12 STM

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SUB-COMMITTEE 1
Higher Education in STEM subjects (Science,Technology,

Engineering and Mathematics)
Oral and written evidence
Contents
1994 Group – Written evidence ............................................................................................................. 7
Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) – Written evidence .............................................................. 13
Professor Edward Acton, University of East Anglia – Written evidence .................................... 20
Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) – Written evidence ....................... 23
Aston University – Written evidence ................................................................................................. 34
British Academy – Written evidence .................................................................................................. 38
British Computer Society (the Chartered Institute for IT), in association with the UK
Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) and the Council of Professors and Heads of
Computing (CPHC) – Written evidence ............................................................................................ 41
British Geological Survey, the Geological Society and the Committee of Heads of University
Geosciences Departments – Written evidence ................................................................................ 54
British Medical Association (BMA) – Written evidence.................................................................. 55
Professor Harry L. Bryden, The Challenger Society for Marine Science – Written evidence 61
Cambridge Assessment – Written evidence ..................................................................................... 62
Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK (CaSE) – Written evidence.......................... 67
Cancer Research UK – Written evidence.......................................................................................... 72
Cardiff University, University College London (UCL), University of Salford, University of
Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of Cambridge, University of York,
University of Bedfordshire and University of Kent – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67) .................... 73
Cardiff University – Supplementary written evidence ..................................................................... 74
Careers Research & Advisory Centre (CRAC) – Written evidence ........................................... 82
City and Islington College – Written evidence ................................................................................. 88
Cogent – Written evidence ................................................................................................................... 91
Cogent, Society of Biology, Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), and Engineering
Council – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245) ............................................................................................. 93
Committee of Heads of University Geosciences Departments, the Geological Society and
the British Geological Survey – Written evidence ......................................................................... 103
Confederation of British Industry (CBI) – Written evidence ...................................................... 104
Council for the Mathematical Sciences – Written evidence ........................................................ 111
Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), the British Computer Society (the
Chartered Institute for IT), and the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) –
Written evidence ................................................................................................................................... 121
Cranfield University, Imperial College London and University College London (UCL) – Oral
evidence (QQ 434-468)........................................................................................................................ 122
Professor Peter Dobson, University of Oxford – Written evidence......................................... 140
EDF Energy Nuclear Generation, Expedition Engineering, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre,
Oxford Instruments and Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust – Oral
evidence (QQ 348-365)........................................................................................................................ 143
Education for Engineering (E4E) – Written evidence .................................................................... 151
Education Foundation – Written evidence ...................................................................................... 153
Engineering Council – Written evidence .......................................................................................... 155
Engineering Council, Cogent, Society of Biology, and Institution of Chemical Engineers
(IChemE) – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245) ....................................................................................... 160
Engineering Development Trust (EDT) – Written evidence ....................................................... 161
Engineering Professors’ Council – Written evidence .................................................................... 164
Engineering Professors’ Council – Supplementary written evidence ......................................... 174
EngineeringUK – Written evidence ................................................................................................... 176
Equality Challenge Unit – Written evidence .................................................................................... 180
Will Evans, Imperial College London, Fabio Fiorelli, University College London, Adam
Hawken, University College London, Amran Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS
Trust and Jennifer Newman, London South Bank University – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347)
.................................................................................................................................................................... 183
Expedition Engineering, Vectura and LGC Limited – Oral evidence (QQ 146-166) ............. 197
Expedition Engineering, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Oxford Instruments, Sandwell and
West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust and EDF Energy Nuclear Generation – Oral
evidence (QQ 348-365)........................................................................................................................ 198
Expert Group for Women in STEM – Written evidence ............................................................. 199
Fabio Fiorelli, University College London, Adam Hawken, University College London, Amran
Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Jennifer Newman, London South Bank
University, and Will Evans, Imperial College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347) ......... 203
Geological Society, the Committee of Heads of University Geosciences Departments and
the British Geological Survey – Written evidence ......................................................................... 204
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Microsoft Ltd, Siemens and Rolls-Royce – Oral evidence (QQ 120-
145) ........................................................................................................................................................... 210
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) – Supplementary written evidence ........................................................ 211
Government – Written evidence ....................................................................................................... 214
Government, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and Department of
Education – Oral evidence (QQ 1-39) .............................................................................................. 269
Government, Department for Education and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
(BIS) – Oral evidence (QQ 1-39) ....................................................................................................... 285
Government – Supplementary written evidence ............................................................................ 286
Government – Further supplementary written evidence ............................................................. 297
Government, Damian Green MP, Minister of State for Immigration, Home Office – Oral
evidence (QQ 366-390)........................................................................................................................ 300
Government, Home Office, University of Manchester and University of Southampton – Oral
evidence (QQ 281-312)........................................................................................................................ 312
Government, David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science, Department
for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) – Oral evidence (QQ 391-433) .................................. 313
Government – Further, further supplementary written evidence .............................................. 327
2
Government – Further, further, further supplementary written evidence .............................. 337
Adam Hawken, University College London, Amran Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare
NHS Trust, Jennifer Newman, London South Bank University, Will Evans, Imperial College
London and Fabio Fiorelli, University College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347) ...... 340
Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) – Written evidence ......................... 341
Heads of Departments of Mathematical Sciences (HoDoMS) – Written evidence ................ 351
Higher Education Academy – Written evidence ............................................................................ 358
Higher Education Academy, Vitae and Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) – Oral evidence
(QQ 167-215) ......................................................................................................................................... 367
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) – Written evidence ........................ 368
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) – Oral evidence (QQ 93-119) ..... 387
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) – Supplementary written evidence
.................................................................................................................................................................... 401
Professor Sir John Holman, University of York – Written evidence ......................................... 408
Amran Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Jennifer Newman, London South
Bank University, Will Evans, Imperial College London, Fabio Fiorelli, University College
London and Adam Hawken, University College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347) ... 410
Imperial College London – Written evidence ................................................................................. 411
Imperial College London, University College London (UCL) and Cranfield University – Oral
evidence (QQ 434-468)........................................................................................................................ 418
Imperial College London – Supplementary written evidence ...................................................... 419
Imperial College Union – Written evidence .................................................................................... 427
Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) – Written evidence ............................................... 430
Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), Engineering Council, Cogent, and Society of
Biology – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245) ........................................................................................... 434
Institute of Education (IoE), University of London – Written evidence .................................... 435
Institute of Physics (IoP) – Written evidence .................................................................................. 440
Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) – Written evidence........................................ 454
Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) – Written evidence ......................................................... 463
LGC Limited – Written evidence....................................................................................................... 466
LGC Limited, Expedition Engineering and Vectura – Oral evidence (QQ 146-166) ............. 470
LGC Limited – Supplementary written evidence............................................................................ 482
Professor Averil Macdonald, University of Reading – Written evidence .................................. 487
Professor John MacInnes, University of Edinburgh – Written evidence ................................... 488
Medical Schools Council – Written evidence.................................................................................. 494
Microsoft Ltd, Siemens, Rolls-Royce and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) – Oral evidence (QQ 120-
145) ........................................................................................................................................................... 499
million+ – Written evidence................................................................................................................ 500
MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Oxford Instruments, Sandwell and West Birmingham
Hospitals NHS Trust, EDF Energy Nuclear Generation and Expedition Engineering – Oral
evidence (QQ 348-365)........................................................................................................................ 507
MyScience – Written evidence ........................................................................................................... 508
National Higher Education STEM Programme – Written evidence ........................................... 513
3
New Engineering Foundation (NEF) – Written evidence ............................................................. 534
Jennifer Newman, London South Bank University, Will Evans, Imperial College London, Fabio
Fiorelli, University College London, Adam Hawken, University College London and Amran
Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347) ............... 536
Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) – Written evidence ................................................. 537
Open Engineering Solutions – Written evidence ........................................................................... 544
Open University – Written evidence ................................................................................................ 549
Open University – Supplementary written evidence ..................................................................... 554
Open University – Further supplementary written evidence ...................................................... 560
Oxford Brookes University – Written evidence ............................................................................ 566
Oxford Instruments, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, EDF Energy
Nuclear Generation, Expedition Engineering and MRC Clinical Sciences Centre – Oral
evidence (QQ 348-365)........................................................................................................................ 570
Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning – Written evidence ...................................................... 571
Physiological Society – Written evidence ......................................................................................... 575
Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) – Written evidence ........................ 583
Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), Higher Education Academy and Vitae – Oral evidence
(QQ 167-215) ......................................................................................................................................... 587
Queen Mary, University of London – Written evidence .............................................................. 602
Research Councils UK (RCUK) – Written evidence..................................................................... 604
Research Council UK (RCUK) – Oral evidence (QQ 68-92) ..................................................... 621
Research Councils UK (RCUK) – Supplementary written evidence ......................................... 634
Research Councils UK (RCUK) – Further supplementary written evidence........................... 641
Rolls-Royce – Written evidence......................................................................................................... 659
Rolls-Royce, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Microsoft Ltd and Siemens – Oral evidence (QQ 120-
145) ........................................................................................................................................................... 661
Rolls-Royce – Supplementary written evidence.............................................................................. 675
Rolls-Royce – Further supplementary written evidence............................................................... 677
Royal Academy of Engineering – Written evidence ....................................................................... 679
Royal Astronomical Society – Written evidence............................................................................ 699
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) – Written evidence ........................................................ 701
The Royal Society – Written evidence ............................................................................................. 703
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) – Written evidence ................................................................ 706
Russell Group – Written evidence .................................................................................................... 723
Lord Sainsbury of Turville – Written evidence ............................................................................... 733
Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, EDF Energy Nuclear Generation,
Expedition Engineering, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre and Oxford Instruments – Oral
evidence (QQ 348-365)........................................................................................................................ 735
The Science Council – Written evidence ......................................................................................... 736
Scottish Qualifications Authority – Written evidence .................................................................. 748
Semta – Written evidence ................................................................................................................... 762
Siemens, Rolls-Royce, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Microsoft Ltd – Oral evidence (QQ 120-
145) ........................................................................................................................................................... 767
4
Professor Michael Singer, University of Edinburgh – Written evidence ................................... 768
Cathy Smith, Institute of Education – Written evidence .............................................................. 771
Society of Biology – Written evidence.............................................................................................. 773
Society of Biology, Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), Engineering Council, and
Cogent (QQ 216-245) .......................................................................................................................... 786
Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) – Written evidence ............................ 787
South East Physics Network (SEPnet) – Written evidence .......................................................... 791
South Eastern Regional College – Written evidence ..................................................................... 800
Syngenta – Written evidence .............................................................................................................. 804
Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) – Written evidence ........................... 807
Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) – Written evidence ............................ 811
UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC), the British Computer Society (the
Chartered Institute for IT) and the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC)
– Written evidence ................................................................................................................................ 841
UK Deans of Science – Written evidence........................................................................................ 842
UKRC – Written evidence .................................................................................................................. 849
Universities UK – Written evidence ................................................................................................. 862
University Alliance – Written evidence ............................................................................................ 871
University College London (UCL), University of Salford, University of Central Lancashire,
University of Surrey, University of Cambridge, University of York, University of
Bedfordshire, University of Kent and Cardiff University – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67) ........ 876
University College London (UCL), University of Nottingham and University of Oxford –
Oral evidence (QQ 246-280) .............................................................................................................. 877
University College London (UCL), Cranfield University and Imperial College London – Oral
evidence (QQ 434-468)........................................................................................................................ 878
University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University, University College London
(UCL), University of Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey,
University of Cambridge and University of York – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67) ..................... 879
University of Bristol – Written evidence ......................................................................................... 880
University of Cambridge, University of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent,
Central Lancashire and University of Surrey – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67) ............................. 885
University of Cambridge – Supplementary written evidence ...................................................... 912
University of Cambridge Careers Service – Written evidence ................................................... 916
University of Central Lancashire – Written evidence ................................................................... 921
University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of Cambridge, University
of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University, University
College London (UCL) and University of Salford – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)..................... 929
University of Greenwich – Written evidence ................................................................................. 930
University of Kent, Cardiff University, University College London (UCL), University of
Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of Cambridge,
University of York and University of Bedfordshire – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67) .................. 936
University of Kent – Supplementary written evidence.................................................................. 937
University of Manchester – Written evidence ................................................................................ 941
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University of Manchester, University of Southampton and Government, Home Office – Oral
evidence (QQ 281-312)........................................................................................................................ 947
University of Manchester – Supplementary written evidence ..................................................... 959
University of Nottingham, University of Oxford and University College London (UCL) –
Oral evidence (QQ 246-280) .............................................................................................................. 960
University of Oxford – Written evidence ........................................................................................ 961
University of Oxford, University College London (UCL) and University of Nottingham –
Oral evidence (QQ 246-280) .............................................................................................................. 969
University of Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of
Cambridge, University of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff
University and University College London (UCL) – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67).................... 980
University of Salford – Supplementary written evidence .............................................................. 981
University of Southampton – Written evidence ............................................................................. 986
University of Southampton, Government, Home Office and University of Manchester – Oral
evidence (QQ 281-312)........................................................................................................................ 990
Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University, University College London (UCL),
University of Salford and University of Central Lancashire – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67) ... 991
University of Surrey – Supplementary written evidence .............................................................. 992
University of Warwick – Written evidence ..................................................................................... 998
University of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University,
University of Surrey and University of Cambridge – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67) ................ 1005
University of York – Supplementary written Evidence ............................................................... 1006
Vectura – Written evidence .............................................................................................................. 1009
Vectura, LGC Limited and Expedition Engineering – Oral evidence (QQ 146-166) ........... 1012
Vectura – Supplementary written evidence ................................................................................... 1013
Vitae – Written evidence ................................................................................................................... 1015
Vitae, Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and Higher Education Academy – Oral evidence
(QQ 167-215) ....................................................................................................................................... 1019
Wellcome Trust – Written evidence .............................................................................................. 1020
6
1994 Group – Written evidence
The following is the 1994 Group’s response to the House of Lords inquiry higher education
in STEM subjects. For more detailed information please refer to the individual responses of
our member institutions.
Members of the 1994 Group are: University of Bath, Birkbeck University of London,
Durham University, University of East Anglia, University of Essex, University of Exeter,
Goldsmiths University of London, Institute of Education University of London, Royal
Holloway University of London, Lancaster University, University of Leicester, Loughborough
University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Reading, University of St
Andrews, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Surrey, University of Sussex
and University of York.
1. Introduction
1.1. STEM subjects are those which contain significant elements of science, technology,
engineering and mathematics. Many STEM subjects are also included by HEFCE in those
subjects defined as Strategically Important and Vulnerable (SIVs). However, not all STEM
subjects are classed as SIVs with Biology a notable exception.
1.2. There is a shortage of STEM graduates at more than one point along the supply chain;
there are concerns in the sector about shortages of well-qualified applicants and
employers have complained that the supply of STEM graduates is not keeping up with
their demand. The Government has acknowledged the importance of STEM subjects to
competition in the global economy and made a commitment to increase the number of
people choosing to study these subjects. Despite this, recent Higher Education reforms
actually threaten STEM subject provision in Higher Education. The withdrawal of
teaching and capital funding and the introduction of student number controls are likely
to undermine efforts by universities to increase the number of students taking STEM
courses.
1.3. However, there are actions that can be taken to encourage growth in take up of STEM
subjects at degree level. A change in the student number control from uncapping
student places for those achieving ABB (rather than the proposed AAB policy), which is
common currency in entry to STEM subjects, would dramatically increase the number of
top universities which would be able to grow their STEM provision rather than being
limited.
2. 16-18 Supply
2.1. Focus on the supply of STEM students at the ages of 16-18 and earlier is welcomed. The
Leitch Review highlighted the skills shortage that the UK has in STEM careers and
STEM-related careers and encouraged strategies to be put in place to address such
shortages by increasing recruitment at schools and university. 1 Initiatives such as those
1 Leitch Review of Skills (2006) ‘Prosperity for All in the Global Economy – world class skills’ http://www.hm-
treasury.gov.uk/d/leitch_finalreport051206.pdf
7
as part of the SIVs programme and other schemes which work with schools have seen
positive effects on raising the aspirations of young people to study these subjects.
Employers surveyed by the CBI stated that encouraging study of maths and science at
school to be the best way in which Government could approach STEM skills shortages. 2
2.2. Annual data shows mixed results for take up of STEM subjects at A level with some
subjects in particular causing concern. 3 Whilst numbers are high for those studying
mathematics (9.6% of the total studying for A levels in 2011) this is not replicated in
physics, with only 3.8% of the total in 2011. Furthermore figures show that there is a
serious gender gap in the study of physics, only 21% of students taking this subject are
female. Total numbers of those taking A Level chemistry and biology are more
reasonable at 5.5% and 7.2% respectively. However, recent growth seen in science and
mathematics subjects is not found in engineering and technology where there has been
gradual decline.
2.3. The STEM disciplines of mathematics and science are included in the new English
Baccalaureate. Pupils should be encouraged to pursue a broad-based education which is
appropriate to them and takes into account their aptitude and interest and the English
Baccalaureate will potentially increase this. While it is not anticipated that the English
Baccalaureate will be included in university applications criteria, encouraging
participation in these ‘facilitating subjects’ at GCSE may lead to increased STEM
participation at A level and beyond. It should be remembered, however, that GCSE level
study may not necessarily translate into degree level study and these STEM subjects
should also be promoted at Level 3. It should also be noted that other STEM subjects,
such as technology and engineering are not represented in the English Baccalaureate and
neither are arts-based and wider humanities subjects. Any move away from these
discipline areas due to the English Baccalaureate would be an unwelcome side-effect.
3. Graduate Supply
3.1. Demand for STEM graduates is high and the skills developed during a STEM degree are
valued by both STEM and non-STEM employers. A recent study by the CBI found that
STEM degrees are ‘favoured by 41% of all employers’. 4 Further evidence of the demand
for STEM graduates is shown by recent DLHE statistics; 83.3% of all engineering and
technology graduates and 78% of all computer science graduates were in full-time paid
employment three and a half years after graduation compared to 72.3% of graduates
from all disciplines. The equivalent figures for the physical sciences and mathematical
sciences were 67.7% and 72.7% respectively, though graduates from these subjects were
far more likely to be undertaking further study: 17.4% of physical sciences graduates and
10% of mathematical sciences graduates compared to 6.5% of graduates from all
disciplines. 5
3.2. Despite this strong demand for STEM skills, there are concerns that the number of
STEM graduates is not sufficient to meet the needs of both STEM and non-STEM
2 CBI and EDI, Building for Growth, p.34,

http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1051530/cbi__edi_education___skills_survey_2011.pdf
3 Joint Council for Qualifictaions (JCQ) (2011) http://www.jcq.org.uk/attachments/published/1575/JCQ%20RESULTS%2018-
08-11.pdf
4 CBI and EDI, Building for Growth, p.7
5 DLHE longitudinal survey 2011.
8
employers. The 2011 CBI Education and Skills Survey showed that 43% of all employers
are reporting a shortage of STEM skills and 52% expected difficulty when recruiting
STEM employees over the next few years. 6 The situation is worse in those sectors
directly related to STEM subjects where there is a skills shortage of over 60% in the
manufacturing, science, engineering and IT sectors. 7 It is reported that the supply of
STEM graduates is particularly weak in several areas:
i) The supply of female STEM graduates. The proportion of all undergraduate and
postgraduate female engineering and technology students has not increased
from 15% in the past ten years, the proportion studying mathematics has also
remained stable at 38% of the total while the equivalent figure for computer
science students has actually decreased in the past five years from 24% to 19%. 8
ii) The supply of UK-domiciled STEM graduates is also especially weak. James
Dyson has pointed out the problems posed to the UK economy if universities
fail to recruit enough postgraduate students from the UK. He has been
particularly concerned by the fact that of the additional 3,825 postgraduate
engineering students in 2008 only 70 came from the UK.’ 9 A HEFCE report has
shown that the number of PGT international students of STEM subjects has
more than doubled over the last eight years, while the equivalent figure for UK
students increased by only 1%. 10 It is important that we encourage an
international student community but this needs to be matched by interest from
UK graduates.
iii) Employers from both STEM and non-STEM sectors have expressed the view
that some STEM graduates could lack some more general skills such as
communication skills, the ability to work in a team, commercial awareness and
time management. 11
3.3. The 1994 Group is concerned that the problems created by a shortage in the supply of
quality STEM graduates may be further exacerbated in the future due to two elements
of the Government’s HE reforms: the withdrawal of HEFCE teaching funding and the
introduction of student number controls.
3.4. The reductions in HEFCE teaching funding in Band B (science, pre-clinical stages of
medicine and dentistry, engineering and technology) will undermine the ability of
universities to provide these disciplines. Under the Government’s proposals funding
available for the provision of courses in HEFCE’s Band B is less than at present when
taking into consideration the additional commitments universities are required to make
in the new fee-regime. It is the very high cost and vulnerable STEM subjects such as
chemistry, chemical engineering, materials and physics will be the most affected by these
changes which will also be disproportionately affected by the cuts in capital funding.
6 CBI and EDI, Building for Growth, http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1051530/cbi__edi_education___skills_survey_2011.pdf

7 Engineering UK 2012, The State of UK Engineering, http://www.engineeringuk.com/euk_download.cfm?58973
8 Rowenna Davis, ‘Women students stick to traditional subjects’, Guardian, 13 July 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jul/13/women-students-stem-subjects
9 ‘Lack of top researchers could harm UK plc, Dyson warns’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12464204.
10 HEFCE, Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects, September 2011, p.18.
11 BIS, STEM Graduates in non-STEM jobs, http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/s/11-771-stem-
graduates-in-non-stem-jobs.pdf
9
3.5. Further damage is posed to STEM provision by the introduction of student number
controls as detailed in our response to the Higher Education White Paper.12 Number
controls could limit the ability of universities to provide courses, such as those in the
STEM subjects, where the qualification profile is often lower. The proportion of
students achieving high A level grades in STEM is often lower than in the Arts and
Humanities. For example, in 2009/10, 40% of those with known qualifications going to
study a degree in the Historical and Philosophical studies achieved AAB or higher
compared to only 20% of those going to study Biological Sciences. Uncapping student
numbers at AAB+ is therefore likely to inhibit rather than expand provision of STEM
courses. A move to full flexibility in student numbers or at least to uncapping student
numbers for those achieving ABB and above would enable the STEM sector to expand
and develop.
3.6. HEFCE has responded to concerns from the sector about the effect of student number
controls on SIVs (which includes most STEM subjects) by protecting them from the
withdrawal of 9% of universities’ student number allocations under the core and margin
policy in 2012-13. We propose that broadening student number controls to enable full
flexibility or at least uncapping student numbers for those achieving ABB and above
would enable the STEM sector to expand and develop rather limiting or simply
maintaining places. ABB entry requirements are common currency in STEM subjects. A
simple shift to ABB+ would mean that around 113 out of a possible 136 departments
(87%) within top universities would be able to expand their STEM student numbers.
This is in contrast to only 66 (49%) in the same category under the AAB+ policy.
3.7. Taken together the withdrawal of HEFCE teaching funding and the introduction of
student number controls will have an unintended yet detrimental effect on the provision
of STEM courses at undergraduate level. This will take place when many STEM subjects
have already been identified as vulnerable and when the Government has been clear
about the economic benefits of an expansion of STEM provision.
4. Postgraduate supply
4.1. The withdrawal of funding poses a similar danger to postgraduate study. Reductions in
HEFCE postgraduate teaching funding and other funding sources are likely to leave
universities with little choice but to raise postgraduate fees from 2012 in order to
continue to provide the same quality of student experience. The effect of rising fees will
be exacerbated by the fact that there is no Government loan available for postgraduate
study and fees must be paid up front. Furthermore, the fact that students will leave their
first degrees with a much higher level of debt may act as a barrier to postgraduate study.
The consequences of a decline in demand for postgraduate STEM courses will be felt
widely and not just in Higher Education. Postgraduate study in the STEM subjects is of
great importance to the careers and life satisfaction of individual students but its
economic and social benefits are also well documented, not least by the Government.
4.2. UK postgraduate students are likely to be worse hit in the new funding environment. Of
the new postgraduates starting between 2002-03 and 2007-08, 73% came from outside
12 1994 Group response to the Higher Education White Paper
http://www.1994group.ac.uk/documents/public/WhitePaper_1994Group_Response.pdf
10
the EU. 13 Only small increases in UK students present a worrying long-term picture for
the UK. With changes in visa rules international students are increasingly likely to return
overseas after their studies posing problems for the UK economy as a result of
shortages in skilled graduates.
4.3. Systems need to be put in place now to prevent postgraduate study faltering in the
future. If progression to postgraduate study is allowed to be affected by the reforms, the
development time to re-establish programmes will be years. There are measures which
can be taken now to safeguard progression to postgraduate study. Action should be
taken to create better terms for Personal and Career Development Loans (PCDLs) to
make these more widely available. The current relationships between the banking
sector, Government and society and present an excellent opportunity to negotiate
better terms for PCDLs.
4.4. Due to the importance of sustaining postgraduate provision we encourage consideration

of some form of Government backed income contingent loan scheme to at least some
groups of postgraduate students. We note the innovative solution proposed by
CentreForum whereby Government postgraduate loans are repaid by the student once
salaries exceed £15,000 so that debt from postgraduate study can be fully recovered.14
The review of Strategically Important and Vulnerable subjects (SIVs) should also
consider which subjects at postgraduate level qualify as SIVs.
4.5. Whilst we urge the Government to consider innovative public funding proposals there
are also actions the private sector can take which the Government has a role in
promoting. Industry sponsored provision have been a successful model of provision in
some parts of the sector and the benefits of these for business should be better
promoted and incentives examined to promote this type of support.
4.6. Regarding Doctoral Training Centres, these have been a positive development in
providing high standards of training for research students. Our previous research has
demonstrated that it is the research-intensive institutions of the 1994 Group and Russell
Groups that show the greatest productivity in PhDs, in terms of completion rates and
the relationship between completions and number of academic staff. The quality of the
infrastructure around research teams was found to be an important factor in producing
PhDs and that if a critical mass is to be recommended in postgraduate research
provision then it lies within these institutions. 15
5. Industry
5.1. Industry also has a role to play in stimulating demand for STEM courses and could have
a greater role to play in promoting STEM study through establishing greater
relationships with universities. There are many examples of schemes in place at 1994
Group institutions already regarding course sponsorship. 16 For example, the University
13 Richardson, H., ‘Lack of top researchers could harm UK plc, Dyson warns’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-
12464204.
14 T. Leunig, CentreForum, Mastering Postgraduate Funding, http://www.centreforum.org/assets/pubs/mastering-
postgraduate-funding.pdf, p.5.
15 1994 Group (2010) Analysis of postgraduate provision at UK Universities
http://www.1994group.ac.uk/documents/public/Research_Policy/Postgraduate_Provision_Research_Report_Jan2010.pdf
16 1994 Group (2010) Industry Sponsored Master’s Degrees
http://www.1994group.ac.uk/documents/public/IPR%20Masters.pdf
11
of York receives £60,000 in sponsorship from Crossrail Ltd. for provision of a MEng
course in Embedded Systems. Students on the course are given the opportunity to visit
Crossrail’s premises in London and may also be offered one-year internships on the
project. Russian oil company TNK-BP sponsors 20 students a year through the
Petroleum Geoscience MSc at Royal Holloway. The sponsored students then work for
the company after graduation. We look forward to the outcomes of the Wilson Review
of University-Business Relationships due in early 2012 regarding provision in this area.
6. Conclusion
6.1. STEM skills are both vital to the health of our economy and in great demand from
employers. However, there are serious threats posed to the future successful provision
of STEM disciplines at undergraduate and postgraduate level due reforms to the higher
education sector.
6.2. Though unintended, the consequences of the withdrawal of teaching funding and the
introduction of student number controls described above will undermine universities’
ability to provide important STEM courses. Expanding student number controls to allow
full flexibility or shifting to uncap numbers for students with ABB+ qualifications will
instead allow the sector to expand and develop. Postgraduate provision is also
threatened in the new funding environment and systems such as those highlighted above
need to be put in place now to prevent postgraduate study faltering in the future. If the
ability to study STEM disciplines at either undergraduate or postgraduate level is allowed
to be affected by the reforms, the consequences for the UK and its economy will be
serious and long-term.
20 December 2011
12
Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) – Written evidence
Summary
1. The Academy of Medical Sciences welcomes the opportunity to contribute to this

inquiry into Higher Education (HE) in Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics (STEM) subjects. The Academy of Medical Sciences promotes advances
in medical science and campaigns to ensure these are translated into healthcare
benefits for society. One of the Academy’s strategic goals is to attract and develop
the brightest individuals to careers in biomedical science so this inquiry is of
particular relevance to our work. Our elected Fellowship includes some of the UK’s
foremost experts in medical science who have contributed to this response and who
would be happy to provide oral evidence to this inquiry.
2. The Academy’s response focuses on postgraduate biomedical training and research,

although many of the issues raised are applicable to other disciplines. We understand
that other organisations, such as the Medical Schools Council (MSC), will address
aspects of undergraduate training and we have liaised with them in the preparation of
this document. We believe that medicine should be included among STEM subjects
so have covered this area in our response.
3. HE is crucial to maintaining the UK’s excellence in STEM areas. Many of these fields
have been highlighted by the Government as strategically important for rebalancing
our economy. 17 Our response highlights the following key ways in which HE in STEM
might be improved:
4. Interdisciplinary science
• Many problems are inherently interdisciplinary and so need to be tackled by
collaborations between different fields. An interdisciplinary team-based
approach needs to be encouraged and prioritised in STEM teaching and
research.
5. Workforce planning
• It is of critical importance that postgraduate medical education and training
are run by effective academic-health service alliances throughout the UK, in
line with other developed nations. The governance of Local Education and
Training Boards (LETBs) should reflect this requirement.
• Maintaining our STEM workforce is crucial but also challenging to plan. Closer
monitoring of numbers and career progression of students would be beneficial
to strategic planning for the future.
6. Sustaining a world class biomedical workforce

• The prolonged high cost and often more modest financial rewards of
postgraduate STEM education may discourage some talented individuals from
pursuing HE in STEM subjects and undertaking careers as researchers. This
17 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2011). Strategy for UK Life Sciences.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/s/11-1429-strategy-for-uk-life-sciences.pdf
13
should be taken into account when planning to expand the contribution of

STEM fields to the UK’s economy.
7. Teaching
• The value and recognition of teaching needs to be improved. Teaching will
determine the quality of our future STEM graduates and should remain
research- led.
8. Industry-academia collaboration
• Industry has largely adopted a new model of open innovation to form closer
partnerships with academia, health services and charities. Our graduates need
to be equipped with the skills necessary to benefit from this environment.
• The mobility of researchers between industry, academia and the health
service needs to be improved to facilitate closer partnership and the
dissemination of talent.
9. Immigration
• Immigration policy needs to be closely monitored to ensure that the UK is
not perceived as unwelcoming to overseas students or researchers.
• We propose that the current cap of 7.5% overseas medical students be
relaxed with some safeguards.
Introduction
10. The Government has identified science, especially life and biomedical sciences, as
areas of special interest for growth in the UK economy. 18 For science to contribute
to our economic recovery and future prosperity, we need to have expertly trained
graduates in STEM subjects in adequate numbers.
11. Prior to the current economic downturn, a succession of inquiries raised concerns
about the supply of the skills needed by UK pharmaceutical and biotechnology
companies. A survey of pharmaceutical companies by the Association of British
Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) identified skill shortages predominantly in the in vivo
science disciplines (e.g. physiology, pharmacology including clinical pharmacology,
toxicology and pathology) and chemistry. 19 Skills gaps in the drug development
pipeline also need to be addressed. It is timely to review the UK’s approach to
educating graduates in STEM fields in terms of the quality of their education as well as
the number of graduates.
12. There has been significant additional support for clinical academics over the last
decade from organisations such as the Medical Research Council (MRC), National
Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and Wellcome Trust. However, one
overarching concern is that we believe graduate recruitment to some STEM subjects
18 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2011). Strategy for UK Life Sciences.
19 Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry (2008). Skills needs for biomedical research. Creating the pools of talent to win
the innovation race. http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/library/industry/Documents/skills-biomedical-research.pdf
14
is being hampered by a shortage of PhD studentships within the UK as some funders

have restricted the availability of these schemes.
Interdisciplinary science
13. There is growing recognition that many research challenges such as climate change or
ageing are only going to be solved with an interdisciplinary approach. For example,
understanding the genetic basis of disease is increasingly reliant on mathematics and
computing. The loss of some academic departments, such as chemistry, is a concern
for fostering interdisciplinary approaches as they can be important to the biomedical
sciences. 20 Cross-fertilisation of traditional academic disciplines from a wider range of
relevant research areas must be encouraged. We welcome the Government’s
commitment to increase investment in collaborative research training with private,
public and third sector research partners. 21
14. The development of talented interdisciplinary researchers who take a more team
based approach to science can be achieved by:22
• creating funding opportunities that specifically combine disciplines
• modifying degree courses to contain a greater interdisciplinary component
• creating specific training positions that allow and facilitate interdisciplinary
training to ensure this approach pervades all career levels
• multi-level networking between scientists of different disciplines and seniority
• high-level support from institutions to commit to increasing interdisciplinary
work
Workforce planning
15. The Academy has given workforce planning for clinical academics considerable
attention so we have focused on this area in our response. Toward the end of this
section we also touch on some broader issues for workforce planning across the
STEM subjects.
Clinical academics
16.As well as maintaining adequate numbers of medical workers, it is important to
sustain appropriate levels of specialised medical professionals. The MSC’s annual
survey of clinical academics is an important tool to help achieve this goal. 23 The
workforce needs to be dynamically managed to ensure that adequate numbers of
trained staff are entering each clinical academic speciality. The planning cycle needs to
take account of the length of medical training and the need to sustain critical mass in
small volume but crucial areas (e.g. community paediatrics, medical ophthalmology,
allergy and public health).
20 More information available at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/1382/1382.pdf

21 Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (2011). Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/i/11-1387-innovation-and-research-strategy-for-growth.pdf
22 Academy of Medical Sciences (2010) Reaping the rewards: a vision for UK medical science.
http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk/p48prid78.html
23 Further information is available from: http://www.medschools.ac.uk/AboutUs/Projects/clinicalacademia/Pages/Promoting-
Clinical-Academic-Careers.aspx
15
17. The ongoing restructuring of the NHS will significantly impact on medical education.
In the current system, regional Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) coordinate
clinical training posts via their Postgraduate Deaneries in collaboration with
universities. Under government reform proposals, SHAs will be abolished. A national
coordinating body, Health Education England (HEE), will be established and NHS
healthcare providers will form Local Education and Training Boards (LETBs), which
will fund postgraduate medical education through a new levy on providers and take
over the functions of Postgraduate Deaneries. The Academy has been working to
influence these reforms and has produced a number of documents on this topic.24
Our key message is that it is of critical importance that postgraduate education and
training are run by effective academic-health service alliances throughout the UK, in
line with other developed nations. This academic-health service link will assist clinical
academics in their tripartite mission of research, training and health service delivery.
The governance framework established for LETBs should minimise any conflict of
interest by containing representatives of both the service providers and the
HEIs with an independent chair. 25
18.National planning and coordination will continue to play a major role in workforce
planning, especially within medicine. Sufficient oversight must exist through HEE to
ensure high quality and consistent standards across the UK and that sufficient
numbers of trainees exist across all specialties. LETBs will need to be responsive to
the national priorities set out by HEE, which in turn will be informed by the Centre
for Workforce Intelligence and nationally determined healthcare priorities. More
specifically, HEE must be able to manage overall trainee numbers on a UK-wide basis
and provide indicative numbers for professional training. This is particularly important
for medical specialties.
19.There is also a need for flexibility in medical training. For example, clinical academics
should be allowed to undertake relevant work abroad at a time that is suitable both
for themselves and their institution.
Broader issues
20.The UK has been an attractive destination for overseas students; however, we
cannot rely on this continuing to be the case. Other countries such as China have
increased their provision of graduate courses, creating more competition for the UK
to attract students and retain them as part of the workforce.26 The UK will become
vulnerable to skills shortages if low numbers of UK-domiciled students study
particular subjects, and if the number of non-UK domiciled students falls, or if they
leave the UK after their studies. This is of particular concern in the STEM sector.
STEM subjects have traditionally attracted overseas students who have then been
recruited into STEM-based industries. Changes in the composition of postgraduate
students must be monitored to provide early warning of potential skills shortages.
24 Further information is available from: http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk/p47prid96.html

25 Academy of Medical Sciences response to the Government consultation (2011). Liberating the NHS: Developing the
Healthcare Workforce. http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk/download.php?file=/images/publication/1301323497100.pdf
26 Academy of Medical Sciences (2009). Department of Business, Innovation and Skills consultation on postgraduate training
http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk/p100puid171.html
16
21. The UK must sustain a world class STEM workforce that has the skills and capacity
to manage and utilise innovation. Highly skilled individuals are UK medical science’s
most valuable resource and play significant roles in attracting commercial activity and
investment, and in improving health. To understand the benefits of postgraduate
education and training, UK higher education institutes (HEIs) should develop and
implement a simple system of tracking postgraduates. More data on workforce
numbers would allow more strategic appraisal of capacity and re-profiling needs.
New initiatives from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the
Futuretrack project are encouraging, but we emphasise the need to gather robust
data on the long-term career destinations of postgraduates. 27,28
Sustaining a world class biomedical workforce
22.The financial burden of cumulative tuition fees and the long duration of postgraduate
training, especially in medicine, could potentially discourage some from pursuing a
career in STEM-related fields. Generally, STEM subjects are more expensive to teach
than non-STEM subjects and this cost may be reflected in the fees charged in the
future. Higher tuition fees may result in a greater level of debt, which may dissuade
some talented students from choosing STEM careers.
23.Relatively modest remunerations in some STEM jobs may also encourage some
qualified graduates to leave STEM areas and pursue careers in better-remunerated
fields, such as finance or consultancy. While a STEM education does equip graduates
with skills that are valued by financial services, to realise its objective of rebalancing
the economy government should ensure that STEM graduates have sufficient
incentive to work in STEM industries.
Teaching
24. The UK has a world-leading track record in biomedical research. To maintain this
track record it is important to deliver research-led teaching within STEM subjects at
graduate and postgraduate level, enabling the UK to develop and foster the
researchers of tomorrow. However, teaching, as part of an academic’s portfolio of
work, can often be under-valued and under-recognised.
25. In 2010 the Academy published a report concerning the valuation and recognition of
teaching. 29 It emphasised the importance of research-led teaching, highlighting that
academics should be encouraged and supported to engage fully with teaching. The
report considered that teaching should be an important component of decisions
around career progression and it is important to undertake teaching across all career
grades.
27 Further information is available from: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/

28 Further information is available from:
http://www.hecsu.ac.uk/hecsu.rd/documents/Reports/futuretrack_stage1_singlesummary.pdf
29 Academy of Medical Sciences (2010) Redressing the balance: the status and valuation of teaching in academic careers.
17
26.Government has advocated that excellence in teaching should be recognised and

rewarded. 30 Guidelines on best practice for this are integral to improving the value
and recognition of teaching. Learned societies and professional bodies, academies,
Higher Education Funding Councils and the Department for Business, Innovation and
Skills (BIS) should be proactive in orchestrating the spread of good practice in the
management of teaching load. The quality of research-led teaching in the UK is a
significant factor in attracting overseas students. It will be important to protect
teaching in the higher education reforms to ensure that quality education continues
to be delivered from those who can bestow a spectrum of skills on our students.
Industry-academia collaboration
27.The UK has historically enjoyed a vibrant pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector

that is the largest in Europe and second in size only to the USA. 31 The benefits of this
strong commercial presence are well established: the sectors support over 165,000
high-value UK-based jobs. 32 However, the sector is experiencing challenging times
with many drugs going off patent, increasing drug development costs and a diminished
drug development pipeline. Much of the pharmaceutical industry has adopted a new
business model, focusing on partnerships with academia and biotechnology firms. Our
STEM workforce needs to be equipped with the skills required for this open model
of innovation.
28.The mobility of researchers and staff across the academic-industry interface will be
an important component of sustaining a world-class STEM workforce; exchanging
skills, forging opportunities for innovation and promoting mutual awareness. The
Government has committed to promoting mobility in the life sciences, which we
welcome.17 Opportunities for flexible collaboration across sectors need to be seized
by developing a biomedical workforce with the skills to move between and bridge
sectors. Currently, there is limited mobility between industry and academia and this
should be addressed to maximise our workforce in these sensitive STEM areas.
Mobility issues can be eased by a number of potential routes:16
• Secondments or mentoring across sectors.
• Promoting flexibility in career options, such as indicators of success that are
shared between academia, industry and the NHS.
• Mapping the profile of the workforce to gain a greater understanding to
strategically appraise mobility between sectors.
Immigration
29.To maintain our role as a leading scientific nation in the face of substantial investment
in science in other countries, the UK must continue to attract world class research
talent. Careful consideration must, therefore, be given to UK immigration laws in
30 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2009). Higher ambitions: the future of universities in a knowledge economy.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/publications/Higher-Ambitions.pdf
31 Academy of Medical Sciences (2011) Submission to the 2011 innovation and research strategy.
http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk/p100puid230.html
32 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2011) Strategy for UK Life Sciences.
18
relation to our STEM workforce. It is important that our immigration policy does not
create a real or perceived barrier to attracting and retaining first class individuals
within the education system or workforce. Considerable efforts are needed to
ensure that there is an understanding among STEM students and researchers
internationally that the UK welcomes their talents. The impact of immigration
policies on our STEM workforce needs to be appropriately monitored and quantified.
30.In economically challenging times we are concerned about barriers that impede
universities from capitalising on the substantial international market for higher
education. The number of overseas medical students that universities are able to
accept is currently capped at 7.5% of the number of home/EU students completing
the first year. We would propose that this cap is made more flexible. There would be
an explicit understanding that the default position would be that the overseas
graduates would return home post-registration, although some could be offered the
opportunity to continue their training in the event of a shortfall of home/EU
graduates.
16 December 2011
19
Professor Edward Acton, University of East Anglia – Written evidence
Professor Edward Acton, University of East Anglia – Written

evidence
House of Lords Immigration Evidence Panel
Thank you for your email inviting me to address this afternoon’s meeting of the Committee
both on the basis of UEA’s experience and as Chair of UUK’s Task Force on the Tier 4
student visa system. UUK’s formal written response will follow but these are my own
comments:
1 [for HEIs] Have you seen a drop in applications for some subjects or from certain
countries at undergraduate or postgraduate level since the new rules were
announced/implemented? Can you give us examples of problems that you have experienced
with the current student visa system and separately as a result of the closure of the Post
Study Work Route?
2 [for Home Office] Have you recorded a drop in student visa applications to HEI's in
2011/12 at undergraduate or postgraduate level in certain subject areas and destination
countries?
UUK's preliminary data indicates serious impact at postgraduate taught level

and in a number of undergraduate fields. Gravest is the blow dealt to Britain’s
standing in the vast Indian market where the publicity around the visa
alterations appears to have triggered a sea-change in attitude towards the UK.
The effects is to interrupt the healthy growth in overseas recruitment and cut
the UK’s share of a thriving world market.
3 How does the Government respond to calls to do more to improve the perception
of the UK as a country to come and study?
The issue of perception is critical. Each further change made to Tier 4 and rules
on post-study work is being reported abroad as discouragement to potential
university students. The efforts of Ministers outside the Home Office to
emphasise Britain’s enthusiasm for well-qualified university students from across
the world are being undermined.
It is vital that the tension between the Government’s net migration target and
its support for university-level recruitment is addressed. UUK is urging the
Government to do so by lifting university-sponsored students out of the ‘net
migration’ calculation.
They are a distinct migration category – temporary, recorded and counted with
meticulous precision by HESA, closely monitored, recognised by the Home
Office to have excellent standards of compliance and to leave when their visas
expire, and actively encouraged to come to the UK.
Publicly bracket them, lift them out of the net migration calculation and the
damage can be halted. Make that clear distinction and the current unavailing
20
efforts by the Foreign Office, BIS, Ministerial overseas visits and every UK
university can start to restore the UK’s welcoming image.
This move would also counteract the unhealthy way in which perceptions that
Britain is no longer welcoming to university students is reinforced and reinforces
perceptions we are no longer welcoming to non-EU scientists and other
academies seeking to make a career here.
4 What is considered to be a sustainable level of international students within the

Higher Education Sector or within an individual institution, given the growing number of
international students globally?
In 2010-11 non-EU full-time the numbers stood at 258,000, approximately 10% of

the total. There were also a further 106,000 international students from the EU.
International students constituted between 26% and 38% of the student body at
Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL, Manchester and Edinburgh and well in
excess of 10% at most leading universities.
HEFCE 2009-14 forecasts point to annual growth in England of about 10,000

non-EU students. There is evidently potential to expand the numbers of good
international students very considerably. Given the cultural, scientific and
economic benefits – a recent case-study by Oxford economics suggested every
10 international students recruited supports 6 jobs in the regional economy – the
case for doing so is urgent.
5 Given recent changes to relax immigration policies for students and graduates
seeking to work following their studies in the US, Australia and France, does the
Government intend to change any of its current policies to protect higher education
institutions from losing out to those countries?
UUK urges the Government to help protect the UK’s interests and those of its
HEI’s by lifting university-sponsored students out of the net migration
calculation.
6 There are reportedly significant weaknesses in the data available to monitor students
coming into and going out of the country, how do you plan to improve this so that in future
the Department has robust benchmark data on which to develop and monitor the impacts of
immigration policies?
HESA data on university-sponsored students is already capable of providing

much more reliable figures on entry and exit of this category of migrants than
the IPS.
eBorders has the potential presently to transform all the available data and the
UK’s reliance on the inadequacies of the IPS.
Meanwhile, the meticulous records available on each individual university-

sponsored students makes this temporary migrant category ideal for piloting the
UK’s shift to eBorder-based data.
21
I hope the above evidence will help the panel in their deliberations.
20 March 2012
22
Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) – Written evidence
Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) – Written

evidence
About ABPI
We represent innovative research-based biopharmaceutical companies, both large and small,
leading an exciting new era of biosciences in the UK.
Our industry, a major contributor to the economy of the UK, brings life-saving and life-
enhancing medicines to patients. Our members supply 90 per cent of all medicines used by
the NHS, and are researching and developing 90 per cent of the current medicines pipeline,
ensuring that the UK remains at the forefront of helping patients prevent and overcome
diseases.
We are the Government recognised body negotiating the pricing of branded medicines on
behalf of the entire industry. Working with our Research Affiliate Members, we promote the
UK as a destination of choice for international life sciences investment.
General comments
It is vital for the strength of the UK pharmaceutical industry and the UK economy that we
maintain a higher education system that both prepares people for work and provides
appropriate knowledge and skills for further academic study and research.
The supply of high quality science skills is an essential element in attracting global
pharmaceutical R&D investment. The UK, which has historically been strong on skills, now
has to compete with the supply of skilled scientists in countries such as China, Singapore and
India. Of the 67,000 people who work in the pharmaceutical industry in the UK, 25,000 are
employed in research and development, so high level scientific skills are vital for the success
of the industry 33 .
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most highly skilled with 73% of employees in
technical or higher occupations. Research carried out by the Sector Skills Councils, Cogent,
Semta and Skills for Health found that the industry creates 1,000 new jobs per year for UK
graduates, 45% of which are in sciences – mostly chemical and biological. Up to 30% of the
science intake comprises small numbers (1-2% each) of highly specialized subject areas
across life sciences and engineering, so that overall the profile of skills sourced each year by
the industry is highly interdisciplinary, 60% graduate, and 40% postgraduate. Some posts are
recorded as hard-to-fill, and surveys indicate skills gaps with the intake 34 . It is anticipated that
in the next decade the mix of skills required will change; but the focus will remain on high
level scientific and technical skills with a high demand for graduate and postgraduate
qualifications.
Responses to questions posed by the Committee
General questions
332010 data from ONS Annual Business Inquiry and UK Business Enterprise Research and Development 2010
34Life Sciences and Pharmaceuticals: A future skills review with recommendations to sustain growth in emerging
technologies, Cogent, Semta, Skills for health, March 2010
http://www.cogent-ssc.com/research/Publications/LSPReport.pdf
23
• What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?
STEM subjects include all sciences, technology, engineering and maths; within this we would
include subjects such as medicine, nursing, psychology, information technology, statistics and
economics. However use of the general term STEM can be misleading as not all
organisations subscribe to this wide definition, and sometimes the focus can be very narrow,
limited to chemistry, physics, engineering and maths. We share the concerns of the Society
of Biology that the biosciences (with the exception of biotechnology) have not been
identified as ‘strategically important and vulnerable subjects’ (SIVS) and hence skills shortages
in specific biological disciplines have not received the same level of attention as those in
chemistry, physics and engineering.
When considering undergraduate teaching of STEM subjects, we believe it is important to

recognise sub-sets of STEM subjects. High cost subjects which include substantial amounts of
practical work should be considered separately to those that are mostly lecture-based and
must be funded at a higher level. This needs to include high cost bioscience courses as well
as physics, chemistry and engineering.
Qualifications in STEM subjects are valued for a wide range of jobs; and are essential for
many. For the pharmaceutical industry these include a wide range of roles in the research,
development and manufacture of medicines; not only the obvious laboratory roles, but also
roles in areas as diverse as patenting, health economics, pharmacovigilance, clinical research
and medical writing. The qualifications required can range from a PhD, possibly with post-
doctoral experience, to BTEC Nationals or a Foundation Degree.
The Science Council has investigated the proportion of the current workforce in science
roles and found that 20% of the workforce is employed in science roles, a total of 5.8 million
people and this figures are expected to increase35 . Of the current figures, 1.2m are classed as
primary science workers - workers in occupations that are purely science based and require
the consistent application of scientific knowledge and skills - and 4.6m are secondary science
workers - workers in occupations that are science related and require a mixed application of
scientific knowledge and skills alongside other skill sets.
• Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used to
influence supply?
Demand for STEM graduates is high. The CBI found that 41% of recruiters prefer to recruit
STEM graduates and are willing to pay a premium for people with qualifications they value 36 .
The same survey found that 50% of employers want to see support for developing STEM
skills – reflecting both their importance for future economic growth and also the shortages
businesses currently face.
In areas where a specific degree subject is required, it is often difficult to predict future
demand. Scientific methods and technologies move very quickly, creating jobs in areas that
did not previously exist, and causing increases or decreases in demand for people with
35 The current and future UK science workforce, Science Council, 2011.
http://www.sciencecouncil.org/sites/default/files/UK_Science_Workforce_FinalReport_TBR_2011.pdf
36 Building for Growth, CBI Education and Skills Survey, 2011
24
specific knowledge and skills. For example there is currently a high level of demand for
people with expertise in engineering or maths who can apply these principles to biological
systems. These people may develop tools and approaches that are required to underpin and
enable modern biological research, or may link experimental biology with mathematical or
computational modelling to answer biological questions. These areas have been classed as
strategic priorities by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council in their
Strategic Plan 2010 – 2015.
The ABPI has previously compared the required pool of scientific talent as being like an
iceberg. While pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies recruit those individuals ‘above
the water’, the much larger pool of scientists under the water is also essential – these
include university researchers, science teachers and lecturers, NHS workers and employees
in a wide range of other businesses and industries 37 .
16-18 supply
• Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do
they have the right skills to study STEM first degrees?
The ABPI welcomes the fact that the proportion of post-16 students studying science
subjects and maths is increasing, and that numbers of entries for A-levels in maths (9.6%),
biology (7.2%) and chemistry (5.5%) are very healthy with only English (10.4%) having a
higher uptake 38 .
However we have concerns over the maths capabilities of young people entering university.
This is particularly acute for those studying bioscience courses, where the majority of
students have not studied maths beyond GCSE and students enter the courses with a wide
variety of qualifications. This leads to low levels of understanding and competency in
mathematical techniques such as statistical analysis. Understanding of statistics is vital to
many areas of drug development – from animal studies to clinical trials – and a lack of
knowledge and understanding in these areas is a barrier to recruitment. Recent research has
found that the vast majority (92%) of bioscience undergraduate programmes did not require
the students to have studied mathematics beyond GCSE, with some institutions accepting
less than a grade C at GCSE maths39 . Whilst we recognise that universities don’t wish to
make their courses unattractive to young people, we suggest that a higher level of
mathematical expertise should be demanded of prospective bioscience students.
We share the concerns of the Society of Biology over the inadequate information, advice
and guidance that young people receive which results in many young people selecting to
study only one science A-level, not realising that this is likely to prevent them from studying
any science subject at a higher level.
• What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of
STEM subjects at advanced level?
37 Sustaining the skills pipeline in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical sectors, ABPI 2005.
38 Joint Council for Qualifications , 2011
http://www.jcq.org.uk/attachments/published/1575/JCQ%20RESULTS%2018-08-11.pdf
39 A survey of the mathematics landscape within bioscience undergraduate and postgraduate UK higher education, Dr Jenny
Koenig, Cambridge University, June 2011 http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/reports/biomaths_landscape.pdf
25
ABPI believes that a number of initiatives have had a positive impact, leading to uptake
increasing in recent years, and bringing levels back to at least the numbers of candidates
taking these subjects in mid 1990s. In particular we welcomed the Triple Science Support
Programme which provided advice and guidance to teachers and managers on how to
develop and deliver three separate science GCSEs. We are pleased to note that materials
created under this programme are still available to teachers through the National STEM
Centre 40 . Promotion of the benefits of studying triple science plus the support offered
through this programme has led to numbers studying three separate science GCSEs from
less than 50,000 candidates per year in 2005 to over 140,000 in 2011 41 .
The creation and development of the national network of science learning centres by the
Department for Education and the Wellcome Trust has been an exceptional initiative,
providing updated subject knowledge to thousands of secondary science teachers, primary
school teachers and technicians and improving their skills and expertise in areas in which
they lack confidence. Knowledgeable and enthusiastic teachers lead to students enjoying
studying science and hence considering studying these subjects beyond 16. Pharmaceutical
companies have recognised the importance of these opportunities for teachers by making
substantial financial contributions to the Enthuse awards that teachers can apply for to cover
course fees, travel and other costs and cover for their classes whist they are out of school.
• What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM
subjects in higher education?
Prior to the introduction of the English Baccalaureate the majority of students already
studied at least two science GCSEs, providing an appropriate baseline of knowledge for
those who wish to study science subjects beyond 16. Concerns have been expressed by the
Society of Biology and others that, in prioritising the subjects required for the Baccalaureate,
schools may limit opportunities for students to study all three sciences at GCSE or
concentrate teaching on only two of these subjects. Either of these responses could lead to
a decreased number of students studying STEM subjects beyond 16 and at university. We
support SCORE in calling for longitudinal research into the effects of the English
Baccalaureate on the uptake of triple science and study of STEM in HEIs42 .
Graduate supply
• Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU and
overseas) sufficient to meet the needs of industry, the research base, and other
sectors not directly connected with STEM?
Although the numbers of STEM students and graduates have been increasing in recent years
the issue is that many choose to study subjects which do not provide the appropriate skills
for roles in academic or industrial research and development. The concerns of the
pharmaceutical industry were highlighted in a report, ‘Skills Needs for Biomedical
40 http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/elibrary/collection/310/triple-science-support-programme
41 Joint Council for Qualifications , 2011 http://www.jcq.org.uk/attachments/published/1589/GCSE%20RESULTS.pdf
42 Evidence to the Education Select Committee Inquiry on English Baccalaureate, SCORE, 2011. http://www.score-
education.org/media/7895/ebacweb.pdf
26
Research’ 43 which built on an earlier ABPI report; ‘Sustaining the Skills Pipeline in the
pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries’ from 2005.
We are concerned that the proposed action to increase the number of places for high
achieving students assumes equivalency of difficulty in achieving A and B grades for different
subjects; whereas there is substantial evidence from the Durham Centre for Evaluation and
Monitoring and elsewhere that the relative difficulty in examinations varies for different
subjects. Chemistry, biology and physics A-levels are all nearly a grade harder than many
subjects including English, Business Studies, RE and Law 44 . This is likely to disadvantage
students taking the harder subjects and may discourage some students from studying science
at A-level.
Restrictions on non-EU students entering UK to study and work will, inevitably, impact on
the quantity of high quality STEM graduates seeking work in the UK pharmaceutical industry.
Companies value a diverse workforce and have employed graduates and postgraduates from
across the globe.
• Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently

high, and if not, why not?
• Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it
research, industry or more broadly within the economy?
Although the numbers of STEM students and graduates have been increasing in recent years
and many choose to study subjects which do not provide the appropriate skills for roles in
academic or industrial research and development or for other jobs in industry. The concerns
of the pharmaceutical industry were highlighted in a report, ‘Skills Needs for Biomedical
Research’ 45 which built on an earlier ABPI report; ‘Sustaining the Skills Pipeline in the
pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries’ from 2005. Of particular concern are the
skills of bioscience graduates where there is a lot of flexibility and variability in the content of
undergraduate courses in a particular subject, such as biochemistry, leading to students
graduating having studied a wide variety of different modules. Many will not have studied the
topics which provide essential skills for bioscience research. ABPI welcomes the Society of
Biology pilot accreditation programme for degrees in biochemistry and in vivo sciences and
looks forward to wider accreditation of bioscience undergraduate courses which will help
employers identify students who have the skills and knowledge for employment and further
academic training.
Over 40% of ABPI members identified students’ lack of practical experience and their ability
to apply scientific and mathematical knowledge as a concern or major concern in our 2008
report. The following skills were also concerns for our members: high level maths skills
(34%), scientific knowledge (27%), communication skills (22%) and team working skills (13%).
Detailed findings on specific subject areas of importance to the pharmaceutical industry are
given in Appendix IV of our 2008 report.
43 Skills needs for biomedical research, ABPI 2008.
http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/library/industry/Pages/skills-biomedical-research.aspx
44 Relative difficulty of examinations in different subjects, Robert Coe et al. CEM Centre, Durham University.
http://www.score-education.org/media/3194/relativedifficulty.pdf
45 Skills needs for biomedical research, ABPI 2008.
http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/library/industry/Pages/skills-biomedical-research.aspx
27
As indicate earlier in this response, ABPI shares the concerns of universities over the low
levels of numerate bioscience graduates. In a recent survey carried out for the UK Centre
for Bioscience, Higher Education Academy only 6% of higher education respondents thought
that their graduates were well prepared to go on to do a Masters in Systems Biology or
Computational Biology where mathematical modelling skills are required 46 .
There are, however, many graduates who do not wish to use their degree to follow a
research career and it is important that a wide variety of degree courses are available to
meet their needs. Pharmaceutical, biotechnology and contract research and manufacturing
companies recruit science graduates, and graduates from other disciplines, into a wide
variety of roles including management training, manufacturing, sales and marketing. These
graduates need good general skills for employability in addition to their discipline-specific
knowledge and skills.
We are concerned that the proposed action to increase the number of places for high
achieving students assumes equivalency of difficulty in achieving A and B grades for different
subjects; whereas there is substantial evidence from the Durham Centre for Evaluation and
Monitoring and elsewhere that the relative difficulty in examinations varies for different
subjects. Chemistry, biology and physics A-levels are all nearly a grade harder than many
subjects including English, Business Studies, RE and Law 47 . This is likely to disadvantage
students taking the harder subjects and may discourage some students from studying science
at A-level.
Work experience and industrial placements are highly values by employers. The 2011 CBI
found that this ranked more highly than degree result in the most important factors
considered when recruiting graduates, being as important as degree subject 48 . The
pharmaceutical industry has been a significant provide of undergraduate placements and
values the additional skills that students who have done a placement bring to the workplace.
Industrial placements as part of an undergraduate degree provide students with experience
of the workplace and employability skills as well as, for laboratory based placements, making
a huge contribution to the practical skills of the student. Students are, however, reluctant to
commit to a placement and many employers do not offer them. Increasing both the number
of placements on offer and encouraging students to consider taking a placement are both
vital to increase the quality and skills of UK graduates enabling them to successfully progress
to postgraduate research or to seek employment.
Universities frequently charge a student half fees for the year they are out on placement, be
that an industrial placement, Erasmus year, or other type of placement. For students
entering university from September when fees will increase significantly we do not believe it
is appropriate for any university to charge more than the amount it costs them to find
placements for their students and supervise the placement; we suggest that this should not
be more than £1000 per student. Students are also penalised through interest charges on
their student loans which continue to be applied during their placement; we suggest that
charges should be frozen for a year so as not to disadvantage these students.
46 A survey of the mathematics landscape within bioscience undergraduate and postgraduate UK higher education, Dr Jenny
Koenig, Cambridge University, June 2011 http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/reports/biomaths_landscape.pdf

47 Relative difficulty of examinations in different subjects, Robert Coe et al. CEM Centre, Durham University.
http://www.score-education.org/media/3194/relativedifficulty.pdf
48 Building for growth: business priorities for education and skills, CBI 2011
http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1051530/cbi_edi_education_skills_survey_2011.pdf
28
A substantial increase in the number of placements offered is unlikely to occur in large

companies, the potential for growth is in small companies and contract research
organisations. These companies will need incentives to provide them. Although students
make a contribution to the company during the latter stages of their placement, the
company provides training, supervision and, normally, a salary to the student. This
contribution could be recognised through a tax credit to the company or through an
alternative financial incentive.
• What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the
quality of degrees and the supply of STEM courses in higher education
institutions?
For those new graduates and postgraduates who enter industry in laboratory based roles the
inadequate practical experiences of graduates was a common observation across the
majority of disciplines in the 2008 ABPI skills survey. Although some comments were around
graduates’ awareness and knowledge of industry-standard equipment and technologies, most
feedback addressed employer concerns over graduates’ confidence with even routine
techniques.
We have major concerns that universities are going to struggle to provide the high quality
practical experience required for postgraduate training or employment in research and
development roles in industry under the funding regime being introduced from 2012. It is
essential that the high cost of delivering these science and engineering courses, including
many bioscience courses which cost more to deliver than the maximum student fee (less
contribution to bursaries and fee waivers) provides receive an appropriate level of additional
funding is essential to ensure that universities maintain capacity in teaching of high cost
subjects.
The additional funding of £1500 which HEFCE plans to provide for the 2012-13 academic
year for these subjects is totally inadequate and will not encourage universities to improve,
or even to maintain at current levels, the teaching of practical techniques and hands-on skills
to undergraduate and postgraduate students. We understand that TRAC data collected by
HEFCE has shown that the cost to deliver laboratory-based science courses in biosciences,
chemistry and physics is, on average, £3000 - £3500 more per student than for lecture-based
courses. We share the concerns of the Learned Societies that universities may find it
uneconomic to deliver science courses under the new funding regime.
If current trends continue and more students select to study these subjects, which, as the
CBI have demonstrated, are in demand by a wide range of employers49 , universities will have
no incentive to meet this demand. We would like the numbers studying these strategically
important disciplines to be monitored with action taken to address any drop in applications
or acceptances.
• What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary for all
universities to teach undergraduates and post graduates and conduct research?
What other delivery model should be considered?
49 Building for Growth, Education and skills survey 2011, CBI
http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1051530/cbi_edi_education_skills_survey_2011.pdf
29
The student experience of higher education should be a positive one which will give them
confidence in their knowledge, enabling graduates to pursue further study or take up careers
that require degree level qualifications. This requires high quality teaching. Whilst funding for
universities concentrates on quality of research and its impact, there are few incentives to
provide top quality teaching.
Teaching informed by research is an essential component of a high quality undergraduate

science degree. Students who are not exposed to a research environment will have fewer
opportunities to consider the applications of the subject they are studying, and will not
necessarily recognise opportunities for employment in research or postgraduate research
training.
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) does not incentivise or recognise teaching, we
are concerned that this decreases focus on high quality teaching within universities and
reduces the student experience. Academic staff who contribute lectures and seminars to
undergraduate teaching programmes are likely to prioritise their research work over
undergraduate teaching as this is the main measure on which they are assessed. We support
any measures to highlight and encourage recognition of teaching excellence in universities.
Collaboration between research-intensive universities and between universities and industry

provides an opportunity to create and maintain true worldwide centres of research
excellence in the UK.
• Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education

institutions offering STEM courses?
We have not analysed provision across the UK, however as more young people choose to
live at home whilst studying it is vital that a wide range of high quality STEM courses are
available in each region.
Post-graduate supply
• Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers they
subsequently undertake?
• Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain
the research base and are they of sufficient quality?
• What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of
PhD students? Are there alternative delivery models?
Although we have concerns over the numbers of high quality PhD researchers in some
specific areas, in general pharmaceutical companies find the skills developed during a PhD are
valuable. The Researcher Development Framework created by Vitae makes a substantial
contribution to enabling postgraduate researchers to identify their strengths, prioritise their
professional development and develop the skills required to enhance their careers in
academia or industry.
One criticism highlighted in our 2008 report was the tendency for postdoctoral applicants to
not have the multidisciplinary skills and knowledge being sought for positions in translational
30
medicine, molecular and translational toxicology, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and

modelling.
One way in which pharmaceutical companies are addressing these issues is to partner with
Research Councils to fund PhD studentships and to host PhD students on their research
sites. People exchange between industry and academia at all levels is valuable and, indeed,
increasingly vital as the model of drug development changes to one requiring collaboration
between pharmaceutical companies, contract research organisations, SMEs and universities.
Good collaborative links between pharmaceutical companies and universities are a win-win
in that universities benefit from additional resource (in terms of high quality facilities, new
technology and other resources); students benefit from industry experience with real
scientific challenges at the cutting edge of research; and industry benefits from independent
expertise with a wider research perspective.
A variety of methods of partnering with universities are also being developed. The MRC
Centre for Drug Safety Science was set up at the University of Liverpool with support from
AstraZeneca, Pfizer, GSK, Novartis, Amgen, sanofi-aventis and Huntingdon Life Sciences; the
Dundee Kinase Consortium is now in its 13th year, supported by five major pharmaceutical
companies and the Wellcome Trust and industry partner to provide a rotation scheme for
clinical scientists. These are just a few examples of the many partnerships between
pharmaceutical companies and universities in the UK and across the globe.
Partnerships with Research Councils are also common. For example an EPSRC,
AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Novartis partnership supporting high-quality
research training in organic synthetic chemistry has been running for several years.
Doctoral training centres are valued by industry and by the students who undertake PhDs
through them as they provide a critical mass of students who learn from each other and
benefit from access to different disciplines in a general area of science and technology. Many
are in areas of science of interest to our industry and have strong links with industry
through employer co-funding of students in these centres. The universities hosting the
centres have appropriate infrastructure and expertise and must have good completion rates.
One alternative model being considered is for industry to play a much larger role in
providing formal PhD training, working in partnership with a university which would accredit
the training.
• Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the balance
right between the number of Masters degree students and PhD students?
• What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of
graduates to pursue a research career?
A major gap in funding exists for taught postgraduate training. Whilst undergraduate
education is funded by HEFCE and the equivalent funding councils for Wales and Scotland,
and postgraduate research training by Research Councils (amongst others) there is no body
charged with supporting postgraduate training which does not involve research. Although
students taking integrated Masters’ courses qualify for student loans for the whole of their
course, there is no such entitlement for those taking a stand alone one year Masters degree.
This is a major issue which needs urgent attention as there are some areas of science, such
as toxicology, that are vital to sustaining pharmaceutical research and development and
31
where postgraduate teaching is essential. Universities running courses valued by industry

have seen the number of home students fall in recent years, action is required to reverse the
existing decline and to encourage UK and EU students to take postgraduate courses in these
areas.
If individuals with appropriate postgraduate qualifications are not available in sufficient

numbers, this results in recruitment of overqualified individuals to ensure that they have the
skills required for the role and, in some instances, recruitment from overseas.
An example of where this has major impact is in specialist fields such as veterinary
pathologists. These posts are key to many pharmaceutical and contract research companies,
and to specialist academic departments, but because the post graduate training is not
research based, no funding is available (and might typically be £30,000 a year over a 3 year
period). Employers are willing to support the training they require for their business and
have even funded this very expensive training for veterinary pathologists. However when
there is a high level of demand for these highly skilled staff a company may invest substantial
sums in training an individual, only for them to move elsewhere.
The lack of funding for postgraduate training is also affecting the ability of UK universities to
comply with the Bologna 3+2+3 model for higher education training; this is making it difficult
for UK students to obtain PhD studentships in top European universities.
Industry
• What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to attract

them?
• What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that
demand for STEM graduates matches supply in terms of numbers, skills and
quality of graduates?
In addition to the placements and collaborative PhDs outlined above which provide high
quality training for individuals, companies have also developed partnerships with universities.
Student awareness of the culture of business and of opportunities outside of higher
education can be fostered through these links. Students offered these opportunities also gain
awareness of the applications of their subject knowledge and of entrepreneurship.
GlaxoSmithKline has gone a step further and has introduced a tuition fee reimbursement
scheme for undergraduates recruited into the UK company. The company hopes that this
will act as an incentive for graduates to gain a degree, especially in areas of science and
innovation, and will provide the company with a consistent flow if technical and leadership
talent.
In the pharmaceutical sector the way in which new medicines are researched and developed
is changing. Hence the opportunities for graduates and postgraduates are also changing.
Whilst recruitment is currently at a relatively low level in many large pharmaceutical
companies there are increasing opportunities in contract research organisations and small to
medium bioscience companies. Graduates are less aware of these companies and hence of
the opportunities offered partly due to the lower level of public awareness but also because
they are less likely to be able to fund major recruitment campaigns.
32
Efforts continue to encourage a dynamic flow of talent across sectors in the bioscience
community by promoting and embedding joint industry collaboration/exchange within
research programmes in research council training fellowships; creating joint academic-
industry appointments; introducing and supporting sabbaticals (academic to industry and vice
versa).
We welcome the Wilson Review of industry-academic collaboration and eagerly anticipate

its recommendations which, we hope, will enhance the opportunities for the UK that
academic-industrial partnership offers.
16 December 2011
33
Aston University – Written evidence
Introduction
1. What is the purpose of stand-alone Masters courses and doctoral provision in HEI’s? In each
case, what is the role of Government in supporting these?
For the Masters courses: Specialization in preparation for PhD or job market; Change
in subject specialization; Income from overseas student for universities
For doctoral provision: training to enter research either hands on or indirect by
undertaking a vocation related to research.
Supplementary questions:
• What policies/ barriers are currently hindering this provision, if any?
Funding
Immigration policies or perceptions of them (dramatically)
Lack of funding from companies
Fear of debt
• How is the balance between Masters provision and doctoral provision determined
nationally and in your institution? Are you content with the process?
The ratio is approx MSc 5:1 Doctoral at Aston University. More even in Science
and Engineering. Determined by availability of funding and overseas applicants with
their own funding. We would prefer to see larger numbers of PhD students.
• How should the balance between funding of research and of research students be
determined?
Weighted towards funding of research.
2. In undergraduate provision there is an attempt to collect data on demand, employability and

destination data. At post graduate level there is a dearth of data on these issues? What
should be done to remedy this situation?
Have coordinated approach to collection and storage of data

There are some very good suggestions in the recent Wilson Review to BIS about
collecting data in a similar way to the DLHE Survey. We would commend the report
to the Committee and ask for their support in its implementation
Supplementary question:
• Does your own institution keep these data?
We have a very good market research unit which collects a lot of these data
We also participate in the PTES and PRES and International Student Barometer
surveys which are very useful (particularly the latter)
The data collected are, however, more limited that for Undergraduate provision.
Delivery models
3. What is your assessment of the EPSRC’s decisions to concentrate funding on Doctoral Training
Centres and to remove funding from project studentships?
34
Will limit doctoral training in particular areas, this is a significant concern.
• What are the dangers of relying heavily on one delivery model such as DTCs?
The richer institutions continue to get richer, outstanding groups in smaller
institutions will become starved of funds and either disappear or be forced to
move to larger institutions. Eventually the only research-led teaching will be in
larger institutions.
• What are the consequences of having universities that cannot offer any PhD
studentships?
Research in laboratory based subjects in particular will suffer greatly and be
dependent on overseas students.
• What do you consider to be a reasonable balance of doctoral provision models to ensure

quality of provision, geographical spread and sufficient breadth of discipline coverage?
Competitive bidding based on research quality and experience of the researchers
and making the bids and quality of training provision
Researcher Development Framework

4. How does Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework feature in the formation of doctoral
graduates at your HEI?
Very important. Courses and training are mapped to provide the skills in the
framework wherever possible.
• How relevant is the Framework to students who will go on to employment outside of
research?
Preliminary evidence gathered by Vitae suggests it has been very useful with
respect to transferable skills.
Quality
5. Is quality of research output the best proxy of quality research supervision and training for
post graduate students? What other criteria should be used?
Research output is only one measure of the skill base of postgraduate students.
Measurement of other research and transferable skill is necessary given that around
40% of graduates do not go into research careers after their PhD.
• What relevance does QAA have to the quality measures for post graduate education?
Considerable
6. What mechanisms do you have for involving industry in setting the standards and outputs for
post graduate STEM provision?
Case awards, KTPs, use of the associated supervisors from industry.
35
• Are there any inhibitions to involving industry more?
No internal inhibitions at Aston University, it is central to what we do. All HEIs
have to ensure that they are listening to industry and providing what they want,
rather than what HEIs would like to give them. HEIs need to learn how to adapt
communication to fit with the language of industry.
Externally, support for more schemes such as KPTs in essential.
Again the Wilson Review makes some recommendations in this area.
Funding
7. There has been a continual erosion of public funding for stand-alone Masters and it has now
disappeared in many areas. What impact will this lack of funding have on the provision of
stand-alone Masters courses?
Masters courses are also attractive to overseas students, however, these are in
particular subjects and in most cases these courses will be viable. In the subjects that
are not attractive to overseas students, it is likely that these courses will decline.
• How will you fund your stand-alone Masters courses?
Via overseas students
• Who will fund UK students who wish to study stand-alone Masters courses?
Industry, eg P/T, or sponsored, or self-funding students
However, self funding for Home students is increasingly an issue which we need to
address in the sector with government. If you have considerable debt from your
first degree you will be less able to take up a Masters degree. We see this as a
central issue which needs to be addressed.
8. What impact does HEFCE’s SIVS funding have on post graduate provision? Is it sufficient?
SIVS funding is essential and without it our fees would have had to be set above what
the market can currently sustain. But it does not cover the full cost and so fees
remain higher than students tell us they can pay. Many institutions are supplementing
these fees by considerable scholarships.
• Are there any areas that are not currently classified as SIVS that should be considered for
such classification?
More areas in the Biological Sciences
Overseas students
9. We have heard that in certain Masters courses over 70% of the students are from overseas.
What are the dangers of such a large proportion of overseas students and how can we
mitigate against them?
The dangers include greater effect from economic and political changes and events,
those coming to learn in a UK centric environment are learning amongst very few
Home/EU students.
36
Mitigation is currently taking place by considerable investment in scholarships for

Home/EU students. This is not, however, stopping a decrease in applications from
these students.
• Is there an over-reliance on overseas students in post graduate education? If so, what
would you consider a sustainable proportion of overseas students?
• We would not call it a negative over reliance in all ways because overseas students
add a tremendous amount to the life of our university. The diversity which they
bring add to the cultural capital of home students. They are now an essential part
of our learning experience.
• We would not put a proportion on this but we would very much like to bring up
the proportion of Home/EU students studying on Postgraduate programmes as
they currently make up only 10% of our Masters population.
• Do you consider that growth in the overseas student population nationally at 30% pa, as
has been the case until recently, is sustainable for UK HEI’s collectively?
PhD level: In long term no. In short term yes, since competition is growing
worldwide e.g. Northern Europe and Australasia. Once the trainers are trained,
they will provide their own training.
Masters: level: the growth could be sustainable if we reversed some of the
immigration requirements. This is having a serious effect on recruitment and
more importantly on reputation.
• Does the proportion of overseas postgraduate students have any effect on in the supply
of academic staff in UK STEM departments?
Yes, in Engineering, Science and Business Management in particular.
10. We have heard in evidence that changes in the immigration system are having a significant
impact on the number of overseas students in post graduate education and stand-alone
Masters in particular. What is your experience of this issue?
Yes, the changes have had a significant effect. Particularly in Business and Management
and in Life and Health Sciences recruitment has been significantly affected (particularly
from some countries).
The removal of Post Study Work had one of the biggest effects. Even though the new
Tier 2 arrangements allow for Masters students to work, and most will be working in
roles which pay them above the threshold limit, this not the perception. There needs
to be strong communication at a high level to reverse this perception.
In addition, key competitor countries are now making it far easier for students to
study in the competitor countries, often reversing previous immigration legislation.
This is a very serious issue. We would be happy to talk in more detail to the
committee on this matter and have a number of case studies which we could share.
14 May 2012
37
British Academy – Written evidence
1. The British Academy, the UK’s national Academy for the humanities and social sciences
welcomes the opportunity to submit evidence to House of Lords Science and
Technology Sub-Committee 1 inquiry into higher education in STEM subjects (science,
technology, engineering and mathematics).
2. We agree that the UK needs a sufficient supply of STEM skills to ensure that our
economy remains competitive and that our scientific and academic research base
continues to be world leading. At a time of significant change in higher education, it is
vital to reflect on the long-term implications of policy developments, and we therefore
welcome the Committee’s focus on such an important area. Clearly as the Academy for
the humanities and social sciences, our interest is not primarily in STEM disciplines, but
we are fully supportive of efforts to address the issues relating to STEM identified by the
Committee for this inquiry.
3. We would, however, urge the Committee to be mindful of some of the broader skills
required by business and industry to be competitive. While it is clear that STEM
disciplines constitute a fundamentally important part of the skills base, other disciplines
(for example, humanities and social sciences) are integral to supporting economic growth
and UK competitiveness.
4. It is also important to emphasise that the skills and knowledge necessary for the UK to
remain competitive on the global stage are not confined to the four STEM subjects
identified in the Committee remit. Quantitative and statistical skills are central to many
social sciences, and to some humanities, and these disciplines should not be ignored or
frozen out in the concentration on STEM disciplines. There is considerable ‘export’ of
these skills to other areas, including STEM disciplines, and their development needs to be
protected. As such, we would stress that in considering the ‘definition’ of a STEM subject
and STEM job, the Committee strongly considers skills and knowledge as not confined to
any particular discipline.
5. The Committee specifically notes quantitative skills in its call for evidence. We would
therefore like to draw the attention of members to the work of the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC) and the Nuffield Foundation in this area, and to the British
Academy’s Languages and Quantitative Skills (L&QS) Programme, which over the next
four years aims to promote a range of initiatives to support languages and the use of
rigorous, especially quantitative, methods across the humanities and social sciences.
6. The L&QS Programme reflects the Academy’s long-standing concerns regarding deficits
in these areas in UK education and research. The aim of the programme is to build
capacity to address these deficits, to strengthen skills in all educational phases from
secondary school to postgraduate study and research, and to contribute to the UK’s
competitiveness. We further believe that this initiative will help to bridge the gap
between humanities and social sciences and the STEM disciplines, and that this in turn
will reduce the reluctance of secondary pupils to opt for STEM subjects (it is important
to note similar issues with languages, as we highlight in paragraphs 8-11).
38
7. Quantitative methods are central to many areas of social science and provide complex
statistical analyses of large and complicated data sets, which underpin estimates of many
social patterns, trends and quantifiable impacts of social interventions. These can lead to
world-class blue skies research, to effective evidence-based policy and to creative
applications in the business environment. They are therefore essential to some of our
core business and industry sectors, as the Committee points out. This critical need for
quantitative research is not confined to any particular discipline or subgroup of
disciplines but, rather, applies across the full breadth of social and natural sciences.
8. Besides the methods of the STEM disciplines, language skills, and more broadly the
understanding of global cultures and economies acquired through area studies, are also
vital to the UK’s competitiveness internationally and to our security needs. We are
aware that the armed services and the police forces have this requirement for language
skills under active consideration.
Learning languages such as Chinese or Japanese might also fulfil the function that the
classical languages had in the traditional curriculum, namely that they provided a training
in logical analysis and other modes of thinking, a mode of analysis which complements
and enhances that based on quantitative methods.
9. The UK‘s social and economic future relies on our ability to compete on the
international stage. When our competitors operate in English and in a range of other
languages, if we were to operate only in English, we would be at a disadvantage. With an
increasing number of companies having international dealings, employers are viewing
mobility and language skills as vital to global business success.50 The UK needs to have
home-grown talent who can contribute to the international multi-lingual market as well
as being an attractive place for international citizens to find employment – e.g. the
mobility should operate in both directions.
10. Strategically, from the perspectives of defence and diplomacy, we live in a thoroughly
globalised world and the capacity in the UK HE system to teach and study certain
languages and cultures is vital for a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of countries
where we now have — or can expect to have — defence and diplomatic interests.
Strong diplomatic understanding of countries will have a significantly positive impact on
the ability of UK companies to do business globally.
11. It also cannot be taken for granted that all leading science will continue to be published
only in English, as noted in recent evaluations of global publication patterns by Thomson
Reuters. This trend is likely to be reinforced as the internet becomes an increasingly
important locus of publication. In such a context, language skills may become an essential
part of the training of STEM students, particularly postgraduates.
12. There is a risk in separating consideration of STEM disciplines from other disciplines.
Exploiting STEM related successes as fully as possible will require skills drawn from non-
STEM expertise. Connections between STEM skills and other skills (or the same skills
acquired via other disciplines) are needed for wider deployment in economy and society.
Hence without planned linkages the funding of STEM subjects may achieve results that
are sub-optimal from a national viewpoint. There has to be a broader package. Non-
50 On mobility and high achievers, see this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15696714
39
STEM skills are essential to the realisation of STEM advances and so should be
considered a fundamental part of the policy from the outset.
16 December 2011
40
Computing (CPHC) – Written evidence
British Computer Society (the Chartered Institute for IT), in

association with the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC)
and the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) –
Written evidence
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

The Institute promotes wider social and economic progress through the advancement
of information technology science and practice. We bring together industry, academics,
practitioners and government to share knowledge, promote new thinking, inform the
design of new curricula, shape public policy and inform the public.
As the professional membership and accreditation body for IT, we serve over 70,000
members including practitioners, businesses, academics and students, in the UK and
internationally. We deliver a range of professional development tools for practitioners and
employees. We accredit almost all University Computer Science degrees in the UK. A
leading IT qualification body, we offer a range of widely recognised professional and end-user
qualifications.
http://www.bcs.org
Council of Professors and Heads of Computing

The Council of Professors and Heads of Computing exists to promote public education in
Computing and its applications and to provide a forum for those responsible for
management and research in university computing departments. CPHC represents the
interests of a membership engaged in the management of University Computing education
and University Computing research within the UK Higher Education sector. We are an
independent body, registered as a charity, and, although we work closely with all the
Professional and Statutory organisations relevant to our sector, we are not affiliated to any
other body.
CPHC is recognised as the Subject Body for Computing by the Funding Councils and by
QAA, and it works in conjunction with UKCRC to address research issues with the
Research Councils, particularly EPSRC.
http://www.cphc.ac.uk
UK Computing Research Committee

The UK Computing Research Committee aims to promote the vitality, quality and impact of
Computing Research in the UK. Its members are internationally leading computer
researchers drawn from both academia and industry. The UKCRC was formed in November
2002 and is an Expert Panel of the British Computer Society, the Council of Professors and
Heads of Computing and the Institution of Engineering & Technology.
By contributing to policy formation within these three key national bodies, UKCRC enables
UK Computing Research to speak with a single voice. UKCRC presents its views to
Government, Parliamentary Committees and other agencies through pro-active submissions
and responses to consultations.
http://www.ukcrc.org.uk
41
General questions
What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?

1. Computer Science is a core STEM subject as it combines the methodologies of
science, engineering, technology and mathematics. Computer Science plays a
major role in all employment sectors, e.g., finance, entertainment, academia,
health, retail, education, defence, government, etc. For example, pharmaceutical
companies such as GlaxoSmithKline require interdisciplinary teams of
professionals working at the boundary of biology, physics, chemistry,
pharmaceutics, numerical analysis and computer science. In fact, almost every
sector has been transformed by the application of computers and computational
thinking. Our conversations with global technology companies, start-ups in
London’s Tech City, Tier One Banks in the City and leading computer games
companies suggest there is a severe shortage of people with deep expert
Computer Science knowledge who also understand how to apply that knowledge
to create business value.
2. Unfortunately, Computer Science has not been recognised as one of the STEM
subjects identified as “strategically important and vulnerable subjects”. In view of
both its strategic importance to the UK’s economy and the under-supply of
Computer Science graduates, this anomaly should be corrected as soon as
possible.
3. Many advances in Science and Engineering of recent times have only been possible
because of accompanying advances in Computer Science; for example the Human
Genome Project 51 , Large Hadron Collider 52,53 , predicting climate change 54 ,
epidemiology 55 , Airbus fly-by-wire 56 and electric hybrid vehicle development 57 .
Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used to
influence supply?
4. Because of the rich and diverse employment opportunities for Computer Science
graduates it is hard to fully understand employers’ demand for them. e-Skills UK
estimates 58 that the excess of demand over supply reaches its maximum in the
Computer Science sector. They also estimate that there has been a steady
increase in demand over the last decade, despite the dot.com bust, outsourcing
and the current period of austerity. Outsourcing has, though, led to a
proportionately higher demand for high-skilled Computer Science graduates.
OECD data 59 shows that unemployment for IT professionals across the main 15
EU states has been less than 5% throughout the period 1998 to 2008.
51 http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/human-genome-mapping-sequencing.html
52 http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Research/DataAnalysis-en.html
53 http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/public/default.htm
54 http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guide/science/modelling
55http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2004_02_06/noDOI.136658616079287325
11
56 http://www.airbus.com/innovation/proven-concepts/in-design/fly-by-wire/
57 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/automobiles/23SPIES.html
58 Technology Insights 2011 http://www.e-skills.com/research/research-publications/insights-reports-and-videos/technology-
insights-2011
59 OECD Information Technology Outlook 2010
42
5. Note that HESA employment statistics for Computer Science are misleading and
over-estimate the true unemployment situation for Computer Science graduates.
This is because degrees with very little Computer Science content are bundled
with true Computer Science degrees when calculating the statistics. This error is
harming the recruitment of students to Computer Science degrees and needs to
be addressed as a matter of urgency.
6. Data from one representative UK University shows that 6 months from

graduating 6.7% of CS graduates on non-sandwich courses were unemployed and
4% of CS graduates on sandwich courses were unemployed, based on a sample of
371 students over 5 years. Also, based on the 30% of 2010 CS grads for whom
the starting salary was known, the starting salary on graduation for non- sandwich
students was £20,754 whereas for sandwich students it was £26, 461. Note the
median salary for men working full-time in 2010 was £28,400 according to the
ONS.
16-18 supply
Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do
7. Computer Science (as opposed to digital literacy skills) is not being taught in
enough schools nor to enough school students. As a result, universities are not
able to assume any prior knowledge of Computer Science in their undergraduate
intake. Mathematics is a key enabling skill for Computer Science undergraduates,
but not enough students reach the necessary level of expertise. See Appendix:
Collapse in students taking GCE computing and GCSE ICT’ for more details. The
current ICT curriculum as taught in many schools has actively discouraged
students from further study of IT or Computer Science. There were only around
4000 students in the UK taking Computing A level in 2010. There has been a
decline of roughly 50% over the last six years of students taking Computing at
GCE.
8. It is extremely welcome that the Coalition Government has recognised the need
to reform the ICT curriculum 60 : “the Government recognises that learning the
skills to use ICT effectively and acquiring the knowledge of the underpinning
computer science are two different (albeit complementary) subjects.
Furthermore, the Government recognises that the current ICT programme is
insufficiently rigorous and in need of reform.”
What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of
9. Governments have confused Computer Science and digital literacy. ICT curricula
have focussed on the latter at the expense of the former. Acquiring skills at using
office products has taken precedence over, for instance, learning to program.
Students find this repetitive and boring. They gain a false impression of the nature
of Computer Science and are put off pursuing it as a degree subject.
60 The Government’s response to Next Gen. Transforming the UK into the world’s leading talent hub for the video games
and visual effects industries, ISBN: 9780101822626
43
What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM
10. The exclusion of Computer Science as a recognised Science in the English
Baccalaureate will exacerbate the problem of its low uptake in schools and
negatively increase its uptake at degree level.
Graduate supply
Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU and
11. No. See earlier discussion of the excess of demand over supply in this sector.
Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently

high, and if not , why not?
12. UK Computer Science graduates are generally recognised to reach a high
standard of technical expertise.
Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it
13. Although they reach a high standard of technical expertise, Computer Science
students do not always have the range of transferable skills required by industry,
which includes entrepreneurial skills. BCS encourages the inclusion of transferable
skills training in Computer Science degrees via its accreditation process. Note,
however, that due to the diversity of employment opportunities open to
Computer Science graduates and the diverse needs of employers in different
sectors, a simplistic ‘kite-marking’ scheme for Computer Science degrees could
have a negative effect. See ‘Appendix: University initiatives to develop softer
skills.’ for some examples of good practice in universities.
What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the
institutions?
14. The exclusion of Computer Science as a compulsory subject in both the new
National Curriculum and the English Baccalaureate is likely to reduce further its
uptake by school students. The situation in Scotland is healthier. The introduction
of the Curriculum for Excellence has returned control over the curriculum to
teachers, many of whom are keen to teach Computer Science as a STEM subject.
The BCS Academy of Computing, in conjunction with the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, is supporting this development by developing exemplary teaching
materials for the first three years of secondary school.
What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop new
and cross-disciplinary STEM degrees?
15. Computer Science is an inherently interdisciplinary subject. Not only does it
employ the full range of STEM methodologies, but it also borrows methodologies
from the humanities, such as Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy and Sociology. In
the other direction, computational thinking is employed by almost every
44
discipline: affecting the questions they ask, the answers they seek and the theories
they form. As a result, cross-disciplinary degrees, both STEM and non-STEM, are
the norm in Computer Science departments. The 2008 RAE evaluated Computer
Science outputs by their absolute significance, rather than just their contribution
to Computer Science. We expect the REF to continue this practice, so that
interdisciplinary research and teaching will continue to be promoted.
What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary for all
16. Computer Science is a fast developing subject and it is vital that Computer
Science teaching keeps pace with these developments. Therefore, Computer
Science teachers must remain in touch with current research developments. The
best way to achieve this is for them to remain research active and to supervise
postgraduate students. Good teaching also contributes to a stronger research
culture by improving the quality and supply of local graduate students.
Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education

17. Most higher education institutions teach Computer Science as a degree subject
and conduct Computer Science research. This has been witnessed, for instance,
by the large number of Computer Science departments submitting to each RAE.
What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM
graduates in terms of gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic background?
18. Female employment in Computing is about 18% which, while higher than many
other engineering subjects, is still unacceptably low. The problem arises both in
our failure to enthuse girls at school-level and our failure to retain those females
who are recruited to Computer Science degrees. Women in Computing and
many other Computing-based organisations are trying to address this problem,
but with only limited success so far.
Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers they
19. Most postgraduate courses now include a substantial element of transferable skills
training to try to ensure that PhD students meet the requirements of employers.
Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain

20. The supply of PhD funding is insufficient to meet the demand. This is especially
true for the very high quality EU and overseas students, who are often ineligible
for even the little funding that is available. EU and overseas students often stay in
the UK both to enhance UK research and to contribute substantially to the
economy.
What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of
45
21. DTC can be an excellent way of both attracting high quality students and
delivering high quality postgraduate education. They should, however, be just one
element of a range of delivery models. For instance, DTCs can overload
postgraduate supervisors within the DTC, but underload equally qualified
supervisors in other institutions. Similarly, there will be potential supervisors
within a DTC institution, whose research does not lie with the DTC area and
whose expertise is not employed by the DTC. We especially regret EPSRC’s
withdrawal of project studentships. Not only did working within a project team
provide valuable experience to PhD students, but it was a rare source of PhD
funding open to EU and overseas students.
Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the balance
right between the number of Masters degree students and PhD students
22. Many employers value MSc degrees highly and prefer MScs over PhDs for many
jobs. So state funding of MSc degrees is vital for the economy.
What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of graduates
to pursue a research career?
23. Students are often reluctant to pursue postgraduate study when they have a
substantial debt from their undergraduate studies. Increased undergraduate fees
will exacerbate this problem.
Industry
What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to attract

them?
24. PriceWaterhouse Cooper have estimated the increased lifetime earnings from a
STEM degree to be about £250k. This is substantially more than an arts or
humanities degree and second only to medicine, which requires a longer period
of study. STEM education should be especially attractive as a route out of poverty
for people from a deprived background, as STEM graduates are valued solely for
the expertise they have acquired.
25. Industry can identify potential high quality employees by offering Summer
internships and sandwich course placements. These are highly valued by students,
who seem them both as a way to gain employment experience and transferable
skills, and as route to employment.
What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand
for STEM graduates matches supply in terms of numbers, skills and quality of
graduates?
26. The BCS Academy of Computing have been working with Computing at School 61
(CAS), which is an organisation for Computing school teachers, to increase and
improve the teaching of Computing in schools. CAS have over 1000 members
covering over 800 schools in the UK. The BCS also accredits Computer Science
degrees to ensure they meet the requirements of employers.
12 December 2011
61 http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/
46
Appendix: Collapse in students taking GCE computing and GCSE ICT

27. The uptake of traditional Computing or IT qualifications has collapsed in English
schools since 2001, as is demonstrated by the following statistics. The following
text and illustrations are taken from the BCS submission to the Royal Society
study on computing in school, http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/37945. It
is included here for convenience.
28. The following charts are based on the results published in June 2010 by the Joint
Council for Qualifications. They indicate a decline of roughly 50% over the last six
years of students taking Computing at GCE. In 2010 only about 5% took
Computing compared to those taking Mathematics at GCE, indicating it is a
subject in trouble, and not just attributable to decline in STEM subjects generally.
Of particular concern is that the female entry for Computing GCE is only about
1% of the female mathematics GCE entry.
47
29. Looking at GCSE we see a similar decline in ICT entries (until 2011 there is no
GCSE in computing). Note these graphs do not include GCSE equivalent
qualifications, such as for example OCR Nationals or ECDL.
48
30. The overall picture for ICT across schools and FE is complicated by non-standard
qualifications, or ‘other’ qualifications as described by Ofqual, which are
qualifications other than GCE, GCE AS, GCSE and KS (Key Skills). Figure 1shows
comparative data from Ofqual 62 on ‘other’ qualifications ranging from Entry level
to Level 3 (which is A2 level equivalent) from 2003 to 2009. The chart shows the
number of students that passed òther’ qualifications in each year. The vast
majority of òther’ qualifications taken in ICT shown here are at Level 1 or 2. The
Ofqual figures do not just include schools, but also FE colleges and training
providers. The chart includes some other subjects for comparison, where the
double digit code against the subject name is the sector subject area code for that
subject.
62 Annual Qualifications Market Report 2010, Ofqual/10/4727
49
Figure 1: Òther’ qualifications passed in England from Entry Level to Level 3
31. Figure 1 clearly shows that a great many students are gaining some kind of
exposure to ICT from vocational qualifications throughout the 13-19 age range
(around 550,000 in 2008/9). Across all subjects Ofqual report that Level 2 òther’
qualifications are the fastest growing qualifications in England. The overwhelming
majority of òther’ ICT qualifications are designed to equip students with user
skills and do not include a Computer Science component.
32. Some doubt had been cast on the value of some of these other qualifications
compared to traditional GCSE qualifications by the Wolf Report on vocational
education qualifications. Wolf Report P71: “… many level 1 and 2 qualifications,
including NVQs which are supposed to reflect workplace requirements, do not appear to
have any positive outcomes whatsoever in terms of earnings and career progression. In
other words, the content of many current vocational qualifications is not actually valued
by employers and the labour market. Yet these qualifications form a major part of what
is offered to 16-18 year olds.”
33. The new Diplomas are included in the òther’ qualification category. They have
not yet proven themselves to be a suitable vehicle for delivering a true alternative
to A2 level. The new IT Diploma is still only being delivered in small numbers, in
2010 there were 540 Advanced IT Diplomas awarded. Ofsted have recently
reported 63 that the `principal learning’ component (which should correspond to
the more academic content) of Diplomas in general is not delivered as effectively
as is desirable in a third of the consortia providing Diplomas. Ofsted have also
reported on other problems with Diplomas: “In addition, little evidence was seen
63 Ofsted, Diplomas: the second year, 2010
50
of careful planning to help learners to rely less on the teacher and to develop
progressively more independent ways of working and learning.” The report also
points out that “The separation of the teaching of functional skills from the
‘principal learning’ was an important weakness as the functional skills taught were
not related to the vocational context of the ‘principal learning’.” This is a serious
concern for Computing, since a lack of connection between the principles of
Computing and how they are put into practice is likely once again to lead to an
unacceptable learning experience for students.
34. The Wolf report also implicitly casts doubt on the value of the IT Diploma in
some schools by including the following quote on P116: Head of the ICT Faculty
at Cottenham Village College explained his preferred qualifications as follows:
“We were running the Diploma in IT. We have abandoned it for two reasons.
1. It is 90% business and only 10% IT.

2. It is 90% report writing and 10% doing IT.
There is a pretence that the Diploma in IT is hands on. But when one examines the mark
schemes (which are, after all, the indicators of the value of each topic), one finds that less
than 10% of the marks are given for doing IT work (building websites, creating databases,
creating videos, etc.) and the vast majority of the rest of the marks are for writing reports on
IT.”
35. The conclusion is that there has been a continual steep decline since before 2005
in students taking traditional ICT qualifications at GCSE and GCE, which already
lack a significant Computing component. At the same time there has been a
steady rise in qualifications that are solely concerned with IT user skills at a
functional level, which are delivered not just in schools but also in FE colleges and
by private training providers. The system is now massively imbalanced in favor of
IT user skills at the expense of Computing. There is also doubt over the value of
some of these vocational qualifications with regards to providing a progression
route to further study or a career.
Appendix: University initiatives to develop softer skills.
36. The following text is taken from the BCS response to the Wilson Review 64 and is
included here for convenience. The ACM (the Association of Computing
Machinery, the main learned society for Computer Science in the US) has
identified that to compete in a global market computing and IT professionals
need:
• a firm grounding in the underpinning principles of Computing, which remain
relevant even though particular technologies rapidly evolve and new ones are
constantly being developed
• to participate in life-long learning to ensure technology specific skills remain
relevant
• soft skills with regards to management, communication and collaboration across
different companies
64 http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/42823
51
• increasingly to become specialised within an application domain; e.g.
pharmaceuticals, finance, telecommunications
• to learn about technologies and management practices that underlie the
globalisation of software; e.g. distributed workflow design and orchestration
37. There are many universities that include initiatives within their degree
programmes that develop some of these additional softer skills. Two examples of
good practice are given below.
38. Queen Mary are running ImpactQM, a three-year EPSRC funded KE project, to
develop a new cadre of young academic scientists and engineers, who begin their
research careers within a structured training framework that immerses them in
both high performance research environments, and in organisations that will be of
increasing importance to the UK’s economy and society. Recent graduates
include Kotub Uddin, a PhD student in the School of Mathematical Sciences. In
2010 he was awarded an ImpactQM scholarship to collaborate with Jaguar Land
Rover where he used mathematical techniques to ensure optimal operation of
co-operative systems involved in motion control in automobiles. Kotub has now
joined the company. Jonathan Dunn, a PhD student working in synthetic organic
chemistry used his ImpactQM scholarship to undertake a collaborative venture
with Cancer Research Technology Ltd, where he worked on drug discovery
projects. Rita Jorge, a PhD student in the School of Biological and Chemical
Science who is working with the Government Office for Science on science
policy projects. ImpactQM have been nominated in the "Outstanding Support for
Early Career Researchers" category in the Times Higher Education Awards.
39. Another example is ProspeKT, which was run by Edinburgh University. ProspeKT
was a partnership between Scottish Enterprise and the University to promote
greater impact from the research within the School of Informatics. Funding was
also obtained from the European Regional Development Fund to extend the
Enterprise Creation element of the program to cover all of the Scottish
Computer Science group. A follow on program, focussing on the Scottish
Research Pool in Computer Science – SICSA, has just been launched funded by
both SE and SFC. This program is called AspeKT.
40. The program provided some 3 floors of space for commercial activity next to the
School and a team of Business Development Execs to translate between business
and the academic world. It has succeeded in driving a culture change within the
School so industrial cooperation is now very widely accepted by the academic
body, one major element here was having qualified Business Development staff to
be able to screen and choreograph the relationships so the academics were not
distracted by a large number of fruitless conversations. The concentration of high
quality research within the School makes it an anchor site for inward investment,
with presentation to companies brought in by UKTI and SDI. Visits have run at a
rate of about 1 per week for extended periods of time and a number of local
successes have been reported recently – the basing of Amazon’s new support
Centre and Avaloq’s recent move to Edinburgh, both are worth some 500 jobs.
The School also houses an Innovation Lab for EADS and recently a major US
entertainment company has also taken space for an innovation studio. The School
52
now has relationships with most of the global ICT players and a number of local
technology based SME’s.
41. The major success of the program has been the number of start-ups and spin-
outs it has spawned – 37 in 5 years making it one of the most productive
academic centres in the UK. Many of these companies are now trading
internationally and a significant amount of seed funding (>£8.5M) has been raised
despite the economic downturn. The survival rate of these companies is also
quite string according to a recent BIS report. This also reflects a strong interest in
the student base to build or work with a start-up when they graduate.
53
British Geological Survey, the Geological Society and the Committee of Heads of University
Geosciences Departments – Written evidence
British Geological Survey, the Geological Society and the Committee

of Heads of University Geosciences Departments – Written evidence
Submission to be found under the Geological Society
54
British Medical Association (BMA) – Written evidence
1. The British Medical Association (BMA) is a voluntary, professional association that

represents doctors from all branches of medicine all over the UK. It has a total membership
of over 147,000, including medical academics, doctors who are employed by universities or
work in higher education, and over 22,000 medical students.
General questions
influence supply?
2. The BMA believes that all medical jobs in the National Health Service (NHS) and other
healthcare providers as well as in organizations devoted to education and/or research, such
as universities and pharmaceutical companies, should be included in the definition of STEM
jobs.
3. In medicine, the overall number of medical graduates required has been agreed and was
the basis for the expansion of places in medical schools and the development of graduate
schools in the last decade. The BMA believes that there should be a matching of
undergraduate places to the number of foundation year 65 jobs in the NHS. Following the
foundation years, the balance between the branches of practice (the various components of
the medical workforce) and specialties is less clear. The system is also becoming less flexible
in allowing and enabling movement between branches and specialties. Shifts in medical
practice arising from technological advance and innovations in treatment add to the
complexity of the problem. All these factors make long-term workforce planning increasingly
difficult.
16-18 supply
4. There are always more applicants for medicine than there are places, including more
applicants with the right A-levels. Such qualifications do not necessarily mean that every
student has the right skills to study medicine and indeed to become a doctor. All students
wishing to study medicine at university must demonstrate that they have undertaken some
form of medical work experience as part of their application. There needs to be greater
awareness of this requirement and the preferred A-level subjects. However, many students
do not have the financial support to work unpaid for a period of time. It is also more difficult
for students from lower income families to gain access to these work environments as often
they do not have the personal connections to professionals who can facilitate internships,
shadowing and work experience.
5. The BMA has urged the Government to assess the impact of student financial support
policies on applications to study medicine, particularly from lower socio-economic
backgrounds.
65 Upon graduation, medical students apply to the Foundation Programme. Places on the two-year postgraduate Foundation
Programme are limited by the workforce planning needs of the NHS but completion of the first year of the Programme is
compulsory to gain General Medical Council registration. Without this registration, a doctor can not practise medicine.
55
6. It should be noted that approximately 10% of applicants to medical school are graduates.
They have often previously taken a STEM subject degree and are disproportionately from
disadvantaged backgrounds
7. The baccalaureate system should be exploring ways to make their programme suitable for
potential entrants into higher education in STEM subjects. There should, thereby, be scope
for taking a wider range of subjects than in conventional systems. This could have a positive
impact on widening access to medicine.
Graduate supply
8. Medicine is different from other STEM subjects in that medical workforce management is
almost wholly geared towards the provision of NHS doctors. There are, however, many
more options for a medical career and sectors requiring doctors. For example, greater
consideration needs to be given to how to build the medical workforce involved in research
and education. It is also clear to many clinical academics 66 that there are insufficient numbers
of clinician scientists and others in medical research and that they are relatively under-
valued.

9. In order to address this question it is necessary to agree on measures of quality. For
example, should these measures encompass quality in patient contact, as an educator, as an
investigator or as a manager?
10. The standards and reputation of UK medical education have long been high.
Nonetheless, it is widely acknowledged that they are at risk from several factors, which
threatens future quality. Examples of risks include:
• The growing focus in the NHS on service provision to the exclusion of all other
activities, including research, education and training.
• The lack of guarantees that all healthcare providers must have a commitment to
education, training and research
• The lack of supportive academic career structures
11. As the medical degree is part of the lengthy process of training a doctor then the degree
is aimed at providing medical graduates with the skills they need for the next part of their
training. This managed approach may be one that could be followed by other STEM subjects.
This would obviously require a heavier involvement in higher education and commitment to
the relevant graduates by employers, though this does seem to be envisaged in the
Government’s current Higher Education White Paper.
66 Doctors working in academic medicine perform vital functions for the NHS and healthcare in general. Their roles include
a combination of teaching (medical and other healthcare students), research, and specialist clinical care.
56
12. We would also stress that exposure to good science in STEM subjects is part of medical
education. Medical research is vital to the country and any changes to STEM education
should enhance our ability to carry out research.
institutions?
13. The BMA shares the views of many university staff who believe that good teaching is not
respected and rewarded sufficiently within higher education institutions. While the BMA
acknowledges that research excellence may go hand in hand with clinical or teaching
excellence, the emphasis in recent and current funding streams has been skewed towards
research.
14. In general, the Government’s policy of transparency in teaching budgets may have a
positive impact, but a cultural change amongst those running English universities is also
required. On the basis of past experience, we fear that medical schools may well be tempted
to use the fact that there are reforms to higher education funding to reduce their
complement of clinical academic staff. Furthermore, this would take place against a
background of significant increases in the number of students and a significant reduction in
the number of clinical academic teachers and researchers over the last decade.
15. In particular, we would welcome improved recognition of teachers and educators who
have qualifications. We have suggested that the Government and higher educational
institutions work closely with the BMA and the General Medical Council (GMC) in
determining how best build on existing guidance from the GMC, which perceives all doctors
as potential teachers. We would support efforts to enable those without formal teaching
qualifications to obtain them. The process must, however, not be so onerous that it either
encourages doctors to give up teaching responsibilities or discourages junior doctors from
undertaking them. We have alerted the Government to the serious contradiction between
its aim of improving teaching and the policies being pursued by NHS employers towards
Consultant Supporting Professional Activities 67 and clinical excellence awards 68 which may
prevent and discourage consultants from undertaking the educational roles for which they
were trained. This has the triple danger: potentially losing experienced medical teachers
from medical education, discouraging junior doctors to take on such roles, and undermining
the quality of the student experience.
16. We welcome the proposal to encourage institutions to report to students on how their
fees are being spent. This must, however, be broken down by subject and not simply
provided in very general terms. The BMA also supports the proposals for presenting the
available data in more imaginative and user-friendly ways. We welcome the Government’s
endorsement of the recommendation for student charters in each institution and suggest
that there should be separate charters for each medical and dental school building on the
67 Supporting Professional Activities (SPA) time is incorporated into SAS doctors’ contracts to provide them with time to
undertake a wide range of work outside of their Direct Clinical Care activities, including the development of new services,
research, clinical governance, training and management. SPAs make up one part of the Programmed Activities (sessions)
that doctors’ time is divided into, along with Direct Clinical Care, additional NHS responsibilities and external duties.
68 To encourage and support innovation in the NHS, consultants may apply for Clinical Excellence Awards (CEAs). ACCEA,
the body that administers CEAs, states that they “are given to recognise and reward the exceptional contribution of NHS
consultants, over and above that normally expected in a job, to the values and goals of the NHS and to patient care.”
(http://www.dh.gov.uk/ab/ACCEA)
57
model agreed between the BMA and the Medical Schools Council. Such welcome emphasis
on the student experience must, however, not be at the expense of quality.
17. There is some evidence from the experience of our members that the relative rigidity of
the research assessment process has limited the recognition of cross-disciplinary research
and thus the interest in and emphasis put on it by institutions. There are also concerns that
the process encourages institutions to play safe, thus closing off new lines of inquiry and blue
skies thinking.
18. In medicine in particular the translational nature of the research undertaken has been
insufficiently recognised, and this has led to a reduction in the number of departments
offering appropriate research facilities. Overall, there seems to be evidence that the
Research Excellence Framework and Research Assessment Exercises 69 have significantly
reduced the amount of clinical and translational research to the detriment of cross
disciplinary research and that reductions in the number of departments offering STEM
research in UK universities also has hampered cross disciplinary medical research.
19. Being a teacher and understanding research is an essential part of what it means to be an
academic doctor. Both teaching and research can benefit from the interaction of the two and
having high profile researchers as teachers also inspires medical students into academic
medicine, which will be vital to the future of medical research in the UK. We would,
therefore, certainly argue that all institutions teaching medicine must also undertake
research.

20. This is of significance for medicine as, broadly, medical students tend to continue their
training and, therefore, their practice, in the region in which they undertook their medical
degree. Some local shortages of doctors (such as in North Wales) could be related to the
lack of a cohort of medical students education and trained, and with an attachment to the
area.
21. The BMA’s Medical Students and Equality and Diversity Committees have undertaken
significant amounts of work, including in conjunction with external organisations, on
widening access to medicine. The BMA is able to share further detail of this work if the
Committee felt it to be of use.
69 The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is a peer review exercise to evaluate the quality of research in UK higher
education institutions. This assessment informs the selective distribution of funds by the UK higher education funding
bodies. The RAE will be replaced by the Research Excellence Framework in 2014.
58
22. There are several different pathways for medical PhDs. Graduate entry includes some
PhDs in subjects related to medicine; there are several MB PhD schemes for selected
students; and there are opportunities for PhD studies “out of programme” during
postgraduate medical training. We have concerns, however, that there is an overall
significant reduction in the percentage of doctors undertaking higher degrees. In the
interests of advancing medical research in the UK, this trend needs to be reversed. At
minimum there needs to be more accurate recording of the number of doctors undertaking
medical PhDs and similar programmes.

