-house expertise that has hitherto been lacking.

The Government could set terms for such arrangements that would be applicable to all industries, and they could give subventions to ensure that the arrangements will be profitable to the companies. The Government could also flout the laws of the European Union by giving favourable tax breaks to companies undertaking investment in new or enhanced technologies. Many other inducements of this sort could be described. They should go hand in hand with a programme aimed at spreading the message regarding the importance and the fascination of science and technology.

What will happen if we do nothing along these lines? Our economy will suffer a further decline. The extremes of wealth and poverty that we are already witnessing will be exacerbated and our society will be ruptured. The ownership of our national assets will pass into foreign hands. We will become a nation of helots, as we were in the darkest days of the Industrial Revolution, but this time it will be for reasons of our deindustrialisation.