23. Ensuring that a cohort of doctors undertakes PhDs is vital to the future of medical
research in this country. We are concerned, therefore, that the Government’s policies on
student financial support will deter graduates from undertaking PhDs and have asked for this
to be monitored separately. Steps should be taken to ensure that doctors who take time out
of programme to undertake a PhD are not disadvantaged financially, either in the short-term,
or in the long-term in respect of their pensions.
24. Graduate schools in higher educational institutions should be working closely with the
postgraduate medical education to encourage doctors to take higher degrees, which have all
but disappeared in some specialties.
25. Masters degrees in medicine are useful in several ways. Some doctors use these as out of
programme opportunities, others to expand generic skills (such as management and
statistics) and others to undertake pilot studies leading to PhD studies. The promotion of
Masters degrees in medicine on a part-time basis as well as full time needs to be encouraged,
and state funding would be one way to do this.
26. The BMA shares the concern of the Browne Review that the increased cost to graduates
of their first degree will mean that fewer will choose to participate in postgraduate study.
This is of particular concern in medicine, where the degree course is already much longer
than other degrees and, therefore, more costly, and where future work in medical education
and research requires a significant number of medical graduates to undertake postgraduate
courses. We welcomed the inclusion of participation rates in postgraduate study as part of
the analysis of the impact of the changes to undergraduate funding, but argued that medicine
must be analysed separately because of its higher costs and because of the particular need to
encourage postgraduate study. We are also concerned that the fees for postgraduate
courses will come under pressure as those for undergraduate courses rise and that this, in
turn, will have a further impact on participation rates.
Industry
them?
59
27. The BMA welcomed the proposal outlined in the Higher Education White Paper to
encourage employer involvement in meeting students’ tuition costs. Partnerships between
employers, students and institutions could be effective in encouraging students from lower
socio economic backgrounds into professions, such as medicine, in which they are currently
under-represented. The proposal is primarily focussed on the involvement of private sector
employers, however, and we would urge the government to consider how such partnerships
could be encouraged between public sector employers and students.
graduates?
28. We would envisage a possible role for internships in research organisations and
research-focussed companies for medical students and graduates interested in research.
International comparisons
What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM
subjects in other countries? Which countries provide the most helpful examples
of best practice?
29. There is a greater focus on STEM subjects in many successful European countries with a
higher level of manufacturing output. We need to continue to be competitive in the
pharmaceutical and medical devices sectors and to continue close co-operation between
these sectors and medicine. The NHS as a whole is not sufficiently research friendly to make
sure that the UK is competitive. In addition, many successful European Universities have a
greater focus on technological development than those in the UK. This has encouraged the
development of significant medical devices industries in those countries.
16 December 2011
60
Professor Harry L. Bryden, The Challenger Society for Marine Science – Written evidence
Professor Harry L. Bryden, The Challenger Society for Marine

Science – Written evidence
I understand that the House of Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee has invited
contributions to its new inquiry which will ask how the UK builds the educational
foundations it needs to face the challenges of the future. The inquiry particularly seeks
contributions on higher education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, the
STEM subjects.
As President of The Challenger Society for Marine Science, I would like to contribute to the
Sub-Committee's discussions involving Marine Science.
As I am sure the Committee members will be aware, UK Marine Science and Technology
industries are rapidly expanding in key commercial and civil sectors such as renewable
energy, offshore oil and gas, environmental monitoring and climate change research. These
Marine Scientific Industries are vibrant and essential to the UK economy. The UK needs
highly skilled marine scientists for achieving national objectives in each of these areas. We
appreciate that the UK could import qualified graduates if necessary, although changing
immigration quotas may make such import more difficult in the future. In terms of national
policy, a much more satisfactory approach is to provide the quantitative technical and
scientific skills to young British students at university so they can tackle the emerging issues
in marine science and technology.
Marine Science is a relatively small field, essentially taught at only 4 universities:

Southampton, Plymouth, Liverpool and Bangor. In the environment of the government's new
model for university funding, it is a major economic issue for those departments training
marine scientists to sustain the high level of teaching, training and fieldwork necessary to
ensure graduating students continue to be capable of entering and advancing our key marine
science industries. Presently, graduates in Marine Science are given baseline classroom
training in a broad range of marine science topics and, most importantly, fieldwork training
in modern monitoring, instruments and modelling techniques so that effectively all our
graduates are presently employable by the growing Marine Science Industries. The key issue
for marine science in the new model for university funding is whether fieldwork training will
be Œaffordable within Marine Science departments. The Challenger Society for Marine
Science strongly recommends that Marine Science students at university are included for
STEM funding to ensure their key skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics
are embedded with fieldwork experience during their university degree programmes.
The Challenger Society for Marine Science has expressed similar views in a letter last June to
Dr. Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills last June. I attach a
copy of that letter here for your information (submitted but not printed).
If you would like more information on the importance of marine science for UK science,
technology and engineering, the Challenger Society would endeavour to provide specific
information on particular issues highlighted by Science and Technology Sub-Committee.
16 December 2011
61
Cambridge Assessment – Written evidence
We recognise that inquiries frequently are overwhelmed with detailed evidence. We

therefore have attempted to give very focussed evidence on key matters.
1 Understanding ‘flows’ in the system: provision of definitive statistics on

GCSE and A levels
Cambridge Assessment has filled the gap left by QCA withdrawing definitive data on the
numbers achieving specific grades in specific subjects. These data – including historical data
allowing consideration of trends - are available for your perusal at:
http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ca/Our_Services/Research/Statistical_Reports
GCSEs:
http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ca/digitalAssets/195397_Report_31_-
_GCSE_uptake_and_results__by_gender_2002-2010.pdf
Page 18 Biology
Page 39 Chemistry
Page 179 Physics
A-levels:
http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ca/digitalAssets/196034_Stats_Report_30_A_level_
uptake_and_results__by_gender.pdf
Page 144 All maths
Key points:
Physics A level entries are increasing, but are still below the level they were in 2002.
We have a serious gender imbalance in Physics at both GCSE and GCE:
Maths A level entries 2010: 54,705 male; 35,552 female; 90,257 total (maths and further
maths)*.
Physics A level entries 2010: 24,368 male; 6,685 female; 31,054 total.
Biology A level entries 2010: 25,285 male; 58,027 female; 58,027 total.
(*note these are all candidates, all ages, from all centres)
Maths A level outcomes suffered terribly through the curriculum 2000 changes –
participation has since then been climbing, from below 20,000 in 2002 to above 30,000 in
2010.
62
There have been huge increases in candidates taking single science GCSEs:
GCSEs*
2007 2011
Biology (code 1010) - 52990 134597
Chemistry (1110) - 50993 131923
Physics (1210) - 50586 130936
Core Science (1300) - 12320 326547
Additional Science (1320) 3408 253429
Single Science (1310) - 66653 ----------
Double Science (1370)- 433520 ----------
A-levels*
2007 2011
Maths (2210) - 51686 71118
Further Maths (2330) - 7199 11357
*(these figures are for England only, restricted to 1 result per subject per candidate (i.e.
resits removed).
There are issues regarding the time allocation for triple science. Some schools have simply
timetabled triple science into the old double science slot (20% of curriculum space or less),
created more space by delivering over three years, with implications for ‘readiness and
maturity’, or by increasing time allocation, with implications for curriculum balance and post-
14 ‘routes’.
2 Analysis of trends in GCSE and A Levels: science
In our ‘Commentary on Policy Exchange Report: Science Fiction? Uncovering the real level
of science skills at school and university’ (2009) we analysed with precision the timings of
shifts in participation in science qualifications, and outlined some of the key drivers.
We have included that paper as Annex 1 – key findings:
• There was no dramatic increase in attainment and participation in Science education

in the period 1997 – 2008
• It is not the case that all pupils took all three science subjects under the
O-level system. Most studied one or two of the separate sciences only, not three.
• A comprehensive analysis must go back to 1991 at least, due to major changes which
occurred then and should clarify the pattern of exam taking prior to the introduction
of GCSE in 1986. Three phases can be identified from 1991 to 2008 (see full
Cambridge Assessment commentary).
• Major shifts within science education derive from events and policy decisions taken in
the early 1990s. Actions taken during the late 1990s and early 2000s have not
significantly disturbed the situation, despite successive Government revisions to the
structure of qualifications. This latter period has been characterised by neither
catastrophic decline in overall volumes nor substantial increase.
63
• It is important to link exam entries to the population of 16 year olds as a whole since
simply looking at trends in entries is misleading. Entries can decline simply because
the population reduces (see Cambridge Assessment full commentary for details).
• Overall A-level volumes from 2002 to 2008 are basically static – but Physics suffered
serious decline – it is climbing slowly back to 2002 levels. The A-level cohort has
decreased slightly. However, per head of the increasing 18-year-old population, the
number of science entries has remained fairly constant since 2003.
• Single science GCSEs and the ‘triple’ GCSE offer have increased dramatically
• Maths participation has increased albeit representing a return to levels which existed
in the early 90’s, after the crash Curriculum 2000: 1991 = 74,972; 2011 = 71,118.
There has been key growth in Further Maths (now standing at 11, 357 (England only)
3 An enduring and damaging myth: ‘the qualification system is a mess – we

have too many qualifications…’
This is said often, and is grossly misleading. Until 2008, our system has had roughly the same
number of qualifications as Germany (see annex 2) – around 5500 (note this does not
include HE qualifications – either in Germany or England). The figure of 20,000 qualifications
– again, oft-quoted – is wrong – it approximates to the number of available qualifications, not
those actually used in education and in the economy.
While it is wrong to use the number of 'available qualifications' - which is around 15,000 -
the number of 'live' qualifications - ie those actually used – has recently increased to around
7,750 – a very significant increase:
http://www.ofqual.gov.uk/standards/92-articles/594-available-qualifications
Where do the greatest increases in numbers come from? The Qualifications and Credit
Framework, NVQs etc were introduced as a means of reducing (rationalising, 'making more
coherent…') the number of qualifications.
It is vital to recognise that the recent increase comes from VRQs (Government initiative),
from GCSEs (Government initiative re modularisation), and from NQF qualifications -
ironically the biggest increase, and a policy instrument with the principal function of reducing
the number of qualifications
Our conclusions from this:
- we do NOT have a system which includes 20,000 quals.
- left alone, the 'underlying' number is consistent with Germany (around 5,000).
However, State interventions designed to 'rationalise' and reduce the number of
qualifications have had exactly the opposite effect.
64
In mathematics, there is compelling evidence that we have too few qualifications in

mathematics – that while the maths demands of subjects such as Biology are increasing,
those entering key natural sciences and social sciences do not have adequate mathematical
understanding. The Nuffield-Kings project
(http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/Is%20the%20UK%20an%20Outlier_
Nuffield%20Foundation_v_FINAL.pdf) shows that a qualification more focussed than A level
and of higher demand than GCSE is required to service HE effectively. This is a very serious
matter, well analysed in the Nuffield-Kings work, and being addressed in Cambridge work on
‘Cambridge Maths’. This is an important area of debate. Our own research suggests that
there is a lack of unanimity in this area – some HE departments feel that there are sufficient
qualifications but that standards of attainment – including application of maths in scientific
contexts – need to be significantly enhanced. This suggests that the King’s research needs
wider dissemination and discussion.
We have discovered extensive enthusiasm for putting maths back into science courses, so
that pupils’ maths is applied in the two years between GCSE and starting a degree. For
Physics, it is considered to be vital that candidates do to take at least AS Maths.
While there is a case for considering new sub-A level qualifications, it is also clear that much
of the criticism of A level is ill-founded. The recent international comparison by Ofqual gave
A level a clean bill of health (see http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy-
ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=ofqual+international+comparison+A+level&pbx=1&oq=ofqual+inte
rnational+comparison+A+level&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1281l15140l0l15437l69l3
7l7l2l2l5l406l6377l2.23.9.1.1l42l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=d2ce5e609e1f794d&biw
=1254&bih=827). In addition, arguments that A level is an unusual form of ‘narrow’
qualification is ill-founded. A level analogues can be found throughout the world (Advanced
Placement Awards in the USA; Senior Secondary qualifications in Finland; A levels in
Singapore; ‘key’ subjects in many Bac qualifications). A levels have the benefit of servicing
three-year intensive HE, of high quality, rather than requiring four years of undergraduate
study. This is vital for overseas income to high-intensity, short-duration English HE.
Cambridge Assessment, in conjunction with OCR, has argued for re-establishing far stronger
linkage between A levels, in order to improve benefit and validity (see
http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ca/digitalAssets/189793_HE_engagement_consultati
on_paper.pdf). This is seen as essential to ensuring better articulation of A level with the
requirements of HE, and establishing higher levels of confidence in A level.
Cambridge analysis of ‘routes’ in the system suggests that the attempt to use Higher
Education as the principal IVET (initial vocational education and training) route was ill-
founded. Our analysis suggests that over 50% of existing HE provision is vocational
(Medicine, Law, Accounting, Engineering etc) and frequently externally regulated by
professional bodies. However, trying to direct over 50% of the cohort into HE was ill-
founded, and led to neglect of a high-quality vocational route of the kind present in
Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Our analysis shows that high level technicians (sub-
degree) are still an issue in the English system (see
http://www.neweng.org.uk/uploads/news/AShortageofSkills.pdf; http://www.icg-
uk.org/article899.html). It is also the case that the majority of State apprenticeships do not
meet the criterion for high-quality, long-duration apprenticeships which are of comparable
standard to apprenticeship in other developed nations (see annex 3). STEM provision will
only be complete when the ‘third route’ – employer-based IVET is subject to careful
65
rejuvenation. If it cannot be rejuvenated, the flexibility of Further Education provision in

England needs to be better exploited to furnish an effective State-funded technician-level
route – a more expensive option than the employer-based route, where the internal
economics of the schemes decreases burden on the State and provides value to employers.
In this model, the funding mechanism is foregone income by trainees-in-training, which
represents a sound ‘deal’ between employers and trainees (see LSE analysis at
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/special/cepsp22.pdf).
4 The importance of patterns of economic development
We do not argue for industrial planning, but we do recognise the importance of

understanding the labour market and economic linkages between education and training
‘flows’ and economic development:
Analysis of number of graduate engineers entering engineering-related jobs, other

professions or work which did not require a degree.
46% of 2009 engineering graduates in subject and degree-related employment six

months after graduation
20% employed in roles not directly related to degree
24% in ‘non-graduate’ employment
Is there a shortage of scientists ?

Smith E et al 2011 see http://www.bera.ac.uk/files/2011/09/science1.pdf
The ‘pull’ factors from the economy are vital – in the case of technicians, the education and
training system seems ill-configured for adequate supply – while at graduate level, economic
development appears to be a limiting factor:
"Perhaps, because of recent initiatives, there seem to be too many people studying
science for the labour market to cope with, or perhaps graduates are no longer of
sufficient quality…
…It is more likely, however, that all of these scientists are without relevant
employment every year because the shortage thesis is wrong and there are no jobs
waiting for all of them or because they are 'dropping out' having learnt that they do not
enjoy their subject areas."
Is there a shortage of scientists? Smith E et al 2011
16 December 2011
66
Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK (CaSE) – Written evidence
Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK (CaSE) – Written

evidence
1. The Campaign for Science & Engineering (CaSE) is a membership organisation aiming to
improve the scientific and engineering health of the UK. CaSE works to ensure that science
and engineering are high on the political and media agenda, and that the UK has world-
leading research and education, skilled and responsible scientists and engineers, and
successful innovative business. It is funded by around 750 individual members and 100
organisations including industries, universities, learned and professional organisations, and
research charities.
Definition of a STEM subject and a STEM job

2. STEM subjects can be defined in relation to curriculum requirements and skills developed.
However, it can be misleading to define a STEM job in a similar way. While there are jobs
for which formal STEM qualifications are a necessity, a STEM qualification has been shown to
be a fantastic preparation for a huge range of careers70 . STEM graduates have been shown to
be nearly 90% likely to be in full-time employment or further study three years later. This is
in comparison to 73% for the creative arts and 78% for languages and historical or
philosophical studies.
16-18 Supply
3. CaSE welcomed the inclusion of maths and science in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), as
a signal of the importance placed on these subjects by the Government. However, we are
concerned that these subjects are being looked at in isolation, rather than as part of a
holistic strategy to improve the STEM skills of pupils. We have two main concerns, and both
stem from the fact that if schools are being asked to emphasise certain subjects within the
EBacc, there will inevitably be a relatively lower emphasis on subjects not included in the
EBacc.
4. The first is that, in order to attain the EBacc, pupils only need two GCSEs in science
subjects 71 . CaSE’s position is that all schools should be able offer ‘triple science’ (separate
GCSEs in biology, chemistry, and physics) to their pupils; although it may not be appropriate
for all pupils to study all three sciences, it is a matter of both principle and pragmatism that
all should have the opportunity to do so. There has been growth in the number of pupils
studying triple science in recent years, but the EBacc’s increased emphasis on two sciences
may incentivise schools to refocus on providing GCSEs in Science and Additional Science
(similar to ‘double award’), at the expense of providing triple science.
5. The greater expense of science subjects relative to others makes this a particular worry; if
a school finds it has to reduce its budget, moving from ‘triple’ to ‘double’ science provision
would be a way of doing so without harming EBacc scores. Given the importance of these
skills, the Government should be increasing incentives for triple science rather than reducing
them.
70 Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education Longitudinal Survey 2006/07 Table 7:

http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/component/option,com_pubs/Itemid,276/task,show_year/pubId,1714/versionId,54/yearId,2
62/
71 More students study core subjects thanks to EBacc, DfE. Accessed 15/12/2011
http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a00197623/more-students-study-core-subjects-thanks-to-
ebacchttp://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a00197623/more-students-study-core-subjects-thanks-to-ebacc
67
6. The second concern is that although maths and science have been promoted via the
EBacc, engineering, design, and technology have been neglected. We appreciate that the
Government is not actively seeking to de-emphasise these skills-based subjects. However,
these practical subjects cost schools more to provide than many others, meaning that they
may be first in line for cuts during times of budgetary difficulty. Again, the Government
should be putting more emphasis on these subjects, not less.
7. A common theme to both of these concerns is that any negative impact might hit pupils at
poorer schools the most. Any effective reduction in provision means that pupils may not
have the requisite qualifications support to take the right A-levels which would allow entry
into STEM in Higher Education. For example, the odds of getting an A or B at A-level
Chemistry are increased by 76% for pupils in the maintained sector who take triple science
rather than double science 72 , and the effect extends across science and into higher
education 73 .
Demand for STEM students and the quality of STEM graduates

8. The 2011 CBI/EDI skills survey highlighted once again, the concerns of employers with
relation to the low level of numeracy, literacy and employability skills of many schools and
college leavers. It is important to note that many of the CBI’s members aren’t recruiting
STEM graduates for careers in research (only 5% of respondents to the CBI survey came
from the science/engineering/IT economic sector 74 ), highlighting a more general skills gap
between HEIs and graduate employers.
9. CaSE member Electroimpact, a global provider of factory automation and tooling solutions
with UK bases in Wales and Bristol, reports that the number of graduates passing their in-
house pre-employment tests each year is decreasing. Electroimpact currently employs 85
graduates and recruits approximately 12 graduates each year. CBI/EDI skills survey
respondents face a similar situation, with 43% of employers currently having difficulty
recruiting STEM skilled staff at some level. At graduate level, 39% of employers are short of
STEM graduates. We agree with the CBI that this demonstrates a clear business need for an
increase in the number of graduates studying STEM subjects.
10. In addition, Cogent, the Sector Skills Council for the Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals,
Nuclear, Oil and Gas, Petroleum and Polymer Industries have also reported that employers
find it difficult to attract high quality skills graduates. In their Cogent Skills Oracle Report
2011, 57% of employers agreed that universities need to further develop CPD programme
relevant to industry, 55% agreed that universities need to improve employability and 52%
agreed that the practical skills of students need to be improved before entering industry75 . It
is hoped that new initiatives such as the Society of Biology’s accreditation scheme and a new
kite-marking scheme from STEM-focused sector skills councils will help students understand
better which courses are valued by employers.
72 Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014: Next Steps, 2006 budget. HM Treasury, 2006. http://hm-
treasury.gov.uk/d/bud06_science_332v1.pdf
73 Success in Science, Ofsted. 2008 (See para 99) http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/surveys-and-good-
practice/s/Success%20in%20science%20%28PDF%20format%29.pdf
74 CBI Building for Growth: business priorities for education and skills. Education and skills survey 2011
75 Cogent Skills for Science Based Industries – Skills Oracle 2011 http://www.cogent-
ssc.com/research/Publications/Cogent_Skills_Oracle_Report_2011.pdf
68
11. Information about accreditation and kite-marking schemes will be included in the new
Key Information Set. Access to high quality careers advice for all prospective undergraduate
students is crucial if students are to fully understand where a degree level qualification can
take them. CaSE has voiced concerns over the proposals for the Key Information Set (KIS)
and how careers in science and engineering are portrayed. Will the KIS take account of the
relatively lower earnings of research academics under the salary indicators to avoid a
skewed perspective? In the absence of AimHigher, schools will now deliver careers advice
through independent providers. It is our understanding that there is no framework for this
provision and it won’t be comprehensively audited. As a result, schools which provide a
below-par careers service cannot be quickly or easily identified, to the detriment of their
students.
Graduate supply:
12. Under the current funding model (pre-introduction of higher top-up fees), higher
education institutions (HEIs) receive 70% more funding from HEFCE with which to teach
lab-based subjects (primarily STEM) 76 , as compared to less resource-intensive subjects. This
was reduced from a 100% uplift in 2003-4. After the lifting of the fees cap, HEFCE will give
£1,500 to HEIs per student 77 for resource-intensive subjects such as science and engineering.
This is the equivalent of a 17% subsidy for HEIS which charge £9,000 per annum, or 20% for
those charging £7,500 per annum. We may therefore see a marked decrease in the financial
incentive for HEIs to offer STEM degrees as compared to other courses.
13. When the new ‘core/margin’ model was announced78 , we raised concerns that it might
adversely affect STEM provision. Universities charging more than £7,500 per annum, but not
able to attract sufficient numbers of uncapped AAB+ students, would see a significant year-
on-year reduction in the number of students they can admit. This will inevitably create
financial pressures on such institutions, and they may look to high-cost STEM subjects as
areas for cuts in order to balance their budgets.
14. However HEFCE recently announced 79 that Strategically Important and Vulnerable
Subjects (SIVS) would be exempt from the reduction in student numbers controls as long as
they maintain numbers of entrants in those departments. This should help prevent any
reduction in STEM provision at those HEIs in the short term, but the trade-off is increased
financial pressures elsewhere for the HEI.
15. For HEIs able to attract mostly AAB+ students, their student number controls are
effectively uncapped, and their undergraduate intake will only be limited by their own
internal capacity. We hope that many will use this freedom to expand capacity on STEM
courses, but are concerned that this may not be the case, as although HEIs will receive
£1,500 more with which to teach STEM, such subjects cost much more to teach. Elite HEIs
may therefore prioritise student number expansion in lower-cost, higher-profit, non-STEM
subjects – potentially to the detriment of other HEIs who are less able to compete for those
highly profitable students, and will come under financial pressures as a result.
76 What are current price group weightings and resource rates?, HEFCE. Accessed 15/12/2011.
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/faq/mainfaq.htm
77 Teaching funding and student number controls, HEFCE. June 2011. (See para 100)
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_20/11_20.pdf
78 Teaching funding and student number controls, HEFCE. June 2011
79 Student number controls for 2012-13, HEFCE. October 2011 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_30/11_30.pdf
69
16. A HEFCE consultation 80 earlier this year revealed that they have been asked by
Government to prioritise Further Education (FE) colleges in the redistribution of the 20,000
places created by the year-on-year contraction in non-AAB student numbers amongst HEIs
which charge more than £7,500. The teaching of science and engineering often requires a
significant injection of capital funding for equipment, and it is difficult to see how FE colleges
will be able to meet national demand for STEM education if provision drops in the HE
sector.
17. In summary, although the exemption of SIVS from the uncapped student number
reductions is welcome and will help prevent an immediate decline in STEM provision
amongst certain HEIs, we remain concerned that there are not enough incentives for HEIs
to increase STEM provision. Current policy is predicated on student choice driving STEM
provision, and while we hope that this will indeed occur, we also argue that the importance
of STEM graduates to the UK’s future is so great that additional safeguards should be put in
place. The simplest and most effective change would be to increase the relative subsidy for
SIVS from HEFCE.
18. The full effects of these changes may not be apparent for a number of years. HEIs with
some AAB students, but not a majority, may take short-term decisions to increase provision
of high-status STEM subjects as a loss-leader in order to be institutionally competitive in a
few years time. This does not necessarily mean that the expanded provision is sustainable,
and may prove out to be even more unsustainable if the market does not behave as hoped.
19. Currently there is no commonly accepted and accurate analysis showing the true costing
of a high-quality STEM higher education. Such an analysis would make policy decisions much
better informed.
Postgraduate STEM education

20. The policy environment around postgraduate taught education is increasingly similar to
undergraduate education. The state has accepted that it has a duty to promote
undergraduate education, either through direct funding or subsidised loans, due to the
national importance of a well-educated workforce and also for reasons of fairness; if higher
education gives social and economic benefits, then it is important that those benefits are
accessible by all.
21. There are a number of sectors reliant on skills obtained through taught postgraduate
qualifications. For instance, this committee established there are concerns over the number
of skilled nuclear engineers required for the UK’s energy needs81 , while the Association of
the British Pharmaceutical Industry found that “the UK has a substantive skills deficit in
biomedical sciences”, particularly in postgraduate-level disciplines 82 .
22. Despite the similarities in social and economic implications, policy itself is markedly
different. While undergraduates receive financial support with both fees and living costs,
stand-alone Masters students receive neither. Applicants must rely on private wealth or
commercial loans in order to meet costs, which restricts access to these important courses.
With undergraduate fees rising to up to £9,000 per year, we expect postgraduate fees to
80 Teaching funding and student number controls, HEFCE. June 2011. (See para 133)
81 Nuclear Research and Development Capabilities – 3rd Report of Session 2010-12, House of Lords Science and Technology
Select Committee. November 2011
82 Skills Needs for Biomedical Research, Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry October 2008
70
rise above that, given they are for higher qualifications. This will exacerbate the access
problem if financial support is not introduced.
23. There is also increasing confusion around the interface between Masters and PhD
programmes. Currently, undergraduates can either pursue a standard three year degree, a
four year integrated Masters programme, or a ‘3+1’ undergraduate degree followed by
postgraduate masters. Each of these initial routes can lead to a PhD – a three year PhD, or a
3.5 year (e.g. EPSRC) PhD, or a four year programme which is now normal in post-doctoral
training centres.
24. There is some concern that higher levels of student debt will deter graduates from
pursuing a postgraduate research career, and the lack of clarity about education and career
routes may make this even more of an issue.
The geographical spread of STEM and equality of access to STEM education

25. It is CaSE’s belief that STEM courses should be available to all those who wish and are
competent to study them. We are concerned that the recent HE reforms may affect the
geographical spread of both higher education institutions offering STEM courses, but also the
geographical spread of students taking STEM students.
26. CaSE is concerned that the increase in fees may deter students from poorer
backgrounds from moving away from home in order to study, in order to reduce living
costs. As a result, their options to study will be limited to those HEIs in their geographical
area. There is already evidence of this happening as it has been shown that certain ethnic
groups, such as Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian students are more likely to live at
home 83 .This is concerning for two reasons. The first is that students are not making
decisions about where to study based on their ability. The second is that student choice will
be limited to the courses that their local HEI offers. For prospective physics students in East
Anglia, if they are not accepted by the University of Cambridge there are no other physics
departments in the region.
27. The Athena SWAN Charter recognises and celebrates good employment practice for
women working in science, engineering and technology (SET) in higher education, awarding
departments with bronze, silver and gold awards. By increasing the visibility of senior women
in these departments, this may have a positive knock on effect for younger staff and students
who are able to identify role models within their departments.
16 December 2011
83Connor, H, Tyers, C, Davis, S and Djan N (2003). Minority Ethnic Students in Higher Education: Interim Report, Institute for
Employment Studies. http://www.ligali.org/pdf/minority_ethnic_students_in_higher_education_rr448.pdf
71
Cancer Research UK – Written evidence
Cancer Research UK – Written evidence
Cancer Research UK welcomes the inquiry into Higher Education in STEM subjects. We
firmly believe that ensuring the strength of UK higher education in STEM subjects is vital for
UK research, providing a foundation for our future productivity and competitive edge in this
area.
STEM higher education recruits and trains the scientific workforce of the future. For cancer
research, this includes all personnel included in the research pathway, including researchers,
clinicians, clinician scientists, and technical staff. To ensure that the UK can remain
competitive and continue to build its scientific potential, education must be comprehensive,
engaging and relevant.
Cancer Research UK is the world’s largest independent funder of cancer research. We

support research into prevention, diagnosis and treatment, from basic research through to
clinical trials, and are committed to ensuring that our research leads to direct patient
benefit. High quality, talented scientists enable this research to take place. We rely on their
skills and expertise, their creativity and ideas. These characteristics are refined and
developed within the school and college science classes to which this inquiry refers.
Because our funding support begins at post-doctoral level, we are not best placed to discuss
all aspects of the inquiry, and so will defer to colleagues more closely attuned to the teaching
environs. However, we anticipate the findings of the inquiry with considerable interest, and
are keen to follow these discussions closely.
Part of our post-doctoral funding is administered through the Doctoral Training Centre
(DTC) model. These training opportunities must ensure that post-doctoral researchers have
the opportunity to learn and hone the skills and expertise that are needed to conduct
world-class research.
We would therefore like to take this opportunity to emphasise the value of science and
research to all aspects of UK society. Biomedical research contributes to the health and
wealth of our nation. Ensuring a strong cohort of highly skilled scientists is vital for this
contribution to continue in the future.
There are a number of issues on the horizon that threaten to drastically change the teaching
landscape. We urge the committee to monitor closely the affect of tuition fees on the
number of students recruited to STEM subjects, on the number of undergraduates
continuing into post-doctoral STEM education, and on the influence of tuition fees on the
stability of research departments as a response to drastic changes to teaching budgets. This
period of potential upheaval could threaten the strength and stability of UK science in the
future; any adverse consequences related to the supply of high quality researchers must be
tackled urgently.
16 December 2011
72
Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of Cambridge, University of York,
University of Bedfordshire and University of Kent – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
Cardiff University, University College London (UCL), University of

Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey,
University of Cambridge, University of York, University of
Bedfordshire and University of Kent – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
Transcript to be found under University of Cambridge
73
Cardiff University – Supplementary written evidence
Within the given timescale and with the need to consult a number of colleagues on the range
of issues presented, we are able to respond to some questions more fully than others.
Colleagues in Schools of Chemistry, Mathematics, Engineering, Computer Science and
Physics and Astronomy have contributed, as have those in the following support
Directorates: Research and Commercial Development, the University Graduate College,
Registry, Careers Service.
Introduction
1. What is the purpose of stand-alone Masters courses and doctoral provision in HEI’s? In
each case, what is the role of Government in supporting these?
The 'purpose' of each depends in part on 'stakeholder' perspective.
Masters courses
• In STEM subjects, our experience is that the majority of stand-alone Masters courses are
designed to offer intensive and focussed training in specific disciplines (e.g. "MSc in
Sustainable Energy and Environment", "MSc in Wireless and Microwave Communication
Engineering", etc.). They provide advanced and industrially applicable skills and
techniques, and prepare students for technology-based professions that benefit
industry/commerce and the wider UK plc. (Indeed, a significant number of courses seek
to train individuals in areas that map onto addressing the grand challenges, and are
delivered by specialists recognised for the quality of their research.)
• Many such courses have good links with industrial or other external partners. (This may
include input into curriculum design – e.g. through industrial advisory boards - in-kind
contributions to delivery – e.g. specialist teaching, equipment, etc. – and
placements/supervision, especially at the project stage).
• From an employer's perspective, the purpose of Masters courses such as these is to equip
students with sought-after, high-level skills, especially those of a technical and numerate
nature.
• Some Masters topics are not necessarily taught at undergraduate level – e.g. Operational
Research, where the primary route to an OR career is an MSc, whilst some other
courses deliver training across traditional boundaries (e.g. physics and biology) and allow
for translation from one discipline to another.
• Many students opt for such Masters courses to become immediately employable in their
chosen fields, though some students do progress to PhD study in a similar subject area.
(Note: in a number of STEM subjects a postgraduate Masters is not a pre-requisite to
PhD study – especially with the growth of 'Integrated Masters' (MEng, MChem, MPhys,
etc.).)
• In STEM subjects it is less common to offer MRes courses, which are specifically designed
for the acquisition of research skills in preparation for PhD. These courses are much
more prevalent in biomedical subjects, sometimes as part of structured four-year
doctoral programmes (and supported by MRC and Wellcome Trust), and in both the
social sciences and humanities (e.g. 1+3 models). There is some development of the MRes
model – but more often aimed at (some) international students.
74
• A specific purpose of HE to Masters level in engineering is to achieve Chartered

Engineering status (SARTOR).
Doctoral provision
• The primary purpose is the training of individuals to pursue research careers, or to
provide trained individuals for business, commerce etc.
• A PhD is, of course, the standard qualification for entry to an academic career, but
doctoral research experience is also a key educational requirement for most individuals
going into a number of industrial R&D careers (including chemical and pharmaceutical).
• We would argue that the government needs to plan and support this people-development
activity to ensure the supply of skills for both industry and the type of high-impact
research that will address the grand challenges.
• PhD researchers are a key resource in many university-based (blue skies or industry-
supported) research projects. They are very often preferable to more experienced
research assistants because they bring enthusiasm, commitment and fresh ideas at a level
that is not always sustained later.
• They can also offer an affordable way for industry to engage with research through
collaborative projects, part-sponsorship, co-supervision, etc.
• Therefore, doctoral provision is a synergistic activity - both research and training. We
hope that government funding agencies can recognise and foster this synergy; at present
the Research Councils can be explicit in dividing the two.
determined?
A major barrier to both Masters and doctoral provision is funding. UKBA restrictions have
also had an impact.
On 'the balance between Masters provision and doctoral provision', the preference at Cardiff
tends to be for the delivery of doctoral provision since PhD training has more obvious links
with research priorities and direct collaboration with external partners. Institutional
investment (central and departmental) reflects this preference, but the balance in actual
student numbers achieves itself on the basis of market forces and the expertise and capacity
of academic staff.
On the balance between research funding and funding for postgraduate researchers, an
algorithm would seem to be an appropriate way of maintaining a minimal balance which
institutions can augment from other sources (including internal investments) according to
their local strategies and resources.
2. In undergraduate provision there is an attempt to collect data on demand,

employability and destination data. At post graduate level there is a dearth of data on
these issues? What should be done to remedy this situation?
75
There are, in fact, data on destinations of both postgraduate taught (PGT) and postgraduate
research graduates (PGR), collected via DLHE (and there is no distinction between level
when it comes to the targets for collection: 80% for all UK full-time students, for example).
Vitae has analysed the PGR data and produced several reports on the matter (see for
example "What do PhDs do?" 84 . This analysis does not seem to have been done for PGT
returns, perhaps because of lack of utility of such analysis to the sector.
Demand data (i.e. demand for courses by applicants?) may be difficult to collect on a UK
level, as applicant information is collected only by the individual HEIs and has been
considered as commercially sensitive information. More recently, sharing of such
information has been considered by some to be in breach of anti-monopoly legislation.
Demand data (i.e. demand for higher degree graduates by employers) is not systematic– but
we are aware of the value placed by employers on high level technical and numerical skills
(as demonstrate by the willingness of a significant number of large companies – in the finance
and industrial sectors - to participate in PGR-only careers events.)
Until now, DHLE has focussed on UK and EU. Cardiff has also tried to collect data in
respect of international graduates.
Delivery models
3. What is your assessment of the EPSRC’s decisions to concentrate funding on Doctoral
Training Centres and to remove funding from project studentships?
studentships?
DTCs (including the EPSRC model) are a good idea in principle – and integration into a DTC
can deliver some real advantages for students, particularly so when the DTC cuts across
disciplines and requires students to educate themselves widely (e.g. complexity science).
But the EPSRC model of DTCs has significant disadvantages:
(a) they require a cohort size of 10-15 entries a year to justify the administrative costs, yet
many of them are focused at a level where this number of students is inappropriately large;
(b) lack of agility and responsiveness to emerging areas: some strategically important areas of
research are locked out because they didn't happen to have a winning bid in the infrequent
competitive rounds of calls for proposals;
(c) the structure of a DTC - specialised, largely bespoke, training - can be rather artificial,
and is much more expensive than the mechanisms already in place for student development
in all university departments;
(d) there is a danger that (EPSRC) DTC funding does not support the best students: more
mediocre students may be funded just because they are attracted to research in certain
subject areas (and/or geographic locations), at the expense of others who are more talented
(and these may be attracted abroad and lost to the UK);
84 http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/14769/What-Do-PhDs-Do.html
76
(e) for a subject like Mathematics, which does not require expensive equipment and there is
less argument for the pooling of resources, there is considered to be little rationale for the
creation of strong centres at the expense of the remaining institutions.
More generally, excessive concentration of PhD studentships via the DTC model means that
truly excellent areas of research, often with critical mass, may find it difficult to secure
doctoral students - even where the researchers concerned offer something which is truly
unique and/or complementary to a DTC investment. A university which cannot offer
general, research-council funded postdoctoral studentships would have to rely fully on
industry grants (which are not available to all STEM subjects) and the few self-funding
students it could attract - and these are more likely to turn to the visibly highly research-
active centres. The DTC model can therefore detract from the research atmosphere in
many good, small departments, thereby making it more difficult for those departments to
retain research-active staff. This in turn has a negative effect on education at all levels,
including undergraduate level.
The removal of project studentships is considered to be somewhat short-sighted and

potentially disastrous. As outlined above, PhD students are very often considered to be the
best resource, and the training/research synergy should be celebrated and maximised, not
squashed. Many individual academics view the loss of project students as hugely detrimental,
including in relation to their personal research opportunities –especially following the demise
of EPSRC CASE for new academics, and the (understandable) steers placed on limited DTG
studentships.
There is also significant concern should investment in doctoral training grants be reduced
further in favour of DTCs. There is a shared view amongst our STEM Schools that support
for non-DTC, single-project studentships is crucial and must not be allowed to wither or be
displaced. Studentships linked to competitively funded projects ensure that students are
engaged in excellent science, while doctoral training grants give the crucial flexibility to
match an outstanding student with a timely project that has not had to wait for funding to be
awarded.
Universities that are unable to offer PhD studentships would suffer enormous negative
impacts on their research environment - in terms of renewal, vibrancy and sustainability. The
Research Councils should recognise their roles in maintaining these environments (and we
suggest that these obligations go beyond studentships and apply right across the Dual
Support grants system.)
Further, there would be a loss of staff, a loss of high-quality research-led teaching, and
ultimately of fee income. UG and Masters students need to be educated, to a large degree,
by people who have a thriving and active interest in the subject being taught, otherwise they
will be exposed to a stale and stagnant curriculum in combination with stale and stagnant
teaching. This requires a strong input from staff who are still involved in creating the subject
matter.
• What do you consider to be a reasonable balance of doctoral provision models to ensure quality
of provision, geographical spread and sufficient breadth of discipline coverage?
A flexible approach is needed based on expertise and the ability to deliver training in
conjunction with industry. The DTA model has many merits, not least because there is a
77
direct relationship with research priority and investment: the EPSRC could be more explicit
in its expectations around use of DTGs, with appropriate reporting requirements, to ensure
that PhD funding was being directed in accordance with the key themes of its delivery plan
(cf. MRC DTG Triennial Reporting). The DTA model is hampered, however, by its annual
award approach meaning it is difficult to plan over a number of intakes.

4. How does Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework feature in the formation of
doctoral graduates at your HEI?
research?
Cardiff's 'University Graduate College' uses the Researcher Development Framework (RDF)
as the structure for reviewing and developing content for our formal training activities, and
also uses it as the organising framework for presenting our 370 plus formal training sessions.
Researchers are introduced to the RDF at the University Induction sessions, titled ‘Starting
Out’, and are encouraged to use the on-line CPD Tool to assess the individual needs and
plan their individual training programme with their supervisor(s). We are also piloting a
'points-based' system to encourage researchers to engage in development activity across all
four domains of the RDF.
The RDF is designed to encourage researchers to develop the knowledge, behaviours and
attributes of successful researchers; these skills are transferable to occupations and
employers outside academia. Importantly, the RDF provides researchers with the language
to articulate their experience to employers. A member of Cardiff Unviersity staff was a
member of the RDF Development Group, who reports that this issue was discussed at
length. Employers (outside of academia) contributed to the validation of the content of the
RDF; they recognised the language and value of the RDF. Several noted a similarity between
the RDF and their organisations' professional development frameworks.
In order to assist researchers with understanding the transferability of their skills, at Cardiff,
we organise annual events for careers outside of academia. Research graduates who are
employed outside of higher education (and normally, outside pure research roles) describe
how the skills they developed during their research degree are used in their current jobs.
We also point our researchers to the Vitae web site, where they can read 'Career profiles'
of researchers and watch video interviews with doctoral graduates who are employed
outside of HE – both of these sources highlight how the skills developed via research (and
which are part of the RDF) are utilised outside of research.
Quality
5. Is quality of research output the best proxy of quality research supervision and training
for post graduate students? What other criteria should be used?
78
It is clear that the quality of HE in STEM disciplines is underpinned by strong university

departments, which are often those with a good research record. It is important in STEM
subjects that PhD students work on projects that are internationally recognised as being
excellent. Success on such a project generally assures education of a high quality.
Appropriate mechanisms for mentoring and formal monitoring are crucial in supporting
successful and timely submissions but there is a danger in putting too much emphasis on
quality assurance processes as indicators, in themselves, of a high quality and relevant
experience.
However, research output of that department is not the only proxy of quality research
supervision and doctoral training quality.
The new draft chapter (B11) on research degrees in UK Code for Higher Education is
relevant for both 'Quality' questions.
QAA Indicators set the standards and the parameters of quality. QAA explore the PGR
experience as part of Institutional Review.
Key is the research environment. Research students should only be "accepted into an
environment that provides support for doing and learning about research and where
excellent research is occurring." (Indicator 4) Research output part of the story. An
appropriate environment in which to do and learn about research includes (page 8 of draft
B11):
• opportunities and encouragement to exchange and develop ideas with people at
appropriate levels who are also engaged in doing and learning about research and
pursuing established research programmes
• ready access to academic colleagues and others able to give advice and support
• adequate learning and research tools including access to IT equipment, library and
electronic publications
• opportunities for students to develop peer support networks where issues or
problems can be discussed informally (this could include access to social space
provided for the purpose)
• supervision (see also the section on Supervision – page 13+/ page 15-16 for
responsibilities of the supervisor) that encourages the development and successful
pursuance of a programme of research
• guidance on the ethical pursuit of research and the avoidance of research misconduct,
including plagiarism and breaches of intellectual property rights
• support in developing research-related skills that contribute to the student's ability to
complete the programme successfully (including, where appropriate, understanding
issues around funding and its commercial exploitation)
• access to a range of development opportunities that contribute to the student's ability
to complete the programme successfully (including, where appropriate, understanding
related to the funding of research and its commercial exploitation)
• access to a range of development opportunities that contribute to the student's ability
to develop personal and, where pertinent, employment-related skills as identified in
the Researcher Development Statement.
• availability of relevant advice on career development.
An environment supportive of research achievement includes:
79
• a community of academic staff and postgraduates conducting excellent research in

cognate areas
• supervisors with the necessary skills and knowledge to support students in working
towards the successful completion of their research programmes
• access to the facilities and equipment necessary to enable students, in all modes of
study, to complete their research programmes successfully.
In addition, it is important for providers to provide:
• access to welfare and support facilities that recognise the distinctive nature of
research degree study
• the opportunity for students to raise complaints or appeal
• mechanisms for addressing students' feedback both as individuals and collectively
6. What mechanisms do you have for involving industry in setting the standards and
outputs for post graduate STEM provision?
A crucial preliminary point also relevant to supplementary question: it is important to

remember that universities are autonomous, self-governing institutions. It is for them to
make their own decisions about courses/ admissions policy/ balance of UG, PGT and PGR,
the portfolio, funding strategies, and to make the necessary decisions to ensure they are
responsive to student choice/ demand.
Mechanisms for involving industry include Advisory Boards and membership of external
bodies, and collaborations (inc. student projects/ curriculum design – specific industry needs,
content, skills etc.
The Russell Group submission to Wilson Review is also relevant:

http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/uploads/Tim-Wilson-14-November-FINAL.pdf
Funding
7. There has been a continual erosion of public funding for stand-alone Masters and it has
now disappeared in many areas. What impact will this lack of funding have on the
provision of stand-alone Masters courses?
Cardiff has enjoyed only limited public funding for stand-alone Masters. Students largely fund
themselves; a few (especially part-time) have industrial sponsorship: this will continue. The
increase in PGT fees (following the rise at UG level) will be detrimental – and the number of
courses will decrease in response to market demand.
80
8. What impact does HEFCE’s SIVS funding have on post graduate provision? Is it
sufficient?
There are no SIVs in Wales
Overseas students
9. We have heard that in certain Masters courses over 70% of the students are from
overseas. What are the dangers of such a large proportion of overseas students and
how can we mitigate against them?
Part of the attraction for international students is studying with UK students (and at the PhD
level, the presence of the best students from all over the world is really important for
sustaining an excellent environment). Whilst the high percentage of overseas students on
stand-alone Masters courses need not be a bad thing, it is important by some to ensure that
no particular country dominates any course. The paucity of funding for UK students is
meaning falling home demand: interest from international students has therefore allowed
some courses to continue and remain available for small numbers of UK students. At the
PhD level the shift to international students has meant that we are training people for the
benefit of the economies of developing nations such as Iraq and Brazil.
about 50%?
If demand is there and there is no mechanism for UK funding then it will continue
We have no evidence of this
10. We have heard in evidence that changes in the immigration system are having a
significant impact on the number of overseas students in post graduate education and
stand-alone Masters in particular. What is your experience of this issue?
We have no specific evidence to offer here. We are aware of this, especially in relation to
India – and the impact we have felt at Cardiff has been largely in relation to business
subjects.
9 May 2012
81
Careers Research & Advisory Centre (CRAC) – Written evidence
The attached information is provided by CRAC (the Careers Research & Advisory Centre
Ltd). It has been prepared by Dr Robin Mellors-Bourne, CRAC’s Director for Research &
Intelligence, and was submitted on 14 December 2011.
About CRAC
The Careers Research & Advisory Centre (CRAC) was established in 1964 and provides
expertise and innovation for all those who support career development and career-related
learning of people at all ages. In addition to its long heritage of development work (devising
career-related activities and training interventions, many pioneering in their time), CRAC
now undertakes career- and education-related research on a contract basis for Government
departments and agencies, public sector bodies, professional associations and employers.
One of CRAC’s major activities is to lead and manage Vitae, the national programme for
career and transferable skills development for researchers in UK higher education, funded by
Research Councils UK. Vitae will be making its own response to selected questions within
this call for evidence.
Scope
The scope section of the call for evidence reports the existence of an apparent paradox in
relation to the supply of and demand for STEM graduates; namely that there are industry
reports of shortages of STEM graduates at the same time that a significant proportion of
STEM graduates end up working in jobs that do not require a STEM degree. This apparent
paradox was the premise for research led by myself by CRAC (supported by NICEC and
CIHE 85 ), commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, which
culminated in the BIS report STEM graduates in non-STEM jobs 86 . Here we are pleased to
respond to certain questions within your call for evidence using the evidence we developed
for that project.
1. General questions

We went to some length in our report to review definitions of STEM both as a subject and
in relation to employment. There appears to be consensus on the letters within the
acronym: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
At Higher Education (HE) level, STEM is defined as a range of subjects of qualification, most
commonly using JACS 87 subject codes (as used by UCAS). However, the range of subjects
included has differed in different studies. Some have defined it “narrowly” –restricting it to a
range of more ‘traditional’ or ‘core’ science subjects – while others have included a wider
range of (often more applied) subjects. Medicine is almost always considered to be outside
STEM (although was notably included in a BIS study on the demand for STEM skills 88 ). An
area for contention is the ‘Subjects allied to Medicine’ group, most subjects within which are
85 National Institute for Careers Education & Counselling, Council for Industry & Higher Education
86 STEM graduates in non-STEM jobs, BIS research paper number 30, Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, 2011
87 Joint Academic Coding System (Higher Education Statistics Agency)
88 Demand for STEM skills, Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills (subsequently BIS), 2009
82
usually included within STEM, with the exception of Nursing (which is very significant in
terms of student numbers). Subjects such as Nursing, but also Psychology, Sports Science
and Archaeological Science, for example, fall within JACS Subject Groups most commonly
considered to be within STEM, but many would consider these might not be “STEM
subjects”. In the absence of a fixed definition, it is important in any project or analysis to
define clearly which subjects are included and which excluded.
In our study we were asked by BIS specifically to take a ‘wide’ interpretation, but
deliberately excluded Medicine and Dentistry, Veterinary Science and Nursing, for reasons
relating to the specific purpose of the research.
At school level, the position is simpler as a narrower range of subjects is taught, largely
within the ‘S’ and the ‘M’ of STEM. However, there remain some maths teachers who prefer
not to be regarded within STEM.
The position in relation to STEM employment is less clear cut; a STEM job is not a well-
established concept. Some previous studies have considered STEM employment as a series
of industrial sectors, defined using Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. Different
studies have used narrower or wider ranges of industrial sectors as their definition of STEM,
and there is certainly no consensus.
However, people in the labour market have specific jobs (occupations) and these may also
be used as a basis to define STEM employment, using the Standard Occupational
Classification (SOC) codes. Again, different collections of codes have been used to define
STEM occupations in different studies.
In our study we considered STEM jobs in terms of both employment sector (SIC) and
occupational role/function (SOC). We found this to be necessary in order to ascertain
whether any particular job was a STEM job, or not. This approach recognises that within any
employment sector, a range of job roles exist which have different levels of requirement for
STEM qualifications (or the skills developed studying them). For example, is a human
resources manager in a pharmaceutical company a STEM job, because the company is in a
STEM sector? Equally, a highways engineer or occupational psychologist working for a
county council are likely to be thought of as STEM jobs, but are within what would normally
be considered a “non-STEM” employment sector.
We therefore used a “matrix” approach to consider the degree to which a particular job
type was a STEM job or not (Figure 1), finding this insightful and necessary. We classified
employment sectors depending on the employers’ needs for STEM skills (expressed through
their recruitment strategies):
• ‘STEM Specialist’ employers which recruit graduates for roles where a degree in a
certain STEM subject/group is required for entry;
• ‘STEM Generalist’ employers which recruit STEM graduates or consider them to be
potentially suitable candidates within roles which are open to holders of a range of
degree subjects. Although a STEM subject is not a requirement for entry, the skills or
knowledge gained from study of STEM courses is seen as advantageous;
• ‘Non-STEM’ employers which make no distinction by degree subject at recruitment
(at least in relation to STEM subjects) and have no specific demand for STEM
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graduates (but may still recruit them).
We classified occupational roles (jobs) depending on the extent to which the skills required
for the job were dependent on STEM qualifications:
• STEM Core jobs where STEM degree disciplines are closely related to the type of
work; for example, scientific, research and development professionals, engineering
and IT professionals, and associate scientific and technical professionals;
• STEM-related jobs where STEM degree disciplines can be more loosely related to the
type of work; for example, certain business professionals (such as accountants, also
some business/marketing/legal roles within STEM Specialist businesses), certain
associate health professionals, but also science administrators and policy advisers, as
well as some education professionals (secondary science teachers);
• All other jobs were classified as ‘Unrelated’ (to STEM) jobs.
Figure 1. Approach to classification of jobs, with selected examples
Occupational Role
HR manager for Social care manager Retail manager
engineering firm IP/patent lawyer Policy adviser
Sport/fitness Management Commercial lawyer
Unrelated
equipment sales consultant Estate agent
Surveyor
Sound engineer
Pharma marketing Accountant Scientific publisher
manager Investment banker Museum explainer
STEM-related Finance manager for Secondary science Science policy adviser
telecom company teacher Food safety inspector
Logistics firm analyst Product designer
Pharma lab chemist IT manager for bank IT manager in local
Software engineer Actuary authority (LA)
Electronics designer LA highway engineer
STEM core
Environmental LA fitness instructor
consultant Royal Navy engineer
Medical physicist
STEM Specialist STEM Generalist Non-STEM
Employment Sector
This approach does not define a simple range of jobs that are “STEM jobs” (and others that
are “non-STEM jobs”). However, we found it necessary as a framework to understand the
nature of employment of STEM graduates. Their jobs ranged from the most STEM-rich at
the bottom left, to non-STEM at the top right in Figure 1. We feel it has considerable
potential as a tool for future definitions.
Understanding demand for STEM graduates

Due to the complexity of the definitions above, consideration of demand and supply is not
straightforward. What emerges is that a range of employers in different sectors have
different needs for STEM skills, or at least needs for workplace-relevant skills that are
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developed to varying extents during study of STEM qualifications. It is relatively simple to

understand the demand of STEM Specialist employers recruiting STEM Core jobs, such as an
engineering company seeking engineers, as there is a relatively simple “supply chain” (i.e.
they require engineering or perhaps physics graduates). This should lead directly to
strategies to attract relevant graduates and, in turn, lead to an increase in supply of such
graduates, but it must be borne in mind that not all engineering students or graduates wish
to enter engineering as an occupation (so some ‘over-supply’ of graduates will always be
necessary).
However, the picture is more complex where employers have more subtle demands for
STEM skills. What was clear in our project was that a very wide range of employers
appreciate the value that STEM graduates bring as employees, to a wide range of roles. Their
value is a combination of specific skills taught/learnt during STEM study and more general
ways of thinking/working which tend to be developed during such study. As a result STEM
graduates are often welcomed into roles which would be classified as “Unrelated” (to
STEM), even if they are not actually targeted. As a result, attempts to match supply and
demand become complicated and dependent on employment types.
2. Graduate supply
Are there enough STEM graduates to meet the needs of industry?

A potentially significant finding of our research was to bring into question the existence of a
simple “pipeline” of STEM graduates into STEM jobs. Quite apart from the definition issues
described above, it was very clear that many STEM graduates had no intention to enter
STEM jobs/careers when they selected a STEM subject at school or even university. Based
on our student surveys, the majority chose STEM subjects at university for reasons of
interest or enjoyment or because they were good at them, while thoughts about potential
value in future careers were secondary. Only a few (perhaps 1 in 6) had a firm career
intention at entry to university and chose their course for that reason. Interestingly this was
the minority even in a ‘vocationally-oriented’ subject like engineering.
During HE, many do come to the view that they would like to pursue a career which relates
to their degree subject – although not all – but this does not necessarily mean a STEM Core
job. It is well documented that engineering and physics graduates are targeted by employers
in the finance or other business sectors, for example, seeking graduates with strong
numeracy and logic, and many enter such sectors rather than engineering or manufacturing.
This means it is too simplistic to consider a linear pipeline of supply; i.e. many enter the
pipeline (start a STEM degree course) with no intention of emerging at the other end of the
pipeline into a STEM job. As individuals, they are subject to wide and variable influences and
perceptions, and make very personal and individual choices which are not necessarily
predictable or rational in an economic sense. Understanding that decision-making process
was a key part of our research.
Therefore comparisons of the supply of STEM graduates and the needs of industry are likely
to be more meaningful at a more granular level than across all STEM subjects and
employment. This has several implications:
• Shortages of STEM-qualified labour will be more meaningful if stated with reference to
particular employment sectors (rather than across STEM as a whole);
85
• It could also be that those shortages are actually of sufficiently “high quality” STEM
graduates in relation to particular sectors, rather than shortages per se;
• An increase in the supply of STEM graduates is likely to be a good thing for a wide range
of employers, including those reporting STEM skills shortages, right across the economy.
However, given the subtlety of the value of STEM graduates to many employers, not all
will be able to express specific statements of demand or sufficiency (or not) of supply.
The quality of STEM graduates and the skills they have

There is much anecdote in relation to the “quality” of STEM graduates and the skills they
possess, or lack. A commonly held image is that many STEM graduates are technically
capable but lacking in the broader behavioural skills that make them employable in the
commercial world (i.e. “employability skills”). In fact most broad employer surveys tend to
deliver broadly positive pictures of satisfaction with graduate skills; it is investigations within
more specific sectors or industries that tend to reveal less positive views. However, these
less positive “narrow” views are often reported as applying more widely, which may be
incorrect. We imagine that other respondents representing particular sectors are likely to
submit to this enquiry their views and evidence of skills shortages or deficiencies in their
particular sectors or niches, but our contention would be that such views relate to
particular sectors rather than to STEM graduates as a whole.
Our research project included interviews with a range of employers, which confirmed that a
wide range of views are held in relation to supply of STEM graduates, their quality and
especially skills. Although our work was qualitative and not intended to be representative,
we found as many employers were concerned about perceived deficiencies in aspects of the
technical capability of the graduates as had concerns about deficiencies in their “soft” skills.
However, almost all felt that some STEM graduates lacked some of the broader behavioural
skills, and a lack of commercial or business awareness was reported by most we consulted.
We conclude, as before, that the skills picture is complex and, for meaningful understanding,
needs to be considered at a more detailed level than “STEM” as an aggregate.
Our research with recent graduates who had entered the workplace suggested that most
felt positive, were learning and developing as employees, and were satisfied with their early
career progress. This was irrespective of whether they were working in STEM jobs or not
(although it is likely that the graduates we found to interview will have been those with
more stable employment, mostly with larger employers). Beyond this we are not able to
comment on the extent to which they had the right skills for their next career phase.
What was very clear was that many STEM graduates working for non-STEM employers felt
highly valued by their employers, and in some cases felt due to their degree background
were making greater progress than (their perceptions of) colleagues with other degrees.
Industry
Incentives to attract STEM graduates

The paradox highlighted (STEM employers unable to hire enough good STEM graduates,
while many choose to work in non-STEM employment) demonstrates that the employment
market is complex and graduate decisions are individual. Although there is some evidence
for a financial premium available in STEM employment (in general), this is not uniform. Some
of the jobs that STEM graduates can enter in STEM-related sectors are better paid than
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many in STEM Specialist sectors. What is perhaps more important is that the perception
amongst most STEM students is that many non-STEM jobs are better paid than STEM jobs.
Our research with STEM students sought their reasons to pursue careers relating to their
degree subject or other career directions. This showed that perceived interest in the job
was uppermost in their mind (i.e. aspirational thinking), while career-related issues such as
salary, career prospects or availability of jobs (more pragmatic thinking) was dominant for
very few and secondary for most. (However, it may be seen as ironic that many STEM
graduates claim to seek interesting work, but actually enter accountancy, not widely
renowned as interesting but well-remunerated!).
Our conclusion is that STEM employers need to offer competitive salaries (in comparison
with other employers competing for STEM graduates) and reasonable career prospects but,
especially, should focus their efforts on promoting the interesting work that they can offer
STEM graduates, and positive perceptions of the working environment and value to society.
Steps to ensure that demand matches supply

Our work did not focus on how industry and universities work together, although this is
increasingly evident as employability strategies are pursued by the universities. However,
research work by CRAC does highlight some difficulty in obtaining knowledge about
graduate supply and demand, which is one aspect of labour market information (LMI).
Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) have made major efforts to collect data and predict future
labour/skills needs in their sectors. However, our experience with careers professionals
suggests that they do not highlight the very broad and simple trends that careers advisers
(let alone students or graduates) need to support career decisions. A useful trend would be
to understand whether there is a rising or falling need for power engineers, for example, and
how that matches with the supply of graduates in that subject. Our experience is that it is
very hard to obtain a good estimate of the annual requirement for, say, graduate electrical
engineers, as opposed to, say, aerospace engineers, in order to assess in which field career
prospects are better. With some exceptions, the extensive and highly detailed data available
in many SSC reports do not offer this type of ‘intelligence’, upon which graduates might base
rational HE course decisions. The growth in number of students studying forensic science, a
field in which there are very few job opportunities, may be a good example of the lack of
such labour market intelligence.
14 December 2011
87
City and Islington College – Written evidence

1. There has been much work on defining STEM subjects and STEM careers through the
FE STEM data project run by the Royal Academy of Engineering which has helped
clarify our thinking on this topic and drawn our attention to some of the difficulties
and consequences of trying to define STEM.
2. There is general agreement about what constitutes Science and Engineering and these
subjects provide progression to a broad range of STEM degrees. Technology is a
more difficult to define aspect of STEM but clearly includes computing for us as
progression into computing careers can be via either the study of computing or
other STEM subjects such as mathematics, the mathematical sciences or engineering.
The overlapping progression paths to STEM degrees from a range college subjects
indicates that these subjects are related and prepare students for STEM degrees; this
helps us to define these subjects as STEM subjects.
influence supply?
3. An improved understanding of the demand for particular STEM graduates would help
us to plan provision. There are some issues here about predicting demand as it takes
some time to implement new provision and there is a significant lag between students
entering college and leaving university as STEM graduates.
4. To produce the required number of STEM graduates requires both the provision of
the courses and the demand from students for places on the courses. The demand
for courses is likely to drive increased provision, given a sensible funding regime, so
we need to further increase demand from young people for STEM courses. It is
essential that accurate information about STEM careers is effectively communicated
to young people, their parents and their teachers. There is much evidence that young
people’s ideas about careers become relatively fixed quite early so interventions need
to start no later than lower secondary school. Medicine is a visible career, has a high
status with young people and their parents and the financial rewards of being a
doctor are well known; colleges are therefore inundated with young people wanting
to study sciences as a preparation for medicine and medical schools are grossly
oversubscribed. The ingredients of visibility, status and known financial reward, could
be applied to improving the demand for STEM study and therefore the supply of
graduates for other STEM careers.
5. City and Islington College has undertaken work with local secondary schools to
improve the understanding of the range of STEM careers by pupils and teachers.
Assessment of this work suggests that this intervention has increased the range of
STEM careers being considered by young people and the number of young people
considering STEM careers. This is a long term intervention starting with year 9 pupils
and their teachers so it is still too early to see if this increases the number of STEM
undergraduates from pupils at these schools but we have seen increased numbers of
pupils studying triple science and so have some confidence that this is likely to have
some positive effect on progression to STEM subjects.
88
Are schools and colleges supplying the right number of STEM students and do
they have the right skills to study STEM degrees?
6. We should be producing more students to study STEM first degrees. HE institutions
and other groups apply considerable effort to recruiting students to STEM first
degrees indicating that supply is insufficient. The wage premium for studying STEM
subjects, identified in numerous surveys, indicates that the there is a shortage of
STEM graduates and the market is responding accordingly.
7. The 16-18 STEM courses are largely well understood by HE institutions and allow
appropriate progression. The entry qualifications for HE STEM degrees are well
defined and stable suggesting that there is a reasonable fit between 16-18 study and
HE study. There are some complaints from some HE STEM departments about
subject knowledge and preparedness of 18 year olds, particularly in mathematics; this
complaint is often echoed by 16-18 teachers about preparedness of 16 year olds for
STEM study. However, whilst improvements are always possible, students continue
to succeed in both 16-18 and HE institutions. On the other hand STEM subjects are
already seen as being difficult and any changes need not to exacerbate this situation
and reduce the supply of students.
8. There have been numerous initiatives in schools colleges and universities over the
years. The best of these have a long life as it takes time for practice to become and
embedded and benefits are seen many years later. Researchers in residence, Aim
Higher and STEM ambassadors have all been useful in providing students with direct
contact with people further along potential career paths and linking them to their
present study. Other initiatives to improve knowledge of STEM careers through the
training and guidance materials produced by the STEM education group at Sheffield
Hallam University and the Futuremorph website and associated national advertising
have certainly raised the profile of STEM careers with pupils. City and Islington
College sends increasing numbers of students to STEM first degrees each year.
Involvement in these initiatives has helped us illustrate to students a range of
opportunities in STEM that they may not otherwise have considered and has aided us
in our work with secondary schools.
9. The initiatives to improve and update the skills and knowledge of STEM teachers
through subject specific continued professional development (from Science Learning
Centres, LSIS STEM, NCETM) initiatives to have been key very helpful in improving
the quality of STEM teaching. We have made substantial use of the CPD for teachers
and technicians at the Science Learning Centres. The quantity of training, involving
large numbers of staff on different subject specific courses, was made possible by
awards to offset the cost of each course and encourage the application and
dissemination of ideas (Enthuse and IMPACT awards). These courses have had a
measurable, positive impact on teaching, helped keep teachers up to date and
changed our practice. LSIS STEM has provided both subject specific training and
networking opportunities to allow teachers to share good practise with colleagues
teaching the same subject in other colleges.
10. A shortage of suitable qualified and confident teachers in the physical sciences is a
barrier to increasing numbers of students in these areas. Pupils need a good
experience of the study of physics and chemistry and a solid grounding in the subjects
to encourage them to continue the study of the physical sciences and related
89
disciplines. The various initiatives to increase the supply of suitably qualified teachers
of physics and chemistry are very welcome in particular the Science Additional
Specialists Programme and the Stimulating Physics Network. We have not made use
of these initiatives as a college but consider them essential in addressing the supply of
teachers and ensuring that school pupils have a good experience of studying the
physical sciences.
11. News of cuts in research funding and loss of jobs by scientists was damaging to the
perception of science as a sensible and safe career path. Much time, effort and money
spent on encouraging the uptake of STEM subjects over many years can be undone
by such stories and the perceptions they induce.
12. There have been increased numbers of students on courses in science at 16+
nationally but it is difficult to ascribe this rise to any particular initiative. As a college
we have experienced significant growth in numbers of students in STEM subjects and
an even larger growth in numbers of applicants for these subjects; this growth is
likely to be a result of both national and local factors.
13. It is not clear that the EBac will have any effect on science or mathematics. However,
the encouragement for schools to concentrate on the EBac subjects may be
detrimental to subjects not included in the EBac such as design technology. There is
some concern that a reduction of pupil numbers in design technology may be
detrimental to engineering recruitment.
13 December 2011
90
Cogent – Written evidence
Cogent is the Sector Skills Council for the chemicals, pharmaceuticals and life sciences,
nuclear, oil and gas, petroleum and polymer industries. These industries rely heavily on
universities across the UK for the delivery of STEM graduates and post-graduates, for
training of their employees at all levels, and for research and development opportunities that
drive forward innovation and business growth.
Our industries readily support universities, particularly in the Science and Engineering areas,
and engage through a large number of national and local initiatives to ensure universities are
able to deliver the correct education and skills, and the employability skills that meet their
needs.
Cogent, with the support of employers, have developed and delivered initiatives and
programmes tackling key areas of employer engagement with Higher Education partners.
These activities, areas being taken forward, and potential case study materials, are detailed in
the attached documentation.
Of particular importance to Cogent and employers, is the higher education agenda that
involves STEM subjects, employer engagement, and access to work based
learning models. Employers are keen to engage further on the content and delivery
mechanisms, and on the debate surrounding quality and employability, whilst providing
support to initiatives that increase industry awareness and the attraction of graduates into
strategic employment sectors.
Over recent years, we have developed sector based solutions with higher education
institutions and employers. These include:
• Nuclear Island, initially a National HE STEM funded initiative to deliver skills for nuclear
new build in the next generation of STEM graduates (www.cogent-
ssc.com/Higher_level_skills/ni_index.php); This is now also being taken forward through
UKCES “Employer Investment Funding” from April 2012;
• Working Higher, a HEFCE funded framework for Foundation Degrees for the science
based industries (www.workinghigher.org);
• Information portal for Placements (all types) (www.cogent-
ssc.com/Higher_level_skills/placement_index.php);
In partnership with others, we have also aided the development of programmes aimed at the
postgraduate market. These include:
• Engineering Council “Gateways to the Professions” programme:

www.engineeringgateways.co.uk/
• Applied Bioscience and Business Management Masters Programme funded through the
North West Higher Level Skills Partnership: www.cetad.lancs.ac.uk/courses/view/54-
postgraduate-certificate-in-applied-bioscience-and-business-management.html
• Certificate of Nuclear Professionalism funded through the North West Higher Level
Skills Partnership: www.nuclear.nsacademy.co.uk/skills-academy-products-and-
services/certificate-nuclear-professionalism-coming-soon
91
Through this experience, we have engaged employers and education providers in higher and
further education sectors, and are now delivering programmes.
In recent months, Cogent has taken a lead in the life sciences sector, and has established the
Life sciences Skills Strategy Board (LSSB) and the Life sciences Advisory Committee (LAC),
to facilitate communication between industry and academia. Through these routes, Cogent
has successfully been awarded UKCES “Growth and Innovation” and “Employer Investment”
Funding for programmes aimed towards this key UK sector. Key elements of these
programmes include:
o Career and Training Pathways
o Higher Level Apprenticeships that involve vocational routes to HE
o Employer-led kite-marking of degree programmes
These project strands involve extensive consultation with colleagues from LSSB, LAC and
other fora. These will involve the development of professionally recognized career pathways
for technical staff, while the latter will help ensure that graduates are equipped with the skills
required by our industries. More information can be found at: www.cogent-
ssc.com/industry/life_sciences/index.php
It is hoped that these initiatives will aid and enhance professional recognition of current and
future employees whilst linking to National Apprenticeship Service frameworks and Key
Information Sets, providing a fit to Skills and Higher Education strategies.
Cogent would welcome the opportunity to support and work with this sub-committee to
aid developments that relate to industry engagement within higher education, and as such we
have also welcomed discussions with Professor Sir Tim Wilson on these areas.
13 December 2011
92
Council – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245)
Cogent, Society of Biology, Institution of Chemical Engineers

(IChemE), and Engineering Council – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245)
Evidence Session No. 8. Heard in Public. Questions 216 - 245
TUESDAY 6 MARCH 2012

Members present
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (Chairman)

Lord Broers
Lord Cunningham of Felling
Baroness Hilton of Eggardon
Lord Krebs
Lord Lucas
Baroness Perry of Southwark
Lord Rees of Ludlow
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Dr Caroline Sudworth, Higher Education Manager, Cogent; Dr Mark Downs, Chief
Executive, the Society of Biology; and Dr Rob Best, Chartered Chemical Engineer,
Institution of Chemical Engineers and the Engineering Council.
Q216 The Chairman: We welcome our second panel for this afternoon in this inquiry
into the teaching of STEM in universities. Welcome to our second panel. Just for the record,
may I ask each of you to introduce yourselves? You may make a brief statement if you wish
to do so, and then I will get on with the questions, perhaps starting with you.
Dr Downs: Thank you very much, Lord Chairman. My name is Mark Downs. I am the Chief
Executive of the Society of Biology. We are a charity and a professional body representing
the breadth of biology from professionals through to amateurs in industry, academia and
students and so on. We have over 11,000 individual members and we also represent 93
member organisations, of which about 60 are other learned societies. They range from areas
such as ecology, so the British Ecological Society, through to the other end of the spectrum
and the more medical allied subjects—the British Pharmacological Society, for example. So it
is a very broad spectrum. We have an interest in science policy in education and, of course,
the accreditation of bioscience degrees.
Dr Sudworth: Thank you very much for inviting me. I am Caroline Sudworth from the
Cogent sector skills council. We are currently licensed by Government to look at the skills
analyses and skills gaps for the science-based industries in the UK.
Dr Best: Thank you very much for inviting me here. I am Rob Best. I am a recently retired
academic with over 30 years at London South Bank University where I was a teacher of
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engineering—chemical engineering in particular. Today I am representing two organisations.
One is the Institution of Chemical Engineers, where I am an accreditor of courses, and also I
am a member of the Education and Accreditation Forum, which decides the outcomes of
such accreditation visits. I am also representing the Engineering Council where I am a
member of the Registration Standards Committee, which is the part of the organisation that
sets the standards that are used by the Institution of Chemical Engineers, and 20 other
professional engineering organisations, to assess engineering standards. I would emphasise in
both cases I am a volunteer, not a member of their staff.
Q217 The Chairman: Your views are not sought when the universities are
benchmarking engineering?
Dr Best: Indeed they are. The benchmark statement for engineering, as set by the QAA, is
the product of a tripartite discussion between QAA, the Engineering Council and the
Engineering Professors’ Council, which is another organisation that I have affiliations to.
Q218 The Chairman: Can I ask each of you, what is the value that you add to the whole
process of STEM in higher education? What is the added value from your organisations
working with institutions? If I could start with you, Dr Best.
Dr Best: I think it is very great, actually. As a professional body, the Institution of Chemical
Engineers operates the range of learned society activities that you would expect, so that is
all the new knowledge, the sharing of knowledge, which is very much an academic pursuit. It
runs conferences, has journals, all that kind of thing. Particularly, it has various special
interest groups, and I would highlight the education special-interest group. I heard today it
has 168 members, which, given that there are 23 academic departments in the UK, is a
pretty strong representation. That works actively with the departments to promote different
aspects of education within chemical engineering in particular.
The institution itself has done a great deal to change the position, earlier on in the past
decade, when the number of applicants to chemical engineering was declining rapidly to a
very critical position. It instituted a programme called “whynotchemeng”, with its own
website and its own organisation, and it completely turned that round. It was very noticeable
with the introduction of that campaign, a year or two later when its effects started, the
downward trend completely reversed, and we have now seen a 125% increase in the
number of entrants to chemical engineering courses. Indeed, it is roaring away at a faster
rate than any other engineering organisation and that is an extremely positive contribution.
The other area where we make a great deal of contribution to the higher-education
community is in developing new programmes and new approaches. The particular thing I
would highlight is that in the past—over more than two decades—we have really driven the
development of teaching in safety, health and environment in our subject area. As you will
appreciate, it is absolutely critical for the chemical industry. We have now reached the stage
where it is a very important expectation of chemical engineering programmes, wherever we
look at them, that they must deal with this appropriately throughout the programme, not
just as a special topic. I can give you many other examples.
Q219 The Chairman: You have given us some really good pieces of evidence there. Dr
Sudworth?
Dr Sudworth: As a sector skills council, we look to work directly with employers, initially,
to look at where skills gaps might be within the industry at the moment and the potential in
the future. One of those industries is the nuclear new-build programme. Currently we do
94
not have a new-build programme, but as soon as we do there will be a lot of skills gaps, so
what we have done is brought together industry as a sector, together with higher education
as a sector. There is an open discussion between the two of them to look at what gaps
there are, how we might fill them and how industry might engage in higher education, but
also the 14-to-19 curriculum as well. Similarly with the Society of Biology, we looked at
working with employers through BIS, through the Office for Life Sciences, to look at where
future skills might be, what are the current issues within higher education and how we might
solve those particular problems.
Q220 The Chairman: Can I just home in on this issue? Identifying skills gaps is one thing.
It is this business of adding value to what is going on. Where do you fit into that space?
Dr Sudworth: I think adding value from our perspective is working as a sector. We reduce
risk by working as a sector, so our employers work together and work together with higher
education through collaboration. We act as a neutral ground for that discussion to take
place. One of the programmes that we have done is the Nuclear Island programme, which is
looking at developing undergraduate civil engineering students to look at how they would
have to interact in the future in industry, so understanding nuclear behaviours and the
attributes that would be required on a site licence facility, which is something that has not
happened for very many years.
Q221 The Chairman: Cogent kite-marks a number of training programmes, does it?
Dr Sudworth: We do not kite-mark at the moment. We do work with the professional
bodies to look at the quality of graduates coming through. There is a potential for us to look
at kite-marking, but as yet it is not agreed.
Q222 The Chairman: Would you like to do that? Do you think that is something a
sector skills council should do?
Dr Sudworth: If the industry requires it we might go down that route, but it is whether
industry and higher education see a value in that process.
Dr Downs: As you might expect, we work in a similar way to the Institute of Chemical
Engineers, and we help students, through careers advice, through fellowships recognising
best students. We work with the academic community in our membership, and, for example,
we try to recognise excellence in teaching through our bioscience teacher award in
universities. We work with the heads of UK biological sciences, who have recently formed a
special interest group within the society, to share best practice, to talk about policy
requirements. So we work across the spectrum. Obviously we offer policy advice to
Government and to others, and we talk to our membership, which is very broad, to gain
their experience from academia, students and industry so that we can influence policy in a
way we think is best.
Q223 The Chairman: What evidence do you have that you make any difference?
Dr Downs: The evidence we have that we make some difference is that increasingly
Government and other interested parties will come to us for information, they will seek our
advice, and the fact that our member organisation base has grown from 70 to 93 over the
last year, showing that other organisations out there recognise the value of bringing together
a single voice for biology. If I take a particular example of plant sciences—which I think is an
essential area for the UK economy, but is much undervalued—we have brought together a
Plant Sciences Federation of around 30 member organisations to talk about the whole
95
breadth of plant science. The fact that people are coming to us, wanting to engage with us, is
a real sign that we are able to make a difference.
Q224 The Chairman: You are happy that 92% of your graduates do not have
mathematics at A-level?
Dr Downs: We are very aware that there is a lack of mathematical skills in biology
graduates. We cannot get away from the fact that biology is a numerate subject, just like
physics and chemistry, and we do have to have a lot more mathematical content in university
degrees a lot of the time. In terms of A-level maths, yes, it would be great to see more
students taking A-level maths who do biology. Equally I think it is appropriate for universities
to provide those skills in whatever way they think fit, providing numeracy skills are brought
up within biology by the time you graduate.
Q225 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Following on from that, I guess when you are assessing a
university course there are really three things. There is the appropriateness of the
curriculum, the quality of teaching, and the quality and rigour of the assessment at the end of
the students. Are you happy that you have mechanisms to address all those three types of
assessment?
Dr Downs: It depends what type of degree you are looking at. One of the problems we face
in biology—as I am sure you know—is this issue of breadth of courses. There is not a one-
size-fits-all. For example we focused in our accreditation programme, which I could talk
more about perhaps later, on research-led degrees for people who want to go into research
careers. For those I think the criteria are more clearly defined. For other areas, I think it is
perhaps slightly different. We do rely on the QAA, as we have just heard, to provide the
benchmark for quality. That is not our role. Our role is to try to make sure that we
challenge if we think it is not appropriate, but by and large we work with them.
Dr Sudworth: I guess for me the quality of mathematical skills from the employer
perspective is not there, and we understand that it is a pre-university issue as well. I am not
condoning that the A-level route is the only route to teaching mathematics up to age 18. In
the engineering sector, we have the engineering for maths qualification, developed through
the engineering diploma. Unfortunately, the uptake of that is very low, but it is a better and
more highly demanding qualification, I believe, from an employer’s perspective.
Dr Downs: If I might interject, Lord Chairman, I think there is another issue around
mathematics, which is that A-level maths of course is good and is very broad, but for
particular subject areas it may not be the most appropriate qualification. In the biosciences,
for example, there is a lot of statistical work, data analysis, and what you might want is a
more focused mathematical curriculum, which the university may be able to deliver.
Dr Best: If I could come in there. The mathematics issue for engineering is a little different,
as you will appreciate. Most engineering courses do require mathematics at A-level as an
entry point, but there are other ways of dealing with that should students not have it. The
outcomes from engineering programmes are always mathematics at a higher level. I will
come back to that.
The Chairman: On that note we will be back in 10 minutes’ time.
[Meeting suspended for a Division in the House.]
96
Q226 The Chairman: Dr Best, you were just in mid-flight. Be fairly brief because we are
trying to move on.
Dr Best: As I was saying, the issue is different for engineering. We have mathematics as a
significant component of all engineering programmes. The issue there, though, is more to do
with the nature of the mathematics that entrants are bringing and, because of the modular
nature of the A-level mathematics curriculum, it is quite possible for students to come into
engineering, or indeed physical science, who have not studied mechanics, which is the basis
for a lot of the work that we do. So there are problems around that. The Engineering
Professors’ Council—and Caroline referred to one of our output services, the ”Mathematics
for Engineering” curriculum, that was set up to address some of these problems—has been
working on this and has produced a number of exemplars that are now available through
various organisations. The highest hit rate on the Royal Academy of Engineering website is
access to these particular exemplars, so we are having an impact there in what schools are
able to access to address these problems of mathematics.
Q227 Lord Rees of Ludlow: It is always the case that the universities blame the schools
and the schools say they are restricted by university entrance preferences. Do you have any
comments on how one can break that logjam?
Dr Best: By providing assistance to the schools. If I can go one further, we are also planning,
through the Engineering Professors’ Council, a means of helping teachers, who often do not
have a mathematics qualification directly themselves, to understand the context of
mathematics, to teach the students, to enthuse the students so that they can bring what we
need into the higher education curriculum.
Q228 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I would like to ask about computing and programming
skills. Is that something that has been underemphasised in schools and needs to be built up a
bit more?
Dr Downs: Yes. Our view is that that is very much the case. There has been a lot of
emphasis on learning at schools—how you use some well-known brand products, shall we
say—and less on the understanding of the underlying computing needs and architecture that
are pretty essential if you are going to go into a more data-driven and analytical science,
which biology is increasingly becoming, and I am certain that is the case for engineering.
Q229 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Can each of you tell us how your organisation
works to interact with industry on the one hand and higher education institutions on the
other hand, to approve higher education courses or to approve accreditation of them. Is
that a significant part of your workload?
Dr Downs: Certainly for the Society of Biology it is. We work with our member
organisations who have professionals across the industries who feed into our deliberations
on how we should develop accreditation of courses, and I could say some more about that.
When we have developed our own accreditation programme over the last 18 months we
have involved industry in the consultation process. They form part of our assessment panel;
they form part of our assessors who go out, so we have a lot of interface with them. We
also interface with people like the ABPI, to some extent the CBI and other employer
organisations, and of course with Cogent and the sector skills councils generally, to make
sure that we understand what employers want. Of course, with over 11,000 individual
members and 80,000 members across our member organisations, a very significant
proportion of those work in the private sector.
97
Q230 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Is that work welcomed by the universities?
Dr Downs: To be fair, universities do welcome feedback on what employers like and prefer
and what is valuable to them. I think if it is done in a collaborative way, it is much better.
What we do not want to see is employers telling universities the way to run their business
and universities telling employers they are not interested. Actually we need a dialogue, and
the professional bodies are well placed to try to facilitate that dialogue because we have
people who sit in both camps.
Dr Sudworth: Pretty much the same as the Society of Biology. Our first and foremost asset
is our employers. Every quarter we sit down with our employers, on a strategic steering
committee for each of our sectors, and look at what skills we would need for the future.
Then we look at facilitating, through our professional bodies, through the SME cluster
organisations and so on, to increase our capacity to approach industry and higher education
for that open dialogue to occur.
Dr Best: The Registration Standards Committee of the Engineering Council is made up of
about 50% of people from industry and 50% academics. They set the standards for
engineering generically. The Institution of Chemical Engineers has an Education and
Accreditation Forum, which is about 30% or so industrial representation, and has a
Professional Formation Forum that is about 70% industrial representation. So again, there is
a balance of industrial and academic input to it. Whenever we go to accredit a programme
we always have at least one academic and at least one industrialist on the panel of that
accreditation visit. Then, when we assess the outcome of the visit, our accreditation forum
always has industrialists present to comment on the product of that. So there is an industrial
involvement right from the top to the bottom of the process.
Q231 Lord Cunningham of Felling: You are all heavily involved with STEM graduates
and postgraduates in your three organisations. Does the employability of STEM graduates, or
for that matter postgraduate students, feature in any of your quality measurements about
your approach to all this?
Dr Best: Indeed it does. The mapping of this was in the Engineering Council’s submission to
this Sub-Committee, but we have a very close match to the CBI list of graduate
employability skills. In our accreditation assessments, the sort of things we would be looking
at would be team working in student project work and problem solving. It is in the nature of
engineering that problem solving is there but also in a more general sense. Communication
skills are always looked at. All of these things are part of that accreditation assessment.
Dr Sudworth: Following on from that one, yes, along with the CBI we look at the
specifications that they have provided because we believe that their research is thorough and
well accepted by industry. What we do within our programmes that we develop direct with
employers is look at what employability skills would be required. One of the programmes
we have done is Nuclear Island. It is not just civil engineering; it is nuclear civil engineering.
Dr Downs: Very much we take a broad-based approach and, because we have involved
employers along the whole pathway to developing our own accreditation programme, those
sort of skills, like numeracy, data handling, experimental design, practical hands-on skills, are
the things that we know employers want to see and we expect that to come out of people
who are on the accredited programmes that we are looking at at the moment. I also think it
is worth just reiterating the fact that our own accreditation programme is focused on
research-based degrees. The reality is that most biology graduates, indeed most science
graduates generally of course, end up going to employment outside the specified field. So I
98
think there are two types of employability skills, one for the general market and one for the
more specialist areas.
Q232 The Chairman: In terms of accreditation, was the biosciences benchmark

inadequate? Is that why you started to do your own accreditation?
Dr Downs: No. The reason that we have started to do accreditation is because there is this
very modular approach to degree courses in the UK at the moment. While you might
undertake a very high-quality academic degree in biochemistry or microbiology or whatever,
because of the modular approach no two graduates—often even from the same university—
will come out with the same skill sets. So we have spoken to employers and talked about the
mix of skills they might like to see for certain research careers. We have gone to universities
and asked them to demonstrate how they can ensure students pick up the right modules,
have the right framework and the right infrastructure to deliver those employability skills. It
is a sort of added value process above and beyond QAA.
The Chairman: Do you want to go on?
Lord Cunningham of Felling: I am fine, thank you.
Q233 Lord Lucas: I am getting a little confused here. We started off this afternoon
talking about the benchmarks that the QAA produces, but it seems you do not actually pay
much attention to them. You have developed your own definitions of what an engineering or
a biology graduate should be like, or I have I misinterpreted that?
Dr Best: Certainly not in engineering. The QAA engineering benchmark is exactly aligned to
the Engineering Council UKSPEC, which is the definition of standards and their professional
engineering competence.
Dr Downs: Yes. QAA, as we heard earlier this afternoon, is the baseline that you expect all
graduates to achieve. Then you are looking for particular skill sets that we can say match
particular types of employment.
Q234 Lord Lucas: For instance, when in the engineering benchmark it talks about
sustainability and ethics but says nothing about commerce, about the skills required to
manage an engineering business, is that something you would like changed? How would that
process work? Talking to the QAA this afternoon it seemed that they might begin to
consider that in five years’ time. Is there any way you would like that accelerated?
The Chairman: You are leading the witness.

Dr Best: Engineering programmes that are aligned to benchmarks, and things of that kind,
always have a degree of latitude in them to add value in other areas. Enterprise and things of
that kind is an area that is under development in many universities. I foresee the time when
that will become assimilated into the benchmark, but I would also add that a student
graduating in engineering has only started the progression to full qualification. They have to
complete another three or four years before they are ready for the full professional
standard, and it is at that phase that—traditionally at least—the commercial aspects, and
things of that kind, are added to that person’s skill set.
Q235 Lord Lucas: Although most engineering graduates will go on, as you said, to do
different things, they will come out of university and that will be their final qualification, and
they will be without the commercial aspects.
99
Dr Best: I am not sure that most engineering graduates would do that. There is certainly a
well-defined group that will go on to run banks in the City, and things of that kind. I am not
sure if that is a good thing or not, but there is a numeracy about the product there that is
very much valued by industry. The starting salaries are very high, so we are doing something
right. Whether they become practising engineers or practising something else depends on
those skills, they are still going to be developing post-graduation into that complete
professional person.
Q236 Lord Lucas: It seems to me that the skill sets or the attributes you are looking for
are very much attuned to academia, and you do not feel any discomfort with their lack of
attunement with the world that a lot of your graduates will go on into.
Dr Best: I disagree with that statement. If you look at the specification for engineering, it
does go beyond academia. It does deal with ethics; it deals with financial sustainability,
economics, environmental impact and things of that kind. They are way outside of the
technical content of the programme.
Dr Downs: I think that is right. There are those technical skills that are applicable across the
spectrum, and it does not necessarily have to be just focused on commerce. There are some
really important generic skills that are taught.
Q237 The Chairman: Dr Sudworth, you were shaking your head vigorously, the record
notes, when Dr Best was talking earlier.
Dr Sudworth: Yes.
The Chairman: So, please explain why.
Dr Sudworth: The professional bodies do have a role in ensuring greater quality than in the
QAA benchmark statements. From the work that I have done with the National HE STEM
Programme, we have looked at the CBI benchmark and employability skills, mapped it to the
QAA benchmark statement, and there is a lot missing from those particular STEM degrees.
We have tried to discuss this with the QAA but to no avail at this moment in time, so we
would like the QAA to look at how employers interact with that quality assurance in STEM
degrees.
Q238 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Why will the QAA not engage with you on this
important issue?
Dr Sudworth: It is a good question. We have tried and there is a small working group that
looks at it, but it seems to go into a big black hole somewhere and I could not tell you
where it goes.
Q239 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Takes minutes and spend years?

Dr Sudworth: Yes. So it is one of those things. Employers do want to see project
management; they want to see that across STEM graduates full stop. Just because they have a
STEM degree does not mean they are going to go into research and development. They can
look at industry awareness, and that industry awareness to enter the science and engineering
industries is critical.
Q240 Lord Rees of Ludlow: A question, which I guess may be for Dr Downs, about
graduate level work. Do you think the balance between Masters and PhDs is correct, and
100
are you concerned that perhaps the PhD in the UK is rather too narrow compared with the
PhD in other countries, where it takes longer and has more coursework and so on?
Dr Downs: We are concerned about the balance. What we are not sure about—as I am
sure everyone else is unsure—is what will happen as a result of the changes to the funding
structures at the moment, but increasingly we would like to see research-focused graduates,
those who intend to go into research careers, undertaking something like a four-year
integrated Masters degree. We would be very opposed to any cutback in degree courses
from three to two years. PhDs may be appropriate to be four years, but I think we need to
focus on the learning outcomes, which is what accreditation is all about. If you can
demonstrate that you have the learning outcomes, the timeframe is not necessarily the most
important aspect, although I accept, of course, sometimes there is that causal link. Probably
what is more important is that you have hands-on project experience, ideally in a private
sector environment, but it might be also in a university environment.
Q241 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Is there not a need for breadth beyond the actual PhD
topic and that does not always come in the UK?
Dr Downs: I agree there is certainly a need for breadth and we are very supportive of what
some of the research councils like the BBSRC are doing, in terms of helping their PhD
students gain that breadth. For example, early next week we have a BBSRC PhD student
coming on an internship to us to do some policy work. So we very much welcome those
things. Masters courses, though, we are concerned about because at the moment HEFCE do
not provide funding for a standalone Masters course, and I think that is a real concern.
Dr Best: If I could just respond to that. An engineering doctorate has been established that
does address some of these broader issues and is very well received. Indeed, the Engineering
Council has recently agreed to accredit such programmes. Could I just take the opportunity
to refute an earlier comment? Engineering programmes generally do include project
management. It is something we look for.
Q242 Lord Lucas: One of the difficulties that students have in choosing a course is
knowing how good it is. Neither you nor the QAA provide any depth. It is just accredited or
not, or meets the benchmark or does not. Is there no scope for pointing out particular
courses as being excellent?
Dr Downs: Accreditation does seek to do that for those courses where it is applicable. We
can say that a course that is accredited by the Society of Biology has good employability
prospects, is a very high academic standard, and has good infrastructure and support
associated with it. The fact that you do go through a very rigorous accreditation process,
and you say to students that these courses are accredited, says that that particular course is
of a very good standard.
Q243 Lord Lucas: But you have accredited everything.

Dr Downs: No. We certainly have not. At the moment we have focused on four-year
integrated Masters courses, and we may well develop beyond that in the future, but we are
not in the position of saying we can accredit everything, because there will be some courses
that are better than others. Over time it may be the case that we raise the bar for
everybody, but inevitably there will be a period where that is not the case.
Dr Best: It is a difficult question to answer. We are looking at a threshold standard. What
we do is we seek to publish the excellent practice that we find in some programmes. I think
that is the approach to it, because you can have a very good programme, but it may not
101
universally be very good. If you start making that judgement, you then get into the business
of ranking, and that is not something I think we would really want to tussle with.
Q244 Lord Lucas: Where would a pupil find these gradings, the aspects of excellence or
the good practice you are talking about?
Dr Downs: On application to universities now, following Lord Browne’s review, there is a
requirement, which is accepted by Government, that students should be able to see whether
the courses are accredited, for example, so they will hopefully understand that. It is a difficult
scenario.
Q245 The Chairman: Can I just stop you here. Our concern—and you heard it from
the first panel—is not just accreditation, but we are trying to raise the bar. We are getting
the impression that minimum is okay, and clearly in STEM it is not.
Dr Best: We do not like seeing minimum. Where we find minimum then we go back to the
department and we tell them what they need to do to improve. There has to be a degree of
confidence between the university and the assessing body, and they have to respect that.
The expectation is that it will exceed the minimum somewhat.
Dr Downs: Lord Chairman, there is also an issue around language here, is there not? If we
describe something as a minimum, it has a negative nuance to it, whereas if we describe
something as a benchmark, it has a positive nuance to it. So there is a language issue around
this, and I do not think anyone wants minimum standards. What we want is high-quality
benchmarks.
The Chairman: A high-quality benchmark? Right.

Dr Sudworth: Following up on that, I think from an employer perspective what is
academically very acceptable might not be employer acceptable, and there are two different
languages going on here. I know the Society of Biology is currently looking at research
agenda, but that is not necessarily what a small or medium enterprise would like to see. I
think what we mean by quality is very different for different audiences. From our
perspective, we only look at what our employers have helped to develop and are currently
being delivered to, as a mark of what employers will pay for, and therein lies an inherent
quality.
The Chairman: Members of the Committee, are you happy? Thank you. This was a session
about quality and standards, and we thank you very much indeed. I apologise for the fact that
we had to shoot off to save the country, but we are very grateful for your evidence. Thank
you very much indeed.
102
Committee of Heads of University Geosciences Departments, the Geological Society and
the British Geological Survey – Written evidence
Committee of Heads of University Geosciences Departments, the

Geological Society and the British Geological Survey – Written
evidence
Submission to be found under the Geological Society
103
Confederation of British Industry (CBI) – Written evidence
1. The CBI welcomes the opportunity to respond to the House of Lords Science and
Technology Sub-Committee I inquiry on higher education in STEM subjects. The CBI is
an independent, non-party political organisation funded entirely by its members in
industry and commerce and speaks for some 240,000 businesses which together employ
around a third of the UK private sector workforce. Our membership stretches across
the UK, including businesses from all sectors and of all sizes, and over 150 sectoral
associations.
2. Science, technology, engineering and maths are traditional strengths of the UK

economy, but skills shortages threaten business capacity for growth. The UK continues
to face a difficult economic outlook. The recovery has lost momentum and high levels of
uncertainty are likely to face the UK in 2012, holding back exports and business
investment. The UK must exploit the potential of high growth sectors, such as
engineering, pharmaceuticals, defence etc, to deliver a sustainable recovery. A lack of
appropriate skills at all levels poses a challenge for business investment and could
undermine competitiveness in high performance export-led markets. It is essential that
the right conditions are in place for businesses to access a STEM-skilled workforce to
secure private sector growth.
Businesses value STEM graduates but struggle to find the skills they need
3. STEM study helps students develop the skills valued by all businesses, as well as the
technical knowledge needed for specific occupations. As a result, demand for STEM
skills is strong across the economy - the 2011 CBI-EDI education and skills survey found
that 72% of employers across all industries value the competencies that STEM
employees bring to the business. STEM study particularly supports students in
developing the problem-solving and analytical skills which businesses value. The CBI has
defined employability skills as application of numeracy, communication, application of IT,
business and customer awareness, problem-solving, team-working, and self-management,
all underpinned and linked together by a positive attitude to work. Because of the high
demand for STEM graduates and the valuable employability skills they have developed,
employers are willing to pay a premium to gain these graduates. Businesses report that
STEM graduates earn more than other graduates over the course of their careers -
more than a third of companies in science and IT (40%), energy and water (33%) and
construction (33%) report that STEM graduates earn more than other graduates 89 .
4. The demand for STEM graduates is significant and employers have difficulty finding the
STEM skills they need. Just under half (43%) of employers report difficulty recruiting
STEM skills. Shortages in STEM qualifications threatens business capacity for growth,
particularly in those high-growth sectors that hold the key to economic recovery.
5. Some STEM employers have also reported difficulty recruiting postgraduate STEM skills
– almost a third (28%) of science, hi-tech and IT employers report current difficulties
89 CBI-EDI education and skills survey 2011
104
90
. In today’s competitive world, it is vital that businesses
have access to the postgraduate STEM skills they need to retain their competitiveness.
6. With significant growth in the demand for STEM skills expected - forecasts for STEM
industries alone suggest a demand for 600,000 professionally skilled staff by 2017 91 – it is
more crucial than ever that significantly more young people attain the STEM
qualifications business will need in future years. Over a quarter (27%) of employers
across all sectors predict problems finding STEM graduates over the next three years.
Employers believe the numbers taking STEM subjects at school must

significantly increase to ensure more go on to further study
7. Studying science and maths unlocks a range of employment opportunities for young
people, but the CBI’s STEM report card shows that too few young people study – or
feel comfortable studying – STEM subjects at school and beyond, and the areas where
improvement is needed.
Report Progress made Areas for improvement

At GCSE 50% of young people The proportion taking All young people
achieved at least a triple science has should have the
Level 6 at Key Stage 3 been increasing but opportunity to study
in science in 2011, on a shallow triple science. School
indicating they are trajectory. facilities for science
capable of further need to improve
The proportion of
study – but only 29% state schools offering
of pupils are due to sit triple science has
triple science in 2013 increased to around
70%
In Having fallen from Apprenticeship starts Careers advice given to
apprenticeships 43,100 to 36,990 have been rising in young people must
apprenticeship starts recent years – over continue to set out the
(14% decrease) in the last three years, benefits of
2008/09, engineering engineering apprenticeships to
apprenticeships starts apprenticeships have ensure the uptake
have risen in 2011 increased by 9% - continues
from 37,860 to 47,020 with rising completion
(24% increase) rates
At A-level In 2011: Entries have increased The number taking A-
from a low base. level Physics in 2011
7.2% took Biology A-
was 40% below the
level
level of entries in 1984.
5.5% took Chemistry Girls only made up a
A-level fifth of Physics A-level
3.8% took Physics A- entrants
level

91 CE/IER employment projections, from Working Futures
105
In higher Less than one in seven The uptick in entries Improvements in

education (14%) of UK students to SET courses has quality and quantity are
studied science, been sustained since needed to meet future
engineering or 2006-07, following a high level skills needs
technology in 2010 92 sharp decline since
1999
8. Action must be taken to increase the supply of STEM skills business needs by
encouraging more young people to study triple science and design and technology
subjects at school; improving numeracy and maths skills; retaining and recruiting more
specialist teachers; raising young people’s interest and enjoyment of science and maths
at school; and providing young people with high quality and relevant careers information,
advice and guidance.
Encouraging more young people to study triple science and design and technology subjects at school
9. Studying all three sciences as separate GCSEs is the best preparation for further study
of science. But while just over 50% of pupils achieving Level 6 or above at Key Stage 3 in
science this summer 93 , only around 29% of pupils are due to sit triple science in 2013 94 .
Too many students fail to realise their potential. This restricts the numbers of those
who progress into STEM subjects at A-level and beyond and the STEM skills available to
businesses.
10. The CBI supports young people having the option of double or triple science but in
order to support the increase in numbers studying separate sciences, the CBI believes
all schools should offer triple science, with schools measured against the proportion of
those most able pupils taking the triple science option. There is still more to be done to
improve the quality of school facilities for science – many schools have poor science
facilities, and thus refurbishment and rebuilding programmes should prioritise science
labs and technology centres.
11. Employers value skills in creative and technical subjects. But the study of design and
technology at GCSE is declining – this year, entries were down by 34,000, roughly 12%
on the previous year. The CBI has called for a technical or creative subject to be
included in the English Baccalaureate to support a rise in numbers studying subjects such
as design and technology and increase the skills valued by business.
Improving numeracy and maths skills
12. Employers want all employees to be numerate, but not enough young people leave
school or college with the numeracy and maths skills businesses need. Only half of pupils
achieved a minimum C-grade pass in GCSE maths, and 13% achieved a grade F or G -
over 100,000 young people. It has been a long-standing CBI aim that steps are taken to
increase the maths skills of school-leavers, and we welcomed the government
announcement that young people who do not achieve an A*-C GCSE in maths at age 16
will be supported to reach this benchmark by 19.
92 Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011

93 Department for Education statistics, 2011
94 The English Baccalaureate: Government response to Education Select Committee’s Report, November 2011
106
“It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of STEM skills to our future and maths is
the bedrock of STEM learning.”
National Grid
13. However, the CBI believes that all young people should study some form of maths
beyond age 16, and so we support the government’s longer-term aspiration for the
majority of pupils to be studying maths at some level to age 18. We also welcome the
government’s announcement in the Autumn Statement that it will invest in new
specialist maths free schools for 16-18 year olds, supported by strong university maths
departments and academics. This will help to promote maths study and careers to
young people and we particularly support the links that will be created between these
schools and universities to support young people in their skills development.
Recruiting and retaining more specialist teachers
14. Success in promoting science and maths to young people depends on high-quality
teaching delivered by subject specialists. Greater recruitment of specialist teachers is
necessary to better address existing shortfalls, and the government has gone some way
in supporting this by committing to more than double the number of participants in the
Teach First scheme as the majority of Teach First participants teach the most demanding
shortage subjects. Teacher training bursaries are continuing to be paid to graduates in
the sciences to encourage more young people with science degrees into teaching. This
will help address the low proportion of science teachers with science degrees.
15. It is important that teachers have access to good quality professional development so
they can update and improve their subject-knowledge and skills. This is crucial to good
quality practical work and improving engagement in STEM subjects among young people.
We welcome the provision of bursaries by the Department of Education to help schools
pay for science teachers’ continuous professional development 95 . The network of
science learning centres, funded in part by Department for Education, will continue to
provide science teachers with access to CPD opportunities.
Raising young people’s interest and enjoyment of science and maths at school
16. Almost two thirds (62%) of businesses see promotion of science and maths skills at
school as the most important way of tackling STEM shortages 96 and many are taking
action to support schools and colleges. For example, Boots Opticians and Specsavers,
having identified a drop off in applications to study Optometry, have worked
collaboratively to raise enthusiasm for science in school and inform young people about
the careers available to them following STEM study.
95 Regional science learning centres offer bursaries which are funded by the Department for Education, 2011.
https://www.sciencelearningcentres.org.uk/about/impact-awards
107
Boots Opticians and Specsavers, with a number of companies, have worked

collaboratively with universities and professional bodies to develop a one hour
interactive science lesson about vision that is delivered to year 9 pupils. The lesson
informs pupils about careers in optics and explains the value of science study to pursuing
such a career, encouraging pupils to take science options at GCSE. The initiative has
won two industry awards including a Recruiter Award earlier this year.
17. Businesses also want to support the teaching of STEM in school, and Sellafield Ltd has
identified an opportunity to do so by providing teaching resources.
Sellafield Ltd provides sponsored teaching resources, produced for teachers by

teachers. These resources are designed to fit into the curriculum and are produced to
high standards of innovation and good practice. They are recommended by examining
bodies, curriculum advisers and subject co-ordinators. The company’s new website
provides these resources free of charge to enable teachers and students to benefit
fully from them.
18. Businesses are also aware of the value of working with local schools to provide practical
experience to young people. e2v technologies has recognised the importance of working
with local school pupils to develop their practical skills and increase their understanding
of how STEM study translates into the workplace.
e2v technologies provides a site visit and practical work experience initiative to the
local secondary school. The initiative gives sixth form students the opportunity to
undertake practical work on raw material properties providing the practical element for
the material science part of their sixth form studies.
19. Teachers, school leaders and employers must also work together at primary school
level to raise interest in science. Business recognises it has a role to play to help schools
enthuse pupils about the opportunities and excitement of studying science from the first
encounters with science.
Since 1998, the Shell Education Service has run science workshops for primary
school children across the UK. Every year over 50,000 children take part in workshops
that encourage them to explore and question science through hands-on investigations.
The workshops, run by expert tutors, focus on primary education with curriculum
based support for teaching on physical processes together with materials and their
properties.
Providing young people with high quality and relevant careers information, advice and guidance
20. Young people need to make informed choices about which subjects to pursue, but only
6% of businesses are confident that careers advice is good enough. While initiatives like
the STEM ambassadors scheme are working to counter this trend, high quality, impartial
careers advice must be made available to all young people. This should include advice
about apprenticeships and vocational training options at local colleges, as well as
opportunities for experience in the world of work. The government is introducing an
all-age careers service in April 2012 which will include a national careers website. In the
108
recently published CBI report, Action for Jobs, we called for a government-hosted
national careers website that is business-led, with high levels of involvement from the
web and social media sector in its design and roll out to ensure it is effective 97 .
21. For many young people, teachers are the first port of call for advice about subject
choices and future study or work. But with most teachers having limited experience of
work outside the education system, their insights can be restricted. The CBI
recommends that businesses and schools should work together to give teachers a
better understanding of work through exchange schemes. Spending time in business as
part of continuing professional development programmes will help build teachers’
knowledge and understanding of the world of work. With the support of business
ambassadors, teachers could ‘buddy’ a local company so they are in touch with
developments in a sector and can share learning – as well as advice on skills and
competencies – back in their schools. This ensures young people gain access to careers
advice that is based on the world of work.
Business-university engagement supports the development of the STEM

graduates business needs
22. Businesses are clear that action is needed to promote science and maths in higher
education to address the shortage of STEM skills. The majority (84%) of science,
engineering and IT employers view the number and quality of STEM graduates as a key
business priority for higher education 98 . The Committee indicated an interest in the
steps industry and business are taking together to address the STEM skills demand –
businesses such as Jaguar Land Rover and Network Rail recognise that they have a role
to play to develop young people with the skills they need, and are increasingly working
with universities to develop these skills.
Jaguar Land Rover has developed a course module with four universities aimed at
Masters level students on future engineering skills - such as those required for the low
carbon sector and development of electric cars – to ensure it has access to the technical
skills it needs.
Network Rail has developed an MSc in project management, tailored specifically for the
company and run in partnership with UCL and University of Warwick. The company will
fund all tuition fees and student accommodation costs for the duration of the course
supplemented by an annual bursary of £5,000. Network Rail gains the specific skills it
needs and as such, can guarantee those graduates a career in the company.
23. Employers have also reported a lack of workplace experience to succeed in a role as a
barrier to recruiting the STEM graduates they need. Almost half (48%) of science,
engineering and IT employers report this as a barrier to recruitment. Businesses are
working with universities, providing sandwich placements to young people during their
studies, to support students to develop their employability skills and experience the
workplace.
97 CBI recommendation, Action for Jobs: How to get the UK working, 2011
109
Sheffield Hallam University has committed to all students having the opportunity to
undertake a sandwich placement year or semester from 2012 – the university is engaged
with a wide range of employers to deliver work opportunities to its students to help
them understand the connection between their course and the workplace and to develop
their employability skills.
December 2011
110
Council for the Mathematical Sciences – Written evidence
About the Council for the Mathematical Sciences (CMS)
The CMS (www.cms.ac.uk) was established in 2001 by the Institute of Mathematics and its
Applications (IMA), the London Mathematical Society (LMS) and the Royal Statistical Society
(RSS). They were joined in 2008 by the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (EMS) and the
Operational Research Society (ORS). The CMS provides an authoritative and objective body
that exists to develop, influence and respond to UK policy issues that affect the
mathematical sciences in higher education and research, and therefore the UK economy and
society in general.
• The IMA is the UK’s learned and professional society for mathematics and its
applications and has around 5,000 members.
• The LMS, founded in 1865, is the UK’s learned society for mathematics. The Society has
as its purpose the advancement, dissemination and promotion of mathematical
knowledge in the UK and worldwide.
• The RSS, founded in 1834, aims to nurture and promote statistics, encouraging statistical
knowledge and disseminating good practice in society at large.
• The EMS was founded in 1883 and has around 450 members. Its aims are the promotion
and extension of the Mathematical Sciences, particularly in Scotland.
• The ORS is the world’s oldest-established learned society catering to the Operational
Research profession, with 3,000 members in 53 countries.
SUMMARY:
• The UK requires a much larger pool of school leavers and university
graduates with a strong grounding in mathematical science. While the
number of students graduating with good quality first degrees in the
mathematical sciences has increased substantially over the past decade, the
total remains far from enough to meet the needs of the industrial and
education sectors.
• The quality of UK undergraduate degrees in the mathematical sciences is
high. At the “top” end, quality has been enhanced by the increasing
popularity of Integrated Masters degrees. There is a serious risk to the
viability of these in the era of high fees.
• The ‘AAB+’ proposals threaten to reduce the numbers taking mathematics
A-level.
• An atmosphere enriched by research and scholarship is a crucial component
of high quality teaching of the mathematical sciences at advanced levels.
• The geographical spread of mathematical science departments in UK HE has
declined over the past 10 years. This threatens to damage the UK’s best use
of its mathematical talent base.
• Students graduating with UK PhDs in the mathematical sciences are very
attractive to the industrial, financial and non-HE educational sectors, but
there are very serious problems with the pipeline to careers in UK HE.
111
• Insufficient mathematical science PhDs are being produced to meet demand.

The problem of lack of numbers is greatly exacerbated within academia by
the inadequacy of the pipeline from PhD to academic positions, a problem
which has worsened in 2011 as a direct result of EPSRC actions.
• The consensus view in the mathematical sciences community is that, in a
time of severe funding restrictions, Taught Course Centres will provide a
more sustainable option than Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs), particularly
since an emphasis on DTC training will threaten the geographic distribution
of PhD provision.
A. Graduate supply
1. Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU and overseas)
sufficient to meet the needs of industry, the research base, and other sectors not directly connected
with STEM?
• The UK requires a much larger pool of school leavers and university

graduates with a strong grounding in mathematical science. While the
number of students graduating with good quality first degrees in the
mathematical sciences has increased substantially over the past decade, the
total remains far from enough to meet the needs of the industrial and
education sectors.
1.1 The size and importance of mathematical sciences as a discipline is evident at the
undergraduate level: with 5475 graduating students in 2007/08, the mathematical sciences
undergraduate cohort is nearly the same size as those for chemistry (2965) and physics
(2765) combined. The popularity of both “straight” mathematics and “mathematics with”
degree courses has been growing. Anecdotal evidence suggests that options such as business
and finance have been growing as the “with” option at the cost of more traditional
combinations of mathematics with computer science or physics.
1.2 Even with such a large undergraduate cohort there is a severe lack of qualified
mathematics teachers. Figures in a recent Royal Society report 99 show that only about
2% of primary teachers in England have a specialist mathematical science qualification (fewer
than one for every four primary schools). An earlier RS report 100 estimated that there were
21,126 mathematics teachers (including 11,652 who have a mathematical sciences degree, or
about 55%) in English secondary schools. DfE data on the shortfall in mathematics teacher
recruitment is tabulated in another RS report 101 and graphed in Figure 1 below. The
numbers (and gender breakdown) of students accepted on to PGCE/PGDE courses in
mathematics is given in Table 1.
99 Science and mathematics education, 5-14, The Royal Society, July 2010
100 The UK's science and mathematics teaching workforce, The Royal Society, 2007
101 The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity, The Royal Society, 2010
112
−1000
People
−2000
−3000
−4000
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
Year
Figure 1: Cumulative shortfall in meeting mathematics recruitment targets,
2000/01 to 2007/08
Year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Total 1162 1311 1502 1858 2059 2066 1835 1645 1599 2068 1881
Male 603 684 841 1020 1173 1107 943 872 846 1085 929
Female 559 627 661 838 886 959 892 773 753 983 952
Table 1: Acceptances to PGCE/PGDE courses in mathematics 102
1.3 Mathematical sciences graduates are in high demand in the UK economy, as

shown for example by starting salaries. Table 2 shows the average salary of undergraduates
and postgraduates six months after graduation in 2007/08. Mathematical science graduates
have excellent career prospects across all sectors. Future growth in the UK will be driven in
large part by the knowledge economy; this growth would be threatened by an undersupply
of well-trained mathematical science graduates.
Subject First degree Postgraduate (excl.

PGCE)
Biological sciences £16,500 £22,500
Physical sciences £19,000 £24,000
Computer science £21,000 £24,000
Engineering & technology £23,000 £25,500
Mathematical Sciences £22,500 £27,000
Table 2: Average salaries of those with first and higher degrees, six months after
graduation in 2007/08 103
London Mathematical Society statistics: www.lms.ac.uk/content/statistics-mathematics

102
Taken from the table on p 94 of Adrian Smith's report One Step Beyond: Making the most of postgraduate education
103
(March 2010)
113
1.4 The following (taken from the International Comparative Performance of the UK Research
Base – 2011 104 ) suggest that the research base is not fully supplied:
“The UK shows high and increasing activity focus in clinical sciences, health & medical
sciences, social sciences, business and humanities. A relative drop is seen in other areas
(biological sciences and environmental sciences). The UK has relatively lower activity focus
in mathematics, physical sciences and engineering.” (p.28).
Possible reasons for this are discussed in the Postgraduate supply section (B).
2. Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently high, and if not, why
not? Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it research, industry or
more broadly within the economy?
• The quality of UK undergraduate degrees in the mathematical sciences is

high. At the “top” end, quality has been enhanced by the increasing
popularity of Integrated Masters degrees.
2.1 Mathematical science degrees are stringently assessed, and evidence from external
examiners' reports and the National Student Survey indicates that the quality of teaching is
generally very high. Most degree courses include a significant component of project work
and HE-STEM 105 has initiatives for incorporating best practice in ‘real-life problem-solving’
and other transferable skills into university mathematics courses. The introduction of more
“generic” content, while clearly enhancing some aspects of the skill set of graduating
students, risks diminishing the volume and depth of mathematical knowledge gained. In
compensation, a significant number of institutions now offer an Integrated Masters
qualification in mathematical sciences in addition to the BSc. These undergraduate masters
degrees typically require an extra year of study, but have nevertheless proved increasingly
popular over the past decade 106 , and students graduating with them are highly valued both by
employers and as PhD students.
3. What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality of degrees
and the supply of STEM courses in higher education institutions?
• High undergraduate fees pose a serious risk to the future viability of

Integrated Masters degrees.
• The ‘AAB+’ proposals threaten to reduce the numbers taking mathematics
A-level.
3.1 One potential risk is to the continued viability of valuable Integrated Masters
and MSc degree programmes – if students have incurred a large debt up to BSc level,
then it is reasonable to expect that fewer of them will stay for a further year of expensive
education.
3.2 The ‘AAB+’ proposals are likely to reduce the number of university applicants who have
taken mathematics A-level. This is because some A-level subjects, including Mathematics and
104 www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/science/docs/i/11-p123-international-comparative-performance-uk-research-base-2011.pdf
105 www.rsc.org/Education/HESTEM/index.asp
106 For example, registrations for the Mathematics Math/MMast at the University of Cambridge (known as "Part III"),
increased by 16% from 2005/6 to 2011/12, from 201 students to 233.
114
Further Mathematics, are graded more severely than others. There is clear evidence 107 for
this. By treating all A-levels as equal the ‘AAB+’ proposals exacerbate the harm already done
by A-level league tables and UCAS tariffs 108 . There is anectdotal evidence that concern for
grades (by individuals, schools or HE institutions) leads some students away from
mathematics A-level even when their interest and intended area of study would make
mathematics the obvious choice.
3.3 However, if the ÀAB+' proposals do remain in place, then it is essential that the list
of (protected) SIV subjects continues to include mathematical sciences. As
discussed in (1), the current number of students graduating in the mathematical sciences is
already well below the demand.
4. What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop new and cross-
disciplinary STEM degrees?
4.1 We have no direct evidence on this question, but we note that there are many existing
“Mathematics with” degrees. However, universities are pragmatic and generally structure
their departments to map onto mainstream REF disciplines. This can discourage staff
appointments at interdisciplinary interfaces and also puts up barriers to novel degree
courses.
5. What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary for all universities to
teach undergraduates and post-graduates and conduct research? What other delivery model should
be considered?
• An atmosphere enriched by research and scholarship is a crucial component

of high quality teaching of the mathematical sciences at advanced levels.
5.1 The teaching of mathematical science at more advanced levels is informed by current
research and students benefit greatly by being taught by someone aware of recent
developments. Moreover, recruitment of the best qualified students in good numbers to a
mathematical science department is much easier when that department buzzes with the
excitement of research being done.
6. Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education institutions offering STEM
courses?
• The geographical spread of mathematical science departments in UK HE has

declined over the past 10 years. This threatens to damage the UK’s best use
of its mathematical talent base.
6.1 For example, the number of submissions to the three mathematical sciences Units of
Assessment substantially reduced from RAE 2001 to RAE 2008 (from 47 to 37 in pure
mathematics, from 58 to 45 for applied mathematics and 46 to 30 for statistics and
operational research). The UCAS database included single honours first degrees in statistics
from only 10 UK universities for 2011 entry. The Steele Report 109 has highlighted the
107 www.score-education.org/policy/qualifications-and-assessment/grading-severity
108 The high percentage of A and A* grades achieved by Mathematics and Further mathematics A level candidates does not
reflect more generous marking, as “linked pair” studies by each Awarding Body routinely shows.
109 www.cms.ac.uk/reports/2007/steele_report.pdf
115
problem of lack of provision in certain areas caused by the closure of departments. Two of
the main findings of the EPSRC's International Review of Mathematical Sciences 110 are that
(with our emphasis): “Overall, mathematical sciences research in the UK is excellent on an
international scale”, and “the high quality of UK mathematical sciences research depends
critically on the diverse and distributed research community”, where `diverse' includes
research area, group size and institution size, and `distributed' refers to geographical
location.
6.2 There are risks in excessive concentration of research funding, as this may threaten the
current geographical spread of institutions offering mathematical sciences degrees. In the era
of Full Economic Costing, research-intensive HE institutions are likely to focus investment in
fields where substantial grant income is more likely. At the same time students are more
likely to choose to study close to home when the cost of a degree is rising fast, so that
there is a severe risk of reducing the number of highly-skilled mathematical
science graduates produced in the UK.
7. What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM graduates in
terms of gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic background?
7.1 Most universities select on A-level results, or their equivalent, and attaining the right
qualifications remains the highest hurdle for those from low-participation backgrounds,
something which clearly affects the mathematical sciences as well as other subjects.
Mathematical sciences have a slightly lower proportion of students from low-participation
neighbourhoods (15.2%) than the overall figure (16.4%) (HESA data). Conversely, HESA data
show that in 2009/10 21.6% of students in the mathematical sciences were from black and
minority ethnic backgrounds, compared with 18.3% for the student population overall. While
this gives no grounds for complacency, it is not evidence that the mathematical sciences have
a greater than average need for action. The HEFCE-funded More Maths Grads project 111
which ran from 2007 to 2010 was focused on increasing the number of students studying
mathematics, in particular encouraging participation from groups of learners who have not
traditionally been well represented in higher education.
7.2 At about 40%, the proportion of female mathematical science undergraduates

is relatively high compared to other STEM subjects112 . But there is severe attrition on
the path through to academic positions: 32% of mathematical science postgraduates
are female, compared with 20% of the holders of postdoctoral posts, 22% of lecturers and a
tiny 4% of professors. Reliable research on the reasons for this decline does not seem to be
available, but it seems reasonable to conjecture that the problems with the academic career
pipeline discussed in (9) affect female mathematical scientists most severely.
8. Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers they subsequently
undertake?
110 Report available from www.epsrc.ac.uk

111 www.moremathsgrads.org.uk/home.cfm
112 www.theukrc.org/files/useruploads/files/final_sept_15th_15.42_ukrc_statistics_guide_2010.pdf
116
• Students graduating with UK PhDs in the mathematical sciences are very

attractive to the industrial, financial and non-HE educational sectors, but
there are very serious problems with the pipeline to careers in UK HE.
We discuss the first part of the above answer here, and the second part in (9).
8.1 As shown in Table 2 above, mathematical sciences PhD graduates attract the highest
starting salaries of all PhD graduates. The value placed by employers outside academia on the
doctorate can be seen from the fact that in 2006, six months after graduation, the average
salary of someone with a mathematical sciences first degree was £22.5k, whereas the
average for someone with a PhD in mathematical science was £27k. According to the annual
HESA surveys for 2004-2008, 42% of doctoral graduates in mathematical sciences find work
in the education sector, 34% in finance, business and IT, and 18% in other sectors.
9. Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain the research base
and are they of sufficient quality?
• Insufficient mathematical science PhDs are being produced to meet demand.

The problem of lack of numbers is greatly exacerbated within academia by
the inadequacy of the pipeline from PhD to academic positions, a problem
which has worsened in 2011 as a direct result of EPSRC actions.
We split (9) into three questions:
(i) How many appointments per year are needed to maintain the UK academic
mathematical sciences research base in steady state?
9.1 According to HEFCE, 1933 FTEs were returned in the mathematical sciences in RAE
2008. Assuming a 40 year career, this would mean 50 new academic staff each year. In fact,
however, the data collected in Table 3 below shows that, over the past decade there have
been substantially more than this number of new appointments, averaging at least 70 per year.
This follows the retirals of many academics appointed in the expansion of the1960s, and
some expansion with the increase in UG numbers.
(ii) Is UK output of PhDs supplying the requisite numbers?
9.2 Based on the first destination data gathered for the 2004-2008 HESA surveys, we
estimate that about 10% of mathematical sciences PhDs become lecturers in UK HE. Since
demand for UK PhDs in the mathematical sciences greatly exceeds supply (see (1)), it would
be damaging for this percentage to increase, so that at least 500 UK mathematical sciences
PhDs are needed annually to maintain the academic research base from within.113 We
estimate that the UK in fact produces about 400 PhDs in the mathematical sciences annually.
However, as Table 3 shows, a considerable majority of the new appointments over
the past decade have not come from those educated in the UK. The UK is indeed
very fortunate to have been able to recruit such large numbers of top quality mathematical
scientists from around the world, but there are obvious risks arising from this development:
there are dangers of instability; and there is a serious risk that UK students will come to
113One might argue that overseas PhDs should correct any shortfall. But if the system works well, any supply from
overseas should be balanced by UK PhDs going to academic posts abroad.
117
believe that a career in mathematical sciences research is not a viable option for someone
educated in the UK.
Trained in the UK 348

Appointed up to and including 2000
Trained overseas 129
Trained in the UK 371

Appointed after 2000
Trained overseas 460
Table 3: Background of UK HE mathematical sciences staff in post in November

2011 114
(iii) What are the reasons for the shortfall in (ii)?
9.3 One reason is already clear from (1) and (9.2): the UK is producing insufficient
PhDs in the mathematical sciences to meet the current demand. The obstacle here is a
scarcity of funded scholarships – demand from prospective PhD students is vibrant, but many
good students have to be turned away due to lack of financial support.
9.4 A second reason concerns the pipeline from PhD to academic position. The
academic jobs market in the mathematical sciences is truly international, and few people are
appointed to a permanent UK academic position without a substantial research track record.
Given the short duration of the UK PhD (normally 3.5 funded years after first degree 115 ), UK
PhD graduates typically need one or more postdoctoral positions in order to successfully
apply for a permanent academic post. A good pipeline from UK PhD to academic career thus
needs around 100 postdoctoral positions per year for newly graduating PhDs in
the mathematical sciences. Unfortunately this is far from the case and we regard this as
a very serious threat to the research base. In recent years there have typically been (in
addition to a number of RC-funded posts as Research assistant) about 10 EPSRC-funded 3-
year Postdoctoral Fellowships per year in the mathematical sciences. These have been
discontinued by EPSRC in 2011, except in Statistics and Applied Probability, a decision which
has caused alarm and outrage in the community, and has prompted letters to the Prime
Minister from a group of prominent mathematical scientists and from 300 young
researchers. 116 Thus, a pipeline which was already badly malfunctioning has been
seriously damaged by EPSRC decisions.
10. What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of PhD students?
Are there alternative delivery models?
• The consensus view in the mathematical sciences community is that, in a

time of severe funding restrictions, Taught Course Centres will provide a
more sustainable option than Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs), particularly
114 From an LMS survey of UK mathematical sciences departments carried out in November 2011, for this report, 39
departments supplied data, out of 47 approached.
115 The typical length is two years more in the US and in much of Europe.
116 EPSRC's revised Fellowship schemes introduced in November 2011 continue these restrictions at the postdoctoral level.
118
since an emphasis on DTC training will threaten the geographic distribution

of PhD provision.
10.1 It is clear that the introduction of the Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) have
reduced the overall numbers of STEM PhD students funded by EPSRC, because of
their much higher per capita costs. Thus it costs around £75k in total to fund a 4-year PhD
from the Doctoral Training Grant, whereas the typical cost per 4-year PhD funded by a
DTC is close to £100k.
10.2 Two noteworthy features of research in the mathematical sciences are: (a) there is no
need to concentrate students to make use of expensive facilities; and (b) the key enabling
resource is the availability of really talented supervisors, who are rather widely spread
across institutions. Bearing these features in mind, the EPSRC-funded Taught Course
Centre model is a cost-effective way to provide core training to PhD students while
capturing most of the benefits of DTCs, but without the severe constraints, expenses and
damaging effects 117 of co-location. Several successful methods have been devised to work
within these constraints. 118 In the first model, there are several networks of universities (one
in Scotland, MAGIC in Northern England and one based in Oxford) with videolinked lecture
theatres by which the localised expertise can be distributed across students in many
institutions; these are supplemented by an annual conference in which students meet in
person. APTS is a longstanding organisation for training postgraduates in Statistics, training
annual cohorts of the order of 80 first-year Statistics PhD students by means of four
residential weeks per year, and NATCOR makes a similar arrangement in Operational
Research. Another group exploits the density of institutions in London to bring groups of
students together.
11. Should state funding be used to promote masters degrees and is the balance right between the
number of masters degree students and PhD students?
• State funding should be used to support masters degrees in areas of key

national need, such as in the mathematical sciences.
11.1 At present the main "state funding" at masters level in mathematical sciences is for
Integrated Masters degrees, with some RCUK funding for a few courses in areas of statistics
and operational research. In view of the lack of first degrees in statistics and operations
research, entry to professional and research posts in these disciplines now typically requires
prior study at masters level. There is thus a pressing requirement for state support for
masters degrees in such areas of particular national need. It is also to be regretted that a
number of excellent masters courses in applied and computational mathematics no longer
receive such support.
12. What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of graduates to pursue a
research career?
• The path from first degree through to PhD in the mathematical sciences
currently depends heavily on Integrated Masters degrees. As discussed above
117 Given restricted funding, concentrating large numbers of students in one place implies few or no students elsewhere.
118 www.epsrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Publications/reports/EPSRCReviewOfTCCs.pdf
119
((1) and (3)), this pathway is likely to be at risk in the face of high increases in
fees.
15 December 2011
120
Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), the British Computer Society (the
Chartered Institute for IT), and the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) –
Written evidence
Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), the British

Computer Society (the Chartered Institute for IT), and the UK
Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) – Written evidence
Submission to be found under British Computer Society (the Chartered Institute for IT)
121
evidence (QQ 434-468)
Cranfield University, Imperial College London and University

College London (UCL) – Oral evidence (QQ 434-468)
Evidence Session No.15. Heard in Public. Questions 434 - 468
TUESDAY 24 APRIL 2012

Members present

Lord Krebs
Lord Lucas
Lord Patel
Lord Rees of Ludlow
Lord Winston
________________
Professor David Bogle, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Head of UCL Graduate
School; Professor Clifford Friend, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Cranfield University; and
Professor Andrew George, Professor of Molecular Immunology and Director of the
Graduate School and the School of Professional Development, Imperial College London.
Q434 The Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome to our three witnesses. I remind the
Committee—no members of the public seem to be present—that we are being webcast.
Therefore, this session is being broadcast around the world, where audiences of millions
eagerly await the words of our witnesses. This is the final oral evidence session of this
inquiry, which is looking at the whole issue of higher education in STEM subjects, so we are
looking specifically at STEM. We particularly wanted a session which looked at postgraduate
education, as throughout this inquiry this area has been raised constantly by oral witnesses
and in written evidence. For the record, will each witness say who you are and where you
are from? If you want to make the briefest of introductory statements, please do so;
otherwise, we will get on with the questions. I will start with Professor Bogle.
Professor Bogle: I am David Bogle. I am head of the graduate school at UCL and have
responsibility for all the postgraduates at UCL. Mostly, the graduate school services support
the doctoral students. However, there are 4,000 doctoral students and about 7,500 masters
students.
The Chairman: Do you have a doctoral training centre?
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Professor Bogle: We have several, yes. However, I particularly welcome this focus on
postgraduate matters, which I do not think have been properly looked at in the past,
particularly as regards the masters areas. Our concerns are about students being able to
support themselves through masters, the lack of any support for them, how that might affect
disadvantaged students from poorer backgrounds with their increased loans and the fact that
so many professions now require a masters degree for entry, which means that there is a
real problem about access to the professions.
The Chairman: I am going to come on to masters in a second, so I am glad that you have
raised that.
Professor Friend: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Clifford Friend. I am the deputy
VC at Cranfield University, which is the UK’s only wholly postgraduate STEM university so
this afternoon’s discussion is absolutely mission critical. We operate right at the interface
with the world of business so this is about not only the core postgraduate T and
postgraduate R skills—on which I shall be interested to share views with you—but its impact
for the economy in particular.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Professor George: My name is Andrew George. I am professor of immunology at Imperial
College. I am also director of the graduate school there. We have about 6,300 students in
our graduate school, of whom 3,000 are masters and roughly 3,300 are doctoral students. I
am also director of the school of professional development, which will soon be charged with
developing professional skills and transferable skills for all students in the college, including
undergraduates. My interest is the funding gap that students need to navigate when they
finish their undergraduate studies and proceed to study for a masters level qualification that
equips them to do a PhD.
Q435 The Chairman: Thank you for that. I especially thank you for coming at such short
notice, which we appreciate. My question to Professor Bogle concerns masters students.
We have heard a lot about the impact of all sorts of government policies on masters
students. However, we have not been given a clear explanation of the purpose of stand-
alone masters courses. Perhaps you could give us your view.
Professor Bogle: There is no single view, not surprisingly. There is a very wide diversity at
UCL. I think that we have 300 masters programmes. I normally divide them into two groups:
one group comprises professional preparation masters courses, which prepare people for
study beyond the bachelor level and deepen their skills and are particularly aligned to
professions such as engineering, architecture, the built environment and medical areas; the
second group comprises a large number of research preparation masters, which are more
geared, although not always, towards a deeper understanding of the discipline and involved
in acquiring a set of research skills. Indeed, I would add a third group: there is a thing called
an MRes programme, which is very much a research masters comprising a series of small-
scale research projects that act as direct pipelines into many of our doctoral training centres,
for example.
Q436 The Chairman: What should be the role of Government in masters and doctoral
programmes?
Professor Bogle: There is a difference between those two. The MRes programme is very
much a pipeline into doctoral study. It is very important for us to maintain that pipeline.
Therefore, there is a clear role for Government in supporting that. As regards the
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professional programmes, you could argue that there is a need for upskilling and providing
skills that are needed for the economy. The aim of these programmes is to advance
individuals’ skills beyond the bachelor level to enable them to enter the employment market.
Many disciplines now have integrated undergraduate masters courses. These professional
programmes are more like those courses.
The Chairman: Would you therefore make that clear distinction between those two?
Professor Bogle: Yes.
Q437 Lord Cunningham of Felling: When you designed these processes that you are
applying to your masters students and your PhD students, was there significant input into
that from outside UCL, from industry, commerce and the professions?
Professor Bogle: In most of the professional masters courses, yes, particularly when they
were set up. When we set up a new programme, we always seek outside advice and
evidence of a market and demand from employers. That was the case in pretty well all the
professional programmes. That was also the case with the research programmes and to
some extent with the MRes programmes and the more traditional research masters in some
of the arts and humanities disciplines, but we are not discussing those here.
The Chairman: Professor Friend, do you have anything to add?
Professor Friend: I hope I will be allowed to add two points, one to the first question and
one to the second. As regards the nuance, the answer from David Bogle about the nature—
The Chairman: You can even disagree if you want to.
Professor Friend: This is too much like the academic meeting from which I have come.
First, we make a clear distinction between the extended undergraduate masters course—a
question was asked about the stand-alone programme—which has historically been driven
by learned professional bodies that wanted to ensure that, when people exit from those
programmes, they have core the competences and discipline base. However, rather like the
Monty Python sketch, I would say that there are not two but four types of masters, which
are about: deepening discipline; translating to discipline, where there is a vocational element;
those that have—we have a very specific focus here because of how my institution chooses
to operate—a multidisciplinary thematic or sector focus, where things start to get very
clearly focused on economic development and the economy; and then a related set of
programmes that are much more closed and that are for the world of business.
To pick up the question about who should fund, the funding should come from learners for
those courses that are about developing or deepening discipline. If a programme seeks to
enhance skills in the economy, there should be the traditional partial subsidy from the state.
As regards translating to discipline, we believe passionately that that is a strong driver that is
doing something for the economy. There should be a mixed economy involving
Government, the learner and business for this third dimension of general thematic sector-
focused activity, which is not focused on the needs of a particular company or the supply
chain of a company. For the fourth category, the business should pay.
The Chairman: With the greatest of respect, I do not see any of that in the current
funding models. Do you?
Professor Friend: I certainly see that in our programmes—
The Chairman: I mean in the government programmes.
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Professor Friend: By “government”, do you mean the Higher Education Funding Council for
England?
The Chairman: In the funding for masters and doctoral programmes, do you think that
current government policy underpins the vision that you have outlined?
Professor Friend: I have not commented on the quantum—the size—of that government
subsidy, but we do receive an element of funding from HEFCE for those sorts of
programmes.
To pick up the question about business, in our programme we were rather thrown by an
invitation from HEFCE, when it asked us one day, “Would you like to tell us what
proportion of your programmes have industrial input into shaping the programme and in
educating?” We thought that was a trick question of some kind by which we were being led
down the path into failing, because every programme or suite of related programmes has
very strong engagement because of our particular position in the higher education market.
The Chairman: Professor George?
Professor George: I would nuance in a slightly different way, but I would be in broad
agreement with that. For the vocational type of masters, I would also differentiate between
two sorts: those taken by recent graduates, which are often discipline hopping or deepening,
and those taken by people who are already in work—for example, a lot of our medical
colleagues often come back as mature students and are in work—which is a slightly different
category.
In our case, I guess that I would say that our differentiation between some of our vocational
qualifications and the integrated masters programme is perhaps not as clear-cut as at other
universities. For example, in engineering, where all our undergraduates in effect do a four-
year integrated masters and walk out with an MEng, there is obviously considerable overlap
there with our masters programme, which is often taken more by overseas students or
external students who are coming to Imperial to get the extra educational benefit or
whatever that Imperial gives them. There is perhaps a grey area there between our
integrated masters and our stand-alone masters. Obviously, for funding streams, that is going
to cause us issues going forward, because the integrated masters is funded as an
undergraduate programme rather than a postgraduate programme and there are immense
dangers of inequity and so on there.
On the question of input from industry, similar to my colleagues, all our masters courses
when they are first set up have to go to two academic reviewers and two stakeholder
reviewers, who are normally drawn from industry or from the NHS if that is appropriate. All
our courses will go through that. All our CDTs that have 1+3s have an industrial panel that
oversees them. Many of our departments that are industry facing would have an industrial
advisory panel. To us, that is absolutely core, but you would expect that from our mission.
Q438 Lord Krebs: I want to make a couple of short points. The first follows up Professor
George’s comment about masters degrees for overseas students. There is a perception—
which may be incorrect, so I would be interested in your view—that some universities have
set up masters degrees basically as cash generators, whereby they can charge overseas
students full fees to come and do a masters degree. Is that a significant component of
masters provision in universities, or is the perception that some people have a
misconception about what is going on?
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Professor George: Speaking for Imperial, I would say that there is no doubt that, when we
set up a new masters course and do our market research, we obviously take into account
the overseas market as part of that. I think that we would not be looking to set up a masters
course at Imperial that was aimed only at overseas students. There are courses that have a
lot of international students on them, but often those courses will be allied with an MEng or
a four-year integrated masters course. So, although those look like they are predominantly
for overseas or international students, in actual fact that slightly belies that point. In our case,
obviously we are cognisant of the overseas market and we do market research in the
overseas market, but I do not think that we would set up a course that was aimed only at
overseas students. However, it is an important part of our financial planning. At the moment,
we do not get the full costs of the masters from the home students, so if you are going to
plan a course, you have to plan it to have a proportion of overseas students for financial
reasons—although there are also other good reasons for having a good proportion of
overseas students.
Q439 Lord Patel: The question that I want to ask is of a similar nature, so let me follow
up on the same theme. We have heard that, on certain masters courses, the number of
overseas students is quite high—sometimes as high as 70%. Is that not detrimental?
Professor George: Speaking from Imperial’s point of view, I know that we have some
courses where the overseas component would appear at first glance to be of that order of
magnitude, but, as I said, those courses are often paired with an integrated masters on which
more of our home students would be taught at the same level. It is really important to
remember that overseas students also bring to the college a vibrancy and international
expertise for our home students, so I think that we need to be careful to welcome our
overseas students for what they bring—they are very good students. If a masters course had
70% of students from overseas and was overdependent on one country, there would
obviously be a fear about resilience and about the ability to cope with changing funding
patterns overseas. That is a concern that we need to look out for to ensure that no
individual masters course is over-reliant on one country or one funder. But the fact that we
have a lot of overseas students brings a lot both to our home students and to our overseas
students, and I would support that.
Professor Bogle: I would support that in the sense that we have a very strong educational
system and a very advanced research base in this country, and it is rather to our credit that
we are very attractive to overseas students. I do not recognise the figure of 70%, but I think
that there probably are some courses with that size and, as Andrew George has said, that is
a problem if you become very reliant on single markets. However, masters-level courses are
a very globalised, international activity. What we do need to do is to ensure that such
students are properly inducted and properly integrated with the British system, and perhaps
we could be better at that.
Q440 The Chairman: With the agreement of Committee colleagues, I am going to jump
into questions on funding. We seem to have started on funding and I would rather follow
that theme. Lord Winston has a question on this.
Q441 Lord Winston: The Lord Chairman tries to throw me as much and as often as he
possibly can.
Obviously, the issue has been the constant erosion of public funding for postgraduate
courses such as masters courses. What impact do you think this lack of funding will have on
postgraduate STEM masters courses? Where do we go?
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Professor Friend: I will have a first go at that one.
We are deeply concerned about the erosion of the funding council subsidy supporting STEM
subjects, counterbalanced with—if that situation persists and the requirement to cover the
cost of the programme shifts to the learner—the non-availability of finance for the learner,
who is supposed to step in. There just seems to be a vacuum around the funding. We are
grateful to the funding council for at least identifying the issue and putting in place some
short-term provision to see us through the interregnum, but we are deeply concerned about
what that will mean in two to three years’ time. We do not know what the impact will be of
students carrying that debt. I am deeply concerned that we will lose capacity in the sector
while we are waiting to collect the data.
Q442 Lord Winston: I was wondering also, given that the three of you represent fairly
technical universities, what you thought the cost of a masters course in your subject might
be. What would happen if you reduced the fees, which has been suggested?
Professor Friend: I shall have a go at that, although it might surprise these gentlemen.
When we speak with the funding council—I should put on the table the fact that Cranfield
University is in receipt of exceptional funding in addition to its core funding—we kind of sit
in a rather interesting situation. Lord Winston will understand this from his Royal College of
Music background, but we are almost conservatoire-like in our educational offering, which
carries a cost with it. We would estimate that there is no differential between what we
charge an international student on a mainstream STEM programme—about £16,000 per
annum at the moment—and the real cost of the UK/EU student. How then do we charge
the sticker price that we charge to the learner? We do that by a combination of: the HEFCE
subsidy, or government subsidy, to our STEM programmes; what the learner will pay, which
is unregulated by the funding council but is regulated by the student market; and, on many of
our programmes, we will fill the gap using industrial funding.
Q443 Lord Winston: In the long term, who do you feel will fund UK students doing
stand-alone masters courses? Sorry, the acoustics in this Room are dreadful, so let me
repeat the question. Who is going to be responsible for funding UK students doing stand-
alone masters courses?
Professor Bogle: I think that we are going to see this coming much more towards the
student, and that is what concerns us. If students do not have access to decent financial
support, particularly if they come from poorer backgrounds, they just will not have access to
these courses. This is a particular problem for home students. Indeed, I hear that this year
we have had a significant drop in home student applications, even if the number of
applications from overseas is still going up. It concerns me also that we have many
continental competitors. There is a lot of talk about undergraduates going overseas—I do
not see that happening so much—but at the masters level, where the student might need to
go away for only a year, when people are in their early 20s that is a much more attractive
proposition. We could then be losing them forever, and that is a real matter of concern.
Q444 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Is it your view that Britain and the British economy
are suffering because we do not produce sufficient students with qualifications in STEM
subjects? My supplementary to that is: are the present funding arrangements going to
improve that situation or make it worse?
The Chairman: This is about masters and postgraduate level courses.
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Professor Friend: I sit on the CBI’s east of England regional council and whenever we get
into any discussion that gets close to the issue of high-level skills and universities, the
challenge that is bowled back to us is that there is a major problem with the STEM skills of
people coming out of both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. In fact, probably
the currency is increasingly moving towards M level through the integrated undergraduate
masters programme—or extended undergraduate programme, or whatever language you
want to use—or the stand-alone masters. I was at an event last night where a major vice-
president from BT was saying the same thing. So this is everywhere.
Professor George: Absolutely, I totally agree with that. We also need to say that it is not
just a question of affording but of attracting the very best students to do M-level subjects
and postgraduate studies. If, on coming out of even a three-year undergraduate course with
£60,000-worth of debt of various sorts, your options are either to spend £15,000 on course
costs plus £11,000 in living costs in order to do an M-level subject and then go on to do a
PhD with an uncertain future or to go into the banking industry, there is a major worry that
we will start losing students in that way. Also, while we talk about widening access and
things like that, the students that we will keep are probably the students who can either rely
on the bank of mum and dad or those who already have a history in their family of going to
do these courses, but we are going to miss out on bright students and good students.
Q445 Lord Winston: Do you lose out on good students for MSc courses?
Professor George: At the moment the issue already comes up—even though we are not
charging these very high fees, which we will likely have to charge now—because of living
costs. How are the students going to get the money to live? At the moment, the issue comes
up with the fact that it costs, let us say, £11,000 to live in London, which is already quite
painful for them. We lose students because they try to raise funding for that but they cannot
make it.
The Chairman: I am trying to get in as many Members as I can. We will take a question
from Baroness Perry and then Lord Lucas and then go back to Lord Winston.
Q446 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I want to concentrate on the question of what

Professor George called the gap between the funding arrangements—or loan
arrangements—that are in place for the undergraduates and, with any luck, the research
council funding for the PhD. On the gap in the middle, is there a possibility of restructuring
postgraduate education so that people could somehow move straight on to something called
a PhD programme. Clearly, the MPhil to DPhil route used to exist and some American
universities have that, where the first year is a research training year but is still part of the
PhD programme. I would have thought that the research councils would have been fairly
sympathetic to that.
Professor George: Through the doctoral training centres, the research councils already fund
1+3 courses, which provide, if you like, that sort of route and are very attractive to
students. We are able to recruit the very best home students on those. In a way, the trouble
with that as a total model—you could argue that, as a total model, you should accept all such
students on to a masters-level programme that then runs through to a PhD programme,
which would remove that gap—is that you would need to be able to spot those students
right at the very beginning, whereas there will be, and there has to be, a tail-off of students.
Therefore, one would need to be slightly more imaginative about the way in which you did
that. However, for those going straight through to research, as Professor Bogle said, you
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could imagine having a system whereby a level of funding was provided for certain MRes
courses that would then take you through to PhD funding for appropriate numbers.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: I should have thought that spotting the potential
doctorate student would be less difficult in the STEM subjects than perhaps in some of the
humanities.
Professor George: I think that it is less difficult, but all of us have had students coming to us
with glowing CVs from very good universities who have not fulfilled that potential when
pursuing their first level of extended research. However, I agree that the relevant
proportion would be less than half.
Professor Bogle: Again, with humanities students in our institution the situation is very
different. I am thinking about people coming in. However, we have already got to the four
plus four point quite often—that is, a four-year undergraduate programme followed by four-
year doctoral programmes through these doctoral training centres, with, typically, an MRes
1+3 in that doctoral programme. Sometimes we take them straight on to a doctoral
programme after four years. Therefore, this process is already happening. It is a helpful
process and aligns us better with European norms. Interestingly, there is a perverse problem
with HEFCE in that it will fund only three years of fees for research degrees, so if you have
the 1+3 scenario you actually get only three years, which is completely contrary to what the
research councils are encouraged to do, so that is a problem.
Q447 Lord Lucas: For the pupils coming through who do not have the resources to
provide £25,000-worth of finance, what is going to be the crucial answer? Is it a matter of
extending student finance or of looking in other directions that require more of a decision
by you as to whether the students really ought to be doing a masters because there is
industrial sponsorship or they are in a 1+3 scenario rather than just letting them run up
their debt when the masters will not contribute to their future?
Professor Bogle: I think that those days have passed. The expectation of many employers,
certainly at the professional level, is for employees to have a masters degree. We have had
various discussions about the erosion of standards at different levels which I shall not
rehearse here, but I think the consequence of that is that a masters degree is required for
employment at the professional level. It is mandatory for chartered engineering and
necessary for architecture, although medicine is slightly different. All the blue chips are
looking to employ M-level people. The masters degree has become the differentiator.
Therefore, I am afraid that means that this matter is down to the individual to address.
Q448 Lord Lucas: In a lot of areas this has caused totally unnecessary inflation. We are
now demanding undergraduate degrees for jobs for which they are really not needed. Part of
the response of industry to the imposition of fees has been to look at this again and to go
for apprenticeships and other ways of getting people in that do not put this high step in their
way. Is that not perhaps the answer to the masters problem?
Professor Bogle: I do not believe so because at the masters level we are talking about
advanced and professional disciplines and sophisticated people. You could argue that many
other jobs should not be graduate-level jobs. However, the horse has bolted and the stable
door is shut in that regard. Employers all expect graduate-level qualifications nowadays on
the part of their employees. That process was all about raising skill levels across the whole
economy. I think that was the rationale behind it in the first place.
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Professor Friend: I wish to refer to a nuance around the edges of this matter. We feel
strongly that the undergraduate level is predominantly about discipline formation that will
become embedded for life. As we move towards wanting a knowledge-based economy—that
is a rather hackneyed phrase—where we need more of the skills we are discussing, which
will translate over time as we build different sectors, the delivery of that skills development
needs to become embedded. That is what we hear. You might challenge business to pay for
that. Our experience is that business does pay when there is a very clear gain for a business
and its supply chain. Business will contribute as one of the triumvirate of funders where that
is appropriate and where the relevant skills are being translated and developed for the
broader economy. There is an expectation that business, the state in some form and the
learner should contribute to funding, thereby providing an appropriate balance underpinning
the skills needed to develop the broader future of the economy.
Q449 The Chairman: Before I come back to Lord Winston, I should say that people are
telling us what the problem is as regards a funding model for the future. I think there is a
general acceptance that no Government of any political persuasion in the near future will
come up with big pots of money to support students, so how are we going to deal with this
issue, particularly as regards what I call taught masters, which is the point that I started with?
We have established that there is a glimmer of hope of getting some funding for research
masters through the research councils. However, are we saying that students will have to
fund taught masters, in which case can you come up with a golden idea as to how we can
deal with this? We will put it to the Government.
Professor George: If we accept that the research masters point is a slightly separate one, as
we have discussed, and we are talking about the professional masters point, some form of
loans system equivalent to the undergraduate loans system seems to me an equitable way
forward. It seems to be a way of sharing the cost. If industry and sponsors contributed to
that loan, some sort of payback could be possible. If that is not the case, we will set up some
inequitable drivers within the integrated masters system whereby students undertaking a
four-year programme that includes an M-level qualification have access to a loans system but
those who do stand-alone masters do not. I think such a process will dissuade some people
and cut down the volume of applicants, but that is an inevitable consequence of shifting the
funding away from the Government, which seems to me to be the realistic starting point
according to what you are telling me.
The Chairman: Unless you disagree with where I think the starting point is.
Professor George: I wish I could, but I think that I do not.
The Chairman: If you agree, do you have any other ideas?
Professor Bogle: What is missing is the idea of differentiating between different types of
masters courses to see whether the balance that Professor Friend was talking about could
be modulated in some way through the funding mechanisms and the loans system.
The Chairman: Professor Bogle, it is difficult enough with just two models. If you have
these variations and what have you, given that you guys are brilliant at manipulating the
system—I was going to say fiddling the system—we will have a difficult situation. Do you
want to come in very briefly, Lord Cunningham?
Q450 Lord Cunningham of Felling: I want to ask Professor Friend a question in

respect of what he said a few moments ago about good people in business and industry
contributing to funding models. Does this apply just at your institution, or is it spreading out
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across higher institutions generally? Is it getting easier? Is there a good learning curve among
industrialists and people in the private sector, or is it hitting the buffers?
Professor Friend: I sought permission from the group director of finance and resources to
reveal a figure to the Committee, which I revealed to the gentlemen sitting at either side of
me just before we came in. This concerns predominantly the UK as we are deeply
concerned about the UK STEM pipeline going through the masters. As an institution we are
already putting £5 million-worth of bursaries into these career men and women. We find
that resource from the business sector.
Q451 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Is it getting easier to find it?

Professor Friend: I am surprised that we have managed to maintain the level of income.
However, as we start to look forward, given that we are all in budget formation period, the
income is softening dramatically as we sit at the bottom of this U-shaped recession. We
thought that it would soften earlier. It has not done so, but the signs are that it is beginning
to soften. This is not philanthropic giving—
Lord Cunningham of Felling: No, of course not. Why should it be?
Professor Friend: In our system, if you have a research intensive masters programme that is
thematic and sectoral, it is possible to sell the project resource provided the students
understand that that is the basis of the programme. Our experience is that that is our
attraction for these men and women. Of course, the programme of work must be attractive
to the sector from which you are trying to draw down the funding. It is a distinctive model,
although I would not wish to mislead the Committee that it is a panacea for the funding gap
across the sector.
The Chairman: I am going to leave that there and come back to Lord Winston, who has
been very patient.
Q452 Lord Winston: Briefly, as regards HEFCE’s funding of strategically important and
vulnerable subjects, do you think that the funding for postgraduates is sufficient?
Professor George: For home and EU students it does not cover the costs that we incur in
teaching them.
Professor Bogle: All that the funding is doing at the moment is helping us to keep the fees
down to a little bit less than what they might otherwise be, but it is a long way from
covering the cost of delivery. We need to discuss who should be paying and what the
balance should be. At the moment, the balance is becoming heavily skewed towards the
individual.
Professor Friend: Given our tuition fee analysis, I estimate that the change that has been
introduced for the year that we are moving into, with the alteration in the STEM price
bands, automatically creates for the learner probably a £2,000 or £3,000 instant increase just
to stand still.
Q453 Lord Winston: The other issue is the definition of what a SIVS should be. Do you
think that we have the right things in the box? In its submission to HEFCE, the British
Academy—I have this on the web—says, “This is not straightforward”, which I think is
rather a nice understatement. Do you think that certain subjects should be included which
are not?
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Professor Bogle: Undoubtedly, and they could potentially change as we see different needs
and different demands from students. However, the last thing that we want is uncertainty, so
this is quite difficult. A lot of this concerns the hard-science subjects anyway and they are the
ones we really want to see developed, so I think in that sense the balance is broadly right.
The Chairman: I am going to leave that there. A lot of the responses so far are opinions
rather than hard facts, though we were interested in the £5 million that you spend on
bursaries. Baroness Hilton is going to try to get some hard facts.
Q454 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Possibly. Part of what we are looking at is the
mismatch between the qualifications from universities and what employers are looking for.
To some extent, at undergraduate level data is collected about the destination of students
and about whether their employers are satisfied with what they are getting. To what extent
do your institutions collect data on postgraduates? We have a dearth on information as to
whether institutions know where their students are going and whether their employers are
happy about what they are getting.
Professor George: We collect data, but it is not very good data because the HESA rules for
collecting data on postgraduate students make no sense at all. Therefore, the data that we
have had to collect up until now has not been good-quality data. The rules are now changing,
so going forward I think that it is vital that we now collect good-quality data. I guess that I
would make a plea that quality data be differentiated not just between masters and PGR
courses but also between the different types of course that we do—we are broadly talking
about vocational and research orientated. I think that we need to be careful to do that.
Especially for PGR data, we also need to look at data that covers more than six months after
leaving, which is a particularly useless piece of data. For PGR more than for undergraduate
courses, I think that we need to be looking more at longitudinal and longer-term data. But
the data is very poor at the moment.
The Chairman: Do you agree?
Professor Friend: I absolutely agree. The only additional thing that I would add, which I am
sure my colleagues would do as well, is that we are very interested in this from the point of
view of managing our alumni. We work very hard to get this data to know where they go
and how useful they might be to us, but that is also a challenge. The only other point that I
would add, given the area in which we operate—I have shared our particular part of this
market with Members of the Committee—is that we actually go out and sound out the
employers. We know that there are significant UK global players that take significant
proportions of our PGT graduates, so we go out and survey them directly.
Professor Bogle: We also have very patchy data. We attempt to get more on the masters-
level students particularly around destinations, but I think that this is really important and
really does need to be collected much more comprehensively. For us, it is all part of the
same process that we have for undergraduates. However, I would very much like to support
what Andrew George was saying, because the PGR thing is something completely different
but we are always being pushed into taking this data as if it was the same as the others, when
it is completely different. There is a particular perversity in the six-month data point for
PGR, which for some reason has to be taken right in the middle of when people are writing
up, so of course they are not properly working. That gives a completely wrong picture.
Q455 Lord Lucas: But you could collect a lot of this data yourselves if you got together
and decided to do it. You do not really need to wait for HESA.
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Professor George: For the HESA data, we are meant to follow its protocols for collecting
the data and it does not approve if we collect the data otherwise.
The Chairman: But you run HESA.
Professor George: It is changing, and HESA is now changing its rules.
The Chairman: Sorry, Lord Lucas, I got excited there.
Q456 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I would like to shift the discussion towards PhD doctoral
training. Given the trend towards concentration, with the development of the doctoral
training centres, what does that imply for the distribution of post-docs, PhDs and so on?
Professor George: I am sure that we all have things to say on this one. On the DTCs—or
CTDs, depending on which research council you are talking about—we welcome them
because they have proved a very good way for us to invest in research either in developing
areas or in interdisciplinary areas, as has been the case with most of our doctoral training
centres that have been EPSRC funded. With the extra money involved in them, the doctoral
training centres have also been very good at allowing us to experiment with new modes of
delivery, new ways of providing transferable skills and new ways of cohort building, which we
are now, where appropriate, rolling out to our wider PhD students. I think that they are a
very vibrant part of the environment for PhD students. Like a lot of universities, we are
moving towards the situation of learning from these centres about cohort building for, if you
like, unfunded doctoral training centres—we will probably call them something different—
and that is what we are moving to.
However, I would be chary—and I think that it would be unfortunate—if a very much larger
proportion of the funding were to go into the doctoral training centres as the mode for
funding. The reason why I say that is that, while being inside one of these means that you are
well funded and you have a lot of studentships, it does worry me that if you are working on
research that is not sexy at the moment or if your face does not fit, it will be difficult to be
innovative and get new research. Certainly looking back at my career, I know that I have had
doctoral or PhD students who would have fit right into a doctoral training centre, but some
of my best research has been done on things that have been outside those sorts of remits.
While I think that there is an awful lot that is good about them, I would be wary about
concentrating much more funding in them compared to the freer funding that a department
or an individual can use.
Professor Friend: We are in exactly the same situation from our viewpoint. We have moved
completely to doctoral training centres—we call them DTCs—many of which are unfunded.
We recognise the value of the funded DTCs, particularly where they are multi-institution. I
think that we all have multi-institution doctoral training centres.
I, too, have concerns. When you operate a stand-alone doctoral training centre that is not
linked to a particular funding council, you see fantastic value. You see the ability to take the
individual funded students, who would operate under an individual academic, and embed
them in this peer-support network that deals with the whole question of transferable skills. I
would be very concerned if there was more and more concentration on funded doctoral
training centres.
Another dimension to doctoral training centres, from our particular positioning in the
marketplace, is that there is a recognition that doctoral training is about filling the pipeline
not only for future academic researchers and future R&D researchers within the business
world but, from our viewpoint, for this interesting third category—we often use this North
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American term—of the catchers. These are not the people who will go into a business R&D
department but the ones who will be out there scouting for innovation in companies. If we
are moving forward into this knowledge-based economy, it seems to us that those sorts of
people are very under-represented in UK businesses. The skills set is rather different from
that of the R&D-focused doctoral student, and DTCs are just the right environment in which
to develop those skills.
Professor Bogle: Our view is not dissimilar, but we have been putting lots into doctoral
training centres and we seem to have been very successful in the EPSRC competitions for
them. What doctoral training centres have really been able to do is disrupt the rather
disciplinary-based concentration of doctoral study, when doctoral study is by its very nature
moving towards the edge of boundaries of disciplines. In that sense, I think that doctoral
training centres have been very successful and they have also allowed a bigger concentration
around a very strong research environment. The way that they work for us is that they bring
in a very different collection or pool of potential supervisors from a much broader range of
disciplines, so I think that they have been very successful.
However, there needs to be a balance. Doctoral training centres need to be drawn not too
tightly, because if they are very focused they lose that benefit—there has been some
evidence of that—but there still need to be ways of supporting those new growth areas in
the interstices that could otherwise be lost. Research councils such as the EPSRC have a
doctoral training grant, but the balance between the two is quite important. Interestingly,
some of the other research councils, such as the ESRC, do not have that mechanism.
Professor George: Just picking up on what Professor Friend said, I might add that some of
these doctoral training centres can also be more for EngDs, which can be a very specific
form of training for a specific type of person. We have found that to be very valuable—
surprisingly so.
Professor Friend: On the EngD environment, which is a fantastic doctoral experience for
the business world, I would just add that our experience is that, if the funded part of the
doctoral centre is not there, being able to deliver EngD is a big, big challenge.
Professor George: Yes, we only do it on a funded basis.
Q457 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Is it your view that we ought to move towards the
American graduate school model, where getting a PhD requires not only a thesis but
exposure to a range of high-level courses? That has not always happened in a traditional PhD
in this country.
Professor Bogle: In this new 1+3 model, the first year provides some more advanced skills,
but the real strength of the 1+3 is that it gives exposure to a range of different research
problems so that we make a more informed choice about the right project for the individual.
Actually, I think that is potentially an even stronger model than the American model, where
there are perhaps too many taught courses, which leads to very long completion times.
Q458 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I have just one more question. What do you think that we
should say to, for example, the outstanding mathematician working in a very small
department in a university who cannot get his graduate studentship? Should such students
get involved in a network?
Professor Bogle: I think that is the answer. There needs to be some sort of similar based
network that is not institutional based. That could be a doctoral training centre that crosses
a wide range of institutions in the way that the AHRC ones increasingly do.
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Professor George: In a well-being survey of our students, we found out that most of our
students are happy but we have some students who are unhappy and are failing, and those
are the students who are isolated. Those are the very students that we need to get into
some sort of network. If you are an isolated person in mathematics or biochemistry or
anywhere else, you have to get involved in a network. That is what rescues them.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: I ask the question because the three of you are all from fairly large
institutions, but I expect that it is slightly different for someone in a very small university.
Professor George: However, we share some of our doctoral training centres with other
institutions. Again, it is amazing that, if early on you include some residential courses, people
then keep up on networking with each other—through Facebook, Twitter and all these
things that I do not fully understand—and they are always interacting with each other.
Q459 Lord Krebs: If I may, Lord Chairman, I want to refer back to the earlier discussion
about MRes courses that Professor Bogle brought up. The one thing that is not clear in my
mind, and on which I would like guidance from the professor, concerns the DTC model
where students spend the first year basically in lab rotations and then go on to their PhD
research. Does that obviate the need for an MRes?
Professor Bogle: That is an MRes. That is what I would see as being an MRes.
Q460 Lord Krebs: Can you see an MRes as being part of the DTC programme?
Professor Bogle: Yes, that is what happens. Those rotations occur. In my opinion an MRes
comprises wet subjects, dry subjects, a series of different projects plus some taught courses.
Some of the four-year programmes tackle those separately. Personally, I prefer there to be
an exit at the end of the relevant year with the potential to get an MRes so that if somebody
decides it is not for them they can make a graceful exit. However, the Wellcome Trust does
not do it that way.
The Chairman: Lord Winston, do you want to come in here?
Lord Winston: Professor Bogle has answered my question.
Q461 Lord Krebs: How useful is Vitae’s researcher development framework for doctoral
students in the professors’ institutions?
Professor Bogle: We have a development programme for our doctoral students. We have a
personal development tool and the researcher development framework is right at the centre
of that. It is much better than what was on offer previously. I welcome the fact that it was
developed at a national level to produce something that is useful and fit for purpose. Our
whole training programme is based around the taxonomy within the researcher
development framework.
Professor George: We are slightly different. We are totally compliant with the researcher
development framework and have mapped all our courses based on it—it informs things
back-room, if you like—but we do not use it front of house with the students; our people
who are delivering it do not find it a useful tool to that extent. Over the past couple of years
we have been keen to develop, with Professor Bogle’s help, a series of what we call the
Imperial attributes and we have thought about what we want an Imperial student to look
like. This is still work in development and is compliant with the researcher development
framework. We want that work to concentrate on the front end in terms of what we
expect from our students, and for the students to be aware of what we expect from them as
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Imperial students and what we will give to them to help them achieve those expectations.
However, it is a question of degree rather than anything else.
Professor Friend: We are in an identical position to that described by Professor George.
The measure fits our corporate mission, which is not to run a lot of parallel initiatives but to
embed into the core of the activity delivered for doctoral students through the DTC.
Q462 Lord Krebs: How is the framework relevant to students who go into employment
outside research?
Professor Bogle: It comprises a very broadly drawn taxonomy. The relevant skills can be
applied generally across a range of areas, although some are specific. We seek to develop
researchers with a set of research skills. Indeed, we seek to develop creative, critical and
autonomous intellectual risk takers. The League of European Research Universities
produced a report on doctoral training and I chaired the body which produced that report.
We want researchers to have that range of skills. Those creative, critical skills are just as
applicable in government and the charitable sector as they are in research activities.
Rigorous, evidence-based judgments need to be produced to solve difficult problems, and
that is what the PhD does par excellence.
The Chairman: Do you want to come in, Lord Lucas?
Q463 Lord Lucas: What do you think of Vitae itself? Its website is a mess of
impenetrable, meaningless guff. I was delighted to hear you say that you find it useful, but I
would never have guessed that from trying to read up about it.
Professor Bogle: It is probably more useful for people within the community than for those
outside it. I was talking particularly about its framework, which we find useful. I would not
like to comment on the website. All websites are a bit iffy sometimes, are they not?
The Chairman: Leaving that compliment about the website, we move on to quality. Before
Lady Perry asks her question, I should say that we are desperately running out of time so I
hope that the witnesses will answer as briefly as possible.
Q464 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I have a brief question about the metrics of
quality research supervision. Is the quality of the research output of a supervisor the best
metric, or are there other issues which would be more appropriate or at least additional?
Professor Bogle: That is a very interesting question. A strong research environment has to
be the primary consideration but, as always, it is not the only one. The quality of supervisors’
training has to be a consideration, as do the average time for completion and the
destinations. All those things ought to be seen as parts of that metric.
Professor George: The problem that we have is being aware that the product of the PhD is
the student, not the research. It has taken a number of years for universities to appreciate
that. However, the research output is the easiest thing to measure and it must be measured.
We ought first to consider destination data. We need to appreciate that, although we are
trying to produce good researchers, only a minority of our students will be superstars and
there has to be a leaky pipe leading up to that. That leaky pipe is okay because the things
that are leaking out of it are achieving good outcomes in other places. Therefore, we need
to look at destination data as well as research output. The one thing I would add to what
Professor Bogle has said is something about critical mass. It is important to have critical
mass. If one does not have it at the institution, it ought to be established through a network.
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Professor Friend: I thought you had hit on a moment of divergence between us but it has
turned to be convergence. I wish to offer a personal view from my institution on an
alternative or proxy for this consideration. Some of these measures are captured within a
sub-part of the research excellence framework, but academic output is not. I am talking
about the research environment available to a PhD student. My other concern is that we
should not measure only a part of academic output. I am going to sound a little repetitive
here, but we may be interested in looking at the output of researchers in terms of industrial
or business environments. However, certain areas of research may not be captured in
conventional RAE or REF terms. There is a proxy for that at the moment and it is called
business QR. It may be good or it may not be, but it is an alternative.
Q465 Baroness Perry of Southwark: We have all experienced brilliant researchers who
are not necessarily very interested in training the next generation of PhD students and,
indeed, in whose labs the new student sometimes has a pretty lonely time. Do you think that
there is a mechanism for involving industry more? You have suggested that the student’s
destination would be part of that, but could industry be more involved in setting the
standards for postgraduate STEM provision?
Professor Bogle: Are you talking about PGR degrees?
Baroness Perry of Southwark: Yes, I am talking about PhDs, not the stand-alone
masters.
Professor Bogle: We have to remember that right at the core of what we do is developing
these creative individuals who will take a difficult new idea right the way through to
completion. I think that there is a role for involving industry—it is involved in a lot of
doctoral training centres—but, as an academic community, we have to have a view that this
is the pinnacle of our qualifications and we need to own it.
Professor George: I think that is absolutely right. All of us in our departments know who
the good supervisors are and who the less good supervisors are—of course we do—but
one of the advantages of the doctoral training centres system is that your peers can make a
judgment on you as to whether you can or cannot supervise a student. Some non-academic
input into that from stakeholders is good, but I agree with David Bogle that, in a way, the job
of the academics is to ensure the excellence of the education.
Professor Friend: However keen I am to interact with the world of business and to have the
world of business funding even PGR, I am with these gentlemen in saying that we have to
maintain the standard.
Q466 Baroness Perry of Southwark: What about QAA? Is its way of operating useful
in the postgraduate world? Be honest.
Professor Bogle: It is pretty hands off, actually. We were instrumental in devising the quality
code. I think that it is helpful—perhaps I should not say this—that we get inspected
periodically so that we can make sure that our house is in order, but I think that, particularly
in the big research-intensive institutions with lots of doctoral students, our house is pretty
good, actually.
Professor Friend: I have nothing to add.
Professor George: I find that there is an interesting divide between the research-intensive
universities, which always want the QAA to be less prescriptive, and the less research-
intensive institutions, which often want more guidance. There are times when I think that
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there is an attempt to micromanage through guidance. I think that the overall principles are
fine, but I find that there is a degree of frustration about that, which I share.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: If I may say so, that is a great contrast to saying that it is
hands off.
The Chairman: Finally, we come to Lord Patel.
Q467 Lord Patel: Half of my question—about the number of overseas students—was

asked earlier on, but the other half relates to immigration policy. It has been suggested to us
that the new immigration visa policy is detrimental to our ability to recruit overseas
students. Is that the case?
Professor Friend: I thought that this question might be asked, so I went through the stats,
which provide a very interesting picture.
Lord Patel: I have another question, for which you might not have the stats.
Professor Friend: On the number of students coming from the rest of the world, there is no
doubt that there has been a modest impact, but, given that we are discussing STEM, the
impact has not been in the STEM area, where in our experience recruitment is buoyant.
Indeed, when I and my colleagues were sharing our thoughts about this outside, they were
saying much the same thing. Year on year, there is buoyant growth, which seems to have
swept through the visa issues other than, in our experience, in India, where there seemed to
be publicity about us being closed for business, which played very strongly according to the
messages that we are getting, and—this is not in the STEM area, but I hope that you will not
mind my sharing this with you—in the MBA area, where I hear the same story from all the
business schools that we interact with. There has been a bit of a toxic combination of:
exposure in India of the story about us being closed for business; a change in the funding for
these students because banks have withdrawn from providing funding; and the issue of the
one-year post-graduation opportunity to work within the UK. For us, that has hit that one
relatively small segment of the university, which accounts for about 2% to 3% of our head
count—that is the scale of the problem. Everywhere else, we are forging ahead, with the
statistics for applications and acceptances being better than last year, so there is growth,
growth, growth.
Professor Bogle: We certainly seem to be strong, but we must not be complacent. Other
countries are trying to portray themselves as much more open for business than us, so we
have to be careful about that, but our very strong reputation for the quality of our education
must be the reason why our performance has been so strong. However, changes in mid-
session such as the withdrawal of the post-study visa are causing a lot of concern at the
moment, particularly among current students, and that sort of thing is very unhelpful. It is
much better if such changes are made in a staged way.
Professor Friend: Let me just add, as we sweep by, that our performance has been
maintained only by greater focus and effort. There are some very strange moments that we
have had with the Border Agency, and it just takes very careful management.
Professor George: In our case, similarly we have not seen a decline, although we are aware
that other universities have seen a decline so it might be that we are relatively buffered.
Having talked to our overseas recruitment people this morning, I know that they are
concerned about the future and are concerned that, especially in India and other countries,
there is a perception that we are closed for business and that it is difficult to get in. Some of
that is compounded by the fact that there are still long delays for visa applications in some
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countries, in particular from India at the moment, and increased bureaucracy. I cannot swear
that this is true, but it was told to me this morning that the 73-page instruction on how to
fill in the form is one issue. There is also an increased burden on the universities in
supporting and monitoring matters. That is a very real issue.
However, the thing that is very much worrying us is the withdrawal of the post-study work
visa. There is a lot of anger among the current generation of students, who feel betrayed by
the United Kingdom because the rules have changed after they paid the fees to come for
one thing but also wanted to come for another. That is very real. It sends out a very bad
message, especially in the engineering sector, to the students, whom we need if we are to
support our engineering industry. I would strongly argue that we need to find a way to
support these students, even if it is only at postgraduate level or was restricted to science
and engineering, because the perception of us is very negative as a result of that.
Q468 The Chairman: I have one question to finish with. On the funding for students
who are doing research masters and PhDs, given that a significant amount of the resource is
coming from the state through the research councils and through HEFCE, what should the
balance be between funding the students and funding the research? Should we be taking
more out of the research pot to fund the students doing the research, or do we have that
balance about right?
Professor George: Sorry, can you define the research pot?
Professor Bogle: I think that we are talking about the EPSRC budget, as we are talking just
about STEM here.
The situation is changing a lot at the moment as well—next year, there is going to be a lot
more on training—so perhaps smoother and more consistent funding streams would be
better. However, I think that the balance is pretty good, actually.
The Chairman: We could have fewer students but fund them more. That is really the
issue.
Professor Bogle: I would like to see—as head of the graduate school, I suppose that I would
say this—more researchers, for which there is a desire within Europe because the value of
the PhD is being seen more broadly. A lot of people still see the PhD just as an academic
pipeline, but we are managing to change that view. I think that we are drawing in more
doctoral students—I have had 30 doctoral students in my time in engineering, of which only
three became academics—so we are developing skills for the broader community. I think
that there is perhaps an argument for increasing the numbers at doctoral level.
The Chairman: On that note, I will leave it there. Let me just say that we were absolutely
right to have a major session on postgraduate education, for which I thank all three of you.
This is our last evidence session, and you have done us absolutely proud. On behalf of the
whole Committee, I thank you very much indeed.
Professor Friend: Thank you for thinking about postgraduates.
The Chairman: We never stop doing so.
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Professor Peter Dobson, University of Oxford – Written evidence
General questions
*What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?
A STEM subject is one that uses the physical sciences and mathematics and a STEM job is
one that applies all of these subjects to create wealth.
*Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used to influence supply?
There is good evidence that employers of STEM graduates are not able to recruit as many of
them as they want and that the quality of these graduates is not matching their expectations.
16-18 supply
*Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they have the right
skills to study STEM first degrees?
No, there are insufficient numbers coming through. They do not have sufficient practical
skills and their ability to communicate is poor.
*What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of STEM subjects at
advanced level?
Not very noticeable.
*What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM subjects in higher
education?
I fear it could be detrimental, but optimistically, it might improve some of the

communication skills.
Graduate supply
*Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU and overseas) sufficient
to meet the needs of industry, the research base, and other sectors not directly connected with
STEM?
This is a difficult point to answer. Currently we depend strongly on non-EU/UK graduates to

maintain our research base and high technology SME base. It is very important that we
maintain a favourable immigration status while we try to build up our indigenous STEM
graduates.
*Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently high, and if not, why
not?
No, the present generation lack the ability to “design and make things”......we have too many
wanting to model or simulate and not enough with practical skills. This is a deep-seated
problem that can be traced back into schools and the lack of practical hobbies.
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*Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it research, industry or
more broadly within the economy?
No, see the above. They also have poor communication and analytical skills.
*What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality of degrees
It depends on what changes are implemented! I would like to see a practical stream of
activity....the old technical colleges for example, and proper Apprentice Courses.
*What effect does "research assessment" have upon the ability to develop new and cross-
disciplinary STEM degrees?
It does not encourage any colleges who are worried about dropping a place in the “tables”.
*What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary for all universities to teach
undergraduates and post graduates and conduct research? What other delivery model should be
considered?
I believe that there should be a strong link between research and teaching for the top
research Universities. However, for the more practically oriented and vocational topics, this
is not so important, but we do need to link those more closely to serve business and
industry. There should also be more training in Innovation and Entrepreneurship
*Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education institutions offering STEM
courses?
Yes.
*What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM graduates in
Personally I am against any sort of discrimination, positive or otherwise. The opportunities

need to be attractive to encourage all!
*Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers they subsequently
undertake?
The evidence points to the answer “No”. For example we have a chronic shortage of
(heavy) electric engineering people, but departments have closed recently. The same can be
said of chemical and process engineering. There is a detachment between demand and
supply!
*Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain the research base
No, I think that there has been insufficient in engineering shortage subjects, and an over-
supply in some physics and chemistry.
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*What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of PhD students? Are
there alternative delivery models?
This new model is transforming the situation and it should be maintained and extended in
strategic subjects. I would avoid any more models for another 5-8 years to assess the
effectiveness of the current DTCs
*Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the balance right between the
number of Masters degree students and PhD students?
No, I think the current balance should be maintained.
*What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of graduates to pursue a
research career?
It might deter a few of the “perpetual student” types.....no bad thing.
Industry
*What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to attract them?
Simple: offer a salary that makes it more attractive than going into banking, accountancy etc...
*What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand for STEM
graduates matches supply in terms of numbers, skills and quality of graduates?
There is insufficient interaction and many “science” departments don’t consult industry via
“industrial advisory boards”....this should be mandatory.
*What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM subjects in other
countries? Which countries provide the most helpful examples of best practice?
We should probably look to China and Korea. Interestingly another facet of the problem
especially for research, is the post-doctoral system. Note that France and other EU
countries have adopted a very UK-like system.
13 November 2011
142
EDF Energy Nuclear Generation, Expedition Engineering, MRC

Clinical Sciences Centre, Oxford Instruments and Sandwell and
West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust – Oral evidence (QQ 348-
365)

Members present

Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Patel
Lord Rees of Ludlow
Lord Winston
________________
Dr Sukhbir Kaur, Trainee Healthcare Scientist, Clinical Chemistry, Sandwell and West
Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust; Eva MacNamara, Engineer, Expedition Engineering;
Dr Simona Parrinello, Group Head at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre; Dr Gustav
Teleberg, Cryogenic Engineer, Oxford Instruments; and Dr Elizabeth Wasey, Safety
Assessment Engineer, EDF Energy Nuclear Generation.
Q348 The Chairman: I just have to warn you all that there is likely to be a vote in their
Lordships’ House within the next 10 to 20 minutes. I welcome our second panel, which is a
mirror image of the first panel, but this time with a pre-eminence of female guests. Thank
you very much indeed for coming. You will have got the gist from our first panel: we are
interested in what happens post-university. I wonder whether each of you could say for the
record who you are and what you are doing at the moment.
Dr Elizabeth Wasey: My name is Elizabeth Wasey. I am a safety assessment engineer with
EDF Energy Nuclear Generation.
Dr Simona Parrinello: I am Simona Parrinello. I am a group head of MRC Clinical Sciences
Centre, Imperial College.
Dr Gustav Teleberg: My name is Gustav Teleberg. I am a senior cryogenic engineer at
Oxford Instruments nanoscience group.
143
Dr Sukhbir Kaur: I am Sukhbir Kaur. I am a trainee healthcare scientist in clinical chemistry
at City Hospital in Birmingham.
Eva MacNamara: My name is Eva MacNamara. I work for Expedition Engineering.
Q349 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. If I could start with you, Dr Wasey.
One of the reasons for our beginning this inquiry was the apparent mismatch between what
students learn at university and the skills that are required by employers once they leave
university at whatever level, either at graduate or post-doc level. Do you feel that you were
prepared for employment when you completed your studies?
Dr Elizabeth Wasey: I did an undergraduate degree in mathematics followed by a doctorate
in mathematics. The undergraduate degree prepared me very well in terms of a
mathematical toolset and some logical and problem-solving skills. Lacking at the end of that
were the softer skills, such as giving presentations and communicating with people. My PhD
closed some of the gaps. When I entered employment, I was still developing some of those
skills. However, I do not know whether it is reasonable to expect an undergraduate degree
to give you all of them, because they develop with experience and maturity. I do not know
whether it is something that undergraduate degrees lack, but those were the things that I
was catching up on the end.
Dr Simona Parrinello: I did my undergraduate degree in Italy, so I am not sure that it will
apply to what you are interested in here. In my field, that is just the beginning, because, after
your degree, you go on to a PhD and do one or two post docs before you can get to the
stage of running your own group of research. The PhD prepares you quite well for a post-
doctoral career. When you go from a post doc to a proper group head position, there is a
huge gap, which the post doc does not you prepare for at all. It is very much a steep learning
curve. In biology, it might help to have some sort of in-between stage where you could still
be post doc, but be given additional responsibility and get a taste of what it would be like to
be 100% in charge. That could perhaps be in the last year or two of your post doc.
Q350 The Chairman: Simona, did you ever contemplate a career outside academia?
Dr Simona Parrinello: I did. After my PhD, I decided to do a post doc in industry—I was in
the United States at the time—but I realised very quickly that it was not for me, so it lasted
about six months, after which I decided that I had to go. That was when I came back to
Europe and started my post doc at UCL.
Dr Gustav Teleberg: I did the end of my undergraduate degree in the UK and the beginning
of it in Sweden. The undergraduate degree was good in that it made all the skills available to
do academic work; it prepared me well for that. It was a physics degree. I do not think that
it had quite enough of a link to engineering. After the course finished, only a small minority
of the students carried on in academia. Either they did not know what they were doing, or
the degree did not prepare them for what the community needed. In terms of maths as a
fundament of physics, the degree was satisfactory, but there was a very poor link with the
industry side of things. I ended up going down that route anyway, because I did a PhD which
was linked to industry and got in that way.
Q351 The Chairman: If I can just reverse the question, did you contemplate going into
academia on a full-time basis?
Dr Gustav Teleberg: I did. After my PhD, I did a one-year post doc, so I was contemplating
that. I did it for a little while, but then I got a better opportunity from industry.
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The Chairman: Or a different opportunity.
Dr Gustav Teleberg: It was different, but it was very much related. I would not have got it if
I had not done my PhD in the first place.
Dr Sukhbir Kaur: After my PhD, I felt prepared for employment, but if I had gone into
employment after my undergraduate degree I think that I would have found it hard to adjust
in terms of my maths and statistics skills, which I developed during my PhD. There is not
much time to apply those skills during your undergraduate degree. Those skills definitely
need to be developed at undergraduate level so that people feel prepared to go into
employment straight afterwards.
Q352 The Chairman: Do you think that that is a weakness in the UK system?
Dr Sukhbir Kaur: Definitely.
Q353 The Chairman: Because the vast majority of students do leave after their
undergraduate experience and go into the world of work.
Dr Sukhbir Kaur: If the maths or statistics element of an undergraduate degree course is
advertised, some students might be deterred from undertaking it, but we should not deny
that science is a quantitative subject. I do not think that we should shy away from that. We
should encourage students to do further study in maths and statistics at undergraduate level.
Eva MacNamara: I did an engineering degree and then went into engineering. In terms of
providing a knowledge base or a toolbox, the degree was fantastic. In terms of applying that
engineering knowledge, I am not sure that we got so much of that. I define science as the
knowledge coming in and engineering as the process of thinking about what I want to come
out and how I create it. I do not think that, in my degree, I really had much opportunity to
do the coming-out bit and the creative thinking part. Where we had those opportunities,
they were very long projects, so we were very concerned about getting it right first time.
That is not my experience of the workplace, where you think up a whole load of things,
some of which do not work. You do not really get that opportunity so much at university.
So, yes, the degree provides the knowledge toolkit, but not so much the opportunity to
apply it.
Q354 The Chairman: So if you were redesigning your undergraduate course, what
would you do differently?
Eva MacNamara: Once a month or twice a term, I would have a one-day or half-day
workshop. Your toolkit would be the lectures that you have had beforehand. You would
then be given a problem of which you have very little advance knowledge and be required to
think about it, talk about it and come up with ideas. The workshop would take place just in
that short half-day. It would provide lots of opportunities to think that way, and you would
start to develop your skills as you did it repeatedly with lots of different problems.
Q355 Lord Rees of Ludlow: All five of you, except for Eva, did PhDs before going into
industry. I would like to ask the other four: do you feel that you have benefited compared to
those who went into industry after their master’s degree and had a four-year head start on
you in industry? Has the value added by the PhD been worth the commitment of the three
or four extra years?
Dr Gustav Teleberg: I certainly think so, although that was mainly because my field of
cryogenics is so specialised that there is not really an undergraduate course that prepares
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you for it. All the other engineers working with me have PhDs in low-temperature physics
or something similar. For me, the answer is yes.
Dr Sukhbir Kaur: That is definitely the case for me. It has developed me as a person. I have
more analytical and critical skills and I can think outside the box. I do not think I would have
these skills if I had not done my PhD.
Dr Simona Parrinello: I am not really in industry, so I am not sure I can answer that.
Dr Elizabeth Wasey:, It has certainly been a huge advantage for me, not necessarily due to
the content of the PhD but due to the method of study. It is about problem-solving on such
a big scale, which is exactly the sort of thing that I now do every day. The processes and
thought processes that I was using helped, rather than the content.
Q356 Lord Lucas: I am interested to know: what did you learn at university by way of
skills or knowledge that your current employers make no use of?
Dr Elizabeth Wasey: In terms of the day-to-day mathematics that I did, I use some
probability theory but apart from that most of what I use is A-level mathematics. But it is
important that I have gone beyond that as it puts everything I learnt before in context, so
that I have a better understanding of the mathematics I am using even though I am not
actually using the stage above that. The context means that I am using the A-level
mathematics, but with a higher understanding.
Eva MacNamara: I agree that I do not use anywhere near as much maths as I learnt in my
engineering degree, although I might do if I was the person who was really good at maths. I
am quite good at maths, but having gone on to industry, I know that the person next to me
is better than me at it and they like doing it. You need the broad range of skills but I
personally, and many other engineers, could do with less maths and I think that it could be
replaced by more of the creative stuff that I have been talking about. That would not harm
the people who know that they are not going to be the ones doing the number-crunching
Q357 The Chairman: That is interesting. What skills are you not using that you
developed with your graduate study?
Dr Sukhbir Kaur: I cannot think of anything I learnt that is not relevant to what I am doing
at the moment. Pretty much everything I have learnt has been a good, solid knowledge base
for me.
The Chairman: I am going to leave that there and bring in Lord Patel.
Q358 Lord Patel: My question follows on quite well from the discussion we have been
having. Do you think you received a good-quality education at university? And what
measures of quality are you using?
Dr Elizabeth Wasey: For me, one measure of quality would be to look at how much I have
learnt and by how much my understanding has improved. From that perspective, I had a very
high-quality education. I was moving through material at a great pace and coming to a very
good understanding of it, through a combination of lectures, tutorials and problem-solving
classes. In terms of quality, it is also important to look at the skills you are taking on to
employment. For me, getting a degree was to a great extent about becoming employable.
While there is always a need to train in any new job, the quality was good and has enabled
me to follow a career of my choice.
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Dr Simona Parrinello: My education was solid and gave me a very strong basis for the next
steps, which was really important, although my university degree was not done in this
country. The post-doctoral training was also very strong. That can be judged based on the
output—for example, the publications that you produce or the environment to which you
are exposed. I would say that USB is very high-end from that point of view.
Dr Gustav Teleberg: The undergraduate degree was of good quality. One measure is
obviously whether I get the job I want or not; the other is how much I enjoyed doing what I
was doing, since it is supposed to be motivational as well. It was good quality overall, but
something was bit lacking at the end. The last part of the degree should have had something
a bit more practical—a real project in a company for example rather than a fourth-year
project done in a research group in the university. It felt like it could have had a little more
at the end, but overall it was good.
Dr Sukhbir Kaur: The quality of my education has been high. The measure that I am using is
the unemployment rate among undergraduates who do the degree I chose, which is very low
compared to other non-vocational degrees. I did not find it very hard to get job offers and
am now on a very competitive graduate training scheme. I got very good publications out of
my doctoral research, and would use that as a measure of high quality.
Eva MacNamara: For me, I think that it was about access to information or just talking
about stuff that I did not know about or understand. If I could get to that quickly and not
spend a long time going down dead ends, that was a high-quality education for me. At
Cambridge, you get a lot of one-to-one teaching, which was a brilliant aspect of it. The
measures of quality will change in future as demands increase with the way that education is
being sold. Also, with the variety of people who might participate in a degree, we have so
much opportunity to teach differently now, with technology and so on, that maybe having
access to information, but in a number of different ways, might become a measure of quality.
The Chairman: Lord Winston, did you want to come in?
Lord Winston: No, I do not think so. I am very happy.
Q359 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Following on from that, as you may know, there is a new
proposal to provide standard information—called the key information set—for people
applying to university for the first time. This includes information on the salaries received by
graduates and levels of student satisfaction et cetera. Would you like to comment on the
kind of information that you think should be given to applicants before they choose their
university? What is the most important information?
The Chairman: Just before you start, there is a Division in the House, so I am now going
to suspend the meeting for 10 minutes. You can do whatever you like during that period.
The Chairman: On that note, Eva, we will allow Lord Lucas to return to his place. There
is going to be another vote straightaway but we would like to continue.
Q360 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I will just repeat the question, which is about the kind of
information that you would have liked to have had when you were choosing a university and
whether you know about this proposed key information set, which is the set of information
that is going to be made available. Is that the kind of thing students need?
The Chairman: Eva, we will start with you, as you had the floor.
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Eva MacNamara: Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think it includes what the key A-
levels are that you need to take to do the degree. That is absolutely essential. You need to
encourage students at GCSE level and below to look at these things before they start picking
their A-levels. I have been back to my old school, an all-girls comprehensive, to try to get it
into engineering more and get people who are interested in art and architecture to come
along and listen. At the end of my talk, they often say, “Yes, I want to do engineering. Am I
doing the right A-levels?”. But they are not, because no one talked to them about that
earlier. It is about putting that information in it and making sure it is available to the under-
16s.
The Chairman: Before you respond to Lords Rees, do any of you know what the new KIS
system is? Okay, you do. Gustav?
Dr Gustav Teleberg: I really like the points that were listed there. As to the things that I felt
were missing, first there did not seem to be any notes of what the international
opportunities were; for example, exchange programmes at different universities. That is
pretty important and is definitely something I took into account when I chose my Swedish
undergraduate institution—what links it had to other universities. Secondly, it did say that it
rates employment opportunities, but it does not say in what areas. After six months, you can
be working in the pub but that does not mean that you have employment that is relevant to
your degree. Those are two things I would like to see in there.
Dr Simona Parrinello: It would be good to set expectations. For example, a lot of people
go into a degree in biology without realising what it involves. It would be good for students
to know that it is a very long path, and that they need to think about doing a PhD
afterwards; as well as explaining what that involves and what kind of success rate there is if
they want to continue for example in academia.
The Chairman: I am going to suspend the meeting for 10 minutes.
The Chairman: We are back in business.
Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: There is going to be another vote.
Lord Winston: Another one? That was three.
The Chairman: We will get a few words in. Do you think we could re-engineer the
parliamentary system?
Q361 Lord Rees of Ludlow: We are still on this question of what information about
universities you would like to have been able to access when you made your choice.
The Chairman: Simona, you have moved into different jurisdictions. What made you make
those choices? Were you attracted by a particular university that gave you good information
or was it just a desire to move?
Dr Simona Parrinello: It was a bit of both, really. I did my PhD in the States. That decision
was based partly on the fact that I was aware that the quality of the science there is top in
the world and partly on a personal desire to live there for a while. I got really lucky and got
a PhD position at Berkeley, where I ended up graduating. Then, when I came to London, the
choice of the lab was again on entirely on scientific grounds, but London was a personal
decision due to my husband.
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The Chairman: If no one else wants to respond to this question, we will move to the next
question, which is from Baroness Hilton.
Q362 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: I will go back to the question that we asked our
students about opportunities for work placements during your degree courses. Were you
offered opportunities to see what industry and the business world was like?
Dr Elizabeth Wasey: There was nothing as part of my degree; there were no sandwich
opportunities or anything like that. There were internships that could be applied for. I
weighed up the pros and cons and came to the conclusion that the amount of time that I
would have to take out of my academic subjects to do the application process, which was
very lengthy—and you end up usually having to apply for a very large number of internships
to get one—was not worth it because it might impact on my grades. So I did not apply for
an internship, but I did undertake a placement in academia under a summer scholarship. So
that was my main experience of the world of work.
Dr Simona Parrinello: I did not have the opportunity to do any of that until afterwards. I
know that for Imperial students there are a few opportunities to do rotations in labs. I had a
summer student last year who came through a very specific programme. Those placements
are awarded to only 12 people each year, so I did not get the feeling that students had a
huge number of opportunities to do something like that. I would say that it would be very
important for students to gain those experiences first hand before they decided whether to
move forward with their career in academia and in research.
Dr Gustav Teleberg: There were very few or no opportunities during the undergraduate
degree. Towards the end of it, when you acquired contacts yourself, it became easier, but
that was more to do with your own initiative. It was not anything that the institution had
dealt with.
Q363 The Chairman: Would it have benefited you if you had had the opportunity to
work in industry or a research lab?
Dr Gustav Teleberg: I would certainly have enjoyed it.
Dr Subhir Kaur: There was the opportunity, but I did not take it up. That was mainly
because it was not encouraged much; it was just announced that the opportunity was
available and that, if you were interested, you could Inquire. I cannot remember any of my
peers choosing to take up the offer either. [Interruption.]
Eva MacNamara: We had a compulsory element. I think that it is really important,
particularly in engineering which is vocational, that there should be at least a month per year
in an industrial placement. It retains more people in engineering; it contextualises the degree;
and you get better engineers coming out of it at the end because they know what to look
for. It also prepares you more for the working world afterwards because you have
developed some of those skills, which you do not really get a chance to develop at
university. [Interruption.]
Q364 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Was any of that organised for you?
Eva MacNamara: There was one person who was responsible for organising it, so if you
did not organise it yourself, they made sure that you still had a placement. But people had to
go all over the place to find a placement—and we are talking about the good years back
then, when it was relatively easy to find something. Employers are not really keen to give
people the time to deal with students. If the Government were to develop a pack or
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something like that meant that employers had to spend just an hour training themselves how
to deal with placements, employers would be able to supervise a student very easily within
the workplace. They would be able to say, “While I do not have any time to look after you
properly, you’ve got this to do, which is very worth while; and when I have got the time to
show you some real-world stuff, I’m going to do that, too”. There needs to be more
government or university support for industrial work placements. [Interruption.]
The Chairman: Lord Patel, rather than us coming back, I am going to give you two
minutes to ask your question.
Q365 Lord Patel: My question is pretty simple and is about employment. Do you think
that you get the right career and employment advice? How did you go about getting it and
what do you think works?
Eva MacNamara: My work placements were very useful because I found out that I did not
want to work for a very big company but, rather, a small company. Because of that, the
careers service was not particularly useful because small companies were not well
represented in it. I did an engineering degree and wanted to go into engineering, so that
aspect of the careers service did not apply to me, although it might be really helpful for
scientists deciding which bit of science to go into.
Dr Elizabeth Wasey: I used the careers service in two ways. The first was careers fairs,
which gave me a lot of insight into the sorts of career that I could think about, because,
doing a pure mathematics degree, I was a little unsure about what I could expect to go into.
The other area in which the careers service helped me out a lot was advice about
assessment centres and the interview process.
The Chairman: On that note, because the votes in the House are going to go on for some
time, I am going to bring this session to an end. Thank you all very much indeed. I apologise
to the Committee for it having been such a disrupted afternoon and I apologise in particular
to you, the panel.
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Education for Engineering (E4E) – Written evidence
About E4E
Education for Engineering (E4E) is the body through which the engineering profession offers
coordinated and clear advice on education to UK Government and the Devolved
Assemblies. It deals with all aspects of learning that underpin engineering. E4E represents the
collective views on education and training policy of 36 Professional Engineering Institutions,
the Engineering Council, EngineeringUK and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
A full list of E4E members is available from:

http://www.educationforengineering.org.uk/membership/default.htm
E4E supports the response to the inquiry from the Royal Academy of
Engineering which answers the inquiry’s questions in detail. This submission
focusses specifically on the issues around proposed Higher Education reforms in the
Government’s White Paper.
What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality of degrees and
the supply of STEM courses in higher education institutions?
E4E is fully supportive of the Government’s commitment to improving the quality of Higher
Education for students. The Professional Engineering Community, through its Institutions,
has worked for many years to ensure high-quality provision in engineering subjects through
its accreditation processes.
We are concerned that the Government’s proposals for the Higher Education system in
England do not support their Plan for Growth and could , therefore impede the delivery of
skills essential to the needs of UK industry particularly during a period of recovery .
Accredited engineering courses in engineering and computing (including BEng, Integrated

MEng and technical MSc courses) set global standards for quality and provide employers with
the professional skills needed for innovative growth in a global economy. The four year
integrated engineering Masters degree (MEng) in particular has equivalence to the
engineering education of other leading nations through the Washington Accord and is
increasingly demanded by employers because of the additional skills developed during the
programme.
We are deeply concerned that the number of high-quality engineering graduates for UK
industry will be reduced if provision of engineering degrees and other strategically important
and vulnerable subjects (SIVS) are reduced because of the proposals set out in the
Government’s White Paper on Higher Education in summer 2011.
The Government’s planned reforms offers little incentive for universities to promote high-
quality provision in strategically important disciplines, such as engineering, that have high
costs.
151
Our chief concerns with the White Paper are around the twin policies of a lifting of the cap
on AAB+ students and the allocation of 20,000 places from the core / margin for low cost
provision of less than £7,500 after fee waivers.
In particular, we are worried about provision of engineering courses at universities that will
have their allocation of student numbers reduced to make room in the system for the core /
margin proposals. These universities are less well placed to compete for AAB+ students than
the most attractive institutions and are unable to provide an average fee level of £7,500.
These institutions are being described as the squeezed middle and provide a significant
proportion of the completions in Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects (SIVS) each
year. These proposals may lead to a reduction in the number of high-quality engineering
graduates from these high-ranking institutions.
Further, we believe it is likely that other universities looking to maximise profits will expand
provision of low cost subjects rather than high cost laboratory based disciplines such as
science and engineering.
In addition, research undertaken by Durham University for SCORE, the Science Community
Representing Education has shown that achievement of AAB+ grades in STEM subjects is
more difficult than in non-STEM subjects119 . For engineering in particular there is a
requirement of a combination of A levels (or equivalent) in at least mathematics and physics
which is yet more difficult to achieve. With league table pressure on schools (in particular
with publication of destination data of school leavers), there is likely to be a responding
pressure on students to undertake A levels in which there is a high likelihood of them
achieving A/B grades. This may lead to a reduction in numbers taking mathematics and
physics subject combinations for engineering.
We also have concern that the proposal to lift caps on AAB+ students does nothing to
encourage universities to consider the context in which candidates achieved their A Level
grades (and other qualifications). The use of contextualised admissions practices are
important to raising the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds gaining
admissions to the most prestigious universities.
The other proposal in the Government’s white Paper to open up competition in the core /
margin for new providers to offer provision of degree programmes below £7,500 (after fee
waivers) is unlikely to increase numbers in high cost subjects such as engineering.
Reports by the Royal Academy of Engineering 120,121 show that employers seek engineering
graduates trained for modern multi-disciplinary engineering and that excellent engineering
education cannot be achieved without sustained investment.
High-quality undergraduate provision where students work on real-life engineering problems

is already underfunded. We see a further risk to this provision at universities which are
unable to make long term investments in higher cost and capital-intensive courses because of
a lack of stability in the funding system.
16 December 2011
119 http://www.cemcentre.org/attachments/SCORE2008report.pdf
120 Engineering graduates for industry, The Royal Academy of Engineering, February 2010
121 Educating engineers for the 21st Century, The Royal Academy of Engineering, June 2007
152
Education Foundation – Written evidence
The Education Foundation is the UK’s first independent, cross party, education think tank.
Launched in November 2011 it aims to lead, shape, and deliver change and reform in the
British education system. It will connect people and organisations across country boundaries
and sectors from: early years, schools, work based learning, further and higher education. It
will identify solutions to challenging issues and focus rigorously on what works and help to
scale up projects and organisations that deliver impact.
Leaders in government, national education bodies, businesses, schools, colleges and

universities have welcomed the prospect of a new think tank. We intend to work with a
range of businesses and partners to help improve the education and learning opportunities of
millions of young people across the UK.
The Education Foundation produced a launch publication, ‘Education Britain – the journey to
Education Reform’ 122 , which included an inspiring range of views and opinions on education,
including a catalogue of the achievements of key organisations, schools, colleges and
universities at the cutting edge of education reform. Taken as a whole, the contributions to
this report forcefully take us beyond the worn out positions of the past and make an urgent
case for a more rounded debate about creating an education nation. We believe that three
of these contributions go some way to answering questions within the call for evidence,
discussing the relationship between formal and vocational education and highlighting the
importance of early education in preparing students to move forward into STEM work. The
relevant individual contributions are attached to this email (not published here, but can be
found at http://www.ednfoundation.org/2011/11/27/education-britain/) . Some of the points
that we feel our contributors cover are highlighted below:
John Ellison, “Can Do”- Talented and skilled for work, adaptable to rapid change, able to invent the
future.
• Ellison discusses making education more adaptable to current issues in science, in
order that in the future those progressing into and working within STEM subjects are
able to grow with the future.
• There is recognition of the relationship between formal education and the
progression of vocational learning to further STEM subjects. Ellison recognises that
other countries have made great use of this relationship to further their own STEM
industry and study.
• Lastly, Ellison discusses the flexibility of Academies and University Technical Colleges
in progressing and developing STEM research in students.
Joanne Jacobs, Adapting to economic and cultural change.

• Jacobs raises the question of technology being adopted in education as not just a tool
but for the purposes of communication and creativity.
• It is also Jacobs’ belief that technology in education is no longer merely an option but
a necessity in the modern world.
Greg Whitby, Digital natives in a hyper-connected world.
122 http://www.ednfoundation.org/2011/11/27/education-britain/
153
• Whitby furthers Jacobs’ beliefs by stating that schools must reflect the reality of their
social and digital contexts.
• Whitby also discusses the importance of teachers with the ability to use critical and
creative thinking.
• Lastly, the importance of using technology to personalise learning and create
experiences and environments designed around the needs of students is raised by
Whitby as a way to further the use of technology within education.
Overall we feel that these contributions suggest that to progress the use and uptake of study
in STEM subjects, the use of technology within education must be widened and understood.
This development and ‘culture’ around STEM subjects within primary and secondary
education will hopefully produce students whom are better equipped to move into STEM
study and eventually industry.
15 December 2011
154
Engineering Council – Written evidence
The Engineering Council is the UK regulatory body for the engineering profession,
responsible for setting and maintaining the standards for the engineering profession and
setting the overall requirements for the accreditation of engineering degrees. The
Engineering Council licenses Professional Engineering Institutions (PEIs) to carry out
accreditation of degree programmes on its behalf. The list of accredited engineering degrees
is published and maintained by the Engineering Council.
This response deals only with those questions and issues that specifically relate to
engineering and the Engineering Council’s interests that are outlined above. It complements
the response submitted by the Royal Academy of Engineering, which we support.
Issues that specifically relate to our interests are:

• The formation process for a professionally qualified engineer which typically involves
a combination of formal education and further training and workplace experience
(generally known as professional development).
• The four year MEng.
• The exemplifying academic award for Chartered Engineer being at Masters level.
• The availability of non-traditional pathways by which individuals may achieve IEng or
CEng, including work-based degrees.
• The Engineering Doctorate (EngD).
Responses to selected questions

high, and if not ,why not?
and
Employers’ concerns about the availability and quality of STEM graduates, and their difficulty
in recruiting STEM staff have been noted in the Royal Academy of Engineering’s response to
this consultation.
Some information about engineering employers’ most desirable attributes in new recruits
was gathered during a study undertaken by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng)
in 2007. This built on a previous study (Spinks et al, 2006) that had concluded:
The best of UK graduate engineers are still world class and industry is generally satisfied with their
overall quality, but there are simply not enough of the best.
Most undergraduate engineering degrees in the UK are accredited by the Engineering

Council in a process undertaken by professional engineering institutions that are licensed to
do so by the Engineering Council and according to its standards. These standards are
155
developed and maintained by the profession, including employers, and set out in the UK
Standard for Professional Engineering Competence (UK-SPEC). Degree accreditation criteria
are derived from this standard and comprise general and engineering specific learning
outcomes. There is a very good match between the Engineering Council’s published general
learning outcomes for accredited engineering degrees and the employability skills cited by
the CBI (2009).
Comparison of UK-SPEC general learning outcomes for accredited degrees and

CBI employability skills
UK-SPEC General learning outcomes CBI employability skills
Planning self-learning Self-management
Group working Teamworking
Appreciate economic and commercial
Business and customer awareness
considerations
Problem solving Problem solving
Communication Communication and literacy
Knowledge and understanding of
Application of numeracy
underpinning science and maths
Effective use of IT IT
!!!! Underpinned by a positive attitude
The inclusion in UK-SPEC of general learning outcomes that appear to map directly to what
employers broadly say they are looking for in graduate recruits is a huge advantage. These
may warrant greater attention by course developers and accreditors.
Thus engineering higher education is playing a key role in preparing graduates for
employment and registration, but it is important to remember that a graduate is not (yet) a
fully competent engineer. The formation process through which individuals become
professionally qualified engineers generally involves a combination of formal education and
further training and workplace experience (generally known as professional development).
Graduates from accredited degree programmes will be able to demonstrate the knowledge
and understanding that underpins the required standard of competence for the particular
category of registrant, Incorporated Engineer (IEng) or Chartered Engineer (CEng).
However, an undergraduate degree cannot reasonably be expected to provide all of the

knowledge, understanding, skills and attributes that some engineering employers expect.
Employers have a key role to play in the post graduation development of engineers, which
may be by way of structured in-company training programmes, though it can be more
difficult for SMEs to make such provision. Cutbacks in graduate training and development
schemes, which have occurred at various times in recent decades, have a direct impact on
the engineering skills base.
A key issue in ensuring that engineering graduates have the right skills is a better shared
understanding of roles and responsibilities in the formation of an engineer. The UK system
of accreditation according to the Engineering Council’s standards provides an established,
mature and internationally respected mechanism for employers to engage in HE, as well as
providing a framework for universities to prepare their graduates for this transition.
Accreditation panels include both academics and engineers working in industry. There was
therefore considerable surprise among the professional engineering community at the
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Government’s announcement in HM Treasury’s Autumn Statement of the establishment of

an industry group including Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) to kite mark degree courses in
STEM subjects. While some SSCs are undertaking valuable work in support of higher
education, the creation of a kitemarking scheme alongside the well-established arrangements
for accreditation by professional bodies could well cause confusion, not least to potential
students and their advisers. If the proposal is to be implemented then it is important that
there is clarity about what it is intended to do and how it differs from professional body
accreditation.
Although provision of a student placement is not a requirement for a degree to be

accredited, strong engagement with industry is, and this is achieved in a variety of ways.
Employers play an important role in the setting of standards, programme design and delivery,
and as members of engineering departments’ industrial liaison boards and visiting
accreditation panels. The involvement of employers in these activities is an important way by
which the profession can ensure that graduates from engineering degrees are employable,
but there is always room for improvement. There is scope for Government to find ways of
incentivising employer engagement with HEIs since many employers find it hard to sustain
their commitment to supporting these kinds of constructive engagement. For example, we
are aware of one university where there were more students than normal who could not
find a sandwich placement last year, which maybe a reflection of the current economic
climate.
How UK engineering degrees form a preparation for employment is further explored by

Shearman and Seddon (2011).
institutions?
The four year integrated engineering Masters degree (MEng) sets a globally-recognised
standard, has equivalence to the engineering education of other leading nations through the
Washington Accord and is demanded by some employers. Some in HE have expressed
concern for the sustainability of the MEng if its extended length makes it less attractive to
students concerned about debt. The RAEng submission covers this issue in detail.
For prospective undergraduates who aspire to chartered status, graduating with an MEng is
the most straightforward way by which the academic requirement for CEng may be
demonstrated. There is an opportunity to support the message about student fees not being
paid up front with information about the MEng providing a potential accelerated pathway to
becoming a Chartered Engineer. Individuals graduating with a Bachelors degree need to
achieve a Masters level award by some other means.
Over the past five years, and in partnership with universities, PEIs and employers, the
Engineering Council has developed a framework for work-based engineering degrees that
foster the integrated development of all aspects of professional competence. This initiative,
known as ‘engineering gateways’, is aimed at those employed in engineering roles and leads
to the award of Bachelors or MSc Professional Engineering degrees. Initially funded by the
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previous government under its ‘Gateways to the Professions’ programme, this type of
degree is available at seven universities with a further five universities in the process of
programme development. Around seventy-five employees are following such degrees
including some from what might be described as non-traditional educational backgrounds.
The number of graduates is small (yet) but the first graduates have recently achieved CEng,
proving that this pathway works. Early indications are that this model is attractive to those
who previously had not felt able to work towards becoming professionally qualified.
Employers have welcomed the pathway, in particular its flexible nature, its focus on their
engineers’ day to day work, and the marked development achieved by their employees who
are enrolled on the degrees, for the benefit of the company. Evaluation reports about
‘engineering gateways’ provide positive evidence of support from all the stakeholders
involved (universities, employers, employees and the professional engineering institutions)
and are available at: http://www.engc.org.uk/education--skills/engineering-gateways
There is the potential for much greater provision of ‘engineering gateways’-type degrees.
However is difficult to accommodate this type of provision within the HE sector’s current
costing models, and this is a particular disincentive to some potential providers, especially at
a time of major changes to HE funding systems. Mechanisms need to be found to overcome
this barrier, and there is scope for Government to find ways of incentivising universities and
employers to engage in this way, for the benefit of the UK skills base.
An alternative delivery model at this level is the four year Engineering Doctorate (EngD)
offered by twenty-six EPSRC Industrial Doctorate Centres. An EngD typically comprises the
equivalent of one year of masters level study and three years based in industry, and is
sometimes described as a ‘PhD+’. There is a strong emphasis on business and enterprise,
and other transferable skills such as leadership and team work.
Feedback that we have received suggests that the EngD is providing industry with highly
skilled individuals who are much in demand, and who are broadly in the same position to
those who have completed in-company graduate training programmes.
References
CBI and Universities UK. Future Fit: preparing graduates for the world of work. 2009.
http://www.cbi.org.uk/pdf/20090326-CBI-FutureFit-Preparing-graduates-for-the-world-of-
work.pdf.
Royal Academy of Engineering. Educating Engineers for the 21st Century. 2007.
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/Educating_Engineers_21st_Century.p
df.
Shearman, R. and Seddon, D. 2011. UK Engineering degrees as a preparation for employment.

Paper presented to the World Engineering Education conference, September 27-30, 2011,
Lisbon, Portugal. in press. Contact authors for further information.
158
Spinks, N. et al. Educating Engineers for the 21st Century: The Industry View. Henley
Management College for the Royal Academy of Engineering. 2006.
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/releases/henley/pdf/henley_report.pdf
16 December 2011
159
Engineering Council, Cogent, Society of Biology, and Institution of Chemical Engineers
(IChemE) – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245)
Engineering Council, Cogent, Society of Biology, and Institution of

Chemical Engineers (IChemE) – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245)
Transcript to be found under Cogent
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Engineering Development Trust (EDT) – Written evidence
1. The Engineering Development Trust (EDT) ( www.etrust.org.uk ) is an independent

educational charity whose mission is to encourage young people to fulfil their
potential through careers in science, engineering and technology.
2. The EDT is the leading UK-wide provider of work related learning programmes
targeting 12-21 year olds and currently engages with some 25,000 students every
year.
3. Since its establishment more than 20 years ago, some than 250,000 students have
benefited from the EDT experiences
4. The EDT would like to make a few points relating in particular to careers awareness
and hence graduate supply, diversity, and industry incentives. Further information on
EDT is provided at the end of this submission.
5. Discussions with many industries as part of our on-going operations, indicates that
there are already skills shortages in many disciplines. The demographics in the UK
are only going to make this even more of a challenge: skilled workers retiring, and
importantly, a declining number of 18 year olds over the next 10 years (before
recovering over the subsequent 10 years...ie a birth rate issue). So the problem is
“HERE AND NOW”.
6. From our perspective, a large part of the problem in getting more young people
interested in STEM subjects and following them through to actual STEM related jobs,
relates to perceptions developed early on. These perceptions may derive from
parents, teachers, friends or indeed general media interactions, but are very strong.
7. As a general rule, young people going in to secondary education have poor
perceptions about engineering and applied sciences as a job/career, and even poorer
understanding of the actual jobs/careers undertaken in modern industry and business.
Through some of our programmes we measure perceptions of engineering before
and after the extended activity, and we can see evidence not only of this poor
perception, but that it can be improved considerably. The challenge then becomes
one of maintaining this and following it through, and of course spreading it as widely
as possible.
8. This then links to careers awareness and information. Most recent studies in to this
agree that much more needs to be done: it is generally agreed that to change
perceptions:
i. employer engagement is important;
ii. Teachers need a bigger role and this requires CPD;
iii. Better and more up to date information is needed (ie data).
iv. All this needs to be provided at regular intervals throughout the school life, in
a manner that is in context with what is being learnt, and in that creates
reinforcement of the key messages.
9. In our opinion this has to be more than just producing careers materials and
websites, even if coordinated. In order to widen participation, we have to do more
to inspire and generate interest amongst those who wouldn’t naturally seek out
information about STEM careers and opportunities. This means providing events and
activities that enable real experiences and context with role models, “seeing it in
action”, “hands-on”. Finding the time and resource/space within and by these schools
for this to take place is key, and encouragement should come from government.
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10. Enrichment activities are an effective and efficient means of providing real world
STEM experiences. Evidence from employers and universities indicates strongly that
participation in these programmes provides students not only with a view on the
world of work relating to engineering, science and technology, but also important life
skills such as team working, communication, project management, report writing,
time management. Universities value such participation when considering applications
for admissions.
11. Widening participation and diversity. The largest grouping is of course girls. We have
been working to increase the proportion of girls on our programmes and indeed
have made some good progress. Typically 50% for our pre-16 activities and ~30%
post-16. However, it seems that we are still only tackling the “easy to reach”, and
this is probably why the overall ratios aren’t improving as we would like to see.
12. Getting to the “harder to reach” schools is a major challenge for organisations such
as EDT, simply because we don’t have sufficient resources on a sustainable basis.
These schools and communities often have bigger challenges in any case, but there is
still enormous scope to include many more schools in what we do. Working with
schools does require the development of a relationship and trust and this takes time;
and this translates into funding! We have little doubt that given the funding and time
we can change perceptions and introduce a much wider group of young people to
the STEM opportunities available.
13. Industry incentives. The introduction of higher tuition fees is certainly making many
more students think strategically about their future study paths; this is already clear
from anecdotal evidence from schools. We have also seen registrations for our Year
in Industry placement scheme recover strongly this year, and in many schools we
deal with there has been record interest in participating in our Engineering Education
Scheme (although there is a limited number of places restricted by company links).
14. Quite a few companies are already looking to recruit a number of potential graduates
directly from school and support them through a variety of routes to HE. Others are
looking to use such schemes as the ones EDT runs to pre-filter and then track
students, keeping in touch with them through their degrees.
15. This demonstrates a rapidly changing environment, and the opportunity for
companies to provide more “tasters” to students such as placements. For the
students this provides the opportunity to confirm the discipline and direction that
they wish to take before jumping finally into an “expensive” degree.
16. Further information about the EDT. EDT aims to raise STEM awareness and
achievement amongst young people, and in so doing to widen STEM participation.
EDT inspires and motivates young people into choosing a STEM career by giving
them the opportunity to experience real life exposure to industry, business and
higher education. The awareness thus gained empowers the students to make
informed choices at key stages of their education. EDT schemes were founder
members of the Royal Academy of BEST programme and more recently Tomorrow’s
Engineers (operated by Engineering UK and RAEng).
17. EDT currently works with students aged from 11-21 and provides a range of
schemes (activity days, visits, projects, courses and placements) tailored to age and
the key transition points in a student’s academic career. These activities link schools
and students to industry and university, providing real experiences and exposure to
role models and mentors, and are delivered through a regional structure and
presence.
18. Programmes focus on four key areas:
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• Skills development- equipping young people with skills that are valued by
business and confidence to achieve in STEM and flourish a range of STEM careers
• Careers awareness - enabling young people to understand sector opportunities
and make informed decisions about STEM learning and work pathways to which
they can aspire
• Curriculum impact- delivering experiences, projects and placements that
provide context and relevance to STEM learning
• Teacher cpd- involving teachers in programme design and delivery to improve
their awareness and application of project learning back to the classroom
19. EDT has a long track record of engaging schools and working with industry links.
Companies benefit from the established and trusted relationships, which EDT offers
enabling effective access to schools and students. Companies can better engage
schools, in a sustainable manner, with more flexibility and value for money, as
resources are expended on direct delivery and support of activities.
20. EDT currently operates 6 main schemes:
i. The Year in Industry (YINI): Industrial paid degree level placements for
students in the year out before or during their degree course.
ii. Headstart Courses: 40 Summer courses at UK universities assisting
informed choice regarding technology based degrees and careers.
iii. Engineering Education Scheme: Links student teams in year 12 with local
companies to work on real problems over a 6 month period.
iv. Go4SET: Links teams of year 9 pupils with companies and universities on a
10 week SET experience.
v. Open Industry: visits for parties of students of all ages to industry and
research sites; half day duration with format linked to curriculum needs.
vi. First Edition: STEM activity days in school or at universities for 11-14 year
olds; introduction to the application of science and maths to real problems,
with careers sessions with role models.
15 December 2011
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Engineering Professors’ Council – Written evidence
Introduction and Summary
The Engineering Professors’ Council (EPC) provides a forum for senior academics
responsible for engineering teaching and research in higher education. It has over 1600
members and represents virtually all of the universities in the UK, which offer degrees in
engineering.
The subject matter of the current Inquiry is therefore of vital interest to our members, with
whom we have consulted in preparing our response. Where our members have expressed
diverse views, we have reflected these as they illustrate the complexity of many of the
questions addressed.
While answers to the wide-ranging questions asked by the Committee do not lend
themselves to being summarized, the following are among the key points made in this
response:
• There are widespread concerns about 16-18 supply, both in terms of “hard science”
and maths knowledge, and in standard of English together with work attitude and
maturity;
• On graduate supply, the EPC is currently involved in research into engineering
graduate employment with a view to elucidating the apparent mismatch between
industry demand and graduate employment statistics;
• The EPC is concerned that, among other negative consequences, the recent higher
education reforms will discourage potential students from taking longer
undergraduate courses like the MEng, and from postgraduate studies;
• We see support for Master’s qualifications as essential, particularly for subjects of
national importance such as engineering;
• We are already concerned at the relatively small numbers of UK (as opposed to
overseas) students taking MScs and doctorates in engineering, and would welcome
measures to encourage take-up.
• Many of our members see the combination of teaching and research as crucial to a
university education.
1.1. What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?
1.2. Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be
used to influence supply?
1.a) Almost any job that requires a numerate education is open to STEM graduates.
Therefore the importance of STEM subjects to the economy is much wider than most
commentators think.
1.b) One area that needs to be addressed in assessing this issue is that a substantial demand
will come from SMEs, and it is not obvious how this can be quantified with any precision,
since many are too over-stretched to respond to questionnaires. So the tendency will be to
underestimate demand.
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2. 16-18 supply
2.1 Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students
and do they have the right skills to study STEM first degrees?
2.1.a) Our members have a number of concerns in this regard:

• There has been a fall in the ability to do ‘hard science’, and particular concern that
the ability of those leaving school with high-grade maths A-levels is not enough for
beginning on many engineering courses. To compensate, most universities have re-
organised their first year maths teaching to compensate for the varying maths skills
even for A & A* students.
• There is also significant concern that the risk-averse attitudes to

practical/experimental work in schools directly and seriously undermines the quality
of the preparation provided. Undergraduates are now starting from a lower base in
terms of laboratory skills and practical awareness for engineering and science
subjects than was previously the case. This inevitably affects what can be achieved at
University and has a direct impact on our engineering and manufacturing industry.
• Concerns have also been expressed about the general attitude to, and aptitude for, a
high standard of spoken and written English, as well as work-ethic and maturity. It is
very important for engineers that they can articulate their ideas effectively.
2.2. What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the
uptake of STEM subjects at advanced level?
2.2.a) There has been some improvement, leading to more applications overall.
2.3. What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of
STEM subjects in higher education?
2.3.a) We welcome the inclusion of a science as one of the qualifying subjects for the English
baccalaureate. As a nation an increased emphasis on high attainment in English and Maths will
also aid the study of, and achievement in, STEM in HE. However, exclusion of Design and
Technology causes concern as this subject presents the only opportunity in most schools for
the pupils to engage with creative practical work, which might excite their enthusiasm for
engineering.
3. Graduate supply
3.1. Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU
and overseas) sufficient to meet the needs of industry, the research base,
and other sectors not directly connected with STEM?
3.1.a) The National HESTEM Programme Midlands Region Hub (funded by HEFCE) is
currently running a project led by our President, Professor Helen Atkinson FREng, on the
employability of engineering graduates. This was prompted by the fact that some engineering
graduates are unemployed despite the fact that a number of engineering employers say they
cannot recruit enough engineers for their needs. The project is exploring the origin of the
mismatch. There are a number of questions, for example: Are engineers graduating in
branches of engineering where the demand is currently low (e.g. civil engineers for a
construction sector currently going through a difficult time)? Are some graduates (for
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example for family reasons) wanting to live in parts of the country where there are not many
engineering jobs? Are some engineers graduating without the skills and competencies
engineering employers are looking for? Is there a correlation between being unemployed on
graduation and degree class? The project is carrying out interviews with a series of
engineering employers and also with unemployed and employed engineering graduates. The
report is in the draft stage but contains much information of relevance to the House of
Lords Inquiry. We would be delighted to pass on a copy of the report if the Inquiry would
find it helpful.
3.1.b) Another aspect is that the question presupposes that industry has a requirement for
STEM graduates that is knowable and predictable. For example, STEM graduates going into
some industries may lead to greater a requirement for them - the system can be one of
positive feedback because, within limits, growth in activity in the area increases demand for
yet more graduates. This can lead to an (probably rather significant) underestimate.
3.1.c) In addition, we are not a command and control economy or political system.
Therefore some people will train as engineers and then chose to go into other professions
(indeed we would hope some would become MPs). That is healthy for society. It is therefore
necessary to educuate more engineers than we actually need because there will always be
leakage. It is also clear that graduates with engineering and other STEM qualifications are
attractive to employers across the labour market because of the analytical and other non-
technical skills they develop.
3.1.d) It is evident from data on MSc course entrants in autumn 2011, and initial figures for
undergraduate applications for 2012, that supply has been damaged by the effects of Border
Agency restrictions on potential overseas students and researchers. This has wider
implications for engineering departments, which have a variety of income streams; if any one
of these, such as overseas student fee income, is threatened, the capability to run the core
undergraduate provision for home students is undermined because engineering is inherently
relatively expensive to teach. Engineering students must develop an appreciation of
engineering principles through laboratories and expertise in design through group design
projects, which require intensive support. Almost all engineering departments in the UK
would be running at a loss if it were not for overseas students’ fees. (The EPC with the
Engineering and Technology Board (ETB) found in a detailed study published in 2007 that the
sector mean Subject-FACTS cost for 2005/6 for a HEFCE4-fundable student in engineering
was
£6,9675 pa – compared to a HEFCE standard unit of resource for engineering of £6,134.
To raise the current standard unit just to meet the mean would have required a 14%
increase in the HEFCE funding allowance; relative costs have not significantly altered since
(see Report on The Costs of Teaching Engineering Degrees 123 ).
3.2. Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education

sufficiently high, and if not, why not?
3.2.a) The majority of engineering degrees are accredited by the Engineering Council, and so
are quality- assured. However, within that framework, our members believe the quality to
be variable. Engineering is a highly demanding subject, which requires competence in
engineering science, communication and practical abilities. Due to financial and time
123 http://www.epc.ac.uk/uploads/occasional_papers/FINAL%20ETB-EPC%20Study%20Summary.pdf
166
restrictions, universities have reduced the amount of hands-on activities that the students
undertake. The variation in quality also reflects the starting point for some students and
access to high quality teaching and research facilities.
3.2.b) A specific concern that has been expressed is about over-reliance, often for financial
reasons, on computer simulation rather than hands-on practical experience.
3.2.c) UK-based undergraduates need to understand that to make themselves employable in

a highly competitive job market they must demonstrate through the application and
interview process the highest standards of aptitude, achievement and motivation.
3.3. Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it
3.3.a) Again, the majority of engineering degrees are accredited by the Engineering Council,
and so are relevant to the engineering profession. Many university engineering departments
use their close links with industry / employers to ensure that their courses are relevant to
demand, though in some cases there may be scope to develop this further; however, a
balance has to be struck since different employers look for different things, and the SME
sector – a major employer of engineering graduates – has widely differing requirements from
those of larger-scale Industry. In addition, university education cannot replace specific
training that industries require (and often look for when making job appointments) –
industries will inevitably need to train staff for their business needs. Specific evidence on
what employers want more of is contained in the IET’s Engineering and Technology Skills &
Demand in Industry Annual Review 2011 124
3.3.b) A related issue concerns the balance in course content between “hard” engineering
skills and “soft” skills such as management, sustainability, health and safety etc; while some
see the latter as important, others feel that the curriculum is too slanted in this direction, to
the extent of pushing out even from four-year MEng courses technical content that was
previously included in their three-year BEng forerunners.
3.4. What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching,
the quality of degrees and the supply of STEM courses in higher education
institutions?
3.4.a) While it is too early to know, EPC members have expressed the following concerns:
• Increased competition for students may open rivalry between academic providers for
students, with potential adverse effects on provision of high quality teaching.
• It is difficult to see how good quality engineering degrees could be provided by low-
cost providers.
• Higher fees will raise student expectations and demands, and may choke off numbers
from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• There are widespread fears that university funding will not increase in real terms,
hence it is unlikely the increased service expected by students will materialise. In
parallel to this, research activities will be streamlined, which will impact on teaching
our students the leading-edge activities as well as core engineering.
124 http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/education/skills2011-page.c fm
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• It will be important to ensure that funds provided for SIVs and STEM initiatives are
not used for other purposes. STEM subjects generally need more funding than many
others – despite typical student fees being the same for all subjects.
3.5. What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop
new and cross-disciplinary STEM degrees?
3.5.a) While some of our members consider it to have In principle a positive impact, there is
a perceived danger that research is "bent" to fit specific funding, and results "bent" to fit
assessment schemes, rather than pursuing and reporting what is scientifically or technically
optimum. This can reduce the disciplinary spread.
3.5.b) There is also widespread concern that engineering academics generally have less
engineering experience than a generation ago. Many come straight through a university route
and many are more science/maths than engineering-based. This is likely to be exacerbated by
RAE/REF initiatives. Recruitment of mature engineers from industry is virtually precluded as
they generally cannot display enough peer-reviewed research publications, or grant awards.
3.5.c) In addition, the REF and similar activities have actually reduced the number of ‘teaching
academics’ as well as those with industrial experience. For academics to be successful, they
are measured on their research, and this inhibits the design of new courses due to the time
required. It also ensures that teaching is often not seen by the new career academics as the
core of their academic activities.
3.6 What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary

for all universities to teach undergraduates and post graduates and
conduct research? What other delivery model should be considered?
3.6.a) Many of our members see the combination of teaching and research as crucial to a
university education, as opposed to further education, as it allows universities to update
course content continually with new material related to current research activity. This
refreshes and enlivens teaching. In addition, research in collaboration with industry
contributes to teaching that keeps track with industry’s requirements for appropriately
qualified graduates. It is also an aspect of our world-class university system that helps to
attract overseas students.
3.6.b) The model of university PhD students contributing to research projects (be they
university, industry, national lab, or a combination) is a model that works already, and should
not be put at risk. For undergraduate students, the combined teaching / research system can
excite them with the thought that a profitable role exists in research and/or industry. The
best way to stimulate them in this direction is to allow them to contribute through their
undergraduate projects to live research projects, and preferable, ones engaged with industry.
This effectively ties the whole system in to one coherent philosophy.
3.6.c) While it might be possible to have a dual track system, or if research funding was
restricted to only a few universities, staff mobility between the two streams would be
difficult and the ‘technical stream’ might become de-motivated. The intellectual quality of
teaching across the sector would be undermined, as would the international reputation of
our teaching.
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3.7. Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education

3.7.a) Yes at present, though with higher costs, more students may need to study from
home, hence limiting choice in the range of courses available locally. The needs of mature
and part time students also need to be taken into consideration, and will become more
important as demographic changes bite.
3.8. What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of
STEM graduates in terms of gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic
background?
3.8.a) The EPC has supported and participated in various initiatives to address these issues.
Bursaries, which are being offered by most if not all universities, are clearly important.
However, selection at all levels should be dependent on set criteria related to ability and
qualifications, not positive discrimination.
4. Post-graduate supply
4.1. Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers
they subsequently undertake?
4.1.a) Some of our members would see this as the wrong question, and note that a PhD is a
journey of scientific discovery; some training along the way may be helpful but it is not the
main point. Some PhDs (in physics, for example) end up in something completely different,
like tourism. It is not the role of the university to dilute training by catering for this explicitly.
However, the core function of a PhD is 'training in methods of research'. It should be the
case that an understanding of the methodology of research could be applied by the student
in disparate areas.
4.1.b) On the other hand, a much higher percentage of engineering PhDs find employment
more specifically linked to their respective PhDs than in many other subjects, indicating that
PhD training is sensitive to their careers. While pure science PhDs are entered upon with
the full knowledge and expectation that any employment opportunities will rely more on the
merits of the individual CV rather than the specific subject of the PhD, PhD studies in
applied sciences can be more focussed towards technology and enterprise applications.
4.1.c) We also note that there has been a significant broadening of the training of doctoral
students (PhD, EngD and Industrial Doctorates) in recent years as a result of Sir Gareth
Roberts’ report. Most engineering departments are addressing this agenda. The
developments have given more consistent provision and encouraged engineering PhD
students to interact more with other disciplines. It has also given greater credence to
training activities in industrial sector partners where this happens. This helps to foster
interdisciplinary thinking as well as broadening career horizons. There is some concern that
where the PhD provision is small research students may not be getting this benefit, so some
would support greater concentration of doctoral training or encouragement of networking
between geographically convenient institutions, particularly for formal training.
4.2. Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to

maintain the research base and are they of sufficient quality?
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4.2.a) Even within our membership, there are differing views on this. While in some areas
the system seems roughly in balance, many of our members see that the numbers are too
low, and that the burden of debt from pre-PhD studies will discourage many home students
who would otherwise have done a PhD.
4.2.b) Employers do recognise the strength of the doctoral training and the strong and
sophisticated skills that they have gained. The take up of PhD and Industrial Doctorate
(previously EngD) graduates by industry is therefore very strong, into both research and
non-research careers. As a result, the number of PhD graduates is not adequate to maintain
the research base, either in academia or in industry. This is evidenced by the very large
number of posts that are filled by non-UK (often non-EU) nationals.
4.2.c) A further aspect is that, in the view of some, an expansion of the PhD student
numbers would enhance the research base, and deliver good engineering science at lower
cost, but frequently no less effectively, than provided by a more senior research associate.
We see the decision of EPSRC to disallow the inclusion of the cost of PhD studentships on
grants as therefore particularly unhelpful in this respect.
4.2.d) As regards quality, some of our members see ever decreasing number of home
student applications relative to those of overseas students as a key issue, particularly
because of language challenges at this level, especially with students coming from countries
where English is not taught and or spoken as mother tongue or as the first foreign language.
To increase home student applications to PhD studies, a helpful approach would be to boost
industrial support with more national schemes with specific titles/ areas of research. On
occasions and places where this is done effectively, there have been significant increases of
home student applications.
4.2.e) There is, however, a risk as perceived by some members that PhD students are being
oriented too strongly to short term, low scientific quality, industrially defined projects and
lack the stimulus towards creative and innovative longer-term research activity. This could
have longer-term impacts for our engineering skills in the future.
4.3. What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and
number of PhD students? Are there alternative delivery models?
4.3.a) Most of our members consider the DTC model to have had a very positive impact. It
permits better training opportunities because of larger numbers, more risk-taking by
doctoral students in the projects that they undertake and in the way they do their projects
(although this also depends on the flexibility given by their supervisors), and encourages less
isolated experience. The move away from project studentships is welcomed by some, as
these were often much too prescriptive and did not allow students to develop as
independent researchers. Interdisciplinary groupings allow students to pursue their research
ideas with a variety of stimuli.
4.3.b) The impact has also been positive both in terms of quality standards and also in terms
of student numbers including home-based student numbers. One suggestion is that these
could be further enhanced with the formal establishment of more "Graduate Schools in
Science and Engineering" and also with specific titles such as "Graduate School of Bio-
Engineering", "Graduate School of Information Technologies", etc. Some consider that the
separation of undergraduate from post-graduate teaching and supervision could be more
170
formalised with much more clear demarcation of academic staff specifically to either
undergraduate or postgraduate teaching and project supervision, although this is not a
universally held view.
4.3.c) On the other hand, some observe that the structure of the competition for DTCs has
meant individual projects that might attract a good student are constrained by the subject
areas of DTCs. This has a negative impact, especially as the DTCs are restricted to specific
areas and hence reduce the opportunity for new and novel research areas that fall outside of
the DTC subject areas .It appears that is going to be far harder to have a diverse range of
subjects covered.
4.3.d) There are high quality PhDs in universities which do not have Doctoral Training
Centres, including PhDs are in collaboration with industry e.g. through CASE studentships.
The establishment by many universities of Graduate Schools has significantly improved the
base of skills and wider interaction that students are gaining through their PhD.
Therefore we would see advantage in having several models working side by side, to give
flexibility and the best capture of excellent candidates. DTCs fit within this, but should not
be the only model.
4.4. Should state funding be used to promote Master’s degrees and is the
balance right between the number of Master’s degree students and PhD
students?
4.4.a) Again, our member have a range of views, although they are united in agreement that
state funding should be used to promote – and directly support – Master’s degrees – though
this should in no way detract from support for PhDs (see response above to 4.2).
4.4.b) For eventual professional qualification as a Chartered Engineer, a Master’s degree

accredited by one or more of the professional engineering institutions is a requirement; this
is gained at present either through a four year integrated Master’s, or following a BEng with
an MSc (or equivalent further learning) to satisfy the Engineering Council for registration.
We are concerned that students will be deterred from taking the four year MEng course
purely on financial grounds; or be deterred from following a BEng with an MSc, which would
need to be privately funded on top of the accumulated student debt. For these reasons, we
see support for Master’s qualifications as essential particularly for subjects of national
importance such as engineering.
4.4.c) One aspect of this is that already our ‘hard-science’, world leading, MSc courses, many
of direct industrial relevance, are now almost free of UK participants, because those who
would be qualified to take them can take well paid careers (often in finance, or even non-
specialist engineering) without undertaking expensive and difficult training to add to their
student debts.
4.4.d) There is a view that establishment and recognition of Graduate Schools would address
these questions in more detail and more effectively. State funding could be made available for
the establishment of Graduate Schools, which could offer full-time, part-time, and life-long
education and professional training courses in collaboration with specific industry sectors.
This would also ensure that we continue to nurture talent and develop expertise for
research whilst promoting more young employment opportunities.
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4.5. What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of
4.5.a) There is widespread agreement among our members that tuition fees will have a
negative impact, when set against other costs that young people face, such as buying a house
etc.
4.5.b) Particularly in engineering where jobs are plentiful many will choose to take a job even
if they may have preferred to pursue research. The stipend needs to keep pace and there
needs to be some way of alleviating the long term burden of the loans that they have
accrued. This would be an incentive to pursue research. In many other fields the need for
differentiation in the market place will keep research student numbers up but this does not
apply to engineering.
5. Industry
5.1. What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to
attract them?
5.1.a) There is a range of possible options, including a high-pay, fast-track, scheme for really
able people plus support for those who wish to undertake specialist training (MSc etc); help
with loan repayments; placements, short and long term; and, within industry, training,
improved career paths and salaries.
5.1.b) Any exposure to the commercial world during a degree course at any level is good
and may encourage a student to move into a relevant STEM industry. However, this is not
likely to happen more without some financial support. At undergraduate level, financial
incentives (such as, but not exclusively, Higher Apprenticeships at Level 6) would encourage
industry to take placement students (this would assist all sizes of industry). Industry would at
the same time have the opportunity to ‘sell’ what it does to the undergraduate – catching
them early.
5.1.c) CASE awards offer a win-win for the postgraduate students, industry and academia,
offering minimal costs with maximum benefit in terms of giving students exposure to ‘real’
engineering challenges.
5.1.d) However, formal schemes for doing this (DTC/CASE) tend to involve long-term
(years) commitment from companies involved, and hence are essentially limited to
established industry.
In some circumstances the situation would be improved by provision in both the funding
mechanisms and degree requirements for research students to move in and out of a relevant
start-up company quickly and easily – say for 1-6 months – for example to deliver small
specific development projects. Critical timescales for a small company are often very short,
and there is no easy way of doing this at present. It could encourage more PhDs to stay in
the STEM commercial sector.
5.1.e) On one view, UK industry needs state incentives to attract and maintain research
scientists and engineers in key export technology and novel application areas. Guidance
could be provided to specific industry sectors how they may pursue schemes, which will
172
enhance their export capabilities. The UK needs to establish new leads in export
technologies and products.
5.2. What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that
demand for STEM graduates matches supply in terms of numbers, skills
and quality of graduates?
5.2.a) Industry and universities are working together in terms of visiting professorships,
industrial advisory boards, joint research and CPD courses. However, there is not always an
integrated vision on the way forward, often due to time and resource demands.
5.2.b) As indicated above (para 3.3.a), courses reflect generalized industry demand as regards
content; numbers depend to a large extent on student choice/demand, which at the time of
application may well not match industry demand four years or more down the line. The core
output should be capable graduates who can work within a range of STEM areas.
5.2.c) Some of our members feel strongly that this question relates again to the quality of the
people coming out of the schools system, especially as regards to practical and experimental
skills, work ethic and maturity.
6. International comparisons
6.1. What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in
STEM subjects in other countries? Which countries provide the most
helpful examples of best practice?
6.1.a) Many other countries have aspects of good practice that merit examination (and much
good practice is also exchanged through collaborative research programmes and other
links). Among countries that our members have mentioned specifically are:
• Finland (a dynamic engineering and research base),
• France (generous support terms for their top ‘Grande Ecole’ technocrats, along with
good wages in industry);
• USA and Japan (Graduate Schools); and the Far East (higher education more geared
towards the requirements of industry).
6.1.b) Graduate Schools are used most effectively in the United States and in Japan. Most
engineering graduates from France and Germany effectively spend the fifth year of the
Master’s programme in industry, thereby providing industry with engineering graduates with
the relevant industrial experience.
16 December 2011
173
Engineering Professors’ Council – Supplementary written evidence
TABLE 1 – engineering MSc overseas intakes Oct 2011 – numbers 1-32 in first column are
reference numbers for an individual university
UP – 2 group Main reason / comment

1 RG Slight increase
2 RG 13% up
NO CHANGE / MIXED – 9
3 M+ MSc numbers PSW
similar (but UG
intake down)
4 RG 2 Depts up, 3 lots of missing MSc
down students, assumed to be
because of visa issues
5 (one course) Post-92 Applications up, Not traditionally Ind/Pak
conversions down
6 Post-92 Engineering But Business School 30%
numbers holding down; PSW change blamed
25 1994
26 Post-92
28 Post-92
31 UA
32 RG
DOWN – 16
7 RG Applications OK, Visa problems, incl long
conversions poor, delays for visa interviews;
esp Indian already affecting staff
recruitment
8 UA Ind/Pak numbers
halved
9 1994 Numbers generally UKBA: PSW & English
down
10 1994 Indian arrivals 20%
down
11 UA OS intake halved
12 1994 MSc numbers Esp drop in numbers from
halved India/Pakistan for visa-
related reasons
13 Post-92 10% drop in OS
14 Post-92 Big drop in Indian
MSc numbers
15 1994 20% drop, after UKBA visas / English [+
applics had been internal accom hitch]
up
174
22 UA 30% drop Visas (countries affected

not known)
23 M+ 30% drop apart
from Civil (no
change)
24 RG 5% drop
27 M+ 2 courses (27%
drop)
29 RG 10% drop Suspended one MSc course
because of staff losses
30 Post-92 95% drop in IT Mainly from India
MSc students
31 RG 30% drop Visas, esp India & China
TABLE 2 – comments on overall student intake numbers / all subjects (Oct 2011), from
BUILA mailing list
UP group Main reason / comment
NO CHANGE
/ MIXED
16 M+ Applications dropped, but Data esp re Nigeria
numbers held / increased
17 Post- Applications up, UKBA changes blamed
92 conversions down
18 Post- Applications up, but Indian applications dropped after
92 conversions down April UKBA changes, esp PSW
change.
DOWN
19 M+ Drop in new student UKBA, esp PSW and other
numbers fr SE Asia changes in mid-recruitment cycle
20 UA Drop in Indian applications UKBA, esp PSW
& enrolments
21 M+ Huge drop in numbers UKBA, esp PSW and other
from India changes in mid-recruitment cycle
March 2012
175
EngineeringUK – Written evidence
About our submission

1. EngineeringUK is delighted to submit evidence to your enquiry. We are an
independent, not for profit organisation whose purpose is to promote the vital
contribution that engineers, and engineering and technology, make to our society.
EngineeringUK supports and has participated in the RAEng submission but this
document presents our unique and distinct positions on the quality, capacity and
capability of STEM subjects in HE.
2. Our primary focus is in working with school-aged children, building their excitement,
passion and aspirations for engineering. As the current generation become the
technicians and engineering graduates of tomorrow we felt it important that your
enquiry has the full facts and understands the longer term needs of tomorrow’s
engineers and technicians who are now in school so that you have the requisite
background information to fully inform your discussion. There is one vital issue here.
Primary school age children demonstrate real excitement and enthusiasm about
STEM subjects; a fact that is evidenced by the massive take-up of our own Big Bang
Fair (see below). But by Year 8 there is a notable drop-off in enjoyment and
thereafter take up of STEM subjects. This is a critical factor which needs to be
addressed if we are to develop a strong pipeline of students into HE.
3. As we have input into the RAEng’s submission, we have not answered every question
in your inquiry notice but have set out what we hope is useful evidence and
information about STEM uptake in schools.
About EngineeringUK
4. Our goal is to improve the perceptions of engineers, engineering and technology and
improve the supply of engineers through the education system. Through our national
programmes we engage with young people, and with those who influence them, to
increase awareness of the wide variety of modern engineering careers on offer and
the benefits and rewards they can bring to individuals and more generally to society
and the economy. We see the role of extracurricular enrichment and enhancement
activities as paramount
5. We lead the development and delivery of The Big Bang: UK Young Scientists &
Engineers Fair 125 . This Fair, referred to as The Big Bang, is now in its third year and is
funding by over 20 science and engineering firms, many in the FTSE 100, along with a
wide range of not for profit bodies within the sector. In 2011 we saw over 25,000
young people, parents and teachers visit the Big Bang at London’s ExCeL. This year,
on the basis of pre-booked numbers, we expect up to 50,000 people to join us in
Birmingham to participate in practical experiments and see first-hand innovation from
the UK’s leading science and engineering companies.
6. The Big Bang is designed to excite young people about science and engineering and
to really encourage them to choose this route when they consider A-Levels or other
routes to higher education. The danger we find, particularly in Year 8, is that there is
125 http://www.thebigbangfair.co.uk/home.cfm
176
a significant dip in enthusiasm for maths and physics which has a notable knock-on
effect on the number of entrants into engineering roles later on.
Context – the economics of engineering

7. The engineering sector is a huge success story. It generated £1.15 trillion in turnover
in the year ending March 2010 – nearly 25% of the turnover of all businesses in the
UK – and employs 5.6 million people across 551,520 enterprises.
8. We know from our research that we cannot be complacent about ensuring the
future supply of skilled technicians and engineers. Future demand as indicated by
Working Futures III indicates that between 2007 and 2017 the manufacturing sector
needs to recruit 587,000 new workers. This will be a challenge when you consider
that from 2011-2020 the number of 18-year-olds will decline from 819,098 to
685,823.
Context – the learner journey

9. EngineeringUK’s purpose is focused on engineering and technology but we recognise
that science and mathematics are the core subjects in school which underpin the
future selection of engineering, whether that is in the context of further or higher
education, or direct employment from school. We have worked with Boston
Consulting Group for our Tomorrow’s Engineers programme in the West Midlands
put this into context, building on the experience with business interventions in
schools.
Engaging with Young People
10. We have observed that learners go on a journey through liking science, choosing
science and then choosing engineering, exemplifying that motivation, subject choice
and then career choice form a natural progression. Awareness raising or inspiration
is followed and underpinned by solid educational contextual initiatives that relate to
the curriculum and ultimately the selection of a further or higher education route or
indeed direct entry into the work force. All three types of engagement are needed to
have an impact, with continuous evaluation as the basis for determining the right mix.
177
Responding to your questions

11. We have deliberately answered the questions where we have relevant expertise and
evidence. We have used the Engineering UK Annual Report 2012 126 as source
material for our submission. This document contains the most up-to-date source
material and we hope will aid your analysis.
Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how could this be used to influence supply?
12. Out of a total of 2.1 million businesses in the UK, just over 550,000 are engineering
businesses. Engineering businesses employ 5.6 million people and generate turnover
over £1.15 trillion, which is 24.9% of the turnover all UK businesses. In the year
ending March 2010 turnover increased 6.9%, despite the impact of the recession.
13. In addition, according to UNESCO the UK has a 2.9% share of global manufacturing
and is the world’s 7th largest manufacturer. Examination of the Sector Skills
Assessments for the 10 engineering-related Sector Skills Councils shows that the
estimated requirement for employees over the next 5-10 years will be just over 2.2
million.
14. Therefore we can state, from an engineering viewpoint, there will be considerable
demand for STEM graduates coming down the track. In fact what we need now is a
concerted effort from teachers, parents and careers advisers to encourage young
people to look very seriously at STEM subjects, because they are likely to lead to
careers that will be in a growth phase as they move towards employment over the
next 10-15 years. This concerted effort needs to be matched by engineering
employers aided by third sector organisations such as ourselves, actively promoting,
supporting the exciting opportunities that the sector will provide etc
Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they
have the right skills to study STEM first degrees?
15. In 2010, 16,624 students achieved an A*-C grade in both maths and physics A Level,
generally considered a pre-requisite to studying a degree in engineering. Of these,
just 21.4% were female.
16. The number of first degree qualifiers in engineering and technology reached 21,955 in
2009/10. However the subject area is very dependent on non-EU students. In
2009/10 non-EU students made up 26.0% of all first degree qualifiers in engineering
and technology, this compares to 9.2% for all courses.
17. However, in order for the engineering and manufacturing sector to successfully
rebalance the economy, the UK needs to fundamentally remodel its skills capacity.
According to the 2009 National Employer Skills Survey for England, the education
system “is not giving young people the skills that businesses need.” Twenty percent
of manufacturers reported skills gaps, while 31% of high-tech manufacturing firms,
“had recruited people from outside the UK owing to a lack of suitably qualified
people from within the UK”.
126 http://www.engineeringuk.com/what_we_do/education_&_skills/engineering_uk_12.cfm
178
18. STEM skills are in demand at every level, with employers of every size struggling to
find the STEM talent they need. This is particularly so with the evolution towards a
more environmentally-friendly economy, where greener skills will be needed. One in
five employers (21%) has difficulty finding graduates with STEM skills, and this
proportion rises to one in three employers (33%) in the science, engineering and IT
sectors. When looking to recruit experienced staff, 44% of science, engineering and
IT employers struggle to find individuals with workplace experience in STEM subjects.
Some solutions – in order to ensure a robust and sustainable flow of students

into HE STEM subjects:
19. Our research with teachers demonstrates their key role in this area:
• Specifically, nearly half (47%) of educators said a career in engineering is desirable,
a fifth (21%) said it was undesirable for students. Those teachers who saw
engineering as undesirable had old-fashioned perceptions of what a career in
engineering was.
• Overall, 91% of the teachers questioned were aware of STEM E&E activities. Of
those who were aware of STEM E&E activities 46% said they were involved, a
further 23% of those aware were not involved in STEM E&E activities, but said
they would like to be.
20. There is a clear need for engineering as a brand, and STEM subjects as a whole, to be
repositioned in the minds of the public and teachers as providing a wide range of high
status career pathways. Perceptions of engineers are positive across all age groups in
the UK. However our research does highlight the need for us to inform parents and
STEM teachers about modern engineering and the opportunities that exist within this
sector.
21. We would recommend as an early outcome, that the careers advisory service
approach to STEM subjects was reviewed and that regular outreach with STEM
practitioners was encouraged. We need robust authoritative and independent STEM
careers IAG – which we can support.
15 December 2011
179
Equality Challenge Unit – Written evidence
Graduate Supply – What is being done and what ought to be done to increase
the diversity of STEM graduates in terms of gender, ethnic origin and socio-
economic background?
• Founded in 2005, the Athena SWAN Charter is a scheme that recognises excellence in
science, engineering and technology (SET) employment for women in higher education.
• Athena SWAN is jointly owned by Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) and the UK Resource
Centre for Women in SET (UKRC). It is managed by ECU and is funded by ECU, UKRC,
the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Higher Education Funding Council
for Wales, the Scottish Funding Council, the Royal Society and the Biochemical Society.
• Any university or research institute embedded within a university that is committed to

the advancement of the careers of women in SET can become a member of the Charter,
accepting and promoting the six Charter principles:
• Addressing gender inequalities requires commitment and action from everyone,
at all levels of the organisation
• A change in cultures and attitudes across the organisation is required to tackle
the unequal representation of women in science
• The absence of diversity at management and policy-making levels has broad
implications which the organisation will examine
• The high loss rate of women in science is an urgent concern which the
organisation will address
• The system of short term contracts has particularly negative consequences for
the retention and progression of women in science, which the university
recognises
• There are both personal and structural obstacles to women making the transition
from PhD into a sustainable academic career in science, which require the active
consideration of the organisation
• There are currently 69 members of the Charter. Once Charter signatories, universities
and their SET departments are encouraged to submit for Athena SWAN Charter
recognition awards at Bronze, Silver or Gold level.
• Through the awards process, institutions and SET departments are encouraged to assess
their baseline and SET academic profile; provide positive support for women at key
career transition points; change the culture and gender balance in decision making; and
scrutinise work-life balance practices.
• As part of the awards, many submissions comment on low numbers of female

undergraduate and postgraduate students progressing into the academic workforce. As a
result there are many examples of good practice in terms of what is being done to
increase the gender diversity of STEM graduates in UK higher education:
a. Imperial College London – student Women in SET society (WSET)
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WSET promotes SET careers amongst women in College, by holding CV development

sessions and networking evenings. WSET also looks to enhance the flow of girls in SET
departments at university through students volunteering for Engineering Open Days and
Robogals.
b. Plymouth University – Faculty of Science and Technology outreach

The Faculty aims to provide curriculum enhancement to pupils through lectures,
practicals and demonstrations, during workshops and events held at the university, and
visits by staff and students to schools. The Faculty’s Girls into Technology days provide
hands-on activities for female-only groups of 15 to 30 students. They also endeavour to
provide careers information, access to current female undergraduate students on an
individual basis, advice from admissions tutors and, where possible, the opportunity to
meet or email a practising female engineer who may act as a role model.
c. University College London – Department of Chemical Engineering, and

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering
The preferred A-level choice for entry to the Department of Chemical Engineering’s
programmes is chemistry, mathematics, and physics. However, recognising that girls are
under-represented in physics after the age of 16, the department widened its entry
requirements and runs a first-year module on ‘physics for chemical engineers’ for
students without A-level physics. The Department has also reviewed its publication
material to attract more female applicants and involves current female students in open
days to attract more female acceptances.
In 2003 the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering redesigned
their degree programmes to be more attractive to a wider range of interests, many of
which were more likely to appeal to women.
d. Keele University – KeeleLink (http://www.keele.ac.uk/keelelink/) and the School

of Physical and Geographical Sciences
Keele has a strong history of involvement with schools, colleges and other educational
partners, which the School of Physical and Geographical Sciences has been extensively
involved in. The School has a nationally leading reputation for its strong commitment to
school outreach work and public engagement in sciences, running aspiration-raising
sessions and workshops, some aimed directly at all-female school groups.
e. University of Nottingham – School of Physics and Astronomy

The School of Physics & Astronomy is engaged in a wide range of activities designed to
help get schools and the wider community involved in physics and astronomy, including
talks and demonstrations, taster days, masterclasses and work experience placements.
These activities all help to encourage women to participate in physics and increase the
proportion of female students accepting offers to study at the School.
f. Queen’s University Belfast – School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

The School is active in leading promotional activities within the university and the local
community, initiating open evenings to engage students and their parents in discussion
about the opportunities available in engineering, participating in public engagement
exercises and hosting the GetSET into Engineering for Girls. These are targeted at
ensuring that prospective female students are informed about opportunities that an
engineering career can offer, enthusing girls about engineering, and providing access to
positive female role models. Through these activities the School has become aware of
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the need to ensure that girls are informed about the benefits of pursuing careers in
engineering prior to GCSE and A-level subject selection.
• In terms of what more can be done to increase diversity, ECU believes that increased
levels of funding for more outreach work involving SET students and academic staff with
those groups underrepresented in STEM would be a huge step forward. It is a necessity
that STEM is better communicated to these groups, so that they can understand what it
means to be a scientist or an engineer, and what is needed to gain access to STEM
education. Improving and encouraging diversity among teaching staff will also have an
impact on those entering STEM higher education, as well as those that continue into
postgraduate study. Lastly, a review of degree programme structures and entry
requirements would also have an impact. Decisions as to A-level subject choices
occurring at 16 often without a full understanding of how interests translate into future
career options, does lead to many diverse groups eliminating themselves from a future
STEM career without realising it.
2 December 2011
182
Will Evans, Imperial College London, Fabio Fiorelli, University

College London, Adam Hawken, University College London, Amran
Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Jennifer
Newman, London South Bank University – Oral evidence (QQ 313-
347)

Members present

Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Patel
Lord Rees of Ludlow
Lord Winston
________________
Will Evans, 3rd year biochemistry student at Imperial College London; Fabio Fiorelli, 4th
year MEng chemical engineering student at University College London; Adam Hawken, 4th
year PhD student at University College London, Amran Hussain, biomedical sciences
graduate of Durham University and Quality Co-ordinator at Imperial College Healthcare
NHS Trust; and Jennifer Newman, 4th year building services engineering student at
London South Bank University.
Q313 The Chairman: Perhaps I may welcome the lady and gentlemen who make up our
first panel this afternoon. You are very welcome here in the House of Lords and we thank
you enormously for contributing to our inquiry, which is looking at higher education in the
STEM subjects. We have had conflicting evidence about quality, about how students are
being prepared to study the STEM subjects in universities and about outcomes, so we want
to put questions to you about your experiences. We would like you to be as honest and
forthright as you possibly can. If you do not understand a question, the learned panel will be
quick to give a detailed explanation.
This session is being webcast and is going out across the world. There is a huge amount of
interest in this process. Any asides you might make to each other about the panel or
anything else will be picked up and broadcast, and will be sent back to your institutions for
further interrogation. I want to make you feel at home.
183
For the record, I will ask each of you to explain who you are and where you are from,
because that is useful for our records. I will address you by your Christian names. Again,
thank you for coming along today.
Will Evans: My name is Will Evans. I am a third year biochem student from Imperial College
London.
Amran Hussain: My name is Amran Hussain. I am a quality co-ordinator for Imperial
College Healthcare NHS Trust and an institutional reviewer for the Quality Assurance
Agency.
Jennifer Newman: I am Jennifer Newman. I am a building services engineering student at
London South Bank University.
Adam Hawken: I am Adam Hawken. I am a final year PhD student in astrophysics at
University College London.
Fabio Fiorelli: My name is Fabio Fiorelli. I am a final year MEng student at UCL in chemical
engineering.
The Chairman: And where did you do your undergraduate work?
Fabio Fiorelli: I did my undergraduate work here at UCL.
The Chairman: Thank you all very much. I wonder if I could start with you, Will, as a
Yorkshireman. I know Ilkley Grammar School well, but for the record it is a comprehensive
school, not a traditional grammar school.
Will Evans: Yes, that is true.
Q314 The Chairman: It is important to state that for the record. A constant theme of
this inquiry has been the quality of maths education in schools, and that it is not sufficient to
prepare students for university. What are your views on that? Did your maths education at
GCSE and A-level prepare you for what you are doing at Imperial?
Will Evans: Actually, I only did maths to GCSE at Ilkley Grammar School. I decided not to
take maths on to A-level, but before I went travelling during my gap year, I taught myself AS-
level maths so that I would have what I hoped would be a reasonable standard for the
degree I was going to take at university. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on how the A-
level maths taught at my school would have prepared me for university, but I can answer
questions on GCSE maths.
Q315 The Chairman: Was the AS-level sufficient in order to do your work when you
got to Imperial?
Will Evans: Yes, I found that it was. But in the first year of studying my subject at Imperial,
maths classes were provided in the afternoon for you to catch up and to give you the skills
and key points that would be important for studying a degree in biochemistry. For example,
they would teach you statistics and logs that might be used in the field of study that I was
taking up.
Q316 The Chairman: So the university made up for any deficiencies. Amran, were you
well prepared for university by your school?
Amran Hussain: I think that there are two different types of experiences. One is self-
motivated and the other is the experience I gained with the assistance of my school. During
my secondary education, a lot of my maths learning was self-motivated because of my
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interest in maths. I read text books and took past exam papers on my own. I do not think
that I had enough support from my secondary school. However, I went to a grammar school
for my post-16 education, and the way they operated was quite different. I was given more
one-to-one sessions and I was challenged more. There was much more in the way of
interesting activities to encourage you to enjoy maths. I thoroughly enjoyed it at A-level. I
was prepared for my degree, which only required me to have GCSE maths.
The Chairman: But your A-level did prepare you for university.
Amran Hussain: Yes.
Q317 The Chairman: Jennifer, what about you?

Jennifer Newman: School-wise, I was underachieving. I attained my O-level and studied for
my A-level. I then went on to an HNC course, and I think that that is where the maths
teaching prepared me for the degree that I am doing now.
The Chairman: You did a level 5 maths course when you were at Lincoln. Was that by
choice or did they insist on it?
Jennifer Newman: No, it was an option, so it was by choice.
The Chairman: Can you tell us, for the record, what a level 5 maths qualification means?
Are we talking about the equivalent of A2?
Jennifer Newman: I am not sure of the current levels. I think it is comparable with
university levels 4 and 5.
The Chairman: So you actually went in without the equivalent of A-level maths and you
took it up there. You have said that it prepared you reasonably well.
Jennifer Newman: Yes.
Q318 The Chairman: Adam, what was your experience like?

Adam Hawken: I was quite good at maths at school. I had the opportunity to do further
maths at GCSE and A-level, but did not take it. When I got to university, I found that a lot of
my peers had done those courses, and there was actually quite a big difference between the
mathematical abilities of students in my undergraduate class. In the first year we had over 40
hours of maths training and I had to catch up with quite a lot. Most of the mathematics I use
now I learnt at university rather than at school. I would say that I was probably under-
prepared at school for my university course.
Q319 The Chairman: Was this a failure of the teaching or the curriculum?
Adam Hawken: Not the teaching at all. As I said, I had the opportunity to do further maths,
but it was not required by my university. I think that the curriculum was lacking a bit. There
were certainly some calculus topics that perhaps we should have done at school, but we had
to learn them at uni. However, the teaching I had at school was impeccable.
Q320 The Chairman: Fabio?

Fabio Fiorelli: I do not know if this question is applicable to me, as I went to high school in
Italy. Most of the mathematics that I use now, in research projects and in answering technical
questions, I learned during my first two years at university. There was a third module in my
university course. However, it was optional and I was in my fourth year, so I decided not to
take it because I wanted to take another module. The topics in the third module should have
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been part of the first two years of my education and I think it should have been compulsory.
I think that the first two years are sufficient.
Q321 The Chairman: But did your school itself give you a good grounding in
mathematics?
Fabio Fiorelli: I think that I had a fairly good grasp of mathematics, but felt at something of a
disadvantage when compared with pupils and students coming out of Asian schools and the
more advantaged British schools. However, I felt that I caught up quite quickly.
Q322 The Chairman: Can I ask all of you whether in your universities you find that
students from India and China have a higher level of mathematics before they arrive? Anyone
can answer.
Adam Hawken: Yes, I found the speed at which Asian students are able to do maths
incredible.
Q323 The Chairman: Why do you think that is?

Adam Hawken: They do more maths, I guess.
Amran Hussain: Yes, they were very good and were able to do more calculations easily,
which was a component of my degree. But maths is not just about being able to add up sums
and doing quadratic equations; it is a way of thinking. There is a mechanical aspect to it
mentally. What I gained from my mathematical education was the ability to implement maths
in other areas of my degree—something I felt that others slightly lacked because they came
from a system that practiced more rote learning. We do not do that. Students have
opportunities to go out and apply their mathematical knowledge in their day-to-day lives.
That was something that I felt us British students had an advantage over the Indian and
Chinese students.
The Chairman: Okay, you have passed the first test. I shall move on to Baroness Perry.
Q324 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I have a very general question about your whole
university experience. I would like you to think about whether you believe that you have
received a high quality education to date. When you reply, perhaps you could tell us what
measure you are using to say whether the experience was of a high quality or not.
Will Evans: I think that the quality of education you get at Imperial is good, but it could be
better. There are troubles in some of the departments, but I am speaking from a student’s
perspective, which may not be accurate. I am talking about how students perceive things. A
lot of students, certainly in biochemistry—I am president of the BioChemistry Society—feel
that they are almost a hassle or a nuisance for some of the lecturers and tutors. Recently
there was a downsizing due to a big budget cut in the life sciences department, and a lot of
the best teaching staff were the ones that seemed to be sacked or moved on. A lot of
people feel that that was because those staff were the ones who did not get the citations
because they spent more time with the students. Whether that is completely accurate, I do
not know, but that is the perception of the students. Certainly in my department, students
feel that they could be treated better by the department and get better value for the money
that they are paying for their education.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: Is that the measure you would use—the sense of your
value as a student to your teachers?
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Will Evans: The measure that I have used when I answered the question just now was
student satisfaction—what value students feel they are getting from their education. I think
that that is just as important as a rubric way of measuring how good something is on paper.
In terms of how good it is on paper, I have not been to any other universities so I have
nothing to compare it with. I can only go by what I have seen during my short and humble
experience.
Amran Hussain: The quality of my education at Durham University was quite high. During
my degree, I felt that I was adequately prepared at all times. My measure was whether I was
doing well in my assignments and exams, because that is where the university comes in in
terms of preparing you. I also felt that my university took things a step further by preparing
us for life so that I am able to implement what I learnt during my undergraduate studies in
my employment and postgraduate work. Those are the measures that I applied. Being a
graduate now, I can look back and say which parts of it were really good and where my
university went out of its way to make the experience valuable.
Q325 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Do you feel the same about your experience as a
PhD student?
Amran Hussain: My experience as a PhD student is quite different. I did a STEM subject for
my undergraduate course and then went on to an arts subject for my PhD. I always wanted
to do an arts degree but I also wanted to acquire a scientist’s way of thinking. As an
undergraduate I needed a lot more assistance, whereas as a PhD student I go back to what I
said about self-motivation. The question of quality is subjective as I have a lot of enthusiasm
for my PhD, but perhaps I did not have as much for my biomedical sciences degree. Where I
needed to be assisted more during the process.
Jennifer Newman: I would agree that I had a high level of education. Part of that I would
judge on my results. If I compare my schooling with university, the results are so much
higher in terms of teaching and how they convey that level of knowledge to me, as well as its
relevance to the workplace because I am also in full-time employment. Everything I have
been taught is very relevant to the job I am doing at the moment, so it all marries up. There
are also the facilities, such as having access to IT facilities. I do not have any problem if I want
to get on to the computers or go to the library. The facilities are good, and that is how I
would judge it.
Adam Hawken: I think that I have had a very high-quality education. First, as an
undergraduate I had access to some really excellent facilities. I also had access to some
inspirational teachers. Virtually all my lecturers were active in research and brought that
interest in research to the lectures. That inspired me to pursue a career in research. During
my PhD, I have also had opportunities to broaden my postgraduate education by taking
some taught courses in other departments of the university. But that has not necessarily
been encouraged. It is something I have done of my own accord. I am very grateful for the
education I have received.
Q326 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Did you have enough help with finding your area
of research for your PhD, because that is often the most difficult path?
Adam Hawken: Yes, I am about to submit my thesis, but I do not think that I have defined
my area of research finely enough. It is tough, but I did have help, particularly in my final
undergraduate year when I was doing my MSc research project. I was picked up by a very
good researcher in my department, and my interests were fostered and encouraged.
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Fabio Fiorelli: I believe that I had a high level of education as well. Since I came here, UCL’s
international ranking has started to climb. Not only did I have excellent quality teaching
overall, but some teachers are passionate about their subject while others are interested in
their interaction with the students. Some can be more perfunctory. I also believe that there
is something that I would call a spiritual component. There is a strong emphasis on
engineering ethics—what we do it for, why we do it and how we should do it. As I say,
some teachers are keen on this aspect while others are a bit less so. I enjoyed it a lot.
I think that the university itself has shortfalls in some facilities. My university has a slight
shortfall in its informatics facilities, but that might be because my degree in particular
requires a great deal of interaction with computers and digital tools. Although there were
some shortcomings, I believe that I have come out a different person and that UCL is my
alma mater. I believe that what could be improved is the interaction with the students. It
would be nice to be able to reward those teachers who make the best of their time with the
students.
Q327 Baroness Perry of Southwark: It has been suggested to us by the student union
at Imperial that a lot of students do not know what the measure of quality is all about,
despite the fact that there is a great deal of emphasis on the student experience. Is that the
experience of any of you?
Will Evans: I did not know what the QAA was until I was invited to this meeting—and I am
the president of the BioChemistry Society and therefore heavily involved with the
department. I feel that I can represent most students when I say that it is not very well
known.
The Chairman: Is that generally felt?
Fabio Fiorelli: Actually, I had help from a tutor from an international school. She knew what
the QAA was, but I do not think I would have come across it without outside help.
Amran Hussain: I should add that there are some students who are interested in quality
assurance and enhancement and are well aware of the Quality Assurance Agency. In the
years leading up to where we are now, the QAA has broadened its scope and now
encourages students to become involved in the National Union of Students—
The Chairman: It has not worked, has it?
Amran Hussain: At my university there is a greater understanding of what the Quality
Assurance Agency is at the moment due to the steps taken by our Student Union.
Q328 Lord Rees of Ludlow: A lot of your teaching at university has been delivered by a
lecturer standing in front of a class, as it would have been for the past 500 years or so. Do
you think enough use is made of computers and the internet as well as other forms of
teaching, such as small groups, personal mentoring and so on? Do you think the dependence
on lectures is appropriate, or is it excessive?
Adam Hawken: Not all of my teaching was in the form of a lecturer standing in front of the
class. When I was at the observatory learning how to use a telescope, demonstrators would
physically teach us how to do stuff. During my fourth year research project, it was me sat in
a room with two staff members going over in detail how I was constructing my code. Those
were my favourite parts of my university experience.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: In the first two years of maths and physics, I guess it is a bit
different.
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Adam Hawken: It is a bit different, yes.
Will Evans: I would like to make the point that biochemistry, the subject I am studying, is a
strongly research-based topic. A lot of the work and focus in the subject takes place in the
lab. I have found that the education at Imperial in terms of lab experience is very poor. It is
possible to graduate from Imperial with a first-class degree in biochemistry without having
had any research experience aside from an afternoon laboratory session to write a lab
report. For example, for the final-year project you are allowed to do a literature project or
a laboratory one. You could choose a laboratory project where you do some research
under a supervisor in a lab, or a literature project where you write a dissertation. Other
than that, there is no option to find out what it is like to be a research scientist.
Lord Winston: That is not true of all faculties. Is that not true, Amran?
Will Evans: I can only speak for the faculty of which I am a part. I cannot speak for any of
the others.
Amran Hussain: It is different for different institutions. I felt that I was exposed to a lot of
researchers and that they involved us in their work. They offered us studentships, with
opportunities to get to know what they were doing, which we could then try to apply to our
undergraduate dissertations. I felt that we did get enough exposure to the research area.
Also, we had a lot of laboratory experience made available for biomedical sciences, but that
is probably because of the way our degree was constructed.
Q329 The Chairman: Jennifer, I am particularly interested to hear your response to the
question put by Lord Rees, because you have an interesting background in terms of where
you have come from and where you are now as a part-time student.
Jennifer Newman: I would say that there is actually quite a combination. It is not just
lecturing because we also have lab sessions. I go to uni for one day a week and there is
always a lab session in that week. There is a lot to the tutorial side, as well as group work.
For some subjects, you are put into a group to do an ongoing task rather than something in
the short term. You work with tutors who advise and oversee it. It is not just straight
lecturing; there is quite a combination.
Q330 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Are you able to watch some of the lectures as a video on
the web at home?
Jennifer Newman: I record lectures on audio, which I find very helpful.
Q331 Lord Winston: Perhaps I may go back to where we started, which was the quality
of education. I wonder if we could tease out how you feel about the general education you
are given as young scientists. A feeling I certainly get at Imperial is that course tutors and the
people who run courses feel that the courses are so pressurised that they do not allow
students to take on much outside of them. Do you feel that you are getting a good general
education? Also, could the five of you address those things that are relatively important to
science but are not actually scientific, such as ideas about ethics, areas of public policy and
the communication of science? Would you mind addressing those three issues in particular,
but also the broader scope?
The Chairman: Fabio, you mentioned that ethics was part of your course.
Fabio Fiorelli: Yes, we have an element of ethics embedded in every course that covers
ideas such as how we have to make things safe and exploring issues of sustainability.
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However, several of the factors mentioned by Lord Winston, such as communication and
the policy of science, were just offered as options. For example, I took a science policy unit
in my second year. I found it quite interesting and enjoyable because it made me look in a
different way at the participation of lay men in science, as well as other things such as what
science is, why do we do it and what the right way of doing it is. I think that those of my
classmates who did not take the course would have missed out on some key things. The
programme is quite compressed, and I wonder if it would be right to add some of these
aspects to other courses, especially at the very beginning of undergraduate courses—at the
freshman level.
Adam Hawken: My experiences with this kind of stuff as an undergraduate and as a PhD
student were quite different. I do not think that my experience as an undergraduate
prepared me for the full skills set I need as a PhD student. I give talks all the time at
conferences as well as seminars at other institutions. During my undergraduate degree I did
perhaps two talks, which was not enough. Personally, I feel that I lack some presentation
skills which could have been drummed into me a bit earlier. Also, there is writing. If you do a
physics degree, you do not have to write very much. But as a scientist and a researcher, I
have to write a lot.
The Chairman: I think that Lord Rees would disagree with you.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: I did maths and we wrote even less.
Adam Hawken: When you are writing papers, you have to be able to translate
mathematical and physical ideas into words on a page that someone else can then read. That
is a skill which no one teaches you. You have to pick it up for yourself. So certainly I think
that that is a deficit in terms of our education. UCL did run a course in science
communication when I was an undergraduate, but it must be said that it was not one that
students took particularly seriously. They said, “Why am I sitting here learning this stuff? I
want to do physics.” It would be far better to incorporate these kinds of skills into the core
subjects rather than have them as an optional extra that some people do not take seriously.
The Chairman: We are fast running out of time, so please be as brief as possible. I would
like to get your responses to Lord Winston’s questions. Jennifer?
Jennifer Newman: On communications, we do presentations which provide quite a good
grounding. People get experience of standing up and talking. On the writing side, my DMS
gave me an awful lot. I learnt from that, particularly things that I would not have known. So
perhaps more could be done on that side.
Q332 The Chairman: Will, I am going to turn to you because I want to ask Amran a
separate question.
Will Evans: At Imperial, there is an option to do a short science communication course in
combination with a literature project. I have been told that that is quite good, but as Adam
mentioned, a lot of students do not take it that seriously. What is also quite important,
taking up what Adam said about feeling that his course did not prepare him for writing his
PhD, is that the option to do the laboratory research project clashes with the option to do
the science communication project. You cannot do both. In terms of the degree in general, I
feel that a good effort was made to integrate some oral presentation and speaking skills
assessments into it, and I appreciate that that is quite a difficult thing to do. You cannot have
six speeches a term from 200 students. In terms of ethics, that was not part of the course at
all. My only exposure to it was that I did an A-level in philosophy and ethics, which I feel has
given me a reasonable grounding in some of the current debates in science. But other than
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the fact that there is an option to do a humanities module in ethics, I cannot remember any
point in the course when it was mentioned or considered.
Q333 The Chairman: Amran, earlier, you spoke about the QAA that you were involved
in when you were at Durham in terms of the new assessment of quality, so we know about
that and you do not need to go back to it. But it is changing now and there is going to be the
new quality code. Could you tell us what you think of that?
Amran Hussain: I think that it is a step forward. The inclusion of, and greater emphasis on,
published information is very important. We were lacking on that front. A lot of institutions
are not publishing information correctly and a lot of students are not clear about what they
are signing up to. That is especially so with the increasing marketisation of our higher
education institutions. We need to know what we are signing up for. On the quality code for
higher education, the third criterion looks specifically at published information.
The Chairman: So you think that this will be a real improvement.
Amran Hussain: I think that it will. It will give us an opportunity, when we are so young, to
know what we are signing up for. Many of us are paying up to £9,000 for our degrees. We
want to know exactly what we are signing up for. I had to search all over the internet
looking for where I wanted to apply, and I had to speak to many people. I should not need
to do that. I want something in the prospectus that clearly identifies which institution does
what and what they will have to offer us.
The Chairman: That brings me nicely, first, to Baroness Neuberger and then to Lord
Lucas.
Q334 Baroness Neuberger: We have a mock-up here of the proposed key information
sets—your published information. Do you think that prospective students would get enough
information from the key information set to make a judgment on the quality of the learning
experience that they can expect? Does it give them enough information about the quality
and does it tell them enough about the other things? For example, it says what salary you
can expect in six months’ time. Should information about employment prospects be included
in this?
The Chairman: Please be as brief as possible, Amran.
Amran Hussain: A lot of work needs to be done with this. I want to know what prospects I
have employment-wise, but I do not want to be given the wrong impression. I am doing a
biomedical science degree; I do not need to be told that I am going to be a biomedical
scientist. If I am young, I am going to be signing up to a degree thinking that I am going to be
a biomedical scientist or a lab pathologist at the end of it. It is more important to highlight
what skills I would be gaining from those degrees, then I could choose whether it is
biomedical science that I want to follow or whether I want to become a quality co-
ordinator. I went into my degree wanting to acquire just the scientific way of thinking. I did
not want to go onto becoming a biomedical scientist. So a lot of work needs to be done
with this. It is improving the status quo and a step towards the right direction. I do not want
to know what salary I am getting; as there is no guarantee.
Baroness Neuberger: So the principle is right, but you are not completely happy. Will,
what do you think?
Will Evans: In terms of the salary, it is a good idea, but the economic climate might not be
the same in three or four years’ time as when you started. In terms of employment
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prospects, when I chose my university degree, I did not really have an idea about what I
would be doing. So the key information would at least give you an idea of what skill sets you
would gain.
Baroness Neuberger: It does not include the skill sets at the moment. It tells you about
how the course divides up—how much time you would spend in scheduled learning or
teaching and how much you would do on your own—but it does not tell you about what
skill sets you would acquire.
Jennifer Newman: I would agree: yes, it should go in. For your progression, you want to
know where you are going to go. For example, with building services, you could do a BSc or
BEng. What does that lead to? They are potentially different routes.
Q335 Baroness Neuberger: Just pushing you on that, would it be possible to design it in
such a way that it gave you enough information to make a proper informed choice?
Jennifer Newman: Yes.
Adam Hawken: I think that it would be interesting to see, as a prospective student, what
career choices people make after graduating. Most people who study astronomy do not
become astronomers. The average pay of an astronomer is probably a lot less than the
average pay of someone with an astronomy degree. Condensing things into one number is
not relevant for everyone. Diversity of information is perhaps more useful.
Fabio Fiorelli: I agree completely with this point. Perhaps some testimonies in the words of
people coming out of the course should be added to the KIS, so that people understand
that, if you get an astronomy degree, you do not necessarily become an astronomer and why
an astronomy degree is more useful in one field than in another. But it should always give
the opportunity of actually becoming an astronomer.
The Chairman: Some people do become astronomers.
Q336 Lord Lucas: One thing obviously missing is any mention of gender. So far as STEM
is concerned, you are a gender-balanced panel—there is a great shortage of women. Do you
understand why so few women do physics and similar subjects? Do you have any suggestions
as to what we should do about it? When it comes to information, would presenting a gender
breakdown, so that women could see what their prospects were from a particular scientific
course, make a difference, given that, in this sort of format, their results are always
submerged by the men?
Jennifer Newman: I do not know whether it would make you change your mind as to
whether you went scientific. I was always interested in the science side, not the English. That
is why I have followed that route. I cannot really say why women do not go in for it. There is
nothing obvious there.
Adam Hawken: As an undergraduate astronomer, I found that we had a higher proportion
of women doing astronomy than in other branches of physics. At PhD level, it is somewhat
skewed towards male researchers rather than female researchers. I think that age is an issue
here; for example, for a girl in her mid-20s choosing a particular career, issues such as
childcare come into it, which is not being supported at universities. I cannot speak from a
female perspective, but I notice the gender imbalance. It needs to be fixed, but I cannot offer
any solutions.
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Q337 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: My question is about workplace possibilities while
you are a student. Obviously, it does not apply to Jennifer, who is rather a mirror image of
that, being in work and being a part-time student. But, have the rest of you had
opportunities to experience the workplace during your undergraduate degrees or
placements with firms or things like that?
Fabio Fiorelli: Yes, we had plenty of opportunities, but compared to the number of students
they were insufficient. We received an invitation to apply for one or another placement
every day, but I know several students with very high marks—in fact, first-class honours—
who applied for more than 50 placements and managed to get none. These were worthy
students with very good CVs who had skills and had applied for other, smaller jobs to bulk
out their CV. So the total number might be insufficient. I was perhaps being a little too
discriminatory, but I was looking in particular for undergraduate research projects or
teaching assistant posts in schools. With these kinds of placement, there is a severe lack of
opportunities. We have only one invitation for an undergraduate research project every
year.
Q338 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Do you think that universities are doing enough?
What is the experience of the rest of you?
Adam Hawken: I know a number of people in physical sciences whose PhDs are part-
funded by companies. That is not the case in astronomy. I do not see why that should be so,
given that if you are studying instrumentation or something like that, you are dealing with
private companies all the time to help build your bits of kit. There is certainly far more room
for involvement with industry, even with something like astronomy.
Q339 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Will, have you had opportunities to work outside
universities?
Will Evans: I was lucky enough to get an internship in Munich in a lab over the summer, but
I agree that it is very competitive and very difficult. There are a lot of students who want to
get work experience or lab experience and who are unable to get it. That is something that
we could attempt to tackle, because I feel that every student has the right to gain experience
of what their degree is in the real world outside the lecture hall. 127
Amran Hussain: My degree benefited from the fact that it was registered with the Institute
of Biomedical Science. If you wanted to become a biomedical scientist at the end of it, you
had to take an industrial placement to comply with that and produce a portfolio. Our
university already had links with hospitals and laboratories all over the country, even abroad,
to be able to carry that out. It also made great strides by introducing Erasmus during that
period. I know that my university works with Japan to get something that will be compliant
with the Institute of Biomedical Science. However, I think some students who take up those
opportunities may not benefit from it. Those are the students who go into the industry and
find out, “Oh, no. Have I really chosen this degree, and is this what I am going to get into?”.
You might only be in your second year or third year. Do you really want to know that then?
It’s just too late and can then affect your overall performance during the remainder of your
studies. I did not take any opportunities because they were specific to my degree and I knew
that this was something that I did not want a career in.
127I did a summer lab placement in a research field related to my degree and I didn't enjoy it. However, I found this a
beneficial experience as it helped me decide that I didn't want to do a pHd and that I didn't want to pursue academia which
in my opinion is useful knowledge.
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Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: But that might be important information for that particular
student if they find that they are not interested in that particular industry.
Amran Hussain: Well, this then means they have to start again under another discipline.
Perhaps they can complete the degree like I have done and then go into another one—I am
doing a PhD in the arts. That is possible, but after graduation we just cannot afford to change
degrees at such a late stage nowadays. I have a friend in computing at Durham University
who is going through a panic attack. She has just done a placement and said, “I don’t want to
do this anymore”. What are you going to say to her? She wants to leave the course and she
has already done three years, it’s just too late to be changing degrees, there are financial and
social implications in doing this.
Jennifer Newman: I had experience of work placements on my HNC. That was part of the
sponsorship because it was a sponsorship scheme. There was a nine-week placement and a
five-month placement. I found that very beneficial. It actually helped me decide which route I
wanted to go down. There were various options.
Q340 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: How was that organised with the workplace?
Jennifer Newman: It was done through the college and the EITB. It was expected.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. We are running out of time again, so perhaps we
can all be as brief as we can.
Q341 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I just want to follow this up with a question about other
kinds of mentoring and advice that you may need, or have received, that is relevant to your
careers. In the case of graduate students, obviously it is what you do after your PhD; for
undergraduates, this may include advice on whether you should go on to a further degree or
into the workplace directly. What kind of advice have you had, and what extra advice would
you like to have had?
Will Evans: At Imperial the careers advice on offer is very good. I feel lucky to have that
available. I also knew how to get additional advice if I wanted it. The student opinion at
Imperial is that the advice available is of a good quality.
Q342 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Is everyone else as positive?

Amran Hussain: Yes. At my university, which was a collegiate university, careers advice was
given in two tiers—one from the university-wide careers service and one at the college
level. Both were very beneficial and approachable at any time. I needed that because I
wanted a career outside of biomedical sciences, so I needed the extra advice. Our university
had a scheme called the Durham Awards Scheme, which trained you during your second and
third years to learn about team building and how to write a CV and covering letter. You get
an award at the end to recognise that you have done it. That encouraged a lot of students to
go out there and do it, so that was very good practice.
Jennifer Newman: I have not sought any advice through the university but have had advice
through my employer. I am currently on a development programme that gives me one-to-
one opportunities with senior management.
Adam Hawken: I have had some advice from my department about its academic career path
and how to get a post-doc academic position and so on, but virtually no help at all with
potential careers outside academia. It is almost a dirty word to say that you want to go into
194
industry. That is not that helpful, given that most people will at some point move into the
private sector.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: And they will have relevant expertise, as you said earlier.
Adam Hawken: Exactly. And knowing what that relevant expertise might be is something of
a challenge. Some employers have employed astrophysicists before and can recognise these
skills, but I might struggle to recognise them in myself and present them in an appropriate
way on my CV.
Fabio Fiorelli: I had the opposite experience. I had plenty of advice from teachers and the
careers centre, which is just in front of our building. There is plenty of material, which I have
found very useful. They have modular workshops that you can attend to build different skills.
But there is an assumption that you are going to go into industry; academia is perhaps an
option—no one says that you cannot go into it—but it is sort of forgotten. In the fourth
year we started to receive the impression that, if we wanted, we could take a PhD, and now
some teachers are trying to lure us into getting one. Previously, we did not receive much
advice. They assumed that we were going to be off drilling oil in the North Sea or the Middle
East.
The Chairman: We will have just a couple of quick questions from Lord Rees.
Q343 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Following on from that, you said that not enough students
are being encouraged to do PhDs. Is there going to be an additional discouragement under
the new system, where people are already in debt when they get their first degree? Is that
going to make it even harder to get PhD engineers?
Fabio Fiorelli: I think it might be more likely. In the current economic climate, people might
not even want to complete a full four-year course but just go for a bachelor’s degree and
then get on and make money.
Adam Hawken: That is a very good point. In that fourth year—I imagine it is similar with
engineering—you learn the skills such as how to programme a computer and how to do
research. That is the year that people will give up on if they are not enjoying their course
too much and it is another £9,000.
Fabio Fiorelli: I absolutely agree. I think that I have learned a good third of my skills,
competencies and ideas in my fourth year.
Adam Hawken: I think it would put people off doing PhDs. The interest on my student loan
is accumulating but I have not started payments. I will do in September when I have a real
job, but if the debt and interest payments were three times as much as they are now, more
people would think twice before pursuing one.
Will Evans: I feel that debt is definitely a big factor. At Imperial, it is almost easier to go into
an office job and earn £25,000 a year when you graduate than it is to get a PhD. With the
new fees system, where people are going to pay £9,000 a year and go into more debt, there
are going to be fewer people wanting to do a PhD, where they earn a low amount of money
and are unable to pay off their debt. I do not mean it is easy, but Imperial certainly publicises
all the banking, consulting and big city opportunities. The debt is quite a significant factor.
The Chairman: Lord Winston, I am going to leave you with the last question.
Q344 Lord Winston: I want to ask Fabio something. What do you feel your expectations
are in terms of future employment and how well you are being prepared for that?
195
Fabio Fiorelli: I believe that at the end of this year I will be quite ready for industry. I did
not feel the same confidence at the end of my third year. I wondered why so many of my
classmates were starting work immediately that year. But if I was working in industry now,
or after my exams, I believe I would have enough competencies. I am not sure what my
expectations are after the PhD but still have four years to understand that better. I am
mostly doing this out of interest in the science. The expectation is that it is going to be
worth it as well.
Q345 Lord Winston: Are you considering a post-doc?

Fabio Fiorelli: Yes, I am considering that as well.
Adam Hawken: I have a post-doc that I start in Italy in September. It was a bit of a
nightmare spending several weeks every evening filling out application forms and not getting
much feedback, but I now have a position that gives me job security for another few years.
There is the concern about spending too much time in academia—that I will get to my mid-
30s and not have secured a permanent position, and then find that I have never had a job
outside of an educational establishment. I am concerned about that, but I will worry about it
later.
Q346 Lord Winston: As a very brief follow-up, given that we all know about the
insecurities of being a scientist, can I ask whether it worries you that you are quite likely to
be living on grant support a lot of the time?
Adam Hawken: Yes, but I have a lot of friends my age who are unemployed. A post-doc
contract of three years is quite good. I have friends who work on contracts of six months,
with breaks of unemployment and poor job prospects in between. For a young person in the
current economic climate, a career in science provides relatively good job security.
Q347 Lord Winston: Does Fabio agree?

Fabio Fiorelli: I think the same. If I manage to get a grant, it seems like quite a safe position
at the moment. I might be wrong, but I assume that the new skills and abilities that I learn
after a doctorate will at least make me more marketable to industry, state research or
similar sectors. I can safely assume that at least I will not be starving. I feel that overall, while
not optimal, the situation is better than it could be, especially when compared to other
fields. I have friends from other faculties who have far worse employment perspectives.
The Chairman: On that note, we will finish this session. The situation of a politician is
pretty insecure as well.
Lord Lucas: Even in this place?
Baroness Neuberger: We could be abolished.
The Chairman: Well, not in this place, but that was the case in my former career. I think I
speak on behalf of the whole Committee when I say that we have thoroughly enjoyed the
evidence that you have given us this afternoon. We thank you all for your honesty,
forthrightness and enthusiasm and wish you every success, whether it is at the end of your
PhD or post-doc work, or at the end of your degree going into the world of work. It has
been a pleasure meeting you and thank you all very much indeed.
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Expedition Engineering, Vectura and LGC Limited – Oral evidence (QQ 146-166)
Expedition Engineering, Vectura and LGC Limited – Oral evidence

(QQ 146-166)
Transcript to be found under LGC Limited
197
Expedition Engineering, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Oxford Instruments, Sandwell and
West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust and EDF Energy Nuclear Generation – Oral
Expedition Engineering, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Oxford

Instruments, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust
and EDF Energy Nuclear Generation – Oral evidence (QQ 348-365)
Transcript to be found under EDF Energy Nuclear Generation
198
Expert Group for Women in STEM – Written evidence
Introduction
The Expert Group for Women in STEM was constituted under BIS to advise on issues
pertinent to engaging women in STEM and ensuring an improved representation of women
in STEM in order that their skills and talents benefit the UK. The Expert Group is currently
engaging with the Royal Academy of Engineering and with the Royal Society in their
pursuance of their Diversity programmes within BIS. In our response we will restrict our
comments to those questions focused on diversity with specific comments on the impact on
gender equality.
Response from the Expert Group for Women in STEM

- What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM graduates
in terms of gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic background?
We recognise that a huge amount has been done, mainly through grassroots projects but
also through mainstream efforts to increase diversity including the work of the Institute of
Physics and the WISE Campaign. It is evident from these programmes that role models are
key, not only through ‘remote’ campaigns such as the STEMNET Leading Lights posters, but
also through direct engagement by role models with different cultural groups such as the
Generating Genius Campaign that engages with Afro Caribbean students and the Promoting
Potential work with the Somali Community in West London (both supported by the HE
STEM Programme). All mainstream campaigns should be required to demonstrate diversity.
There needs to be more direct intervention with different cultural groups, not only through schools,
but also through a strategy of direct interaction with community groups and, in particular, with
parents.
Careers advice to schools and at HE level is key. There is evidence from the HE STEM
Programme that those undertaking to provide careers guidance harbour stereotypical views
of what is acceptable for male and female students, and that the advice they give guides the
students accordingly. Training courses provided by the UKRC through the HE STEM
Programme have demonstrated that careers professionals are unaware of their biases and
are keen to provide more balanced advice and guidance once they are provided with the
training and sufficient knowledge of the types of work available in science and engineering.
It is essential that careers professionals be better trained to ensure that they are fully aware of the
range of careers available from STEM and that stereotypes are not reinforced.
Further evidence from work at the Institute of Education in London shows that parents have
considerable influence on their children’s career aspirations – frequently dissuading girls
from continuing with STEM. Campaigns to indicate to parents the ‘bonus’ enjoyed by those
who acquire STEM qualifications and the professional nature of STEM careers increasing the
number of girls and other under-represented groups in STEM.
Campaigns to indicate to parents the range of professions available to their daughters from STEM
qualifications should be instigated.
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- Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they have
the right skills to study STEM first degrees?
Currently the quality of the best STEM graduates in the UK matches any from the rest of the
world indicating that the UK system has the capability to compete in terms of quality of
provision and UK employers are happy with the quality of the best graduates. The complaint
from industry is that there are too few of these high flying students available on graduation.
These high flying graduates are, typically, those that enter university with the highest A –
level grades in STEM subjects. It is clear that many students with comparable grades in STEM
A – level subjects choose not to study STEM degrees, preferring the more lucrative offerings
of medicine and allied professions (ophthalmic optics, pharmacy, veterinary science). Indeed
there is evidence that secondary schools advise the highest achieving, scientifically able
students to study medicine as otherwise they are ‘undervaluing themselves’.
If the UK wants STEM graduates of the quality and quantity that Medicine currently attracts, then
Industry has to reward and recognise STEM graduates to the same levels as those graduating in
Medicine in order to compete.
It is also notable that Medicine and allied professions do not suffer from the same limited
diversity as STEM even though the A – level grades required are comparable (currently the
proportion of female undergraduates in medicine is over 50% and the proportion of ethnic
minority students in medicine, pharmacy and opthalmics in extremely high). There is
evidence of parental influence on these groups in making this choice of career direction.
Valuing and affording status to those in STEM careers in the same way that professions allied to
medicine are valued and rewarded would increase diversity.
- What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand for STEM
HEIs are working very hard to attract the highest quality A – level students into STEM –
however note comment above about the number of high quality A – level students opting
for other areas of study.
Concerns have been expressed that there are many STEM graduates who do not have the
broader range of skills that industry requires and thus are not employed. It is this shortfall
that leaves UK employers complaining about lack of supply. Research undertaken by the
London and South East Spoke of the HE STEM Programme has indicated that the skills that
are lacking are rarely the technical skills and more often the more generic business
awareness, project management, financial planning, budgeting and personnel management
skills, and that the employers complaining of this lack of skills are SMEs where, with fewer
employees, there is a need for each employee to bring a wider range of skills to the
company. A more diverse supply of STEM graduates would increase the probability that
there are those with the wider range of management, business and people skills available to
industry, particularly SMEs.
In order to satisfy the need for this wider range of business focused skills by SMEs, dedicated
modules on business awareness project planning, financial planning and management should be
200
provided to STEM (and all other undergraduates) by Business Schools in universities with input from
employers.
This would provide a considerable boost to UK talent by enabling all graduates to hit the
ground running and provide considerable support to SMEs which are the motor of growth in
the economy. Ensuring that currently under-represented groups are not excluded would
extend the pool of talent, providing an excellent business case for enhancing diversity.
The HE STEM Programme has undertaken to engage employers in the production and
provision of STEM undergraduate programmes in order to provide training in this wider
range of skills. However there is evidence that only a very few are prepared to engage –
though those that do are very effective. Requests for workplacement opportunities for
students are usually met with polite refusals. Many high flying graduates – particularly women
who, on average, out-perform men at undergraduate level - are attracted out of STEM on
graduation by the offer of more female friendly working practices and lack of familiarity with
current STEM employment opportunities. Wider availability of opportunity to engage
directly with employers during their undergraduate degree would increase the probability
that these high flying female STEM graduates enter the STEM workforce.
There is considerable scope for greater engagement by industry with HEIs through industry focused
modules and work placements – though each has to understand that if extra material is required in
the curriculum to satisfy industries’ needs, then other material has to be removed.
* What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM subjects in
other countries? Which countries provide the most helpful examples of best practice?
There is evidence that there are a lot more girls study maths and physics to a higher level in
other European countries, for example Italy, Spain. This indicates that it there are cultural
rather than biological reasons for women not studying maths/physics in the UK. One
interesting correlation is that cultures more closely influenced by the USA (UK,
Netherlands, Scandinavian countries) routinely have a lower proportion of women in then
mathematical and physical sciences than those more removed – Spain, France, Italy, Eastern
Europe. Interestingly the proportion of women in STEM in Eastern European countries has
reduced since their exposure to more western influences. Most people in the UK are
unaware of this difference in performance from country to country and therefore assume it
is ‘normal’ for women not to engage with STEM. Greater awareness of the UK’s
underperformance in this respect might open their eyes to the impact of cultural influences
and change their attitudes to women in STEM.
Conclusion
Women and other under-represented groups are capable of undertaking the most
demanding of degree courses but those with STEM A – levels are, currently, opting to focus
on professions allied to medicine. The reasons are strongly cultural with significant influences
being wielded by parents and, to a lesser extent, those offering careers advice who hold
stereotypical views of what is acceptable for women and/or what constitutes a high status,
well rewarded career choice. In addition to the programmes undertaken to date that have
sought to work with students in isolation, a more holistic approach, incorporating
engagement with community groups and parents, as well as a change in society’s attitude to
STEM, through a visible reward and recognition system that places STEM on a par with
201
Medicine will attract the highest achievers from a wide range of under-represented groups,
including women, to study STEM and to continue working in STEM – assuming that family
friendly working practices are adopted by all STEM employers to continue the good work
required to attract the diverse groups into STEM initially.
16 December 2011
202
Fabio Fiorelli, University College London, Adam Hawken, University College London, Amran
Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Jennifer Newman, London South Bank
University, and Will Evans, Imperial College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347)
Fabio Fiorelli, University College London, Adam Hawken, University

College London, Amran Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS
Trust, Jennifer Newman, London South Bank University, and Will
Evans, Imperial College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347)
Transcript to be found under Will Evans, Imperial College London
203
Geological Society, the Committee of Heads of University

Geosciences Departments and the British Geological Survey –
Written evidence
1. a. The Geological Society is the national learned and professional body for
geoscience, with over 10,000 Fellows (members) worldwide. The Fellowship
encompasses those working in industry, academia and government, with a
wide range of perspectives and views on policy-relevant geoscience, and the
Society is a leading communicator of this science to government bodies and
other non-technical audiences.
b. The Committee of Heads of University Geosciences Departments (CHUGD)
is the subject association of Geoscience (geology, applied geology, earth
science, geophysics, geochemistry and some environmental science)
departments/schools based within universities in the British Isles. It promotes
discussion and exchange of information between departments and provides a
point of contact between these and professional, government and quality
control agencies.
c. The British Geological Survey (BGS) is a world leading geological survey and
the United Kingdom's premier centre for earth science information and
expertise. The BGS provides expert services and impartial advice in all areas
of geoscience. Its client base is drawn from the public and private sectors
both in the UK and internationally.
2. We have not attempted to address all the questions raised in the call for evidence.
Below, we offer some general comments, followed by responses to some of the
questions raised.
3. It is vital that current and future national skills needs and education policy are
considered together. Significant numbers of trained geoscientists in a wide range of
specialisms will be needed to ensure future wealth generation, economic innovation,
and the delivery of resources and services to the UK population. Geoscience is
inherently interdisciplinary, and as a result its practitioners are particularly adept at
working across tribal boundaries, be those boundaries academic, commercial or
political. Geoscientists are also crucial to meeting known policy challenges over the
next decades, particularly as we seek to decarbonise the energy system and the
economy. In recent months, we have sought to alert ministers, parliamentarians and
other decision-makers to the concerns of senior geoscientists from both academia
and industry that the UK’s ability to meet existing and future geoscience skills needs
is in jeopardy. This situation may be exacerbated by recent and prospective Higher
Education (HE) policy and funding decisions, in the context of global undersupply of
trained personnel. As our organisations and others work to encourage talented
young people to study geology and to pursue a career in geoscience, we have urged
Government to ensure that students are not deterred from doing so and that
universities are not disincentivised from offering geoscience courses, both at
undergraduate and postgraduate level.
4. The Committee’s call for evidence highlights the fact that while there are reports
from industry that they are struggling to recruit suitable graduates, many STEM
204
5. The Geological Society, working with others, has recently established a Geoscience
Skills Forum, bringing together representatives from industry, academia and
government. An early priority is to gather information about current and future skills
needs, the concerns and expectations of educators, and students’ drivers and choices
in selecting their careers, so that our future actions and advice in this area are
founded on a robust evidence base.
6. As in the wider STEM community, there is profound uncertainty among geoscientists

about the intended and unintended consequences of multiple significant changes
currently underway in HE policy and funding. This is disruptive, and makes planning at
a departmental and university level very difficult. Consultations (for example, those
being undertaken by HEFCE regarding implementation of policy set out in the recent
HE White Paper, starting with that on transition arrangements for 2012-13) are
understandably piecemeal. It is difficult for implementing bodies, HE institutions and
other stakeholders to see the big picture, and to respond in an informed and
coherent way to the significant changes now underway.
General questions
7. Regarding the definition of a STEM job, we note the valuable analysis recently
undertaken for the Science Council (available at
http://www.sciencecouncil.org/content/science-workforce) on the UK science
workforce, which distinguishes primary and secondary science workers; and core and
related science sectors.
8. As noted above, our understanding of the demand for geoscience graduates is

currently partial, and largely anecdotal – a matter we intend to address through the
Geoscience Skills Forum. Our impression is that a clear evidence base is lacking in
other scientific disciplines too.
16-18 supply
9. Departments offering undergraduate geoscience degree programmes seek students

with good science A-levels (not necessarily including Geology). The recent upturn in
the number of students taking science A-levels is therefore welcome.
205
10. Recognising that Geology is not taught as a separate subject in most schools, it is
important that pupils are introduced to geoscience within mainstream curriculum
subjects, to complement the careers information and advice provided by our
organisations and others, so that students are aware of geoscience as a degree
option, and of the employment opportunities this opens up.
Graduate supply
11. As noted above, while there does not appear to be an undersupply in absolute
numbers of geoscience graduates, there is anecdotal evidence of serious shortage of
those who are considered suitably skilled, particularly in some sectors of geoscience
industry. (Being ‘suitably skilled’ may depend on the content of undergraduate
programmes, graduates’ ability to apply this knowledge, having a postgraduate degree
or other training, etc.) This is supported by inclusion in the UK Border Agency’s
revised March 2011 Shortage Occupations List of geoscientist, geophysicist,
hydrogeologist, engineering geologist and a range of related geoscience and
engineering specialisms. Applicants in these occupations for Tier 2 migrant status are
to be assigned high priority under the new immigration regulations. However, the UK
cannot rely on importing these skills. Despite the large number of geoscientists being
produced in emerging economies, there is not expected to be any surplus. According
to recent work undertaken by the American Geosciences Institute, China is
undersupplied by 30% in comparison to its projected needs, for example, and India is
neither importing nor exporting trained geoscientists. It is therefore essential that we
ensure sufficient domestic supply of geoscientists.
12. In light of the multiple changes underway in HE policy and funding, there is
widespread uncertainty and considerable disagreement about the aggregate effect
(both in geoscience and more widely) on the number and diversity of applicants; the
number and range of undergraduate degree programmes available; and number of
student places available. (HEFCE noted this uncertainty and disparity of view in its
letter to Vice-Chancellors following its consultation on transition arrangements for
student funding and numbers for 2012-13, available at
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/circlets/2011/cl26_11/.) Nevertheless, some particular
concerns have been identified.
13. It is essential that the funding of undergraduate teaching continues to recognise the
greater cost of teaching STEM subjects compared with most other subjects. It is also
important to recognise that some science subjects are more expensive than others
to teach. We therefore welcome HEFCE’s maintenance of the differential in teaching
funding allocation between subjects in Bands A, B and C in 2012-13, and (since not all
Band B science subjects cost the same to teach) the continuation of the additional
funding stream for some very high cost science subjects. The continuation of this
additional funding is important, recognising that some subjects are more expensive to
teach than others. Were it not for additional funding, the level of provision would be
at risk, as vice-chancellors are more likely to prioritise subjects which attract the
same level of funding per student but which are less expensive to teach. This would
be likely to lead to the closure of programmes and departments, and a reduction in
the number of graduates in such subjects, to the detriment of future national skills
needs.
206
14. We are also pleased that HEFCE has recognised that there is widespread support for
an overall review of both the price group system and the additional support for very
high cost science subjects from 2013-14 onwards, including the method for deciding
which subjects should receive additional funding. A particular concern is that the
simple allocation of additional funds to broad subject areas on the basis of aggregate
cost data, as has happened in recent years, may fail to take account of key
information, particularly regarding smaller subject areas which are nonetheless vital
to meeting future national skills needs. For example, TRAC data for 2009-10 show
that the mean full teaching cost per student FTE per year in ‘Earth, Marine and
Environmental Sciences’ is £9,298 across all 57 universities offering degrees in this
broad subject classification. However, at the 13 Russell Group universities, where
courses in this area are more likely to be in Geology or Geoscience, rather than less
costly Environmental Science courses, the average cost is £11,279. This is over
£1,000 more than the average cost of teaching Physics (both at Russell Group
universities and at all universities). These data suggest that the costs of providing high
quality geoscience degrees, even compared with other mainstream science
disciplines, are not fully recognised within the current regime.
15. There is particular uncertainty in the science community about the likely impacts of
Government’s proposal to remove students achieving AAB+ at A-level (or
equivalent) from student control numbers, particularly in combination with other
planned policy changes. (HEFCE noted the variety of views expressed on this subject
in its letter to vice-chancellors.) For many, a concern is that this may cause the
number of students undertaking science degrees to decline, or that geoscience in
particular may be adversely affected in comparison with other science subjects.
16. We welcome HEFCE’s decision, in light of its recent consultation, to exclude STEM
and other SIVS student numbers when creating the margin of 20,000 student places
in 2012-13 for competition among lower cost institutions, recognising that these
institutions are less likely to teach higher cost SIVS subjects. We also welcome
HEFCE’s implicit recognition that uptake of STEM subjects may be at particular risk
as a result of HE policy changes, as they say they will monitor this.
17. Fieldwork is regarded by both industry and universities as an essential part of the
training of geoscientists and its inclusion as a mandatory element of undergraduate
programmes is a requirement for their accreditation by the Geological Society. Many
university departments require students to meet some or all of the costs of field
study themselves, meaning that the total cost to students of studying geology is often
higher than that of other subjects. This trend is likely to continue with increasing
pressure on departmental budgets. Furthermore, the fact that fieldwork usually takes
place during vacations makes it more difficult for students to secure paid employment
to subsidise their costs. This is a potential disincentive to students who are
considering studying geoscience. (Those elements of fieldwork costs which are not
met by students contribute to the high cost to universities of teaching geoscience.)
Postgraduate supply
18. The loss of public funding for the support of taught applied Masters courses is a
major concern for our community. (We note that this concern is shared by others,
as indicated in HEFCE’s letter, referred to above.) Such courses are not intended to
207
be preparatory to a PhD or a research career, but constitute applied training which is
highly valued by industry, particularly in certain sectors including petroleum
geoscience, hydrogeology and engineering geology – indeed, many employers in these
areas require applicants to have an MSc. Emerging evidence from the Geoscience
Skills Forum suggests that shortage of those with suitable applied Masters training is
the main concern in some sectors, rather than the supply of undergraduates. It was
very disappointing that the recent HE White Paper paid almost no attention to
postgraduate training.
19. Because they do not principally constitute part of a research career, funding for such
taught Masters courses should not be weighed against that for PhDs. Public funding
to support the delivery of taught MSc courses has historically been delivered through
the Research Councils. This is rapidly being withdrawn, with the abolition of NERC
MSc studentships from 2011, and the phasing out of EPSRC Collaborative Training
Accounts by 2013. Many MSc students are already funded by industrial sponsors,
predominantly large oil companies. However, the loss of public funding is not likely to
be substituted by further funding from industry. Individual graduates may not be
retained in employment by their sponsoring company for long enough to justify the
investment. This financial risk is relatively greater for smaller companies, for which
the loss of investment in one employee is relatively greater, and which in addition do
not benefit from the smoothing effect of employing more graduates. With others, we
have undertaken to use our best efforts to stimulate more collaborative industry
funding, but this is unlikely to meet the shortfall. Most students will only be able to
complete an applied geoscience Masters course if they fund it themselves, usually
through a commercial bank loan (since student loans are not available for
postgraduate study), on top of increased debts for undergraduate degrees. A number
of MSc courses are already closing, and this trend is likely to continue. (Increasingly,
these are dependent on independently-funded overseas students.) Numerically small
specialisms which are nonetheless vital to industry are particularly vulnerable. For
example, micropalaeontology has a key role in locating hydrocarbon resources, and
while even large oil companies will only employ a few micropalaeontologists, their
community represents a valuable element of national capability.
20. There is a strong case for modest government expenditure to support taught MSc
courses, in order to avoid this market failure which could risk huge long term losses
and jeopardise our ability to meet known policy challenges. Efforts on the part of the
geoscience community to persuade NERC to reconsider its decision to withdraw
MSc funding have been without success, and at a time of increasing budgetary
pressure it is understandable that taught Masters courses are not considered the
highest priority within Research Councils’ portfolio of research funding
responsibilities. Government should therefore provide dedicated funding to support
Masters courses, and make HEFCE responsible for its allocation. In specialisms where
there is demonstrable risk of skills shortage, HEFCE should provide protection for
Masters training, as for SIVS at undergraduate level. It would be logical to ensure that
such support is consistent with the UK Border Agency’s policy regarding shortage
occupations (where these require postgraduate training).
Industry
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21. As noted above, industry pays for significant numbers of MSc places, particularly in
petroleum geoscience, and with others we will seek to stimulate further industry
funding. These efforts would be more likely to meet with success if they were
supported by incentives from Government, such as tax breaks or fund matching.
22. Industry partners are closely involved in benchmarking the skills and competencies to
be taught to undergraduate and graduate students, through the Geological Society’s
degree accreditation scheme. They will also be key stakeholders in the Geoscience
Skills Forum. We would be happy to refer the Committee to industry contacts, if it
wishes to explore further the needs and interests of any particular sector.
23. We have no comment to make on international comparisons.
24. We would be pleased to discuss further any of the points raised in this submission, to
provide more detailed information, or to suggest oral witnesses and other specialist
contacts.
19 December 2011
209
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Microsoft Ltd, Siemens and Rolls-Royce – Oral evidence (QQ 120-
145)
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Microsoft Ltd, Siemens and Rolls-Royce –

Oral evidence (QQ 120-145)
Transcript to be found under Rolls-Royce
210
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) – Supplementary written evidence
Thank you for giving GlaxoSmithKline the opportunity to provide evidence to the
Committee a few weeks ago. You asked for some additional written input on a number of
issues that were not able to discuss on the day. I have attempted to provide some feedback
on some of these issues below. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you require further
information from GSK.
1) Introduction to GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is one of the world's leading research-based pharmaceutical and

healthcare companies, developing and supplying medicines to improve patients' quality of life.
We employ over 96,000 people in over 100 countries. Our products cover a wide range of
healthcare areas: prescription medicines, vaccines, rare diseases, dermatology, and consumer
healthcare, and we produce medicines that treat six major disease areas - asthma, virus
control, infections, mental health, diabetes and digestive conditions. In addition, we are a
leader in dermatology and we are developing new treatments for cancer and rare
diseases.GSK is the largest pharmaceutical company by value in the UK, is British-owned,
and is headquartered in the UK, employing more than 14,700 people. We are the largest
private sector funder of R&D in the UK, spending £1.8 billion in the UK in 2010; over 40% of
our global R&D spend.
2) GSK’s views of the Higher Education reforms
In general, GSK would have concerns if universities were unable to continue to provide
high quality practical experiences in some science and engineering degree courses because of
the high cost of delivering them. GSK would be concerned if the additional funding that
HEFCE intends to provide for such subjects was inadequate, leading to universities to reduce
the quality of the teaching of practical techniques and skills to undergraduates – which would
have a knock on effect on their future employability in postgraduate research or in industry.
Regarding Master’s degrees, we agree that some aspects of the availability of funding for
taught postgraduate training may not have been given the appropriate level of attention in
the current education reforms. We suggest that the impact of the reduction in funding
available for participation in such courses should be monitored. There are a number of key
areas of biomedical science of relevance to the pharmaceutical industry where the provision
of postgraduate teaching through Masters courses remains important, such as veterinary
pathology, toxicology and statistics. Based on recent experiences however, it must be noted
that when GSK has identified a need for the development of a specific Masters-level course,
e.g in imaging, then the universities have been very approachable in establishing such a
programme.
There is a much greater demand within the pharmaceutical sector for the development of
shorter and more specific modular training programmes. In this context GSK considers that
the BBSRC’s Modular Training for Industry initiative should be commended. Through this
programme the BBSRC makes funding available for the development of industrially-relevant
short training courses at Masters degree level. The individual training modules are developed
by the university in close collaboration with industry.
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3) The impact of student fees on industrial placements
When GSK does recruit we actively seek people who have had industrial experience at
some stage of their academic training or research. The chances of such applicants of gaining
employment in the pharma sector in most areas of science are considerably enhanced if they
have been on an industrial placement programme. For this reason GSK is a strong advocate
for sandwich placements. We would be concerned therefore that as a result of the
introduction of student fees and the student loan scheme, student s would be deterred from
applying to do a sandwich year, as this would be seen as leading to an additional year of debt.
We strongly endorse the recommendations concerning sandwich degrees in Sir Tim
Wilson’s Review on industry-academic collaborations and welcome calls for the further
encouragement of such degrees through the development of a new compact between
students, universities, government and employers, reflecting the benefits to all parties from
the enhanced employment outcomes arising from them.
As Sir Tim has pointed out, it is matter of concern that the present regulations permit a fee
of up to £4,500 for sandwich years. We agree that universities should be encouraged to
adopt a much lower fee; e.g an initial guideline fee of £1,000 as suggested. We fully support
the proposal that the Student Loan Company should suspend interest charges on any
existing loan during the period of the placement. The recommendation that the Government
should support companies that host students on full sandwich placement years through a tax
credit or grant mechanism should be explored further as a means of stimulating the further
development of such placements.
4) GSK’s views on impact of visas and immigration controls on recruitment and

staff mobility
GSK acknowledges that we have faced very few issues concerning visa availability over the
last twelve months. We are aware that the whole visa process has been under-subscribed,
possibly as a result of the current economic situation. We remain concerned over a number
of aspects of the current immigration controls, and feel that a number of the ongoing
changes that are being made at the UKBA could threaten the stability of the system thus
making any medium- or long -term planning very difficult. Whilst we welcome the recent
announcement that the Government is to allow those who enter as PhD-level scientists and
researchers to qualify for settlement without having to meet the £35,000 minimum salary
threshold introduced under Tier 1, some of the proposed changes to qualifying salaries
could lead to issues with GSK getting visa’s for some of our graduates especially within the
science and manufacturing areas. We will therefore continue to monitor developments.
GSK is also concerned of the longer-term implications of the introduction of changes that
could limit the number of STEM education experiences open to foreign students .At the
moment, the UK is seen as a great place to get a STEM education and a start to a career – if
this is limited then the pool of talent will diminish or even move elsewhere and the UK will
no longer be seen as a centre of excellence in this arena (at which point we could also see
UK based students choosing to go and study elsewhere). Those overseas students who
come to the UK, and then return to their home countries with a positive view of their time
here could have a real impact on the UK’s international competitiveness.
212
5) The assessment of quality in graduate and post-graduate job seekers
GSK has a high level of engagement with many universities in the UK. We do however
accept applications from all universities, and we do not screen favourably to any specific
University for any of our programmes in the UK. We are more interested in motivations
and drive to work at GSK and within the area of the business they have chosen to apply for.
We also look for a range of experiences relevant to our leadership competencies and
specific examples of where the job-seekers have demonstrated these. Our final-round
assessment centres are designed to provide an opportunity for the applicants to
demonstrate these behaviours further by taking part in various exercises. We share what
we are looking for with all our candidates through each stage of the recruitment process
through detailed correspondence and information on our website. All our programmes have
a benchmark of a 2:1 degree classification
GSK has built relationships with a large range of universities in the UK and we encourage
candidates to apply from a variety of degree courses with the exception of some of our
more technical programmes e.g in manufacturing where we look for students who have a
degree in a relevant engineering or science course. Through our active studentship
programmes and the strategic relationships we have developed with many of the universities
we are able to get a better understanding of the quality of the graduates and post-graduates
arising from these institutions.
6) The benefits of kite-marking and accreditation of courses
In a few fields, for example in the development of in vivo research skills, where employers
need to have confidence that graduates do have the necessary skills for a research career,
then GSK can recognise the benefit of appropriate course accreditation. In this context we
welcome therefore the work that the Society of Biology has been doing to establish such an
accreditation programme for the Biological Sciences.
GSK has been supporting the establishment by EMTRAIN (one of the Education and Training
projects of the EU’s Innovative Medicines Initiative) of the “On-Course” catalogue www.on-
course.eu which we believe could become the most comprehensive biomedical
postgraduate course portal in Europe.
14 March 2012
213
Government – Written evidence
This memorandum has been prepared by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)
with contributions from the Department for Education (DfE). HEFCE and RCUK are providing
separate submissions.
1. The UK’s universities are world class, with four in the top 30 globally, and 30 in the
top 200, according to THE rankings. Their reputation in STEM is indisputable, and in
research the UK continues to punch above its weight: our Research Base is second in
the world only to the USA for number of citations, and the most productive in the G8
(papers and citations per unit GDP).
2. Our historic and continuing investment in Science and Research is the foundation on
which our universities’ performance and reputation in STEM is based. The present
Government’s commitment to science and research was demonstrated by protecting
the programme budget with a flat-cash, ring-fenced settlement for 2011-15. This was
achieved at a time when the economic outlook was poor, and when there was
significant pressure to make savings across many major areas of Government
expenditure.
3. This protection has been given because of compelling evidence that a strong research
base is vital for our future as a nation in a global knowledge economy. This applies to
both fundamental, curiosity-driven research and research related to the challenges
facing business and public services. The supply of graduates and post doctorates is vital
for the labour market.
4. Supporting world class research is vital for sectors such as the advanced manufacturing,
life sciences and space industries which are critical for promoting long-term,
sustainable, economic growth. The effective exploitation of research will create new
businesses and improve existing ones, attract highly skilled scientists and technicians,
becoming a focus for international investment, while improving public policy and
services.
5. The UK’s leading research position is in part due to its effectiveness in attracting
productive and internationally mobile researchers to work in the UK, both those that
began their research careers in the UK and those that began them elsewhere.
Internationally mobile researchers are more likely to have internationally co-authored
work, which attracts more citations. Recent reforms to the immigration system,
including the introduction of the Tier 1 exceptional talent route, and the increased
points for PhD level jobs in Tier 2, will continue to allow the brightest and best
scientists to come to work in the UK. From April 2012, the post study work route
allowing students graduating from UK institutions to work in the UK will be closed;
however, students with a job offer from a Tier 2 sponsor will be able to remain in the
UK to work, provided they meet the minimum salary requirements.
6. When considering the state of Higher Education in STEM subjects, it is important to

remember that English universities are autonomous, self-governing institutions. It is for
them to make their own decisions about the courses they provide; their admissions
214
policy; how to implement their own funding strategies and to make the necessary
decisions to ensure they are responsive to student choice and that their institutions
can continue to flourish. These decisions will affect STEM at both undergraduate and
postgraduate level, balance between teaching and research in any institution.
7. At a strategic level, the Government believes that the quality of HE in STEM disciplines
is underpinned by strong university departments, which are often those with a good
research record.
8. Teaching and research have an interlinked relationship where, over time, new research
findings and theories are fed in to undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Some
universities put great value on the way their staff conduct cutting edge research, whilst
also teaching undergraduates, considering it as one of their most important attributes.
Understanding the needs of industry and other employers is vital – the future of higher
education is moving to model where supply and demand will operate in a more
transparent market. Students will demand better information about the quality of their
degrees, and how these will lead to their chosen careers. Universities will need to
respond, particularly in STEM where there is greater correlation between specific
industry needs and the content and skills taught.
9. Funding is provided for research through two pathways – the dual support system.
Research Councils provide research funding on a UK-wide basis for research projects,
national facilities and international subscriptions. Quality-Related research funding for
English HEIs is provided by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE),
with equivalent funding bodies in each of the Devolved Administrations. The National
Academies (Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering and British Academy) fund
brilliant individuals UK-wide.
10. The Government believes that STEM skills are vital for economic growth. STEM issues
are cross-cutting, and affect many areas including: education policy development (DfE);
higher education policy (BIS); STEM workforce and skills (BIS); and research funding
(BIS). This mainstreaming approach means that STEM issues are given proper
consideration where they occur, rather than being located in a single place or team.
11. At undergraduate degree level, in 2009/10 the number of UK-domiciled STEM entrants
rose by 5% from the previous year to 175,015; UK-domiciled entrants comprised 86%
of all STEM entrants in 2009/10. The total studying STEM full-time as a first degree in
09/10 stood at 522,420. There have been large increases since 2008/09 in Mathematical
Sciences (+6%) and Engineering (+7%). Also in 2009/10, UK domiciled STEM PhD
entrants were up 9% compared to 2008/09 (9,290 new UK-domiciled entrants), and all
STEM PhD entrants up by 6% (61% of STEM PhD entrants (9,290) were UK-domiciled
in 2009/10). This included large increases in Engineering (+20%) and Physics (+10%).
12. The role of Further Education is also significant. In 2009/10 1.74 million STEM and
Numeracy qualifications were achieved in the FE and Skills sector in England. Whilst
the absolute numbers studying Level 4 (first degree i.e. HE) STEM in FE are small (less
than 5% of all HE STEM), offered as foundation degrees or equivalent, this is a valuable
route for widening participation in STEM. At the same time, FE colleges also teach a
significant proportion of all STEM A levels.
215
13. A further 640,000 STEM qualifications were taken by 16-18 year olds in schools.
Uptake of science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects at GCSE and A
level has been rising steadily. In 2011, Mathematics, Biology, Psychology, Chemistry and
Physics were amongst the top ten A Level subjects – each with over 29,000 entries.
Chemistry, Mathematics, Biology, Physics and Further Mathematics were amongst the
top-ten year-on-year increases.
14. The Government understands the importance of engaging all young people in STEM.
That is why there is a substantial programme of work in place to achieve this aim. This
includes helping young people to understand how studying the STEM disciplines leads
to future career opportunities. Programmes supported by BIS include STEMNET and
the over 27,000 volunteer STEM Ambassadors, National Science and Engineering
Week, the Big Bang Fair and the National Science and Engineering Competition. BIS
also runs a periodic Public Attitudes to Science Survey which in 2011 included, for the
first time, a sample of young peoples’ attitudes.
Definition of a STEM subject
15. The definition of a STEM subject varies depending on the level of education and varies
between countries. In the UK, GCSE and A-levels sciences (Biology, Chemistry and
Physics) and Mathematics are defined as STEM qualifications 128 . Defining a STEM
qualification becomes more complicated when considering FE, Skills and HE as the
breadth of options requires finer classification.
16. At HE level, subjects are classified for data collection purposes according to the Joint
Academic Coding System (JACS). At its ‘highest’ level this classifies all subjects/courses
into up to 21 groups. Within this list the STEM classifiers are: Medicine & dentistry;
Subjects allied to medicine; Biological sciences; Veterinary science; Agriculture &
related subjects; Physical sciences; Mathematical sciences; Computer science;
Engineering; Technologies; and Architecture, building & planning. This is the
classification system used by UK institutions including BIS and HESA and is the
definition used in this document.
17. More details on the JACS are given in Annex A, along with an indication of some of
the more disaggregated subject levels. These definitions can apply in the UK (though
different education systems across UK Nations do imply some adjustments have to be
made 129 ) but the same classification may not necessarily hold for international
comparisons.
18. Sometimes one will find reference in reports/analysis to “hard STEM” and “soft STEM”
(or perhaps ‘core’ and ‘non-core’). There is no agreed definition of these, but “hard or
core STEM” will generally include: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, perhaps Maths, some
Engineering subjects and then maybe some other specific subjects within the other
STEM broad groups. “Soft STEM” will then be those STEM subjects not included in the
“hard” definition – these will (clearly) also vary, but always tend to include the newer
STEM subjects such as Sports Science and Forensic Science.
128 Royal Society State of the Nation (2011)

129 Royal Society State of the Nation (2011)
216
Definition of a STEM job
19. STEM jobs are less precisely defined than STEM subjects and there is no conventionally
agreed definition or standard. The common practice both domestically and
internationally is to consider either the occupation or the industry where the job is
located. This system is the international norm as there are internationally adopted
classifications of occupations and industries, but it is subject to error. Occupations and
industries are more heterogeneous than qualifications.
20. The most common definitions are based on Standard Occupational Classification
(SOC) codes, sometimes combined with industrial sector (SIC) codes and/or
qualifications of employees (in particular subjects and at particular levels). Not all jobs
within a STEM occupation or an industry require STEM skills and the fact that a STEM
graduate holds a job does not necessarily make it a STEM job. Therefore, there may be
considerable variation in classifications.
Figure 1: Number and percentage of STEM and non-STEM jobs by sector

50%
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STEM
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21. Some SOC codes are indisputably STEM, e.g. Scientific Researcher, Chemist – whereas
others are less clear or open to interpretation, e.g. Psychologist, Teacher, certain
management roles. This implies that the definition of a STEM job is dependent on the
study and the data available.
• The former Department for Innovation, University and Science (DIUS) 2009 report,
“The Demand for STEM Skills”, defined STEM occupations ‘by inspection’ of 4-digit
SOC codes. The report noted that: “There is necessarily some arbitrariness in which
occupations are/are not classified as science occupations, but the low proportions of non-
STEM graduates found in STEM occupations as we defined them lends at least some
credibility to our classification system.” Some of the analysis in this report has also
considered graduates from STEM subjects working in Financial and Teaching
occupations. The full list of SOC codes deemed to be STEM in this report is given in
Annex B.
217
• The BIS 2011 research report, “STEM Graduates in Non-STEM Jobs”, noted that: “A
particular issue is the definition of STEM (and thereby also “non-STEM”)”. While degree
disciplines can be grouped relatively easily into a STEM cluster (…) it is much more difficult
to classify STEM employment in the absence of a generally accepted definition of what
comprises either a STEM job or STEM skills. Neither Standard Occupational Classification
(SOC) system codes or Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes are particularly valuable
to do this”. The authors developed their own definition of a STEM job based on
sector and occupation. Some more details are in Annex B.
Demand for STEM graduates and how this could influence supply
22. Labour demand is a function of business needs; businesses require graduates for many
jobs, not all of which are STEM jobs. The skills of STEM graduates are also valued in
jobs that are not traditionally classed as STEM.
23. There are no administrative records on the total number of jobs for STEM graduates.
Evidence on the state of labour demand can be followed by looking at employment
growth, vacancies (filled or unfilled) and by opinion surveys of employers (information
on opinion surveys is given under the section on Graduate Supply).
24. Employment growth of STEM graduates is healthy and higher than that of non-STEM
graduates. Figures for the 2009/10 graduating cohort show that 87.9% of STEM
graduates were in employment or further study 6 months after graduation compared
to 85.6% of non-STEM graduates. See Annex C for more details on employment
statistics, occupations of STEM graduates and earnings.
25. The UKCES skills audit 130 looks at employment growth. The table below shows the
four STEM occupations from the top 20 fastest growing occupations (4-digit SOC
level) in the first year of the recession. A STEM qualification would be a requirement
for just three of these occupations (Lab testers, Physicists et. al. and Pilots/flight
engineers).
Table 1: STEM occupations in the list of top 20 fastest growing occupations 2008/09
Occupation Spring 2008 Summer 2009 % change

Pharmacy manager 5616 10056 79.1
Routine laboratory testers 8436 13493 59.9
Physicists, geologists and 19551 28915 47.9
meteorologists
Aircraft pilots and flight 16376 23694 44.7
engineers
Source: UKCES skills audit
26. However, the skills audit report also highlights the significant demand for highly skilled
specific STEM-related occupations across a number of sectors. In some cases, these are
critical to the relevant industry or sector. These include food and drink manufacturing
industries (Improve, 2009) and a range of employers within medical technologies
130 http://www.ukces.org.uk/ourwork/nssa
218
(Hogarth et al, 2010). The primary industries for the low carbon economy are not
likely to yield significant employment growth in the next 10 years, but will have
particular requirements for high-level STEM occupations.
27. The degree to which supply is able to cover demand, as indicated by the number of
vacancies and the speed at which they are covered needs to be borne in mind when
looking at mismatches between supply and demand for STEM. Demand changes rapidly
in response to economic conditions. The formal supply of STEM responds more slowly.
There is a minimum amount of skill shortages that will need to be borne in a dynamic
economy in which innovation is driving production.
28. Because the labour market is highly heterogeneous and regionally segregated, facts
regarding employment growth, hard to fill vacancies and opinion surveys indicate areas
where the mismatch between supply and demand is more acute and may require
action. Mismatches reflect a wedge between supply and demand requirement and
expectations. Both sides of the market have a part to play in reducing these
mismatches.
29. The UKCES skills audit notes that skills shortage vacancies (those hard to fill due to a
lack of skills, work experience or qualification) are relatively low in England. For every
1,000 employees there were 2.7 of these vacancies in 2009. This amounted to 3 per
cent of all establishments being affected by such vacancies, but mostly among the small
employers: 63% of all skills shortages occur in establishments with fewer than 25
employees. It is worth bearing in mind that vacancies of all types are more prevalent
where employment is higher and thus some correction for employment levels, such as
the density of vacancies per 1,000 jobs gives a more accurate picture.
30. The overall proportion of all vacancies that are skills shortages declined from 21% to
16% between 2007 and 2009, indicating a better fit between demand and supply. The
highest proportion of shortages are in Skilled Trades and Professional occupations but
their density (per 1,000 employment) is greatest in Associate Professionals. Hard to fill
and skill shortage vacancies are disproportionally concentrated in London and South
East. The largest volumes of skills shortage vacancies are in business services and health
and social work sectors of activity. However, as a proportion of all vacancies skills
shortages are highest in Utilities followed by Agriculture and Construction.
Table 2: Vacancies and skill shortage vacancies (SSV)

Vacancies SSVs SSVs per % of vacancies
1,000 that are SSVs
employees 2007 2008
Unweighted base 35,310 5,118
All England 385,675 63,100 2.7 21 16
Manager and senior 19,750 3,725 0.9 21 19
officials
Professionals 36,825 8,300 3.2 28 23
Associate professionals 64,125 12,700 7.4 22 20
Skilled trades 28,975 8,900 5.5 37 31
Personal services 54,700 9,125 5.1 21 17
Sales and customer 46,325 5,475 1.8 15 12
219
services
Machine operatives 20,125 2,900 1.9 24 14
Elementary occupations 61,300 6,925 2.1 15 11
Note: Weighted figures rounded to the nearest 25
Base: All vacancies (weighted 365,675; unweighted 35,310)
Source: National Employer Skill Survey 2009
STEM graduates in non-STEM jobs
31. The evidence shows that not all STEM graduates end up in STEM jobs, and this is a
relevant point to consider when analysing demand for STEM graduates. Studies of
longer term outcomes of destinations of graduates (e.g. Demand for STEM skills, BIS,
2009 ) have shown that that substantial proportions of STEM graduates (between 34%
and 50%, depending on the definition of a STEM job) find employment in non-STEM
occupations and jobs by three and a half years after graduation.
32. There is a great deal of subject-specific variation in the proportion of STEM graduates
that will end up in STEM jobs, as illustrated in the graph below. For example, graduates
in medicine and subjects allied to medicine are very likely to end up in STEM jobs,
whereas graduates in biological sciences are far less likely to do graduate jobs.
Biological sciences is an interesting example, with the second highest number of
graduates but the lowest percentage (20%) entering STEM jobs.
Figure 2: Percentage of graduates in STEM jobs and number of qualifiers by subject
Source: Demand for STEM Skills, BIS, 2009 (based on Longitudinal DLHE for 2002/03
leavers).
33. Of course, just because a STEM graduate is working in what one definition happens to
class as a non-STEM job does not mean that they are not using (some of) their STEM
skills in their work. Also, it is worth noting that “leakage” of STEM qualifiers to non-
STEM jobs is more prevalent amongst those holding lower level (non-HE)
qualifications. For example, a study recently published by the Royal Academy of
220
Engineering 131 found that 48% of those holding HE STEM qualifications were in STEM
occupations, compared with 40% for NVQ4 and 25% for NVQ2.
16 - 18 SUPPLY
34. The Government thinks that further action is needed to improve science and
mathematics education to increase the supply of students with the skills to study STEM
subjects at university. There have been continued increases in the number of students
taking A levels in mathematics and the sciences in recent years (see Annex D);
however, more may still need to be done if the UK is to keep up with international
competitors both economically and educationally. For example, the UK’s position in
the international education league table 132 measuring the skills of 15 year olds has
dropped in the last decade, from 4th to 16th place in science and 8th to 28th in maths.
Even taking into account the increase in the number of countries included in the study
in 2009, this still constitutes a serious and significant fall in our position in relation to
other countries. The Government feels it is crucial that students are provided with a
rigorous and challenging mathematics and science education to allow them to progress
in further study.
35. Although A level entries in STEM subjects are increasing, the Government feels there is
still some distance to be travelled. Physics A level entries are still some way behind the
other two sciences and mathematics (29,216 entries in 2011 compared to 54,736 for
Biology). The Government is also concerned about the attainment gap between rich
and poor in mathematics and science. For example, analysis of 2009 A level physics
entrants showed that 34% of the free school meal (FSM) entrants gained top marks
compared to 51% of those students not eligible for FSM 133 . There are also gender
differences in A level uptake, particularly in physics and to a lesser extent mathematics,
further mathematics2 and biology (see Annex D). For these reasons, and the reasons
discussed in the previous paragraph, the Government is continuing its programme of
public spending and action to improve science and mathematics education in schools.
36. Wider school reforms will also support the Government’s commitment to improve
attainment and uptake in science and mathematics. Greater school autonomy will give
schools a bigger role in initial teacher training and continuous professional
development. This autonomy means that pupils will not only benefit from better
trained teachers, but it will also allow for the development of more innovative
curricular. Central to the government’s desire to increase autonomy and choice in the
school system are Academies and new schools such as Free Schools, University
Technical Colleges (UTCs) and Studio Schools. These new schools will help to drive
improvements across the education system through giving head teachers more
freedom to run their schools in a way that meet the needs of their pupils.
37. UTCs play an important role in the government’s STEM agenda. There will be at least
24 new UTCs before the end of this Parliament, all of which will provide opportunities
for 14-19 year olds to experience high quality technical education. Delivered in
partnership between universities, employers and sometimes existing colleges and
131 http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/releases/pdf/The_Labour_Market_Value_of_STEM_Qualifications_and _Occupations.pdf

132 2009 PISA study
133 Maths and Science Education: The supply of High Achievers at A Level, DfE 2011.
221
Academies, UTCs deliver an education that engages pupils and meets the needs of
modern business. The sponsorship of employers, (both national and local), ensures that
pupils learn what industry needs, and that pupils have access to the latest technologies
and work experience placements. School leavers from UTCs are well equipped to
progress into Higher or Further Education, an Apprenticeship or employment.
38. The Government has also announced its intention to set up a number of specialist
mathematics Free Schools for 16-18 year olds. The creation of these schools underpins
the government’s commitment to improving the standard and rigour of mathematics
teaching. The schools will be supported by strong university mathematics departments
and will provide students with a deeper and richer experience of mathematics. As Free
Schools, these institutions will have the maximum freedom to develop innovative
curricula and to teach outside the mainstream of A level syllabi, for example they can
teach the Cambridge Sixth Term Examination Papers. Under the leadership of the
academic mathematics community, these schools will provide the most able students
with the best possible preparation for further study in mathematics and related
disciplines such as engineering. We will discuss these plans with the mathematics
community over the next few months.
39. Studio Schools are also an innovative new model of educational provision for 14-19
years olds. These schools use project-based learning to develop employability skills and
prepare young people for work, including in STEM based industries. Students spend a
significant portion of their week working with local employers, (with over 16s paid a
real wage) and all students have a ‘personal coach’ to help tailor the curriculum to their
individual needs. Students follow a broad and balanced curriculum, designed to give
them the employability skills and mainstream qualifications they need in work, and to
progress to further or higher education (including maths, English and science GCSEs).
40. Reforms to teacher training, including the development of Teaching Schools, will also
play a key role in driving up STEM standards across the system. These schools, many of
which will have a mathematics and science lead, give outstanding schools a leading role
in the training and professional development of teachers, support staff and head
teachers, as well as contributing to the raising of standards through school to school
support. The first 121 teaching schools have been designated, and there will be further
opportunities for schools to apply as the national network grows to 500 teaching
schools by 2014.
41. The National Curriculum, however, still has a vital role to play in improving the quality
of STEM teaching and learning across the majority of schools in the country. To ensure
that the National Curriculum benefits from international evidence about what the
highest performing education jurisdictions do, we are currently reviewing the National
Curriculum. This review has involved looking at international best practice and
academic evidence, and is working with expert practitioners to identify the essential
knowledge that children should acquire,in core subjects such as science and
mathematics.
42. Alongside the ongoing review of the National Curriculum, the government is also
committed to restoring confidence and rigour in GCSEs and A levels, to ensure that
they are respected by employers and HE. The reform of GCSEs will end
modularisation, leading to more coherent teaching and greater subject depth. Based on
222
findings of the National Curriculum Review, new GCSE specifications will be produced
for science and mathematics. Universities and learned bodies, who have a strong
interest in maintaining standards, will be invited to play a greater part in the
development of qualifications in the future.
43. The government’s commitment to increasing the number of young people taking GCSE
science and mathematics is clearly exemplified by the English Baccalaureate (EBacc).
The EBacc is a new performance indicator that recognises the success of those young
people who attain GCSEs across a core of academic subjects and is intended to drive
school and pupil behaviour. The content of the EBacc is based on a core entitlement of
subjects that many pupils across the world already study and supports the aim that
every pupil, regardless of their background, should leave school with a good basis to
progress.
44. The core subjects contained within the EBacc help to prepare pupils for an
increasingly competitive global market, and provide students with a wide variety of
options for future study and employment. The EBacc includes GCSEs and iGCSEs,
rather than alternative science courses which may not provide the same level of depth
or rigour as a GCSE or iGCSE. In recent years an increasing number of pupils have
been moved away from GCSEs or iGCSEs onto alternative science courses. These
alternative courses might be suitable in some cases, but on the whole do not prepare
pupils as effectively for A level study and therefore limit the opportunities to progress;
the EBacc is designed to counter this trend.
45. Whilst it is very early to say what the full impact of the EBacc will be, a recent
survey 134 of 692 schools about the EBacc suggests that schools have responded
positively, with many more students now opting to take the EBacc subjects. The survey
estimates that 47% of pupils in Year 9 in 2010/11 chose to study a combination of
GCSEs that would make them EBacc-eligible – an increase of 25% percentage points in
the proportion of the end of KS4 cohort studying towards an EBacc, and an
approximate increase of 115% in the number of pupils studying these subjects.
Specifically on science, the take up of triple science continues to increase: the survey
found that 92% of schools were offering GCSE triple science (compared to 72% in
2010) and 29% of pupils were studying this option (16% in 2010).
46. On 8 November 2011 the Government published its implementation plan for
reforming initial teacher training “Training our next generation of outstanding teachers”.
Much within this plan focuses on the recruitment of high quality science and
mathematics teachers. This includes: bursaries of up to £20,000 to attract more
graduate physics, chemistry and mathematics specialists into teaching; a focus on
specialist physics, chemistry and biology initial teacher training (ITT) courses in
preparation for the discrete teaching of those specialisms, rather than science as a
single subject; a teacher training scholarship offered by the Institute of Physics worth
£20,000; and a pilot ITT course in physics and maths supported by the Institute of
Physics.
134The DfE through the Centre for Analysis of Youth Transitions commissioned the National Centre for Social Research to
undertake a survey to assess the effects of the English Baccalaureate on secondary schools in England. The survey was
undertaken in June and July 2011. The results were published (DFE-RB150) in August 2011.
223
47. In addition, specific DfE funding of up to £135 million is committed over the current
spending review period to improving science and mathematics education. This funding
will be focussed on improving the quality of teaching by, for instance, providing
professional development opportunities for science teachers and technicians through
the network of science learning centres and increasing accessibility to good quality
professional development opportunities for mathematics teachers. The Government is
also encouraging more students to take qualifications such as GCSE triple science, A
level physics and further mathematics, which will enhance their prospects of studying
and doing well in STEM subjects at university.
48. DfE is funding and managing a pilot of a linked pair of maths GCSEs and its independent
evaluation. The pilot began in September 2011 and continues to 2013 and come out of
the recommendation in the 2004 report “Making Mathematics Count” by Professor
Adrian Smith that there should be a double award for maths GCSE. The linked pair
aims to improve pupils’ attitudes towards mathematics and inspire more young people
to study maths beyond GCSE. The two GCSEs are Methods in Mathematics and
Applications of Mathematics, both of which must be taken since together they cover
the Programme of Study plus additional content. Decisions on the content and number
of mathematics GCSEs will be made in light of the National Curriculum review and
evidence from the linked pair pilot.
49. This Government understands the need to engage young people in Science and other
STEM subjects with the intention of breaking down pre-conceived ideas about those
subjects. It also recognises the need to inform young people about the wide variety of
opportunities which studying Maths and Science A levels open up. To this end,
Government has funded a number of interventions in these areas.
50. STEMNET’s STEM Ambassadors programme (funded by BIS) which has created a
unique nationwide network of over 28,000 volunteers (24,000 of which are CRB
checked) from science, engineering and technical companies or academia, who work
with schools across the UK. The Ambassadors both raise awareness amongst children
of the range of careers that science and technical qualifications offer and provide
stimulating scientific activities to increase their interest in STEM subjects. In return, the
initiative provides valued CPD opportunities for the STEM Ambassadors concerned.
51. BIS contributes to the cost of the Big Bang Fair which is the UK’s first national fair
celebrating young people’s achievements in science and engineering. It works to ensure
that this talent is nurtured for the future. In 2011 there were over 29,000 participants
increasing from 5,000 in 2009. The centrepiece of the Fair is the final of the National
Science and Engineering Competition where the annual UK Young Scientist of the Year
and UK Young Engineer of the Year awards are selected from the 300 projects taking
part. The competition, open to all 11-19 year olds, accepts projects from all areas of
science, technology, engineering and maths.
52. The Big Bang Fair and the National Science and Engineering Competition form part of
National Science and Engineering Week. Thousands of events and activities in all types
of venues across the UK are showing how science and engineering relate to everyday
life, from intimate café discussions and shopping centre science busking to city-wide
science festivals.
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53. BIS has given financial support to the development of a new Technical Apprenticeship
Company (TAS) dedicated to sourcing and employing apprentices for employers within
the Cogent science-using Sector. Through the TAS, it will be much easier for
companies to take on apprentices by removing the barriers that get in the way.
54. Apprentices are important to the future prosperity of the Sector and there is already
real appetite from companies of all shapes and sizes to get involved. The TAS offers a
robust recruitment service to employers looking to employ an apprentice but without
the in-house time and resource, for a one-off fee. It will be of particular benefit to
SMEs and will include local support networks. It will also provide the ideal service for
employers, for example, experiencing challenging trading conditions. The new TAS will
be a valuable addition to the services on offer from the National Skills Academy for
Process Industries, to process manufacturing companies.
55. The TAS will promote progression routes to Higher Level Education to apprentices
who complete their frameworks and an alumni programme will be established to
support the promotion of apprenticeships to schools. The overriding aim is “real jobs
for real apprentices”. The service is demand led and supports both delivery of Cogent
Apprenticeship frameworks and all other related frameworks to employers who might
not be in position to employ the apprentice at the outset, by employing the apprentice
and charging the employer a service fee
GRADUATE SUPPLY
STEM Entrants and Qualifiers from University
56. At university level STEM take-up is increasing, with the number of first degree STEM
entrants increasing by 6% since 2008/09 compared to only 4% in non-STEM subjects
(see Annex D for graphs). HEFCE will provide a detailed breakdown of undergraduate
and postgraduate students across all STEM subjects as part of their submission to this
inquiry.
57. Many subjects have seen an above average increase in entrants between 2008/9 and
2010/11, including Mathematical sciences (8%) and Engineering (8%). This may be an
indication of a reversal in the previous downward trend seen between 2002/03 and
2007/08.
58. The number of first degree STEM qualifiers increased by 5% between 2008/09 and
2009/10, in line with the increase in non-STEM (also 5%). Many subjects have seen an
increase in the number of qualifiers, including Mathematical sciences (8%), Chemistry
(6%) and Engineering (5%). Annex E has a very detailed breakdown of STEM qualifiers
at each level and numbers of UK and non-UK domiciled students.
225
Figure 3: STEM qualifiers from University
145,000 0.44
Number of STEM degree qualifiers
140,000 Proportion of first degree qualifiers who study STEM
0.435
135,000
130,000 0.43
125,000
0.425
120,000
115,000 0.42
110,000
0.415
105,000
100,000 0.41
2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10
Employer Satisfaction with STEM Graduates
59. Data from opinion surveys that are run regularly by the CBI suggest employers worry
about recruiting appropriately skilled STEM graduates. In the latest survey in 2011 (566
respondents) 21% expressed difficulty in recruiting STEM graduates, down from 30% in
2010 (see table 3). These figures must be considered in the context that the data only
covers private employers and represents a limited sample of these employers.
Furthermore, difficulties sometimes reflect lack of work experience and employability
skills in STEM candidates rather than a lack of STEM skills.
Table 3: % Employers expressing difficulty in recruiting STEM employees
2008 2010 2011

At any level 59 45 43
Experienced (+5years) 33 24 26
Technician 24 26 22
Graduate 23 30 21
Qualified apprentice 15 24 25
Postgraduate 11 15 18
No difficulty NA NA 36
# Respondents 735 694 566
% Private sector
employment covered by
respondents 7% 8% 9%
Source: CBI
60. The reported reasons for recruitment difficulties are varied and differ across sectors.
The graph below details the proportion of employers reporting that they encountered
various barriers to STEM recruitment.
226
Figure 4: Specific barriers to STEM recruitment as a percentage of employers expressing

concern
60
50 2009 2010 2011
40
30
20
10
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Source: The CBI
61. These results show that not all recruitment difficulties arise from a lack of graduates,
experience and particular skills continue to pose barriers for recruitment in the eyes of
employers. It is also worth bearing in mind the previous evidence that a lack of
graduates may simply mean that these graduates choose employment in other areas.
Reducing leakage may be as good a policy option as increasing graduates.
62. A sample of 396 EEF members reported in 2011 that “Engineering skills for
production” are currently the most difficult to obtain from applicants. This indicates a
need for exploring what is meant by “for production” as production is context-related.
63. More representative opinions of the overall employer population can be drawn from
the UKCES National Employer Skills Survey (NESS) 135 , which surveyed around 79,000
employers in 2009. The downside of breadth however, is that the survey does not
focus on STEM but on skills shortages and barriers to recruitment of all skills. This
estimates that around 12% of all employers in England have vacancies, of which 3%
would be classified as ‘hard-to-fill’ and a ‘skills shortage’ vacancy (i.e. hard to fill due to
a lack of skills, work experience or qualifications in the applicants for the role). More
information on the UKCES NESS survey is given in Annex F, including employer
dissatisfaction ratings at a sector-specific level.
Skills Shortages and Barriers to Recruitment of all Skills
Variation by sector
64. Consideration of how the incidence of hard-to-fill and skill shortage vacancies varies by
industrial sector gives a (limited) indication of recruitment difficulties into STEM jobs:
9% of employers in the Electricity, Gas and Water sector report having ‘hard-to-fill’
135 https://ness.ukces.org.uk/NESS09/default.aspx
227
vacancies, with 7% also being a ‘skills shortage’ vacancy, compared to only 3% and 2%
respectively in the Business Services sector. This might lend some support to the idea
that there is more of a problem recruiting STEM skills, compared to non-STEM skills.
However, the Destinations of Leavers of Higher Education (2010) survey shows that
the Utilities sector attracts a very small proportion of graduates both in STEM and
non-STEM subjects, despite being a traditional STEM sector.
Figure 5: Skill shortages across sectors
65. The evidence presented suggests that detailed analysis would be required to determine
whether identification of a sector skill shortage should result in targeted intervention.
Employer satisfaction with graduates generally
66. The majority of employers are satisfied with the quality of their recent graduate
recruits. The National Employers Skills Survey 2009 found that 85% of employers who
had recently hired young graduate recruits thought that they were well prepared for
work (compared to only 66% of employers who had hired 16 year old school leavers,
and 74% for those recruiting 17-18 year olds).
67. Similarly, the CBI’s Education and Skills survey 2011 showed that for the majority of
the employability skills examined, most employers who responded were satisfied with
the skills of their graduates 136 . However, some specific skills did elicit higher levels of
dissatisfaction: more than half said they were not satisfied with graduates’ foreign
language skills, nor their business/customer awareness. Also, when asked about their
priorities for HE, 70% of respondents cited the development of employability skills.
68. However, it is clear that graduates do bring benefits to employers. In some 2007
research on employers’ use of graduate skills137 , where employers were able to isolate
136Exhibit 20 in the CBI report: http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1051530/cbi__edi_education___skills_survey_2011.pdf

137Employer and university engagement in the use and development of graduate level skills, Hogarth et al (2007) DfES research
report, RR835A
228
the impact graduates had on the business, they commonly mentioned that graduates
were more likely to:
• challenge how things are done;
• assimilate things quicker;
• be flexible;
• come at things from a different perspective (often theoretical);
• be problem solvers;
• bring new ideas and energy;
• use their initiative and act without waiting for instruction.
Higher Education Reforms
69. Through moving public spending away from teaching grants and towards repayable
tuition loans, the Government is giving students more power and choice. Institutions
will need to demonstrate that they excel at teaching in order to attract prospective
students.
70. To help students to exercise their choices effectively they need high quality,
comparable information about courses and how they are delivered. All institutions will
be required to publish, from September 2012, a set of useful information items (key
information sets) for prospective students, in a standard and comparable format, which
will help them choose the courses and institutions that are best for them. Information
will include student satisfaction, course costs, professional body accreditation,
employment rates and salaries of previous graduates.
71. The UK approach to quality assurance is highly regarded and the revised arrangements
for Institutional Review that were introduced in September 2011 have a stronger focus
on quality enhancement and on involving students.
72. Building on this approach, the Higher Education White Paper Students at the Heart of
the System proposed a move to a more risk-based approach to quality assurance,
retaining the features of the current system but moving towards an approach which
will focus QAA effort where it will have most impact. The Higher Education Funding
Council for England (HEFCE) will consult on the criteria and triggers that would
underpin such an approach.
73. Following the publication of the White Paper, BIS Ministers wrote to HEFCE setting
out priorities for funding. These include the additional costs associated with high cost
subjects and strategically important and vulnerable subjects (SIVS), which includes some
STEM subjects 138 . Ministers will give their final instructions to HEFCE in the 2012/13
Grant Letter, due at the turn of the year.
74. In October HEFCE published a document which sets out their decisions on the setting
of student number control limits for 2012-13; this document stated that funding for
provision of strategically important and vulnerable subjects (SIVS) will be excluded
from the pro-rata cut of 20,000 places to create a flexible margin of places that Higher
Education Institutions can bid for.
138 A list of SIVS can be found at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/funding/201213/faq.htm#q7
229
75. However, as all English universities are autonomous institutions that are independently
run, it is for them to make their own decisions about the courses they will provide;
their admissions policy; how to implement their own funding strategies and to make
the necessary decisions to ensure they are responsive to student choice and that their
institutions can continue to flourish.
76. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the new system for assessing research in
UK Higher Education Institutions. The REF will be a process of expert review with
institutions invited to make submissions in 36 units of assessments. These 36 units of
assessment cover the full spectrum of academic disciplines. The REF assessment allows
the Funding Councils to recognise and fund excellent research where it is found and in
all disciplines. Hence, the REF will help sustain the breadth and diversity of academic
activity, in a range of subjects, on which teaching in new and cross-disciplinary fields
can build.
77. Teaching and research have an interlinked relationship where, over time, new research
findings and theories are fed in to undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Some
universities put great value on the way their staffs are conducting cutting edge research
at the same time as teaching undergraduates, considering it as one of their most
important attributes.
78. However, the university sector is diverse and autonomous, with each institution having
its own self-defined mission, and different blend of teaching and research. It is not a
Government requirement for the title of “university” that research is being undertaken
by the institution or by the lecturer. Academic staff should be enabled, supported and
encouraged to keep up to date with the scholarship of their discipline and therefore be
equipped to deliver “research informed teaching”.
79. On the current criteria for university title in England, an organisation wishing to apply
for approval to use the title ‘University’ must:
• have been granted powers to award taught degrees;
• normally have at least 4,000 full time equivalent (FTE) higher education students,
of whom at least 3,000 are registered on degree level courses (including
foundation degree programmes); and,
• be able to demonstrate that it has regard to the principles of good governance as
are relevant to its sector.
80. As part of its proposed reforms to higher education, the Government is currently
consulting on potential changes to the FTE student numbers requirement, potentially
allowing smaller organisations with taught degree awarding powers (who currently can
only get university college title) access to university title.
81. Teaching provided by Higher Education Institutions is delivered to students in a variety

of styles and course structures which are dependent on the course and subject area.
There is no single configuration for institutions. The student, when selecting a course
and institution, will select the most appropriate course structure and style for their
needs.
230
Diversity of All Graduates
82. The Government is committed to ensuring our universities remain open to all people
with the ability to succeed in higher education. We have set in place a challenging
framework placing more responsibility on universities to widen access.
83. Higher Education Institutions have legal duties for equality of opportunity under the
Equality Act 2010. They are accountable to the courts. Under the new student funding
arrangements any institution which wishes to charge over £6,000 from 2012 for their
courses must agree an Access Agreement with the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) and
will have to take part in the National Scholarship Programme (NSP). Government
funding for the NSP will reach £150m by 2014/15. The NSP will form part of a package
of measures to support disadvantaged young people through their education.
Institutions will have to provide match funding themselves and will determine what
support they will provide, including options such as fee waivers or discount on the
tuition charge and a free foundation year.
84. All institutions in receipt of the widening participation element of Teaching Grant will
continue to outline how they support widening participation via their Widening
Participation Strategic Assessments (which are submitted to HEFCE).
85. BIS has undertaken equality impact assessments of the reforms that have been
announced. Overall, these indicate that no adverse impacts on protected groups should
result from these reforms. Further equality impact analysis will be done as the Higher
Education Bill is developed.
86. There has been significant progress in Higher Education on equality of opportunity. The
number of disabled students declaring a disability has risen over the last five years,
from 7.4% in 2004/05 to 9% in 2009/10139 . The proportion of Black and minority ethnic
undergraduates has grown from 16.4% in 2001/02 to 20.4% in 2009/10. And there is a
higher proportion of students from minority ethnic communities in HE than would be
expected by their representation in the working population 140 .
87. Other research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies research (2008) shows that young
people from nearly all minority ethnic groups have a greater likelihood of participating
at the most selective universities compared with White young people. (Only young
people from the Black African group are equally as likely to attend, and young people
from the Black Caribbean group have a slightly lower probability of attending (1-2%
difference)).
88. In 2009/10 58% of home students in English Higher Education Institutions were
women. This figure has grown significantly over the last 10 years: in 1994/95 it was
50%. Although there is some variability in specific subject participation rates, women’s
representation is higher than men’s in most subjects, including some very competitive
139 Source: HESA - UK domiciled postgraduate and undergraduate enrolments to full-time and part-time courses in all years
of study, in England
140 Proportion in HE is 20.4% in 2009/10; proportion of minority ethnic population in the general working population is
11.1% and 13.4% of the under 30’s age group of the working population. Higher representation applies for all minority
ethnic groups (apart from the ‘other’ group). Source: HESA student record 2009/10 and Labour Force Survey, Q4 2010,
England only.
231
and highly rewarding subjects like Medicine and Law.
STEM Diversity
89. This Government is committed to promoting equality in the workplace as our

announcements on positive action, transparency, flexible working and parental leave
demonstrate. The Government wants to ensure that the STEM workforce is diverse,
reflects wider society, and makes use of all the talents available to it. Despite positive
progress, there are still too many groups under-represented in this sector.
90. The Government is encouraging the embedding and mainstreaming of diversity in the
STEM workforce in a number of programmes, funded both by Government and other
partners. This builds on the wider work of the Government to promote inclusive and
diverse labour market and workplaces (including the Lord Davies Review on increasing
women on boards and more generally through the Public Sector Equality Duty).
91. Delivery of this strategic outcome is being taken forward by a number of delivery
partners during this Spending Review period. A broad mix of STEM activities and wider
societal programmes are funded from the Science and Research budget and these have
a major impact on diversity in the STEM workforce. These include the work of
STEMNET and the STEM Ambassadors to encourage a diverse STEM pipeline; the
National Academies’ fellowships; Research Councils’ PhD and fellowships awards; and
the Big Bang Fair and National Science and Engineering Competition.
92. Specifically, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society have been asked
jointly to lead and develop a new diversity programme for STEM, to widen
participation among under-represented groups. The Royal Academy of Engineering is
building on internal work to improve the diversity of the Academy. The Royal Society
have identified three themes: to define and understand the scientific workforce; to
identify barriers, with the objective of removing such barriers; and to increase the
diversity of the scientific workforce, demonstrating clear leadership in ways that will
have a tangible impact.
93. Better value can be realised through these broader activities and through better
direction of existing diversity projects rather than focussing on one particular diversity
aspect. Therefore funding for the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science,
Engineering and Technology (UKRC) will not be renewed post March 2012.
Transitional funding (£500,000) for the financial year 2011/12 has been granted to the
UKRC to enable them to transfer their knowledge and expertise to the RAEng and RS
whilst working towards becoming a stand alone, independent body from April 2012.
94. By embedding good practice on diversity issues within other programmes and partner
organisations, and given the right incentives and direction, Government expects these
to establish a wider reach and greater impact on all areas of diversity and equality in
the STEM workforce.
POST-GRADUATE SUPPLY
95. This will be covered in the Research Councils UK submission.
232
INDUSTRY
96. The Government is absolutely clear that businesses need to engage with universities.
Stronger collaborations will give employers the influence they need to ensure the
higher education system can produce a highly skilled and well educated workforce that
has the capacity to innovate, help increase productivity and stimulate growth, this
applies to STEM and non-STEM.
97. Some employers already do contribute by supporting students or employees through

sponsorship or bursaries; helping to design and accredit courses and by offering work
placements. A recent announcement by KPMG, who are sponsoring students, is a
helpful signal to others. However the Government wants to find ways of strengthening
the existing links between businesses and universities.
98. Government wants business to be more active in helping students, through better
information, advice and guidance, to choose the right subjects to study; to offer
relevant work experience; and where appropriate to work with universities to develop
courses that will provide attractive employment for graduates. This will allow graduates
to ensure a good supply of STEM graduates.
99. Sir Tim Wilson, in the course of his review into how to make the UK the best place in
the world for university-industry collaboration, will look specifically at interventions in
enterprise and professional skills development, and exploiting the research/innovation
capability of business and universities through collaboration. The report is due early in
2012.
INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS
100. International comparison of take up and progression in Higher Education has to be

considered in the context of a country’s whole education system. Comparative
education research may shed some light on reasons for performance differences.
101. The UK is mid-table within the OECD in terms of the proportion of degrees awarded
in the subjects of Science and Engineering. The proportion of these subjects in the total
is falling for most countries (diamonds indicate the proportions 10 years before)
indicating increasing movement away from STEM is a widespread phenomenon.
233
Figure 6: International comparison of the percentage of Science and Engineering degrees

awarded in 2007
45
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102. The international evidence shows the UK faring slightly worse than the OECD average
in terms of percentage employment in Science and Technology occupations (figure 7);
thus, the UK has a higher rank in international measures of supply for STEM than of
demand for STEM. This indicates that supply and demand of STEM should not be
considered separately.
234
Figure 7: International comparison of percentage employment in Science and Technology

Occupations, 2008.
Luxembourg
Sweden
Denmark
Norway
Netherlands
Germany
Australia
Canada
Finland
Czech Republic
Belgium
United States
France
Italy
EU15
EU27
Austria
Slovak Republic
New Zealand
Hungary
United Kingdom
Poland
Spain
Ireland
Greece
Korea
Portugal
Japan
Turkey
45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0
%
Professionals Technicians
19 December 2011
235
ANNEX A
THE JOINT ACADEMIC CODING SYSTEM AND STEM SUBJECTS
In the UK, there is a fairly clear classification of subjects at HE level for data collections
purposes: the Joint Academic Coding System (JACS). This is used by UK institutions (e.g. BIS,
HEFCE, HESA) to identify the subject matter of programmes and modules. It covers all levels
of HE study (undergraduate, post-graduate, other)
At its ‘highest’ level it classifies all subjects/courses into up to 21 groups, as indicated in

Table A.1 below (this is ‘JACS2’, as used for data collection from 2007/08 onwards).
Table A.1: Broad JACS codes
A Medicine & dentistry

B Subjects allied to medicine
C Biological sciences
D Veterinary science, Agriculture & related subjects
E Physical sciences
F Mathematical sciences
G Computer science
H Engineering
J Technologies
K Architecture, building & planning
L Social studies
M Law
N Business & administrative studies
P Mass communications and documentation
Q Linguistics, Classics & related subjects
R European Languages, Literature & related subjects
T Eastern, Asiatic, African, American and Australasian Languages, Literature & related subjects
V Historical and philosophical studies
W Creative arts & design
X Education Combined
In terms of the above, A-K are classed as STEM; L-W are non-STEM. For
analysis/reporting purposes, depending on the context and the numbers involved, the above
codes may be combined (eg. H & J, or Q-T) or be further split (eg. D is often separated into
‘Veterinary Science’ and ‘Agriculture’).
It is this level of coding that is used in many published statistics, such as the annual HESA
performance Indicators (PIs), and for many ‘headline’ analyses from data sources such as the
LFS and the DLHE.
There are more disaggregated levels within the classification. The lowest level that is
generally used by HESA for published statistics is given in Table A.2 below for the STEM
subjects.
236
Table A.2: More detailed JACS codes for STEM subjects, as used by HESA for published data
A. Medicine & dentistry

Broadly-based programmes within medicine & dentistry
Pre-clinical medicine
Pre-clinical dentistry
Clinical medicine
Clinical dentistry
Others in medicine & dentistry
B. Subjects allied to medicine
Broadly-based programmes within subjects allied to medicine
Anatomy, physiology & pathology
Pharmacology, toxicology & pharmacy
Complementary medicine
Nutrition
Ophthalmics
Aural & oral sciences
Nursing
Medical technology
Others in subjects allied to medicine
C. Biological sciences
Broadly-based programmes within biological sciences
Biology
Botany
Zoology
Genetics
Microbiology
Sports science
Molecular biology, biophysics & biochemistry
Psychology
Others in biological sciences
D. Veterinary science, Agriculture & related subjects
Pre-clinical veterinary medicine
Clinical veterinary medicine & dentistry
Broadly-based programmes within agriculture & related subjects
Animal science
Agriculture
Forestry
Food & beverage studies
Agricultural sciences
Others in veterinary sciences, agriculture & related subjects
E. Physical sciences
Broadly-based programmes within physical sciences
Chemistry
Materials science
Physics
Forensic & archaeological science
Astronomy
Geology
237
Science of aquatic & terrestrial environments

Physical geographical sciences
Others in physical sciences
F. Mathematical sciences
Broadly-based programmes within mathematical sciences
Mathematics
Operational research
Statistics
Others in mathematical sciences
G. Computer science
Broadly-based programmes within computer science
Computer science
Information systems
Software engineering
Artificial intelligence
Others in computing sciences
H. Engineering
Broadly-based programmes within engineering & technology
General engineering
Civil engineering
Mechanical engineering
Aerospace engineering
Naval architecture
Electronic & electrical engineering
Production & manufacturing engineering
Chemical, process & energy engineering
Others in engineering
J. Technology
Minerals technology
Metallurgy
Ceramics & glasses
Polymers & textiles
Materials technology not otherwise specified
Maritime technology
Biotechnology
Others in technology
K. Architecture, building & planning
Broadly-based programmes within architecture, building & planning
Architecture
Building
Landscape design
Planning (urban, rural & regional)
Others in architecture, building & planning
An even more disaggregated classification for recording purposes is available on the HESA
website 141 , though statistics are not normally published at these levels. At this level JACS
codes are formed from a letter and three digits: the letter indicates the subject area (as in
Table A1) and the numbers indicate the topics within the main subject area – for example,
141http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/component/option,com_studrec/task,show_file/Itemid,233/mnl,09051/href,JACS2.html/
238
C350 is ‘Marine Zoology’, within the group ‘C300: Zoology’, which itself sits in the broad
group ‘C: Biological Sciences’.
The OECD’s Science, Technology and Industry (STI) Scoreboard 2011 142 looks at graduates in
STEM-type subjects, defined as:
“Science degrees include: life sciences; physical sciences; mathematics and statistics; and
computing. Engineering degrees comprise: engineering and engineering trades;
manufacturing and processing; and architecture and building.”
This will correspond quite closely to some of JACS groups A-K, but not all (e.g. excludes
Medical subjects, may exclude some of the sub-groups within broad STEM subjects).
Other studies and sources use different definitions of STEM or science subjects. Generally
these will be a sub-set of the wider group of STEM subjects. The definition used will depend
on the purpose of the analyses and/or who is doing it: e.g. it may just include some of the
physical sciences, with engineering and maths; others will exclude medical subjects.
142 http://www.oecd.org/document/10/0,3746,en_2649_33703_39493962_1_1_1_1,00.html#toc
239
ANNEX B
SOME DEFINITIONS OF STEM JOBS
143
DIUS 2009 report: The Demand for STEM Skills
The SOC codes used to construct the “science occupation” variable included:
- (i) managers in construction (1122), mining and energy (1123), IT (1136), R&D
(1137), health services (1181), pharmacy (1182), healthcare practice (1183), farming
(1211), natural environment (1212);
- (ii) chemists (2111), biologists (2112), physicists/mathematicians (2113), engineers

(2121, 2122, 2123, 2124, 2125, 2126, 2127, 2128, 2129), IT professionals (2131),
software professionals (2132), medical occupations (2211), other medical
professionals (2212), pharmacists (2213), opticians (2214), dentists (2215),
veterinarians (2216), scientific researchers (2321), statisticians (24234), actuaries
(24235), architects (24310); and
- (iii) technicians (3111, 3112, 3113, 3114, 3115, 3119, 3121), draughtspersons (2113),
other medical associate professionals (3214, 3215, 3216, 3217, 3218, 3221, 3222,
3223, 32290, 32292, 32293).
(Some different definitions of Financial occupations were also used in the report, according
to SOC and SIC codes).
144
BIS 2011 research report: STEM graduates in non-STEM jobs
The authors defined STEM and non-STEM jobs according to:
• A STEM Specialist sector where employers seek core STEM competences in graduates, a
STEM Generalist sector where STEM graduates might be suitable or preferred, and non-
STEM employers where there is no overt demand for STEM graduates; and
• STEM Core jobs where a STEM degree and associated competences are directly relevant,
STEM-related jobs where STEM competences are of relevance but applied more broadly,
and Unrelated jobs where a STEM degree qualification has little or no apparent relevance.
They used the combination of both the sector and occupational role classifications, which
could be represented as positioning in a 3 x 3 Sector/Occupational Matrix, to assess how
much any particular job was a ‘STEM job’ or a ‘non-STEM job’.
In terms of SOC 3-digit codes, their classification gave:

Core STEM job functions: Building construction/skilled trades (212, 312, 243, 53),
Consulting (242, 212), Engineering/Technology (212, 213, 311), Environmental
management (121, 311, 355), Health & social care (221, 118, 321, 322, 323, 244),
Equipment installation/maintenance/repair (311, 313, 524), ICT
management/development (113, 213, 313), Logistics/distribution/transport (116, 351,
143http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/migratedD/publications/D/Demand_for_STEM_Skills
144http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/s/11-771-stem-graduates-in-non-stem-jobs.pdf
240
821), Production/operations (112, 212), Project management (113, 212), Quality

assurance/safety (356, 311), Research & development (211, 212, 232).
STEM-related job functions: Editorial/writing (341, 343), Education/teaching (231),

Insurance (353); also, for some STEM graduates only: Accountancy/finance (113, 115,
242, 353), Business organisation/management (111, 113).
Though note that these are also combined with the employer sectoral classifications (SIC) to
provide a full assessment of the “STEM-ness” of any particular job.
Appendix A2 of the report provides more detail on which sectors and which occupations
were in each of the three categories. It also briefly reviews some previous attempts to define
STEM jobs. (Note that in their definition of STEM subjects they excluded: Medicine and
Dentistry, Veterinary Science and Nursing).
Royal Academy of Engineering 2011 report: The Labour Market Value of STEM
Qualifications and Occupations
This study was carried out by the Institute of Education for the Royal Academy of
Engineering, It use Labour Force Survey (LFS) data from March 2004 to December 2010.
STE occupations (no occupations were classified as being in the area of mathematics) were
defined by a panel drawn from across the STE subjects and disciplines and convened by the
Royal Academy of Engineering.
The full list is available in an annex to the report, and is re-produced below.
Occupations coded as STEM

STEM Coding
SOC2000 S T E
CODE DESCRIPTION
2111 Chemists 1
2112 Biological scientists and biochemists 1
2113 Physicists, geologists and meteorologists 1
2212 Psychologists 1
2216 Veterinarians 1
2321 Scientific researchers 1
1136 Information and communication technology managers 1
2131 IT strategy and planning professionals 1
2132 Software professionals 1
3131 IT operations technicians 1
3132 IT user support technicians 1
1121 Production, works and maintenance managers 1
2121 Civil engineers 1
2122 Mechanical engineers 1
2123 Electrical engineers 1
2124 Electronics engineers 1
241
2125 Chemical engineers 1

2127 Production and process engineers 1
2128 Planning and quality control engineers 1
2129 Engineering professionals n.e.c. 1
2431 Architects 1
3113 Engineering technicians 1
3114 Building and civil engineering technicians 1
5215 Welding trades 1
5221 Metal machining setters and setter-operators 1
5222 Tool makers, tool fitters and markers-out 1
5223 Metal working production and maintenance fitters 1
5224 Precision instrument makers and repairers 1
5231 Motor mechanics, auto engineers 1
5232 Vehicle body builders and repairers 1
5233 Auto electricians 1
5241 Electricians, electrical fitters 1
5314 Plumbers, heating and ventilating engineers 1
8143 Rail construction and maintenance operatives 1
3119 Science and engineering technicians n.e.c. 1 1

3111 Laboratory technicians 1 1
2126 Design and development engineers 1 1
5212 Moulders, core makers, die casters 1 1
5242 Telecommunications engineers 1 1
5244 TV, video and audio engineers 1 1
5245 Computer engineers, installation and maintenance 1 1
1137 Research and development managers 1 1 1
3112 Electrical/electronics technicians 1 1 1
5249 Electrical/electronics engineers n.e.c. 1 1 1
Occupations coded as medical
medical dummy 1
221 Health Professionals
2211 Medical practitioners
2212 Psychologists
2213 Pharmacists/pharmacologists
2214 Ophthalmic opticians
2215 Dental practitioners
medical dummy 2
321 Health Associate Professionals
3211 Nurses
3212 Midwives
3213 Paramedics
3214 Medical radiographers
242
3215 Chiropodists
3216 Dispensing opticians
3217 Pharmaceutical dispensers
3218 Medical and dental technicians
322 Therapists
3221 Physiotherapists
3222 Occupational therapists
3223 Speech and language therapists
3229 Therapists n.e.c.
Other definitions of STEM jobs
• For a recent (2011) Royal Academy of Engineering report , The Labour Market
Value of STEM Qualifications and Occupations, STEM occupations (actually referred
to as STE, as no occupations were classified as being in the area of mathematics) were
defined by a panel drawn from across the STE subjects and disciplines and convened by
the Royal Academy of Engineering. This was also done according to (4-digit) SOC codes.
A separate classification was done for ‘Medical’ subjects. More details are in Annex B.
• The Science, Technology and Industry (STI) Scoreboard 2011 (OECD) refers to
“Human resources in science and technology” and these are defined on the basis of both
educational attainment and occupations “defined according to the Canberra Manual (OECD
and Eurostat,1995) as persons having graduated at the tertiary level of education or employed
in a science and technology occupation for which a high qualification is normally required and
the innovation potential is high.“ The occupations covered are:
- Professionals (ISCO Group 2) which includes: physical, mathematical and
engineering science professionals; life science and health professionals; teaching
professionals; and other professionals; and
- Technicians and associate professionals (ISCO Group 3) which includes:
physical and engineering science associate professionals; life science and health
associate professionals; teaching associate professionals; other associate
professionals.
• Studies of Skills Needs like those carried out by the UKCES also look and employment
growth within occupation and within sector, defining STEM either “by inspection” as
before or following existing studies.
243
Annex C
EMPLOYMENT OUTCOMES FOR STEM AND NON-STEM GRADUATES
1. This annex contains information about employment levels, occupations and earnings
of STEM graduates.
Employment
2. STEM (first degree) graduates tend to have slightly better outcomes than non-STEM
graduates 6 months after graduation, with a slightly higher proportion of STEM
graduates in employment or further study. The chart below shows outcomes for the
2006/07 graduating cohort. Six months after graduation 89.9% of STEM graduates
were in employment or further study compared to 87.7% of non-STEM graduates.
3. Although the recent recession has dampened these figures slightly, the overall trend
has continued. Equivalent figures for the 2009/10 graduating cohort show that 87.9%
of STEM graduates were in employment or further study 6 months after graduation
compared to 85.6% of non-STEM graduates.
4. Looking at the progression of graduates over time, a follow up survey examining the
outcomes of 2006/07 graduates 3½ years after graduation found that this gap had
remained roughly constant, with 94.6% of STEM graduates in employment or further
study compared to 92.9% of non-STEM graduates.
Figure C1: Employment statistics for STEM and non-STEM graduates

1.0% 0.4% 1.3% 0.7%
100%
3.8% 3.2% 1.9% 4.8% 2.1%
4.3%
5.4% 6.1%
90% 11.2% 5.8%
14.5% 5.4%
80% 5.1% 15.8%
70% 9.0%
8.4%
Other
60% Economically inactive
Unemployed
50%
Further study only
40% 81.7% W ork and further study
78.3%
W ork only
66.4% 63.5%
30%
20%
10%
0%
6 Months 3 1/2 Years 6 Months 3 1/2 Years
STEM Non-STEM
Source: HESA, Destinations of Leavers from HE surveys (2006/07 cohort)
5. Within this, non-STEM graduates experienced a much larger flow of graduates into
the work only category and out of the further study only category compared to
244
STEM graduates. 3½ years after graduation almost double the proportion of STEM
graduates were in further study compared to non-STEM graduates.
Occupations
6. Turning to the occupations that graduates enter, the chart below shows that the
majority of graduates do enter ‘graduate level’ jobs - defined here as SOC groups 1-
3: Managers and senior officials, Professional occupations and Associate professional
and technical occupations.
7. Six months after graduation, a higher proportion of full time employed STEM
graduates were in professional or associate professional and technical occupations
compared to their non-STEM counterparts; however, a higher proportion of non-
STEM graduates were employed as managers and senior officials. For the other ‘non-
graduate level’ jobs, there generally appears to be a higher proportion of non-STEM
graduates compared to STEM graduates employed in these occupations.
Figure C2: Destinations of STEM and non-STEM graduates

50%
43.8%
45%
36.0%
35.7%
40%
6 months after graduation
32.1%
35%
30.0%
29.9%
29.1%
30% 3 1/2 years after graduation

21.1%
25%
16.4%
20%
15.2%
13.8%
10.9%
15%
10.1%
10.1%
7.3%
10%
6.2%
6.1%
5.5%
5.3%
5.0%
4.6%
4.2%
3.6%
3.0%
2.5%
2.2%
1.5%
5%
1.2%
1.0%
1.0%
0.9%
0.7%
0.8%
0.5%
0.4%
0.4%
0%
STEM Non- STEM Non- STEM Non- STEM Non- STEM Non- STEM Non- STEM Non- STEM Non- STEM Non-
STEM STEM STEM STEM STEM STEM STEM STEM STEM
Managers and Professional Associate Administrative Skilled trades Personal Sales and Process, plant Elementary
senior officials occupations professional and secretarial occupations service customer and machine occupations
and technical occupations occupations service operatives
occupations occupations
8. 3½ years after graduation, the proportion of graduates working as managers and

senior officials or in professional occupations has increased, whilst the proportion in
‘non-graduate level’ jobs has in almost all cases decreased. These changes have
generally served to close the gap between STEM and non-STEM graduates. In the
graduate level occupations, there has been a larger increase in the proportion of non-
STEM graduates in the managers and senior officials and professional occupations
compared to STEM graduates, whilst the difference in the proportion of non-STEM
and STEM graduates in the associate professional and technical occupations group has
245
also reduced. In the ‘non-graduate level’ occupations, there was also consistently a
larger reduction in the proportion of non-STEM graduates in these occupation
groups at 3½ years compared to STEM graduates.
9. This implies that although STEM graduates have better initial outcomes after
graduation, non-STEM graduates do catch up over time.
How many STEM graduates continue working in STEM?
10. The degree to which graduates remain in STEM appears to be strongly influenced by
their discipline.
Table C1: Occupations of STEM graduates by discipline
11. If STEM occupations are defined as excluding finance and teaching, then 51% of the
2006/7 cohort of qualifiers found employment in non-STEM jobs. If Finance and
Teaching are included as STEM, this percentage falls to 34%. Many more STEM
graduates enter non-STEM occupations than non-STEM graduates enter STEM
occupations.
Earnings
12. Looking at the figures for median earnings of full time employed graduates at 6
months and 3½ years after graduation shows a very similar picture. Although at 6
months after graduation STEM graduates appear to have higher median salaries than
non-STEM graduates, this advantage does not appear to persist. 3½ years after
graduation, although the median salaries of STEM graduates still tend to be higher,
they have not grown faster during this period. This implies that STEM graduates have
experienced a similar level of career progression (as measured by median wages)
over the period compared to non-STEM graduates. It is important to note though
that compared to the population as a whole, graduates still tend to fare much better.
Figures from the ONS show that overall earnings increased by only 6.3% in the
period from January 2008 to November 2010 compared to the first degree average
of 28.1% noted below (although this latter figure does not take into account inflation
so will overstate the difference).
246
13. Comparing the average earnings of all STEM and non-STEM graduates, regardless of
when they graduated, shows that there still appears to be an earnings premium for
STEM graduates.
Table C2: Salaries of STEM graduates

Median Median Percentage
Salary 6 Salary 3 ½ increase in
months after years after Median
2006/07 cohort graduation graduation Salary
First degree
Medicine & dentistry £29,000 £40,000 37.9%
Subjects allied to medicine £20,000 £25,500 27.5%
Biological sciences £16,000 £22,000 37.5%
Veterinary science £25,000 £30,000 20.0%
Agriculture & related subjects £17,000 £20,000 17.6%
Physical sciences £18,000 £23,500 30.6%
Mathematical sciences £21,000 £27,600 31.4%
Computer science £20,000 £25,500 27.5%
Engineering & technology £23,000 £27,300 18.7%
Architecture, building & planning £21,000 £25,500 21.4%
Social studies £20,000 £25,000 25.0%

Law £17,000 £22,000 29.4%
Business & administrative studies £18,000 £24,000 33.3%
Mass comms & documentation £16,000 £20,500 28.1%
Languages £17,000 £23,000 35.3%
Historical & philosophical studies £17,000 £22,272 31.0%
Creative arts & design £15,000 £20,500 36.7%
Education £20,000 £25,000 25.0%
Combined £22,000 £25,000 13.6%
First degree total £19,000 £24,331 28.1%
247
Source: DIUS research report, The Demand for STEM Skills, 2009.
Is there an earnings premium for STEM graduates in STEM jobs?
14. The earning premium appears to be largest when an individual is also in a STEM
occupation, indicating that STEM graduates may be bale to gain some additional
benefit from their qualification.
Table C3: Salaries of STEM graduates in STEM and non-STEM jobs
Source: DIUS research report, The Demand for STEM Skills, 2009.
15. A similar result has also been found in a more recent research report 145 which uses
recent data from Labour Force Survey (2004-2010) on all qualifications from Level 2
through to level 5 (higher degrees). They find that the additional wage premium of a
145 Department of Quantitative Social Science, Institute of Education for the Royal Academy of Engineering: The Labour
Market Value of STEM Qualifications and Occupations (2011)
248
STEM qualification at work in a STEM occupation is positive and larger than

premiums obtained by STEM qualifications in non-STEM jobs and conclude that the
labour market values STEM qualifications in general but more so in STEM jobs.
249
Annex D
UPTAKE FIGURES FOR STEM SUBJECTS AT SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY

LEVEL
Graphs showing A level entries from Schools and Colleges (figures are for
England only)
2011 figures are provisional
Mathematics A level entries

80,000
70,000
Number of entries
60,000
50,000
40,000
30,000
Male
20,000
Female
10,000
Total
0
2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012
Year
Further Mathematics A level entries

12,000
10,000
Number of entries
8,000
6,000
4,000 Male
2,000 Female
Total
0
2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012
Year
250
Biology A level entries

60,000
50,000
Number of entries
40,000
30,000
20,000 Male
10,000 Female
Total
0
2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012
Year
Chemistry A level entries

50,000
45,000
Number of entries
40,000
35,000
30,000
25,000
20,000
15,000 Male
10,000 Female
5,000 Total
0
2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012
Year
251
Physics A level entries

35,000
30,000
Number of entries
25,000
20,000
15,000
10,000 Male
Female
5,000
Total
0
2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012
Year
University level STEM
STEM Entrants
1. At university level STEM take-up is increasing, with the number of first degree STEM
entrants increasing by 6% since 2008/09, compared to only 4% in non-STEM subjects
Figure D1: STEM entrants to University
210,000 Number of STEM degree entrants 44%
Proportion of first degree entrants who study STEM
200,000 44%
190,000 43%
180,000 43%
170,000 42%
160,000 42%
150,000 41%
2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10
Source: HESA; UK HEIs
252
2. Many subjects have seen an above average increase in entrants including

Mathematical sciences (8%) and Engineering (8%). This may be an indication of a
reversal in the previous downward trend seen between 2002/03 and 2007/08.
STEM qualifiers
3. The number of first degree STEM qualifiers increased by 5% between 2008/09 and
2009/10, in line with the increase in non-STEM (also 5%).
4. Many subjects have seen an increase in the number of qualifiers, including

Mathematical sciences (8%), Chemistry (6%) and Engineering (5%). Similar trends are
also observed at both MSc and PhD level.
5. HEFCE have provided detailed information about undergraduate and postgraduate

STEM student numbers with their submission, so information is not repeated here.
253
Annex E
Entrants Data
First Degree Entrants to UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)

% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
Medicine and Dentistry 8,230 9,030 9,230 9,555 9,550 9,695 9,835 9,925 21% 1%
Subjects allied to medicine 35,470 40,880 41,385 44,115 39,670 38,735 41,600 44,800 26% 8%
Biological Sciences 34,610 35,845 36,525 39,515 39,310 40,890 43,375 46,145 33% 6%
(C1) Biology 6,165 6,340 6,370 6,900 6,485 6,980 7,225 7,605 23% 5%
(C6) Sports Science 5,955 7,505 8,045 9,475 9,960 11,120 11,885 12,630 112% 6%
(C8) Psychology 14,475 15,155 15,700 16,850 15,980 16,270 17,090 18,095 25% 6%
(C9) Other Biological Sciences 3,320 2,105 1,740 1,460 2,000 1,600 1,875 2,135 -36% 14%
Veterinary Science 835 755 830 845 940 970 950 980 17% 3%
Agriculture and related subjects 2,585 2,815 2,740 2,920 2,695 2,710 2,860 3,075 19% 8%
Physical Sciences 16,595 16,525 16,050 17,615 17,175 18,055 18,700 19,570 18% 5%
(F1) Chemistry 4,025 3,845 3,665 4,030 4,020 4,230 4,465 4,620 15% 3%
(F3) Physics 2,990 3,030 2,905 3,045 3,040 3,435 3,555 3,765 26% 6%
(F4) Forensic and Archaeological Science 885 1,350 1,860 2,365 2,365 2,425 2,245 2,530 186% 13%
Mathematical Sciences 6,345 6,600 6,990 7,285 7,400 7,970 8,940 9,665 52% 8%
Computer Science 30,205 26,920 23,160 21,195 19,885 19,855 21,210 22,910 -24% 8%
Engineering and Technology 27,985 27,065 27,190 27,215 26,565 28,905 31,325 33,540 20% 7%
Engineering 25,325 23,965 24,260 23,990 23,365 25,305 27,365 29,525 17% 8%
Technology 2,660 3,100 2,930 3,225 3,200 3,600 3,960 4,015 51% 1%
Architecture, Building and Planning 8,875 9,885 10,405 12,060 11,825 12,580 13,295 12,930 46% -3%
TOTAL STEM 171,740 176,315 174,500 182,315 175,015 180,360 192,095 203,540 19% 6%
TOTAL NON-STEM 225,510 229,340 232,025 244,795 236,570 248,245 265,545 275,475 22% 4%
TOTAL 397,250 405,655 406,520 427,105 411,585 428,605 457,640 479,015 21% 5%
% 'science' 43% 43% 43% 43% 43% 42% 42% 42%
Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

Notes: Figures are based on a HESA standard registration population and have been rounded to the nearest five.
(1) Figures exclude entrants from the Open University due to inconsistencies in their method of recording subject of study over the time period.
254
UK Domiciled First Degree Entrants to UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
(C1) Biology 5,745 5,855 5,865 6,315 5,890 6,285 6,505 6,770 18% 4%
(C6) Sports Science 5,845 7,290 7,800 9,225 9,640 10,835 11,555 12,320 111% 7%
(C8) Psychology 13,720 14,295 14,715 15,695 14,825 15,055 15,865 16,675 22% 5%
(C9) Other Biological Sciences 3,205 2,005 1,635 1,370 1,825 1,460 1,730 1,935 -40% 12%
Veterinary Science 770 690 740 745 775 835 805 795 3% -1%
(F1) Chemistry 3,755 3,505 3,270 3,690 3,645 3,835 4,050 4,110 9% 1%
(F3) Physics 2,815 2,785 2,655 2,780 2,695 3,075 3,185 3,330 18% 5%
(F4) Forensic and Archaeological Science 860 1,280 1,790 2,265 2,275 2,285 2,130 2,370 176% 11%
Engineering 18,850 17,395 17,155 17,110 16,135 17,285 18,785 20,065 6% 7%
Technology 2,220 2,695 2,540 2,810 2,805 3,060 3,430 3,390 53% -1%
TOTAL STEM 152,785 155,535 152,795 160,970 153,095 156,730 166,775 175,015 15% 5%
TOTAL NON-STEM 199,015 200,095 201,395 213,070 202,960 211,785 225,480 231,025 16% 2%
TOTAL 351,795 355,625 354,195 374,040 356,055 368,515 392,255 406,045 15% 4%
% 'science' 43% 44% 43% 43% 43% 43% 43% 43%

255
Masters Degree Entrants to UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
(C1) Biology 1,055 1,015 960 1,090 1,305 1,215 1,425 1,605 52% 13%
(C6) Sports Science 475 585 620 675 730 825 940 1,195 152% 27%
(C8) Psychology 3,170 3,250 3,575 3,625 3,665 3,995 4,305 4,985 57% 16%
(C9) Other Biological Sciences 410 495 440 335 420 480 535 565 38% 6%
Agriculture and related subjects 1,120 1,150 1,100 1,020 985 1,080 1,070 1,315 17% 23%
(F1) Chemistry 830 875 690 745 735 615 680 805 -3% 18%
(F3) Physics 545 620 590 580 665 470 555 690 27% 24%
(F4) Forensic and Archaeological Science 410 565 715 735 715 625 665 695 70% 5%
Computer Science 9,860 8,995 9,030 8,130 8,635 8,420 10,645 11,245 14% 6%
Engineering 10,120 10,450 10,575 10,340 11,515 11,680 14,420 15,695 55% 9%
Technology 1,280 1,175 1,090 1,080 1,115 1,390 1,450 1,760 38% 21%
TOTAL STEM 49,730 50,990 52,235 52,325 55,405 56,100 65,595 71,085 43% 8%
TOTAL NON-STEM 82,760 87,205 88,525 91,785 97,945 103,360 117,380 133,285 61% 14%
TOTAL 132,485 138,195 140,760 144,110 153,350 159,465 182,980 204,370 54% 12%
% 'science' 38% 37% 37% 36% 36% 35% 36% 35%

256
UK Domiciled Masters Degree Entrants to UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
(C1) Biology 715 670 635 710 810 790 835 960 34% 15%
(C6) Sports Science 385 455 465 490 560 650 735 940 144% 28%
(C8) Psychology 2,545 2,520 2,780 2,870 2,785 2,970 3,290 3,840 51% 17%
(C9) Other Biological Sciences 295 315 275 200 225 230 305 295 0% -3%
Agriculture and related subjects 620 635 510 515 485 510 500 635 2% 27%
(F1) Chemistry 515 530 400 425 375 280 310 355 -31% 15%
(F3) Physics 385 410 375 390 410 270 335 415 8% 24%
Mathematical Sciences 850 930 760 765 765 625 595 650 -24% 9%
Engineering 3,490 3,235 3,090 3,255 3,540 3,625 3,980 4,455 28% 12%
Technology 635 525 515 430 380 495 515 690 9% 34%
TOTAL STEM 29,290 28,330 28,240 29,190 29,020 29,540 32,840 35,785 22% 9%
TOTAL NON-STEM 43,690 44,380 43,575 45,875 47,290 49,470 55,970 61,895 42% 11%
TOTAL 72,985 72,715 71,815 75,070 76,305 79,010 88,815 97,680 34% 10%
% 'science' 40% 39% 39% 39% 38% 37% 37% 37%

257
PhD Degree Entrants to UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
Subjects allied to medicine 990 1,005 1,065 1,085 1,170 1,210 1,425 1,445 46% 1%
(C1) Biology 545 510 505 510 590 610 770 735 35% -5%
(C6) Sports Science 75 90 100 90 105 90 85 120 60% 41%
(C8) Psychology 750 985 1,030 1,150 1,390 1,480 1,475 1,645 119% 12%
Veterinary Science 80 80 75 100 100 70 65 70 -13% 8%
Agriculture and related subjects 220 190 165 170 135 190 170 215 -2% 26%
(F1) Chemistry 860 815 855 880 985 1,005 1,055 1,085 26% 3%
(F3) Physics 525 535 560 575 655 765 805 880 68% 9%
Mathematical Sciences 480 425 460 475 580 560 580 585 22% 1%
Computer Science 745 885 880 865 920 855 995 980 32% -2%
Engineering 1,980 2,090 2,145 2,005 2,205 2,580 2,560 2,910 47% 14%
Technology 200 220 215 230 215 250 310 280 40% -10%
Architecture, Building and Planning 225 290 265 275 325 300 345 440 96% 28%
TOTAL STEM 10,200 10,810 11,135 11,350 12,445 13,500 14,265 15,305 50% 7%
TOTAL NON-STEM 6,330 6,945 6,760 7,090 7,720 8,025 8,370 9,110 44% 9%
TOTAL 16,530 17,755 17,895 18,440 20,165 21,525 22,635 24,410 48% 8%
% 'science' 62% 61% 62% 62% 62% 63% 63% 63%

258
UK Domiciled PhD Degree Entrants to UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
Medicine and Dentistry 1,050 970 1,040 1,055 1,035 1,185 1,270 1,365 30% 7%
Subjects allied to medicine 765 745 780 770 800 755 935 995 30% 6%
(C1) Biology 375 335 340 325 365 355 485 460 23% -5%
(C6) Sports Science 60 80 80 75 90 70 75 90 50% 20%
(C8) Psychology 640 845 890 970 1,185 1,255 1,220 1,395 118% 14%
Veterinary Science 55 50 55 75 70 55 50 55 0% 10%
Agriculture and related subjects 100 105 90 65 60 90 75 105 5% 40%
(F1) Chemistry 610 540 550 535 575 630 690 715 17% 4%
(F3) Physics 365 380 360 400 410 485 500 550 51% 10%
Mathematical Sciences 280 245 240 230 305 255 310 300 7% -3%
Computer Science 330 420 345 345 360 320 425 430 30% 1%
Engineering and Technology 985 1,005 980 980 920 1,150 1,200 1,400 42% 17%
Engineering 875 880 870 855 810 1,035 1,045 1,250 43% 20%
Technology 110 130 110 125 110 115 155 150 36% -3%
TOTAL STEM 6,595 6,865 6,780 6,950 7,225 7,765 8,485 9,290 41% 9%
TOTAL NON-STEM 3,340 3,660 3,460 3,795 4,005 4,215 4,215 4,945 48% 17%
TOTAL 9,930 10,525 10,245 10,745 11,230 11,980 12,700 14,240 43% 12%
% 'science' 66% 65% 66% 65% 64% 65% 67% 65%

259
Qualifiers Data
First Degree Qualifiers from UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
(C1) Biology 4,430 4,480 4,580 4,445 4,670 4,680 4,625 4,685 6% 1%
(C6) Sports Science 3,745 4,975 5,630 6,210 6,325 7,495 7,855 8,370 123% 7%
(C8) Psychology 8,900 9,680 10,615 11,345 11,655 12,615 12,175 12,650 42% 4%
(F1) Chemistry 2,955 2,735 2,705 2,520 2,665 2,825 2,930 3,100 5% 6%
(F3) Physics 2,205 2,180 2,225 2,345 2,255 2,255 2,490 2,575 17% 3%
(F4) Forensic and Archaeological Science 385 520 745 1,195 1,445 1,640 1,710 1,710 344% 0%
Engineering 17,520 17,560 17,300 17,345 17,120 17,595 17,950 18,910 8% 5%
Technology 1,940 2,030 2,040 2,190 2,380 2,560 2,590 2,760 42% 7%
Architecture, Building and Planning 6,555 6,735 6,565 7,365 7,615 8,655 8,905 10,385 58% 17%
TOTAL STEM 118,105 123,165 127,475 130,450 130,705 136,260 136,035 142,785 21% 5%
TOTAL NON-STEM 156,340 161,825 169,540 175,460 179,960 189,850 189,160 199,060 27% 5%
TOTAL 274,445 284,990 297,015 305,910 310,665 326,110 325,195 341,845 25% 5%
% 'science' 43% 43% 43% 43% 42% 42% 42% 42%

Notes: Figures are based on a qualifications obtained population and have been rounded to the nearest five.
260
UK Domiciled First Degree Qualifiers from UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
(C1) Biology 4,155 4,230 4,335 4,135 4,345 4,335 4,215 4,275 3% 1%
(C6) Sports Science 3,650 4,860 5,520 6,055 6,150 7,305 7,645 8,120 122% 6%
(C8) Psychology 8,325 9,075 10,075 10,710 10,950 11,775 11,325 11,655 40% 3%
(F1) Chemistry 2,760 2,550 2,525 2,325 2,420 2,525 2,655 2,750 0% 4%
(F3) Physics 2,055 1,995 2,075 2,145 2,055 2,005 2,210 2,290 11% 4%
(F4) Forensic and Archaeological Science 360 500 720 1,135 1,385 1,560 1,655 1,615 349% -2%
Computer Science 15,645 16,930 16,620 15,515 13,585 12,435 11,570 11,410 -27% -1%
Engineering 12,465 12,720 12,340 11,780 11,690 11,760 11,880 12,080 -3% 2%
Technology 1,585 1,730 1,725 1,875 2,060 2,140 2,175 2,270 43% 4%
TOTAL STEM 104,260 109,095 112,640 114,240 114,620 119,500 118,535 122,970 18% 4%
TOTAL NON-STEM 138,145 142,380 148,195 151,565 154,685 163,245 160,645 167,050 21% 4%
TOTAL 242,405 251,480 260,835 265,805 269,305 282,745 279,180 290,015 20% 4%
% 'science' 43% 43% 43% 43% 43% 42% 42% 42%

261
Masters Degree Qualifiers from UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
Biology 580 545 640 760 750 950 1,005 1,135 96% 13%
Sports Science 230 285 365 445 445 455 620 660 187% 6%
Psychology 1,990 2,305 2,370 2,855 2,780 2,825 3,045 3,285 65% 8%
Agriculture and related subjects 785 900 895 910 870 815 960 915 17% -5%
Chemistry 375 450 430 395 410 475 455 515 37% 13%
Physics 290 305 335 335 340 400 370 460 59% 24%
Forensic and Archaeological Science 295 350 440 575 595 535 555 570 93% 3%
Mathematical Sciences 760 975 1,265 1,120 1,200 1,230 1,285 1,310 72% 2%
Computer Science 6,490 6,365 6,790 6,485 6,145 6,590 6,015 7,625 17% 27%
Engineering 5,435 6,835 8,145 8,555 8,430 8,870 8,870 11,125 105% 25%
Technology 830 800 810 825 790 1,015 1,045 1,125 36% 8%
TOTAL STEM 27,590 31,740 34,900 36,935 37,235 39,955 41,145 47,320 72% 15%
TOTAL NON-STEM 52,930 61,610 65,885 69,270 71,375 76,775 80,130 89,850 70% 12%
TOTAL 80,520 93,350 100,790 106,200 108,610 116,730 121,275 137,170 70% 13%
% STEM 34% 34% 35% 35% 34% 34% 34% 34%

262
UK Domiciled Masters Degree Qualifiers from UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
Subjects allied to medicine 2,500 2,900 3,005 3,250 3,575 3,805 4,200 4,005 60% -5%
Biology 435 385 420 500 470 610 630 635 46% 1%
Sports Science 180 255 290 355 320 350 480 490 172% 2%
Psychology 1,555 1,700 1,785 2,150 2,140 2,095 2,205 2,400 54% 9%
Agriculture and related subjects 435 445 450 415 425 385 415 410 -6% -1%
Chemistry 250 270 245 210 215 200 190 220 -12% 16%
Physics 185 205 215 200 215 235 215 265 43% 23%
Engineering 1,920 2,045 2,285 2,240 2,220 2,285 2,375 2,635 37% 11%
Technology 480 385 355 365 260 330 345 400 -17% 16%
TOTAL STEM 16,245 17,025 17,455 18,215 18,650 19,230 20,135 21,195 30% 5%
TOTAL NON-STEM 26,900 28,720 29,315 30,525 31,100 32,130 33,560 36,180 34% 8%
TOTAL 43,145 45,745 46,770 48,740 49,745 51,360 53,695 57,375 33% 7%
% STEM 38% 37% 37% 37% 37% 37% 37% 37%

263
PhD Qualifiers from UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
Medicine and Dentistry 1,360 1,530 1,565 1,745 1,730 1,785 1,970 1,945 43% -1%
Subjects allied to medicine 885 875 930 905 955 1,005 965 1,080 22% 12%
Biology 680 630 610 625 670 620 710 655 -4% -8%
Sports Science 45 70 70 80 85 55 80 120 167% 50%
Psychology 775 730 795 825 895 955 955 1,270 64% 33%
Veterinary Science 70 60 95 85 80 70 50 55 -21% 10%
Chemistry 995 1,035 1,020 965 1,040 885 900 1,025 3% 14%
Physics 605 565 555 630 660 590 655 675 12% 3%
Computer Science 370 465 545 710 715 715 790 840 127% 6%
Engineering 1,735 1,795 1,800 1,950 2,135 1,895 2,095 2,215 28% 6%
Technology 270 235 205 240 250 235 280 305 13% 9%
TOTAL STEM 9,970 10,465 10,780 11,255 11,730 11,160 11,885 12,780 28% 8%
TOTAL NON-STEM 4,785 4,680 4,860 5,130 5,680 5,355 5,660 5,865 23% 4%
TOTAL 14,755 15,145 15,640 16,385 17,405 16,520 17,545 18,645 26% 6%
% STEM 68% 69% 69% 69% 67% 68% 68% 69%

264
UK Domiciled PhD Qualifiers from UK HEIs, excluding the Open University (1)
% change % change
02/03 to 08/09 to
Subject of Study 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 09/10 09/10
Medicine and Dentistry 1,085 1,270 1,260 1,365 1,305 1,360 1,460 1,435 32% -2%
Subjects allied to medicine 640 660 685 635 685 675 630 685 7% 9%
Biology 490 465 430 435 445 425 470 410 -16% -13%
Sports Science 35 55 55 70 65 45 65 90 157% 38%
Psychology 670 635 680 695 760 795 805 1,080 61% 34%
Veterinary Science 50 45 65 60 45 55 40 35 -30% -13%
Chemistry 680 740 705 660 710 580 585 605 -11% 3%
Physics 425 390 370 445 455 400 415 445 5% 7%
Computer Science 175 225 260 330 320 300 330 320 83% -3%
Engineering and Technology 910 885 845 845 960 810 920 940 3% 2%
Engineering 760 770 740 745 840 685 780 805 6% 3%
Technology 150 110 105 100 120 125 140 135 -10% -4%
Architecture, Building and
Planning 85 80 110 75 100 85 85 100 18% 18%
TOTAL STEM 6,540 6,940 6,960 7,095 7,330 6,825 7,085 7,505 15% 6%
TOTAL NON-STEM 2,585 2,595 2,545 2,650 2,935 2,675 2,760 2,925 13% 6%
TOTAL 9,125 9,535 9,505 9,745 10,265 9,500 9,845 10,435 14% 6%
% STEM 72% 73% 73% 73% 71% 72% 72% 72%

265
Annex F
FURTHER INFORMATION ON EMPLOYER SATISFACTION WITH STEM

GRADUATES
Employer satisfaction with STEM graduates
1. The NESS 2009 survey referred to in the main body of the text does not split the results
down to examine employers’ satisfaction with STEM and non-STEM graduates separately.
The different levels of satisfaction across industry can be used as a tentative proxy for this.
2. As noted above 85% of employers were satisfied with the work readiness of their recent
graduate recruits; 11% said they were not satisfied (the remainder being ‘Don’t knows’)
and the table below show the proportion dissatisfied by industrial sector.
3. The table shows that whilst some of the industry sectors which are probably more likely to
recruit STEM graduates (e.g. Water Supply, Construction) do display higher levels of
dissatisfaction with the work-readiness of their graduates, this is not universal. Other
industries such as Mining and Quarrying, in which high levels of STEM graduates could be
expected, actually show relatively low levels of dissatisfaction and other non-STEM areas
can also display relatively high levels of dissatisfaction (such as Administrative and Support
Service Activities).
4. Overall, issues of quality may be more sector-specific, rather than a generalised problem of
low quality STEM graduates.
Table E1: Proportion of employers experiencing recruits from education being

poorly or very poorly prepared for work, by industry sector
17-18 year old 24 year old
16 year old school/college university/higher
school leavers leavers education leavers
Unweighted Unweighted Unweighted
base % base % base %
Agriculture, Forestry and
Fishing 2,329 26% 4,136 18% 2,992 21%
Mining and Quarrying 43 15% 89 15% 168 8%
Manufacturing 6,471 33% 9,146 25% 5,541 14%
Electricity, Gas, Steam
and Air Conditioning
Supply 67 48% 205 22% 199 12%
Water Supply; Sewage,
Waste Management and
Remediation Activities 333 23% 433 19% 307 17%
Construction 8,777 33% 11,641 26% 5,117 17%
Wholesale and Retail
Trade, Repair of Motor
Vehicles and Motorcycles 23,319 27% 39,520 20% 24,983 12%
Transportation and
Storage 2,281 33% 3,665 28% 2,282 13%
266
Accommodation and
Food Service Activities 15,207 28% 28,603 20% 19,340 10%
Information and
Communication 744 32% 2,961 19% 7,567 13%
Financial and Insurance
Activities 925 22% 2,919 19% 3,922 13%
Real Estate Activities 945 23% 3,518 16% 5,111 10%
Professional, Scientific
and Technical Activities 4,140 33% 9,488 21% 20,774 14%
Administrative and
Support Service
Activities 2,989 27% 6,488 24% 6,625 15%
Public Administration and
Defence; Compulsory
Social Security 513 30% 1,677 15% 2,947 8%
Education 1,755 27% 5,768 18% 11,160 6%
Human Health and Social
Work Activities 2,894 27% 10,817 21% 10,347 11%
Arts, Entertainment and
Recreation 4,617 24% 8,521 20% 7,828 9%
Other Service Activities 4,797 33% 6,196 24% 3,575 13%
Activities of
Extraterritorial
Organisations and Bodies 5 0% 15 0% 3 0%
Source: UKCES NESS 2009
Possible reasons for any dissatisfaction
5. Looking at the specific skills employers report to be lacking amongst their new recruits
from HE, the majority (55%) report a lack of experience of the working world; 44% report
a lack of required skills or competencies, whilst 38% cite a poor attitude to work.
267
Table E2: Skills lacking among poorly prepared recruits taken on directly from education
Source: NESS 09
6. This suggests that there may be scope for improvement of the quality of graduates through
higher education through more employer-HE engagement on course content and provision
of more work experience opportunities.
7. The CBI 2011 survey reported that 17% of responding employers were engaged with
universities to develop business-relevant STEM courses. It was higher for some sectors;
Energy & Water (53%), Construction (30%), Science/Engineering/IT (38%).
268
Government, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and Department of Education –
Government, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and

Department of Education – Oral evidence (QQ 1-39)
TUESDAY 20 DECEMBER 2011

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Lucas
Lord Rees of Ludlow
Lord Winston
________________
Sir Adrian Smith, Director-General of Knowledge and Innovation, Department for Business,
Innovation and Skills, and David Russell, Director, Curriculum and Behaviour Group,
Department for Education
Q1 The Chairman: Good afternoon to our witnesses to the first evidence session of our
inquiry looking at higher education in STEM subjects. Members of the Committee will declare any
interests they have at this point, which will last them for the rest of the inquiry. I am a board
member of the National Environment Research Council. I am also interested in medical research,
as Chairman of the Association of Medical Research Charities, and interested in IT as Chairman of
the e-Learning Foundation. Do any Members have any interests they would like to declare?
Lord Rees of Ludlow: I am Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a fellow of the Royal
Society.
Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: I have no interests to declare.
Lord Winston: I am an employee of Imperial College London and a member of the Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council. I am a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the
Academy of Medical Sciences.
Lord Broers: I am a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. I also
chair Bio Nano Consulting, which is a company owned by Imperial and UCL.
Lord Lucas: I am a council member of City & Guilds and one of the founders of Behind the
Screen, which is an initiative on teaching computing in schools.
269
The Chairman: Right, so there are no flies on this panel. Welcome to both our witnesses. We
are grateful to you for coming just before Christmas. We know how busy a time this is, but we
were anxious to get the inquiry under way before the recess. Welcome to Sir Adrian Smith, the
Director-General of Knowledge and Innovation at the Department for Business, Innovation and
Skills, and David Russell, Director of Curriculum and Behaviour at the Department for Education.
Do you wish to make a brief statement before we start or can we go straight to questions?
Sir Adrian Smith: Perhaps I can say very briefly that we have submitted a lengthy memorandum,
but there were some delays in clearance and it may be that some Members have not read it in
great detail. If I refer to the fact that we have supplied you with the information, there is a lengthy
detailed memorandum available to Members.
The Chairman: We are very grateful for that. Mr Russell?

David Russell: No, thank you, Lord Chairman.
Q2 The Chairman: Professor Smith, what is the rationale for the Government’s definition of
STEM? We are finding it really quite difficult to get a definition that bears scrutiny, particularly
over pieces of academic work.
Sir Adrian Smith: Whatever exists at the moment will of course have grown up historically, bit by
bit. Starting with what exists at the moment: at the higher education level, there is a classification
for data collection purposes, which is carried out by HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency,
and there is a system called the Joint Academic Coding System, JACS. At its highest level, that
system classifies all subjects and courses in about 21 groups. Ten of the group codes are classified
as STEM. That is the classification that for day-to-day purposes has been used by BIS and HESA. I
know that you will be talking to HEFCE, which uses a slightly different classification from HESA’s
that excludes some of the finer level classifications down at the level of agriculture and
architecture; they do not separate them out in way that HESA does 146 .
This has not been a static system. I do not think that it has changed much recently but there was a
significant change back in 2002-03. It is a moveable feast and at the end of the day the level of
distinction that one goes into is a matter of what is pragmatically useful. New programmes and
new subject interfaces arise. For example, how do you classify something like bioinformatics,
which grew from biology on the one side and mathematics and computer science on the other? It
would be terrific if we had an agreed national or international classification. Certainly, for most
daily purposes between BIS and HESA we have the classification system and it is set out in detail in
the memorandum that we have given you. Perhaps because there are only the 10 headings, I will
say very quickly what the STEM headings are under that classification: medicine and dentistry;
subjects allied to medicine; biological sciences; veterinary science, agriculture and related subjects;
physical sciences; mathematical sciences; computer science; engineering; technologies; and, finally,
architecture, building and planning. Those are the current definitions of STEM, for better or
worse.
Q3 The Chairman: How does the department set about making international comparisons?
Where are the international standards?
Sir Adrian Smith: If you were doing it at an OECD level, for example, you would have even
greater problems, because different countries will have different classifications. What tends to
happen, rather crudely, is that you use some level of aggregation where you feel fairly safe that you
146A spreadsheet showing which of the JACS codes are classified as STEM by HEFCE can be found at
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/funding/201213/faq.htm#q7
270
have got something comparable. The more granular you want it, the more hopeless it becomes.
There is no agreed international standard.
Q4 The Chairman: Mr Russell, do you want to add anything to that?

David Russell: In the schools context, STEM is not a phrase that shapes the thinking in quite the
same way. We tend to focus on the classifications that you would find in the national curriculum
or in GCSEs. It is a term that we use, but within that the focus moves on very quickly to maths,
physics, chemistry, biology—that is the heart of what the Government consider to be the STEM
programme for schools. Crudely speaking, if you think of a pipeline, then you think more broadly
about ICT, engineering, D&T and so on. It is not a term that we really need to precisely define in
the schools context because we are guided by the structure of the national curriculum.
Q5 The Chairman: Professor Smith, there is great play about making sure that the best STEM
graduates end up in STEM jobs. What are the Government doing to prevent leakage of STEM
graduates into areas to which, quite frankly, their training and background are perhaps not best
suited?
Sir Adrian Smith: There might be some who say that the skills and training that come from STEM
education and STEM graduates are much needed and add great value to many different kinds of
workplaces. I am not sure that everyone would sign up to your initial premise, Lord Chairman.
The Chairman: It was just provocative, given your own position. We will move on.
Q6 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: I think this is a question for Mr Russell. To start at the
bottom of the chain, are schools and colleges providing the right number of STEM students, as far
as you can tell, and are they equipped to study first degrees in STEM subjects? Do you feel happy
about that transition?
David Russell: I am not sure that there really is such a thing as the right number of students
qualifying from schools and colleges. The Government’s view of that is that it is difficult to have
too many and we would like more, so a lot of our activity is based on that aim. Having said that,
there are certainly signals that come down the chain, if you like, into the schools system that say
that there are not enough. For example, the National Employer Skills Survey always tends to single
out STEM as an area where more skills are needed. In terms of numbers, while there is very
encouraging growth, the Government would say that more is better, and of course increased
supply can generate its own demand in this perhaps more than in anything. The other part of your
question was about quality.
Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Yes, the actual ability to do degrees as a result of school work.
David Russell: We get very mixed feedback from universities on whether students have the right
skills and understanding, but it is fair to say that within that mix there definitely are concerns and
there are some voices that say that the situation is not improving—or even deteriorating. A-level
is a significant achievement. It is a good qualification. Recent international work has borne that out.
It stands up well against comparable qualifications from other countries. That is not to say that it
cannot be improved. As the Government said last year in our White Paper, HE institutions will be
more involved in the design and reform of A-levels in future. It is important to change these
anecdotal noises into something more systematic, which is why the Government have asked
Ofqual to do a systematic piece of work asking universities to give us their thoughts on A-level
quality in quite a fine-grained way, and that should report in the spring.
The Chairman: Do you mean the spring of next year?
271
David Russell: Spring 2012.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Q7 Lord Lucas: Are universities the best judge of what should be taught in schools, or should
industry have a strong say in that?
David Russell: I inferred that—perhaps incorrectly—from the question that Lady Hilton asked
about higher education. HE is obviously a very important recipient, but certainly not the only one.
Industry needs to be fed, if I can use that phrase, in many different ways, not just from graduates
but at technician level with folk coming straight from school or apprenticeships. For the schools
system and certainly for the department, there is always an important exercise of balancing the
different views that come in about how our school leavers are being equipped by their diet of
exams and indeed by the national curriculum.
Q8 Lord Broers: You say that the A-level is a high-quality qualification that stands up well
against international comparison. However, would you like to comment on the breadth of subjects
internationally? I would observe that our students tend to specialise earlier than international
students, so one would expect the A-level to be high quality if, for example, the student is only
doing maths and physics and is not required to carry on with English and a language. Would you
like to comment on that?
David Russell: Broadly speaking, that is a fair observation. Most countries require a broader
statutory curriculum to a higher age than we do in England. Many systems do not have a significant
terminal exam until the age of 18, as opposed to ours at 16. You are absolutely right: England’s
situation is not typical. Having said that, comparative work does account for these differences, so
in comparing international performance and international studies, or indeed looking at the rigour
of international qualifications, these things are controlled for. I think that your basic point is right,
but it does not invalidate the research.
Q9 The Chairman: Professor Smith, do you keep any information—or does anyone keep any
information—about where the best STEM graduates go? In other words, do we track them from
getting the best A-levels into university and then into particular jobs? Do they end up in STEM
careers? Do they end up in academia? Where do they end up?
Sir Adrian Smith: There is probably decent data if you track people through the academic
system—we know they do the PhDs and the postdocs and the rest. As far as I know, there is no
form of national data collection or register out there in general business and industry and
employment where you can track what happened to somebody who got, say, a first in maths from
Imperial 20 years ago.
Q10 Lord Winston: There is increasing anecdotal evidence that the recent increase in the
uptake of science and maths at A-level is due mainly to an increase in the uptake in private
schools. Could you comment on that and whether the statistics support the observation? I would
add that, certainly at the university where I work, we would include the grammar schools in that
aspect. There seems to be a big difference from the state sector in general.
David Russell: I am delighted to say that the statistics do not bear that out at all; in fact, they
show the opposite. I suggest that I send the Committee some statistics afterwards.
The Chairman: Yes please.

David Russell: I will pull out a few key headlines that will make the point. In 2008, 22% of maths
A-level entries came from independent schools. That has now fallen to 20%. In biology, 18% has
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fallen to 16%. In chemistry, 22% is down to 19% and, in physics, 23% is down to 20%. In all these
subjects, the share taken by independent schools of a very quickly increasing pie is falling quite
significantly. There are small real increases in independent schools but they are swamped by the
increases in state schools. I am afraid I do not have the stats on grammar schools today but we
will certainly have them and I can send them to the Committee.
Q11 Lord Winston: One thing that the more so-called research universities are finding is that,
in maths, even kids who have two maths A-levels still need to do quite a lot of extra maths in the
first year of university. Again, that applies probably more to pupils from state sector schools than
to the others. Would you comment on that?
David Russell: I am not sure that I can comment on that fairly today. There are some obvious
factors to take into consideration, such as what the rest of the student’s diet was. Was it maths
and physics or was maths the crowning glory of their set? What grade did they achieve and over
what period of time? A lot of factors could play a part in it. I would not like to say that universities
complain about the quality of their intake. I am not sure that I could say much more than that
today.
Q12 The Chairman: Do you want to comment on that, Professor Smith?

Sir Adrian Smith: I will just come in on the general uptake. From the BIS perspective, as many of
your colleagues will know, we run STEMNET, which is the flagship programme of the STEM
ambassadors. There are 28,000 or 29,000 of them who go into schools and do a fabulous job in
raising awareness of science and the potential of science. We fund the Big Bang Fair, which this
year was in London at Edexcel and attracted 30,000 attendees. Within that, there are the national
science and engineering awards. BIS has sent messages and awareness into the schools. I would
like to think that maybe that had something to do with the increased uptake in recent years.
Lord Winston: But the funding of the ambassadors programme has been cut back somewhat, has
it not?
Sir Adrian Smith: No.
Lord Winston: I have got that wrong; I apologise.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: To follow up what Lord Winston said, is it not the case that if you look
at those who get three As at A-level, the independent schools seem to be dominant?
David Russell: I do not have those figures but I suspect they would bear that out.
The Chairman: It would be very handy if you could do that work for us. It would be good to
have that set of statistics to put into the report.
David Russell: Certainly.
Q13 Lord Rees of Ludlow: We all think that STEM subjects are good for their own sake, but
the Government are telling us that they are important for underpinning our economic growth.
How strong do you think that claim is? Is STEM especially important for economic growth
compared to other areas of higher education?
Sir Adrian Smith: At this point I would wave at you the recent Innovation and Research Strategy for
Growth published by BIS, together with a very long and detailed economic analysis document.
Certainly, the response to the economic analysis document has been that it is a great thing of its
ilk and we have not had one for a long time. What do those things show? They go into some
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depth as to the ingredients of an innovation and growth economy. What are the prerequisites for
innovation? It is not simply to do with research and development and it is not simply to do with
schools. There is a whole host of things, but one thing is absolutely clear if you unpick it and look
at where growth comes and what kind of innovative companies it comes from. It is not, for sure,
the whole story, but technology, growth in technology and research and development are
absolutely fundamental.
There is overwhelming empirical evidence that the economic rate of return on research and
development investment is of the order of 20% to 50%. Recent studies by the Wellcome Trust
and the Medical Research Council show that every £1 million invested in R&D generates a return
of nearly £400,000 a year in perpetuity. Of course it is not the whole story and of course
important things go on in the cultural and creative industries. However, if you look at the
heartlands of the manufacturing industry and the technological developments, they are absolutely
key, central and significant in whatever form of economy we are to have. That production,
dissemination and exploitation of knowledge in the science and research arena is fundamental,
even though it is not the whole story. If you put that in the context of international comparisons
and look at the investments being made in India, China and the other BRIC countries, I do not see
any way that you could not reach the conclusion that, if the UK is to have a future, it needs to
invest heavily in STEM subjects.
Q14 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Is it at the undergraduate level, Masters or PhD that this should
happen?
Sir Adrian Smith: Of course it is a pipeline, unless you are going to import everybody. You will
not have postgraduates unless you have graduates and you will not have the graduates unless they
do the A-levels, which is why the take-up of A-levels has been so encouraging in recent years.
There are legitimate debates about how much emphasis you put on undergrad and postgrad.
David Russell: I would just extend that back even further. Prior to A-levels, the take-up of triple-
science GCSE is also vital. That has been a tremendous success story. The number of pupils taking
triple science has rocketed in the past few years. It has increased from around 5% in 2005 to 20%
in state schools alone. It is well on track to reach 30%. I am sure that it will level off at some point
but it has exceeded all expectations. It is a tremendously encouraging development at GCSE.
Q15 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Looking up to the level of Masters and PhDs, we know that there
is a high proportion of overseas students at that level, many of whom do not or, indeed, cannot
stay here. Should we be concerned about the number of people being trained at that level who
will stay in this country?
Sir Adrian Smith: Let us get some of the facts straight because of some of the misleading ways in
which this is paraded. If you look at the percentage of overseas students doing, let us say,
postgraduate work in physics, you come up with a particular story. However, the starting point is
not that there is a fixed number of places so that, if the overseas component increases, the home
component decreases. If you take engineering PhDs, the total number of UK-domiciled bodies has
increased. As a percentage of the total taking PhDs, it has decreased. One way of explaining that is
the UK’s success in recruiting overseas students, which has not been at the expense of UK
students.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: The course might not exist if the overseas students were not there to
support it, but we need enough people who stay on beyond their PhD.
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Sir Adrian Smith: I agree of course but I think that everything that David and I have said bears out
that the trends in recent years in that respect, compared with, say, 10 years ago, are very
encouraging.
Q16 The Chairman: Do you feel that there is enough, Professor Smith? I come back to the
point that Mr Russell made: you can never have enough. I do not quite know what that means at
the end of the day. We now have around 30% of students taking three sciences in our schools.
That is translating into an uptake in our universities of students taking physics, chemistry and,
particularly, mathematics. However, computer science has gone exactly the opposite way. We
have seen a drop of one-third there. How do you calculate what is enough?
David Russell: Perhaps I could start by unpacking my statement that you can never have enough.
What I mean is that, as well as increasing the number of people who are properly qualified in
STEM subjects at school level, it has other effects. It can enrich the pool. If any given university did
not want to expand its numbers but wanted to increase its quality, it is also a good thing that
more students are taking these subjects because there is a bigger field. Equally, as Professor Smith
said, STEM skills, knowledge and understanding are really good things to have under your belt if
you are not going to take a STEM degree. I spent my last year in school doing maths and
chemistry, although I have a history and philosophy degree. That combination has been
tremendously useful to me in my career. I am a great advocate of STEM for non-STEM
undergraduates, if you like. Equally, there is the point that Lord Lucas alluded to earlier. We need
an eye to practical and vocational qualifications, such as apprenticeships and computing science, of
which mathematics is a fundamental part. For so many different reasons, it is not a simple matter
of the more we produce from the school system, the more universities can expand
commensurately. There are many, many beneficial effects of increasing STEM quality and take-up in
schools.
Q17 The Chairman: On this issue of growing the number of STEM graduates in our
universities, what is enough?
Sir Adrian Smith: I do not know how you would approach the question of what the right number
is, but what would make you think that you did not have the right number? It would be large
numbers of unfilled vacancies and employers saying that they cannot get hold of the people. You
can look at the employment rates of graduates: the STEM graduate employment rate has gone up
in recent years and is now nearly 90% in employment or further studies six months after
graduation. You can look at some proxy indicators, none of which would tell you that we are
overproducing. There is demand for STEM skills within both traditional STEM employers and
emerging, new STEM employers—for example, look at what has happened to medicine, healthcare
and technology in diagnostics. There is a moving feast of employment opportunities and
employment demands as research and technology translates into new businesses, such as the new
businesses that will come around nanotechnology. If you ask, “Are we overproducing? Is there
mass unemployment among STEM graduates?” the answer is no. In surveys of employers, most
engineering employers will say that they still cannot get enough of the right highly skilled people.
So whatever the right number is, we are not there.
Q18 Lord Broers: That is very interesting, but I would just like to probe it. Is the high
unemployment among young people confined to people without degrees or to people with
degrees in the arts and humanities?
Sir Adrian Smith: I do not know the total breakdown of those statistics, although perhaps
between our departments and DWP we could get them. Clearly there are very differential
unemployment rates depending on skill levels.
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Lord Broers: And you are suggesting that if you have a STEM degree you have a very good
chance of getting a job.
Sir Adrian Smith: Nearly 90% of recent STEM graduates are in full-time employment or further
education six months after graduating.
Q19 The Chairman: This is an important area. Without that information presumably it is very
difficult for you, or indeed DWP, to be able to target resources. Is that so?
Sir Adrian Smith: How finely do you want to target? If you know from all these sources that you
certainly do not have enough—you have not saturated the market—why would you not expand? It
is not for me to suggest the exact number, and most people I know who comment on this do not
think it would be good to try to return to some detailed level of manpower planning.
Q20 The Chairman: I do not think that any Member of this Committee would suggest
returning to that, but there seem to be some imbalances. In your own evidence to us, you talked
about biological sciences, which has the second highest number of graduates but the lowest
percentage, 20%, entering STEM jobs. Two weeks ago the Government produced a very
interesting bioscience strategy to drive the UK economy. Do you worry at all about that?
Sir Adrian Smith: We would need to unpick that and have a more nuanced debate about what is
captured by “biological sciences”. For example, under that heading we have psychology;
psychologists going into big business, organisational psychology, human resources departments, et
cetera, those are non-STEM jobs but presumably we want and celebrate psychologists in these
places. There are nuances that I think we need to unpick there. A lot of graduates in forensic
science, highly trained analytical chemists, are much in demand in the food industry. Many of those
jobs in the food industry would not traditionally have been characterised as STEM jobs. There are
lots of definitional and nuanced unpickings that we would need to do before we really knew what
that meant. People coming under the heading of biological sciences are not predominantly hard-
nosed scientists of the kind that underpin the initiatives in the life sciences policy.
Q21 Lord Winston: I should have declared an interest as Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam
University. Are you able to comment on whether there is a difference in these employment figures
between the so-called research universities and some of the new universities where the courses in
the STEM subjects are often rather different? My impression is that there might well be.
Sir Adrian Smith: If there is, I do not have those figures at my disposal, but we can make inquiries
as to whether those figures are available.
The Chairman: We would be grateful for that, because this is an important area and one of the
reasons why we are doing this inquiry is that there are mixed messages coming out about the
supply and demand of STEM graduates.
Sir Adrian Smith: Let me correct myself. I think I already know that those figures are not
available, because one of the things that the higher education reforms are trying to achieve would
be to have very hard-nosed information for students about employability rates from individual
courses within universities. This would be part of the new deal, and there is a group working on
these key indicators and key information sets, so that when graduates are considering where to go
and which course to do, one thing that they would have available to them would be employment
rates from those courses over the last few years. The fact that that is a relatively new initiative
that is going on now suggests that we do not have those kinds of numbers at the moment.
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Q22 The Chairman: If you had a situation where there was a perceived shortage in a
particular graduate skill area, do you feel that you have sufficient leverage over the universities to
be able to influence what they offer and what they deliver?
Sir Adrian Smith: We certainly do not have that kind of direct leverage. What I think many
people would see as a highly successful higher education system in this country has been built on
the autonomy of individual institutions, the non-interference of Ministers and departments at a
very micro level in terms of courses offered. That said, there are many other routes to influencing
that. One thing that Tim Wilson has been looking at in his review of university-business
interactions is the role of business in working with universities to perhaps create niche Masters
courses in areas where there are specific skills shortages. The other form of intervention in
England, with HEFCE, is the notion of strategic and vulnerable subjects, where certain things are
identified as important to the country and the grant letter from the Minister says that it wants
HEFCE to make sure that those things are relatively protected.
Q23 The Chairman: In terms of those strategic and vulnerable subjects, if the north-west
universities, for example, are closing their physics departments, do you feel that there is sufficient
leverage within that programme to be able to ensure that regionally physics or chemistry or
whatever subject could continue to be delivered?
Sir Adrian Smith: I am looking at Professor Wakeham on your right there, because he and I were
part of a consortium in the south-east when we were worried about closures of physics
departments some five to 10 years ago—I cannot remember exactly when. In negotiation with
HEFCE and its strategic development fund we put in place something that mitigated that. Within
the structures that we have, there are certainly creative ways of avoiding those kinds of wipe-outs
of courses in particular regions. Of course, in Scotland, there was the pooling of physics
departments.
Q24 Lord Rees of Ludlow: If there is a shortage of skills in a particular area, obviously
universities can help a bit, but would you not agree that the greater help would be if the industries
were to make posts in those areas more attractive? Engineering is not perceived as attractive by all
the brightest young people compared to the financial sector. Would you agree that to some
extent it is the industries themselves that could enhance the pull towards the field of engineering,
where we need these people?
Sir Adrian Smith: I am sure that there are instances where those kinds of market forces would
have an influence. Of course, they do not have an instant influence—there is a time lag. In some
other areas it may be a consequence not of short-term market forces but of long-term historical
decisions. We pulled away from a lot of work in nuclear physics and nuclear engineering. If those
programmes come back, we have to restore that. That is not a pound-note market failure; it is
historical.
Q25 Lord Broers: Now I want to ask about the interactions with industry. What steps are
industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand for STEM graduates matches
supply in terms of numbers, skills and quality of graduates, and what plans do the Government
have to encourage further joint working between industry and academia? We had the question
about the schools, but I think that the more direct interactions should take place with the
universities.
Sir Adrian Smith: One way in which universities have been incentivised and funded to interact
with business is what started off as HEROBAC—Higher Education Reach-Out to Business and the
Community—and then morphed into HEIF, the Higher Education Innovation Fund. One thing that
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happened in that last spending review was the protection in cash terms of that HEIF funding, which
has helped universities to develop knowledge transfer, technology transfer and knowledge
exchange capability. There are clearly measurable outputs from that showing a sea change over
the last 10 years in the levels of university and business interaction. What has not necessarily
followed from that uniformly, although there are dozens of excellent examples of it, is where
those interactions between universities and business have turned into concrete manifestations in
course design and influence. There are a lot of Masters courses—again, if you are interested, Lord
Chairman, my department could supply some examples of this—where companies have worked
with universities to create niche courses. Throughout most of the university system, most science
and engineering departments will have industrial advisory groups where people from industry
comment on the nature of the undergraduate degree. Many of the professional institutes actually
accredit and have a direct influence on university degrees. So there is really an enormous amount
that already goes on, but we have asked Tim Wilson in his review of university and business
interaction to look at this in depth and review it again. He is going to be reporting early in 2012. If
there are concrete things that come out of that review, I am sure that we will be very interested
in taking them forward.
Q26 Lord Lucas: Is one way of dealing with the funding problems of high-cost degrees not to
ship students out to industry for a year so that they can come face to face with up-to-the-minute
equipment—possibly extremely specialised equipment that no university can reasonably afford?
There seems to be an idea that that sort of degree is second-class and that a year in industry is
not something you see much at Russell Group universities. Is there a problem in the way that
universities view that?
Sir Adrian Smith: I do not have at my fingertips the statistics on what used to be called sandwich
courses or years in industry. Again, I think we could get those. I am not absolutely sure what the
trends have been. But do not just look at the undergraduate level. Often, those kinds of
interactions with industry are even more productive at the postgraduate level. There are more
and more designs of PhD funding structure in which people spend a year doing joint projects with
industry. We must not talk as though there is a lack of activity in that space, although one can
always look at whether it could be made better. For example, KPMG sponsors students directly to
do specific courses because of its skills needs. I think that the Government would be very
interested in encouraging more businesses and companies to look at that kind of route. Again, I
think some of that will come out of the Tim Wilson review.
The Chairman: Will the Tim Wilson review give us evidence of PhDs going directly into
industry?
Sir Adrian Smith: I cannot tell you because I have not seen the latest draft of what he intends to
say. Perhaps you should ask him.
Q27 Lord Broers: Like your reaction, it is perhaps anecdotal evidence but in my experience
British industry does not employ the same number of PhDs as, for example, American industry.
With the few exceptions of the companies that we easily think about, it is less prestigious for a
PhD to go out into industry than it is for them to stay in the university world, which is not the
case in the United States.
Sir Adrian Smith: Historically, I am sure that you and I know of cases in the past in which leading
professors have expressed disappointment that some very clever PhD had had to go and work in
industry because there were no post-doc positions. I hope that we are doing everything at our
disposal to help to change that kind of cultural attitude. It depends on the area, but in many not
more than around 30% of a cohort of PhDs will go on through the academic system to post-doc.
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Most PhDs go out there into the rest of the world. One thing that we are concerned about—we
have had discussions with the Royal Society about this—are research careers, and providing
people with the skills set and the expectation that most people starting on PhDs will not have a
lifelong academic career. Instead of seeing that as a source of disappointment, we should see it as
how the world is and a good thing for business and industry.
Q28 Lord Winston: The Government’s memorandum deals quite a bit with issues of diversity,
which we are obviously concerned about. We are glad to see that the Government are doing
what they are doing. However, we are also concerned about the statistics that are available on the
diversity of STEM graduates specifically. For example, it is certainly my impression, from recent
graduation ceremonies at more than one university’s medical school, that there are still very few
Afro-Caribbean or black African students coming through who are qualified in medicine. It would
be interesting to hear your observations on that and what you are doing to increase the diversity
of STEM graduates.
Sir Adrian Smith: In the memorandum we have listed a number of recent reports from such
bodies as the Equality Challenge Unit, which produces annual statistical reports. I will not list all
the entities we referred to, but there are a lot of hard data out there that are referenced in the
memorandum. As I mentioned earlier, we have STEMNET and the STEM ambassadors. Choosing
the right role models and getting them into the right places is one way of doing it.
Lord Winston: I have seen them at work and they are very effective.
Sir Adrian Smith: The other thing is that we have asked the Royal Academy of Engineering and
the Royal Society to work together to develop a targeted diversity programme for STEM that
builds on some things that the academies have done in less systematic ways in the past. We have
really challenged them, but there is only so much that you can do from a central government
department and it is almost counterproductive to try to do some things from a department. We
have challenged the academic leadership in the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of
Engineering to come up with a diversity strategy, and they are working on it now.
Q29 Lord Winston: I wonder whether David Russell thinks that there are enough teachers
from such backgrounds. It is very clear that we have addressed the issue of gender pretty
successfully, but do you feel that there is enough diversity among teachers in general, other than
on the question of gender? Clearly, inspiring teachers make the best role models for science.
David Russell: I completely agree and the answer is no, there is not. In most schools that have a
significant minority ethnic population, the staffing does not represent that demographic at all.
There is definitely an issue there. It is a complex issue to do with career choices, career
aspirations, sometimes qualifications but sometimes not, and chosen cultural norms in terms of
what careers folk from different ethnic backgrounds aspire to. It is a complex picture but it boils
down to a simple answer: no, diversity is not sufficient.
The other important thing to say about this, building on our theme from earlier, is that the most
significant determinant of what one does at any point in one’s academic career is what one has just
done the year before. Therefore, if we are to improve the diversity of the graduates that you
congratulate at graduation ceremonies, it begins with ensuring that every school in the country is
providing a rigorous core academic diet of the type of subjects that can keep those doors open.
That has just not been the case in enough schools in the country. If I may, I think this is a good
point to mention the effect of the English baccalaureate, which, as I am sure the Committee
knows, is simply a recognition that a student has taken a broad and balanced, rigorous academic
core curriculum, including maths and at least two sciences. The number of pupils who take a range
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of subjects that would qualify them for that measure is increasing very rapidly, even in the past
year, from only 22% to 47%. That is a trend that I would expect to continue. Although I do not
have the precise data on this, I think they would bear out my assertion that that EBacc take-up is
not evenly distributed among different minority ethnic groups. I think it will have a very beneficial
effect on the pipeline to aid diversity.
Q30 The Chairman: When you are providing the other statistics, perhaps you could also
provide us with some statistics on that. The Government’s declared policy is to close the
attainment gap between, if you like, the rich and the poor and between people from different
ethnic backgrounds, particularly in maths and science. You have given us some impressive statistics
about the improvement, but it would be really good to see whether in fact that applies to the
lower socioeconomic groups and in terms of ethnic diversity. Are you able to do that?
David Russell: I absolutely will.
Lord Winston: If you have anything on teachers, I think that would be quite helpful too.
David Russell: Absolutely. The white majority is not dominant when it comes to STEM
qualifications. It is a nuanced picture broken down by different ethnic groups. We will give you
those statistics.
The Chairman: That would be very helpful.
Q31 Lord Lucas: There seems to be a cultural component to some of these things; for
instance, you really notice how strongly the Asian communities are attracted to medicine. The one
cultural thing that puzzles me and seems totally refractory is the avoidance of physics by girls. Even
at the best schools there are only half as many girls taking physics as you would expect in a boys’
environment. Have you any indication of what the problem is? Has anyone done any research on
the underlying problem? It means that there is a very large chunk of the potential hard end of the
STEM market, particularly for engineering, physics, the material sciences and computing, which just
never gets there.
David Russell: I think you are right. We have made some headway in this issue, but it remains the
standout issue when you look at gender breakdown of subject take-up. It is one of the focuses of
activity for the Stimulating Physics programme that the DfE is funding now and in future years. The
funding is actually rising for that programme, from £1.5 million this year. I do not honestly know,
but it is very interesting to see that girls who do take physics do extremely well at it—better on
average than boys. There is nothing obvious that comes out of the statistics. Equally, when one
looks at the qualitative analysis, one does not hear lots of stories like, “Well, I really loved physics
but I felt that my school did not want me to do it”. There is nothing very obvious that is putting
girls off who want to take physics but feel that they cannot. The issue is a little bit deeper than
that: they do not seem to want to take physics. You have to go a bit further back to find the root
cause. One suspects that there are some very big social and cultural issues there that need to be
addressed about gender stereotypes, primary education—even pre-schooling—and social norms,
which is possibly slightly outwith the remit of this investigation. I agree that at the root of that is a
really serious issue about untapped potential.
Lord Lucas: If you look at the Chinese community, the children that are exported to us, there
are almost equal proportions of boys and girls doing physics. It does not seem to be anything that
is in the genetics.
David Russell: There is absolutely no evidence that there is anything in genetics to influence this.
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Sir Adrian Smith: It is an unresolved mystery and unresolved mysteries are proper subjects for
research. An Economic and Social Research Council project being carried out at the Institute of
Education is trying to go back in time to identify the pivotal influences that lead to these attitudes
and choices. It has not produced its final report yet so I do not know what will come out of it. It is
looking back to roughly the age of 12 but it is entirely possible that you need to go back to five or
six, or even three, to solve the problem.
Lord Lucas: It is still there in all-girls’ schools.

Sir Adrian Smith: If we could just change the proportion of girls doing physics, at a stroke we
could solve all those supply problems we were talking about earlier.
Q32 The Chairman: Before I bring Lord Lucas back in on another thorny area, does BIS have
any statistics about faculty staff in universities? We are getting anecdotal evidence that in areas
such as mathematics and computer science many universities are dependent on non-EU overseas
staff to be able to man their faculties. Is that a worry? Is that something we should be worried
about? Is there any evidence that that is true?
Sir Adrian Smith: It depends a bit where you start. Is that a sign of a problem or a sign of how
wonderful it is that the UK can attract the brightest and the best to come here to work? I am not
sure that there are definitive data on that but we can see what exists.
The Chairman: It would be interesting if you could give us a response to that. Lord Rees, were
you going to add something?
Lord Rees of Ludlow: I was going to say the same as Sir Adrian—we should try to attract
worldwide talent; it is not a negative.
The Chairman: Equally, is there any evidence that our best talent is going abroad to work as
faculty staff in the States or China?
Sir Adrian Smith: It would be harder to pinpoint those numbers because once people leave these
shores you do not know quite what they do. If you think back to when there were noises in the
system about brain drains, we have not heard those in recent years.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. Lord Lucas, you wanted to ask about the HE reforms.
Q33 Lord Lucas: What effects have you noticed so far on the STEM pipeline resulting from the
Government’s higher education reforms? One thing we are told is that the incentivisation for AAB
candidates is going to make life difficult for those who are offering STEM degrees at lower levels
than that. Are you seeing universities increasing the breadth of their degrees? I know that UCL is,
which I am delighted to see. That is one way of reducing the cost of a STEM degree, to get a bit of
humanities in there, one way or another.
Sir Adrian Smith: You asked me what I have seen so far. I will not start with “seen”; I will start
with “heard”. When I go to the British Academy, I hear that it is the end of the world as we know
it. When I go to the Royal Academy of Engineering, I hear that it is the end of the world as we
know it. So on balance—
Lord Lucas: It is the end of the world as we know it.
Sir Adrian Smith: In fact, the serious answer is that it is simply too early to know virtually
anything about the effects of the recent reforms. Of course, it is not too early to speculate or to
have anxieties or—from one’s own favourite point of view—to think that it is the end of the
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world as we know it. But we do not even know yet, and will not until 15 January, something as
simple as the effect on overall numbers of applications to the university system. There is lots of
speculation in the press because you take a snapshot in November and find that it is X% down on
November last year, forgetting that last year’s November was a peak that was X% higher than the
year before, and that we now have much more information floating around the system because of
the new fee regime, such as fee waivers and bursaries. You might conjecture that students would
take a lot longer in making up their minds where to apply and so the pattern of application from
the starting gun to 15 January might look different. All are totally compatible with what we have
seen so far. Until 15 January there is not even the first data point to tell us what is going on. I am
sure that is a very disappointing answer.
Q34 Lord Lucas: No, given that it is happening, I am interested. There was an announcement
about the curriculum review saying it would aim for greater breadth. Does that mean a reduction
in STEM content pre-16 in order to introduce other subjects?
David Russell: No, it does not. The DfE published two things yesterday. The first was a report by
the expert panel of Professor Dylan William, Professor Andrew Pollard, Professor Mary James and
Tim Oates, which has been looking at structural issues in the curriculum. Is it the right shape?
What do other countries do in terms of statutory breadth at different ages? Have we got the key
stage structure right? What do we do about attainment targets, and so on? These are quite
technical but very important aspects of the curriculum. We also published an evidence report
looking at what the national curricula of high-performing jurisdictions around the world tell us.
These are reports—the first is a set of recommendations to the Government from the expert
panel and the second is an evidence report by the Government—and there will follow a period of
discussion and engagement based on those. One thing that is quite easy to see from the
international evidence is higher levels of challenge and demand in various different curricula in
high-performing jurisdictions—for example, Singapore being more ambitious in what it teaches its
children about cells in upper primary, Hong Kong being more ambitious in what it teaches its
children about plastics and hydrocarbons in lower secondary, and Alberta and Massachusetts giving
far more attention to earth science and space as a specific subject. So quite the contrary—the
direction of travel in the curriculum review is that we really need to learn from other experiences
about just how high our aspirations can be in science, and indeed in other aspects of the
curriculum.
Q35 The Chairman: Before we let you off the hook here, Professor Smith, the Government
conducted an impact assessment of their reforms in higher education. Therefore, there must have
been some analysis of what the Government thought might happen. I wonder whether what has
happened so far has matched any of the concerns that you had.
Sir Adrian Smith: I am afraid that I have to repeat what I said earlier. There are things that many
people would wish to worry about, monitor and be concerned about. Will it have a differential
effect on student choice? Will more students choose the humanities instead? That is the demand
side. On the supply side, will universities want to switch from teaching STEM to the humanities
because they think they can make few more bob doing that? Who knows? All those things are
uncertain. What will be the effects down the line on, say, progression from undergraduate to
postgraduate? Legitimately, there are many questions that the reforms throw up. We have asked
HEFCE to collect and monitor all sorts of data to see how these things will go. There are major
interest groups within universities and different mission groups who are concerned about the
potential differential effects on widening participation. All those are obvious and legitimate
questions but we have absolutely no data.
282
Q36 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I want to focus on postgraduate and doctoral study. There are
two concerns. One is that UK students may be less willing to take up doctoral training if they are
in debt already. The other is that there have been changes in doctoral training provision. Can you
say anything about any trends that have emerged so far?
Sir Adrian Smith: Again, the answer to the first part, I am afraid, is the same one: it is an obvious
and legitimate concern. In the short term, HEFCE is still putting some funding into postgraduate
teaching for the higher-cost subjects. The research councils have their own individual strategies.
One thing that has happened in recent years is in response to the community in the past, which
was concerned that the quick and dirty three-year PhD was not equipping our students at the
same level as many of our international competitors. It was not enough. Therefore, there has been
a movement to a much more focused, “Here’s four years’ worth of money—use it in the most
creative way” approach, including new schemes and industrial training PhDs. There is a lot of
creativity in that space but there are finite sums of money. Collectively, there was a will in the
community to have fewer PhDs if necessary, but ones who were better trained and more
internationally competitive. I think those trends are continuing. There is a behavioural response to
what everybody will persist in calling debt—we can debate the meaning of the word. Will people
shy away from going into postgrad? We have to watch that very carefully and be prepared to make
creative interventions if we need them to prevent that from happening. Again, who knows?
Q37 Lord Rees of Ludlow: What about the influx of foreign PhD students and visa
constraints?
Sir Adrian Smith: Considerable concerns are voiced in the community about the impact of UK
Border Agency rules, whether on the implications and implementation of those rules per se, or,
more elusively, whether it creates the impression that Britain does not want the brightest and the
best. The Government are doing all they can to say “Yes, we do” and that the rules are not
designed for that purpose, but it is something to worry about and to monitor. My department
certainly does monitor that carefully—not just in the academic space but in a number of innovative
businesses that want to recruit PhDs. There are provisions within the rules, which are not totally
understood at the moment by a lot of people in the community, whereby there still are proper
possibilities for people to stay on and work. We probably just have to do more to get the
information out there so that people understand the rules. But there is a concern, clearly.
Q38 Lord Winston: One of the concerns is about not just the PhD student but the first post-
doc period, which is often very useful to our research base. Certainly, we have had problems in
keeping really good PhD students who now have their doctorate and whom we would like to have
for a bit longer. I do not know whether there is any chance of that changing.
Sir Adrian Smith: The first thing we need to do is something that I have encouraged in my
interactions with the community. Where you think there has been a problem, give us a detailed
case study. In most cases it has transpired that the procedure was either not understood or not
applied. If, at the end of the day, it is the policy that is getting in the way, we will continue a
dialogue about policy. However, you shoot yourself in the foot if you start arguing about the policy
and then find that the person has not followed the right procedures.
Q39 The Chairman: Does Lord Rees want to bring up the issue of RCUK’s evidence, or shall
I?
Lord Rees of Ludlow: This was some evidence in RCUK’s submission to us that claimed a
decline in the quality of those being taken on as graduate students.
283
The Chairman: Is this a worry to you?
Sir Adrian Smith: I have not seen that evidence, so it might be more politic to reply when I have
understood it.
The Chairman: You are becoming more of a civil servant each time we meet you, Professor
Smith, but, as usual, you have answered our questions with great straightness and honesty. We are
very grateful for that. Mr Russell, this is the first time that we have met you and we have enjoyed
enormously the evidence that you have given to the Committee. We look forward to the
additional information that you will give us. Thank you very much.
David Russell: It has been my first appearance before any Committee, so thank you for making it
such a pleasurable experience.
The Chairman: We will not be as kind next time. Thank you very much indeed.
284
Government, Department for Education and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)
– Oral evidence (QQ 1-39)
Government, Department for Education and Department for Business,

Innovation and Skills (BIS) – Oral evidence (QQ 1-39)
Transcript to be found under Government, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
285
Government – Supplementary written evidence
Response from the Department for Business, Innovation and skills to the request for information following
the oral evidence given by Sir Adrian Smith, Director General, Knowledge & Information (with David
Russell, Director, Curriculum & Behaviour Group, Department for Education) on 20 December 2011
Four copies of the economic analysis document
Paper copies of the ‘Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth’ and the accompanying detailed
economic analysis have been sent to the Committee Clerk.
Statistics on unemployment in young people broken down by skill levels.
Data is taken from quarter 3 of the 2011 labour force survey, which looks at 18-30 year olds in
England with different highest qualification levels.
Employment ILO unemployment

Rate rate
Level 7-8 85% 6%
Level 4-6 78% 9%
Level 3 67% 11%
Level 2 67% 17%
Below level 2 57% 23%
No Qual 37% 34%
286
Employment figures broken down by type of university. (Q21)
Data Based on the Destinations of Leavers of Higher Education 2006/07 Cohort

Mission Group
Russell Group 1994 Group Million+ University Alliance Guild HE Non-affiliated
Non-
Activity STEM Non-STEM STEM Non-STEM STEM Non-STEM STEM STEM STEM Non-STEM STEM Non-STEM UK
Work only 63.1% 54.8% 58.0% 56.7% 72.0% 67.0% 71.2% 67.2% 74.2% 72.2% 70.2% 65.6% 67.5% 63.4%
Work and further study 9.8% 9.1% 10.0% 9.6% 9.1% 9.0% 9.4% 9.7% 9.6% 8.3% 9.2% 8.8% 9.5% 9.2%
six months Further study only 18.3% 24.0% 21.5% 21.3% 7.7% 10.4% 9.0% 10.4% 7.1% 8.4% 11.6% 14.0% 13.2% 15.0%
after graduation Unemployed 3.9% 4.7% 5.1% 5.1% 6.8% 7.6% 5.9% 6.1% 4.2% 6.9% 4.8% 5.7% 5.1% 6.0%
Not available for employment 4.3% 6.3% 4.6% 6.2% 2.9% 3.8% 3.2% 4.9% 4.0% 3.1% 3.3% 4.7% 3.7% 5.0%
Other 0.7% 1.0% 0.9% 1.1% 1.4% 2.0% 1.2% 1.7% 0.9% 1.1% 0.9% 1.1% 1.0% 1.4%
Work only 72.9% 79.1% 75.2% 80.4% 81.5% 80.8% 84.4% 82.3% 89.0% 82.9% 80.1% 81.7% 78.7% 81.1%
3.5 years after Further study only 17.4% 9.1% 15.0% 6.8% 4.5% 3.8% 4.8% 3.4% 2.4% 3.8% 8.3% 5.6% 10.4% 5.6%
graduation Unemployed 2.5% 3.3% 2.1% 3.8% 4.7% 6.7% 3.7% 4.3% 1.9% 4.7% 3.8% 3.7% 3.2% 4.3%
Other 0.2% 0.4% 0.3% 0.3% 0.6% 1.2% 0.3% 0.5% 0.0% 1.3% 0.5% 1.2% 0.3% 0.7%
Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) and Longitudinal DLHE surveys
STEM: Science, technology, engineering and mathematics
(1)
Covers leavers from full-time and part-time courses.
Data Based on the Destinations of Leavers of Higher Education 2009/10 Cohort

Russell Group 1994 Group Million+ University Alliance Guild HE Non-affiliated
Activity STEM Non-STEM STEM Non-STEM STEM Non-STEM STEM Non-STEM STEM Non-STEM STEM Non-STEM UK
Work only 63.4% 54.5% 56.1% 57.2% 69.2% 65.6% 70.9% 66.8% 75.6% 71.8% 68.1% 65.0% 66.5% 63.1%
Further study only 20.3% 23.7% 22.4% 20.5% 8.9% 9.8% 8.7% 9.4% 5.3% 7.9% 12.4% 13.0% 14.0% 14.1%
Unemployed 6.3% 8.1% 7.9% 8.6% 11.1% 12.3% 8.6% 8.4% 7.4% 8.5% 8.2% 8.9% 8.2% 9.2%
Other 0.7% 1.2% 0.9% 1.1% 1.5% 1.8% 1.2% 1.6% 1.5% 1.6% 0.8% 1.2% 1.0% 1.4%
Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey
STEM: Science, technology, engineering and mathematics
(1)
Covers leavers from full-time and part-time courses.
287
Information on masters courses where industry and universities have worked together
to create them.
Please see separate attached document, “Innovative Practise Report: Industry Sponsored Master’s
Degrees” (1994 group, February 2010 ) for examples of such courses. We cannot provide an
exhaustive list of such courses as this data is not available.
Statistics on sandwich courses.

Enrolments to Sandwich Courses by Domicile, UK Higher Education Institutions
2000/01 – 2009/10
Domicile
Academic
Year UK Other EU Non-EU overseas Total
2000/01 114,415 6,050 4,155 124,615
2001/02 116,785 5,175 4,850 126,815
2002/03 114,400 4,905 5,865 125,170
2003/04 111,030 4,355 6,995 122,380
2004/05 107,310 4,520 7,570 119,405
2005/06 106,955 4,695 7,600 119,250
2006/07 104,640 4,585 7,455 116,680
2007/08 105,445 5,105 7,870 118,415
2008/09 103,115 5,270 7,745 116,130
2009/10 104,855 5,335 7,950 118,140
(1)
Covers students of all ages in all years of study.
(2)
Domicile refers to the country of a student's permanent or home address prior to entry to their course.
Enrolments to sandwich courses

2000/01 to 2009/10
128,000
126,000
124,000
122,000
E n ro lm en ts
120,000
118,000
116,000
114,000
112,000
110,000
2000/01 2001/02 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10
Academic year
288
Sandwich Courses by Institution (Academic Years 2000/01 and 2009/10)
2000/01
Institution Enrolments % of total
Sheffield Hallam University 6,935 5.6%
University of Ulster 6,630 5.3%
University of the West of England, Bristol 6,045 4.9%
Nottingham Trent University 5,000 4.0%
University of Hertfordshire 4,830 3.9%
University of Surrey 4,605 3.7%
Bournemouth University 4,575 3.7%
University of Huddersfield 4,370 3.5%
Leeds Metropolitan University 4,340 3.5%
University of Northumbria at Newcastle 4,240 3.4%
Coventry University 3,955 3.2%
Loughborough University 3,770 3.0%
University of Bath 3,725 3.0%
Brunel University 3,655 2.9%
Manchester Metropolitan University 3,375 2.7%
Aston University 2,865 2.3%
University of Plymouth 2,685 2.2%
University of Glamorgan 2,365 1.9%
Kingston University 2,280 1.8%
Liverpool John Moores University 2,155 1.7%
Middlesex University 2,020 1.6%
University of Bradford 1,925 1.5%
Oxford Brookes University 1,910 1.5%
University of Portsmouth 1,665 1.3%
University of Gloucestershire 1,645 1.3%
University of Teesside 1,595 1.3%
Staffordshire University 1,585 1.3%
University of Wolverhampton 1,565 1.3%
University of Wales, Cardiff 1,565 1.3%
Glasgow Caledonian University 1,545 1.2%
University of Central Lancashire 1,360 1.1%
Harper Adams University College 1,350 1.1%
University of Derby 1,295 1.0%
University of Westminster 1,230 1.0%
University of Sunderland 1,220 1.0%
Robert Gordon University 1,215 1.0%
University of Greenwich 1,180 0.9%
University of Salford 1,125 0.9%
Southampton Institute 1,030 0.8%
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff 905 0.7%
University of Lincoln 820 0.7%
City University 665 0.5%
University of Paisley 585 0.5%
Swansea Institute of Higher Education 580 0.5%
Thames Valley University 575 0.5%
Victoria University of Manchester 560 0.5%
London Institute 540 0.4%
De Montfort University 540 0.4%
Napier University 540 0.4%
University of Brighton 520 0.4%
289
University of North London 495 0.4%

London Guildhall University 465 0.4%
Anglia Polytechnic University 455 0.4%
University of Leeds 450 0.4%
Edinburgh College of Art 445 0.4%
University of Central England in Birmingham 420 0.3%
South Bank University 400 0.3%
University College Northampton 380 0.3%
Queens University of Belfast 355 0.3%
University of Kent at Canterbury 330 0.3%
University of Dundee 305 0.2%
Writtle College 250 0.2%
University of Reading 240 0.2%
University of York 225 0.2%
University of Wales, Aberystwyth 210 0.2%
University of Nottingham 170 0.1%
University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology 145 0.1%
University of East London 140 0.1%
University of Edinburgh 135 0.1%
University of Cambridge 130 0.1%
University of Lancaster 125 0.1%
Kings College London 120 0.1%
Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College 115 0.1%
University of Leicester 110 0.1%
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 100 0.1%
Cranfield University 100 0.1%
University of Hull 90 0.1%
University of Luton 55 0.0%
University of Birmingham 55 0.0%
University of Wales, Swansea 50 0.0%
University College Worcester 45 0.0%
University of Warwick 40 0.0%
Bolton Institute of HE 30 0.0%
University of Exeter 30 0.0%
University of Durham 25 0.0%
University of Wales, Bangor 25 0.0%
University of East Anglia 25 0.0%
University of Sussex 15 0.0%
School of Pharmacy, University of London 15 0.0%
University of Essex 10 0.0%
Scottish Agricultural College 5 0.0%
University of Abertay Dundee 5 0.0%
Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine 5 0.0%
University of St Andrews 0 0.0%
University of Surrey,Roehampton 0 0.0%
Open University 0 0.0%
Royal College of Art 0 0.0%
College of Guidance Studies 0 0.0%
Institute of Advanced Nursing Education 0 0.0%
Bishop Grosseteste College 0 0.0%
Bretton Hall College of HE 0 0.0%
Central School of Speech and Drama 0 0.0%
Chester College of HE 0 0.0%
Canterbury Christ Church University College 0 0.0%
York St John College 0 0.0%
290
College of St Mark and St John 0 0.0%

Dartington College of Arts 0 0.0%
Edge Hill College of HE 0 0.0%
Falmouth College of Arts 0 0.0%
Homerton College 0 0.0%
Kent Institute of Art and Design 0 0.0%
King Alfreds College, Winchester 0 0.0%
Liverpool Hope 0 0.0%
Newman College 0 0.0%
North Riding College 0 0.0%
Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication 0 0.0%
Rose Bruford College 0 0.0%
Royal Academy of Music 0 0.0%
Royal College of Music 0 0.0%
Royal Northern College of Music 0 0.0%
St Martins College 0 0.0%
St Marys College 0 0.0%
Trinity and All Saints College 0 0.0%
Trinity College of Music 0 0.0%
Westminster College 0 0.0%
Surrey Institute of Art and Design, University College 0 0.0%
Bath Spa University College 0 0.0%
University College Chichester 0 0.0%
Wimbledon School of Art 0 0.0%
University of Wales College, Newport 0 0.0%
North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education 0 0.0%
Trinity College, Carmarthen 0 0.0%
Glasgow School of Art 0 0.0%
Northern College of Education 0 0.0%
Queen Margaret University College,Edinburgh 0 0.0%
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama 0 0.0%
University of Bristol 0 0.0%
University of Keele 0 0.0%
University of Liverpool 0 0.0%
Birkbeck College 0 0.0%
Goldsmiths College 0 0.0%
Institute of Education, University of London 0 0.0%
London Business School 0 0.0%
London School of Economics and Political Science 0 0.0%
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 0 0.0%
Queen Mary and Westfield College 0 0.0%
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College 0 0.0%
Royal Veterinary College 0 0.0%
St Georges Hospital Medical School 0 0.0%
School of Oriental and African Studies 0 0.0%
University College London 0 0.0%
Wye College 0 0.0%
University of London (Central Institutes and activities) 0 0.0%
University of Oxford 0 0.0%
University of Sheffield 0 0.0%
University of Southampton 0 0.0%
University of Glasgow 0 0.0%
University of Strathclyde 0 0.0%
University of Aberdeen 0 0.0%
Heriot-Watt University 0 0.0%
291
University of Stirling 0 0.0%

University of Wales, Lampeter 0 0.0%
University of Wales College of Medicine 0 0.0%
Welsh College of Music and drama 0 0.0%
University of Wales, Registry 0 0.0%
Institution of Cancer Research 0 0.0%
Norwich School of Art and Design 0 0.0%
Northern School of Contemporary Dance 0 0.0%
Cumbria Institute of the Arts 0 0.0%
Stranmillis University College 0 0.0%
St Marys University College 0 0.0%
Total 124,615
2009/10
Institution Enrolments % of total
University of Ulster 7,125 6.0%
Sheffield Hallam University 6,320 5.3%
University of the West of England, Bristol 6,235 5.3%
University of Surrey 5,630 4.8%
Nottingham Trent University 5,285 4.5%
Bournemouth University 5,210 4.4%
University of Bath 5,100 4.3%
University of Huddersfield 4,630 3.9%
Aston University 4,565 3.9%
Loughborough University 4,545 3.8%
University of Portsmouth 4,540 3.8%
Coventry University 4,220 3.6%
University of Hertfordshire 4,175 3.5%
Leeds Metropolitan University 3,860 3.3%
Manchester Metropolitan University 3,560 3.0%
University of Northumbria at Newcastle 3,485 2.9%
Brunel University 3,165 2.7%
University of Teesside 2,275 1.9%
Oxford Brookes University 2,035 1.7%
Cardiff University 1,555 1.3%
Harper Adams University College 1,520 1.3%
University of Brighton 1,510 1.3%
Liverpool John Moores University 1,485 1.3%
University of Manchester 1,355 1.1%
Kingston University 1,300 1.1%
University of Bradford 1,275 1.1%
University of Gloucestershire 1,115 0.9%
University of Central Lancashire 1,105 0.9%
University of the Arts, London 1,095 0.9%
University of Kent 1,095 0.9%
Staffordshire University 940 0.8%
Glasgow Caledonian University 935 0.8%
University of Nottingham 910 0.8%
Thames Valley University 890 0.8%
University College Birmingham 790 0.7%
Southampton Solent University 770 0.7%
University of Lincoln 630 0.5%
Robert Gordon University 590 0.5%
University of Glamorgan 580 0.5%
292
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 545 0.5%

University of Leeds 515 0.4%
University of Southampton 495 0.4%
University of Sheffield 455 0.4%
Aberystwyth University 450 0.4%
City University 420 0.4%
University of Westminster 405 0.3%
Middlesex University 385 0.3%
University of York 370 0.3%
University of Wolverhampton 360 0.3%
Queens University of Belfast 350 0.3%
University of Reading 335 0.3%
University of Bristol 330 0.3%
Edinburgh College of Art 320 0.3%
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff 295 0.2%
University of Greenwich 290 0.2%
Edinburgh Napier University 280 0.2%
University of Plymouth 270 0.2%
University of Cambridge 255 0.2%
De Montfort University 250 0.2%
Glasgow School of Art 225 0.2%
Anglia Ruskin University 225 0.2%
University of Durham 220 0.2%
Swansea Metropolitan University 220 0.2%
Swansea University 205 0.2%
Birmingham City University 205 0.2%
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine 195 0.2%
University of Edinburgh 175 0.1%
University of Lancaster 175 0.1%
University of Salford 150 0.1%
University of Derby 140 0.1%
University of Glasgow 135 0.1%
University of Oxford 110 0.1%
University of Exeter 105 0.1%
University of Sunderland 100 0.1%
London South Bank University 75 0.1%
University of Hull 75 0.1%
University of the West of Scotland 70 0.1%
University of Birmingham 65 0.1%
Bangor University 65 0.1%
University of East Anglia 55 0.0%
University of Warwick 55 0.0%
Kings College London 40 0.0%
University of Essex 35 0.0%
University of Chichester 30 0.0%
London Metropolitan University 30 0.0%
University of Northampton 20 0.0%
University of Worcester 15 0.0%
University of Leicester 15 0.0%
Buckinghamshire New University 15 0.0%
University of Liverpool 15 0.0%
University of Aberdeen 10 0.0%
University of Bedfordshire 10 0.0%
University of Sussex 10 0.0%
University of Cumbria 5 0.0%
293
University of East London 5 0.0%

Queen Mary and Westfield College 5 0.0%
Bath Spa University 5 0.0%
University of Keele 5 0.0%
University of Bolton 5 0.0%
Goldsmiths College 5 0.0%
University College London 5 0.0%
University of Chester 0 0.0%
University College Falmouth 0 0.0%
University of Abertay Dundee 0 0.0%
Writtle College 0 0.0%
Open University 0 0.0%
Cranfield University 0 0.0%
Royal College of Art 0 0.0%
Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln 0 0.0%
Central School of Speech and Drama 0 0.0%
Canterbury Christ Church University 0 0.0%
York St John University 0 0.0%
University College Plymouth St Mark and St John 0 0.0%
Edge Hill University 0 0.0%
University of Winchester 0 0.0%
Liverpool Hope University 0 0.0%
Newman University College 0 0.0%
Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication 0 0.0%
Roehampton University 0 0.0%
Rose Bruford College 0 0.0%
Royal Academy of Music 0 0.0%
Royal College of Music 0 0.0%
Royal Northern College of Music 0 0.0%
St Marys University College, Twickenham 0 0.0%
Leeds Trinity University College 0 0.0%
Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance 0 0.0%
University of Wales, Newport 0 0.0%
Glyndwr University 0 0.0%
Trinity University College 0 0.0%
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh 0 0.0%
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama 0 0.0%
Birkbeck College 0 0.0%
Institute of Education 0 0.0%
London Business School 0 0.0%
London School of Economics and Political Science 0 0.0%
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 0 0.0%
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College 0 0.0%
Royal Veterinary College 0 0.0%
St Georges Hospital Medical School 0 0.0%
School of Oriental and African Studies 0 0.0%
School of Pharmacy 0 0.0%
University of London (Institutes and activities) 0 0.0%
University of Strathclyde 0 0.0%
Heriot-Watt University 0 0.0%
University of Dundee 0 0.0%
University of St Andrews 0 0.0%
University of Stirling 0 0.0%
Scottish Agricultural College 0 0.0%
University of Wales, Lampeter 0 0.0%
294
Institute of Cancer Research 0 0.0%

Norwich University College of the Arts 0 0.0%
Stranmillis University College 0 0.0%
St Marys University College 0 0.0%
Royal Agricultural College 0 0.0%
UHI Millennium Institute 0 0.0%
Arts University College at Bournemouth 0 0.0%
Conservatoire for Dance and Drama 0 0.0%
Courtauld Institute of Art 0 0.0%
University of Buckingham 0 0.0%
Heythrop College 0 0.0%
University for the Creative Arts 0 0.0%
Leeds College of Music 0 0.0%
Guildhall School of Music and Drama 0 0.0%
Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts 0 0.0%
University Campus Suffolk 0 0.0%
Total 118,140
Data on faculty staff, whether they are UK domiciled, EU or overseas.

Data on Faculty Staff, Separated by Domicile
Non-EU
Other oversea
Academic cost centre UK EU s Total
Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) (2) Departments:
Agriculture & forestry 860 90 45 995
Anatomy & physiology 1,130 235 205 1,570
Archaeology 520 90 65 670
Architecture, built environment & planning 3,055 400 425 3,885
Biosciences 7,680 1,970 1,480 11,135
Chemical engineering 450 175 220 845
Chemistry 2,200 610 550 3,365
Civil engineering 970 180 295 1,440
Clinical dentistry 1,100 100 95 1,295
Clinical medicine 13,755 2,870 2,450 19,070
Earth, marine & environmental sciences 2,470 450 315 3,235
Electrical, electronic & computer engineering 2,250 485 955 3,690
General engineering 2,530 330 515 3,370
Geography 1,480 220 225 1,920
IT & systems sciences, computer software engineering 4,755 955 1,150 6,860
Mathematics 2,495 785 705 3,990
Mechanical, aero & production engineering 2,425 400 715 3,540
Mineral, metallurgy & materials engineering 635 140 215 985
Nursing & paramedical studies 8,695 380 345 9,420
Pharmacy & pharmacology 1,530 230 250 2,005
Physics 2,450 875 635 3,960
Psychology & behavioural sciences 4,045 710 530 5,280
Veterinary science 800 160 100 1,060
Total SET 68,280 12,835 12,475 93,590
Non-SET Departments:
Business & management studies 9,275 1,415 1,700 12,395
Catering & hospitality management 595 50 35 680
Central administration & services 1,400 125 120 1,640
Continuing education 1,530 265 200 1,995
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Design & creative arts 11,170 875 665 12,710

Education 9,515 410 345 10,270
Health & community studies 4,460 225 200 4,880
Humanities & language based studies 8,680 1,555 1,280 11,520
Media studies 2,560 230 215 3,005
Modern languages 2,120 1,505 520 4,145
Residences & catering 15 0 0 15
Social studies 9,460 2,225 1,915 13,600
Sports science & leisure studies 1,700 130 85 1,910
Staff & student facilities 365 10 10 390
Total academic services 960 80 65 1,105
Total Non-SET 63,805 9,100 7,355 80,260
Total 132,085 21,935 19,830 173,855
Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency Staff Record
Notes: Figures are on a full person equivalent (FPE) basis.
(1)
The Nationality field defines the country of legal nationality and is not necessarily the
domicile of the person.
(2)
SET Departments listed in the table are consistent with Equality Challenge Unit
definitions.
Comment on RCUK’s claim that they “have seen evidence that the number of quality
candidates for PhD places has reduced in recent years at some research-intensive
universities”.
RCUK’s evidence about the reduction in the number of quality candidates applying for PhDs
is not one that is widely recognised, although such views are from time to time voiced by
universities. This kind of evidence from a small number of institutions, whilst important,
should not be given undue weight, though Research Councils will always want to understand
the many different concerns that arise from universities.
January 2012
296
Government – Further supplementary written evidence
Higher Education in STEM subjects: Immigration aspects
1. At the Sub-Committee’s evidence session on 20 March, I undertook to provide a note

on two issues.
Visa statistics
2. Lord Krebs asked whether the student visa statistics I quoted are normalised to account
for increases in the total flow of students from around the world “as developing
countries become more affluent and people go overseas”.
3. The figures I referred to are main applicant entry clearance visas issued under Tier 4 of
the Points Based System and its predecessor study routes, published by the Home Office
at: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-
statistics/immigration-asylum-research/immigration-q4-2011/. They are not normalised,
in the sense that they are not adjusted to reflect the UK’s share in the overall global
international student visa ‘market’. That information is not available to the Home Office,
and is not applied to official statistics of this kind. In any case, increasing economic
prosperity will not automatically lead to a higher proportion of a country’s nationals
studying abroad. Improved access to higher quality educational provision in their home
country may have the opposite impact.
British Council Report
4. The Committee asked me to write with supplementary comments on the British

Council’s recent report Impact of Visa Changes on Student Mobility and Outlook for the
UK.
5. Central to the Report is the assertion that “all recent immigration changes have
managed to single out the UK as the country with the toughest immigration regime
when compared to its competitors”. In fact the table on p.30 of the report which
compares the key features of the student visas systems of the UK, US and Australia as of
May 2011 shows no significant differences between the systems. It omits two key
features of the US and Australian systems - widespread interviewing of students and
robust ‘credibility’ or ‘intentions’ tests at the heart of their entry clearance processes –
that are not currently part of the UK regime and which some might argue are more
onerous for students. The report also contains a number of factual inaccuracies in its
description of the current policy framework within the UK, including the rights of
international students to bring dependants, the rights of those dependants to work, and
with regard to the arrangements we have put in place to allow international graduates to
remain in the UK in skilled employment. Therefore as a matter of fact we dispute that
the UK is out of line with competitor countries.
6. The Report suggests that the visa measures taken by the UK will have a detrimental
impact on the UK education sector in terms of numbers of international students and
reputation. We take the view that stopping applications from bogus students and raising
297
standards amongst education providers were necessary and will enhance the UK’s
reputation.
7. The Report makes clear that, internationally, the student route has been abused and
other countries have, like the UK, had to tighten their policies at various times in
response. For example it notes that in Australia, in the face of “widespread agreement
that a variety of education providers and their agents manipulated the system primarily
for migration outcomes rather than educational outcomes”, the Government required
re-registration of all providers of international education. This resulted in 49 providers
closing down, displacing over 10,000 students. In the US “over half of the 80,000
schools………were found by government investigators to no longer exist or to have
been post boxes.”
8. This is similar to experience in the UK, which has resulted in the Home Office
establishing a stricter regime of inspection and licensing for sponsors, particularly in the
largely unregulated private sector. In the last year more than 450 colleges have been
prevented from bringing international students to the UK under Tier 4. The key point is
that policymakers in different countries have encountered similar problems and
responded in a similar manner. Again the UK is not out of line.
9. The Report does not offer any alternative suggestions for tackling the abuse, but
indicates that a fall in student numbers is inherently a sign of policy failure which will lead
to a subsequent relaxation. Clearly, measures to combat abuse will deter applications
from bogus students. But the picture on numbers and the impact of visa policy changes
is in any case more complicated. In Australia, the Report identifies a range of factors,
including the strength of the Australian dollar, bad publicity from college closures,
damage to Australia’s reputation from physical attacks on international students, and
increased competition from other countries as contributing to a drop in student
enrolments in 2009/10. However, these did not affect the number of university
applications which actually increased slightly. It is too soon to draw any conclusions
about the impact of the most recent Australian policy changes. In the US, the changes
appear to have brought about a levelling off, then a slight fall in numbers, followed by a
steady rise – despite the fact that policy was not significantly liberalised. It is therefore
not obvious that the visa policy tightening caused significant falls or long-term damage to
genuine students and education providers, as is suggested.
10. The evidence in the report does not support its assertion that “the publicity overseas of
closures of private colleges [in the UK] is expected to have a negative impact on the UK
education brand as a quality destination”. It is much more likely in our view that the
existence of low-quality colleges unable to meet basic standards but charging high prices
was already tarnishing the reputation of the UK as a provider of high-quality and good
value education. The Government is confident that the action it has taken to eradicate
unscrupulous providers unable to meet basic educational standards will enhance rather
than tarnish the UK’s reputation as a destination for high quality education.
11. The Report draws a negative inference from the closure of the Post Study work regime
but does not explain the opportunities which remain available for international graduates
to stay on after their studies. We have replaced the previous blanket access to the UK
labour market with a more selective process that allows high-quality graduates -
298
including those in STEM subjects - to transfer into skilled employment. They will not
count against the numerical limit on skilled economic migrants and the employer will not
have prove the job could have been filled by someone in the resident labour market. It
is also possible for those seeking work experience after their studies to use Tier 5 of the
Points-Based system which contains, in the Government Approved Exchange Scheme
categories, possibilities for interns and for tailor-made schemes where the
representative body acts as a sponsor – a possibility for example for Pharmacy graduates
to do practical training, an issue which was raised in the evidence session. We have also
just opened a route for Graduate Entrepreneurs to stay on to pursue business ideas
developed during their studies. University students can work during their studies to gain
experience or earn extra money, and work placements as part of a course are also
permitted. These arrangements are similar to those in place in the US, and those that
existed in Australia prior to their recent review of their student visa regime.
12. Finally the Report suggests the reforms will make it harder for universities to recruit
world-class non-EEA academic staff. Universities are able to recruit staff through Tier 2
of the Points-Based System and the limit on the number of Tier 2 migrants did not
prevent such recruitment as the limit has not been reached. Academics can also be
recruited through the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent route. The Government announced on
4 April certain relaxations in the operation of the Resident Labour Market test which
will further facilitate recruitment of PhD level academic staff and researchers. We have
also exempted these occupations from the new £35,000 salary threshold at settlement.
And we have recently announced the new Permitted Paid Engagements route which
enables lecturers, examiners and others who are coming to the UK for permitted paid
work for up to one month to apply under the visitor route.
13. We have prioritised universities in our reforms with lighter-touch immigration rules,
after listening carefully to the sector. We have not imposed limits on the number of
students they may recruit, have allowed flexibilities on English language requirements,
retained the rights of their students to work during their studies and to do extensive
work placements, and – at postgraduate level – bring dependants who may work. The
Government has been clear that the UK is open to the brightest and best students and
our reforms have been designed to ensure that we can continue to attract them. The
British Council is well placed to advocate this very positive message.
16 April 2012
299
Government, Damian Green MP, Minister of State for Immigration,

Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 366-390)

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Winston
________________
Damian Green MP, Minister of State for Immigration, and Carolyn Bartlett, Student
Migration Policy Team, Home Office.
Q366 The Chairman: Good afternoon, everyone. I welcome you to this extraordinary
session of the Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee looking at higher education in
STEM subjects. I thank you Minister and Ms Bartlett for joining us this afternoon during the
Lords’ Recess, although I understand that the Commons is sitting somewhere else in the
Building. We have a whole series of questions this afternoon of which we have given you
some notice, but I wonder if you and Ms Bartlett could introduce yourselves for the record.
If you would like to make any introductory statement, provided that it is brief, we would
like to hear it.
Damian Green MP: Thank you very much. I am Damian Green, the Minister of State for
Immigration. Accompanying me is Carolyn Bartlett, who is head of the student migration
policy team at the Home Office. I appreciate that you have had a question session with
some of our officials already, so I will briefly say as an introduction that reducing net
migration and tackling immigration abuse are compatible with continuing to attract the
brightest and best to the UK. Indeed, we want to attract more world-class individuals with
the knowledge and expertise that would drive leading research and economic growth. I do
not believe that the reforms of the immigration system act as a barrier on STEM nor have
we seen any evidence that they do so. We recognise that the university STEM courses, the
subject of this inquiry, fall into the high-quality, low-risk part of the sector, which we have
deliberately sought to prioritise throughout our reforms. As a final thought, it is important
that the academic and research sector recognises its own influence on perceptions of our
system. Any message that the UK is closed to talented students and researchers absolutely
does not come from the Government. We are consistently careful to emphasise that we
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continue to welcome the brightest and best and that we will continue to focus on the
quality of the people who we welcome to this country, as well as on the quantity.
Q367 The Chairman: Ms Bartlett, do you want to say anything as an introduction?

Carolyn Bartlett: No thank you. I have nothing further to add.
Q368 The Chairman: Minister, that is an interesting statement because it flies in the
face of evidence that we have received from many of the top universities, which states that
the Government’s immigration policies are deterring students from coming, particularly at
postgraduate level, from countries including India and Pakistan. Given that limiting legitimate
study was not the target of your policies, how are you working with the universities to solve
the problem? Is it just one of perception, and in that case what are you doing about it, or is
there a problem with the policy?
Damian Green MP: Throughout our immigration reforms, not just in the student field but
in other fields as well, we have been careful to consult very hard and to have a genuine
consultation and not some of the fake consultations that we have all seen Governments
have in the past. With the student proposals, we had a long consultation and we talked long
and hard to the universities. When we announced our final proposals—you need not take it
from me—Universities UK said that the changes, “will allow British universities to remain at
the forefront of international student recruitment”. That is what the university sector said
after we announced our reforms. If we look at the facts and figures, what has happened is
certainly that the headlong growth in university numbers coming from overseas has been
reduced, but it was running at something like 30% a year. It was clearly not a sustainable
number. There has been a 7% reduction in entry clearance visas issued for study between
2011 and 2010, although it is still the third highest year on record, but the picture on
university students, which is what the universities care about, shows a 13.7% rise. Very
specifically, as I said in my opening statement, what we wanted to do was ensure that
everyone who is coming here is a high-quality student coming to study at a high-quality
institution. The factual evidence is that that is what we are achieving so far. I appreciate that
it is early days and we are still in the first year of the reforms, but that is what seems to be
happening.
Q369 The Chairman: A policy is often well intended and I do not think that anybody on
the Committee would argue with the intentions of either your department, Minister, or
indeed BIS in terms of the work that it wants to do to attract the brightest and best at both
undergraduate and particularly postgraduate level into the UK. Is there not an issue in key
areas, such as engineering, to get those students in? Are you saying in terms of your
statistics basically that overall it is okay but we are not really bothered what areas they
come into provided that they are at a particular standard? Do you have a responsibility, in
other words, for trying to make sure that we attract the people who will be the best suited
to actually driving our economic growth in the future?
Damian Green MP: Yes, in fact, I am saying the exact opposite of your first proposition. I
am very concerned with the quality of who is coming in. An old model that would allow 30%
growth year on year on year, which I would candidly describe as pile it high and sell it
expensive, is one model for university growth. That is unsustainable for the universities. You
can ask my colleague, David Willetts, about that in a few minutes’ time. I am concerned,
obviously, about the integrity of the immigration system. It is clearly the case that in the
early years of the introduction of the points-based system, when the previous Government
moved to a more objective paper-based system from the old system of just interviewing
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everyone and deciding purely on that basis, there was huge abuse. It was the biggest single
loophole in the immigration system. The previous Government closed down student
applications altogether for three areas because it was transparent that there was widespread
abuse. Driving that out of the system is obviously good for the integrity of the immigration
system, but I contend that in the long term it is good for the education sector as well. What
we must be selling as a country is the excellence of education in this country. If it becomes a
loophole in the immigration system, certainly there will be students who will have a
disappointing educational experience. I am determined for that not to happen.
Q370 The Chairman: But in tracking those key areas, to take engineering, because that
is where we have received evidence, Ian Bradley, the head of academic services at the
faculty of engineering and physical sciences at the University of Manchester, commented:
“As I look across postgraduate taught in what we describe as STEM subjects, we have seen
probably a 30% reduction in Indian students coming to the University of Manchester … but
typically it is around 30% up to about 35% across all disciplines such as chemical engineering,
electrical engineering, mechanical aerospace and civil engineering”. They are the very areas
in which we want to attract people. I have no doubt that there are growths elsewhere but
the point I am making is how to get the right people in the UK rather than simply say that
provided they meet a quality standard it does not matter what discipline they go into. Is that
not your problem?
Damian Green MP: It is the problem for all of us. We are all working together to try to
have a successful university sector and to have a successful controlled immigration system,
in which, as I said, the student system was the biggest single loophole in recent memory.
That is what we are changing. He will know about the figures for Indian students, but I
would be interested to see the figures for Chinese students because the overall pattern has
been that while applications from the subcontinent have come down, applications from
China are still going up. In India and China, the two big markets in which many of our big
universities are fishing, there is clearly not an overall feeling that Britain is off limits or
anything like that. The Chinese numbers are still going up. It is obviously for universities
themselves to decide where they are pitching their appeal and where they are looking for
students in particular subjects. My responsibility is to ensure that those coming here have
the proper qualifications, the capacity to benefit from the courses, are going to obey the
rules and will go home when they have finished their courses; all the sorts of things that you
would expect an immigration Minister to be concerned about.
Q371 The Chairman: May I ask a final question before I pass you over to Baroness
Neuberger? When did you last have a conversation with your equivalent in BIS to talk about
this particular issue? What are your antennae out there in terms of being able to track these
trends?
Damian Green MP: I cannot remember the exact date of our last meeting but David
Willetts and I talk regularly about this because student visas are roughly two thirds of the
issue. Inevitably, it is by far the biggest single route of immigration into this country. Indeed,
one of the things that we have learnt in the course of doing our immigration reforms is how
important it is for the UK Border Agency and parts of BIS, such as the UKTI, to work more
closely together. I know that officials work very closely together all the time.
Carolyn Bartlett: We have a close and productive dialogue with BIS officials. We talk
regularly about these things.
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Q372 The Chairman: So you have this intelligence coming to you about what is
happening in individual universities? If Manchester is 30% down in engineering, would that
worry you as much as it would worry BIS?
Carolyn Bartlett: Of course we do not want to see a big reduction in engineering courses
in any areas and we have developed a visa system to ensure that our universities are
prioritised. We listened to them very closely when we developed our reforms. As
Universities UK said, it considered that the package that we put together would allow
British universities to stay at the forefront of international recruitment. We consider that
that is the case and we are not seeing any evidence to the contrary at the moment. There
are individual reports of dips here and there, but, overall, we have a positive picture of
university numbers holding up fairly well across the board.
Q373 The Chairman: You are tracking these then? Are you saying that your
department tracks them?
Carolyn Bartlett: We do not track individual subjects.
The Chairman: You do not know then.
Carolyn Bartlett: But there are comprehensive Higher Education Statistics Authority data
that do that. That is an agency that works with BIS. I think we will come on to that in terms
of the data that are available. There are detailed and comprehensive data. They are not
available immediately. There is a bit of a time lag, but we will come on to that in a minute.
Q374 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I wondered whether you had thought about the
message that goes out to cultural attachés from other countries and so on with all the
publicity about the restrictions on bogus students and bogus universities. In a totally
different forum, some of us sat in Committee Room 2 a few weeks ago and listened to
cultural attaches from the Gulf who were very uptight about this and said that in many cases
they were advising their Governments to send their students to Canada or Australia and
not to the UK because the UK’s atmosphere was unfriendly towards foreign students. I
appreciate entirely that that is not the intention of the policy, and not the way that you have
very carefully crafted it; but the message that goes out is just as important as the reality. Is
there not a case at least for communicating much more directly with the people in foreign
Governments who advise students, and making it clear—as you put it—that the best and
brightest students are more than welcome here, and indeed are needed?
Damian Green MP: I am sure that there is. David Willetts is leading a task force that
consists of Universities UK, BIS and the UKTI. We at the Home Office are working with it
precisely to maximise the opportunities for higher education. It is slightly frustrating: I hope
that you will never hear from a government Minister’s lips anything other than that we want
the brightest and the best, that we want to be more attractive to them and that we want
not just our fair share but more than our fair share. I have heard myself say that a lot.
Clearly, there are places that the message is not reaching. The frustration is that often it is
the complaints of the sector itself that get reported. Inevitably, when people say that it is all
going wrong, it gets reported—and it gets reported very avidly in other countries. One of
the interesting things is precisely the dichotomy that I mentioned: Chinese applications are
still going up and Indian applications are coming down. I confess that this is an anecdote; I
cannot stand it up. Somebody who knows the Indian scene very well said that one reason
may well be that India has a vibrant free press in which everything gets reported, and that
there are many educational agents there who have a direct commercial interest in making it
clear to as many people as possible how difficult it is to get to Britain, because then these
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people will employ an agent to fill in what is not a vastly complex form. So they will
ruthlessly put stories in the press about how Britain is becoming more difficult and more
unwelcoming, and therefore that if you want to get in you had better employ an agent. As I
said, this is an anecdote told to me by someone—but we are operating in a cut-throat
world.
Q375 Baroness Perry of Southwark: That is undoubtedly an accurate anecdote, but is

it not all the more of an argument for making sure that we, too, get our message out? I
spent six years of my life selling British education abroad for Her Majesty's Government. It
was just like that in the 1990s; the Australians, Germans and Americans were all downselling
the UK and upselling their own countries. It was their job. The important thing is that we
should fight back and get the message through to people that we are not trying to be
unwelcoming and hostile towards foreign students; we want more foreign students, but we
just want good ones.
Damian Green MP: Yes, I am sure that is right. It may be a classic example of while we
play cricket other people play kung fu, and we suffer as a result. I am not conscious that we
ever badmouth other people's systems in the way that other people badmouth our system. I
completely agree that clearly we need to be better at getting our message across. However,
to some extent that would be pointless if the substance were not there behind it. I see it
absolutely as one of my responsibilities to make sure that, for example, the visa system is
clear and simple. All over the world, for all categories of visa application, people always
complain that it is too difficult and/or too expensive. However, we are constantly working
to make sure that turnaround times are quick and within our service standards. Carolyn will
know the figures for India, for instance.
Carolyn Bartlett: In New Delhi, we managed to process 92% of visas for students within 15
days.
Damian Green MP: And in the Gulf—I am always interested in the Gulf and talk to Gulf
ambassadors a lot—the figures for turnaround times are very good. We have set up new
systems in some Gulf countries and are piloting systems with premium services and so on.
We are on the case.
Q376 Baroness Neuberger: A lot of what I wanted to ask has been covered, but there
are two things that I would like to put to you. One is that clearly you still want the brightest
and the best, but we have heard a lot of evidence—I am worried that you have not had the
evidence from universities—that suggests that numbers are down, particularly from India
but also from Nigeria. Julia King, the Vice-Chancellor of Aston University, said at a
Universities UK event that the reduction was dramatic. Clearly, individual universities are
reporting a massive reduction, but you do not seem to be getting the reports. Even if some
of this is due to a mistaken impression that people are getting that we are playing cricket
while they are playing kung fu, what are you intending to do to—if you like—up our skills at
kung fu?
Damian Green MP: By kung fu, I meant going around badmouthing other people’s systems.
On the first point, that individual applications are down, university visa applications are not
down, are they?
Carolyn Bartlett: Not as far as we can tell. They seem to be holding up across the board at
present. Admittedly, UCAS data, which are the official data put out on this, cover only
undergraduate courses. However, for the current year, non-EEA applications are up by 14%.
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Q377 The Chairman: Perhaps I should say that our concern is for STEM. I know that
that sounds terribly selfish as a Science Committee, but that is what we are interested in.
Unless I have missed something, you have not been able to convince us that you have any
understanding of what is happening in UK universities about applications—particularly
postgraduate applications—for STEM. HESA does not do this.
Baroness Neuberger: The figures are not disaggregated.
The Chairman: No—and HESA only does it retrospectively.

Damian Green MP: Exactly. That was the point I was going to make. If you are asking why
we do not know this, the answer is that I asked some time ago what was happening. I was
surprised to discover that HESA knows all this but can only produce the figures 18 months
in arrears. I find that surprising.
The Chairman: You could put it more strongly.

Damian Green MP: I am conscious that I am going to be followed by the Universities
Minister who was responsible for HESA. I am sure that he will explain this. I am referring to
the disaggregated data of the type that you want—and that, frankly, we would like as well. I
do not know why we cannot have it. Every university must know on 1 October who has
arrived, what subjects they are doing, where they are from and so on. Nevertheless, the
body that is responsible for collecting the data cannot produce them until 18 months
afterwards. As I said, I find that surprising.
The Chairman: It was worth having you for that quote.
Q378 Baroness Neuberger: May I press one other thing, about the UKBA’s website?
My colleague Lord Lucas was fairly critical—with Glyn Williams and Neil Hughes—of the
accessibility of the website. We got the reply that it could be friendlier and more
welcoming. Is that something that is going to happen?
Damian Green MP: Certainly we will look at it. Very few government websites are at the
cutting edge of accessibility, in my experience. To some extent this is for good reason,
because of all sorts of things that you have to put into them. The Home Office website is
forever under attack by hackers, which is tiresome and means that we have to put in
security features that may slow it down. However, I will happily go away and try to make
our website more user-friendly. We could talk about this off-line.
Q379 Lord Lucas: What particularly worried me was the contrast with the US equivalent
that is doing the same job. The US equivalent is very much part of the marketing of the US
university sector. It is a case of, “Here we are, we are the front door. Welcome, come in
and we will help you to do this and that”. By contrast, the UK Border Agency website
seems to be a series of barbed-wire fences under which you have to crawl, and has the
feeling of, “Go away, go away”.
Baroness Neuberger: Hence the impression that the UK is not open for business.
Lord Lucas: I think that several of us got the impression from Mr Williams that the Home
Office did not see itself as having a role to play in helping the British university sector, but
felt that it had its own job to do and that it was up to the British university sector to fend
for itself.
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Damian Green MP: Of course, the truth is that we all need to work together. There is an
agreed government policy covering all departments for a more selective immigration system
and a successful, outward-looking university sector. On this point, and on the point about
selling ourselves overseas, we are trying much harder than ever to ensure that we work
together across departments to make that a reality.
Q380 Lord Winston: It is not just a question of websites. There is an issue about
attitude of mind that I would like you to address. I regularly commute between here and
Caltech in California, which is one of the 10 leading science universities in the world. I speak
to a lot of students in the laboratory, most of whom are not American. Some of them
considered coming to Britain, but felt that Britain was quite hostile to them. Indian and
South American students in particular are choosing not to apply to British universities. It is
anecdotal evidence, but it is obvious in that laboratory. I have to tell you that when I go
through Customs at Los Angeles airport on my way to Pasadena, the Customs man does
not know me—he does not know my face—but says, “Hey, Doc, what research are you
doing?”. There is a welcoming attitude to scientists visiting the United States. When my
colleague from California comes to see me, she is grilled in a very hostile fashion by the
authorities in this country. She has credentials that make her a senior scientist. That seems
to be fundamentally poor management of immigration personnel.
Damian Green MP: My experience of American immigration is patchy. I have been treated
in a very friendly manner there and also been treated fairly badly. I suspect that all countries'
immigration systems have individuals who have good and bad days. It is absolutely the case
that anyone in the border force should be—as the vast majority are, for the vast majority of
the time—polite and suitably welcoming while doing the job that we want them to do,
which is to ensure that those coming in have the right to come in. I am sorry if your
colleague had bad experiences; I am sure that that is not the norm. The wider point you
make about students feeling unwelcome here is surprising; I revert to the fact that in the
past five or six years, the number of students coming from overseas to this country has
more than doubled.
Carolyn Bartlett: Not quite doubled.
Damian Green MP: So the idea that all around the world, people are saying, “Oh, God,
we’re not going to Britain” is simply not borne out by the facts. I am puzzled, frankly, by the
mass of anecdotage that says that people from all over the world do not want to come
here.
Q381 Lord Winston: Our Committee is talking about the students that we most want
to attract—top-level students who have choice. That is the issue. Caltech has the best
brains in the world. Imperial College, Oxford and Cambridge can certainly compete, but we
do not find it so easy to recruit these people because more and more of them are going to
other universities.
Damian Green MP: Absolutely—those are the people we want to come and study in this
country. There is not the remotest debate about that inside or outside government.
The Chairman: I am going to leave that because we are getting short on time.
Q382 Lord Lucas: One of the things we stub our toe on from time to time is the fact
that you include students as migrants, which I know is the official way of doing things and
originally comes from the UN or somewhere similar. But other countries which have a large
import of students show their figures differently.
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Australia, for instance, shows in its figures what is called temporary entry, which includes
students, separately from those who have come in specifically to migrate. That seems to me
to take a lot of heat out of the debate and what gets into the newspapers around students
and immigration. Proper students—those who to university to follow proper courses and
who go home and work afterwards—are not migrants in the sense that we would ordinarily
think. They are imported exports, if you see what I mean. They are an export but we have
to bring them here in order to sell to them. The Australians recognise that and take the
heat out of the debate by reporting it separately. We seem to insist on reporting it as one
figure and it gets us into trouble in publicity terms every time. Can we not do something to
take a bit of heat out of the debate by following the Australian example?
Damian Green MP: It is a UN definition. An immigrant is someone who moves to another
country with a view to staying there for more than one year.
Q383 Lord Lucas: I understand that. The Australians seem to feel able to go beyond it.
Damian Green MP: In a sense, the Australians have had more problems than we have in
terms of acceptance. They have had terrible things, including fights, riots and violence against
immigrant students in a way that, happily, we have avoided in this country. Particularly given
the level of passion and emotion that surrounds the immigration debate in this country, I
have always thought that the idea of defining away the problem would not be remotely
credible. It would make the life of the immigration Minister much easier if, with a wave of
the pen, I could gaily say, “These people are no longer immigrants and therefore it does not
count so we do not have a problem any more”. I do not think that that would be credible
with the public and I can see why.
The other point is that the view that students come, study and go is not the case. We have
done a study of the 2004 cohort and found that 20% of them were still here five years later.
The idea that someone comes here, does their course and goes is just not the case. As I
have said, some 20% stayed, which is tens of thousands of people. In fact, it would not
reflect reality.
Q384 Baroness Perry of Southwark: My question has partly been answered in what
we have said so far. In particular, it looks at the growth that we are hoping to see in the
STEM sector. Because of the needs of the economy, we desperately want to see the STEM
subjects increasing in numbers in universities so that we have the highly skilled workforce
that we need. One of the worries is that our immigration policies may be mitigating against
the growth policies that we have for STEM subjects in universities. I think that we have all
been quite concerned to discover that the figures on what is happening are not broken
down into subjects. If there is a diminution of numbers in the STEM subjects, you would not
know about that. Is that so and, if so, is there anything you could do to rectify that?
Damian Green MP: We would know about it afterwards. We have had the discussion
about the provision of the statistics. Clearly, the sooner we get detailed statistics, the faster
we can act. I would not want to give you the impression that we have not actively tried to
skew the system in favour of STEM students and other similarly valuable students. That is
why we have created the graduate entrepreneur route. Many science and engineering
students will particularly benefit from that. Those with good ideas will be able to stay here
and develop them. We have created a special immigration route for them. We have
exempted any graduate transferring into skilled employment. Again, many of the STEM
students you are concerned about would be covered by this. We exempt them from our
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limit on skilled work visas; so they are explicitly helped in that. They also do not have to
pass the resident labour market test for those jobs.
Another route we have created from scratch is the gifted and talented—the exceptionally
talented—route, part of which is specifically designed for the world’s best scientists to come
here. I am trying as hard as I can to make it very clear that Britain is as welcoming as
possible for precisely the sort of people who your Committee is concerned about.
Q385 Lord Lucas: The threshold of £20,000 for the route-to-work for graduates seems
to be creating difficulties in some areas. Under current economic circumstances, some
sections for STEM graduates do not command that high a salary—£18,000 or £19,000
seems quite common in some sectors.
Damian Green MP: That figure is not plucked out of the air. It was set in August 2009 and
has been there for a long time, following a recommendation by the independent Migration
Advisory Committee. At the time, the skill threshold—what we defined as a skilled job—
was jobs at NQF level 3, which are relatively low. Since then, we have increased the skill
level to NQF level 6 but have left the pay threshold at £20,000, which does not seem to us
to be unreasonable. It was an objective measure produced three years ago by an
independent committee and it seems perfectly sensible to stick with it.
Carolyn Bartlett: I should probably add that in certain specialisms, if people need to stay on
and complete training—for example, pharmacists—which I know was raised at one of the
evidence sessions, it can be done through a tier 5 government-approved scheme. At the
moment, the Department of Health is in discussion with the profession to make sure that
that happens for pharmacists. Therefore, there is another route for people to complete
their training if they do not quite meet the £20,000 salary threshold.
We are not aware of any other specific groups on which that salary threshold would impact.
I think that the median starting salary for graduates is around £25,000, which we hope will
not deter anyone from a STEM subject.
Q386 Lord Broers: We have discussed this question quite a lot but I would like to ask
you a couple of questions. The serious inconsistency we are coming across in this inquiry is
industry’s perception of graduates, their suitability for industry’s purposes and the number
of graduates that are being produced. There are inconsistencies there. It is clearly very
important that we understand the mix of students who are graduating, which is why we go
on about data all the time. There have been recent changes; there is no point in looking at
the 2004 contingent, for example. There was a period, post 9/11, when American
immigration got it very wrong. I remember a terrible case when students were stranded in
Boston due to outrageous behaviour from immigration officials. The Americans understood
that and rethought it; they sent a lot of immigration officials off to charm school and taught
them how to interact with young people and others coming in. Maybe it is time we did the
same. We tightened up our rules and you can see why we did. So I would ask you whether
that is something you would consider.
Secondly, would you look again at whether there is a case for improving data collection at
the Home Office? We really need to know which students are coming in and for what
subjects and whether they are staying or not. We need to correlate those coming in and
those leaving. Would it not be a good idea to take a very serious look at that now and
revamp it and to take a serious look at retraining some of our immigration officials?
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Damian Green MP: I have made the point that I hope that our immigration officers,
working for the border force, do their jobs politely. I agree with your analysis of what
happened in America post 9/11, but there was no equivalent post 7/7 here, so I do not think
that we need that type of swing. We always try to improve and we have just separated off
the border force from the rest of the UKBA; therefore, there has been a radical change so
that the organisation becomes much more focused. In the end, it is a law enforcement
organisation and we want the border force to keep our borders secure. The police are a
law enforcement organisation and one is constantly enjoining them to have a friendly face to
the respectable vast majority. The same is true at the border.
In terms of statistics collection, as I have said, I sympathise a lot. At the Home Office,
essentially we are issuing visas. We know which visas have been issued and we know when
people come in and when they leave—the other point you were making—and fewer people
leave at the end of their courses than people think. We know that, but other bodies are
already collecting the information that this committee would like to know about how many
people we are educating. I have huge sympathy with pondering the mix of what is coming
out of the university sector, but I rapidly start speaking as a citizen rather than as the
Immigration Minister because it is not my direct responsibility, so I shall back off at that
point. Nevertheless, I quite understand that, but the information is already there and is
already collected by HESA. As soon as we get it, we feed it into our own system, but our
responsibility at the Home Office and at UKBA is to know who is getting visas to ensure
that those who get visas to come here are genuine students and all those sorts of things.
That is what we do. We also check who has left at the end and who has not. Although we
play a very significant role in the overall university STEM sector, it is not really central to
UKBA’s purpose to note the details of individual courses done by individual students.
Q387 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I find that answer quite worrying, if you do not
mind my saying so. You said that you worry about the proportion of STEM students only as
a citizen and not as Immigration Minister. I would respectfully suggest that, as Immigration
Minister, it is your concern as well. Surely, government is a unified system. What one
department has as its priorities must also be reflected in other departments and they should
not contradict each other. We know, for example, that almost all STEM subjects at graduate
level are supported only by overseas students; many of the STEM graduate courses would
close if there were no overseas students, or if the number of overseas students declined.
That must mean that your immigration policies have a direct impact on the provision that
universities are able to make to train people in the STEM subjects. As it happens, they are all
under one roof now in BIS, but what happens in higher education also impacts on UK
business, UK plc. So there really is a seamless route from your department’s policies to
university policies and to UK plc. I hope that what we have been asking you today will
stimulate you to think that it is important that, as Immigration Minister, you are concerned
with how many students come in on the STEM ticket.
Damian Green MP: I do, but I take your thought to a conclusion: if you are suggesting that
we should in some way change the Immigration Rules so that it is easier for people to come
in as STEM students than as something else, then I hope I have explained that we have
deliberately set up graduate entrepreneur routes—the exceptional talent route—precisely
so that we can achieve what we want to achieve. To that extent, as Immigration Minister, I
am trying very hard to do that. We have set up special routes to enable that to happen as
well as the other exemptions I mentioned a few minutes ago. In terms of the mix of
university students across the board, that really is a matter for the Universities Minister and
I suspect that he would say that that really is a matter for universities and that it is not for
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government to dictate which students, and which mix of students, universities take. The
committee may disagree with that, but I guess that that is the view of the Universities
Minister. All I was saying was that it is not for me as the Immigration Minister to start
trampling all over universities’ policies, not least if you have the Universities Minister coming
here in five minutes’ time to tell you what it is.
Q388 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I absolutely sympathise with that position and
the last thing that any of us would want is to see the Home Office dictating to universities
how many students they should have. As the question from Lord Winston emphasised, it is
in the STEM subjects that international competition is most heated and the really top
technological universities, not only in the United States but also in Korea, Germany and so
on, are competing very hotly for the brightest and the best in those subjects because those
are the engines of future economic growth and so on. I suppose all we are asking is that, in
your work as Immigration Minister, you keep an eye on the way in which all students are
treated and the way in which they perceive the United Kingdom as welcoming to students
because that affects students in the humanities and social sciences as well as in technological
subjects. If we get it wrong, we shall lose out on the most competitive sector.
Damian Green MP: I very much take that point.
Q389 Lord Lucas: Would it be possible for you to let us have a note of the data that
you accumulate on each person who comes here on a student visa, so that we can see what
is there and what use might be made of it?
Damian Green MP: Yes.
Baroness Neuberger: And perhaps anything you are going to do with the website. That
would be very helpful.
The Chairman: Lord Winston, I am conscious that you might want to ask another
question.
Lord Winston: I am very happy, thank you. I am content to listen.
Q390 The Chairman: Minister, something in one of your earlier answers puzzled me.
You said that there was roughly 30% growth a year and that that was not sustainable. For
many universities, the growth in non-EU overseas students is their lifeblood particularly in
terms of maintaining masters courses and PhD courses and that that is absolutely essential.
I wondered what your thinking was. If we can attract the right calibre 30% more each year,
is that not something that we should be doing? Can I link that in to a policy that universities
are struggling with, or so we have heard, in that masters courses will now have to be fully
funded by the students and, therefore, particularly in STEM subjects, that is becoming a real
problem. We have a double whammy appearing down the track of immigration policy:
perhaps while being perceived as forcing people out, you have a deliberate policy to limit
this, and the BIS Department is creating a fee structure which will militate against the very
students that we want.
Damian Green MP: You will forgive me if I do not comment on the BIS Department’s fee
structure. That really is not for me. You said that we have a “policy to limit”, but very
explicitly we do not have a limit on student numbers.
The Chairman: You said that 30% was not sustainable.
Damian Green MP: You then narrowed it down to masters courses. I was talking
generally. Across the board the number of foreign students was going up 30% a year and,
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projecting that into the future, there will not be enough high calibre students to do that kind
of thing. At that point, you get to a position where people are clearly coming through the
system, as they were in the early years of the points-based system, who should not be here
as students.
The Chairman: I did say the right calibre.
Damian Green MP: And that squares the circle. Of course, we want more students of the
right calibre; I just observe that simply to keep the numbers going up at that sort of level
year after year I cannot believe that that is a credible business model for any university. At
no stage, up to now, have we said that we will put a limit on student numbers in the way
that we put a limit on work visas.
The Chairman: On the positive note of a new website and beaming, smiling border
officers welcoming in every student, as they do in the United States, we will finish this
session. Thank you very much indeed, Carolyn Bartlett and Minister Damian Green.
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Government, Home Office, University of Manchester and University of Southampton – Oral
Government, Home Office, University of Manchester and University

of Southampton – Oral evidence (QQ 281-312)
Transcript to be found under University of Manchester
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for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) – Oral evidence (QQ 391-433)
Government, David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities

and Science, Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) –

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Winston
________________
David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science.
Q391 The Chairman: Minister, we thank you for joining us this afternoon. As you have
noted, Members of the Committee have come away from their recess in order to question
you this afternoon, so they are incredibly eager. For the record, could you say who you are?
If you want to make a brief statement, please do so.
David Willetts MP: Thank you very much. I am sorry that the Committee has had to wait
for me after the previous session. My name is David Willetts and I am the Minister for
Universities and Science. BIS has submitted written evidence to this Committee on STEM
and I very much look forward to answering the Committee’s questions following on from
that.
Q392 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. You are always very generous with
your time and we are grateful to you. We are struggling as a Committee about the issues of
quality and standards. Let us take quality first. We had a group of students at our last
evidence session. Government policy clearly states—perhaps we can use this as shorthand
for future policy—that the market will very much depend on giving students the information
in order to make choices. One issue is quality, yet, apart from one student whom we
interviewed, nobody seemed to know anything about how quality was measured in their
institutions. We would like to know what evidence you have that the current quality
measures are sufficient not only to enable students to make educated choices but to drive
up quality within institutions.
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David Willetts MP: I guess that our starting point is that, because of the autonomy of
universities, we do not want to go down the route of having a kind of Ofsted for HE.
Although one can see the pluses of that, it would also have enormous drawbacks in terms of
the change to the relationship with universities, so we are quite correctly operating without
that type of power. We are trying to massively improve the information available to
prospective students, notably through the key information sets that are increasingly going to
be made available. That information is partly from previous student surveys, showing what
they think of an individual institution, but increasingly it is also objective information about
inputs. Although institutions are not under any obligation to do this, I would like to see
what the student-teacher ratio is in seminars and other teaching environments. We are not
requiring that, but as we have a more freed-up system, beginning with AAB, we think that
prospective students will be looking for that sort of information on university websites. We
think that there will be an explosion of information in the next few years.
Q393 The Chairman: Clearly, one key issue that affects undergraduates in particular is
the quality of teaching. I am sure that your officials have read the comments that the
students made. That is where the real problem appears to lie, yet all the incentives in
universities are for research, while teaching is very much seen as a sort of lower class of
activity in universities. What are you going to do about that, as it surely must be your
responsibility?
David Willetts MP: I very much agree with that analysis. It is absolutely the case that we
have very sharp incentives on research and we have not had comparable incentives on
teaching. Indeed, one survey showed that, when university academics were asked what they
thought affected their prospects for promotion, top was research performance, second was
administrative efficiency in handling departmental paperwork and third and last was teaching.
This is very bad indeed. But the thought behind the higher education reforms—notably this
tariff-based system, beginning with AAB, which is only a start—is that students should have
greater scope for taking their funding to the university of their choice. We believe that the
sort of factors that they will look at when they choose their university will be information
about what kind of teaching experiences are available. I already get anecdotal evidence that
the changes coming in this autumn are changing the culture of universities towards greater
stress on teaching quality.
Q394 The Chairman: If, for example, your letter to HEFCE stated that that was what
you wanted to see and that it should be reflected in the way in which HEFCE distributed its
resources, would you not achieve that objective without determining precisely how
universities would do that?
David Willetts MP: As I say, we are going to a model where the resource allocation will
essentially be done by students voting with their feet. It is not completely that way—AAB is
perhaps 90,000 out of 350,000 students, so that is a quarter—but we think that that is the
most potent power of the lot. HEFCE’s allocation of teaching money has historically been
on the basis of the four bands, as we well know, and the number of students. Trying to get
it to assess individual teaching quality at individual universities would take us down the
Ofsted for universities route. There is a permanent temptation to go down that route, but
we try to avoid it.
Q395 The Chairman: Let me finally talk about QAA, which is there to assure quality—
that is what it says on the tin. I remember taking exactly the same line of inquiry in the
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Commons a few years ago, but QAA is still monitoring processes, not the quality of what
goes on. Surely, Minister, that is not right.
David Willetts MP: This boundary is very delicate. The argument is about the kind of
measurement of quality. The standard of what goes on is the responsibility of external
examiners, for example, and the other bodies that might kitemark or in other ways
recognise degrees. I was at an event here in Parliament a few weeks ago—I cannot
remember whether you were there—where the Society of Biology was accrediting some
biological science courses, but not every course that had applied for accreditation had been
accepted. The society had been going round trying to work out whether these biological
science courses at individual universities met its requirements of high standards and it had
not accredited them all. I think that those types of systems are better than a central
government one.
The Chairman: So we should get rid of QAA and go to the societies.

David Willetts MP: The QAA’s role is to be confident that the external examiners are
doing their job and things like that. It is a process-type check, but is an important check on
process. Ensuring that a university is well run, that there are proper external safeguards and
that the academic staff are properly scrutinised by the governing body is what the QAA is
there to establish.
The Chairman: But nothing happens, does it?
David Willetts MP: I know your historic scepticism about the QAA and I am not sure that
I want to stray into this debate. I remember it from the Commons and I remember the
headlines that followed. I understand where you are coming from, but I think that the QAA
has a useful function. It has been overbureaucratic. It has gone round automatically every
university every four years and there were some universities that are particularly well
regarded, shall we say, for which the four-year QAA inspection was a bit of a waste of time,
so we are suggesting having less frequent QAA inspections but having risk triggers, which
could well be a series of complaints from students, that would then lead to a more rapid
QAA inspection. We think that having less frequent automatic inspections and having risk
triggers for an inspection is a better way for QAA to operate.
Q396 Lord Broers: I would like to come in on the Chairman’s first question about the
balance between research and teaching. Are you in your department taking a serious look at
the numbers? The reason that has become the case in universities is that there is a pretty
massive financial reward for success in research. You said yourself that that was not so in
teaching. Is that fundamental and does it have to go on being the case so you incentivise
research with money but you incentivise teaching with persuasion?
David Willetts MP: As I said, a big change is about to happen. It is only a bit of caricature
to say that in the past HEFCE noted down the number of students, allocated university
students—so 2,000 students. It then broke them down into four bands—A, B, C, and D, did
the multiplication of how much money was attached to each band and wrote them a
cheque. In future, an increasing proportion of university income will come from students
choosing to go to university A rather than university B. We hope they will do that by
visiting not just the official websites but increasingly there will be mobile phone apps and
distinguished organisations will try to provide advice to prospective students on teaching
quality at universities. With that happening, I hope that that will drive changes in teaching.
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Q397 Lord Broers: And your estimates are that that could produce as much additional
money for a university as success in research assessment?
David Willetts MP: Alongside the cash-protected ring-fenced science budget, at the
aggregate level, if anything the amount of cash going into universities for teaching combining
the traditional HEFCE grant and the increase in fee loans, grows modestly over the lifetime
of this Parliament. Through these changes we have delivered a slight increase in the cash
available to teaching, if anything.
Q398 Lord Winston: To follow up on that, do you think that part of the problem with
research assessment, for example, you have pretty clear metrics that are easy to identify
effectively and you can make some kind of judgment on that basis, but with teaching it is
much vaguer? Should we be looking for metrics that are more effective than the ones we
have at present? Would that help?
David Willetts MP: Yes, and I think that there have been some academics involved. A guy
whose name escapes me wrote a report for the previous Government in their final years on
teaching quality, perhaps prompted by your investigations then. He made the interesting
observation that some inputs are a good proxy for quality. I wish I could remember his
name. They are things such as student/staff ratios, qualifications of staff and hours of
academic interaction per week. That kind of information is exactly what we think
prospective students will ask for and university will provide. They would have to provide
some of it as part of the key information sets and some of it they may wish to provide in
addition.
Q399 The Chairman: I was hoping that you might mention the Dearing awards, because
they are seen to be an interesting way of specifically recognising high-quality teaching in
universities and are highly prized by those lecturers who see their careers in teaching terms.
David Willetts MP: You are right. I should have mentioned those as well. I accept that.
That is a fair point.
Q400 Lord Broers: We have a whole series of questions here in and around the same
subject. We are worried about the disconnect that we see in various areas, specifically
between the needs of employers and university curricula. The QAA benchmark for
engineering was established by a group of around 20 people of whom only one represented
an employer. Is that appropriate? How do the Government intend to facilitate, encourage or
incentivise increased interactions between industry and HEIs to help to ensure that higher
education institutions are producing the graduates whom industry needs, particularly SMEs?
Would you like to comment on that and attempt to answer those questions? There is not
much participation by industry in the setting of university curricula. Is that appropriate or
should we seek better, closer interaction?
David Willetts MP: On the specific point on the QAA, my understanding is that the original
2000 exercise did indeed suffer from the weakness that you described. A revised subject
benchmark statement for engineering in 2006 had a higher level of engagement from
employer groups. Ultimately, universities have to take responsibility for setting their
courses, but we are very keen on accreditation, which is professional bodies recognising
courses and kitemarking, which is when employers give a tick in a box for a course. There is
a long-standing debate about media studies. I have been to the launch of the kitemark from
the SSC in that sector, where the BBC and some other employers have said, “We have
endless numbers of people applying to us who have done media studies. Those media study
courses at universities X, Y and Z get the kitemark from us. If someone puts this course on
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their CV, that is the course that the BBC will take account of”. So there is more of that
happening, and we are encouraging it. As I say, in physics, chemistry and biological sciences,
we now have the professional bodies accrediting courses in those three disciplines.
Q401 Lord Broers: Do you think that it is worthwhile for the Sector Skills Council to
do that again; for example, engineering departments that are already heavily accredited and
looked at by the institutions? Or should we ask the institutions to try to come up with
something?
David Willetts MP: My view is that we are moving to a much more open environment.
Sticking with your own professional interest in engineering, I can imagine a university that
was very keen to be able to say, “Rolls-Royce approves of our engineering course”. It is for
the university and Rolls-Royce to decide whether or not Rolls-Royce feels able to say that.
But I can well imagine that if you were running an engineering course, you would ask Rolls-
Royce to say that. It is entirely for Rolls-Royce. It may say that it does not want to get into
that activity. It may say that it is keen to reward people whose engineers it finds particularly
employable, “Yes you can say that Rolls-Royce endorses this course”. A lot more of that
will be going on, and a good thing, too.
Q402 The Chairman: May I just intercede here? Lord Broers’ original question was that
the QAA in terms of benchmarking for engineering only had one employer. The rest of
them were presumably academics or other people who are doing the accreditation. That is
quite different from what you are saying, Minister, about Rolls-Royce actually accrediting or
giving a kitemark. Is it not QAA that needs to get itself out of this kitchen or bring different
people onto its kitemarking or accreditation panels?
David Willetts MP: My understanding is that QAA and other bodies like that tend to deal
with professional bodies and on this occasion it dealt with the Engineering Employers
Federation, the Engineering Professors’ Council and the Engineering Council UK. Those are
the representative bodies to stop Rolls-Royce being bothered all the time by people wanting
their individual courses endorsed. That is how it tries to represent the industry. If,
separately, an enterprising university that is proud of its engineering department and
observes that Rolls-Royce regularly recruits from it wants to write to Rolls-Royce saying
that it wishes to put that fact on its prospectus with some quote from Rolls-Royce, that is a
bilateral thing between the university and Rolls-Royce.
Q403 Lord Broers: Are there specific things that you think that the Government might
be able to do to incentivise young people to take courses that are appropriate to support
our economy? There was a time, you might remember, when engineers got a supplementary
payment that did a lot for the quality of applicants. Is that appropriate?
David Willetts MP: The supplementary payment should come from employers. If they wish
to recruit engineers, I still have sufficient residual belief in the market mechanism to think
that the wage signal is something that still matters. We try in BIS—I have been to some of
these events and I know you have too—through STEM ambassadors and the celebration 147
of engineering to ensure that STEM subjects and the excitement of STEM subjects is
conveyed to as many young people as possible before they take their decisions about which
GCSEs, A-levels and university courses to do.
The Big Bang Fair, a National 3 day Fair in which young people’s achievements in science and engineering are celebrated.
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The finals of the National Science and Engineering Competition are held at the Fair.
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Q404 Lord Broers: This is one area in which the market has consistently failed for
decades in this country. If you look at the absolutely top graduates from the top universities,
they can come down to the City and work for a consultancy and earn in the low £40,000s. If
they go to engineering companies, even good ones, they are only paid in the £20,000s and
often in the low £20,000s. That is something that has frustrated a lot of us who have been
trying to persuade them otherwise. Do you have any ideas as to how we might make the
market work in this area?
David Willetts MP: Along with all the other things that we need to do, I gently suggest that
they might consider paying engineers are little more than £20,000. I am sufficiently of a
traditional mindset to think that is part of how a labour market is supposed to work. There
are a lot of things that we have to do and I am not complacent. There are good things
happening. We have more people doing these classic STEM A-levels, for example. They are
all back in the top 10 now, which is great news. But employers should send out a clear signal
about how much they value people with these skills. They cannot completely escape that
part of the bargain.
Q405 The Chairman: I just finish on this section with the Wilson report. It made a
recommendation that students, particularly those studying in STEM areas, should be
involved in work experience. What you understand by that?
David Willetts MP: This is a tricky area. There is what people traditionally think of as the
sandwich course, which is now sometimes renamed the industrial placement, and also now
subdivided into thick sandwiches and thin sandwiches. A thick sandwich is six months or 12
months as part of your main degree where you go off and have industrial experience. The
other model is that you might have 13 weeks or six weeks in some kind of business
environment as part of your course. There is probably a belief that we need some more of
those slightly more flexible short-term options alongside the classic year-out industrial
placement.
Q406 Lord Winston: I was in discussion this morning with some people from BMW
about creating a relationship with Imperial. Their problem is that it is very costly for them
to have people for a short period of two or three months and it is not of much benefit to
their industry, whereas a year is really useful because they then have someone who is really
committed. Does not that remain a significant problem? Might there be more constructive
ways in which we might try to work out deals with industry to help with this issue of work
experience, which does seem to be an important issue?
David Willetts MP: Yes, I accept that, and this Committee’s guidance on that would be
very helpful. We are considering our response to Tim Wilson’s report at the moment.
There is striking evidence that industrial placements of the kind that you have described are
concentrated in a very small number of universities—I seem to remember that
Loughborough University does a lot, as do Aston, Bath and Imperial—which, interestingly,
tend historically to have been colleges of advanced technology. The fact that such
placements are concentrated in a small number of institutions might be taken in two
different ways, but I take it as evidence that, if they can do it—if Loughborough and Bath can
crack it—other universities ought to be able to do it as well. Perhaps this Committee has
some ideas about how that could be encouraged. Tim Wilson has some quite ingenious
financing-type ideas, which we are trying to model at the moment because they are not
costed, but I am not sure that they could be made to work. If people have observations, we
will be very interested to hear them.
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Q407 Baroness Neuberger: Moving on to SIVS, from everything that we have heard
the SIVS policies have worked well but we would love to know how the Government intend
to continue to support them. How will it be determined that a subject is strategically
important? What contingency plans are in place to support STEM SIVS if there is an increase
in demand from students to study these subjects or if current provision for support proves
inadequate?
David Willetts MP: The SIVS—strategically important and vulnerable subjects—concept is
a valuable one. In the grant letter that the Secretary of State and I sent to HEFCE, we made
it clear that, even with its grant declining, we hoped that HEFCE would consider ways in
which that kind of support would carry on. So far, HEFCE has been able to do that. HEFCE
has the scope to reappraise or redefine the policy, but I broadly think that it is a very useful
and legitimate tool to have in the armoury.
Q408 Baroness Neuberger: Would you continue to support, or persuade HEFCE to

support, the expensive SIVS STEM courses at a level that allows them to be offered on an
equal basis with other subjects? Obviously, that is our concern.
David Willetts MP: We also have this methodology of bands A, B, C and D, whereby the
higher-cost courses are in band A—I think that is basically medicine and veterinary
courses—and band B, which includes engineering courses. Again, there is a powerful logic to
that, which reflects the higher costs of courses involving labs and medical facilities. We have
signalled to HEFCE that we expect that to continue.
Q409 Baroness Neuberger: I have one last question. There is clearly an element of
cross-subsidy of STEM subjects by non-STEM subjects through student fees, which is
happening as a result of government policy. Are you happy with that?
David Willetts MP: Well, this is where the battle of the two cultures is now fought. Who is
subsidising whom? There are arguments both ways. Our view is that this is part of the
responsibility of the vice-chancellor and of the management team of a university as to what
resource they wish to put into different subjects. However, the bands are an attempt to
capture those costs. [Interruption.] Would the Committee excuse me? I promise to vote as
quickly as possible and then return.
The Chairman: The Committee is suspended for 10 minutes.

[Meeting suspended for a Division in the House of Commons.]
The Chairman: Before the Division, Baroness Neuberger was in full flight.
Q410 Baroness Neuberger: Yes, I was. But let us leave that there and to back to the
beginning. How do the strategically important and vulnerable subjects get determined?
David Willetts MP: HEFCE determines that. The subjects are those thought to be in the
national interest and they tend to be in the physical sciences but not necessarily. For
example, you might take the view that across the nation we should have a capability in
foreign languages. They have been sustained through SIVS as well but that a judgment
reached by HEFCE.
Q411 Baroness Neuberger: Is there any involvement from your department in that?
David Willetts MP: No. In the time that I have been in government alongside the Secretary
of State, I do not think that I have ever tried to specify what should or should not be a
strategically important and vulnerable subject. We have said we think that the exercise is
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worthwhile and have asked HEFCE to carry on with it. It is an interesting question. I am not
sure whether we could write to HEFCE and say that there is a discipline which we regard as
strategically important and vulnerable. I would have to send the Committee a note on that.
All I can say is that we have not done it in the time we have been in government.
Q412 Baroness Neuberger: Lastly, how does the thinking about SIVS tie together with
industrial policy? I accept that you have not directly been involved in determination. How
does it get linked up? This, I think, is where we have been interested right the way through.
How does it tie together with us economically and industrially as a nation?
David Willetts MP: Part of the view taken when HEFCE defines the strategically important
and vulnerable subjects includes disciplines that are necessary for our economic future. That
is a factor but we have the good fortune that people study a wide range of subjects at our
universities. The engagement becomes rather greater where the Lords Science and
Technology Committee has had a big influence. I am thinking of the nuclear power R&D
issue where this Committee’s report a few months ago brought home to us the need for a
more sustained linking of academic work and the need to sustain the flow of people into the
nuclear industry, given that we are now moving back into the creation of new nuclear
capacity. There have been various drafts flying around and I genuinely cannot remember
where our reply has got to. But I know that we are considering, through a further
programme of work by Sir John Beddington, what this means, for example, for the EPSRC’s
work and where industrial doctoral training centres should be. At the post-graduate level,
you can make some of those connections. Historically in Britain we have not done enough
of that. The nuclear report from this Committee has focused minds very much on that
issue, which is leading to quite a big rethink across government as to what more we should
do.
Q413 Baroness Neuberger: Do you think therefore that it could happen at an

undergraduate level in this sort of area? If we are right in saying that there is a real issue
about STEM subjects, could the same thinking apply?
David Willetts MP: Ultimately, we are talking about people making their own choices. They
should be well informed choices, including decisions about employment which comes from
doing particular courses. I heard of a cruel trick on someone—a fellow MP wrote to me
about this constituency case—who did a biological sciences undergraduate degree intending
to work in public health. After getting their degree, the person applied for a job in public
health but the public health people said that they do not recognise a degree from that
university as suitable training for working in public health. That kind of stuff makes you just
want to scream and say, “Hang on, we have got to sort all this out”.
I am wary of going so far as to say that people should study physics because it is in the
national interest. Ultimately, free individuals have to be left to take a well informed choice—
but we can influence it. This person had a clear career goal in mind of entering public health
but did not get the information that they needed to link up their university course with their
chosen profession. That is where the kitemarking, accreditation and all that type of
information kick in. There has been a surge of it on the web and the new HE regime is
driving a lot more interest in that type of information.
Q414 The Chairman: Just before we leave this subject and I bring in Baroness Perry,
HEFCE is its written evidence to us said that SIVS are subjects identified by the Government
as strategically important, which is not what you have said.
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David Willetts MP: Let me send the Committee a note. All I can say is that I am not aware
in my nearly two years as a Minister of any attempt to instruct HEFCE on what are the SIVS.
Q415 The Chairman: It is just that it ties in with what you have just said to Baroness
Neuberger.
David Willetts MP: That is a fair point. I will send you a note on it.
Q416 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I am switching now to the funding of post-

graduate courses—both the taught masters and the PhDs. You will be well aware that
universities are quite worried about the lack of funding for their short masters degrees. It
will be much more expensive for young people to press on from a degree that they have
paid for to a masters degree that they will have to pay for. At the same time, the research
councils are restricting the range of STEM subjects that they will consider for funding. There
is a sort of double whammy there for STEM subjects at the post-graduate level. The
Committee wonders whether, because of these changes, you think that there are any
unintended consequences of a reduction in STEM activity at the post-graduate level.
David Willetts MP: The post-graduate scene is quite an open, flexible, non-subsidised one.
There has not been a government guarantee of funding for all post-graduates, a lot of whom
finance themselves in a range of ways. As I understand it, 30% of post-graduate research
students and 60% of post-graduate taught students currently do not receive any public
funding. Especially in an age of austerity such as we are in now, it is very hard to see how we
could create a new public expenditure programme for post-graduates. Within that, you will
have seen that in January HEFCE announced an extra £39 million specifically for post-
graduate taught provision.
As regards the reports on what the research councils are doing—which is their decision and
not mine—my understanding is that they are focusing on larger collaborative doctoral
training centres and that there is a debate within the academic community. Here again, we
do not tell them what to do as regards whether post-graduate work should be sprinkled
liberally across a large range of institutions or concentrated in a smaller number that have
critical mass. These debates probably go in cycles but I think it is fair to say that the
research councils are in a cycle where they think that having these larger doctoral training
centres makes sense. Some individual universities may think that they are losing out even if
overall the total amount of provision is not really falling.
Q417 Baroness Perry of Southwark: In the case of STEM subjects, are you reasonably
sanguine that there will be no adverse impact?
David Willetts MP: Research councils are working within the cash-protected science
budget. The glass is half full rather than half empty; the situation could have been a lot
worse. We have maintained the balance between the different research councils; we have
not shifted funding towards or away from more STEM-type research councils. Therefore, in
the circumstances I trust the judgments that the research councils are making.
Q418 Lord Broers: I would like to talk about data collection. We have just had quite a
stern conversation with the Home Office about this and about immigration policy. We were
struck during the course of the inquiry by the lack of access to basic information on higher
education. It is often held in disparate places and in difficult-to-use formats. Many witnesses
argued for a central repository for information on both the demand for and supply of
students at discipline or industrial-sector levels, in order to underpin policy and to enable
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students to make an informed choice about their course. How do you propose to improve
the situation?
David Willetts MP: First, I accept that this is a problem; at the moment everybody is
unhappy. Universities complain about the burden of data collection. Some data that they
collect and send up to the centre are never referred to again, so they complain to me that
they are collecting data to no purpose. On the other hand, you are absolutely right that
elementary data about outcomes and employment prospects from doing particular courses
at particular universities that prospective students should have is very hard to obtain. We
are working on this. The best single piece of news so far this year is that extra data is being
piloted in the Labour Force Survey. About 100,000 people in work in the labour force are
asked a set of questions. It has been agreed that they will be asked for more information
than before about whether they went to university, and if so which university they went to
and what course they did. That will enable us over time to build up a picture of where
people who have gone to particular universities and done particular courses have ended up
in the jobs market, what kind of jobs they are doing and how much they are being paid. That
will take some time to feed through. I cannot remember the exact timing, but I think that
the first question is due to be asked in the spring. It will take time, but down the track it will
significantly improve data in this area. There is more that we should do, but that is a good
start.
Q419 Lord Broers: Do the Government intend to carry out an impact assessment in
2013 of the recent higher education reforms to monitor the impact of policy decisions
before making further changes—and if so, on what timescale?
David Willetts MP: We produced an initial impact assessment in June last year, in which we
made a commitment to what is called in the trade a post-implementation review plan. So we
have committed ourselves to continue to assess the impact of the HE reforms. I fully
understand that when something as big as this happens in HE, you have to continue to
monitor it. We will try to use administrative data, and I very much hope that we will be able
to commission specific evaluative studies of this. It is a big thing that is happening and we
need to monitor how it is going and what its impacts are.
Q420 Lord Broers: So it is likely that there will be an assessment in 2013?

David Willetts MP: As I said, the formal impact assessment was done as one of the
requirements last year. What I can undertake to the Committee is that we will monitor
very closely the impacts of the reforms, and that we have committed ourselves to utilising
“a range of approaches from monitoring based on administrative data sources to specially
designed and commissioned evaluation studies to understand the operation or impact of
specific aspects” of our HE changes. That is what we are committed to doing, and we will
do it.
Q421 The Chairman: When we had the Minister for Immigration from the Home Office
here before you, he was damning in his criticism of the problem of collecting statistics that
came significantly later, and particularly about HESA’s collection of statistics, when
universities had information to which the Home Office and your department do not get
access. Is not there something more than just the post-university employment data—the
real-time data for students who are in universities and going through specific courses? Do
you have that information separately from HESA?
David Willetts MP: I think that it is HESA data that we are really talking about here.
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Q422 The Chairman: But it is 18 months out of date by the time it is published.
David Willetts MP: Yes, and we are investigating whether there are changes we can make
to improve that situation. It is an understandable frustration. HESA needs to know where
people are by the end of the academic year and then needs to combine and integrate data
from 130 different HEIs. If there are ways in which it can be done more promptly, I am up
for that. I believe in data and, more importantly, the coalition believes in open data and
transparency. If there is anything that we can do here, we will.
The Chairman: We are as one on this.
David Willetts MP: Very good. You have never said that to me before.
Q423 Baroness Perry of Southwark: We are in happy harmony. I want to hear more
about your proposal, which I think is very exciting, and the idea of taking people who are in
employment and backtracking, so to speak. Will you be able to break that down by cohort,
or will it simply be by which university and what subject? Will you be able to say that this is
what happened with the class of 2012 or 2011?
David Willetts MP: I think that we are planning to ask when the students were at
university. Of course, the advantage of this is that it is a large data set. About 100,000
people are surveyed every year. Starting from the other end, I think what is good about this
approach is that it is a new angle; we are not trying to track people from university but
taking a slice of people in the labour market and asking them questions. It will be a year or
two before the social scientists and statisticians have worked out exactly how much
granularity they can extract from it but, clearly, the more granular the better. I cannot
commit to them being able to do so, but it would be great if they had sufficient data to be
able to observe changes over time and where people were who left university 10 years ago.
Q424 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Presumably you will try to look at those who are
in graduate occupations, or will you look right across the board? Quite a lot of graduates do
not go into graduate occupations.
David Willetts MP: Oh yes, this is an inquiry of everybody in the labour force. What
constitutes a graduate occupation is another tricky issue on which it be very interesting to
have this Committee’s views. There was a lively debate after the Prince of Wales left Trinity
College, Cambridge, as to whether becoming a monarch was a graduate occupation. Some
people debate whether, for example, running business should constitute a graduate
occupation. Tim Wilson has some comments on that in his report. So there are lots of value
judgments here. What constitutes a graduate occupation is a fascinating subject.
The Chairman: Lord Winston has a much simpler question for you.
Q425 Lord Winston: It is a kind of Trinity College question, in fact. During the course
of the inquiry we have heard a number of different definitions of what the letters STEM
actually stand for, including from government agencies. Is there one overarching definition
that you would prefer, or is there some intention to try to have one? It is interesting to
consider that at one end there are some courses in psychology which would, presumably,
be regarded as STEM. Then there are things like veterinary nursing, radiography and
complementary therapies. It is probably important to try to focus down a bit, is it not?
David Willetts MP: Yes, this is the so-called joint academic coding system that provides the
definition. It means that there are a range of subjects, and people can make a bit of mischief
and get into those interesting questions about what constitutes a STEM or non-STEM
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subject. Chemical engineering and architecture are, I think, STEM subjects according to the
JACS definitions. We tend to follow them, but you could try sub-definitions, and this
Committee might have a view on that. But it gets a bit invidious if you start doing that. For
example, is psychology to be included? There are lots of borderline issues here. My
understanding is that psychology involves quite a lot of mathematical and analytical skills
together with trying to think in an objective way about behaviour. Under the JAC system, it
has been counted as a STEM subject.
Q426 Lord Winston: But it does make a difference how we gather our statistics when it
comes to looking at STEM applicants to university, for example?
David Willetts MP: Yes, and the data are published in a sufficiently raw form that it is
possible to extract from the broad definition of STEM, where we use the JAC measure, and
say that we should narrow the definition. If you wanted to, although I am not necessarily
endorsing this, you could count only people who do physics, chemistry, biological sciences,
maths or engineering—and nothing else. Forensic science and architecture would be
excluded. It is possible, and this Committee could do so if it wished, for individuals to
analyse the raw data for their own purposes with whatever narrower definition they wished
to use. I would be a bit uncomfortable with government starting to engage in that, but any
person from outside it can.
Q427 Lord Winston: Some employers have told us that they feel that the number of
courses is inadequate scientifically and that one issue is with maths literacy, which is not
always in these courses. Would you say that was a fair assessment?
David Willetts MP: Yes, I think that there is a maths challenge here. Maths is now so
pervasive and fundamental to modern rigorous thinking that across a whole range of
subjects people who have not done A-level maths find themselves at a disadvantage. That is
important. I have been at meetings on this recently, because it is a very important problem,
and some universities have a permanent maths support unit available. I have seen it at
Loughborough University, but I believe that many other universities have a similar type of
model. You may be doing political science and you may have given up maths at GCSE, and
you are suddenly given a paper from the American Political Science Quarterly doing a
regression analysis of voting behaviour in presidential elections which contains lots of
algebra. Normally you either panic or skim through that bit. But it is an opportunity to get
people back into doing a bit of maths and, if a user-friendly mathematician is available and
communicates to non-mathematicians, people could go to that person and say, “I’ve been
trying to read this paper but I can’t make head or tail of it—can you explain how this
methodology works and why it matters?”. That is a fantastic opportunity to get someone
back into mathematical thinking who might not have done the subject for two or three
years. Because I saw a particularly inspiring example in Loughborough, I associate that with
Loughborough, but my understanding is that quite a few universities run that as a campus
service for people who discover that they need maths, even if they did not do the A-level.
Q428 Lord Lucas: It is a problem because they may complain that they do not know
enough maths, but they also complain about the type of maths. Engineers complain if you
have not done mechanics, biologists would complain if you have not done statistics and the
City will complain if you have not done fluid dynamics. To what extent should industry be
allowed to affect universities and universities be allowed to affect what is taught in schools,
or do they just have to put up with what comes through and say, “At least they are
mathematicians and we can teach them what is missing”?
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David Willetts MP: The more communication about this the better. In the IT industry
there is deep dissatisfaction about IT and computer science, as I am sure you have picked
up, at the school level and at university level. I do not know what has gone wrong but
clearly something has gone wrong. There is some quite extraordinary evidence that some
computer science courses, which you know are in short supply, also have very low
employment outcomes. I have had this conversation with Hewlett Packard, which is helping
to design a computer science course at some universities. I believe from memory that they
are involved with De Montfort. So De Montfort’s computer science course includes
elements of computer science that enables Hewlett Packard to feel that they can recruit
from that course as they know that the students will have the type of skills they need to
work on software or programming for Hewlett Packard. No one is forcing any individual
university to do that, but, if they have the enterprise and the get-up-and-go, they can deal
with Hewlett Packard. That is where I would like to see a tick in the box. De Montfort
should say, “Hewlett Packard have helped to design our computer science course”,
indicating that that is a course from which the company would recruit graduates. If all these
things can be done by initiative and information, rather than by instruction from the centre,
that will be in keeping with the traditions of higher education in our country.
Q429 The Chairman: Are you supportive of the Department of Education’s move to
have universities much more involved in deciding the content of A-level mathematics in
order to drive up standards? When we had eight vice-chancellors from Salford down to
Cambridge here, we were struck by the fact that every one of them said that they had to do
remedial mathematics, even for courses like engineering where they had people with
straight As. Are you supportive of what Michael Gove is doing?
David Willetts MP: Yes, that makes a lot of sense.
Q430 Baroness Neuberger: On immigration policy, we had your colleague Damian

Green with us earlier and we had a certain amount of robust discussion about the extent to
which the negative perception of the Government’s immigration policies in some countries
has led to a drop in applicants, particularly from India and Pakistan. We are interested in
how you are working, from your perspective, with the Foreign Office and Home Office to
improve the negative perception that the Government’s immigration policies might have
created.
David Willetts MP: There is a very important communication challenge here. I have been
abroad much of the past fortnight and one of the main things I have been doing in interviews
abroad is to emphasise that legitimate students who have the qualifications are welcome to
study in Britain. That is a very important message. In some countries—there may be a
particular problem in India—the reporting of our policies is very different from the reality.
There is a communication challenge there. When I was last in India in the autumn I did a
series of media interviews trying to explain the truth and I know that the permanent British
Council staff there and others try to get that across.
Q431 Baroness Neuberger: One thing that we heard earlier was that, clearly, the
media may be reporting it and that is fine, but what do you think we can do more robustly?
You are having those conversations when you go to India, but is there something that we
could do more coherently across departments to try to change that perception, if it is as
strong as the universities, in evidence to us, suggest that it is?
David Willetts MP: One reason why last week I was on the trade mission to Asia with the
Prime Minister was precisely that we see education as a great national asset. As part of the
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interviews there we were saying that you have to be a legitimate student, properly qualified,
with the necessary level of English and that then you are welcome to come and study in
Britain without a limit on numbers. Some people seemed to think that there was a limit on
numbers. Provided you are a legitimate student, there is not a limit on numbers. We were
communicating that in a whole range of Asian countries in south-east Asia last week. We
will carry on with that flat out. I know that there is an issue with India, but the UCAS figures
so far, which are partial, suggest that there has not been a fall in non-EU applications to
undergraduate courses at British universities.
The Chairman: In STEM subjects?
David Willetts MP: I have not seen a subject breakdown. I am not sure there is one.
Baroness Neuberger: One thing that we have been hearing is that the data comes
through quite late.
David Willetts MP: I do not recall seeing a subject breakdown, but if there is one I shall be
happy to share it with the Committee.
Q432 Baroness Neuberger: Lastly, your colleague Damian Green spoke about the idea
of a 30% growth year on year in the numbers of students. What do you think a sustainable
level of dependency on international students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels
within higher education institutions might look like?
David Willetts MP: We have now introduced a set of stringent conditions about language
standards, about previous academic qualifications, about working while studying and once
you have in place, as we rightly have, the mechanisms to eliminate abuse and bogus colleges,
we are in open competition with American and Australian universities and other universities
around the world. Each individual university has to make its own judgment on its capacity,
but the Government are deliberately not setting a figure. It will emerge from the number of
people that a university thinks it can take on, but they have to pass the criteria to ensure
that it is not being abused.
Q433 Baroness Neuberger: I think that we would all say that that is fair enough, as we
have discussed in the Committee and heard in evidence, some other countries are selling
their higher education more successfully than we are and particularly on the STEM subjects,
and that is why we are so interested.
David Willetts MP: We do have a great international offer. We can be very proud of our
education. People who are suitably qualified should be welcomed to study in Britain. That is
the Government’s policy. Of course, there are other ways in which they can access British
higher education other than physically coming here to study. Last year, there was a very
interesting crossover in the statistics in that the number of people physically coming to
Britain to study from outside the EU went to just over 400,000, but for the first time it was
exceeded by another 400,000 people studying trans-nationally, studying for British university
qualifications while abroad through the Open University or through a campus abroad. That
is the other way in which we can do it.
The Chairman: On that note, the Division Bell has beaten us again, exactly at 5.30 pm. I
thank you very much for your contribution. As ever, you engaged with the Committee
superbly and we thank you for that.
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Government – Further, further supplementary written evidence
Response provided by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to a request for
supplementary evidence following the oral evidence given by David Willetts MP, Minister of State for
Universities and Science, on 17 April 2012.
Who determines what subjects should be considered SIVS and how these conclusions
are reached?
In 2004 the Secretary of State responsible for HE funding, asked HEFCE to advise ‘whether
there are any higher education subjects or courses that are of national strategic importance,
where intervention might be appropriate to enable them to be available...and the types of
intervention which it believes could be considered’. The letter included a list of subjects the
Government considered to be strategically important.
In response to this HEFCE appointed a Board level Advisory Group, chaired by the late Sir
Gareth Roberts. The group’s report, published in June 2005, established a policy framework
to secure the national interest with regard to strategically important subjects. A key plank
of the policy was that the English HE system’s success is founded on the ability of
autonomous institutions to respond dynamically to changing circumstances. The report
suggested that ‘HEFCE should guard against an overly interventionist role’ and focus on
‘subjects which are both strategically important and vulnerable’. Importantly, Government
should define strategically important subjects and HEFCE’s role should be to identify
whether they are vulnerable.
Drawing upon the subjects highlighted by the then Secretary of State, the Advisory Group
considered the following broad subject areas both strategically important and vulnerable:
a. within STEM: chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics
b. modern foreign languages and related area studies
c. quantitative social science (QSS)
d. land-based studies (subsequently removed from the list following a second Advisory
Group report in 2008)
This approach provided the basis for HEFCE’s programme of SIVS interventions between
2005-06 and 2011-12.
How could a new subject be classified as a SIVS?
HEFCE are currently considering a new approach to SIVs in their consultation on the future
operation of teaching funding from 2013-14 onwards, when HE institutions will increasingly
see their income flow from student fees. The proposed approach moves away from a SIVs
list for targeted funding, to one that is described in the HE White Paper 'Students at the
Heart of the System' as one that is focussed on identifying the minority subject areas 'which
are strategically important and vulnerable and require support to avoid undesirable
reductions in the scale of provision’.
HEFCE will continue to support those subjects which have until now been identified as
strategically important and vulnerable (mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, modern
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foreign languages and related area studies and quantitative social sciences) but propose no
longer to have one single list of SIVS. Instead HEFCE propose to monitor the health of all
subjects and make selective, collaborative interventions where there is strong quantitative
and qualitative evidence of a particular risk to the continued availability of a subject. A key
aspect of a new approach would be to identify and monitor risks, rather than respond to
speculation before having a full understanding of the impact of the HE reforms.
UCAS data on overseas students

A breakdown by subject of UCAS data on overseas students by JACS codes, as of 19 March
2012.
Non EU domicile change

2011 2012 Nos %
Group A Medicine & Dentistry 11,112 12,189 1,077 9.7%
Group B Subjects allied to Medicine 9,532 10,169 637 6.7%
Group C Biological Sciences 8,652 10,393 1,741 20.1%
Group D Vet Sci,Ag & related 925 1,285 360 38.9%
Group F Physical Sciences 4,591 5,505 914 19.9%
Group G Mathematical Sciences 5,855 6,324 469 8.0%
Group H Engineering 21,688 24,849 3,161 14.6%
Group I Computer Sciences 3,937 4,520 583 14.8%
Group J Technologies 836 810 -26 -3.1%
Group K Architecture, Build & Plan 5,104 5,364 260 5.1%
Group L Social Studies 20,961 21,712 751 3.6%
Group M Law 16,186 18,266 2,080 12.9%
Group N Business & Admin studies 39,495 45,328 5,833 14.8%
Group P Mass Comms and Documentation 2,276 2,545 269 11.8%
Group Q Linguistics, Classics & related 2,028 2,416 388 19.1%
Group R European Langs, Lit & related 598 651 53 8.9%
Group T Non-European Langs, Lit and related 244 256 12 4.9%
Group V Hist & Philosophical studies 2,413 2,591 178 7.4%
Group W Creative Arts & Design 9,965 10,864 899 9.0%
Group X Education 457 489 32 7.0%
Y Combined arts 1,630 1,797 167 10.2%
Y Combined sciences 2,566 2,910 344 13.4%
Y Combined social sciences 4,162 4,656 494 11.9%
Y Sciences combined with social sciences or arts 5,122 4,910 -212 -4.1%
Y Social sciences combined with arts 3,782 4,337 555 14.7%
Z General, other combined & unknown 1,900 3,962 2,062 108.5%
Grand Total 186,017 209,098 23,081 12.4%
All STEM 74,798 84,318 9,520 12.7%
All non STEM 104,197 115,908 11,711 11.2%
STEM = Groups A to K + Combined sciences

Non STEM = Groups L to X + Combined arts, Combined social sciences, Social sciences
combined with arts
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What measures has Government introduced to encourage STEM skills provision in

areas where the UK is either lacking skills or where a significant increase in skills is
necessary in the future to support Government policy?
1. This Government has a substantial programme of work in place to engage young people
with STEM. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ (BIS) work includes
helping young people to understand how studying the STEM disciplines, including
engineering, leads to future career opportunities. Programmes BIS supports include
STEMNET and the STEM Ambassadors, National Science and Engineering Week, the Big
Bang Fair and the National Science and Engineering Competition. BIS also runs a
periodic Public Attitudes to Science Survey which in 2011 included, for the first time, a
sample of young peoples’ attitudes.
2. David Willetts recently attended the Big Bang Fair, which is the first national fair
celebrating young people’s achievement in science and engineering. This is an inspiring
event, celebrating both science and engineering talent in the UK and working to ensure
that this talent is nurtured for the future. This year there were over 56,000 participants
at the Big Bang Fair, which increased from 29,000 in 2011.
3. The Government also wants students to have access to the best information, advice and
guidance to help them make subject choices. This should be independent and impartial,
not forcing students down one particular route over another but guiding them to a well-
informed choice based on reliable data about the performance of institutions, the
returns which accrue to qualifications, and trends in the job market.
4. Schools will be responsible for ensuring their pupils have access to independent and
impartial careers guidance on the full range of post-16 education and training options,
including Apprenticeships. This new legal duty commences in September 2012 and will
apply to pupils in Years 9-11. Schools will be expected to work in partnership with
external, expert careers providers, as appropriate. The Government will consult on
extending the duty down to year 8 and up to age 18 for students in schools and colleges
from September 2013. FE colleges and HE institutions will continue to provide strong, in
house IAG services.
5. Statutory guidance was recently published to support schools in planning for the
introduction of the new duty. This places a clear expectation on schools that face-to-
face careers guidance should be secured where it is the most suitable support for young
people to make successful transitions, particularly those from disadvantaged
backgrounds. An Ofsted thematic review of careers guidance, reporting in Summer
2013, will identify good practice and establish a baseline for future improvements in the
quality of provision.
6. The Key Information Set will be available on University websites from September. The
National Careers Service was launched on 5 April, so that everyone has access to
accurate information and professional advice. Alongside this “The Right Advice At The
Right Time” was published, which brings together everything the Government is doing
to help young people and adults get the advice they need.
7. The National Careers Service will:
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o Provide information and advice for approximately 370,000 young people through
the use of the helpline and website;
o Offer face to face advice to 700,000 adults each year in a range of locations in
local communities;
o Provide detailed sector by sector labour market information so people can
discover which industries are growing in their area;
o Provide tools such as a CV builder and a Skills Health Check on the website to
help people identify their skills strengths and gaps;
o Operate to the enhanced national matrix quality standard for information, advice
and guidance.
8. Some young people and adults need additional support. Local authorities will continue to
have a legal duty to help young people re-engage with education and training. The
Youth Contract will provide a range of new opportunities to help young people access
education, training and work, including job subsidies, work experience placements,
Apprentice incentive payments, and extra support through Jobcentre Plus.
9. Beyond this, the Government will support a flourishing market in exciting products and
services that help people make career choices. Industry and the voluntary sector are
leading the way, with the Youth Inspiration Project, exploring ways to inspire young
people to think about their future with optimism, explore their options and make
positive choices. Other positive initiatives include Inspiring the Future, a free service
bringing thousands of people from all sectors and professions into schools to talk about
the choices they made and the routes they took.
Should government be doing more than just providing students with information and
advice to encourage them to study subjects that are in short supply and of economic
importance?
10. Giving students access to accurate, up to date information about the job market is the
right first step. The Government wants to see informed young people making positive
choices about their futures, based on empirical data from reliable sources. Access to
information and opportunities to learn about different careers – such as opportunities
provided by STEM Ambassadors and the Big Bang Fair – are a key way to encourage
students to study STEM subjects.
11. Students should also have access to professional advice if they need it, so that they can
talk through their options with someone who understands careers and the job market.
The package of reforms in “The Right Advice At The Right Time” will help strengthen
demand for the courses and skills that the economy needs, driving sustainable growth
and social mobility.
12. The National Careers Service will provide information and advice for approximately
370,000 young people through the use of the helpline and website and offer face to face
advice to 700,000 adults each year in a range of locations in local communities. It will
also:
• provide detailed sector by sector labour market information so people can discover
which industries are growing in their area; and
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• have tools such as a CV builder and a Skills Health Check on the website to help
people identify their skills strengths and gaps;
13. Schools will be responsible for ensuring their pupils have access to independent careers
guidance, with a new legal duty beginning in September 2012, applying to pupils in Years
9-11. The Government will consult on extending this down to year 8 and up to age 18
for students in schools and colleges from September 2013. FE colleges and HE
institutions will continue to provide strong, in house IAG services.
Postgraduate provision
The Browne review envisaged that the HE Council would fund postgraduate courses
on the same basis as undergraduate courses - by targeting investment on courses that
are a priority for the public interest. Who do you expect to fund STEM stand-alone-
Masters courses provision? We have heard from industry that they will not be able to
pick up the bill and home students may well not want to add to their debt burden.
14. Although Lord Browne’s review of higher education suggested that HEFCE funding for
postgraduate taught provision should be reduced on a similar basis to undergraduate
support, and the initial spending review allocations to HEFCE followed this advice,
HEFCE’s Board agreed in January to provide an additional £39m (reaching around
£135m in total) to maintain postgraduate taught funding at levels prior to the HE
reforms.
15. HEFCE is maintaining the high cost allocation for postgraduate taught as for
undergraduates - around £10k per student for Band A and around £1,500 per student
for Band B – which particularly benefits STEM. HEFCE propose to allocate an additional
£1,100 per student for postgraduate taught in Bands C to A, totaling around £39m.
16. The February 2012 HEFCE consultation on funding arrangements for 2013-14 and
beyond announces their intention to continue to provide this funding support for
postgraduate provision as a transitional approach, together with further development of
the evidence base for future investment.
Should Government offer loan schemes for postgraduate study similar to

undergraduate level?
17. Postgraduate provision is essentially unregulated and largely unsubsidised by

Government. It is important to remember that 30% of postgraduate research students
and 60% of postgraduate taught students currently do not receive any public funding.
18. Support for postgraduate taught provision is being maintained by HEFCE at pre-reform
levels – HEIs need not increase postgraduate fees to adjust for changes which might
otherwise have occurred to their grant from HEFCE. Without this funding, there were
also concerns that universities would increase fees to a level that could deter students
from lower income backgrounds.
331
19. Before considering what, if any, further support for postgraduate provision is justified
and affordable, BIS will continue to work with HEFCE to better understand the
underlying evidence of the purpose and characteristics of, and outcomes from,
postgraduate study; and review postgraduate participation following the changes to
undergraduate funding.
We have heard evidence that the Research Council DTCs are restricting the breadth
of topics studied at postgraduate level in some disciplines, leaving some centres of
excellence with no funding for postgraduate research students. What assessment has
been made of the impact of these changes on the breadth of courses available across
the UK at undergraduate as well as Postgraduate level?
20. The Research Councils are increasingly 148 awarding funding for postgraduate training on
a competitive basis to larger collaborative Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) or
Partnerships. These often involve collaborations between a number of universities to
create a broader centre of excellence in postgraduate training in a particular discipline
or set of disciplines.
21. DTC or Partnerships enable good practice to be shared and the partnership can engage
in a more strategic way with external organisations and industry, to ensure that the
research needs of the wider economy and society are taken into consideration.
Research Councils invest in those centres which can provide excellent research training
– combining cutting-edge research with developing a wider set of professional and
enterprise skills in PhD students.
22. Research Councils take careful advice from their advisory bodies on the strategic
priorities for postgraduate training – to ensure that areas of strategically important and
vulnerable high-level skills are maintained in the UK, and also to ensure that the UK is
training people in cutting-edge areas where there is evidence of likely future increase in
numbers of people with specific high-level skills.
23. The need for strategic focus is widely accepted in the academic base, as is the role of
Research Councils in driving up the quality of postgraduate training.
24. In addition to the information above, further detail on post-graduate training provision
from the individual Research Councils can be found below:
AHRC:
25. Through its Block Grant Partnerships (BGPs) and BGP Capacity-Building Route awards
(BGP:CBs) and Collaborative Doctoral Awards (CDA) scheme, the AHRC provides
postgraduate studentships to ROs in subjects across the whole of the Arts and
Humanities disciplinary range, in response to subject areas proposed by the ROs
themselves. The AHRC’s BGP2 scheme (studentships commencing 2014) will similarly
make awards to ROs in response to proposals submitted by ROs themselves, covering
the whole of the AHRC’s subject domain.
148 Currently AHRC, BBSRC, ERSC, EPSRC and MRC follow a DTC-type funding model, it is expected NERC will move to
a similar funding model within the next few years.
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26. As set out in the AHRC Delivery Plan, AHRC will ensure BGP2 funding continues to
support national capacity and capability in Art and Humanities disciplines, providing
funding across the whole of the AHRC’s subject domain, and ensuring specific support in
the three priority subject areas where there is strategic need for research capacity in
the UK: Modern Languages, Design and Heritage.
27. The AHRC’s Block Grant Partnerships (BGPs) are awards made to Research
Organisations for an allocation of postgraduate studentships (Masters and Doctoral) in
specific subject areas across the whole of the AHRC’s subject domain. The allocations
are for 5 annual cohorts of students, commencing with students beginning their
postgraduate study in the 2009-10 academic year. This first round of the BGPs ensured
stability of arts and humanities disciplines, in the context of previous AHRC funding
patterns. A list of organisations that have a BGP award is available, along with a summary
of the total studentships offered under the BGP awards by scheme and subject.
28. Block Grant Partnerships: Capacity Building Route (BGP: CBs) are also awards made to
Research Organisations for an allocation of postgraduate studentships (Masters and
Doctoral) in specific subject areas across the whole of the AHRC’s subject domain. The
allocations are for 3 annual cohorts of students, commencing with students beginning
their postgraduate study in the 2011-12 academic year. The BGP: CB scheme was open
to all Research Organisations that do not hold a BGP award. It is intended to help
organisations to build capacity and develop a case for a clear strategic approach for the
next round of the Block Grant Partnerships Scheme in 2013, which will be open to all
UK HEIs. A list of organisations that have a BGP: CB awards is available, along with a
summary of the total studentships offered under the BGP: CB awards by scheme and
subject.
29. The AHRC has implemented the above schemes with careful consideration of the need
to ensure strategic support and national capability across all arts and humanities
subjects. BGP and BGP: CB holding Research Organisaions are required to recruit
postgraduate students within the subject areas specified by their award.
BBSRC:
30. BBSRC has not restricted the breadth of topics available for study at postgraduate level
through our Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTP) programme. As with previous quota
Doctoral Training Grant block awards, the partnerships will identify supervisors and
students who will select and direct the specific topic of the individual studentship,
ensuring that the student has the intellectual freedom to pursue interesting and
important lines of research without restriction. What the DTP competition aimed to
achieve (and was successful in doing so) was to encourage institutions to take a more
strategic approach to the allocation of their studentships to more closely align with
BBSRC’s research priorities in order to ensure a supply of highly trained people in areas
such as food security, industrial biotechnology and bioenergy and basic biosciences
underpinning health, as well as for the wider economy. The DTP approach will also
provide a multi-disciplinary high quality training environment for students.
31. BBSRC awarded the DTPs competitively based on expert peer review by its
independent Training Awards Committee. The key criterion for awarding a DTP was an
excellent training environment, with the other important consideration being the quality
of the research being carried out in the DTP institutions. Those institutions which were
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unsuccessful in obtaining a DTP are still able to apply for studentships through BBSRC’s
other schemes, such as the annual Industrial CASE competition, Industrial CASE
Partnerships or targeted priority studentships awarded alongside other strategic
investments, e.g. strategic Longer, Larger grants or Research and Technology Clubs.
ESRC:
32. The ESRC’s 21 DTCs were commissioned in 2010 through a competitive peer review
process. In applying for DTC status institutions detailed the disciplinary training they
would like to provide. It was for institutions to set the breadth of topics to be covered.
Provided the training in each of the disciplines included in their bid met our quality
threshold ESRC have approved them to deliver it. Only in a minority of instances was
training excluded. Once commissioning of the DTCs was completed, ESRC reviewed
provision across the network to ensure the full range of the social science disciplines
where included and will continue to monitor this.
EPSRC:
33. EPSRC currently supports about 80 centres for Doctoral Training (including Industrial
Doctorate Centres), these span a wide range of topics. However EPSRC's centres for
Doctoral Training are only one of our routes for allocating postdoctoral studentships.
The other two main routes are our Doctoral Training Grants (held by more than 40
universities) and the Industrial Case route. There is no restriction on the topic of study
for PhDs via these routes.
34. EPSRC have regular contact with the universities who receive the majority of EPSRC
funding and they have not had any specific feedback to date about concerns on the
impact of CDTS on the breadth of courses available.
35. As mentioned in the initial RCUK response to the HE inquiry into STEM subjects, in
2009 EPSRC made a major investment in Centres for Doctoral Training. A mid-term
review was held in 2011 which required the Centres to demonstrate progress and
impact in their areas. This was an early health check on the Centres as none of the
students working in the 2009 tranche of centres have yet completed their PhDs. Each
Centre provided entry information on two cohorts of students plus some numerical
information on the third cohort (who started in the same year as the review). EPSRC
currently has 80 centres, 59 of which (who were at an appropriate point) were
reviewed. The review panel recognised that the CDT approach was an effective way of
training a cohort of students and allowed students more time to gain some specific skills.
It noted that many of the centres had succeeded in leveraging substantial industrial
funding using a variety of approaches. It also noted that many Universities and other
funders were adopting a cohort or centre-based approach to supporting PhD students.
Finally, the panel noted that the centres can act as a catalyst for bringing people
together, and can act as a nucleation site to bring together good activities.
NERC:
36. NERC will be moving to a DTC funding model in a couple of years. NERC currently
allocates the majority of its studentships (240 per year) through an algorithm based on
grant and fellowship success, so the studentships are allocated across a wide range of
institutions and those NERC fund will cover PhD topics and disciplines across the whole
of NERCs remit and NERC have no restrictions to the contrary.
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MRC:
37. 45% of MRC’s provision of PhD-studentships is in the form of block doctoral training
grants to some 25 HEIs. HEIs are free to allocate these studentships to projects within
MRC’s remit without restriction on the breadth of topics. However, MRC do agree
partnership priorities with each individual HEI, reflecting the (i) individual HEI’s research
strengths, (ii) specific opportunities for multi/inter-disciplinary training and training in
scarce, advanced research skills, and (iii) MRC’s strategic priorities. None of MRC's HEI
partners has complained that this degree of ‘light-touch steering’ has detrimentally
restricted the range of topics available for study. In addition, MRC have analysed their
portfolio of studentships reported through the JES Studentship Portal. The distribution
closely mirrors that of the MRC grants portfolio (albeit the categories are broad). By
this measure, MRC have no evidence that the studentship portfolio has significant gaps.
MRC do not fund taught masters courses.
38. About 42% of MRC’s studentships are allocated to MRC research centres, institutes and
units, and to capacity development areas (the latter identified by the research and
industry community). These studentships share features with the doctoral training
centres of other Research Councils: each centre, institute etc works on a broad theme –
providing a degree of focused training aligned with UK science priorities. The remaining
studentships (13%) are allocated through (i) CASE PhD studentship involving
collaboration with industry; and (ii) the MRC fellowship scheme for trainee clinicians to
study for a PhD. These are not themed.
39. MRC studentships form less than 25% of biomedical studentships in the HEIs receiving
MRC studentship funding. There is no reason to believe that HEIs do not have plenty of
flexibility in how they allocate their overall basket of studentships, at least within the
biomedical sciences.
40. Following a competition earlier this year, MRC awarded funds for 180 advanced
research masters places per annum for three years. These were targeted to skills critical
to UK scientific competitiveness. Some institutions successful in previous years failed this
year, because their applications did not meet the assessment criteria including relevance
to the skills priority; they may well consider that they have lost out.
41. MRC have no evidence that MRC PhD and Masters funding policies have a direct impact
on HEI decisions on funding for undergraduate courses. MRC are fully supportive of the
work of organisations such as the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, the
Society for Biology (with BBSRC support) and COGENT (sector skills council) to
promote practical skills in undergraduate training.
STFC:
42. STFC does not fund DTCs and STFC studentships are allocated by an algorithm that
takes into account research funding, and research active academics. So STFC student
allocations map onto STFC’s research priorities and centres of excellence.
The current definition used by BIS includes disparate subjects such as complementary
therapies and engineering. Isn't there are danger that this broad definition may hide
reductions in traditional areas vital to the UK economic growth?
335
43. It is possible to look at numbers studying and/or graduating in specific subjects, or

groups of subjects (within the limits of the classification) as required: for example, one
can look at numbers and trends for those studying engineering if that were a concern, or
specific types of engineering such as mechanical engineering.
We heard from a biochem student that he did not take A level maths because it was
not required for entry to his course. However the university then had to provide him
with extra maths lessons to make up the shortfall. Pharmaceutical companies have
told us that graduates in biology and biochemistry have inadequate mathematical
skills for their purposes. Is there a case for HEIs to require that prospective students
attain maths A level in order to study any STEM subject?
44. The Government believes that universities are best placed to decide the most
appropriate qualifications for admission to their courses, free from Government
interference. Many universities have indicated the need for mathematics qualifications
across a wide range of subjects and the Government is taking steps to encourage more
students to study the STEM disciplines including mathematics. That will mean that
universities will be able to have greater confidence that their demand can be met where
they believe A level maths would be an appropriate admission qualification.
27 April 2012
336
Government – Further, further, further supplementary written evidence
Government – Further, further, further supplementary written

evidence
1. At the Sub-Committee’s evidence session on 17 April, I undertook to write on two

issues. I apologise for the delay in providing this note.
Data sources
2. The Sub-Committee asked for further detail of the information available to the Home
Office to assess the impact of its student visa policies.
3. The Home Office uses a range of data to monitor changes in international student
numbers.
4. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes long-term international migration
figures in line with international norms. These define a migrant as someone staying for
12 months or longer, and are based on the International Passenger Survey (IPS). IPS
figures show long-term non-EEA student arrivals almost doubling between 2005 and
2011, from 95,000 to 181,000.
5. The Home Office also monitors total student visa admissions. These grew by over 80%
between 2005 and 2010, to 535,000. Non-EEA visitor admissions grew by 3% over the
same period.
6. Home Office data is taken from our administrative systems, principally from records of
applications, grants and extensions of visas for non-EEA nationals. Main applicant visas
granted to non-EEA students under Tier 4 of the Points Based System and its
predecessor routes increased from 176,000 in 2005 to a peak of 273,000 in 2009, before
falling back to 254,000 in 2010 and 237,000 in 2011. Extensions for leave to remain have
been running at around 100,000 in the same period with around 40,000 overseas
students also going into the Post-study work route. This indicates that inflows have
historically been much higher than outflows.
7. IPS and Home Office visa statistics are published quarterly.
8. As I explained to the Sub-Committee, Home Office systems are primarily designed to

monitor overall visa numbers, and immigration compliance. It is not possible to
routinely disaggregate visa statistics by institution-type, educational establishment or
subject. In 2010, the Home Office conducted a major exercise to sample over 17,000
Confirmations of Acceptance of Studies (CAS) issued by educational institutions licensed
to bring non-EEA students to the UK, though the UK Border Agency’s Sponsor
Management System. This research estimated that roughly half (49%) of non-EEA
students were at universities, 34% at privately funded institutions of FE or HE, 6% at
publicly-funded colleges, 8% at English language schools and 3% at independent schools.
337
Within the university sector, over half the CAS issued were for postgraduate studies of
varying type, but there were also a significant number of university students on pre-
degree courses. The Home Office is currently considering the merits of repeating
analysis along these lines.
9. The Home Office also undertakes ad hoc research on non-EEA students. For example,
a study in 2010 tracking certain cohorts through a range of data systems indicated that
up to 26% of those studying at private colleges may be non-compliant with the terms of
their visa. Its Migrant Journey Analysis (2010) showed that of 186,000 migrants granted
student visas in 2004, one in five (21%) remained legally in the immigration system five
years later and that 13% of those granted settlement in 2009 had originally entered the
UK as a student.
10. The Home Office also monitors independent data sources on non-EEA students at
universities. As the Sub-Committee is aware, the most recent UCAS figures from
March suggest that non-EEA undergraduate applicants to universities for the 2012
academic year increased by 12.4% compared to the equivalent point last year. I
understand that BIS has confirmed to the Sub-Committee that applications to STEM
subjects have increased by 12.7% and applications to non-STEM subjects have increased
by 11.5%, compared to the equivalent point last year.
11. Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data provides detailed breakdowns derived
from returns by universities, including total numbers of non-EEA students (as well as UK
and EEA students) by subject, course level and institution. The most recent figures
cover the 2010/11 academic year. These show total increases in the non-EEA university
population, including an 8.3% rise in non-EEA undergraduates and a 4.5% rise in non-EEA
postgraduates between 2009/10 and 2010/11. On STEM subjects there was an increase
of 7% in non-EU undergraduates between 2009/10 and 2010/11 and a 1.9% rise in non-
EU postgraduates in the same period. In 2010/11, non-EU STEM students accounted for
11% of all STEM students at UK higher education institutions.
12. As I explained to the Committee, HESA data for the current (2012/13) academic year is
scheduled to be published in February 2013. The Home Office understands that HESA
is currently looking at improvements to the timeliness and coverage of its data
collections, but that these will not be deliverable until 2014. The Home Office supports
efforts to ensure that this data is made available more quickly, to allow more timely
analysis of year on year changes to non-EEA students in STEM subjects.
13. Once the E-borders process is fully in place, we will be able to match passenger
movement against visa data and therefore build up a picture of departures for those
students whose leave has expired.
UKBA Website
338
14. Lord Lucas also asked about the scope for making changes to the UK Border Agency’s
website, which he compared unfavourably to the US equivalent in relation to its usability
and tone.
15. There are a number of different websites which hold information on how to obtain a US
student visa. In the UK this is available on a single site. The corporate site of the
Department of Homeland Security, the equivalent of the Home Office, features very
little information for prospective students, and emphasises its role in immigration
compliance, enforcement and border security. Much of the information it holds is
contained in word documents. The Department of State does provide a dedicated visa
information site, Travel.State.Gov., billed as a service of the US Bureau of Consular
Affairs.’ The equivalent UK site is Visa4UK, the official British Government site for
online visa applications. This conveys a similar welcoming tone.
16. In addition, the Government provides significant funding, via the FCO, to the British
Council, whose website features a dedicated Education UK section providing detailed
information on studying in the UK, including available courses and subjects, life in the
UK, and applying for a visa. The primary focus of the site is undergraduate and
postgraduate study.
17. The UK Border Agency website was designed following extensive user testing. Recent
amendments include a new section signposting prospective students to inspection
reports on colleges that have undergone independent quality assessments under our
tighter sponsorship requirements. The Agency encourages feedback on its site and is
currently considering, in partnership with various universities and representative groups,
how it might provide more accessible and user-friendly information on visa processes
and rules to prospective students. In progressing this work it welcomes any further
comments or observations from the Sub-Committee.
2 May 2012
339
Adam Hawken, University College London, Amran Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare
NHS Trust, Jennifer Newman, London South Bank University, Will Evans, Imperial College
London and Fabio Fiorelli, University College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347)
Adam Hawken, University College London, Amran Hussain,

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Jennifer Newman, London
South Bank University, Will Evans, Imperial College London and
Fabio Fiorelli, University College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-
347)
340
Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) – Written evidence
Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) – Written

evidence
Introduction, scope and summary findings

1. The data presented in this submission relates to the Sub-Committee’s interest in 16-
18 supply of STEM students to UK higher education. Specifically, it uses Higher
Education Statistics Agency data (see Appendix I for methodology) to present a
picture of the reliance of UK higher education on supply of entrants to STEM subject
courses from independent schools.
2. Data is presented for all of those subjects identified by HEFCE (2005, 2008), in four
groupings, as ‘strategically important and vulnerable’ (SIV):
• STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but excluding biological
sciences and electronic engineering)
• area studies and related minority languages and cultures
• modern foreign languages
• quantitative social science
as well as for individual STEM subjects.
3. The findings are that
• SIV/STEM subject entrants are strongly concentrated in the highest-ranked
institutions.
• In 2006/07, 24.1% of all independent school entrants were recruited to SIV subject
courses, compared to 16.8% of entrants from state schools/colleges.
• During 2003/04 to 2006/07, independent school entrants to SIV subjects declined
slightly as a proportion of all entrants (as was the case across all subjects), but
increased their representation in the top-10 ranked institutions. 149
• Among the top-30 ranked institutions, reliance on independent school entrants to
SIV subject courses remained steady (at 27% overall, ranging across subjects from
20.4% to 41.9%).
• Reliance on independent school entrants to SIV subject courses increased over the
period in top 10 universities (to 39.0% overall , ranging across subjects from 30.4%
to 58.2%) and at Oxbridge (to 48% overall, ranging across subjects from 41.8% to
78.4%).
• Of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) group of subjects:
¾ there is the highest reliance on independent school entrants across the branches
of Engineering (from 23% for Electronic Engineering to 36% in General
Engineering);
¾ reliance is least, but still at high levels, in the physical and biological sciences, and
in mathematics (from 17% in Physics to 29% in Astronomy, Earth and Ocean
Sciences).
• In vocationally-oriented subjects where wage premia and/or ‘rates of return’ to
graduates over a career are particularly high, other than in law, there is a strong
concentration of independent school entrants: Economics (42%); Medicine and
Dentistry (38%); Business and Management (30%); Veterinary Science (29%).
Detailed findings
149 For the rankings used, see Appendix 2.
341
4. Table 1 shows the proportion of undergraduate UCAS (A level/highers) entrants

studying for degrees in those subjects currently deemed by the government to be
‘strategically important and vulnerable’ (SIV). From these proportions, and from other
HESA data 150 it can be established that:
• SIV subject entrants are highly concentrated in highest-ranked institutions. In
2006/07, 59.4% of SIV subject students were those entering the top-30 ranked
institutions and 20.8% were those entering the top-10;
• when related to figures for all entrants, independent school entrants are more likely
than state school/college entrants to study SIV subjects. In 2006/07, 24.1% of all
independent school entrants were recruited to SIV subject courses, compared to
16.8% of entrants from state schools/colleges;
• during 2003/04 to 2006/07, independent school entrants to SIV subjects declined
slightly as a proportion of all entrants, but increased their representation in the top-
10 ranked institutions;
• among the top-30 ranked institutions, reliance on independent school entrants to SIV
subject courses remained steady at 27% overall, ranging from 20.4% to 41.9% across
subjects (subject areas in Table 7.3 are ordered by this measure);
• reliance on independent school entrants to SIV subject courses increased over the
period in top-10 universities (to 39.0% overall, ranging from 30.4% to 58.2% across
subjects) and at Oxbridge (to 48% overall, ranging from 41.8% to 78.4% across
subjects).
Table 1. Young undergraduate UCAS (A levels/highers) entrants to UK courses of study that
are strategically important and vulnerable, by higher education institution bands and by
school/college background, 2003/04 and 2006/07 (actuals and %)
% ind. school all % ind. school % ind. school % ind. school
Subject area Total entry
uk top 30 top 10 top 2
03/04 06/07 03/04 06/07 03/04 06/07 03/04 06/07 03/04 06/07
Economics 4,960 4,603 29.4% 30.6% 38.1% 41.9% 50.6% 55.2% 49.2% 53.2%
E.European,
Mid-East & 461 597 15.6% 34.3% 36.0% 39.9% 58.2% 58.4% 71.5% 78.4%
Far East
W.European
Lang. and Lit.
4,683 4,755 27.1% 24.6% 34.2% 32.7% 42.1% 45.3% 54.3% 51.6%
Mineral and
Mats.
Technology 1,335 1,541 13.9% 12.2% 24.7% 27.8% 36.6% 39.1% 58.3% –
Engineering
(less Elec. 7,855 5,677 18.0% 18.3% 26.8% 26.8% 41.9% 43.6% 47.2% 52.3%
Eng.)
Mathematical
4,723 5,677 18.7% 16.4% 22.4% 21.1% 32.2% 32.6% 43.5% 41.8%
Sciences
Physical
11,172 12,321 14.7% 14.2% 20.1% 20.4% 29.7% 30.4% 43.7% 43.8%
Sciences
All SIV
35,189 37,898 20.0% 19.0% 26.9% 26.8% 37.6% 39.0% 46.8% 48.0%
subjects
(18.1%) (17.8%)
of all entrants
150 This complementary data is set out in a fuller report: Young undergraduate entrants to UK higher education. The
strengthening relationship between leading universities and independent schools. University of Exeter/HMC, 2009.
342
Source: HESA bespoke data
5. Table 2 shows the reliance in various individual subjects of 30 the top-ranked UK

universities on independent school entrants.
Table: 2. Extent of reliance of leading universities on independent schools for young

undergraduate UCAS (A level/highers) entrants in selected subjects, 2006/07
Total UG entrants: % independent Strategically

Subject top-30 universities* school important and vulnerable
Modern Middle Eastern Studies 63 50% SIV
Economics 2,863 42% SIV
Spanish 632 41% SIV
Russian & East European Studies 142 40% SIV
Medicine and Dentistry 3,717 38%
Italian 204 38% SIV
Religious Studies 826 37%
Japanese, Chinese & Far Eastern
Studies 204 37% SIV
General Engineering 801 36% SIV
History 4,540 32%
Business and Management 4,871 30%
Astronomy, Earth & Ocean
Sciences 3,253 29% SIV
Veterinary Science 425 29%
Mineral and Materials Technology 370 28% SIV
French 1,185 28% SIV
German 494 26% SIV
Mechanical Engineering 1,248 26% SIV
Civil Engineering 1,115 25% SIV
Biology 2,030 25%
Physical Geography 1,668 24% SIV
Sports Science 876 24%
English 3,815 24%
Electronic Engineering 704 23%
Molecular Biology , Biophysics,
Biochem. 973 23% SIV
Law 3,405 21%
Chemistry 2,021 20% SIV
Psychology 2,914 20%
Mathematics 3,664 20% SIV
Microbiology 183 17%
Physics 1,961 17% SIV
Computer Science 1,841 16%
* Under the age of 21, full-time and part-time, UK and ‘overseas’
6. Table 3 shows the proportions among those who enter from independent schools in
relation to the rank of university entered, across two groups of subjects: those that
343
are ‘strategically important and vulnerable’ (SIV); and other selected subjects. From
this table it can be seen that, of this intake:
• over two thirds (68.4%) have a place at a top-30 ranked university; one quarter
(27.5%) at a top-10 ranked university; and 8.1% at Oxbridge;
• over four fifths (84.1%) of all independent school entrants in SIV subjects have a
place at a top-30 ranked university; two fifths (42.9%) at a top-10 ranked university;
and 11.8% at Oxbridge;
• within their respective cohorts, independent school entrants are more than twice as
likely than state school/college entrants to secure a place at one of the top-30
ranked universities; four times more likely to enter a top-10 ranked universities; and
five times more likely to enter Oxbridge.
Table: 3. Proportions of young UCAS (A levels/ highers) entrants from among the
independent school intake embarking on selected undergraduate courses in leading
universities, 2006/07 (%)
Subject grouping --- Proportion of all independent school entrants ---

to UK higher education in that subject
Top-30 Top-10 Top-2
universities universities universities
SIV subject groups*
W. European, Languages and
Literatures 89.4% 41.6% 8.3%
Mathematical Sciences 89.3% 58.0% 18.4%
E. European, Mid-East & Far Eastern
Studies 86.8% 31.2% 19.5%
Economics 85.2% 42.1% 8.8%
Physical sciences 84.4% 44.2% 13.8%
Engineering (less Electronic Eng.) 78.9% 38.5% 11.1%
Minerals and Materials Technology 55.1% 18.7% –
Independent school entrants: all
SIV subjects 84.1% 42.9% 11.8%
Other selected subjects

History 82.0% 33.1% 13.2%
Medicine and Dentistry 79.8% 21.3% 8.1%
Veterinary Sciences 77.6% 34.3% 10.1%
English 75.3% 30.8% 14.1%
Business and Management 46.9% 10.3% 0.7%
Independent school entrants:

all subjects 68.4% 27.5% 8.1%
State school/college entrants
all subjects 30.6% 6.9% 1.5%
* For subjects within SIV groupings, see Appendix I, paragraph 9
Conclusions
7. The leading UK universities have, in recent years, come to resemble more closely than
before the profile of leading independent schools – in terms of demography (a greater
344
reliance on non-UK students) and, especially, financial arrangements (locally-set fees

which they seek to increase and bursary support for needy students).
8. The very strong representation of former independent school students within the UK’s
leading universities is explained by:
• the excellence of their school/college grades; and, within this,
• a high concentration on those subjects that are ‘strategically important and
vulnerable’ (SIV) to the government and to society, in which the leading universities
dominate.
9. The wider research upon which this submission is based 151 established that, during
2003/04-2006/07, across almost all measures, independent school entrants to top-30 UK
universities maintained their relative position. Among top-10 universities independent
school entrants have undoubtedly consolidated and enhanced their position in almost all
areas. This pattern also holds true for entrants to SIV subjects, including STEM.
References
HEFCE (2008) Strategically important and vulnerable subjects. Final Report of the 2008 Advisory
Group. Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council. Available at:
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2008/08_38/08_38.pdf
HEFCE (2005) Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects. Final Report of the Advisory Group.
Bristol: Higher Education Finding Council for England. Available at:
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2005/05_24/
16 December 2011
Appendix 1
Technical aspects of the dataset, including definitions and a note on independent
school pupil numbers in Northern Ireland
1. The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) maintains a database of all students
enrolled on degree courses at UK institutions of higher education, derived from annual
returns made by the institutions. Various analyses of these data are publically available
from HESA website (http://www.hesa.ac.uk/).
2. For the present study, data was commissioned from HESA for student entrants over the
four years 2003/04 to 2006/07 (the most recent available at the time). Entrants chosen
for inclusion in the data were all full and part-time undergraduate entrants under the age
of 21 on 31 August. Within this population, data on students’ educational background
and prior attainment were also sought.
3. HESA Performance Indicator tables 152 report the school and college background of
entrants for UK domiciled students only. In this study data for all ‘young’ undergraduate
entrants was sought on the basis that it would include two further groups of interest to
HMC schools:
• students entering UK higher education institutions from the Channel Isles, the Isle of
Man and other countries such as Hong Kong, Germany and China; and, probably
151 For the rankings used, see Appendix 2.

152 See: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/content/category/2/32/141/.
345
• entrants from families serving in the UK armed forces and diplomatic service, 153 along
with those whose parents are working abroad.
The total population in the dataset of all UG entrants ranges from 321,763 in 2003/04
to 346,440 in 2006/07.
4. It is notable that in HESA data generally, there are large numbers of unknowns for some
of the categories where reasonable completeness might have been expected. Thus, in
the Performance Indicator tables (UK-domiciled entrants aged under 21) there were, in
2006/07, 31,555 full-time UG entrants (11.6%) for whom no data was returned by
institutions for school/college background. 154
5. Both the number and proportion of ‘unknowns’ in the school/college background
category increases when all ‘young’ entrants (i.e. ‘home’ and ‘overseas’, full-time and
part-time) are included. However, some control over the problem of unknowns can be
obtained when the dataset is confined to those students for whom both school
background and UCAS entry levels are known. This comprises a group of 212,784
students entering UK universities who are: domiciled around the world (UK and
overseas); have applied for entry through UCAS, 155 have studied GCE A levels or
Scottish highers 156 and for whom receiving institutions have a returned a record of
school background.
6. It is this population of 212,784 which is the basis for all of the tables used in
this report. Values for this group in terms of the ‘state school’ / ‘independent school’
split were compared with those for: UK-domiciled entrants only; for all entrants for
whom school background is known; and for UK-domiciled entrants for whom school
background and UCAS A level / Scottish highers attainment is known Table A, below. 157
Table A. Undergraduate entrants to UK universities aged under 21, 2006/07:
% independent total number
schools of such entrants
a) ‘All comers’ for whom school background
is known 11.7% 267,292
b) Full-time entrants domiciled in the UK
for whom school background is known 12.3% 241,115
c) ‘All comers’ for whom school
background and UCAS A level / higher
attainment is known 13.9% 212,784
d) Full-time, ‘first degree’ entrants* domiciled
in the UK for whom School background and
UCAS A level / highers attainment is known 15.0% 194,745
* ‘First degree’ = UGs, excluding those on courses leading to Foundation Degrees,
HNC or HND qualifications. With these latter entrants included, the independent
school split is probably nearer to 14%.
Source: HESA 06/07 PI tables: SP2, SP4, T1b: and bespoke data
153 It is not certain how these students are accounted for in terms of domicile, but HESA assumes that most institutions
report the postal address of entrants at their point of entry. Thus, UK families serving abroad are probably mostly to be
found outside the UK-domiciled population used in the Performance Indicator dataset.
154 HESA 2009b (Table T1b: ‘Participation of under-represented groups in higher education: Young full-time undergraduate
entrants’; and Table SP2: ‘Young entrants to full-time first degree courses by subject and entry qualifications 2006/07’).
155 In 2006 there were 45,363 overseas undergraduate entrants to UK universities accepted through UCAS, the highest
number being from China (4,502), followed by the Republic of Ireland (2,675), France (2,388) and Hong Kong (2,360),
UCAS 2007.
156 See paragraph 8, below.
157 Including Applied A levels (from 2005) and, earlier, GNVQ and VCE (Vocational Certificate of Education) awards.
346
7. From these data (item (a), minus item (b)), we can conclude that in 2006/07 there were
26,177 entrants domiciled from beyond the UK, or part-time and UK-domiciled, for
whom institutions recorded school background (a mix UK and non-UK schools /colleges
being reported). By selecting dataset (c) in Table A we are able best to report data
beyond the UK relevant to HMC schools, and do so by prior attainment. The trend data
contained in the report is as reliable as the consistency with which the higher education
institutions undertake the annual census of entrants.
8. Full-time entrants holding Baccalaureate qualifications are not included in any of the data
in this report. This omission probably has little effect on the overall independent school
/ state school proportions itemised in this report, as in 2006/07 there were only 1,455
entrants domiciled in the UK holding baccalaureate qualifications and 58% of these had
attended state schools or colleges. 158
9. The following definitions used in the data are those which form the basis for all tables
in the report.
Entry years and participation: those entering in the autumn of 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006
and who were enrolled on 1 December of the relevant year, excluding those
withdrawing within two weeks of commencing their course.
Age: under 21 at 31 August of the relevant year.
Subject areas: as recorded by HESA’s Joint Academic Coding System (JACS), comprising
19 broad subject areas and 159 principal subjects. Under apportionment, each
headcount is, where necessary, divided in a way that in broad-brush terms reflects the
pattern of a split programme. This is analogous to the use of FTE calculations, but
should not be confused with them, since the splits used for apportionment are
conventional rather than data-based.
School/college background: this is taken from data held about the previous institution
attended. All schools or colleges that are not denoted ‘independent’ are assumed to be
state schools. This means that students from sixth-form or further education colleges,
for example, are included as being from state schools.
UCAS tariff points: the score for all qualifications, less any duplicates in subjects taken at
different levels (e.g. AS plus A2 equals one qualification with only the full A level grade
being counted). HESA publishes the following guidance on the nature of this data:
‘Each year, UCAS calculates a total tariff score for each student in the application
process based on data provided to them by the examination boards. These tariff
scores are sent to the HE institutions to which the student is applying.
Unfortunately, as some qualification data is not returned to UCAS, the total tariff
score is not always representative of a student's achievements. To minimise this
occurrence, HESA recommended that HE institutions attempt to augment the total
tariff score by adding in tariff scores for qualifications that were not received by
UCAS. In practice, some institutions have added additional qualifications to their
students’ total tariff scores and some have not. As a result student tariff data is less
comparable across the sector. To increase comparability, we are able to deduct
these augmented tariff scores from the total tariff score field.’
158 HESA 2009g (Table SP2: ‘Young entrants to full-time first degree courses by subject and entry qualifications 2006/07’;
and Table SP4: ‘Percentage of young entrants to full-time first degree courses from state schools by subject and entry’).
347
Split enrolments: the HESA Student Record contains information about individual
enrolments, which, because a student can be enrolled on more than one programme of
study, will exceed the number of students. Postdoctoral students are not included in
the HESA Student Record.
Rounding strategy: Due to the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 and the
Human Rights Act 1998, HESA implements a strategy in published and released
tabulations designed to prevent the disclosure of personal information about any
individual. This strategy involves rounding all numbers to the nearest multiple of 5. This
rounding strategy is also applied to total figures, the consequence of which is that the
sum of numbers in each row or column rarely matches the total shown precisely.
Strategically important and vulnerable subjects. In most tables, subjects are reported by the
relevant HESA JACS (Joint Academic Coding System) code. In some tables, such as
those reporting on ‘strategically important and vulnerable’ subjects, subject groups are
represented. These groupings (with the relevant JACS code) are:
Medicine and Dentistry (A1 , A2, A3, A4 and A9)
Biological Sciences (C0, C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7, C8 and C9)
Veterinary Sciences (D1, D2 and D3)
Physical Sciences (F0, F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, F6, F7, F8 and F9)
Mathematical Sciences (G1, G2, G3 and G91)
Computing Sciences (G4, G5, G6, G7, G9, and G92)
Engineering (H0, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, H7, H8 and H9)
Mineral and Materials Technologies (J1, J2, J3, J4, J5, J6, J7and J9)
Western European languages and Literatures (R1, R2, R3, R4, R5, R6 and R9)
Eastern European, Mid-East & Far Eastern Studies (R7, T1, T2, T3, T4 and T6)
Business and Management Studies (N1, N2, N4 and N5)
10. A note on the number of independent school pupils in Northern Ireland over the age of
4 (main report, paragraph 2.1). Definitions of independent schooling around the world
are not clear cut. For example, the OECD distinguishes between two kinds of
independent school: those receiving less than 50% of their core funding from
government agencies and those receiving more but not managed by the government.
Official figures in Northern Ireland for 2007/08 show there to be 821 independent
school pupils in the province in 17 schools, all but three with less than 60 pupils on
roll. 159 However, there were also in Northern Ireland eight other schools in
membership of the ISC, but grant-aided by the government. In calculating the figure of
7,159 pupils for 2007/08 included in Table 2.1:
• two of these ISC schools were excluded (both of which were charging the parents of
pupils only nominal enrolment fees);
• the remaining ISC member schools were included (all charging at least some pupils
full fees);
• the number under the age of 5 (excluded from the table in paragraph 4.1) was
estimated in line with the proportion for all ISC member schools;
• pupil numbers for the ISC member schools taken from their websites in August 2009
were adjusted for the overall difference in the school population in 2007/08
compared to 2008/09.
159 DENI: 2009 and email communication from DENI
348
The resulting proportion of independent school pupils for Northern Ireland (2.2%) is in
line with that identified by the OECD (Jenkins et al., 2006: 22).
References
DENI (2009) Schools and pupils in Northern Ireland 1991/92 to 2008/09. Belfast: Department
of Education Northern Ireland. Available at: http://www.deni.gov.uk/index/32-
statisticsandresearch_pg/32-
statistics_and_research_statistics_on_education_pg/32_statistics_and_research-
numbersofschoolsandpupils_pg/32_statistics_and_research-
northernirelandsummarydata_pg.htm
HESA (2009a) Performance Indicators tables. Cheltenham: Higher Education Statistics
Agency. Available at: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/content/category/2/32/141/
HESA (2009b) PIs 2006/07: Sector data. Cheltenham: Higher Education Statistics Agency.
Available at: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/content/view/1188/141/
UCAS (2007) Media release: Final figures for 2006 entry. Cheltenham: Universities and
College Admissions Service. 18 January. Available at:
http://www.ucas.com/website/news/media_releases/2007/2007-01-18-
final2006figures11?callingPage=/about_us/media_enquiries/media_releases/&pageNum=
Appendix 2
In this submission data is presented for the 30 highest-ranked universities in the Times 2010
Good University Guide.
The Times Good University Guide 2010: the 30 highest ranked universities
Rank UG entrants Average UCAS Membership
2006/07* points 2007/08 organisation
1 Oxford 3,175 524 Russell Group
2 Cambridge 3,218 539 Russell Group
3 Imperial College 2,084 489 Russell Group
4 St Andrews 2,065 468 1994 Group
5 University College
London 3,367 452 Russell Group
6 Warwick 3,978 463 Russell Group
7 London School of
Economics 1,190 483 Russell Group
8 Durham 3,361 459 1994 Group
9 Exeter 2,993 394 1994 Group
10 Bristol 3,440 447 Russell Group
11 York 2,255 434 1994 Group
12 Kings College London 2,733 415 Russell Group
13 Bath 2,356 440 1994 Group
14 Edinburgh 3,716 447 Russell Group
15 Leicester 2,034 360 1994 Group
15 Southampton 3,870 407 Russell Group
17 Loughborough 3,193 368 1994 Group
18 Sheffield 4,189 406 Russell Group
19 Glasgow 3,528 412 Russell Group
20 Nottingham 5,755 408 Russell Group
21 Newcastle 3,985 405 Russell Group
349
22 Birmingham 4,618 403 Russell Group

23 Lancaster 3,029 388 1994 Group
24 Manchester 6,553 412 Russell Group
25 Aston 1,909 365 None
26 Cardiff 4,512 394 Russell Group
27 Leeds 6,244 392 Russell Group
28 Liverpool 3,731 387 Russell Group
28 East Anglia 2,779 361 1994 Group
30 Royal Holloway 1,903 365 1994 Group
* All undergraduate entrants under the age of 21, full-time and part-time, UK and ‘overseas’
Source: The Times, 2009; bespoke HESA data
350
Heads of Departments of Mathematical Sciences (HoDoMS) – Written evidence
Heads of Departments of Mathematical Sciences (HoDoMS) –

Written evidence
HoDoMS is the collective of departmental heads of Mathematical Sciences in UK Higher

Education. Heads are a key influence in the provision of learning and teaching of
Mathematical Sciences at degree level and also in providing support for the wider STEM
community and other academic areas. They also often lead in decisions on degree
programmes and research directions within their departments. HoDoMS supports over 100
heads of departments which are either specialist in Mathematical Sciences or multi-
disciplinary involving Mathematics.
UNDERGRADUATE SUPPLY
1. Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU
and overseas) sufficient to meet the needs of industry, the research base, and
other sectors not directly connected with STEM?
1.1 The numbers of mathematics students has been growing in recent

years following the down turn in 2000 when new A- level syllabuses
were introduced, which caused a major collapse in recruitment. The
popularity of both “specialist” mathematics and “mathematics with” courses have
both grown throughout this period. The complementary disciplines that
constitute the “with options” has gradually changed over the last decade
towards, for example, Business and Finance at the expense of the more
traditional options such as Computer Science and Physics.
1.2 The emphasis of the questioning appears to target 18-21 years old
students on their first degree, whereas reskilling/retraining of the
existing adult population could also be an important part of a more
immediate solution to supply problems in teaching or other areas. The
Equivalent or Lower Level Qualifications (ELQ) funding issues are a serious
obstacle for progress on this front.
2. Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently

2.1 The obvious should be stated – there is a great range of quality in

output of graduates from HEIs. The last decade has seen a major growth in
the undergraduate population in Higher Education across all disciplines and that
has brought a change in the content of undergraduate courses, and the way in
which the learning and knowledge gained is tested and examined.
2.2 The band of top quality students is still there but institutions have had
to adapt their curricula to accommodate the increasingly wide ability
range of the large population of undergraduate students in mathematics
(as a percentage of the year cohort). The changes have meant that for many
Mathematical Sciences undergraduates, the content of their curriculum has
become more algorithmic and less theoretical particularly for the majority of
students who take a degree with only a single A-level in Mathematics, despite the
increasing popularity of “Further Mathematics”.
351
2.3 Clearly if HEIs were to provide a meaningful undergraduate

experience from which the increasing numbers of graduates could
benefit, and progress, then a change of bias from some of the more
challenging theory to a more practical approach was always likely to
be the case. This easing of content has been counterbalanced by the
requirements of the increasingly demanding types of assessment and progression
that are used within undergraduate programmes.
2.4 Employers demand that students not only have subject specific skills
but also generic skills that are important in the work place such as team
working skills, communication skills, time-management skills. Consequently
mathematics degrees have evolved to assess these skills albeit in a context
related way as well as assessing theoretical knowledge.
3. Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it
3.1 There is year-on-year evidence that mathematics graduates are in

demand 160 . Their exposure to problem solving and the identification of the
relevant facts in the pursuit of a solution are important generic skills for the
workplace.
4. Comments on: "Government will free around 85,000 student numbers from current controls
in 2012/13 by allowing unrestrained recruitment of the roughly 65,000 high-achieving students,
scoring the equivalent of AAB or above at A-Level and creating a flexible margin of 20,000
places to reward universities and colleges who combine good quality with value for money and
whose average charge (including waivers) is at or below £7,500."
4.1 Mathematics may not be affected greatly by the core-and-margin

funding model. The UK already has a wide variety of university departments
offering a broad range of mathematics degree programmes: some will be well
managed and will survive, while others will flounder. A real risk to
mathematical sciences departments would be that the Department for
Education decides to make A-level mathematics harder (e.g. as was the
case with Curriculum 2000) and that this significantly reduces the proportion of
students who obtain an A grade.
4.2 HESA evidence 161 at (Table SP2 (e.g. 2009/10)) enables an estimate of the
proportion across the UK of entrants in each subject with AAB+ grades. For
particular subjects this gives 2009/10 data as follows:
Medicine/Dentistry/Vet. Sci. 88% Computer Science 6%

Biological Sciences 17% Law 28%
Physical Sciences 30% Languages 37%
Mathematical Sciences 47% Education 6%
Mathematical Sciences is in the upper-middle by this statistic, which indicates that

– a lot of good students do decide to take maths. It is not perceived as being
expensive to teach and can be given a variety of slants, both vocational and
160 http://www.milkround.com
161 http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2060&Itemid=141
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academic. In conclusion, there is little incentive for most universities to

reduce mathematics quotas or close mathematics departments
directly because of the core-and-margin model.
4.3 However, there is concern for the ‘squeezed middle’ of universities where good
students may get “hoovered up” by universities higher up the chain and
recruitment will suffer. The policy will have some negative consequences
for universities recruiting just below the AAB level.
4.4 It is arguable that the 'flexible margin of 20000' places will need to be adjusted
with each reduction in the core allocation that resulted from the high A-level
allocation. Otherwise, participation in higher education in mathematics
could be narrowed by creating a virtual entry requirement far above
the A level grades of most applicants.
4.5 It is currently common for mathematics departments to set a lower entry tariff
for students studying both Mathematics and Further Mathematics (for example, a
student studying a single mathematics A-level may receive an offer of AAB,
whereas one studying both mathematics and further mathematics may receive an
AA offer). Such an approach may fall foul of a national AAB policy: an
unintended consequence of the AAB policy might be to reduce the
incentive to take a Further Mathematics A level.
5. Comments on: “The potential for employers or others to offer sponsorship of individual
places outside of student number controls. How would such a move impact upon the
mathematical sciences; is it likely employers would support such provision?”
5.1 The HEFCE funded More Maths Grads (2007-2010) endeavoured to increase
employers’ interest in sponsorship but it was tough going, with strong regional
variations. Similarly, the current HE STEM programme appears to struggle with
the areas of work-based learning and employer engagement. There are very
few employers who are prepared to put substantial efforts into giving
time to partnerships with universities or to provide substantial
funding for individual students (the decline of the apprenticeship and
increasing “short-term” ism in industry may be affecting this). It tends to be
individual professionals with an interest in mathematics, or professional bodies,
who devote the time to creating links. Universities frequently invest a lot of
effort for minimal return!
5.2 There is much more potential for sponsorship in the Engineering
sector where there are big employers. It is less clear how well this will
work for mathematics, where employment opportunities are more diverse.
There is little evidence that financial institutions will be interested in sponsoring
any but a few Oxbridge or top Russell Group places. Few companies outside
the financial sector employ mathematicians in large numbers, so we will have to
put resources into courting many different employers, with a corresponding
loss of efficiency.
6. Comments on: “Increase the flexibility on student numbers for quality courses charging
less than £7500 fee? Is quality mathematics provision realistically deliverable for a fee of
less than £7,500?”
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6.1 The pressure to remain effective in teaching undergraduates with

reduced funding will lead to cutting staff involvement (just as in any
other organization). Cost cutting will surely involve more delivery of training
and less of education. A good education in mathematics, as with other subjects,
requires engaged teaching staff with a passion for, and a deep understanding of,
their subject.
7. What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching,
institutions?
7.1 There has been retrenchment in some universities across STEM

subjects in recent years, particularly in Physics departments. Such
departments are relatively expensive to maintain requiring laboratories,
specialist equipment and the associated technical support. Although there will
be extra funding for such subjects, it is unlikely that this funding is sufficient to
meet the extra costs and there may be a continuing pressure to reduce delivery
of laboratory-based subjects.
8. What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop
8.1 It may have an indirect effect – there is encouragement for staff to follow
funding with increased involvement in inter-disciplinary research – this can only
broaden the horizons of the lecturer to see new opportunities in inter-
disciplinary topics at degree level.
9. What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary

for all universities to teach undergraduates and postgraduates and
9.1 Universities traditionally supported a symbiotic relationship between

research and teaching. Recent governments have widened the definition of
university and allowed a weaker link than hitherto existed, especially in many of
the newer university institutions.
9.2 In more advanced teaching modules (typically in the 3rd and 4th years of an
undergraduate degree), teaching staff frequently need to be research-active in
order to be sufficiently knowledgeable, and possess a deep enough
understanding, to present the topic in a way that ensures relevance for the
students and enables sufficient context to be given in order to aid
understanding.
10. Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education

10.1 There could well be contraction of high-cost sciences in the coming

financial retrenchment. Physics departments have already
experienced this in the last decade. This may result in regional “deserts”
for some STEM subjects, meaning that students of such subjects may not be able
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to choose to live at home whilst studying with the result of increasing costs and
reducing attractiveness (to such students), cf. 7.1.
11. What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of
background?
11.1 Major HEFCE initiatives have mobilized recruitment of undergraduates and

outreach, e.g. More maths grads 162 , see also MathsCareers 163 .
11.2 Imporving information on what a university mathematics degree can lead to
in the jobs market has been important. Realizing that a mathematics degree is
broadening in many ways (and not narrowing, which is still a common
perception) and develops useful work skills has been a key message. After
career-specific degrees, it is one of the most sought disciplines in the
employment market. The increasing popularization of science and mathematics
on television is probably useful for recruitment. However, bad experiences at
School can mean many years before individuals consider further studies in
mathematics: this highlights the need to ensure that teachers of
mathematics (and other STEM subjects) have relevant qualifications
themselves.
POSTGRADUATE SUPPLY
12. Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers
12.1 Increasingly so. What was very much a private collaboration between staff
and students on a research topic a decade ago is now scrutinized at both
subject and university level with expectations of milestones which cover both
the academic and the general skills agenda. Research Councils require all PhD
students to acquire generic employability skills in addition to the subject-specific
skills that they develop during their studies. In an effort to ensure that students
have an opportunity to increase their breadth of knowledge and are not limited
to the expertise available within their departments, consortia such as MAGIC 164
have been set up, which enable teaching staff from other institutions to share
their knowledge.
13. Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to

maintain the research base and are they of sufficient quality? What
impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of
13.1 The highest ranking university departments almost certainly have the largest
number of postgraduate students – this shows the importance of a strong
162 http://www.moremathsgrads.org.uk/_db/_documents/MMG_FinalReport.pdf
163 www.mathscareers.org.uk/
164 The MAGIC group is a consortium of 19 maths departments who organize postgraduate-level lecture courses in
mathematics. These are given using Access Grid videoconferencing technology, and so allow specialized courses to be
taken by students who are distributed widely across institutions.
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postgraduate student community to a successful research environment. This is

lacking in many departments.
13.2 The DTCs are perceived to be successful, but are also seen to have reduced
the supply of EPSRC funding for postgraduates in non-DTC departments. So
overall, most departments feel a real loss to their research culture as a result of
the concentration of students in only a few departments and fewer in their own.
13.3 Increased concentration of funding to only a few specified DTCs will
inevitably have the effect over time of reducing the breadth of mathematical
research within the UK and it assumes that the Research Councils are able to
correctly predict which topics will be of importance in the future. This risk was
highlighted in the EPSRC-commissioned 2010 International Review of
Mathematical Sciences 165 , which emphasised (in Section 4 of the report) the
importance of maintaining a diverse research base.
14. Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the
balance right between the number of Masters degree students and PhD
students?
14.1 The impact from the increase in undergraduate fees and an assumption of
(eventually) matching increases in MSc fees is likely to have a negative impact on
postgraduate numbers. The potential decrease in student recruitment may be
mitigated to some extent by students seeking extra qualifications to differentiate
themselves in a difficult jobs market A potential way forward would be to
extend the current funding for the 4-year Master of Science degree to the 3-
year +1 year combination of a BSc + MSc.
15. What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of
15.1 The willingness of graduates to pursue a research career will depend on their
perception of succeeding in achieving a permanent research/academic post that
is sufficiently well-rewarded to offset the uncertainty and time required to
achieve one.
15.2 A major concern is that applicants for academic posts from some countries
are able to develop their university research CV in a number of temporary
posts in their own country much more easily than is the case in the UK166 . For
example, Germany is a prime example where there are many temporary
appointments and, by contrast, permanent posts are relatively few. By
comparison, young UK postgraduate students struggle to get the several post-
doctoral positions they may need to establish themselves in research. As a
result the UK has incredibly strong research Mathematics
departments with many high quality staff from Europe and overseas,
but the recruitment has been at some cost to our home grown talent.
The very best of British students can usually survive this impasse, but
other highly competent researchers lose out.
165 Available from:

http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Publications/reports/InternationalReviewOfMathematicalSciences.pdf
166 Also highlighted in the 2010 International Review of Mathematical Sciences.
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16. What lessons can be learnt from the provision of HE in STEM subjects in
other countries? Which countries provide the most helpful examples of
best practice?
16.1 In many European countries the approach is that anyone can take
the mathematics university programmes, but many do not see it
through to completion! This process is seen as a mark of the maintenance of
high standards and personal student responsibility for their own progress. This
is diametrically opposite to the UK system where universities are effectively
paid to progress students and in which a disaffected student has a platform to
criticize the lecturer, the programme, the department, and potentially the
university. The competing philosophies are totally different in both culture and
financing. In that sense we may be able to learn, but not in an incremental way.
16.2 It is plausible that our day-to-day teaching and support provision for
undergraduate students is currently superior to that provided by many of our
European counterparts. However we are probably delivering less in terms of
theoretical rigour, and more in terms of developing and realizing the potential
of our students.
15 December 2011
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Higher Education Academy – Written evidence
Background
1. The Higher Education Academy (HEA) is a UK-wide organisation owned by Universities
UK and GuildHE which supports the higher education sector in providing the best
possible learning experience for all students. Guided by the sector, we have prioritised
four areas of activity where we believe we can make the biggest impact, and best realise
our mission to improve opportunities and outcomes for all students:
− Helping to improve the quality of learning and teaching practice by
providing a structured framework and resources to underpin professional
development and by supporting a vibrant and professional learning culture across
the sector;
− Supporting leaders and managers to develop an organisational culture
and infrastructure within which student and staff learning can thrive, and in
which change is managed confidently and creatively;
− Responding quickly and intelligently to the most urgent and significant
strategic issues and contemporary challenges that the sector is facing,
supporting the sector to react wisely and decisively during times of
unprecedented change and acting as a national voice to positively influence
change;
− Underpinning all of the above with high quality and rigorous research and
evidence and applying this insight to enhance policy and practice.
2. STEM INTRO
The HEA has recently undergone an organisational restructure. There is now a

dedicated STEM team which look after promoting learning and teaching development in
STEM subjects. The group is headed by Dr Janet De Wilde, and includes eight discipline
leads, an academic lead and five academic development officers. They all have STEM
backgrounds and are experts in their disciplines and have contributed to this response.
General questions
3. There has been a long-standing understanding that STEM incorporates mathematics,
statistics, the traditional sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology, alongside
technology-based subjects such as computer science and engineering. The HEA adopts a
broader definition of STEM subjects covering eight broad areas in its STEM team. These
include 1) Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research 2) Physical Sciences 3)
Engineering, 4) Biosciences, 5) Computing 6) Built Environment, 7) Psychology, 8)
Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES). This wider base of subjects as
recognised by HEA STEM is sensible from an economic perspective. The important
skills in STEM relate to numeracy and an ability to generate, understand and analyse
empirical data including statistical and critical analysis; a working knowledge of
computer hardware, software, programming; and an understanding of scientific and
mathematical principles. STEM subjects also share an emphasis on problem solving –
applying the theoretical knowledge of the subject to a practical problem in the everyday
world, to find innovative and creative solutions. All of these characteristics of STEM
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subjects are shared by the subjects included in HEA STEM. This broader definition of
STEM also has the advantage of allowing recognition of these skills amongst existing
graduates.
4. The HEA considers a STEM job to be one that requires and utilises one or a range of
the high level skills in numeracy, analytical skills, statistical skills, mathematical principles,
scientific principles, engineering, technology knowledge, computing programming, and
highly skilled applications of computing. As a consequence of this definition there are
many STEM jobs in non-STEM industries.
• Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used
to influence supply?
5. The demand for STEM graduates may be interpreted on the basis of the needs of STEM
employers however it has been observed that many STEM graduates end up in non-
STEM jobs. The HEA considers that the STEM skills of numeracy, analytical ability and
technology capability are skills required by a wide range of employers from all sectors
including corporate, industrial, civil service, NHS and others. The demand is much
greater than would be expected by looking at purely STEM sector employers.
6. Inducement into STEM-related study in higher education (HE) is by the promotion of

the range and diverse nature of future employment and identifying the appropriate
levels of remuneration. There is also the promotion of academic stimulation from
studying and applying knowledge from a STEM discipline to make a difference on global
problems, for example energy, climate change, population
7. The HEA is aware that there is real concern in the computing community about the
standing and funding of computing in HE, which contrasts with a speech made recently
by the Prime Minister: “we're not doing enough to teach the next generation of
programmers. One of the things you hear from the businesses here in Tech City is ‘I
don’t just want people who are literate in technology, I want people who want to
create [computer] programs’, and I think that’s a real wake up call for us in terms of
our education system” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15916677). The
approach to IT in schools has confused students understanding of computing as a STEM
discipline.
16-18 supply
• Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and
do they have the right skills to study STEM first degrees?
8. The HEA acknowledges that school/college curriculum and experience plays a
fundamental role in ensuring that students choose STEM subjects and that they enter
university with the correct skills. A report from the Russell Group in 2009 highlighted
the low supply of STEM students from schools
(http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/uploads/STEM-briefing.pdf).
9. The HEA recommends consideration of The Advisory Committee on Mathematics

Education (ACME) report on the mathematical needs project. This examined the
number of people that should study maths beyond 16 by looking at courses in HE that
require some mathematics beyond GCSE/Standard Grade.(http://www.acme-
uk.org/news/news-items-repository/2011/6/launch-of-the-acme-mathematical-needs-
project)
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10. The HEA recommends consideration of The Nuffield Foundation report on “Is the UK
an outlier?” This reports on a range of countries against what proportion study
mathematics beyond 16, unfortunately England/Wales are last in the table.
(http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/uk-outlier-upper-secondary-maths-education)
11. In particular the decline in the skills base of students entering University with A-level
Mathematics over the last few decades has been well documented. It is recognised that
currently students coming through, for example, a traditional A-level route can achieve
high grades by being able to complete routine, highly structured questions; they are
considerably less able to attempt unfamiliar problems. The HEA Engineering Subject
Centre published an article in 2007 which highlights the lack of mathematical skills in
students entering engineering degrees
(http://www.engsc.ac.uk/journal/index.php/ee/article/viewArticle/62/97).
12. In general the HEA is very aware of transition problems into university and is working
with the sector to facilitate dialogue. The HEA is currently initiating a project called
Tackling Transition with the National Science Learning Centre. The aim is to bring
school teachers and university lecturers together to discuss the issues especially around
skills gaps. This project will start with psychology but will cover the HEA range of STEM
subjects as it is rolled out.
• What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake
of STEM subjects at advanced level?
13. The HEA is conscious of a range of government initiatives that encourage people to
enter university and to study STEM subjects. It has been fully supportive of these and
acknowledges their success; in particular the HE STEM programme (www.hestem.ac.uk)
and the Aimhigher programme (www.aimhigher.ac.uk).
14. Initiatives, such as the HEFCE funded “more maths grads” project 2007-2010, managed
by the HEA’s MSOR subject centre, have sought to increase the number of students
studying Mathematics. Work, as part of the project, included increasing awareness
amongst teachers and pupils of the career opportunities which are available to those
who study Mathematics. Following a dip in the number of students studying A-level
Mathematics, in recent years the numbers have been continually rising. In recent years
opportunities for studying A-level Further Mathematics have increased significantly, as a
result of initiatives such as the Further Mathematics Support Programme.
15. When considering computing, although there has been a recent upturn, the number of
students studying computing at university has fallen by almost 50% in the last ten years.
Many people put this down to the poor school curriculum which emphasises the use of
ICT (databases, spreadsheets) rather than programming skills. It is considered by many
to be boring and demotivating. There is considerable work in this area headed by
ComputingAtSchool in collaboration with the British Computer Society
(www.computingatschool.org.uk).
• What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of
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16. The HEA is aware that there is concern over the English Baccalaureate not leading to
any uptake in science subjects ( www.cbi.org.uk/media-centre/press-
releases/2011/08/cbi-calls-for-automatic-opt-in-for-triple-science-gcse/)
17. Whilst the Baccalaureate is likely to widen the skills base so that students have a
broader but more general level of education which gives future flexibility it is not
necessarily addressing the need of STEM subjects.
Graduate supply
• Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU
18. Studying HESA statistics, there has been growth in the uptake of STEM subjects.
However, as discussed previously, there is a wide range of employers competing to take
the most able of these students. The HEA believes that there is a need to increase the
number of STEM graduates which will support developments required in the knowledge
economy.
• Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education

19. The HEA recognises that quality of STEM graduates is maintained by the high
expectations of meeting professional body accreditation.
20. The HEA has worked extensively in the area of employability (see
http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/employability).
21. STEM graduates are noted for being numerate, and problem solvers – and are therefore
attractive to almost any sector of employment. This is an issue because STEM
employers are often not offering well-paid career introductions and progression paths
that could compete with commerce and business sectors.
22. From the National Student Survey scores the HEA is aware that there is an issue for
some STEM graduates that they do not receive adequate communication and other
generic skills. Whilst academics collectively recognise the value of the development of
subject knowledge and understanding and some very good work is undertaken in HE
institutions to assist students in developing graduate level attributes and skills, not all
academics recognise the need for a degree programme to allocate time to the
development of students’ wider skills for employability. Yet, these generic skills are the
ones upon which the majority of employers place the key emphasis.
23. Further evidence of lack of appropriate skills can be seen in Computing graduates.
Whilst the number of graduates in Computing is increasing and demand for graduates
with computing skills is growing, Computing graduates continue to have very high
unemployment rates. This suggests that many of those that are graduating do not have
the skills required by the industry. It is generally accepted that Computing students do
not have the communication and business awareness skills that are required by industry
and as seen in David Cameron’s speech, there is also growing concern that many
Computing graduates are now lacking programming skills.
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24. Geography is a popular A level subject with a strong recruitment profile in most
universities. Geography is sometimes offered as a stand-alone degree but also in
combination with other subject disciplines. Graduates are seen as being employable due
to a mix of numerical and literacy skills. Geology and Environmental sciences struggle
more with recruitment, though at postgraduate Masters level employability from some
Geology courses is exceptionally high (e.g. those going into mineral exploration). A
GEES degree will provide strong training in data analysis and statistics, field research and
laboratory methods, and will encourage students to undertake significant independent
research. In Environmental science the required grades for entry onto undergraduate
courses have traditionally been lower. Careers in environmental consulting pay well, but
in conservation are very poorly paid, which could explain the number of STEM
graduates who do not go into STEM jobs. Similarly the numerical skills gained in a GEES
degree mean that graduates are able to secure jobs in a wide range of career
trajectories, such as accounting. Hybrid rather than full STEM funding for Geography on
degree courses is jeopardising places in some universities who need to reduce student
intake.
• What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching,
institutions?
25. The HEA works extensively on the promotion on quality of teaching and the learning
experience. The HEA recently commissioned a report by Grahams Gibbs on
Dimensions of Quality
(http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/evidence_informed_practice/Dimension
s_of_Quality.pdf). The report emphasises the relationship between quality with such
factors as class size and contact hours and others. Hence higher education reforms in
England, and the increased emphasis on the publication of data through key information
sets, could provide the opportunity for a renewed focus on the importance of teaching.
If teaching is really to be valued in the same way as research, the career structure
within universities needs to change so that there is an increase in the promotional
opportunities which are available to good teachers.
26. The HEA promotes professional development and accreditation of teaching through its
recently re-launched UK Professional Standards Framework
(http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ukpsf).
• What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary for

all universities to teach undergraduates and post graduates and conduct
research? What other delivery model should be considered?
27. The HEA embraces the teaching/research nexus which provides a healthy and vibrant
environment in HE. It is highly desirable for HE institutions to both teach and undertake
research. The removal of research from some institutions would, in time, lead to a
marked two-tier system. Students benefit from an undergraduate curriculum which is
informed by research and gain valuable insight into research methods by being taught by
active researchers. In many disciplines some element of undergraduate research is
included. Research methods are used widely by undergraduates in Statistics.
28. In general students need to be equipped with cutting edge knowledge, and also find
learning about these aspects of their subjects inspiring and motivating. To facilitate
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students entering into research, they are more likely to do so if they have role models
at undergraduate level who are actively advancing their subjects. Not every academic
who teaches needs to be research active, but there is a need for at least advanced
scholarship of the subject, and there is a need for research activity to be undertaken by
at least a significant proportion of the academic staff teaching on a course.

29. The MSOR Subject Benchmark Statement (2007) recognises a rich variety in the nature
and content of degree programmes in the mathematical sciences. Professor Nigel
Steele’s report “Keeping HE Maths where it Counts”
(http://www.cms.ac.uk/reports/2007/steele_report.pdf) has also highlighted the
importance of location of HE institutions offering Mathematics degree programmes. In
particular, it draws attention to the impact this has on students wishing to travel from
home to their place of study. The closure of an institution, or even the discontinuation
of a discipline within an institution, can have a profound impact on the outreach
activities which are accessible to school pupils in a given location. It is inevitable that
this could impact on the uptake of STEM subjects.
30. The HEA is also aware that the Royal Society of Chemistry has expressed concerns
about the lack of geographical spread of chemistry degrees.
• What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of
background?
31. In the HEA definition of STEM there is a wide variation of uptake in terms of gender
and diversity, for example in physics the uptake is approximately 20% female whilst in
the biological sciences the range is approximately 50-60% and in Psychology it is 70-80%
(data from HESA statistics for 2009-2010). Psychology also has a higher proportion of
disabled students than many other subjects (see Craig and Zinckiewicz, 2010, Inclusive
practice within psychology higher education, published by HEA Psychology Network).
32. The HEA believes that to increase the diversity within STEM, there needs to be culture
change within the lecture theatres and within the workplace. For instance, in the
physical sciences, the HEA has recognised the excellent work on changing culture in
undergraduate physics degrees as demonstrated by Professor Simon Bates team in the
University of Edinburgh see (http://www2.ph.ed.ac.uk/elearning/contacts/). His team has
researched and applied the use of Personal Response systems as a tool for interactive
engagement in large lectures. They have demonstrated that their adopted methodology
which enables debate and interaction in large group male dominated lectures not only
greatly increases the attainment of female students but also the whole class. The HEA
has funded a workshop to highlight this inclusive culture changing approach to others
and is in negotiation to look at further dissemination methods. Such approaches need to
be adopted more widely across the UK.
• Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to
33. A significant number on STEM PhDs are from overseas; they will benefit personally, the
project will be good and hopefully part of a larger programme at an HEI, but the
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researcher on completion is likely to return to their home country with a significantly

higher standing than if they remain in the UK.
34. In Biological sciences, the HEA understands that many biological scientists believe that
there is a definite place and purpose for one-year and two-year taught/research
postgraduate programmes that provide advanced learning without necessarily requiring
the commitment and extreme specialisation of doctoral programmes.
35. Psychology postgraduate training often culminates in a professional doctorate, rather

than a PhD. This prepares the postgraduate student for research, but also for
professional practice within e.g. the health service, prison service, and educational
system. From psychology graduates 20% pursue careers in professional psychology,
whilst 80% seek other careers. There is some postgraduate training relevant to these
graduates, including the PhD route, but as this does not prepare them for careers in
psychology due to lack of accreditation (HPC), it tends to be either research focussed
or more generic in its emphasis (e.g. finance/accounting, human resources, marketing
etc). Demand for professional psychology postgraduate training is high and extremely
competitive. There is scope for provision of postgraduate training for psychology
graduates to prepare students for alternative careers in areas that traditionally seek
STEM graduates.

36. The HEA is aware that there is serious concern that the reforms may have an
unintended consequence of reducing the number of graduates willing to undertake
research qualifications and hence a research career. In particular, the new fee regime
and the consequent rise in student debt, is predicted to have a deleterious effect on
PGT and PGR enrolment for UK students.
37. A report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England shows that the
growth in international students taking up postgraduate places in science, technology,
engineering and mathematic subjects is far outstripping that among their UK
counterparts.
Industry
them?
38. The HEA recognises that direct engagement of industry with students is ideal and there
is a range of options that would attract graduates including; sponsorship and bursaries
during study, followed by an inclusive culture, clear and progressive career paths,
attractive contracts and salaries during employment.
39. To address the gender imbalance in STEM careers it is important that the government
supports initiatives such as the recent Talent2030 launch (http://www.talent2030.org/)
which aims to increase the number of females in engineering careers. The Talent2030
identified that mainland Europe is more successful in recruiting and retaining women in
engineering disciplines. Whilst the launch placed an emphasis on ‘getting young girls to
see’ engineering as an option, the HEA believes that a greater emphasis should be
364
placed on the responsibility of industry for culture change within the workplace to
ensure that women who have chosen STEM careers are retained in the industry.
40. Considering this by subject areas; in physical sciences the subjects are somewhat
different in relation to how closely aligned they are to specific industries. Chemistry is
closest with industry employing a significant proportion of graduates. One could argue
that forensic science is similar although the critical difference here is that far fewer
graduates are employed, both in absolute terms and certainly as a proportion of the
total produced that funders are increasingly favouring doctoral degree programmes
over master's programmes. For example, the BBSRC and NERC have been slashing
financial support for master's programmes in biology over the last few years (and
especially in the last year). Many biological scientists are concerned about this
development as they believe that there is a definite place and purpose for one-year and
two-year taught/research postgraduate programmes that provide advanced learning
without necessarily requiring the commitment and extreme specialisation of doctoral
programmes.
41. Physics and astronomy doesn’t have such a directly aligned single industry so the
graduates who are employed in industry are more widely spread. Astronomy graduates
may be more likely to stay in academia than physics graduates.
42. Industry needs to offer packages which are on a par with those in other (e.g. financial)
sectors in order to be attractive to the best graduates. Glaxo Smith Kline (employing
50-100 graduates a year) is now offering to pay off the students fees of those graduates
who stay with the company for at least two years.
43. Within Built Environment (BE); part time provision for learners sponsored by
employers has been a mainstay of the BE landscape and there is much to learn from BE
about innovative, flexible and employer-responsive provision.
44. In psychology an obvious incentive for STEM graduates to enter industry would be to
offer postgraduate training, funded by the employer, to new graduate recruits. This
would offer graduates the potential for career progression and development, which
after the expense of their undergraduate degree would be a welcome alternative to
entering full-time postgraduate study. In psychology, the number of postgraduate
training places for professional psychology is capped, so that the supply and demand is
well matched. This is largely due to funding being provided by state employers e.g. the
NHS, education authorities, prison service.
45. Employers can play a big part in increasing the uptake of STEM subjects. Some
opportunities include promoting the STEM content of the career opportunities they
provide, placement opportunities, an increased emphasis on short internships, working
collaboratively with HEI’s to promote the STEM subjects and offering graduates
employment which include fee payment incentives. Work has already been done in
some of these areas as part of projects through funding initiatives such as the HE STEM
programme.
365
• What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM
subjects in other countries? Which countries provide the most helpful
examples of best practice?
46. The UK could learn from the USA and particularly The National Science Foundation,
(http://www.nsf.gov/). The USA has understood the need for excellence in STEM
education and its relation to the economy and its international competitiveness as
highlighted in an extensive report called “Refuelling the U.S. Innovation Economy: Fresh
Approaches to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education”
(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1722822).
47. The need for legislative action in the USA was shown in the report for congress called
“Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education: Background,
Federal Policy, and Legislative Action” (http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33434.pdf).
15 December 2011
366
Higher Education Academy, Vitae and Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) – Oral evidence
(QQ 167-215)
Higher Education Academy, Vitae and Quality Assurance Agency

(QAA) – Oral evidence (QQ 167-215)
Transcript to be found under Quality Assurance Agency (QAA)
367
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) – Written evidence
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) – Written

evidence
Background
1. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) is pleased to be invited to
provide evidence to this broad-ranging inquiry. We have focused on those elements in the
call for evidence most pertinent to our role. We are happy to provide further comment
should the sub-committee wish.
2. HEFCE was established by the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 as a non-
departmental public body operating with a high degree of autonomy within a policy and
funding context set by the Government. The Council’s main function is to administer grant
provided by the Secretary of State for Education and Skills. We provide independent advice
to the Secretary of State on the funding needs and development of higher education.
Further information about the role, policies and funding allocations of the HEFCE can be
found on our web-site at www.hefce.ac.uk.
3. In the academic year 2009-10, HEFCE allocated nearly £8 billion167 to universities and
colleges, the large majority of which was paid to higher education institutions. This
represented 36 per cent of English HEIs’ total income of £22.2 billion 168 . The majority of this
funding was allocated as ‘block grant’ to institutions, which may be allocated within
institutions according to their own priorities.
4. The teaching element of this grant is currently derived from the number of students
reported within four broad ‘price bands’, which are weighted to ensure that funding broadly
reflects the cost of delivery. Most of the STEM subjects fall within price Band B, which
receives a weighting of 1.7 relative to the cheapest subjects. mathematics, information
technology and computer science fall within price Band C, which receives a weighting of 1.3.
5. HEFCE’s total funding allocation for 2011-12 is £6.5 billion (see ‘Recurrent grants for
2011-12’, HEFCE 2011/07). This represents cuts of £572 million in recurrent funding and
£1,040 million in non-recurrent and capital funding from the 2009-10 position (as announced
in ‘Recurrent grants for 2009-10’, HEFCE 2009/08). These reductions are not offset by any
increase in income to universities from regulated fees.
Strategically Important and Vulnerable subjects (SIVS)
6. HEFCE has a long history of engagement with subjects169 , but has only had an explicit
programme to sustain the future of strategically important and vulnerable subjects since
2005. SIVS are subjects identified by the government as strategically important, where there
is compelling evidence of a requirement for action to enable them to continue to be
167 £7,994 million was allocated in March 2009. This included some capital funding brought forward from 2010-11 and
some monies allocated to higher education providers in the further education sector. See ‘Recurrent grants for 2009-10’
(HEFCE 2009/08). All HEFCE publications are available at www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs
168 Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency finance record. Figure for total income of higher education institutions in
England. See www.hesa.ac.uk/dox/dataTables/finance/download/stafffin0809-0910.xls?v=1.0

169 For example, ‘Minority subjects’ funding and the Chinese studies initiative:
www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2005/rd03_05/
368
available at a level and in a manner that meets the national interest. Most of our SIVS
investments are additional to our recurrent funding for teaching, research and the
business/community interface.
7. During recent years, attention has primarily focused on two broad areas: chemistry,
engineering, mathematics and physics within the STEM subjects, and modern foreign
languages. There is also a strand of activity in quantitative social sciences, which is led by the
Economic and Social Research Council. The activities supported by HEFCE have focused on
promoting demand and attainment among potential students, securing the supply of teaching
and research provision and promoting the flow of graduates into employment. A full list of
SIVS investments is available at www.hefce.ac.uk/aboutus/sis (examples are used throughout
this report to illustrate our response to the Committee’s questions).
8. An evaluation of our programme of work to support SIVS170 found that we have

exercised leadership without any heavy-handed market interference which may have stifled
the dynamism and innate competitiveness of the English higher education sector). Individual
projects were considered to have provided value for money and those on the supply side
were considered to have been particularly effective.
The Government’s HE reforms
9. The government's June 2011 White Paper Higher education: Students at the heart of the
system 171 proposes a student-led system for undergraduate education, made possible by
substituting a large proportion of the teaching funding currently routed through HEFCE for
loans and grants to students. From 2012-13, reductions in HEFCE grant will be offset by fees
from students as successive cohorts paying up to £9,000 per year enter universities and
colleges.
10. Following these reforms, the government will maintain some public funding for
teaching, around £2 billion, ‘to fund additional costs and public policy priorities that cannot
be met by a student-led funding system alone’ 172 . Following consultation during 2011,
HEFCE has confirmed its approach to providing this funding during 2012-13 173 , including the
provision of a ‘fee supplement’ to the clinical and STEM subjects within the current price
bands A and B. The implications of this shift for the funding of STEM subjects is discussed in
more detail in paragraph 49 below. We will consult further on the longer-term approach
from 2013-14 between February and May 2012.
11. A key aspect of this work is to establish an approach to supporting the teaching of the
highest cost activity that mitigates the impact of costs on the demand for and supply of this
provision, which is primarily in the STEM subjects. HEFCE’s interest in this area embraces
both undergraduate and postgraduate taught provision, for which the reductions in overall
teaching grant may be particularly problematic due to the absence of student finance
arrangements to support any increase in tuition fees. There is also a challenge associated
with establishing a method for controlling the government’s student finance expenditure
without unduly distorting subject provision, to which HEFCE has responded in 2012-13 by
170 www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2011/rd05_11/
171 http://discuss.bis.gov.uk/hereform/white-paper/
172 White Paper, paragraph 1.25
173 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2011/outcome.htm
369
protecting activity within chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics within the
approach to implementing student number controls.
12. In the context of our SIVS work, we are working with bodies such as the Research
Councils, the National Academies, the government’s Chief Scientists and the Sector Skills
Councils to identify and respond to risks to subject provision, for example where there is
evidence that the student-led system may not sustain a flow of graduates, supply of
programmes and expertise, and level of research activity consonant with the national
interest. Given the significant calls on the funding made available to HEFCE to achieve the
objectives set out in the White Paper, there will be difficult choices between competing
priorities, and we will need to work with other funders and interested parties to maximise
the effect of any interventions in this area.
13. In addition to these reforms, in early August 2011 the Department for Business,
Innovation and Skills (BIS) published a technical consultation on a new, fit-for-purpose
regulatory framework for higher education. The BIS consultation sets out the Government’s
proposals for a proportionate, risk-based approach to regulation which aims to encourage
innovation and diversity, and which is more responsive and accountable to students.
14. From August 2013, the Government proposes that HEFCE will assume the role of the
‘independent lead regulator’ for higher education in England, with a remit to promote and
protect the interests of students and the wider public.
15. A key aspect of this work will be the provision of high-quality, accessible information
to inform student choice. From September 2012, Key Information Sets (KIS) will provide
standardised course level information on every university course in the UK174 . Salary data
will inform students about the early career returns to courses in different universities;
information on professional and industry body accreditation will signal courses that are
valued by employers and provide routes into the professions; and data about the
percentages of graduates that go into graduate jobs will provide further context for
students’ decisions.
16. Subject to the outcomes of the Government’s consultation and any changes to
legislation, a single regulatory framework, managed by HEFCE, will be in place by 1 August
2013. Within this framework, we expect that all providers of higher education – universities,
further education colleges, and for profit and not for profit private providers - will need to
meet core requirements around quality, information, dispute resolution, access and financial
health. The requirements may, however, vary according to whether the institution seeks
registration for government grant, student finance, university title, or degree awarding
powers.
17. As indicated above, HEFCE’s funding is determined by the cost of a subject, rather
than its grouping within a heading such as STEM. 175
174Further information is available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/infohe/kis.htm

175A full description of how HEFCE currently allocates funding is available at:
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/hefce/2010/10_24/
370
18. We do, nonetheless, aggregate data under the STEM heading for a number of
purposes, for example data analysis, specific initiatives and periodic SIVS Advisory Group
reports. For these purposes, HEFCE interprets STEM subjects to be within the four areas of
science, technology, engineering and mathematics 176 , and we focus on the number of
undergraduate student FTE in HESA academic cost centres. This captures the volume of
students undertaking study in STEM areas, including activity that takes place beyond a
course with a STEM name. For example, if a student studies on a course named as
architecture (non-STEM) but studies a number of modules within that course that are taught
in and by the engineering and technology areas, we capture the proportion of their activity
that is spent on those engineering and technology modules within our STEM cost centre
data.
19. As indicated above, HEFCE has a specific interest in SIVS within STEM. This was
initiated by a request from the then Secretary of State in 2004 for HEFCE to advise on
‘whether there are any higher education subjects or courses that are of national strategic
importance, where intervention might be appropriate to enable them to be available...and
the types of intervention which it believes could be considered’. The letter included a list of
subjects the Government considered to be strategically important.
20. In response to this HEFCE appointed a Board level Advisory Group, chaired by the
late Sir Gareth Roberts. The group’s report, published in June 2005, established a policy
framework to secure the national interest with regard to strategically important subjects.
The report suggested that HEFCE should focus on ‘subjects which are both strategically
important and vulnerable’, that the government should define strategically important
subjects, and HEFCE’s role should be to identify whether they are vulnerable.
21. Drawing upon the subjects highlighted by the Secretary of State, the Advisory Group
identified broad subject areas which should be considered both strategically important and
vulnerable, and to which HEFCE’s attention should be focused. Within the STEM subjects,
the areas identified for particular attention were chemistry, engineering, mathematics and
physics.
22. This approach has provided the basis for a programme of work in SIVS between 2005-
06 and 2011-12 177 . Each aspect of the programme has addressed specific aspects of
vulnerability in different strategically important subjects. Examples include:
a. promoting demand and attainment among potential students, for example the
National HE STEM programme, which bring universities and schools together to work
on demand-raising and curriculum development activities.
b. securing and increasing the supply of provision, for example through additional
teaching funding for very high cost and vulnerable science subjects, the provision of
Additional Student Numbers (ASNs), and the enhancement through collaboration of
critical mass and capability, for example the alliances between the physics departments
in the Midlands and in the South East.
c. promoting the flow of graduates into employment, for example by supporting
the development of new programmes with employers and Sector Skills Councils in
specific areas of STEM.
176 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/aboutus/sis/
177 A full list of SIVS investments, and an evaluation of the programme, is available at www.hefce.ac.uk/aboutus/sis.
371
d. monitoring and forecasting the provision of SIVS, for example by analysing data
on the flow of graduates through A-level, application to higher education and on to
undergraduate, postgraduate taught and postgraduate research programmes, and by
asking higher education institutions to provide early warning if they are considering
the closure of SIVS provision.
e. seeking to understand the employment outcomes from SIVS, and the
relationship between the supply of and demand for these subjects, by analysing salary
data and labour market surveys.
23. Although the first Advisory Group identified a group of subjects as strategically
important and vulnerable, there has been a fluid approach to subject boundaries and the
portfolio of activities supported within the SIVS programme has extended beyond this core.
For example, although Biological Sciences and Computer Science were not identified as
SIVS, universities have been supported in each area to develop provision that addresses
specific employer concerns about the nature and sustainability of provision.
24. The position of these subjects is monitored by our SIVS Advisory Group, which has
reported periodically since 2005. Within these reports, we identify three levels of activity:
• STEM within SIVS - physics; chemistry; chemical engineering; civil engineering;
electrical, electronic and computer engineering; general engineering; mechanical,
aero and production engineering; minerals, metallurgy and materials engineering;
mathematics;
• Clinical STEM - clinical dentistry; clinical medicine; veterinary science;
•Other STEM - anatomy and physiology; biosciences; IT and systems science,
computer software engineering; earth, marine and environmental sciences; pharmacy
and pharmacology.
For postgraduate students, a slightly different approach has been required, given the nature
of reporting. 178
25. In the context of research funding, we define STEM subjects as those falling under the
RAE2008 main panels A-G, comprising medicine, sciences, mathematics and engineering.
Quality-related research (QR) funding is designed to target funding where research quality is
highest. We distribute mainstream QR grant based on the quality, volume and relative cost
(in three cost bands) of research in different subject areas, by determining first how much
funding to provide for research in different subjects and then dividing the total for each
subject between institutions. We first allocate the total sum available between 15 broad
subject areas (represented by the 15 main panels in the 2008 RAE) in proportion to the
volume of research in each subject that was assessed in the RAE as meeting or exceeding
2*(internationally recognised quality). However, in making this initial allocation between
subjects, we have since 2009-10 adjusted the allocations to ensure that the proportion of
178In the 2010-11 report of the SIVS Advisory Group, we considered the number of postgraduate taught / research
student FPE studying on courses in subject areas defined by JACS codes. The STEM subject areas defined by JACS codes
for the purposes of the SIVS work are: (STEM within SIVS) physics and astronomy (JACS codes beginning F3, F5);
Chemistry and materials science (JACS codes beginning F1, F2); Engineering and technology (JACS codes beginning H, J);
Mathematical sciences (JACS codes beginning G0, G1, G2, G3, G91); (Clinical STEM) Medicine and dentistry (JACS codes
beginning A); Veterinary sciences (JACS codes beginning D1, D2); (Other STEM) Agricultural sciences (JACS codes
beginning D7); Anatomy, physiology and pathology (JACS codes beginning B1); Biological sciences (JACS codes beginning
C0, C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C7, C9); Computer sciences (JACS codes beginning G4, G5, G6, G7, G92); Earth, marine and
environmental sciences (JACS codes beginning F6, F7); Forensic and archaeological sciences (JACS codes beginning F4);
Medical technology (JACS codes beginning B8); Pharmacology, toxicology and pharmacy (JACS codes beginning B2).
372
mainstream QR allocated to each main panel group in medicine, sciences, mathematics and
engineering is not less than it was in 2008-09.
26. In 2010, the government asked us to prioritise the allocation of additional places
through the University Modernisation Fund (UMF) on STEM subjects, and on areas
highlighted in the New Industry, New Jobs (NINJ) strategy and the UK Commission for
Employment and Skills (UKCES) National Strategic Skills Audit. JACS and learndirect course
codes 179 were used to identify the priority areas that the UMF sought to support, and the
list of eligible codes represented our interpretation of the broad sectoral and occupational
priorities highlighted in NINJ and/or by UKCES, as well as our existing interpretation of
STEM and SIVS codes. 180
27. STEM graduates work within a wide range of careers within the fields of science,
technology, engineering and mathematics. Several reports, including from the CBI 181 , Royal
Society 182 , and our own SIVS Advisory Group, have identified employers’ demand for STEM
graduates in a wide range of sectors, suggesting that their skills are highly valued in different
contexts.
influence supply?
28. To a certain extent the supply of undergraduate students entering HE can be

predicted because there are robust leading indicators (from A levels, through to UCAS
acceptances and on to HE entrants) and recognised patterns of progression into these levels
of HE. However, this trajectory does not apply to postgraduate levels of study as it is more
difficult to identify patterns of progression, thus patterns of supply are harder to identify and
harder to influence. In established professions such as medicine, law and architecture, there
is a clear link between the subject of study and the career followed. For most STEM
graduates, however, the link is less clear and the relationship between the demand for and
supply of graduates is harder to follow.
29. The 2009 report of HEFCE’s SIVS Advisory Group 183 , chaired by Peter Saraga, the
former Director of the Philips Research Laboratories, considered the available evidence on
employer demand for STEM graduates and commissioned new research in this area. The
report includes a list of the published evidence on demand for STEM graduates, which has
been updated in an annex to the group’s 2011 report. 184 The report highlights a wide variety
of predictions about employer demand, as identified from employer surveys, labour market
forecasts, or quantitative indicators such as salary, andor earnings data. it highlights the
179 JACS and learndirect codes used for the UMF are shown at Annex E in
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/circlets/2010/cl08_10/
180 We also extended scope to Modern Languages and Quantitative Social Sciences to be consistent with our SIVS policy
and institutions could exceptionally request support for other courses not covered by these codes; however, in these
cases, the proposal needed to explain clearly how the course contributed to the priorities. The Department of Health also
asked us to accommodate growth priorities for healthcare-related higher education provision, specifically in healthcare
science and paramedic science: proposals in these areas needed to be for undergraduate new entrants and had to
demonstrate evidence of support through letters from partner Strategic Health Authorities.
181 CBI Education and Skills Survey 2010 states that 72% of firms are employing STEM-skilled staff
182 ‘Hidden Wealth: the contribution of science to service sector innovation’ Royal Society, 2009 concludes that STEM is
deeply embedded within the UK service sectors and has an extensive impact on service innovation processes, which is
often hidden. STEM is also likely to play an important part in the future of services, as many services are on the cusp of a
transition to more personalised and interconnected systems, which will require significant advances in STEM.
183 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2010/10_09/
373
difficulty in using this data to shape supply. Demand can be expressed in terms of a
predicted shortage at some point in the future or an immediate and unfulfilled demand, and
can be identified at national or regional levels or framed in terms of sectors or occupations
(rather than subjects in HE). Demand may relate to specific courses and levels of study, or
to skills attributable to one aspect of these, thus the link between an identified employer
need and a subject or course within HE is rarely straightforward. Importantly, the report
notes that employers are not a homogenous group and research tends to capture the views
of larger employers (or their representative bodies). Employers’ views on what they need
from HE varies by size of business and which level and type of manager is questioned 185 .
30. In this context, the report highlights that:

a. Demand from employers can be articulated in terms of broad graduate attributes,
individual or groups of subjects, or specific skills acquired within subjects and
programmes. These requirements may be associated with graduates in identified
subjects or programmes, levels of performance or qualification, with highly selective
institutions or aspects of the HE experience such as work placement and time
abroad.
b. There are two areas in which the views of employers are consistent enough to
inform national policy on the level and nature of HE provision.
i. Firstly, evidence commissioned by the group and in numerous other reports
suggests that employers consistently identify a demand for STEM graduates,
which arises from a broad requirement for numeracy aligned with specific
technical skills. These graduates are also employed across a wide variety of
jobs. 186
ii. Secondly, employers are concerned about broad employability skills. In both
cases, this perception derives from an expectation that there will be a
particular premium on these skills in the advanced and rapidly changing
labour market of the future.
c. Employers could provide clearer signals of the subjects, skills and attributes they
particularly value, and that will position graduates most effectively in the labour
market. They could also engage more in the development and delivery of provision,
for example through staff and student placements.
d. There are some immediate areas of shortage, which can be identified at the level of
skills required by specific employers and attributable to specific programmes in HE,
such as in-vivo techniques in the pharmaceutical industries and engineering skills
required for the nuclear industry. It should be possible for requirements such as
these to be addressed through close working between individual and groups of
employers, universities and colleges. This does, however, require responsiveness
from HE providers, underpinned as appropriate by public funding incentives, and
employer funding at a level appropriate to the specificity of their requirements.
185 Ewart Keep, Higher Education and a Skills Agenda More Broadly Conceived, in IPPR 2009, First Class? Challenges and
Opportunities for the UK’s University Sector.
186 This is confirmed by recent research conducted on behalf of BIS: STEM graduates in non-STEM jobs’, March 2011,
available at www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/s/11-771-stem-graduates-in-non-stem-jobs.pdf.
While suggesting that there is a need to raise STEM students’ awareness of the range of career opportunities available to
them, to enable them to make informed career choices, the BIS report also notes that almost all STEM graduates surveyed
are making good use of the skills learned as part of their STEM degree (particularly analytical and problem-solving skills),
regardless of occupation
374
31. One indicator of demand is the nature of the job undertaken and the salary earned
following studies, which is collected in the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education
(DLHE) and Long Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (LDLHE) surveys. Median
salaries 40 months after qualifying are disaggregated by broad STEM-related subject area in
the following table. This shows that for the broad subject areas in which the STEM subjects
sit, median salaries of graduates 40 months after qualifying were typically higher than those
seen across all subject areas (STEM related and non-STEM related). For example, first
degree qualifiers from the subject area of mathematical sciences reported a median salary of
£27,600 40 months after qualifying: more than £3k higher than the median salary across all
subject areas at the same point. For postgraduate qualifiers it was £2k higher than the
median salary across all subject areas.
UK domiciled leavers in 2006-07 in full-time paid UK employment 40 months

after qualifying (excluding self-employed)
Broad STEM-related Level of qualification Median salary 40

subject area of study months after qualifying
Medicine and dentistry First degree £40,000
Postgraduate £41,400
Subjects allied to medicine First degree £25,500
Biological sciences First degree £22,000
Veterinary science First degree £30,000
Postgraduate N/A
Physical sciences First degree £23,500
Mathematical sciences First degree £27,600
Computer science First degree £25,500
Engineering and First degree £27,300
technology Postgraduate £34,000
All subject areas First degree £24,330
(STEM related and Postgraduate £30,000
non-STEM related)
Table notes: Extract from Table 11 of the ‘Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education
Institutions Longitudinal Survey’, 2006-07. The full table is available from www.hesa.ac.uk.
32. The table above also illustrates a premium for postgraduate qualifiers within the broad
STEM-related subject areas. Median salaries 40 months after qualifying were more than £5k
higher for postgraduate qualifiers compared to first degree qualifiers across nearly all of the
STEM-related subject areas considered.
33. Other important sources of labour market information and analysis (for both
undergraduates and postgraduates) include UKCES’ work with the Migration Advisory
Committee (MAC) to review the evidence around skills shortages and skills needs, and
thereby inform the MAC’s recommendations on jobs that may be filled through
375
immigration 187 ; its National Strategic Skills Audit 188 and sector specific reviews such as
NESTA’s of the video games and visual effects industries 189 .
34. As indicated above, HEFCE is developing a Key Information Set (KIS) within the
framework of its new regulatory role, which will include information intended to help
students understand their employment possibilities. In response to a request in the White
Paper, we are currently commissioning research to establish whether a similar suite of
information should be made available to post-graduate students. The postgraduate sector
ranges in level from short continuing professional development activity, to masters
programmes undertaken for personal, professional and research preparation purposes, and
doctoral levels of study. User needs will therefore vary but, with this caveat, the research
we are commissioning will help us to determine whether a postgraduate KIS is possible, or
indeed desirable.
35. As suggested in the 2009 SIVS report highlighted above, reports on employer
requirements can inform tailored responses by employers, institutions and government.
HEFCE’s contribution to such responses includes support for:
a. A new MSci led by King’s College London, which is being co-financed by HEFCE
and employers in the pharmaceutical industry 190 ;
b. An employer engagement project led by Cogent, the University of Hull and the
HE Academy Subject Centre for Physical Sciences, to establish a consortium of five
geographically spread HEIs to develop a flexible foundation degree framework with
specialised routes for foundation degrees in the chemical, nuclear and bioscience
industries 191 ;
c. IT-related degree courses which support the needs of the economy, driven by
effective engagement between the IT sector, the Higher Education sector and
schools 192 .
36. Following the HE finance reforms, we expect that such responses will need primarily
to be driven by employers and institutions, with publicly supplied information and loans to
individuals in support.
16-18 Supply
37. The number of entries to A levels in STEM disciplines demonstrates student choice
prior to HE, which influences entry to universities and college. A level subject area data
from 2009-10 to 2011-12 193 shows that student numbers continue to grow in physics
(5.1%), chemistry (7.1%), mathematics (8.2%) and biological sciences (3.8%).
Graduate supply
187 www.ukces.org.uk/publications/er20-skills-shortage-and-needs
188 www.ukces.org.uk/publications/nssa-vol-1
189 www.nesta.org.uk/publications/assets/features/next_gen
190 See http://www.kcl.ac.uk/biohealth/research/divisions/ips/education/MSciinIntegratedPharmacologyandPhysiology.aspx
191 Further detail here http://www.hefce.ac.uk/econsoc/employer/projects/show.asp?id=43
192 http://www.e-skills.com/ITMB
193 DfE Research and statistics gateway: GCE/Applied GCE A/AS and Equivalent Examination Results in England. 2010-11
data is provisional but likely to be indicative of the overall trend once final data becomes available.
http://www.education.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s001035/index.shtml
376
38. Analysis of data between 1999-2000 and 2009-10 on the flow of undergraduates
suggests that at a time of wider expansion in undergraduate numbers, those in STEM have
seen a continued expansion, and at a rate higher than other subjects during recent years.
Physics, chemistry and mathematics all saw growth across three measures of the STEM
pipeline: undergraduate FTE, UCAS acceptances and A-level entries for each of the subjects
all show an increase of at least 6 per cent over the three years. However, trends in
engineering and technology continued to show variability across these measures.
39. Early analysis 194 of DLHE responses of first degree qualifiers indicates that for the four
STEM subjects addressed within our SIVS work, during 2008-09 35% 195 were in further
(probably postgraduate) study six months after qualifying from their first degree. As our
2011 SIVS Advisory Group report makes clear, there has been sustained growth in the flow
of postgraduate taught and postgraduate research students during the last decade, and in the
STEM areas the flow of taught students has been higher than the average overall. A
significant proportion of this growth is, however, attributable to international students.
Although the recruitment of international students brings great benefits to English
universities, this carries some risks for the sustainability of provision, given the volatility of
some international markets. There may also be a risk in relation to the UK’s future
workforce, given that many postgraduate students enter positions requiring advanced skills
and expertise following their studies, including in universities and research organisations.

40. Research commissioned for the 2009 report of HEFCE’s SIVS Advisory Group aimed
to gain understanding of what employers mean when they express a desire to recruit STEM
graduates, how they do so, and what happens when they are unable to recruit the people
they want. Interviews were conducted with key senior decision makers among large
companies and their representative bodies including MW Kellogg, Barclays, the Association
of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and Procter and Gamble.
41. Firstly, the research found that employers typically expect more from STEM graduates
than they did in the past. More advanced technology means that UK based industries are
addressing more complex scientific and business challenges, which in turn means that STEM
graduates are increasingly required to draw upon disciplines such as design and social
sciences to solve real world problems. The globalisation of production and research can
require employees to work in teams that rarely meet face to face or work together at the
same time, and may include people from different cultures speaking different languages. For
some employers, the UK may be a small part of worldwide business in companies that are
located in and directed from a wider variety of locations. Where the workforce comes from
may, therefore, be immaterial to the company, if not its local managers and national
194 Population is restricted to UK- and EU-domiciled first degree qualifiers who responded to the DLHE, and who had
studied towards an undergraduate qualification aim at HEFCE-fundable HEIs (not including the Open University) and were
awarded a first or 2:1 class of first degree. It does not provide data relating to qualifiers from clinical STEM subject areas as
the degrees obtained by such qualifiers are often not subject to classification.
195 Of total 11,650 respondees
377
governments. This dynamic raises the importance of employees’ ‘soft’ skills and their
adaptability.
42. Secondly, the notion of ‘quality’ may vary depending on the employer questioned.
R&D intensive employers, for example, may express a need to recruit STEM graduates,
postgraduates and post-doctoral researchers of the highest intellectual calibre. The numbers
required here may be small, but they are vitally important to these businesses. For others,
there may be a broader concern with aspects of the modern STEM curriculum, such as the
move to more flexible or modular learning, or a limited focus on practical experimentation.
Others again may associate ‘quality’ with the social or cultural capital apparent in candidates
who demonstrate team work, communication skills, leadership potential and business
acumen. Some employers may associate these attributes with a particular set of universities,
typically with high entrance requirements or a track record of working with business, and so
may restrict their recruitment efforts to a very narrow field.
43. Thirdly, employers may selectively use internships and placements 196 to ensure
candidates meet their quality profile ahead of formal recruitment. In this context the
numbers of students undertaking sandwich placements – which are strongly correlated to
positive employment outcomes 197 – have been decreasing (10.5 per cent of undergraduates
in 1994-95 were registered as sandwich in comparison with to 6.5 per cent in 2006-07) 198 .
Discussions with employers suggest that cost is a key factor, both to host employers and to
students, who are unable to afford placements if they are unpaid, if they have to give up
part-time employment to undertake them, or need to travel or live near to the placement.
Student demand, influenced by peer culture, is also a key factor, as recent HEFCE-funded
research has shown. 199 We expect that Sir Tim Wilson’s review of university-business
interaction will help to shape government policy in this area.
44. In a fast moving and changing labour market, staying in work and developing a career
requires adaptability and willingness to move as new opportunities arise. In this context,
employability (essentially next steps after university) is best seen as a shared responsibility
between the student, university and employers: HEIs build work into their pedagogy and
curriculum as well as providing advice and guidance; employers and civil society provide
internships and placements, engage with the curriculum and sponsor students; students take
advantage of these opportunities for the benefit of their careers - whether that is further
study, work, research, self employment, as innovators or social entrepreneurs.
45. Every university publishes an employability statement (available on www.unistats.ac.uk)

that sets out the range and scope of their interaction with employers and the services on
offer to prepare students for life after higher education. Virtually all universities then
recognise student achievement and steps they have taken towards their future employability
through awards, transcripts of achievement or supplements to diplomas 200 .
196 The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions 2009, Unleashing Aspiration: The Final Report, Section 4.4
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/227102/fair-access.pdf
197 Ibid chapter 7 figure 7a.
198 The CBI 2009, Future Fit Preparing Graduates for the World of Work, http://www.cbi.org.uk/pdf/20090326-CBI-FutureFit-
Preparing-graduates-for-the-world-of-work.pdf
199 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2011/interns.htm
200 An example is the York award, https://www.york.ac.uk/students/work-volunteering-careers/skills/york-award/
378
46. Turning to wider learning, an international survey of graduates five years after
graduation suggests that UK graduates are well prepared for their longer-term career, but
poorly prepared for their first job, reflecting the historically looser relationship between HE
and employment in the UK than some other countries 201 . This may change if fee-paying
students demand more from universities in terms of transition into work, but if it does it
will be important to retain the flexibility that has enabled STEM graduates to make diverse
contributions, such as those highlighted in the Royal Society’s report on science graduates’
contribution to service sector innovation’ 202 .
institutions?
47. The recent HE White Paper and the subsequent technical consultation invited HEFCE
to consult on the introduction of a more risk-based approach to quality assurance for all
providers, due to be implemented from 2013-14. HEFCE plans to undertake this jointly with
the QAA, in spring 2012. It is likely that this approach to quality assurance will continue to
be underpinned by Institutional Review in England and Northern Ireland, which has been in
place since the start of 2011-12 for HEIs. Additionally, HEFCE will consult on the triggers
which would prompt QAA to carry out an out-of-cycle investigation as well as the
frequency of review. The consultation will also need to comment on how this policy links
with proposals for a single regulatory framework, in particular how might a provider’s
quality 'risk profile' inform HEFCE’s overall judgement of risk status. Similarly, the White
Paper proposals for reforming the process and criteria for Degree Awarding Powers and
University title will impact on this policy in terms of how new providers entering through
the single gateway are reviewed. The consultation will therefore reflect clearly that the
eventual risk-based approach to quality assurance will be dependent on the outcome of
parliamentary debates on the forthcoming HE Bill.
48. It is difficult at this point to predict how the HE reforms will influence student choices
about whether and what to study, and to what level and how their choices will in turn
influence the decisions of higher education institutions with regard to subject provision. In
response to the White Paper, we have taken steps to identify the risks to subject provision
in the new system, and have sought advice and evidence from partner bodies with an
interest in this area: the Research Councils, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of
Engineering, the British Academy, the Alliance of Sector Skills Councils and the
government’s Chief Scientists. This, allied to advice and guidance from our SIVS advisory
group, is helping us develop a new approach to supporting strategically important and
vulnerable subjects, which will be considered by the HEFCE Board in January.
49. Given the level of uncertainty about the way in which students, universities and
employers will respond to the reforms, we expect that a key aspect of our approach will be
to identify and monitor risks, rather than respond to speculation before we have a full
understanding of the impact of the HE reforms. We have already, however, taken steps to
minimise the extent to which the implementation of undergraduate student number
controls may provide incentives for HEIs to move provision away from the current SIVS
201 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2008/rd22_08/
202 http://royalsociety.org/policy/publications/2009/hidden-wealth/
379
within STEM. For 2012-13, in addition to removing controls for students achieving grades of
AAB at A-level or equivalent, the government has asked us to re-cycle 20,000 places within
the non-AAB or equivalent population to institutions with a net fee below £7,500. Our data
indicates that there are around 30,000 students in the non-AAB+ SIVS 203 entrant population,
and there is a concern that their high cost, combined with their specific A-level entry
requirements, could mean that they are disadvantaged through this process. We have,
therefore, excluded the non-AAB numbers in SIVS from the cut necessary to re-cycle
20,000 places. We expect as a condition of this measure to require institutions to maintain
their numbers of non-AAB+ SIVS entrants each year. We await guidance from the
government on its proposed approach to student number controls from 2013-14 and
remain prepared to take similar action to protect vulnerable STEM provision.
50. HEFCE’s cost-based approach to providing teaching funding is intended to support the
infrastructure and staff time necessary to produce highly employable graduates, which in the
STEM subjects includes high cost facilities. Due to the reductions in HEFCE funding prior to
the implementation of the higher education reforms, we believe that the notional funding
attributable to each student in the STEM subjects within price band B declined by 6%
between 2010-11 and 2011-12. With a £3,375 fee, the notional HEFCE grant for these
subjects of £4,894 should yield a total resource rate of around £8,300 per student in 2011-
12. In 2012-13, HEFCE will provide a fee supplement of around £1,500 for these subjects,
which means that a fee of around £6,800 would need to be charged to students entering in
2012-13 in order to sustain 2011-12 resource rates, or £7,300 to sustain 2010-11 rates. For
undergraduate students, we expect that most universities with STEM provision will exceed
this fee level. This comparison does not, however, account for inflation or reductions in
capital funding.
51. We also allocate funding to institutions to contribute towards their costs in

supervising home and EU domiciled postgraduate research students through the research
degree programme (RDP) supervision fund, which is a fixed pot of £205M in 2011-12. Since
2009-10, allocations have been calculated as a sum per student FTE in all departments that
were awarded a quality profile in the 2008RAE. Like mainstream QR, the allocations reflect
the relative cost of research in different subjects. For 2011-12, the sum per student FTE in
high cost laboratory and clinical subjects is £5,515.
52. From 2012-13, following a sector consultation, the HEFCE Board has decided in
principle to increase the value of the RDP supervision fund to £240 million, and to link the
funding more explicitly to high quality by taking account of the amount of 3* (internationally
excellent) and 4* (world leading) research activity in the supervising department, as a
proportion of total activity at 2* (internationally recognised) quality and above. This will
have the effect of producing differential rates of funding per student FTE, depending on the
RAE quality profile of the supervising department as well as on the relative cost of the
subject. Indicative calculations suggest an increase in the rate of funding per student FTE
compared with 2011-12 in approximately 70% of departments in high cost laboratory and
clinical subjects.
53. HEFCE will monitor closely the effect of the new undergraduate funding system on all
aspects of STEM provision. If this monitoring indicates significant negative effects, we will
need to consider the measures necessary to sustain provision. As indicated above, we will
203 Mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering
380
explore a wide range of possible measures to achieve this and any funding measures will be
within the constraints of our allocation from Government. Where possible, any measures
will be undertaken in collaboration with other organisations and funding bodies with an
interest.
54. Research assessment through the RAE, and in future the Research Excellence
Framework, ensures that excellent research in all disciplines is recognised and can be funded
preferentially on the basis of high quality, thus helping to sustain the breadth and diversity of
academic activity across the whole national academic base on which both teaching and
research in new and cross-disciplinary fields can build.
55. In preparation for the 2001 RAE, there was a review undertaken of Interdisciplinary
Research and the RAE 204 , and following that, measures have been enhanced in each
successive RAE to enable cross-referral between units of assessment (UOAs) of parts of
submissions that embody research that does not lie within the bounds of one particular
UOA. For the 2008 RAE, extensive use was also made of expert advice from around 1,000
specialist advisors. Taken together, these measures sought to ensure that cross- and
interdisciplinary research could be identified and assessed by competent experts. The
RAE2008 manager’s published report 205 included a full quantitative breakdown of the use of
cross-referral and specialist advice by unit of assessment.
56. Further enhancements have been made to the process for REF 2014 206 including:
a. broader-based UOAs (reduced in number from 67 to 36) and main panels

(reduced from 15 to 4); which will mean a broader range of expertise on each panel is
available to assess inter- and cross-disciplinary research.
b. after HEIs have been surveyed on their submission intentions, the REF team will
appoint additional assessors to work with more than one panel where there are
strong cross-disciplinary connections between particular sub-panels.
57. All academic staff should be enabled, supported and encouraged to keep up to date
with the scholarship of their discipline so that they are equipped to deliver teaching
informed by current theory and practice. A need for teaching to be underpinned by
scholarship does not imply that all institutions must undertake research and postgraduate
training in order to inform their teaching directly. As to delivery models, as students
become increasingly well-informed learners and consumers, institutions will be encouraged
to maintain or develop models that best meet students’ needs.
204 http://www.rae.ac.uk/2001/Pubs/1_99/
205 http://www.rae.ac.uk/pubs/2009/manager/manager.pdf
206 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/
381
58. HEFCE aims to support universities and colleges in maintaining excellence and
improving the learning environment. This work is vital to meet student expectations, the
challenges of global competition, and the increasing diversity of the student population. In
particular we continue to provide funding to the Higher Education Academy to identify and
share effective teaching practices, such as through the UK Professional Standards
Framework. Furthermore, as the current government strategy takes steps towards creating
a level playing field for new providers and for non-teaching bodies to be awarded Degree
Awarding Powers, it will be important to have clarity on the roles and responsibilities of the
organisations concerned in order to maintain quality, standards and the reputation of UK
HE.

59. HEFCE’s SIVS work to date has included an awareness of the geographical implications
of sustaining STEM provision. For example, a previous example of early intelligence and
resolution by HEFCE was the closure of the Chemistry department at the University of
Exeter and the take-up of the affected student numbers by the Universities of Bristol and
Bath, to provide continuity of teaching. We also adopted a spatial approach to sustaining
provision through our investments in physics collaborations in the Midlands and the South
East.
60. Within the framework on our future SIVS policy, we expect to monitor the
accessibility of subject provision. We intend to look beyond the quantity of activity at
national level to consider issues such as the nature of provision and, given the potential for
more students to seek local study options in the future, its location and accessibility. We
will retain a capability for early insight into and response to developments within the sector
through our Regional Consultants. Any action we take will reflect the student and the
national interest, and it will have due regard for the independence of the HE sector. It will
also continue to create space for the underlying dynamism and responsiveness of the HE
sector; this, rather than the state planning associated with many HE systems, has served us
very well. To illustrate this, Lancaster University is re establishing its department of
Chemistry after a 12 year gap, with a first cohort of undergraduate students expected in
2013 207 .
What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of
background?
61. The 2010-11 report of the SIVS Advisory Group noted a decline in engineering and
mathematics provision in post-1992 HEIs. Students in these institutions are more likely than
others to be mature, in work, studying locally and from neighbourhoods with a record of
low HE participation. Programmes in these institutions also have a strong tradition of
vocational orientation. This suggests a limit on the diversity, and in some locations the
availability, of graduates in these subjects.
62. The Director of Fair Access Sir Martin Harris's report on "What more can be done to
widen access to highly selective universities?" also highlighted that selective universities have
207 See http://news.lancs.ac.uk/Web/News/Pages/Lancaster-University-announces-new--Department-of-Chemistry-.aspx
382
a higher share of STEM provision and noted that any lack of availability of key science
subjects at GCSE was a potential barrier to successful A-level, and therefore university,
participation. A number of institutions refer to STEM-related outreach activities and
milestones in their access agreements and widening participation strategic assessments. The
thematic review of widening participation strategic assessments conducted by Action on
Access also noted a number of activities relating to access for women to STEM subjects.
63. HEFCE has funded a number of projects as part of our SIVS programme that aim to
increase and widen participation in STEM disciplines. For example, the National HE STEM
programme runs from August 2009 to July 2012 with £20 million of funding from HEFCE’s
strategic development fund, and a further £1 million investment from HEFCW. It builds on
the four previous STEM pilot projects and aims to
a. widen participation within and across the STEM disciplines
b. develop and enhance the STEM curriculum
c. engage the workforce and society to enhance their knowledge and skills.
64. SEPnet, the South East Physics Network, is a consortium of university physics
departments in London and the South East of England that will run for 5 years to May 2014
with £12.5 million of funding from HEFCE’s strategic development fund. The project
includes a dedicated outreach strand. Designed to promote physics to schools and the
public, SEPnet offers a range of activities for school students in different age and ability
groups, both at university campuses and in school. Inclusivity is a core element of any
activity, for gender, ethnic and socio-economic background.
65. Analysis of data on employment destinations of doctoral graduates indicates that they
are being trained for a range of research and other doctoral professions. The most recent
LDHLE survey indicates that across all disciplines, around two fifths of the qualifiers from
postgraduate research degrees enter research and teaching professions within HE, just over
a tenth enter non HE based research roles, and the remainder deploy the skills they have
acquired from doctoral training in a range of other engineering, health, business, finance and
management professions.
66. Qualifiers at all levels of HE, not just PhDs, need to be well rounded and confident
individuals that are capable of shaping their own future – whatever that may be - as they will
have to live with uncertainty, change and complexity. We expect that the Wilson review of
university-business interaction will advise further on the preparation of research students
for work in business, and we will respond to the review in due course.
67. Masters degrees are highly diverse, enabling individuals to extend their interests,
change their skills, develop the advanced skills necessary for specific professions, or take the
steps necessary to embark on research. Any policy or funding approach needs, therefore, to
be sensitive to these variations.
383
68. Prior to the HE reforms, HEFCE provided teaching grant for STEM postgraduate
taught provision, albeit at a lower rate to reflect the higher fees generally attributable to
activity of this kind. Following the reforms, funding has been made available for HEFCE to
provide a high-cost fee supplement for postgraduate taught students, comparable to that at
undergraduate level. There is, however, no student finance scheme for postgraduate taught
students to underpin such an increase.
69. The Browne review suggested that continued public funding should be made available
for postgraduate taught provision, targeted at priority courses, but that student finance
provision was not necessary as the private benefits to individuals would be sufficient to
generate investment. 208 In addition to confirming support for a high cost fee supplement, the
White Paper asks HEFCE to review participation in postgraduate study, and to consider
whether additional data on postgraduate participation needs to be collected in order to help
evaluate the longer term impact of the undergraduate student finance reforms. One
example would be whether debt levels could be a deterrent to postgraduate progression,
particularly for students from low income backgrounds. 209
70. The reforms to undergraduate student funding may have a consequential impact on
the postgraduate sector, as might other factors such as visa restrictions on academic staff
and students, and the future funding arrangements of the sector itself. HEFCE is now
developing a structure for understanding and monitoring postgraduate activity. We are also
considering, in the context of our work on teaching funding highlighted above, whether
there is scope to provide funding beyond the fee supplement attributable to undergraduate
students, given the absence of comparable student finance, the importance of postgraduate
taught activity for research and professional careers and for university finances, and the
government’s request for HEFCE to support a smooth transition through the
implementation of the reforms.
71. The development of the highest levels of skills and the undertaking of world class
research are central to our aspirations for an innovative and competitive economy. It is,
however, presently difficult to predict how the government’s forthcoming HE reforms will
influence graduate choices in terms of pursuing a research career. HEFCE will take steps
through its SIVS work to monitor and respond to evidence on the flow of STEM graduates
into and out of higher education. The key factors will, however, be the salaries made
available to graduates for research careers, and the extent to which graduates’ employment
behaviour is affected by their requirement to begin student finance repayments once they
are earning more than £21,000.
Industry

them?
208 Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, page 55
209 BIS White Paper, paragraph 1.33
384
graduates?
72. As discussed earlier, data from the 2009 LDLHE survey illustrates and signals to
students the earnings premium for STEM graduates, but salaries are one part of the picture
of industry and HE working together. HEFCE has, for example, invested £4.3 million with
the University of Lincoln and Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd (SITL) to create the
first purpose-built School of Engineering to be created in the UK for more than 20 years 210 .
A further example is our support, with research funders, Pfizer and GSK, to develop
research and training methods involving specific research techniques where national capacity
is particularly low 211 .
73. Public information, as discussed in paragraph 15, provides another route for
employers and others to signpost the courses they value to prospective students. In relation
to skills, we also welcome the Government's growth review on education and training
published as part of the Autumn Statement on 29 November. This recommends that Sector
Skills Councils and other employer bodies should help develop robust accreditation
frameworks that tell students about the courses employers really value. The Higher
Education Public Information Steering Group will consider any proposals for inclusion in Key
Information Sets (the bodies that will accredit courses from September 2012 already
includes the Society of Biology, Skillset and the British Computer Society). This
development will help inform student choice: to extend that further we are talking to other
accrediting bodies about inclusion in the 2012 KIS.
74. The HE Business and Community Interaction survey outlines a wide range and scope
of relationships between industry and HE. More detail is available at
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/econsoc/buscom/hebci/. This includes: the provision of placements
and internships; collaborative and contract research; consultancy and continuing professional
development; sponsoring professorial posts and investing in HE’s wider fabric; and work to
communicate the benefits of science via events, museums libraries and galleries. These are
all ways industry and HE can and do work together to ensure skills, knowledge, expertise
and discovery are exchanged between HE and industry.
of best practice?
75. 2009 OECD data indicates that 19% of total UK graduates are in STEM fields of study,
a median figure between the representative countries. In terms of proportion of total
graduates in science studies (life, physical, mathematical and computer), the UK is third
highest at 13.6%. As a percentage in engineering and technology fields (engineering and
construction, manufacturing and production), the UK drops to the lower half of the table at
5.3%.
210 http://www.siemens.co.uk/en/news_press/index/news_archive/unioflincoln.htm
211 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/aboutus/sis/res_stem.htm
385
76. HEFCE has recently commissioned research to consider how other countries with
similar HE funding and student finance systems to England have identified and mitigated risks
to subjects or skills. The evaluation will illustrate the balance between market forces and
government agency in supporting STEM disciplines, and the consequences of the policy
approach adopted. We hope that the evaluation report will be available in April 2012.
16 December 2011
386
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) – Oral evidence (QQ 93-119)
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) – Oral

TUESDAY 24 JANUARY 2012

Members present
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (Chair)

Lord Broers
Lord Krebs
Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Patel
Lord Rees of Ludlow
Lord Winston
________________
Examination of Witness
Sir Alan Langlands, Chief Executive, Higher Education Funding Council for England
Q93 The Chairman: Welcome to the second evidence session this afternoon. We have
with us Sir Alan Langlands, Chief Executive of HEFCE and an old friend of various
Committees over the years. So welcome to you. For the record, I wonder if you could say
who you are and what your current role is.
Sir Alan Langlands: Okay. I am Alan Langlands. I am the Chief Executive of the Higher
Education Funding Council for England.
Q94 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. I will start. Our initial question to
witnesses was a definition of STEM, and in some ways we have settled on the definition of
the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. We find it a bit strange that HEFCE have
a different definition and I wondered why you have chosen to do that. Why do we not just
have a clear definition across the whole piece so we can centre on that?
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not think we have a different definition. The issues that we talk
about under the broad definition of STEM—science, technology, engineering and
mathematics—vary from time to time depending on circumstances. Since 2005-06, since
Gareth Roberts reported, we have been using the term “strategically important and
vulnerable subjects” because his report led to a position where the Government would
387
define “strategically important” and HEFCE would define “vulnerable”. Consistently through
that period we have been focused on chemistry, physics, engineering and technology,
mathematics and then, outside the STEM margins, modern languages and quantitative social
sciences. That is common parlance. That is consistent. You have heard reference earlier
today to HESA. That is consistent with the HESA cost centre information and the way in
which we collect information. So HEFCE talks about SIVS and within these four STEM areas.
We also talk about clinical STEM—medicine, dentistry and veterinary science. A lot of
people think that the “M” in STEM stands for medicine, but in fact it stands for mathematics.
Then there are a range of other STEM subjects that have not been so vulnerable and have
not required that extra attention, which again fall outside of our definition—things like
biosciences, anatomy and physiology, earth sciences and environmental sciences. It is not
that we are not interested in these things but we have just been using the definition that
gave us focus. It may seem odd to the Committee, but when we and BIS and the sector and
the research councils, and I think the national academies and others looking in on this,
discuss these things, we all know what we are talking about.
Q95 Baroness Perry of Southwark: The White Paper has posed a new role for HEFCE.
I must say, somewhat to my dismay, you are now being described as “a lead regulator”. We
have a lot of regulators in higher education, and I am interested to know how you are
preparing for this regulatory role. There are several questions around it. Do you think it will
require parliamentary oversight in your regulatory role? Do you feel there is a conflict of
interest between funding the institutions and regulating them at the same time? Finally, what
is your relationship with other higher education funders and regulators of which, as I say, we
have a large number?
Sir Alan Langlands: We are preparing, and were preparing hard until we read the Daily
Telegraph this morning, which began to raise the possibility of delays in legislation. We are
preparing in the ways you would expect: looking at our internal structures; looking at our
regulatory capability; and, as you have pointed out, thinking about our relationships with
others. I will perhaps come on to these in a minute or two. I know people are concentrating
on the word “regulator” and worrying about the juxtaposition of HEFCE as a funder and a
regulator, but we are that at the moment anyway. We have statutory responsibility for
assessing the quality of mainly undergraduate higher education. Our financial memorandum
as a sector sets out the regulatory framework by which we operate with universities and
colleges. So there are extensions to that set of responsibilities but they are not extensions
that I think begin to undermine the relationship or the autonomy—our relationship with
universities or indeed universities’ autonomy. They are about taking additional
responsibilities on that are currently carried out in BIS.
Q96 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I know you want to answer some of the other
sub-questions, but could you just give us an idea of what you see as the extensions and what
specific areas you are going to be regulating that you were not regulating before?
Sir Alan Langlands: The extensions are to do with designation of people or organisations
who want to provide higher education in the UK—perhaps private sector providers,
perhaps others. I am sure you have been reading in the press about New College and AC
Grayling’s attempt to try something new. Ultimately, HEFCE would be responsible for
designating that institution in one of several ways: giving it access to HEFCE funding;
ensuring that its students could access loan funding; ensuring that a new organisation like
that was properly set up to have research degree-awarding powers; and making judgments
on titles, whether these organisations should be styled as university colleges, as colleges or
388
as universities. All of the tasks that are currently undertaken by the Secretary of State it has
been suggested—and only suggested in consultative documents—would be passed to
HEFCE and would become essentially additions to its existing responsibilities.
Q97 Baroness Perry of Southwark: The Secretary of State has tended to use senior
academics to advise on that kind of question. Would you see yourself as doing the same
thing, because your staff at present have been engaged in more administrative duties?
Sir Alan Langlands: Yes. I think we would have to take advice. Having said that, on some of
these questions it is HEFCE and senior professional and administrative staff at HEFCE who
also give advice to the Secretary of State, so we are quite practised in that, but we do not
take the final decisions; we provide neutral advice. So we are preparing hard.
On your question about relationships, clearly this is messy territory. There are an awful lot
of players around. HEFCE is dealing with funding and regulation; QAA is dealing with
standards and quality; the Student Loans Company has become hugely important given the
amount of resource that passes through it, in terms of funding universities and having no
tradition of having direct relationships with universities. The Office of the Independent
Adjudicator deals with student complaints and yet HEFCE is going to have some
responsibility for protecting the collective student interest, and so on and so forth.
So you can imagine the build-up to a change like that, which is not accompanied by any
organisational change. Lord Browne in his report suggested that there would be a single
organisation or could be a single organisation to do that. Ministers have rejected that notion
and they simply want us to work together to achieve all of these changes in a coherent way.
That is what we are trying to do, in anticipation of hearing the outcome of the consultation
process and knowing whether or not there is going to be legislation, what the scope of that
will be and what the timetable will be. It is a very fluid situation.
Q98 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Do you see the professional bodies, the
engineering institutes, the Royal College of Nursing, the Medical Council and so on, being
involved in this? Do you see them also being part of this consortium that you are
anticipating?
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not think they are logically part of that consortium but that is not
to say we do not have strong working relationships with these bodies. Indeed, you will see
from our evidence that, through the summer, in thinking about the future of strategically
important and vulnerable subjects, and STEM for shorthand, we have been working very
hard with these bodies, with the national academies, with the royal colleges, with research
councils and others, and with employers and representatives in schools, all of whom have a
view on questions of demand and supply in these important areas.
Q99 Lord Krebs: Thank you, Lord Chairman. In your submission, you talk about the risks
to subject provision and I wondered what work you were doing with other bodies to
identify risks, what risks you have identified to date and which of those risks are specific to
STEM subjects, which are the focus of this inquiry. Finally, how do you intend to mitigate the
risks?
Sir Alan Langlands: Yes. There are general issues, generic issues of risk, some of which we
touched on earlier. Will we be able to afford in future the cost of provision, the cost of
providing public support to SIVS subjects and STEM subjects? How will the reforms affect
patterns of student demand? Other changes are going on at the moment in relation to
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sources of income in universities—for example, what is happening in the overseas market

and how that might affect the viability of some programmes that have a strong bias or even
a reasonably even balance between UK students and overseas students. There are these
general things but then, as you would imagine, when one talks to the professional bodies and
the British Academy, they tend to raise the issues that you would expect them to. So the
British Academy is worrying about world languages—languages that are taught in
universities but very rarely taught in schools. I am just picking one or two examples here.
For example, BBSRC are concerned about what they call industrial biotechnologies, the
preparation of students in that area, whole animal physiology, plant and agricultural sciences,
systematics and taxonomy—the kind of things you would expect the BBSRC to worry
about.
What we are faced with—and I now have a very long list of these suggested
vulnerabilities—is trying to put together some sort of evidence, some sort of clear rationale
for where we should put our limited funding and how that plays with our traditional and
long-held commitment to the mainstream of chemistry, physics, maths and engineering.
Q100 Lord Krebs: In terms of how you are mitigating risks, will that possibly be by
distributing your funding in a way that mitigates the risks?
Sir Alan Langlands: I think that is right. We would want to check some of these things out
with universities and employers in terms of early warning of problems. We would look in
some of these areas to secure, through some of our discretionary funding—and we will still
have some—opportunities for collaboration between universities. We have had some very
successful examples in our mainstream work on physics, for example in the south-east and
in the West Midlands, in bringing universities together to run doctoral programmes and to
collaborate more in their research, and one could see that as a device for dealing with the
idea of trying to make progress in these straitened times.
Q101 Lord Krebs: Perhaps I may come in with a final follow-up, looking at it through the
universities’ lens, and I declare an interest as a member of Oxford University. An issue is the
affordability of teaching different subjects and—without going into the details, which you are
familiar with—the way that the new regime is going to play out, which means that in effect
the humanities are much better funded relative to the past than are the sciences. There is a
shift away from funding STEM subjects to funding humanities, as a result of the £9,000 fee.
Looking at it from the universities’ perspective, there may be a disincentive to teach STEM
subjects because they are less affordable than they were before.
Sir Alan Langlands: That argument of course is all in the eye of the beholder. I think there
are many in the humanities who are very worried that they are not receiving mainstream
public funding for their subjects. The important point to make here, though, is that the fee
for STEM subjects is not the income. There will be a hefty supplement—a grant that will
support high-cost subjects. Currently, or in the year about to happen, 2012-13, that is
almost £10,000 for medicine, dentistry and veterinary science and £1,500 for the so-called
band B subjects, some of the other sciences—and we may even add to that list a bit. That
funding is pretty secure. The HEFCE support for—we like to say—SIVS but within that the
STEM subjects I think is pretty secure for the next two or three years. The Government
have been clear that they want that to continue to be a priority, to the point at which, even
with strains of competition and market running through some of their veins, they have asked
us to intervene to ensure that STEM subjects are not damaged by the unintended
consequences of the reform process.
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I think the money is going to be there within reason—who knows about the future?—and I
think the policy will to protect these areas is there. Indeed, in some areas we will increase
our funding. We will surprise people in the next few weeks by continuing our funding for
elements of postgraduate education. We are increasing our funding for postgraduate
research and PHD supervision, at the moment from £205 million to £240 million in the next
year. We are very conscious of our responsibilities in that area and regard the additional
funds we have as the public good element of funding these subjects.
The Chairman: Before I bring in Lord Winston on strategic vulnerable subjects, Lord
Lucas wanted to make a point.
Q102 Lord Lucas: Will you regard it as acceptable if a university chooses to cross-
subsidise—that is, take money from, say, a history course and use it to fund an engineering
course?
Sir Alan Langlands: Traditionally we have not regarded that as our business, and there are
two or three (former) Vice-Chancellors sitting around this table who would be horrified if
they thought that HEFCE would interfere in that sort of thing. Of course we are moving
away now in our teaching funding from the block grant and by 2015 we will be focused only
on four big areas. I would imagine that one of those will be strategically important and
vulnerable subjects, and I would imagine that the Government will want to be assured that
the money is being spent for its intended use. I do not think we will be worrying too much
about the intricacies of cross-subsidisation in universities, but I think if we apply funding to
the STEM area we expect it to be spent in the STEM area. What I think is implied in both
questions about the excess of fees over the costs of running humanities programmes I think
will be a question that students will raise, perhaps rightly, rather than HEFCE.
Q103 Lord Winston: This question concerns strategically important and vulnerable
subjects. Apart from anything else, we are quite interested in how you define STEM.
Definitions are quite important in our report and so maybe some comment on that for SIVS
might be useful as well. The evaluation of the SIVS programme has concluded that, although
demand has increased for SIVS subjects, the programme may not have resulted in lasting
solutions for the root causes of vulnerability. It concluded, “The SIVS programme has been
effective in providing support for these subjects, most notably in areas of sustainable
provision and in building research capacity. The programme overall was good value for
money”. What we would like to know is what you see as the future of the programme and,
of course, the burning question that you are asked in every aspect of your activity: will there
be enough money for this programme?
Sir Alan Langlands: We will continue to support the range of things that we have been
supporting. We will be open-minded about taking on board additional responsibilities or
additional areas of concern, but that might mean either diluting resources or transferring
them in one way or another. So there will be tailored support, probably at its current level,
for as far forward as I can see, which is not very far at the moment. We do not know for
definite what our funding is going to be for the coming year, 2012-13, but we have a pretty
good idea that it is going to be okay and that we will be able to cope. We will keep faith
with these areas. We will keep faith with the commitment to clinical STEM. There are one
or two really high-cost areas, like chemical engineering and metallurgy, that we will put
additional funds into, and there are some intermediate-cost subjects around agriculture and
some aspects of IT that we are thinking about putting some additional funding into at the
moment. The position funding-wise is pretty secure. Looking forward—and for Lord Krebs I
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outlined some of the pressures—there are pressures building up in the system, and of
course one of the difficulties in running the STEM funding programme is that you are always
trying to repel boarders, because everyone wants to get on to this bandwagon, as they see
it. That can be quite difficult, but I think there are people out there who have legitimate
concerns about their subject areas that will have to be taken seriously.
Going back to the question about the involvement of others, I do not think that this is
something that HEFCE can tackle alone. You really have to think about the whole system, so
discussions with schools and colleges, employers, the national academies and professional
bodies are all terribly important. Our SIVS group has been very good at keeping that
community involved and often having to make quite subjective but realistic judgments. It
may be put on the record that I think Peter Saraga has been an absolutely marvellous chair
of that group for some time now.
Q104 Lord Winston: A word about definition—extending the list, for example. How do
you see that? We have earmarked a couple of other subjects, for example computer science
and biological sciences.
Sir Alan Langlands: They would come into my definition of other STEM subjects. They
have not been particularly specially funded. They have not been given a premium in recent
times because they have not needed it in terms of demand or vulnerability. There have been
very specific interventions in these areas. For example, when the pharmaceutical industry
raised questions about the lack of in vivo skills, we worked very hard with selected
universities to develop Masters programmes. We funded these. We tried to move that
discussion on in a practical way. We do not use the definition to close the argument down;
we merely use it to keep track of what is going on.
Q105 The Chairman: In terms of driving the economy first, the coalition Government is
fairly clear that STEM is an incredibly important factor in that. Yet when you created the
20,000 extra places, you deliberately excluded, particularly, those STEM subjects which
come within SIVS as part of that. Can you explain what your thinking was on that? Was it to
try to balance the intakes or what was your thinking? What effect has it had?
Sir Alan Langlands: There were not 20,000 extra places; there were 20,000 places
skimmed off the existing number. Going forward—and we have been living through a
decade of growth in undergraduate places that a couple of years ago came to a pretty
shuddering halt, although we have managed through various initiatives to keep it going a
little bit longer—that will not be sustained beyond the beginning of 2012.
The 20,000 you refer to in the so-called “core/margin exercise” is essentially top-slicing
existing numbers. Bluntly, the strategy there, and it worked, was a device by Government to
try to drive fees down in certain universities so that the idea was that you top-sliced 20,000
places and you allowed people to bid for these places who had fees of less than £7,500.
The Chairman: That excluded science, did it not, and engineering?

Sir Alan Langlands: It did not exclude all science and engineering but it excluded science
and engineering in the research intensive universities. To create that pool of 20,000 we had
to take 8% or 9% of the places away from every university. What we did not do was take
the physics places away from UCL or the chemistry places away from Birmingham or the
maths places away from Newcastle, because we wanted to keep that part of the economy
stable. The Government, I think, were quite comfortable with that, because although they
wanted this to be a disruptive intervention to reduce fees, they did not want to disrupt this
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area. After the White Paper, the Secretary of State wrote to me and said, “In freeing up
student numbers, provision of and support for strategically important and vulnerable
subjects should not be disadvantaged”. So he was very clear that, while he wanted this to
happen, he wanted it to happen in a way that did not damage the STEM area.
The Chairman: I suppose my question to you is: are you confident that it has not?
Sir Alan Langlands: I am absolutely 100% confident that it has not. Of course, these
changes are now fixed on the baseline, so it will not happen into the future. I am sure if the
Government wanted to repeat this exercise, the same discipline would hold, so numerically
about 30,000 places in chemistry, physics, maths and engineering were excluded from this
exercise. By excluding them, and keeping them stable in universities, we therefore have an
agreement that we are holding to, so that universities who kept these numbers will be
expected to keep them into the future, to teach in these subject areas and not to move
student numbers around. The universities have been very responsible about this in recent
times. If anything, they have been trying to increase STEM numbers rather than decrease
them.
Q106 Lord Lucas: When we were listening to the Vice-Chancellors last week, there was
some concern that the way the policy would work at the lower, more practical end on the
STEM scale would be difficult, in that universities would find places skimmed off and then
would be unable to get them back again, because they were admitting on ABB, or a bit
lower, and science courses are always going to be over £7,500 if they are any good.
Sir Alan Langlands: That would be a view expressed by some Vice-Chancellors, and part of
my job is to balance all the conflicting interests. In fact, if I find they are all disagreeing with
me, that is usually a sign that we have it just about right. Depending on which organisation
you are in, or university, and which subject mix you have, you take a very different view and
feelings are running very high in the sector. Of course, the Government have not declared
that they have a policy of moving to ABB or, indeed, that they are going to repeat the
core/margin exercise. That is still a discussion that is ongoing, so as always universities—just
as I used to when I was at one—are jumping the gun and seeing problems that are not there
yet.
Lord Lucas: It did seem to me to be pretty clear that if you lose students and have no way
of getting them back at all then we are going to lose STEM students altogether, because how
can in the current year, in the current system, an ABB student who has had their place
removed have it re-created?
Sir Alan Langlands: If you lose them from one university they will pop up elsewhere. It is
not—
Lord Lucas: But you cannot do that, because you can only have the extra places if you
have fees of £7,500 or under.
Sir Alan Langlands: No, there are two separate exercises going on here. One exercise,
dubbed by the Government “core and margin”, is the top-slicing of 20,000 places. In the
competition, which HEFCE has run, to reallocate these 20,000 places around the sector,
STEM subjects were excluded. The notion of creaming off those students with results at A
level of AAB plus or equivalent is recycling. This is the Government’s attempt to stimulate
student choice. Assuming universities are willing to expand their places, and many are, it is
allowing more students to get to their university of first choice. It is not diminishing the
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total pool of students or, indeed, the mix of subjects. It is simply moving that place from one
university to another.
Lord Lucas: There is clearly some misunderstanding here.
Q107 Lord Lucas: Yes. We have some key information sets coming up. Is what is going
to be included very much along the lines of the White Paper or has that evolved? When do
you think we will know what we are getting? As you see it at the moment, do you think it
will be good, solid, reliable information or will it be difficult to quantify? What pilots are you
undertaking to show that the information that is going to be produced will be useful for
students?
Sir Alan Langlands: First, the information that is going to be produced is information that
students and prospective students said they wanted. There was a major survey exercise. So
this is the information that students said they wanted. It is not the information that
universities said they want to give students. That has been quite meticulously carried
through. Some elements of that information are not new; they are tried and tested, so they
are National Student Survey results, the employment destination information, which has all
sorts of flaws but it is the best we have and I think is recognised as being okay. People are
interested in information on course accreditation, tuition fees and living costs—mainly the
costs of accommodation. People are very interested in the percentage of the time taken up
by what has been labelled “scheduled learning and teaching”. Some people call that “contact
hours” but it is not quite that; it is timetabled activity within universities. Also students have
said that they are interested in assessment methods and how their work is going to be
reviewed. All of that is in the mincing machine and every university has signed up to doing
this. The Government see it as a central plank of their policy of giving students the
information they need to make choices. We have agreed to review it in 2014, so after the
first run at this we will have a thorough look at it.
This is not my personal opinion but there is a preoccupation in some quarters that students
who are paying fees will only be interested in getting better information about salaries and
future employment. I do not necessarily think they will, but I am sure there will be an
emphasis on that sort of thing in the future. So it is very much a part of the Government’s
game plan that is being implemented systematically through the sector.
Q108 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Are you confident that these market-driven student
choices will lead to a better outcome, in terms of high-quality graduates who will in
retrospect feel they made the right decision?
Sir Alan Langlands: Market-driven student choice is not the only thing that is going on.
There are constraints in this as well. It is market-driven within a fixed pot of money—a very
fixed pot of money if you listen to the Treasury, who are worried about student support
and student loan funding into the future, with occasional interventions from Government
about moving students around the system, sometimes to do with the cost of fees and
sometimes to do with simulating the notion of choice. There is a strange combination of
choice, markets, regulation and occasional government initiatives, so it is very difficult. I
think it is going to be very difficult in future to disentangle all of that and determine whether
the system is better as a result of this, but as I understand it this was a set of decisions
driven by financial imperatives, really.
Q109 Lord Winston: These key information sets can be very different for different
universities. For example, many of the new universities have a tight-knit local community
where people are living locally, often in that city, compared with, say, University College
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London, where very few people would have a local commitment at all to Bloomsbury. Does
that matter?
Sir Alan Langlands: No matter where you come from, you would be very interested in the
outcome of the National Student Survey and indeed in the cost of living. Universities are
responding to that. I am not breaking any secrets; it is quite public that Manchester have
decided that their way of trying to improve the student experience, and hopefully the quality
of the outcome, is to reduce their undergraduate numbers, which is quite an interesting step
and not one that many have taken, but things like that will happen. I can imagine in the
future a number of universities rebalancing, maybe reducing their undergraduate numbers
and increasing their postgraduate numbers. No matter where you come from in the
country, or indeed abroad, students and prospective students tell us they already look at
that sort of information; this is merely codifying it for them in an easily accessible way.
Q110 The Chairman: Very quickly, in terms of postgraduate education, there was
nothing in the Browne review really about the funding of postgraduate education. Is that
something which HEFCE are lobbying the Government on or do you have any views
yourself as to how we should get that balance right?
Sir Alan Langlands: Yes. It was hugely disappointing that it did not emerge in the Browne
review as an issue, because I think the relationship between undergraduate fees and
demand-side risk is very significant indeed, as we were hearing earlier. It was not tackled in
the Government’s White Paper, and then subsequently the outcome has been, “Well,
HEFCE is going to monitor this”. I do not think monitoring it is going to be good enough.
We have been arguing that this is not good enough and that we want to get back to work
on this issue. Before the last election, Adrian Smith did some very good work in this area,
and I think this week his postgraduate group is reconvening and meeting with HEFCE, the
research councils, the national academies and various others to discuss this issue again. I
think it is a neglected area.
There are two sets of problems and one is very immediate. There is a supply-side problem
that says the withdrawal of HEFCE grant without, in the case of postgraduate students,
financial support to deal with any fee increases is going to create an immediate financial
barrier. We are trying to deal with that now, this week, in our Board meeting by trying to
carve out some money to ease that through the transition period in the hope that we get a
longer-term solution to it.
The longer-term issue, which is really about student funding and where loan funding might
come from in the future, needs close attention. We are also seeing early signs of some
employer-funded reductions in supporting postgraduate places, so there is a difficult mix
there. We also have a position where some of the controversy around migration issues is
likely to deter international students from coming to the country for their postgraduate
period, and maybe international students generally.
There is a difficult mix of issues, and I think we have to start trying to get to the bottom of
this in an integrated way. We have certainly put more HEFCE resource of time and effort
into this. It is not an area where we have been traditionally involved. I was listening to the
last discussion with interest, because I think the thing that we all have to recognise is that
the real responsibility for the quality of postgraduate education is in the universities. That is
what they are there for. The notion of HEFCE or anyone else puddling around in that area
in an ill-informed way is not the answer. The answer is to solve some of the financial and
policy issues and then allow universities to do what they do best, to get on with it and make
it work on a day-to-day basis.
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The Chairman: That is a very interesting response.
Q111 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Just to follow this up, there is a concern about the funding
of postgraduates and about the perception of graduates, that they will not therefore be keen
to continue, but do you have any view on the numbers that we ought to be shooting for of
graduates as a proportion of postgraduates in the years to come?
Sir Alan Langlands: If I were to try to snap at a view, it would be an ill-informed view. I am
happy to give thought to that and take advice and send in a note, but it is quite a tricky
question. It is not always a linear process. People have gaps and move around and it is
difficult to get at the information that would allow us to think about that, but it is precisely
these things that we need to know more about.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: Do you have no view on the relative numbers of Masters degrees
and PhDs that we should be aiming for?
Sir Alan Langlands: No, and I think I would be loath to say that the current balance is
about right. I do not know if it is. We need to start from first principles in thinking about
that.
Q112 Lord Patel: Sir Alan, it is good to see you in this environment, which is different
from the fun environment that we used to see each other in more often. So it is good to
see you. I think you answered the question, which was my supplementary following the last
evidence session we had, about whose role it is to assess supply and quality of postgraduate
PhDs and doctorates, and I think you will confirm that your answer was the universities.
Sir Alan Langlands: That is what universities are for, that is what they do and that is what
is written in to their charters, their senates and their teaching committees. This notion of
regulation, which everyone is talking about at the moment, completely ignores the fact that
at their heart universities in this country are self-regulating bodies. You folk, who have
worked closely in universities, know much more about supervising PhD students than
anyone sitting in Swindon or Bristol is going to know about it.
Q113 Lord Patel: My main question follows on from Lord Rees’s question, and that is
the concern that because of the increase in debt levels at undergraduate level this will be a
counter-incentive for graduates to go on to postgraduate study. Is HEFCE intending to
review the long-term effects of the reform?
Sir Alan Langlands: We have been asked to do that and we have been asked to do it as we
go along. The difficulty in this issue is that we would have to have three years or four years
of the new system before we see this effect. We are back to Lord Krebs’s point about
whether there is a way in which we could all work together to figure out whether this was
likely to happen. There may be something around surveying existing undergraduate
students, who are coming through the system, to try to figure out if their attitudes towards
postgraduate education are changing. There must be a way of getting at this before just
waking up on 1 September 2015 and thinking, “The numbers are falling off”.
So, yes, we are trying to get at it, and there is what I think is quite an integrated discussion
between HEFCE and its partners but also, as I said earlier, with Adrian Smith holding the
ring with all the parties. The Government are worrying about this, we are worrying about it,
and the universities are, so something is going to happen to try to deal with this issue, I am
sure. There has to be a good policy response. My problem is that I do not know what it is
yet.
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The Chairman: That is a very honest response.
Q114 Lord Broers: This question relates to how you see HEFCE going about making
some of these difficult decisions. You say that given the significant calls on funding made
available to HEFCE to achieve the objectives set out in the White Paper there will be
difficult choices between competing priorities and you will need to work with other funders
and interested parties to maximise the effect of any interventions in this area. Could you
give us examples of how interventions could be prioritised and maximised? For example,
how was the decision reached to maintain £2 billion of the teaching fund to cover the extra
cost of SIVS provision?
Sir Alan Langlands: It was not. The £2 billion covers a number of other things. I am not
sure if we got to this in the previous question. It covers four areas and it is roughly £2
billion. It covers high-cost subjects, including SIVS and all medicine, dentistry and veterinary
science. It also covers the widening participation allocations, which currently are in excess
of £300 million. It also covers specialist institutions, including the conservatoires, where the
costs tend to exceed the fee levels. So we have these four areas where we are going to have
to make judgments.
If you want the blunt answer to how we arrived at £2 billion, the answer is that it is a kind
of balancing figure. The policy is a policy of substitution, of removing as much HEFCE grant
as possible and pushing as much money through the student loan system, through publicly
funded loans, as the alternative source funding for higher education. There was a real
imperative, I am sure—and I was not there—in the public spending negotiations to move in
that direction. Having said that, I think the Government have been absolutely solid within
these four areas that I have mentioned in saying that these are priorities—they are
essentially public goods where the cost of the fee will not cover the cost of provision,
therefore it is in the public interest to have a premium or a supplement in the form of a
HEFCE grant to support that activity. In broad terms that is how the decision came about.
The real trouble comes in balancing the different priorities within these headings, but also,
given that we have a defined total sum—the HEFCE grants and of course research funding is
ring-fenced, so the only thing that is fluid is HEFCE teaching grants—in balancing that with
the costs and the cost pressures on student support funding and the student loan system. It
is very difficult, and Ministers have been very clear in saying that if universities cause, say by
over-recruitment, an overshoot and additional pressure on student support and student
loans—because the students have a legal right to access that funding if they have been
recruited by a university—they will take the money away from HEFCE. It is a real classic
example of punch the pillow in one spot and it is going to bulge elsewhere. That is why I
think we are very guarded about whether we are going to have this money into the long
term. I am trying today to be reassuring about the next two or three years, but how this is
all going to unfold into the future I think bluntly is anyone’s guess.
Q115 Lord Broers: Would it be an incorrect generalisation to say that the reforms have
taken the independence away from HEFCE, so Government is interfering far more now?
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not think that is so. They have taken a lot of money away from us
but that has probably not affected our independence but it has affected our—
Lord Broers: It sounds like they had quite a voice in your thought-stream. That was not
something that came out of the HEFCE council.
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Sir Alan Langlands: No. It came out of public spending negotiations. Of course they had a
voice. They were the people who were negotiating it, not HEFCE. It would never be the
case that the UGC or HEFCE in its past life was negotiating public funding. We take what
we get.
Q116 The Chairman: You mentioned briefly, in terms of the £2 billion, the three areas.
You said: high-cost subjects, widening participation and Lord Winston’s conservatoire. Are
there three or four?
Sir Alan Langlands: Yes, sorry, there are four areas. High cost-subjects, SIVS—
The Chairman: Right.
Lord Winston: I think we get the smallest slice of that cake.
Sir Alan Langlands: You get the smallest slice of that cake, yes.
Q117 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Just listening to this, is HEFCE growing or

shrinking? You said that the Government had taken a lot of money away from you, but it has
also given you additional jobs to do. As an organisation, are you able to shrink because you
have less money to dispense or are you going to have to grow in order to do all these
complicated extra things?
Sir Alan Langlands: The answer is that we have to shrink. We have shrunk over the last
couple of years to accommodate the pressure on the administrative spending. Indeed, our
colleagues in BIS have shrunk by a very significant margin along the lines of the rest of
Whitehall. We have not shrunk by too much and I think the Government has been wary.
HEFCE is a very small organisation. Our administrative costs, as a percentage of the money
we have been dispensing over the last two years, are about one-quarter of a per cent. It is
the smallest quango in percentage terms in the country, and that is why I think it is quite
effective—very effective in some cases. We are not going to be allowed to grow. We are
taking on additional responsibilities. We may have to force a discussion about funding for
administrative costs. I was very interested recently that when the Care Quality Commission
as a regulator essentially failed they were criticised by the Prime Minister in the House of
Commons for failing to bring the fact that they did not have enough resources to do their
job properly to the attention of the Government. We would not fall into that trap, but
neither would we grow for the sake of it. We want to develop, as the paper said, this
observatory function so that we can really get to grips with and understand the reforms.
We would have to reach a common designation process for universities—if we had to deal
with maybe 60, 70 or 80 more private sector organisations—and we would have to have a
registration group that was able to deal with that work efficiently.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: Will you need more money from Government than you
are currently receiving? You say you are a very trim organisation.
Sir Alan Langlands: Yes, we may do and that is a live discussion. In global terms, there is a
small issue of top-slicing and reallocating 20,000 places. At one point we had 25 people
working on that, assessing all the bids, because we literally had hundreds of bids and that
seemed to me to be not a good use of time or indeed the sort of intervention that was
maybe even necessary, but I can understand why it was happening. It was happening to drive
the fees down.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: Universities are going to be asked to do an awful lot

more monitoring of themselves and filling out forms telling people what they are doing, and
398
telling you, among others, what they are doing. Presumably that is going to put an extra
burden on them. They are going to need more administrators.
Sir Alan Langlands: I mentioned earlier that all the regulatory bodies, the national bodies,
were coming together and working together at the moment, and we are doing two things.
One, we are trying to map out all these processes and making sure that there is not
duplication of effort, and the White Paper asked HEFCE and HESA to look at the whole
data and data-collecting landscape in higher education with a view to streamlining it and
reducing it.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: That is going to be really important.
Sir Alan Langlands: We are already making good progress on these issues. We have very
good people working on it, so I am hopeful that we can make some of these changes and
streamline at the same time. It is probably going to be the only way in the current
environment.
The Chairman: The final question is from Lord Winston on international comparisons.
Q118 Lord Winston: Yes, and I think you are to be congratulated on your economy.
That is a point well made. There are two questions here, really, which perhaps we can
conflate quickly because of time. What has been seen in other countries, following similar
higher education reforms, and what do you think we could learn from other countries’
experiences on that? I wonder if you could also address the issue, which obviously is of
concern to us, of how UK STEM provision compares with that in other countries in the
developed world and rapidly developing countries. Obviously China is of importance to us
and Singapore, and so on.
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not have a lot to go on. On the first question, there is no
comparator for the soon-to-be-reformed higher education system. There is no other
country in the world that has a combination of very strong university autonomy, a very
generous—I am sure it does not feel like that for some people—student funding system, but
also very tight control and sometimes government intervention on student numbers and a
desire for pluralism and for introducing the private sector. That is a mix that does not exist
anywhere else in the world, although other countries have tried to do bits of that, so we are
kind of on our own. The interesting thing, talking to people around the world at the
moment, is that quite a number of people in other countries are hoping it does not work
because they think they would have to do it as well, so we are slightly on show in trying to
make this work.
More precisely on the comparative figures, STEM new entrants as a percentage of total
enrolments in the UK are 21.3%. The EU average is 24.4% and the OECD average is just
over 24%. The average in Germany is 26.9% and in Korea it is 31.8%. As for the so-called
BRIC countries, I do not have the numbers in my head, but they are all pushing up very
smartly on volume. What the detail under these figures shows is that the UK is holding its
own in the sciences but is lagging—maybe not surprisingly, given our industrial base—on
engineering and technology areas. These are the areas that draw us down a bit in terms of
the international comparators. We will need to do more on this to get to grips with it all.
The Chairman: The final word, Lord Rees.
Q119 Lord Rees of Ludlow: You have talked a lot about numbers but not at all about
the quality and rigour of the courses, and I wonder if you are satisfied with the comparison
with these other countries in that respect. If you are not, can one firm up the external
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examiner system or something of that kind in order to have greater confidence in the
quality and rigour of all these degrees?
Sir Alan Langlands: There is a lot of work going on. Colin Riordan, who is going to Cardiff
next summer and is currently the Vice-Chancellor at Essex, led a group at the tail-end of the
last Government, into the new Government, following real Select Committee concerns in
the Commons about this issue. I think things are improving; the QAA is committed to new
approaches. There has been quite a detailed UUK-sponsored study to try to sharpen up the
external examiner system, so there are various initiatives. It is very difficult to compare.
Talking to colleagues abroad and occasionally travelling, I think what we do is still held in
very high regard and I think there are all sorts of “market signals” that say we are still doing
pretty well, but I do not think there is room for complacency and you can always find
examples that challenge the generalisation I am making. It is very difficult to get at.
Again, the quality of what is provided is ultimately the responsibility of the university. That is
what autonomous universities mean. That is what your senates and educational sub-
committees are set up for. They are about sustaining and maintaining these standards into
the future, so in terms of having a system in place that oversees quality I think we do well,
but we are not in any way complacent. Standards are the day-to-day business of universities.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: So the signals sent by student demand may not be the right ones.
Sir Alan Langlands: They might not be. UK students are pretty discerning and they will
probably become more discerning. At the end of November I was in China and talked to
lots of students, and they are very thoughtful about what is going on. There is a situation at
the moment where we can see a pattern where students from India have decided,
individually and collectively, that a move in the direction of Canada is preferable to a move
in the direction of the UK at the moment, and you can see numbers flowing in that
direction. There are all sorts of other factors at work here that are very difficult to get at,
so we fight on with that.
The Chairman: That is quite a sobering note to finish on, in terms of where quality lies.
Let me just thank you enormously, Sir Alan, on behalf of the whole Committee. It has been
an excellent evidence session, as ever when you come before us. You give us your own
views as well as the views of your organisation, which we find particularly attractive. Thank
you very much indeed.
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Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) –

Supplementary written evidence
HEFCE funding for SIVS and STEM
Introduction
1. This document has been prepared in response to the request to HEFCE’s Chief
Executive from Elisa Rubio of 25 June 2012:
The Sub-Committee is in the last stages of the inquiry and we are expecting
publication of the report on 24 July.
During your evidence session you made some comments on the proportion of the
HEFCE budget allocated to SIVS but no figures were discussed. This is something
that the Sub-Committee is quite interested about and I wonder whether you could
let me have the latest figures available for the HEFCE funding allocated to SIVS. I am
not sure whether you are able to disaggregate the SIVS funding for undergraduate
provision and for postgraduate provision. If you are, could you please let me know
how much funding was allocated to each provision.
2. The previous written submission from HEFCE, and the oral evidence provided by the
Chief Executive on 24 January 2012 are available at:
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/science-
technology/STEMsubjects/STEMevidence.pdf.
Background
3. HEFCE’s funding powers are in relation to the activity of institutions: we do not fund
individual students. Our approach to funding has been to adopt methods that are an efficient
means of distributing grant between institutions, reflecting Government priorities. Having
calculated allocations, the bulk of the funding (the recurrent grant) is allocated as a block
grant. Institutions have freedom to distribute their block grant internally to support their
own particular priorities, as long as it is used to support teaching, research and related
activities – those areas that we are empowered to fund. However, we apply terms and
conditions to the grant that we provide.
Recurrent teaching funding and subject categories: price groups, STEM and
SIVS
4. Most of our recurrent teaching funding is calculated to reflect the numbers of students
in broad subject groupings known as price groups. We are using students as a proxy
measure for the activity of institutions, rather than determining grant for particular students.
Our price groups reflect where subjects display similar costs and are broadly as follows:
• Price group A: clinical years of study in medicine, dentistry and veterinary science
• Price group B: laboratory-based science, engineering and technology
• Price group C: intermediate cost subjects with a laboratory, studio or field work
element
• Price group D: classroom-based subjects.
401
5. STEM refers to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Clinical subjects are
sometimes included within STEM and sometimes not. SIVS refers to strategically important
and vulnerable subjects. In the context of our SIVS work in STEM areas, we have to date
focused – on the advice of our Advisory Group – on four subjects the evidence suggests
have been most vulnerable within STEM: chemistry, engineering, maths and physics. 212
6. There is no one-for-one correlation between price groups, STEM subjects and SIVS.
For example:
a. Most of price group B will relate to STEM subjects, but there are some
exceptions: agriculture is included within price group B, but most of agriculture is not
treated as STEM; some institutions are also permitted to include elements of high cost
creative and performing arts in price group B. Equally, STEM subjects do not fall
entirely within price group B: Mathematics is in price group C; if clinical subjects are
included, then relevant years of study for them are in price group A.
b. Not all STEM subjects are SIVS – for example biosciences are not a SIVS – and
not all SIVS are STEM – modern languages being a particular example.
c. While SIVS are more commonly found in price group B, they can also be found
in price group C (mathematics, modern languages) and price group D (quantitative
social science – this cannot generally be equated to whole courses, but is more
concerned with the curricula across a range of different subjects).
7. Other than for a small number of particular targeted allocations, we do not provide
teaching grant for STEM subjects or SIVS as a discrete category, but rather students
following such courses are counted in allocation methods that reflect different student
categorisations (such as price groups or widening participation categories). Because we do
not need to collect information on STEM/SIVS categories to run these funding models, we
can only estimate how much of our teaching grants is attributable to STEM/SIVS students
based on more historic data. We will not, for example, have 2011-12 data on the numbers
of students in STEM subjects or SIVS until we receive the individualised student data for the
year in December 2012.
8. The finance arrangements for higher education are changing significantly from 2012-13,
with more income provided through student tuition fees, supported by the availability of
increased publicly-funded loans, and less through HEFCE block grants. We have therefore
sought to provide figures for 2011-12, the last year of the existing funding arrangements,
and for 2015-16, which will be approaching a more steady-state position under the new
funding arrangements. Because of the transfer from HEFCE grant to tuition fees, we have
also sought to estimate the change in full-time undergraduate fee income relating to
students in STEM subjects and SIVS.
9. The above factors mean that the teaching funding figures that follow are very
approximate, because they are based on estimated/forecast student numbers, estimated fee
212 For the period 2005-06 to 2011-12, the HEFCE definition of SIVS has included the following broad areas: STEM
(chemistry, engineering, maths and physics), modern foreign languages, area studies and related minority languages, and
quantitative social sciences. Land-based studies were initially considered under the SIVS programme but following a review
in 2007 were no longer considered vulnerable. Islamic Studies was identified by the Government as strategically important
in 2007.
402
income and, by 2015-16, forecasts of the grant that BIS may make available to us. BIS has
currently announced only indicative teaching funding up to the 2013-14 financial year (April
to March). There are some differences in the totals for STEM within the table due to
rounding.
10. In the new HEFCE teaching funding arrangements for 2012-13 onwards, we will
continue to provide funding to meet some of the additional costs of higher-cost subjects at
UG and PG level. We will, therefore, continue to provide funding for subjects in price
groups A and B, and also for a new price group, C1, which will cover the higher-cost
subjects in price group C (archaeology, design and creative arts, information technology and
systems sciences, software engineering, and media studies). Furthermore, we will be
continuing our additional allocation for very high-cost STEM subjects (physics, chemistry,
chemical engineering and mineral, metallurgy and materials engineering).
Estimated recurrent teaching grant attributable to STEM and SIVS by academic

year (August to July): figures in £billions
2011-12 2015-16
estimated forecast
Non-clinical STEM 1.2 0.4
Clinical STEM 0.4 0.4
HEFCE recurrent teaching grant
than can be attributed to Total STEM 1.7 0.8
subjects
SIVS 0.7 0.2
Total all subjects 4.1 1.2
Total HEFCE recurrent teaching grant* 4.3 1.3
Estimated FT UG fee income Total STEM 0.8 2.0
SIVS 0.4 1.0
Estimated resource (HEFCE
teaching grant plus FT UG fee Total STEM 2.5 2.8
income)
SIVS 1.1 1.2
Non-clinical STEM 30% 36%
Proportion of HEFCE recurrent Clinical STEM 11% 30%
teaching grant attributable to
subjects Total STEM 40% 66%
SIVS 17% 18%
Proportion of HEFCE recurrent Non-clinical STEM 28% 26%
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2011-12 2015-16
estimated forecast
teaching grant plus FT UG fee Clinical STEM 8% 8%
income attributable to subjects
Total STEM 36% 34%
SIVS 16% 15%
* HEFCE recurrent teaching grant excludes our allocations of non-recurrent funding for
special initiatives, though BIS treats this as part of teaching grant in its grant letter to us.
11. The figures show that the changed financial arrangements for higher education are
expected to result in an overall increase in income for STEM and SIVS. These subjects will in
future account for a much larger proportion of our total teaching grant, because we will be
providing little in relation to classroom-based and other lower cost subjects. In resource
terms (HEFCE grant plus fee income) STEM and SIVS are expected to account for a slightly
smaller proportion of the total income for the sector. This is because, while all subjects are
expected to see an increase in income, the availability of fees of up to £9,000 will have a
greater proportionate benefit for lower cost subjects.
12. Institutions are constrained in the overall number of FT UG students they can take
each year through their Student Number Control (SNC). We have taken steps to ensure
that the implementation of the Government’s SNC proposals for 2012-13 do not provide
incentives for providers to move provision away from subjects previously identified as SIVS,
and we are looking to maintain similar protection for these subjects in SNC proposals for
2013-14.
Research funding and subject categories: units of assessment, STEM and SIVS
13. Most of our recurrent research funding (mainstream quality-related research funding,
or mainstream QR) is calculated to reflect the volume and quality profile of research in a
number of different subject groupings known as units of assessment (UOAs). There are 67
UOAs based on the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), though these will be
collapsed into broader groupings of 36 UOAs for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework
(REF). The volume measure is the number of research active academic staff submitted to
those assessment exercises.
14. In addition to mainstream QR, we also provide a number of smaller elements of QR

funding:
a. Funding for research degree programme (RDP) supervision. This is based on

postgraduate research student numbers in each UOA where the institution meets a
quality threshold and, from 2012-13, also includes a quality weighting.
b. QR charity support fund. This is based on research income from charities. We

used to collect this information by UOA, but this disaggregation is not necessary to
determine the allocation and is therefore no longer required. This means we can
attribute QR charities funding to UOA in our allocations up to 2011-12, but not
thereafter.
c. QR business element. This is based on research income from business and

industry. It is calculated at the whole institution level, not by UOA.
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d. QR funding for national research libraries. This is funding allocated to five

institutions maintaining libraries that we have designated as being of national
importance. It is also not allocated by UOA.
15. There are some differences between teaching and research in whether particular
subjects are treated as STEM. For research funding purposes, clinical and allied health
profession subjects are treated as STEM, whereas this is not always the case with some
analysis of teaching funding. Even if clinical subjects are included in STEM for teaching,
teaching in nursing and midwifery will generally not be treated as STEM, whereas research in
those subjects is.
16. The mapping of subjects to SIVS is generally consistent between teaching and research
and currently includes physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and modern languages.
Although quantitative social science is treated as a SIVS, it cannot be identified separately
within our research funding allocations by UOAs and (as with teaching) is therefore
excluded from the analysis which follows.
17. We have more certainty about the attribution of most of our research funding to
STEM and SIVS, because allocations are made at quite a disaggregated level (by UOA) and
this facilitates a mapping of UOAs to STEM and SIVS categories. In addition, while for
teaching funding BIS have announced only indicative funding up to the 2013-14 financial year,
in research it has confirmed funding up to the 2014-15 financial year. Given this greater
certainty about our research funding budget, we have informed the sector that we expect to
maintain our research funding in cash terms during this spending review period.
18. The figures which follow show recurrent research funding attributable to STEM and
SIVS within the announced allocations for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years. As
there is no equivalent for research of the shift in teaching from HEFCE grant to tuition fees,
these figures will also serve as a reasonable estimate of the steady state position at the end
of the spending review period.
Estimated recurrent research grant attributable to STEM and SIVS by academic

year (August to July): figures in £millions
2011-12 2012-13
STEM 806 819
HEFCE mainstream QR and RDP
supervision funding than can be SIVS 326 331
attributed to subjects
Total 1,290 1,290
Total HEFCE recurrent research grant 1,558 1,558
Proportions of HEFCE mainstream QR STEM 62% 63%
and RDP supervision funding than can be
SIVS 25% 26%
attributed to subjects
STEM 987 Not
HEFCE mainstream QR, RDP
available as
supervision and QR charities funding SIVS 334
2012-13 QR
than can be attributed to subjects
Total 1,488 charities
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Proportions of HEFCE mainstream QR, STEM 42. 66% funding

RDP supervision and QR charities cannot be
SIVS 22%
funding than can be attributed to attributed to
subjects UOAs
19. The table shows slight increases in the total recurrent research funding for STEM and
SIVS between 2011-12 and 2012-13, within a fixed overall recurrent research grant total.
Approximately two-thirds of HEFCE recurrent research grant can be attributed to STEM
subjects. The proportion attributable to SIVS is much less and this reflects the fact that
medical and health-related subjects account for a large proportion of recurrent research
grant and, in particular, of QR charities funding, but that while these are treated as STEM
subjects, they are not SIVS.
Non-recurrent HEFCE funding for SIVS

20. HEFCE has had a policy framework and programme of work in place to sustain
Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects (SIVS) since 2005. Over this period, the
Government has defined which subjects are strategically important, and HEFCE has
identified if they are also vulnerable. We have done this by considering whether there is
compelling evidence of a need for action to enable them to be available at a level and in a
way that meets the national interest. We have made investments to increase and diversify
the demand for, and to sustain and re-shape the supply of strategically important subjects.
These investments, for discrete programmes of activity, have encompassed a wide range of
areas, not just in STEM.
21. The table below summarises the main items of expenditure by area over the period
2005-06 to 2011-12. 213
SIVS programme expenditure by area, 2005-06 to 2011-12

SIVS programme Allocation (£million, 2005-06 to
2011-12)
Demand-raising
STEM pilots 15.9
National HE STEM programme 21
Routes into Languages 4.5
Centres for Excellence in Teaching and 29.65
Learning
Research capacity
Science and Innovation awards 10.2
South East Physics network (SEPnet) 12
Great Western Research collaboration 4
213Please note that the total figure for these investments differs from that provided in the summary of our SIVS
investments on our website, because it does not include initiatives undertaken using recurrent teaching funding (such as the
support for very high cost STEM subjects). Such initiatives would come within the figures in the earlier section of this
document on recurrent teaching grant.
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Midlands Physics Alliance 4

Birmingham-Warwick alliance 10
Integrative Mammalian Biology 4
Language Based Area Studies subject centres 11.2
Islamic Studies 1
Quantitative Social Science 4
Information technology 9.4
Open University delivery 2.2
Total 143.05
22. We are close to finalising a new policy approach to SIVS for the new fee and funding
system. It starts from the assumption that the HEFCE support for high-cost subjects (see
paragraph 10) and specialist providers, allied with increased fee income, should be sufficient
to address the recurrent requirements for most subjects. However, this does not preclude
other funding initiatives outside recurrent funding, which would be made through
discretionary investments (often with partner organisations) to address specific risks to
subjects. At this stage we cannot anticipate where these risks might arise, and therefore we
are not in a position to give an indication of the likely scale of future non-recurrent
investments in SIVS.
13 July 2012
407
Professor Sir John Holman, University of York – Written evidence
Thank you for inviting me to make a written submission to the inquiry. I do so from my
perspective of having taught A level sciences for 33 years, been a headteacher of a school
with a large sixth form, established the National Science Learning Centre and advised the
government on STEM education policy from 2006 to 2010. I now teach chemistry to
honours undergraduates at the University of York.
You will have received comprehensive responses from several organisations, including the
Wellcome Trust, to which I act as education adviser. I will not attempt to be comprehensive
myself, but instead I would like to emphasise just five points that I believe are particularly
important. My comments relate mainly to pre-university education in schools and colleges,
where the seeds are sown for STEM study in higher education.
1 The importance of specialist teachers in secondary schools

It is a feature of physics, chemistry and mathematics that they are often taught by non-
specialist teachers because of the shortage of specialists. However skilled they may be at
teaching, non-specialists often lack the depth of knowledge and understanding to draw on
when a bright student asks a deep question, or starts an interesting aside. Such moments
can often be the spark that ignites an interest in further study. Ofsted tells us that the better
qualified a teacher, the more effective they will be 214 , but headteachers do not always
recognise the importance of specialism. Faced with a hard-to-fill vacancy, they may settle for
a non-specialist who looks as if they can teach rather than going through the difficult
business of searching for a chemistry, physics or mathematics specialist. Government must
maintain and intensify the drive to attract high-achieving STEM specialists into teaching.
2 The impact of triple science

Students who have taken triple science at GCSE are far more likely to take STEM A levels
and proceed to STEM in higher education than those who have not. The government’s
Triple Science programme has been very effective in getting more schools to offer triple
science, but there is still some way to go before it is available to every student.
The availability of triple science benefits most of all those students from disadvantaged
backgrounds. Students taking triple science GCSE are about 5 times more likely to proceed
to take A level sciences than students taking double science GCSE, but the availability of
triple sciences benefits disadvantaged students even more than the average. For example,
males on free school meals taking triple science GCSE are 9.3 times more likely to proceed
to take A level sciences than the same students taking double science GCSE. 215
3 The need for high quality careers advice and for transparency by HE
STEM A levels have the reputation of being harder than most other A levels, and this acts as
a disincentive for students to opt for them, and for schools and colleges to guide students
to take them 216 . To compensate, students need to be aware of the career advantages -
better pay and wider opportunities – of taking these subjects. Giving students and their
214 Ofsted data from 2004/05 inspections showing better pupil outcomes when science teachers’ specialism matches what
they are teaching
215 Data provided by the Schools Analysis and Research Division, DfE (formerly DCSF)
216 STEM Careers Review for the Gatsby Foundation, November 2010
408
parents authentic labour market information about the jobs available for those with STEM
qualifications is the key, but the rationalisation of the careers advisory service means that
this must increasingly be delivered by the web.
It is important that HE and employers are transparent and unequivocal about the
qualifications they prefer. If they value A level mathematics more highly than other
qualifications, they must say so. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds suffer most from
the lack of clear information about the value of STEM qualifications in the labour market.
4 The importance of post-16 mathematics

Mathematics is the foundation for most STEM subjects – including, increasingly, the
biosciences. Students with a post-16 qualification in mathematics (particularly A level
mathematics) are likely to experience fewer problems and be less likely to drop out than
those without. Yet England, Wales and Northern Ireland have the lowest participation rate
in post-16 mathematics of 24 developed nations surveyed by the Nuffield Foundation 217 . The
Secretary of State for Education has said he would like to see the "vast majority" of pupils in
England studying maths to the age of 18 within a decade 218 , but is this soon enough? More
needs to be done to build on and accelerate the encouraging growth in popularity of A level
maths (up 40% in the past 5 years) and to provide new and rigorous level 3 maths
qualifications to support biosciences.
5 Importance of practical work

Practical experimental work and fieldwork are the bedrock of science teaching and an
important way to engage bright students and motivate them to further study. Yet practical
work is perceived to be declining 219 . It is important that, as the Government creates the
new Science National Curriculum, with renewed emphasis on knowledge and theory, it
does not unintentionally eliminate opportunities for young people to learn, and to be
assessed on, the methods and practical techniques of science.
14 December 2011
217 Is the UK an outlier in upper secondary maths education? Nuffield Foundation 2010
218 Speech to the Royal Society, June 2011
219 Practical experiments in school science lessons and science field trips: Commons Science Select Committee's Ninth
Report of Session 2010-12, September 2011
409
Amran Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Jennifer Newman, London South
Bank University, Will Evans, Imperial College London, Fabio Fiorelli, University College
London and Adam Hawken, University College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347)
Amran Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Jennifer

Newman, London South Bank University, Will Evans, Imperial
College London, Fabio Fiorelli, University College London and Adam
Hawken, University College London – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347)
410
Imperial College London – Written evidence
Summary
1. Imperial College London makes the following points, and would welcome the
opportunity to elaborate further through discussion with the sub-committee:
a. high-quality STEM graduates, who have benefitted from a research-led and
laboratory-based or mathematics education, are of strategic importance to both
STEM and non-STEM industries, and play a leading role in the UK and global
economy
b. the maintenance of high quality, research-led postgraduate provision in STEM
subjects, and its sustainability, is of vital importance to the needs of industry,
commerce, healthcare and academia
c. the sustainability of STEM education remains a key issue, particularly in light of the
additional investment being committed by international competitors
d. the quality, coverage and content of STEM teaching in state schools it not
currently sufficient.
Context
2. Imperial College London is the only UK university to focus exclusively on science,
technology, engineering, medicine and business (single honours business is not taught at
undergraduate level). Annually, over 5,000 students graduate from the College, over
half of which are postgraduate students. In 2010-11, 47% of our full time students were
from outside the UK (30% non-EU and 17% non-UK EU) and 38% were studying at
postgraduate level (18% postgraduate taught and 19% postgraduate research). Our
students are taught by leading academics and, in 2010-11, the College received £299M
research grant funding.
3. In accordance with our mission and educational objectives, the College aims to identify
and attract students of the highest academic ability and potential who are most able to
benefit from our courses. Students will succeed at the College only if they have
sufficient prerequisite subject knowledge and proven ability to cope with, and thrive on,
STEM courses of the highest academic standard and intensity. Hence, the majority of
our programmes require A* or A grades at A-level (or equivalent) in physics or
chemistry and in at least one mathematics subject. The average A-level tariff score for
undergraduate entrants in 2010, based on the best three grades, was better than the
equivalent of A*,A,A.
4. The College’s subject base, and the nature of our courses, mean that our graduates are
valued highly by employers and are important to the economy. We provide rigorous,
intensive and research-led education and the majority of our undergraduate courses are
accredited by a relevant professional body. Many courses, at postgraduate level in
particular, have been developed in consultation with industrial partners including, for
example, Laing O’Rourke, GSK and Veolia. Our graduates can expect high starting
salaries as a consequence, with the reported average starting salary six-months after
graduation from an undergraduate degree being £29.3k in 2009-10.220
220 Data from Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) Survey.
411
5. Core to our mission since our foundation has been the application of our research and
education for the benefit of industry, commerce and healthcare. We seek to embed
within our students an understanding of the importance of applying their knowledge for
the benefit of society and the economy generally, and provide opportunities for them to
achieve this. The College works in partnership with Imperial College Healthcare NHS
Trust through our Academic and Health Science Centre (AHSC), to deliver innovation
in medical research, education and healthcare. In 2010-11, the College secured £37M
research income from UK and global industrial sources and Imperial Innovations plc
attracted investment for the College’s portfolio of spin-out companies to the value of
£88M.
6. The context in which we operate helps to shape, and inform, our view that the
provision of high quality, and appropriately funded, STEM education, at primary,
secondary and the higher level, is of utmost importance. Science, quite rightly, moves at
a rapid pace; hence, creating the environment and infrastructure to nurture and foster
this change is essential for economic development.
Supply and demand

7. A key strength of the UK higher education (HE) sector is its diversity, which ensures
the delivery of different types of educational provision serving various economic,
industrial, and societal needs. Whilst it is important to acknowledge the different
contribution that various parts of the sector play in fostering STEM knowledge and
skills, the current and future needs of economy and society will not be met without
sufficient numbers of high-quality STEM graduates who have benefited from an excellent
research-led and laboratory-based or mathematics education. It is not only important
that our graduates are equipped fully to apply their skills in the current economic
environment, they are also able, and are often required, to adapt to, and define, future
economic need.
8. A high quality research-led and laboratory-based or mathematics education, equips

students to think critically and independently, and to foster the analytical skills
necessary to provide solutions to economic, social and industrial problems. Such skills
are not only necessary for careers in traditional STEM industries, but are requirements
for a variety of business sectors. For example, it is essential to ensure an appropriate
mix of skills amongst politicians and public servants with a view to ensuring informed
and evidenced-based policy making. In 2009-10, 89% of our graduates were in full-time
employment or further study six months after their first degree. The highest recruiting
sectors of our graduates include medicine, education, technology, manufacturing,
finance, public administration and business management consultancy.221
9. The College has concerns that some of the proposed reforms to HE, would impact
negatively on the quality of UK STEM graduates. Most particularly, the proposal to relax
the controls around HE designation, including degree awarding powers and university
title, has the potential to divert public funding (mainly in the form of subsidised student
loans) to support providers which have no experience of delivering laboratory-based
courses.
221 Data from DHLE.
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10. Scientific challenges are increasingly likely to straddle academic boundaries and we take
a multidisciplinary approach to identifying, and applying, solutions to economic and
social challenges. For example, healthcare is improved within our AHSC through the
interaction, and application, of engineering, business, life sciences, mathematics and
medical expertise. Reflecting this, it is important for students to be located in an
environment with a critical mass of expertise that spans scientific disciplines. This is
unlikely to be found amongst the new providers that the Government is seeking to
encourage.
11. Most of the College’s undergraduate courses are longer than three years, which is
necessary to ensure the quality of our provision, to prepare students for research and
to meet the relevant professional body accreditation standards. Whilst we acknowledge
that there are instances where further diversity within the sector might be encouraged,
this must not be pursued at the expense of excellent research-led and laboratory-based
STEM provision.
12. There are different types of postgraduate taught (PGT) courses, including single
discipline or multi-discipline based Masters degrees with a significant research
component, Masters degrees with a significant professional component and courses,
often at diploma or certificate level, that aim to equip students with particular
vocational skills, or to adapt to new business environments. Each of these develop
graduates with particular knowledge and skills, and therefore meet different needs of
economy and society. However, recent discussions on the reform of HE have been
notable for the lack of attention paid to how Masters degrees should be funded, and
organised, within the sector.
13. Of particular concern to the College is the need for the UK to maintain high-quality,
sustainable and research-led Masters provision which meets the needs of industry,
commerce and healthcare, whilst preserving a pipeline of candidates who are suitably
qualified to pursue postgraduate research (PGR) studies. Increasingly, high-quality,
research-led Masters degrees are a prerequisite of postgraduate research (PGR)
courses internationally. The uncertainty over the provision of support for such courses
is therefore a considerable risk to the future of the UK’s academic and economic
development.
14. STEM trained post-doctorates are necessary to ensure the development of the next
generation of academics and researchers and it is now more important that leaders of
the future are well-versed in science. Possessing an in depth understanding of the
scientific process, and the context within which that science takes place, our PGR
students are increasingly in demand by employers who value the critical and analytical
skills that are fostered by the research, technical and transferable skills training we
provide. Key sectors outside of education (higher and other) that recruit our PGR
students include medicine, pharmaceutical, energy, technology and finance. Note that it
is commonplace to have employees in high level management functions in the Far East
with higher degrees in science.
15. Appropriate facilities, a critical mass of expertise across relevant disciplines, and
supervisory capacity, are necessary to support PGR students effectively. Hence,
particularly at a time of public funding constraint, resource should be targeted with a
413
view to ensuring that high quality provision is funded sustainably. PGR students also
contribute enormously to research capacity within UK universities. For example, PGR
students comprise over half of our doctoral and post-doctoral researchers and are
involved in research projects that have direct economic and social implications for the
UK and internationally. Hence, the provision of studentships to encourage the best UK
students to undertake postgraduate studies is a necessity.
16. We operate a number of centres for doctoral training, with research council support
and in collaboration with academic and industrial partners. A key strength of the
doctoral training centre model is in cohort building, through activities such as seminars
and workshops aimed at equipping students with the skills needed to work with, and in,
a variety of environments. Through our Industrial Doctoral Centres, research students
spend time at an industrial placement, which helps to foster a further understanding of
the research application process. Nevertheless, it is also important to recognise the
role played by PGR students resourced through project-based funding, which enables
the College to provide additional opportunities in emerging research areas and also for
those talented individuals who might be less interested in experiencing the industrial
environment directly.
Sustainability
17. The delivery of excellent laboratory-based education is resource intensive. It is
therefore important that STEM education is funded sustainably in universities and
schools with a view to ensuring appropriate quality and coverage. In 2009-10, the full
cost to the College of educating a HEFCE fundable taught student in some engineering
subjects was £15.7K per annum. Hence, despite the rise in undergraduate tuition fees,
leading institutions will still face a deficit on much of their taught STEM provision. In
contrast, we calculate that the average cost to Russell Group institutions of educating a
humanities student is around £7.1K per annum. Appropriate funding for STEM is
therefore essential.
18. Given that the full cost of educating a HEFCE fundable taught STEM student is often
greater than the level of funding available, institutions have to cover their costs through
alternative revenue steams. Hence, a significant proportion of growth in students
studying STEM subjects is due to an increase in international student numbers. The
presence of international students is also important to the quality and reputation of UK
universities, enhancing student recruitment and enriching the student experience.
Benefits to the UK economy include inward investment and the fostering of valuable
relationships internationally. For example, many of our international graduates become
leaders in industry and politics worldwide. Changes to immigration rules threaten to
undermine the important contribution that international students make to the UK
STEM community, both whilst studying at university and as highly skilled graduates.
19. The sustainability of the sector must be considered in the wider international context.
For example, countries such as the US and Germany are investing more into higher
education and research because they regard science, and STEM graduates, as part of the
solution to, and mechanism for, economic growth. Gross expenditure on research and
development (public and private) in China increased from $75billion in 2007 to
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$144billion in 2010. 222 It is clear that the UK cannot complete with China in terms of
the amount invested; hence, research funding in the UK must be concentrated in those
institutions with the greatest capacity to deliver.
20. The additional investment by BRIC economies in higher education is also noteworthy.
In order for the UK economy to compete internationally, it cannot aspire to match the
volume of STEM graduates these nations have the capacity to produce. Whilst technical
skills are important, the UK should aim to focus on the development of higher-level and
innovative STEM knowledge and skills amongst its workforce.
STEM teaching in schools

21. The College has been concerned by the quality, and coverage, of STEM teaching in
schools for some time and has invested significantly to work in partnership with schools
and other education providers to help to address these issues. For example, building on
the College’s long-standing summer schools and science activities, which involve over
6,000 pupils per annum, we invested £1M capital start up funding to open the Reach
Out Lab in 2010. With the assistance of Lord Winston, it provides additional facilities to
deliver practical programmes and an experience of university for pupils aged six to
eighteen, specifically from schools without ready access to laboratories.
22. The College’s outreach strategy is targeted at disadvantaged school children who are
capable in science, with a view to encouraging and enabling them to apply to study a
STEM subject at university. Many of our activities in this regard are aimed at supporting
science teaching, and address the shortage of specialised science subject teachers, in
schools. The Pimlico Connection is an example of one of our voluntary tutoring
schemes, in which our undergraduate and postgraduate students participate in regular
sessions at a local primary or secondary school to engage in tutoring and mentoring in
science-related subjects whilst raising aspirations and providing positive role models for
both science and higher education. Around 6% of undergraduates leaving the College
enter a career in education and, through INSPIRE (Innovative Scheme for Postgraduates
in Research and Education), some of our postgraduate students and post-doctoral staff
are employed to spend time in partner secondary schools teaching and studying
towards qualified teacher status.
23. Whilst we are looking at additional ways in which the performance of bright students
from disadvantaged backgrounds can be raised, such schemes cannot, of course,
substitute for a high quality state education in science and mathematics. In order for
students to benefit from the research-led education the College provides, they must
have a minimum standard of prerequisite knowledge; hence, more needs to be done
within state schools to improve science and mathematics teaching, and coverage, to
effect change in the diversity of students studying science at university. For example, in
2010, 53% of A-level students awarded A* and A grades in at least 3 STEM subjects
were from independent or selective state schools. 223
24. We support the recognition given to science in the new English Baccalaureate, and also
to other academic subjects important for entry into selective universities generally. For
example, good literacy skills are also necessary to study STEM subjects at the higher
222 Elsevier, International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base - 2011: A report prepared for the Department of
Business, Innovation and Skills (October 2011), p.8.

223 Based on data supplied by the Department for Education.
415
level. However, one science subject at GCSE, particularly a general science qualification,
is not sufficient preparation for school children intending to study subjects at A-level
that are prerequisites for entry onto a STEM degree at university. For example, our
education provision and standards are such that students who study on our courses
tend to have at least two, normally three, good GCSE grades in separate science
subjects (i.e. Physics, Chemistry and Biology). However, despite a recent increase in the
number of students studying separate science subjects at GCSE level, it remains the
case that a significant proportion of GCSE pupils taking science are studying just one
general science qualification (we estimate this to be around 20%), or a combined double
science award (estimated to be around 50%). Hence, students need to be given the
opportunity, and encouraged to study, separate science subjects at GCSE level to
ensure that large numbers are not excluded from an excellent STEM higher education
even before they select their A-level subjects. 224
25. We have concerns that the modular approach taken in certain A-level courses means
that students are not sufficiently prepared for higher study. A modular approach does
not encourage students to retain knowledge or to think critically about how the various
parts of their subject inter-relates. Also, important parts of the curriculum are
sometimes not a compulsory part of the course. As such, despite our entrance
requirements, it is necessary for us to provide some of our students with remedial
mathematics support to assist their transition to undergraduate study. We are also
concerned by the lack of opportunities provided in some state schools to study Further
Mathematics at A-level.
Employability
26. The nature of our courses means that professional skills provision is embedded within
the curriculum. To complement this, we deliver extensive transferable skills training
covering, for example, science ethics and communications, and operate a placement
unit. Engaging with industry is embedded within our academic culture and we have
numerous partnerships with industry, both in the UK and internationally, which help to
inform our education provision. As such, graduate recruiters are keen to engage with
us. For example, our Patrons Club provides opportunities for employers such as
Accenture, BP, Cisco, Deloitte and Shell, to invest in the development of our Careers
Advisory Service and to engage with our students.
27. Our AHSC partnership enriches the experience of our medicine students, and of
students from multidisciplinary areas developing medical applications. Hence, changes to
NHS funding and organisation should also be considered in light of their potential
implications for education, research and innovation in medicine. Our medicine
education prepares students appropriately for their future careers by being fully
integrated with other science and mathematics subjects. For example, it is compulsory
for our medicine students to choose an intercalated BSc course option. Often taught by
experts from other disciplines, they involve a research-based module, and equip
students with the necessary critical thinking and analytical skills necessary to contribute
fully to the innovative and fast-changing healthcare environment in which they will
operate as medics.
Suggestions
224 Based on data on Department for Education website.
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28. Given the points made above, we suggest that the following steps should be taken:
a. public funding should be targeted in support of research-led and laboratory-based
and mathematics STEM education
b. research funding should be concentrated further into those institutions with the
greatest capacity to deliver at the highest level across a range of subjects and to
apply their research findings for economic, social and industrial benefit
c. the proposal for reducing the threshold at which HE designation is awarded
should not be implemented
d. world-leading UK universities need to be consulted urgently on the need, and
mechanisms, to maintain and develop high-quality, research-led and sustainable
Masters provision for UK students
e. PhD training resources should be targeted with a view to ensuring that high
quality provision is funded appropriately
f. the role of international STEM students, and graduates, should be recognised
within the immigration system
g. reforms to the NHS should be considered in light of their possible impact on
leading medical education, research and innovation
h. separate science subjects, laboratory-based teaching and Further Mathematics
should be incentivised and funded appropriately in state schools
i. incentives to attract specialised mathematics and science teachers into state
schools should be developed further
j. the coverage and curriculum of certain A-levels, including the impact of the
modular approach taken, should be re-examined.
16 December 2011
417
Imperial College London, University College London (UCL) and Cranfield University – Oral
Imperial College London, University College London (UCL) and

Cranfield University – Oral evidence (QQ 434-468)
Transcript to be found under Cranfield University
418
Imperial College London – Supplementary written evidence
Imperial College welcomes the opportunity to respond to these questions. The College is a
leading, selective, research-intensive university focused on natural sciences, engineering,
medicine and business. It has approximately 15,000 students of whom 9080 are
undergraduate (26.9% overseas), 3,437 are master’s (42.0% overseas) and 3,406 are
doctoral (29.1% overseas) students.
Introduction
1. What is the purpose of stand-alone Masters courses and doctoral provision in HEI’s?
In each case, what is the role of Government in supporting these?
Master’s courses fulfil several different functions.

• A master’s qualification is increasingly prerequisite for doctoral training in
research-intensive universities. Imperial College thus normally requires either
a master’s degree or a substantive body of professional experience (normally 3
years) for registration for a doctoral degree. The type of master’s degree may
vary according to the student, the discipline and/or the project. A research-
based master’s degree (MRes) provides a valuable fundamental training in
research methodology instilled through original research projects performed in
two or sometimes three laboratories; if taken in-house, the training also
enables the student to make an informed decision about their choice of
supervisor and project for their doctoral studies. Taught, research-rich,
master’s degrees (MSc) instil core specialist knowledge, understanding and
practical expertise in a given discipline as a foundation for research and my also
enable a student to discipline hop (e.g. a bioengineer studying a medical science
or a life scientist studying mathematics) and, hence, to undertake
interdisciplinary research or research at the boundaries of his/her core
discipline.
• Master’s courses which provide advanced specialist knowledge, understanding
and practical expertise in a discipline also fulfil an essential role in providing the
pipeline of well qualified scientists for specific professions; such programmes
are sometimes accredited by professional bodies, particularly in engineering,
and are often developed in close consultation with industry.
• Professional master’s courses are specifically designed to support career
development, in for example the NHS; such programmes are not necessarily
research-rich but have an important place in ensuring a well qualified
workforce.
We consider Master’s level training to be an essential component of postgraduate

education, assuring the pipeline of highly educated and skilled scientists for the
workplace and for doctoral training, both of which are necessary for the UK to remain
competitive in the global economy. We believe that master’s level education should
be supported by Government as a key component of the Higher Education
framework.
419
Increasingly, Imperial College is offering part-time Postgraduate Certificates and

Diplomas, in some cases tailor-made to the needs of specific industries. These short
courses (4 or 8 months full time equivalent respectively) enable people in the
workplace to study at master’s level; they have the added advantage that they offer
the opportunity for staged progression from Certificate to Diploma to a full Master’s
degree if desired.
• Many master’s programmes in the sciences necessarily involve practical classes

and projects which are expensive to run in terms of both staff time and
laboratory costs, particularly consumables which, in some cases, may cost
upwards of £12K per student per year. The current HEFCE funding model
does not provide for this; there are now examples of courses which are
important feeders for industry and academia being closed down because they
are not cost-effective.
• It is unclear how the costs of fees and subsistence for UK master’s students
will be met in the future, aside from the small number funded by the research
councils and other providers (e.g. medical charities).
• Imperial College has engaged in the Bologna process. Its full master’s courses
(MRes. MSc, MBA) operate over one calendar year and provide the 90 ECTS
credits required for recognition in Europe. Like other UK universities,
Imperial has not engaged in the 3 + 2 + 3 year model advocated in Europe for
training at Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral levels, although two of our
Departments are exploring the possibility of introducing master’s degrees
which will take two academic years to complete.
• The majority of undergraduate programmes offered by Imperial College are 4-

year integrated Master’s programmes, leading to MSci or MEng degrees. The
final year of these programmes occupies one academic year and accrues 60
ECTS credits. These programmes provide entry to doctoral programmes in
the UK; however, some leading universities in Europe no longer regard the 60
ECTS credits at master’s level as a sufficient qualification for doctoral training
and require students to undertake and pass additional taught programmes
before commencing their doctoral study. We are concerned about the
potential impact of this on our student population and our reputation as a high
quality provider. We believe this problem could be solved by allowing those
students registered for an integrated master’s degree and wishing to pursue a
doctorate to extend their final year to a full academic year, thereby, accruing
the requisite 90 ECTS credits at master’s level for doctoral study in Europe.
However, under the current regulations such a mechanism would render the
students’ ineligible for loans and grants in their final year.
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• There are no restrictions nationally on the provision of postgraduate

education. UK HEIs are free to determine (a) their own postgraduate student
numbers and (b) the relative balance of master’s:doctoral provision and
Home/EU:overseas students within those numbers. We believe this is
appropriate and reflects the autonomous nature of UK HEIs.
• As a research-intensive university, Imperial College wishes to expand its

doctoral student population (a) to support its mission in training the next
generation of high quality scientists and (b) to enrich its research environment.
The College also wishes to continue to deliver master’s courses which (a)
support its doctoral training programmes, (b) provide advanced
specialist/professional training to support the training needs of industry,
commerce and the public sector, in particular the NHS and (c) enable
interdisciplinary research.
determined?

It would seem sensible to collect parallel sets of data on master’s and doctoral
students, both Home/EU and overseas.
The College routinely collects data on applications, acceptances and registrations

on all its degree programmes; however, the data on postgraduate applications are
incomplete because candidates for grant-funded programmes are often selected
by the grant holders following advertisements in the national/international press;
only those selected complete the formal application to the College via Registry.
The College routinely collects destination data on Home and EU PGT students
but, as with the undergraduate numbers, these data should be viewed with
caution as they are based on self-reporting.
Delivery models
The Doctoral Training Centres have had many advantages, not least in ensuring critical
mass in key research areas and in creating cohorts of students who, addition to
undertaking research, have the opportunity to engage in well-funded, sophisticated
programmes designed to enhance their professional development, to provide
opportunities for industrial engagement and to prepare them for the workplace.
There are however concerns that
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• the loss of project students has limited the opportunity for scientific training
and development of other areas of research. It has also led to an overall
reduction in UK postgraduate research student numbers.
• students who are not funded by DTCs (i.e. the vast majority in the College)
and who are therefore not members of a specific cohort do not have an
equivalent experience, particularly in relation to professional development.
This is undesirable for Departments and College which strive to ensure that all
students have a comparable experience but which do not have the necessary
resources to offer the level of support provided by the DTCs. The College is
exploring ways to address these issues but notes that the difficulties are
exacerbated by the loss of core Roberts’ funding to support transferable skills
training for doctoral students.
• the centres will not be sustainable in the long-term unless the grants are
renewed. Loss of funding may impact heavily on Departments which have
invested heavily in these areas at the expense of others and which may not be
sufficiently adaptable to compete when the priorities for strategic funding
change.
See above
studentships?
Imperial College believes that it is desirable for doctoral training to be

concentrated in research-intensive universities which have the expertise and
resources to provide a high quality education.

See above. We also believe that institutions should be encouraged to collaborate

where appropriate.

Doctoral students acquire multiple skills beyond their discipline which are applicable in
many careers, not just research. These skills include: life-long learning; independent
working; critical thinking; data analysis and other high level analytical skills; problem
solving; ability to research, interpret, evaluate and summarise information; project
management. Imperial College invests in career advice for all its students and early
career researchers and has programmes in place to help these individuals develop the
broader/softer skills required in the workplace, particularly in areas such as team
working, communication (oral and written) to professional and lay audiences, ethics,
cultural awareness, business and enterprise awareness.
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research?
A significant proportion of doctoral students will not pursue careers in research

and of those who do undertake postdoctoral research many will leave research as
their career develops. The Framework is very important to these students.
Quality
5. Is quality of research output the best proxy of quality research supervision and
training for post graduate students? What other criteria should be used?
Research output is one measure of the quality of research supervision. However,

there are significant differences in output between disciplines and, for very good
reasons, not all theses lead to publication, for example, the work may be commercially
sensitive. Additionally, many papers have multiple authors and it is difficult to
ascertain the contributions of individuals to the work. We believe that other criteria
are more valuable:
• Completion rates
• Destination data
• Student feedback
• Reports of external reviews and employers
As for undergraduate programmes, the QAA has oversight of the mechanisms

institutions have in place to ensure the quality of postgraduate provision. It thus
reviews the processes used to recruit students, oversee progression, examine
students, train and appoint supervisors, review provision at departmental level,
oversee external placements, provide career advice and transferable skills training,
reward excellence in supervision, encourage student engagement, deal with student
complaints and appeals etc. This oversight undoubtedly encourages institutions to
look carefully at their provision, as also do external reviews by e.g. funders; hence, it
serves as a driver to improve quality and the student experience.
Imperial College works very closely with industry. It routinely invites industrial
representatives to review new master’s course proposals, to act as external
examiners of master’s and doctoral students and to participate in the quinquennial
review of postgraduate programmes. Industrial representatives also serve on the
panels of the professional bodies which oversee the accreditation of degree
programmes. Several Departments also have a panel of external advisors who visit
the Department regularly and meet both staff and students. In addition, the College
regularly discusses its educational provision with its main employers.
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The College would welcome increased opportunities for its students to undertake
internships in industry, commerce or the public sector as part of their training.
The College welcomes advice from industry. However, we would wish to

maintain a balance which recognises the professional judgement of academics and
the autonomy of the University.
Funding
provision of stand-alone master’s courses?
Imperial College is extremely concerned about the erosion of public funding for
master’s courses and the impact this may have on (a) widening participation and (b)
the pipeline of appropriately highly trained UK scientists for direct entry to the
workplace or progression to doctoral studies. We also believe that it will have
serious impact on mature students who may wish to undertake a master’s degree (a)
for professional development and career progression within their chosen field of
work, (b) to re-enter the workplace after a career break or (c) to change career
direction as the job market changes.
The College will continue to encourage staff to seek external funding where
possible for master’s course. However, it recognises that such funds are unlikely
to be sufficient to bridge the gap and it is likely the course viability will become
increasingly dependent on overseas students. We would welcome incentive
schemes to encourage industry and other employers to support studentships,
offer internships or research placements and/or assist with the high costs of
laboratory consumables.
Aside from the small number funded by research councils and other funders it is
unclear at present. The College is concerned that UK graduates with high levels
of debt will be discouraged from considering postgraduate education and the
impact this will have on (a) the ability of the UK to compete in global markets and
(b) widening participation and social mobility.
8. What impact does HEFCE’s SIVS funding have on postgraduate provision? Is it

sufficient?
424
We welcome HEFCE’s consideration of strategically important and vulnerable subjects

but are unsure whether the impact on postgraduate provision will be sufficient. We
believe that at postgraduate level teaching should be concentrated in centres of
excellence and that institutions should be encouraged to collaborate where
appropriate to optimise provision.
• Are there any areas that are not currently classified as SIVS that should be considered
for such classification?
We are concerned that the life sciences do not appear to be included. Several
areas of the life sciences are both strategically important and vulnerable; e.g. in
vivo animal physiology and pharmacology (which is key to the pharmaceutical
industry) and quantitative biology. The former is extremely expensive to teach
because of the very high costs of practical classes and research projects.
Overseas students
Imperial College is an international university which aims to attract those students

who are best qualified to benefit from the education it provides irrespective or their
country of origin, race, ethnicity or religion. The College welcomes its overseas
students who (a) are academically highly gifted, (b) bring an important and valued
cultural dimension to the College and (c) on graduation, are excellent ambassadors for
the College and the UK. We are concerned about courses becoming dominated by
students from a single country because of impact it may have on the student
experience and we take care to ensure that all students are encouraged to broaden
their cultural experience and mix widely within the College.
Student mobility is an increasingly important factor in preparing students for

careers in the global economy. The UK’s reputation for excellence in education
positions it well to build upon its strengths in postgraduate education and sustain
its position a major global provider. Overseas postgraduate students make a very
significant contribution to the UK economy and, in our view, it is important that
this is sustained.
It is very important that the UK continues to be seen as an attractive option for

study and that talented students are not deterred by the changing visa regulations.
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Imperial College aims to attract the most able staff to its academic posts; as with
our student population, a significant proportion of our academic staff are not of
UK origin.
The College has invested in staff so as to ensure that overseas applicants receive high
quality advice on visas. Applications from overseas students for stand-alone Master’s
programmes and doctoral training have increased over the past two years, particularly
in Engineering. However, the College is concerned that the new regulations, in
particular the restrictions on post-study work, may be perceived as unwelcoming by
prospective students
8 May 2012
426
Imperial College Union – Written evidence
Note: We understand the value of interviewing current students, to hear their impressions
and experiences of the topics in question, and welcome the Sub-committee’s willingness to
take evidence from them.
However, we think the Sub-committee could also benefit from evidence from current
student elected officers, who have both recent & direct experience of being a student, and
considerable knowledge of the policies and structures (such as the KIS or QAA) that arise
in discussions of HE policy. Current students are not generally familiar with student
feedback or QA systems within their university, nor with various services (careers, work
placements) outside of their own immediate experience.
Student influence on course improvement

The influence of student feedback on courses varies widely from department to department.
In the case of Imperial College, high-level student representatives (sabbatical officers, etc)
are well integrated into committee structures and have input into institution-wide decisions
(bursaries, e-learning, etc) from an early stage.
However, at departmental level and below (dealing with smaller issues such as a poor
lecturer, missing lecture material, or broken equipment in a laboratory) there are large
variations between departments. Only recently has the students’ union and College worked
together to benchmark the efficacy of representation at departmental level, which has
shown that PGT and PGR representation is particularly patchy, and in some departments,
non-existent. Meeting frequencies and QA working practices also vary widely between
departments, with centrally-determined minimum standards yet to bed in.
A widespread perception amongst students is that the feedback they provide – through
annual College surveys, or to student-staff committees – is usually ignored or dismissed by
staff. This perception is sometimes accurate, but more often it is the case that the changes
made as a result of feedback are not communicated to the student body, who have moved
onto a different year by the time changes are made. This perception reduces the
participation levels of feedback, and if not remedied in a department, can make the impact of
student feedback progressively weaker year on year.
One such example of this is the student online survey (SOLE) which students complete
twice yearly. The data from this survey is essential to determining staff progression and is
used by lecturers to enhance courses. This is often not recognised by students.
QAA & students

Generally, only the full-time student officers can be expected to be familiar with the QAA’s
processes, as they are sometimes members of institutional reviews. Most students would be
unfamiliar with the QAA altogether.
Key Information Set – usefulness

The KIS is a welcome innovation which, if it contains the right information, will drive up
quality and improve the decision-making process of prospective students. However, most
current students are not aware of the proposals. It will be a major challenge to encourage
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prospective students to use the objective information offered in the KIS over the subjective
information they are bombarded with from friends, family, peers and prospectuses.
Key Information Set – information

We suggest that more fields be introduced to the KIS to allow prospective students to
compare teaching quality, such as:
‐ A percentage breakdown of teaching mode (one-to-one, tutorials, lectures, self-
directed study, fieldwork)
‐ Full details of hidden costs – equipment, books, field trips, licences, accreditations,
subscriptions
‐ A detailed breakdown of accommodation costs, as university accommodation in
particular may offer a range of prices, but the number of available cheap beds is
usually vastly outnumbered by the number of available expensive beds (which can be
up to five times as expensive, at over £250 a week).
‐ A breakdown of how the final degree qualification is calculated
‐ Greater details on students’ union quality – number of clubs & societies, student
participation in elections, student approval of representation & advice services, etc.
Work placements – opportunities & barriers

Work experience is obviously a positive experience for students. A major barrier to work
experience is the exclusion of students who cannot afford to not earn during holidays (if the
placement is unpaid or poorly paid). Student feedback has made clear that the quality of the
placement has a major effect on their career choice – if the placement is poorly designed or
uninteresting, with only make-work tasks assigned to the student, their perceptions of a
career in research or industry can be changed permanently.
Careers service
While careers advice & planning is introduced early in most courses, student feedback has
indicated that the opportunities available are dominated by the banking & consultancy
sectors, to the exclusion of research & industry. Students have shown an appetite for
‘alternative’ careers fairs that focus on everything but banking & consultancy. The higher
starting salaries and more attractive recruiting efforts of banking & consultancy ‘drown out’
other sectors, while simultaneously providing a more lucrative income stream to careers
services through stalls at events.
Further to this, students are driven to secure a job as quickly as possible. This often drives
them into internships, with the majority available in The City as opposed to Industry. It was
recently estimated that 66% of students from Imperial College secure their work through
internships.
Effect of HE reforms
Anecdotal reports from students indicate that higher levels of debt could put students off
from further study. However, we believe that by the time students under the post-2012 fee
system are nearing postgraduate study, and clarity about the payment system beds in, they
will judge that investing more time in postgraduate study at quality institutions will be worth
the return. We do fear, however, that accumulation of interest during studying may affect
the likelihood of students pursuing PhD study, and recommend that the interest on student
debt be frozen for postgraduate students to counteract the fear of debt growing while
earnings remain low.
428
PhD employment expectations

PhD students report that the training they are offered for life outside of study (transferable
skills such as project management, presentation, etc., which are modularised and made
compulsory by many institutions) are useful, but come into conflict with research,
particularly during busy periods and when under pressure from supervisors to produce
results.
March 2012
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Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) – Written evidence
IChemE is the international qualifying and membership organisation for chemical,

biochemical and process engineering professionals. With some 35,000 members in well over
100 countries, it sets and maintains the internationally recognised standard of excellence
and competence, Chartered Chemical Engineer (MIChemE) and related standards. Founded
some 90 years ago, IChemE enjoys respect and credibility with industry, Government,
regulators and the world of education and research. The organisation is headquartered in
the United Kingdom with offices and staff in several countries and is governed by an
international Council comprising senior figures from industry, academia and elsewhere.
In this submission we wish to address the central role of professional engineering

institutions such as ourselves in relation to standards and accreditation in higher education.
Professional Engineering Institutions

The Professional Engineering Institutions, of which IChemE is among the largest, operate a
well proven and internationally acclaimed system of accreditation in Higher Education,
providing assurance to employers, students, educational institutions and regulators alike
(some specific advantages are tabulated at the end of this paper). The system is itself
robustly regulated by the Engineering Council. Satisfactory completion of a degree
programme accredited to Masters level – typically in the UK, a 4 year MEng - indicates
achievement of the “learning” component of engineering formation, which together with
proven experience “on the job” (professional formation) enables an engineer to qualify for
Chartered status, the mark of the fully rounded professional engineer. A degree
programme accredited to Bachelors level indicates partial achievement of the necessary
learning requirements, and the remainder can be made up e.g. by completion of a separate
Masters course or by structured on-the-job training with guidance from the appropriate PEI.
In this way, PEI accreditation adds value to higher education courses in engineering
disciplines both by an assurance of quality and by providing a clear pathway into industry and
towards full professionally qualified status with competence referenced against a global
standard.
The accreditation process itself is conducted in close co-operation with industry. Each
IChemE accreditation involves a visit to the university concerned, typically over two days, by
one industrial and two academic assessors (or two industrial and one academic); the results
are then considered by our Education and Accreditation Forum made up of a wide range of
industrialists and academics with extensive experience in the field, and recommendations
often reflect the desire to ensure courses and learning outcomes reflect industry needs.
Where standards are seen to be at risk, conditions may be imposed which have to be met
within a defined timescale; in extreme cases, accreditation may be refused or withdrawn.
Innovation is encouraged and IChemE offers an Award to recognise this.
This UK-based system is widely respected around the world - which is why IChemE for
example accredits considerably more universities outside the UK than within it, and why
chemical engineers throughout the world seek to become Chartered through this
Institution. IChemE increasingly involves trained and qualified non-UK engineers in the
accreditation process, both in the UK and overseas, thereby ensuring that the standards are
430
truly international. This is a classic example of where an organisation or country that is

seen as a standard-setter derives real commercial and reputational benefit. In this way our
system of engineering accreditation and qualification represents a major asset to the UK
which, with our colleagues in the other UK-based engineering institutions, we are keen to
exploit to the full.
Addressing other skills levels

Provision of properly accredited training and skills development at lower than graduate level
has for some time been problematic in important areas of industry, especially since the
demise of large organisations such as ICI and CEGB which at one time invested heavily in
structured training. Engineering technicians, for example, perform highly responsible and
often safety-critical jobs but have been less ‘professionalised’ than in, for example, Germany,
with less provision for skills development. The PEIs have responded by extending their
work to cover the development and accreditation of technician training, leading to
professional registration as Engineering Technicians (EngTech) with access to PEI
membership and the support of the institutions – and for those with the aptitude and
inclination, progression paths to more senior levels. For some, this may include higher
education qualifications; for others, structured on-the-job professional development.
Sector Skills Councils and Skills Academies

The need for better skills provision at non-graduate levels is of course wider than
engineering, and the creation of Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) and National Skills Academies
(NSAs) has helped to address this. The expansion of apprenticeships and development of
standards in areas of craft and technician skills have for example been necessary and
welcome. IChemE has supported the creation of the National Skills Academy for the
Process Industries (NSAPI) and has been working with it in several ways – effectively the
SSCs and NSAs have been working from lower level skills upwards, while PEIs have worked
from graduate level downwards, and we have sought to ensure a seamless interface
between the two along with clear progression paths for individuals.
However, concerns arise in three areas. First is complexity: the skills architecture created
by the previous Government has proved extremely complicated and, because of the number
of public bodies involved, very costly. Although SSCs and NSAs are in essence ‘strategy’ and
‘delivery’, in practice not all NSAs deliver training – instead they seek to ensure that others
do so and to approve or accredit those that do, subject to their meeting a prescribed
standard and to payment of a fee. Meanwhile, both types of organisation bear the cost of
management, premises, overheads, and support for their respective Boards. This
complexity can be confusing for employers and learners, and the associated cost compares
adversely with the approach adopted by the professional institutions with their relatively
small number of employees and large number of professionally qualified volunteers..
Secondly, SSCs and NSAs have begun to assume knowledge in fields outside their useful
scope, and considerable concern has been generated by moves to locate ownership of
standards within SSC which has little relevant expertise in the subject matter. In the
industries IChemE serves, process safety is an example: IChemE members hold
responsibility for many of the most potentially hazardous operations and sites, and it is
among those members – in particular the many who specialise in process safety – that in-
depth expertise and experience reside. IChemE’s work with the NSA for the Process
Industries is seeking to ensure that this expertise is brought to bear, and it is essential that
this is achieved.
431
Thirdly, SSCs have begun to expand their interests into higher education where there is
really no need, at least in those subjects such as engineering where the robust system of
accreditation described above serves the sector’s needs. Indeed, SSC involvement may
undermine the existing system, while needs in the area of, for example, apprenticeship
promotion which are more pressing (though perhaps less able to generate revenue for the
SSCs concerned) may receive less priority than they merit.
A preferred approach
Our position is that the Sector Skills Councils and Academies should focus specifically on
the areas where there is a need, primarily at the less senior levels of the skills ladder, and
should not seek to duplicate the work that is already done by professional bodies in Higher
Education. Going further, we would suggest that major savings in costs and complexity
could be made in two ways. First, where there is a need for a more robust system of
accreditation and endorsement of training courses and training providers professional
institutions would be both willing and able to apply the expertise they have built up over
many years in Higher Education to, for example, the FE area, and would be doing so at a
much lower cost than running a separate organisation. We would like Government to give
us the opportunity to do so at a fraction of the cost of working through non-governmental
public bodies. The PEI approach is remarkably cost effective since it fundamentally involves
professionals, committed to their sector, contributing their services on a pro bono basis
through their professional organisations. In addition, PEIs will be able to ensure that
progression paths from FE to HE are clear, accessible, and supported by advice and
mentoring where needed.
Second, we suggest that it is not necessary for SSCs and Skills Academies to be separate
bodies each with their own built-in costs. In the longer term a preferred option would be
for a single body to be owned by the relevant industry, with senior industrialists coming
together with the relevant professional institution acting as a broker and ensuring standards
are not compromised. Instead of having a free standing bureaucracy, a partnership board
could be established with a professional body providing secretariat services – one might
make a comparison with the move from a Regional Development Agency to a Local
Enterprise Partnership. Such a body would be ideally placed to provide clear and accessible
progression pathways into higher education from a wide variety of backgrounds, while
ensuring close linkage to the current and anticipated requirements of industry and
commerce.
We believe that in these ways, higher education in engineering, and by extension in STEM
more broadly, can be linked effectively into the broader skills landscape in a manner which is
simple in structure, academically sound, cost effective and responsive to employer needs.
3 April 2012
Annex: University degree programme accreditation – the benefits
Students, their parents & advisors
IChemE accreditation:
• Assures you that the course will give you a solid professional grounding in the
subject
432
• Assures you the teaching will be of a high standard, relevant, with appropriate
practical content and appropriate contact hours from fully qualified academic staff
• Meets the needs of employers
• Includes internationally accepted standard process safety and sustainability content
• Means the first step towards Chartered status is automatically achieved
Universities
• Helps attract students
• Benchmarks you against internationally respected standards
• Helps assure employability of students
• Gives you first rate consultancy advice worth up to ~£20,000 per accreditation
cycle
• Gives you access to advice, comparisons & information as part of IChemE’s
international community of accredited departments.
• Provides leverage in securing resources from university Vice Chancellors
• Improves industry-academic links via accreditation panel work and the Education &
Accreditation Forum
Employers
• Assures you that the course meets needs identified by academics & industrialists
together
• Gives you graduates who’ve been trained in safety and immersed in a department
with a safety culture
• Ensures graduates will have experience of teamwork, design, presentation, etc
• Improves industry-academic links via accreditation panel work and the Education &
Accreditation Forum
• Means the first step towards Chartered status is automatically achieved
Regulators and funders
• Assures you that taxpayers’ money is well spent
• Is much cheaper than you doing the audit/benchmarking yourselves
• Provides international quality & learning outcome comparisons
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Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), Engineering Council, Cogent, and Society of
Biology – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245)
Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), Engineering Council,

Cogent, and Society of Biology – Oral evidence (QQ 216-245)
434
Institute of Education (IoE), University of London – Written evidence
Institute of Education (IoE), University of London – Written

evidence
General questions

1 The most comprehensive definition of STEM subjects is to be found in the FE STEM
Data Project (Frost et al., 2010 – analysis extended in Harrison et al., 2011). Quoting
from Frost et al. (2010):
• STEM qualifications contain learning outcomes that are deeply rooted in science or
mathematics, engineering and/or are of a ‘technical’ or ‘technology-application/use’
nature.
• STEM qualifications are deemed distinct from other qualifications because they can,
for those who wish it, provide the required foundation for progression into further
study or employment in a STEM-related field.
• To take account of the modular nature of some qualifications, they are deemed to
lie within STEM when the majority of the assessment objectives are Science,
Technology, Engineering or Mathematics focused (and/or the qualification is
recognised as a pre-requisite for progression in STEM).
• They are deemed to be ‘STEM-related’ when Science, Technology, Engineering or
Mathematics features in many learning objectives (and/or the qualification provides
a degree of learning that will aid progression in STEM).
• They are deemed to be ‘outside STEM’ if STEM does not feature in at least some
learning objectives for all learners (not just those who take STEM-related options
within the qualification).
2 Subject definitions for Science and Mathematics are commonly understood. The
subject of Engineering can be readily defined (Frost et al., 2010) by inspection of
Sector Subject Area Tier 1 classifications:
• Construction and the Built Environment
• Engineering
• Information Technology
• Manufacturing and Product Design.
3 The T in STEM is less well defined. The FE STEM Data Project defines qualifications
in Technology to include:
• IT/ICT practitioner qualifications
• Electronics/systems & control
• Music technology
• Production technology and technical theatre (light; sound; media)
• 3-D design
• CAD/CAM
• Interactive media
• Design & Technology GCSEs and GCEs
• IT/ICT GCSEs and GCEs.
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with Technology-related areas to include IT/ICT user qualifications and general Art &
Design.
4 There are two recent definitions for STEM jobs. The first is based on a classification
of STEM within Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes (Greenwood et
al., 2011). The second definition (Dodd et al., 2011) adopts the classifications of
‘Primary Science Worker’ and ‘Secondary Science Worker’ to cover all STEM jobs.
5 However, we have strong reservations as to the meaning of a STEM job from a

mathematics perspective. There are two main reasons. First, many jobs ‘need’ a
mathematics qualification simply as an entry qualification, but this does not mean the
job demands mathematics skills. In such cases, qualifications in mathematics are used
as a means of selection. Secondly, many jobs need mathematics but would not
necessarily be classified under a STEM umbrella as this would make STEM too large
to be meaningful. Examples include financial services, of course, but also those in the
animation industry, computer games, weather forecasting, etc. Such jobs have
featured in case studies provided by the IMA Mathematics Matters project and
ACME’s Mathematical Needs project, with supporting detail in Improving Mathematics
at Work (Hoyles et al., 2010).
16-18 supply
Are schools and colleges supplying the right number of STEM students and do
6 Annual data on the numbers of students taking advanced levels are published by the
Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ, 2011). From an historical perspective the
number of students studying physics at advanced level is low (32,860 in 2011; 3.8% of
the total); the numbers studying biology (62,041 in 2011; 7.2% of the total) and
chemistry (48,082 in 2011; 5.5% of the total) are reasonable, though there is room
for improvement in chemistry; and the number studying psychology (which is now
classified as a science and meets the advanced level subject criteria for science) is
high (56,133 in 2011; 6.5% of the total). The number studying mathematics is also
high (82,995 in 2011; 9.6% of the total) with strong growth in recent years following
dramatic declines after the introduction of Curriculum 2000. Further mathematics is
growing very strongly as well, albeit from a rather low base (12,287 in 2011; 1.4% of
the total).
7 The growth seen in science and mathematics at advanced level is not found for
engineering and technology. There are 403 advanced qualifications in Engineering
taken in England, but only six are completed by more than 5,000 people (Harrison et
al., 2011). Participation in technology at advanced level is in gradual decline: down to
18,249 in Design and Technology and 4,002 in Computing in 2011 (JCQ, 2011).
8 A particular concern for advanced level physics is the gender gap. Only 21% of the
students taking advanced level physics are female and this percentage has hardly
changed over many years despite initiatives by the Institute of Physics and others to
improve the situation. In contrast to the gendered participation at advanced level
physics, attainment levels of boys and girls are quite similar. In the 2010 examination
entries for GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) science, 3.3% of girls
achieved the highest grade, A*, and 9.7% an A grade compared to 2.3% and 8.1% of
436
boys respectively. In physics 4.9% of girls and 5.1% of boys achieved a grade A*,
while 21.2% of girls and 21.1% of boys achieved a grade A, indicting that there is no
inherent difference between boys and girls in their aptitude for physics.
9 Any decline in the number of learners doing specialist physics degree courses means
there are implications for the number who go on to do specialist physics teacher
education courses, impacting the availability of good quality teaching for learners.
This, in turn, may have implications on engagement with physics and post-16
participation in physics. The Leitch Review highlighted the skills shortage that the UK
has in STEM careers and STEM-related careers and encouraged strategies to be put
in place to address such shortages by increasing recruitment at schools and
university (Leitch Review of Skills, 2006). The British government has been
committed to increasing the number of STEM professionals as it perceives this to be
crucial for Britain to be able to compete in an increasingly economic global economy.
10 The evidence as to the suitability of current advanced levels for students studying for
a science first degree is largely anecdotal. However, it does seem to be the case that
advanced level physics and, to a lesser extent, advanced level chemistry make fewer
mathematical demands on candidates than in the past. This is undesirable. In other
respects the limited data we have both nationally and internationally suggest that
advanced levels in the sciences remain a solid preparation for a science first degree.
It would be desirable for more students beginning a science first degree to have
studied mathematics to advanced level. This is typically the case for physics but less
so for chemistry and less so still for biology.
11 The most sustained government initiative on the uptake of the sciences at advanced
level, particularly physics and chemistry, came about as the result of the STEM
initiative headed by Professor Sir John Holman from 2006-2010. As a result of this
initiative a long-term decline in the uptake of physics at advanced level was turned
around while chemistry and biology saw encouraging increases in uptake too. There
is now a risk that the impetus of this initiative may be lost. In addition, although the
present government has shown a commitment to physics teaching in that students
training on secondary PGCE courses to be physics teachers will receive a generous
bursary, there is a danger that fewer biology graduates may become teachers.
12 The significant increase in the uptake of advanced level mathematics and further
mathematics was noted earlier. Vorderman et al. (2011) report the improvement in
entry numbers to mathematics in HE rising to 7,276 acceptances in 2010. With 45%
of candidates getting a grade A* or A in advanced level mathematics in 2011 (JCQ,
2011), HE admission tutors for mathematics have a difficult task in selecting from the
rising number of candidates who apply.
13 Notwithstanding the success of mathematics at advanced level, problems remain:

• A number of students fail to get a grade C at GCSE (41% of candidates in 2011)
and then have nowhere to go – although this might be resolved following the Wolf
review (Wolf, 2010).
• A resit following a grade D in GCSE mathematics is reasonably likely to yield
437
success. However, the 13% (in 2011) who got less than a D have little prospect of
passing (i.e. obtaining at least a grade C) at resit.
• The significant number of students who do get a grade C or above and do not go on
to do any mathematics – but then are often faced with HE study or a job that
demands some mathematics and they have forgotten much that they had learnt.
14 There is a real need for the mapping of different routes for mathematics post-16 for
these different groups – not least for those who might be primary teachers (who are
likely to fall into the third category above).
What effect, in any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM
15 It is difficult to be sure but the English Baccalaureate is unlikely to have much effect
on the number of students studying the sciences in higher education. There is a risk
that such students may have had a narrower 14-16 education than would otherwise
have been the case due to too many of them not studying enough subjects that are
excluded from the English Baccalaureate. This would ultimately be to their and the
UK’s disadvantage.
16 The National Committee for 14-19 Engineering Education has expressed concern
that the English Baccalaureate may lower participation in engineering and technology
subjects at Key Stage 4 with subsequent effects on take up of these subjects at
advanced level. In times of limited school budgets, greater investment in English
Baccalaureate subjects is likely to come at the expense of investment in other higher
cost subjects such and engineering and design & technology.
9 December 2011
References
ACME (2011) Mathematical Needs: Mathematics in the workplace and in Higher Education,
ACME, London.
Fiona Dodd, Jon Guest, Andrew License (2011) The Current and Future Science Workforce,
TBR/Science Council
www.sciencecouncil.org/content/science-workforce.
Andy Frost, Clive Greatorex, Matthew Harrison, David Mason (2010) FE and Skills STEM
Data Summary report, October 2010, Blue Alumni/Royal Academy of Engineering
www.thedataservice.org.uk/statistics/other_statistics_and_research.
Charley Greenwood, Matthew Harrison, Anna Vignoles (2011) The Labour Market Value of
STEM Qualifications and Occupations, Institute of Education, University of London/Royal
Academy of Engineering
www.raeng.org.uk/news/releases/shownews.htm?NewsID=701.
Matthew Harrison et al. (2011) FE STEM Data Project July 2011 report, Royal Academy of
Engineering
www.thedataservice.org.uk/statistics/other_statistics_and_research.
438
Celia Hoyles, Richard Noss, Phillip Kent, Arthur Bakker (2010) Improving Mathematics at
Work:
the need for techno-Mathematical literacies, Routledge.
JCQ (2011) http://www.jcq.org.uk/.
Leitch Review of Skills (2006) Prosperity for All in the Global Economy – world class skills,
HMSO, Norwich.
Carol Vorderman, Christopher Budd, Richard Dunne, Mahzia Hart, Roger Porkess (2011) A
World-class Mathematics Education for all our Young People, the Conservative Party.
www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2011/08/Vorderman_publishes_report_on_m
aths_education.aspx.
Alison Wolf (2010) Review of Vocational Education – the Wolf Report, Department for
Education
www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/DFE-00031-2011.
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Institute of Physics (IoP) – Written evidence
Summary of key points
16-18 supply
• It is well understood that many entrants to undergraduate physics degrees are ill
prepared to cope with the mathematics contents of their degrees, due to the
removal of mathematical content from the physics A-level, in order to allow physics
to be a stand-alone A-level. This situation could be addressed if A-level physics
allowed the subject to be described with the appropriate level of mathematics.
Graduate supply
• The proposals in the HE reforms to liberate student numbers could have a number
of unintended consequences: the AAB+ equivalent policy could lead to the
recruitment of high-performing students to non-science subjects where the cost of
teaching them is less than the income available from tuition fees; and the policy to
allocate places to HEIs charging £7,500 or below will benefit HEIs ‘lower down’ in
the sector that do not have the capacity to teach laboratory-based science subjects,
nor will have the ambition to do so.
• The HE reforms may also have an adverse impact on uptake for the four-year
integrated Masters degrees, which are now the norm for those considering a career
in university or industrial R&D. Financial constraints are certainly a factor in some
able students choosing to study a three-year degree, instead of taking-up the extra
year which would mean another year of debt accumulation. HEFCE teaching funding
provision will need to ensure that STEM departments can continue to afford to offer
four-year courses.
• There is an intimate relationship between teaching and research, in terms of space

and facilities, financial sustainability, student contact with researchers, academic staff
time and workload, and the supply chain of new researchers. A more coherent
approach to teaching and research in STEM subjects by the research councils and the
funding councils is essential.
• More research needs to be carried out into what societal factors influence different
groups in making subject choices, and what practical approaches are proven to work
with young people to build a culture that recognises that STEM subjects are
appropriate for all.
Postgraduate supply
• EPSRC’s policy to discontinue the provision of project studentships on its research

grants and fellowships, coupled with the squeeze on doctoral training account
funding means it will be very difficult to allocate studentships to the small-scale
projects which are often the generators of research breakthroughs. The policy will
have an impact on UK PhD student recruitment and will also severely disadvantage
the recruitment of high-quality European students.
440
• Centres for doctoral training have focused studentships in too small a number of
research areas and locations, resulting in a landscape that is extremely patchy both
geographically and across research fields. Other ways of achieving economies of scale
in postgraduate training need to be considered, such as the regional alliances, which
offer joint training to graduate students without the concomitant narrowing of the
subject base.
• Serious consideration should be given to supporting Masters degrees with state

funding, especially in areas that are of national importance such as nuclear physics.
Industry
• The Confederation of British Industry has reported that there is growing demand for
STEM skills, particularly in the low carbon, and digital media sectors. However, there
are issues with employers experiencing some difficulty in hiring staff with the
requisite STEM skills, and therefore having to pay a premium for them.
• There is much scope for developing STEM students’ generic ‘workplace’ skills over
the course of their degrees and employers can play a positive role by offering
summer work placements or internships.
• Positive statements on the importance and sustainability of careers in STEM from

senior government ministers in reports and public statements, especially in the
current financial climate, must continue to be made to encourage potential students
to consider a STEM subject at university. Senior politicians and leaders of business
must continue to make statements emphasising the potential jobs in the STEM
sectors. This is particularly true in the current financial climate where companies are
laying off staff.
General questions
1. Physics is one of the most highly valued and respected STEM subjects. Since physics deals
with the fundamentals of matter and energy as well as being the origin of a great deal of
instrumentation, it underpins a wide range of technologies. In addition, the reductionist and
mathematical approach of physics provides tools and techniques that underpin other STEM
subjects.
2. A ‘physics’ job is one that can be defined as one that requires specialised intellectual,
technical and practical skills applied to solve complex problems using quantitative
techniques, to develop technical products and services, and assemble and operate highly
specialised equipment and facilities. As a result, physics graduates can be found in virtually
every sector of the economy, satisfying important national requirements for highly skilled
people in many areas, including information technology, financial analysis, engineering,
environmental science, energy technology, intellectual property law and medical physics.
The IOP considers that a physics graduate employing physics skills in areas such as these has
a STEM job.
441
influence supply?
3. A recently published report by the Science Council has revealed that 20% of the UK’s
workforce – 5.8 million people – is dependent upon scientific skills in order to do their jobs,
and that this is projected to rise to 7.1 million people by 2030 225.
4. In addition, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), based on a survey of employers,

has reported that there is growing demand for STEM skills, particularly in the low carbon,
and digital media sectors, but employers report some difficulty in hiring such staff226 . This
message has been echoed in the report Employability Skills Review 227 , published by the
National HE STEM Programme 228 , of which the IOP is a partner organisation, where it was
stated that:
“The hi-tech, science and IT sectors are all reporting difficulties in recruiting STEM graduates and
predicting even greater difficulty in future years. These employers rate STEM graduates highly, not
only for their technical competency but also because of the analytical, problem-solving, numeracy
and intellectual rigour skills that they bring with them.”
5. One important factor in increasing applications to STEM subjects has been the increased
emphasis given to STEM by successive governments, beginning in 2006 with the chancellor’s
statements regarding the importance of STEM graduates to the economy. Statements such
as these from senior government ministers in reports and public statements, especially in
the current financial climate, can only help potential students to consider a STEM subject at
university, which will lead to an increased pool of graduate talent which will help satisfy the
demands of employers and help to rebuild the economy.
16-18 supply
6. Physics suffered over many years from a substantial drop in the numbers of A-level
students; entries fell by around 40% between 1985 and 2007. However, results published
this year, by the Joint Council for Qualifications, showed an increase for the fifth
consecutive year in the number of students sitting examinations in physics and, for the first
time since 2002, physics is back in the top 10 most popular subjects. The total number of
students entered for physics A-level has increased by 6.1%, from 30,976 in 2010 to 32,860 in
2011, which is encouraging in view of the government’s target of 35,000 by 2014. Over the
last five years, the number of A-level exams taken across all subjects has risen by 7.7%, but
the growth in the number entering for physics is far stronger – a 19.6% increase over the
last five years.
225 The current and future UK science workforce; The Science Council; http://www.sciencecouncil.org/content/science-
workforce
226 Building for growth; business priorities for education and skills;
227 HE STEM: Employability Skills Review; http://www.hestem.ac.uk/sites/default/files/employability_skills_review.pdf
228 The National HE STEM Programme; http://www.hestem.ac.uk/
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7. The encouraging result at A-level is supported by a continued increase in AS-level

numbers, with the number of entrants increasing from 45,534 last year to 58,190 this year.
The 27.8% increase is partly explained by a change to funding rules for maintained schools in
England, but far outstrips the average increase across all subjects of 17.9%.
8. Despite the period when physics suffered a dramatic fall in A-level numbers, entries to
UK physics degrees remained reasonably stable over the same period. And, of late, we have
noted increases in the number of applications and accepted applicants to physics degrees.
9. However, the most common complaint from HE admissions tutors in physics and
engineering subjects is that the entrants’ knowledge base is weaker than it used to be. Part
of the reason for this is that the students have a broader range of skills than they used to,
particularly in the ICT area. But there is a specific problem in the mathematical content of
A-level physics. Broadly, in order to allow physics to be a stand-alone A-level, a great deal of
the mathematics has been removed. Not only does this make the physics less satisfying, it
also means that students do not actually realise the nature of the subject and it certainly
means that they are not adequately prepared for university entrance. The IOP strongly
recommends that A-level physics be reviewed to allow the subject to be described with the
appropriate level of mathematics.
10. This recommendation is strongly supported by the findings of a report commissioned by

the IOP from EdComs; Mind the Gap: Mathematics and the transition from A-levels to physics
and engineering degrees 229 , which gathered the opinions of both physics and engineering
academics, and first- and second-year undergraduates in physics, engineering and computer
science. The report expressed the views of academics that current mathematics and physics
provision at A-level leads to students learning by rote rather than developing their
understanding and independence. More than half of the academics surveyed asserted that
their first year undergraduates were not very/not at all well prepared to cope with the
mathematics content of their degrees and, although only a fifth of the students felt
mathematically ill-prepared for their courses, many of the students’ comments from
interviews acknowledged a gulf between the mathematics they were taught at school and
the requirements of their degrees.
11. The report recommended that this situation could be addressed with a number of
solutions, including that changes should be made to the A-level structure – both the way in
which mathematics is taught at that level, and also to the amount of crossover between
mathematics and physics at A-level. Students reported that the approach of teaching
mathematics solely in order to pass the A-level exam did not provide them robust
knowledge that could be applied to their physics learning.
12. There have been a number of recent initiatives aimed at increasing the uptake of STEM
subjects at A-level, which have been very successful. Amongst these, supported by the
Department for Education, are the Further Mathematics Support Programme 230 (which aims
229 Mind the Gap: Mathematics and the transition from A-levels to physics and engineering degrees;
http://www.iop.org/publications/iop/2011/page_51934.html
230 Further Mathematics Support Programme; http://www.fmnetwork.org.uk/fmnetwork_impact.php
443
to increase numbers studying mathematics and further mathematics at AS/A-level, and

provide training and support to teachers), and the Stimulating Physics Network 231 (which
aims to increase the uptake of A-level physics and to improve the confidence and subject
knowledge of non-specialist teachers). The government has also been successful in
increasing the numbers of GCSE students taking triple science, which is seen to lead to high
levels of progression into science and mathematics A-levels). In addition, recent changes to
teacher training recruitment have been very positive; the setting of separate targets for
physics, chemistry and biology teachers and the introduction of the new physics with
mathematics PGCE will regain some of the lost ground in the recruitment of physics
teachers. An observation here is that government initiatives often work best when carried
out with in partnership with an external partner, such as a charity or professional body,
which has no commercial interest in the project but usually has a deep professional interest
in making it successful.
13. We are of the view that the English Baccalaureate will have a limited effect of increasing
the numbers studying STEM subjects at university, despite the fact that one of its aims is to
increase the take up of the individual sciences. Timetabling pressures associated with the
qualification may result in fewer pupils having the opportunity to study triple science.
Graduate supply
14. This is a difficult question to answer. As stated previously, there is great national
demand for STEM graduates, and some of the Sector Skills Councils, such as COGENT232 ,
have reported that employers are experiencing difficulties in attracting, recruiting and
retaining high quality STEM skilled graduates.
15. Moreover, we are aware of important sectors, such as nuclear technology, where the
UK is facing a critical skills shortage. Many experienced nuclear engineers in the UK are
over the age of 50 and thus likely to be retiring within the next decade. All of the engineers
involved in the original planning and building of the UK’s nuclear power stations (the first of
which opened in the 1950s) have already retired. There is also a strong possibility that
expertise will be lost rather than passed on. Therefore, there is a need to ensure that a new
generation of nuclear engineers are trained. In addition, the energy supply sector is
undergoing change and rapid expansion in many other fields that also require graduate and
technical expertise, examples include clean-coal and renewables technologies.
16. Despite departmental closures and falls in the numbers studying A-level physics over
previous years, the number of accepted applicants to undergraduate physics, and the
number of graduates has remained remarkably steady, against a backdrop of an increase in
231Stimulating Physics Network; http://www.stimulatingphysics.org/

232Technically Higher: Securing Skills for Science and Innovation; http://www.cogent-
ssc.com/Higher_level_skills/Publications/EmergingHigher.pdf
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the overall HE cohort. Numbers of accepted applicants to physics (and astronomy) rose
from 3,069 in 2005 to 3,827 in 2010; the latter figures represent 0.8% of the total cohort of
accepted applicants; the equivalent figure for 1994 was 1.2%.
17. Over recent years, we have observed increases in the number of applications to physics
degrees, which has led to annual increases in the number of accepted applicants. This could
be because the message that a physics degree opens doors to a wide range of career paths
in both academia and industry is finally filtering through to students, their families and
teachers. However, due to the high-costs associated with teaching physics and other STEM
subjects, because of the need to provide a practical laboratory-based experience (requiring
adequate floor space, consumables and often expensive modern equipment), there will
always be a limit on the numbers that can be accepted onto university courses. This is an
issue that will be exacerbated by the government’s HE reforms, which will favour cheaper
subject options in the arts and the humanities, which we discuss later in the response.

18. With regards to physics graduates, we would like to think that the majority of them are
trained to a high level, and indeed, the IOP runs a degree accreditation scheme providing an
independent, rigorous and valid assessment of the content and standard of physics degree
courses. However, there is the perception that the ‘level’ of STEM graduates in the UK is
less than that of other comparable nations in Europe, because their graduates usually study
for five years before entering the job market.
19. A survey undertaken by the CBI revealed that some employers have expressed concern
that job applicants with STEM qualifications can lack employability skills and do not have
much experience in the working environment2. But, surveys undertaken by the IOP of the
views of employers of physicists suggests that there is strong demand for physics graduates
and that employers are of the view that physics degrees provide:
• flexibility and versatility to tackle a wide range of technical and non-technical

subjects;
• good analytical and problem-solving skills;
• good mathematical and IT skills;
• a good breadth of technical interest and ability;
• a good understanding of fundamentals from which to approach new situations where
traditional approaches do not work;
• analytical problem-solving capabilities;
• an ability to grasp concepts quickly and in a quantitative way (more important than
knowledge of a particular specialism); and
• an ability ‘to argue on one’s feet’.
institutions?
445
20. The much higher tuition fee inevitably changes the student-teacher relationship. There is
likely to be an increasing tendency to view students as ‘customers’ and teaching as a
‘purchased service’. This may not necessarily happen, but one can imagine that the quality
and rigour of degrees and the evaluation process will inevitably come under considerable
pressure to ensure that the customers remain 'happy'. Given our current national obsession
with league tables these pressures are going to be difficult to resist.
21. In terms of the supply of STEM courses in HEIs, we have a number of concerns. Most
HEIs in England that offer provision in science subjects will charge the maximum fees of
£9,000 from the 2012/13 academic year. The additional income from HEFCE for Band B
subjects, such as the sciences, has been estimated to be around £1,500. Transparent
Approach to Costing (TRAC) data demonstrate that the cost differential between science
and non-science subjects is currently of the order of £3,000-3,500. As a result, even with
the additional HEFCE funding, an HEI accepting a new science student in 2012/13 will suffer
a financial penalty of around £2,000, compared to one accepting a new humanities or social
science student that will produce a premium. This is a serious funding shortfall and will
remain an acute problem for 2013/14 and beyond. Furthermore, this additional income of
£1,500 may be forced down if HEFCE funds have to be re-allocated to cover the costs of
higher than expected tuition fees, pushing science departments into the red and making
them vulnerable to potential closure. If the government takes the decision to increase
neither the fee level nor the additional income from HEFCE’s teaching budget, inflation will
erode departmental income, and when coupled with student bursary contributions, etc., this
may result in less science being taught in English universities.
22. The HE reforms may also have an adverse impact on uptake for the four-year integrated
Masters degrees – the MPhys/MSci – which are now the norm for those considering a
career in university or industrial R&D. Financial constraints are certainly a factor in some
able students choosing to study a three-year degree, and avoiding the extra year of debt
accumulation; this may particularly be the case with women, who we know, for whatever
reason, are less likely to study for a fourth year. HEFCE teaching funding provision will need
to ensure that STEM departments can continue to afford to offer four-year courses.
23. In addition, the government has stated that 65,000 places are to be made available for
students achieving AAB grades or above at A-level or equivalent (here termed AAB+
equivalent), and that initially, 20,000 places will be allocated to HEIs whose average charge is
at or below £7,500 (following waivers).
24. The core quotas for HEIs will be lowered according to the existing numbers of students
achieving AAB+ equivalent, following which an HEI can freely recruit as many students at
this level as it is able to attract and accommodate. With all HEIs competing freely for the
students with the highest exam results of above AAB+ equivalent, there is a risk that some
may prioritise the recruitment of high-performing students to non-science subjects where
the cost of teaching them is less than the income available from tuition fees. We would like
more information on how higher cost and strategically important and vulnerable subjects
will be treated with regard to AAB+ equivalent students.
25. We also have some questions over the practicalities of unlimited recruitment of the
AAB+ equivalent students. For instance, will there be a differentiation between subjects that
446
are more difficult relative to others?233 If not, this could then lead to a decrease in the
numbers of students taking science and mathematics subjects at A-level, for which the
grading is more severe. A system using unspecified A-level grades makes no sense unless a
decision is taken to ensure that all A-levels are of equal grade severity.
26. In addition, as it is understood, the 20,000 places allocated to HEIs whose average
charge is at or below £7,500 will be made available by reducing the core quota (i.e. the non-
AAB+ equivalent quota). This will benefit HEIs ‘lower down’ in the sector that frequently do
not have the capacity to teach laboratory-based science subjects, nor will have the ambition
to do so, as fees of £7,500 will not usually be sufficient to teach science subjects. The
implication of this policy is that the national provision of science courses could reduce as
certain HEIs take on more students in lower cost subjects.
27. HEFCE will need to implement levers to ensure that the provision of science courses is
maintained at both the ‘top-end’ and in the middle-ranked HEIs (which will have a critical
role to play in achieving the widening participation agenda) that will presumably lose some
of their better students to those in higher ranked HEIs. The supposed market among HEIs
may result in these middle-ranked HEIs being squeezed to no apparent benefit to anyone.
28. It is difficult to pinpoint what precise impact research assessment will have on the
development of such degrees, but we do know that, even though there have been moves to
get better recognition for cross-disciplinary subjects within research assessment exercises,
this remains a difficult area. A major challenge for STEM subjects is how to accommodate
the increasing multidisciplinarity of research while maintaining the essence of the disciplines
that make them so valuable. The nature of the RAE/REF sub-panels is to reinforce the
rigidity of the discipline, and even within physics, there has been a perception that physics
research closer to application has not been given sufficient credit.
29. The IOP, via the National HE STEM Programme4, has first-hand experience of
developing such a degree course. Launched in 2007, Integrated Sciences 234 is an
interdisciplinary sciences degree developed by the IOP with the University of Leicester and
London South Bank University, which combines the study of all three of the core sciences.
Applications, as expected for a new course, have been modest, but are improving and there
are prospects of other UK universities offering the degree course 235 .
30. Whilst we support and have been intimately involved in developing the Integrated
Sciences degree, our view is that while subjects will always be fluid to a certain extent, it is
essential that subject-specific degree courses do not to lose their identity, which could
otherwise have serious long-term consequences. Broadly, physicists do not think like
biologists, who do not think like engineers. None is better but all are necessary in their own
right.
233 Relative difficulty of examinations in different subjects (2008); SCORE;

http://www.cemcentre.org/attachments/SCORE2008report.pdf
234 Integrated Sciences; http://www.iop.org/education/higher_education/stem/integrated_sciences/page_43338.html
235 University of Bradford is now also offering the degree course; http://www.brad.ac.uk/undergraduate/integrated-science-
sls/
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31. In STEM subjects, one cannot divorce teaching from research, as a direct connection
between the two is essential for the functioning of HE, in terms of space and facilities,
financial sustainability, student contact with researchers, academic staff time and workload,
and the supply chain of new researchers. Moreover, research directly informs the content
and motivation of both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. It is the presence of this
link that makes the UK a top destination for highly able overseas students, and it is precisely
this aspect of our education system that emerging economies are struggling to emulate.
32. To sustain this, a more coherent approach to teaching and research in STEM subjects by
the research councils and the funding councils is essential, as the teaching of physics, and
other STEM subjects, is being, or very likely will be, influenced by research council policies
concentrating research in fewer HEIs. This will particularly be the case for smaller
departments, for which undertaking research is being made more difficult due to changes in
EPSRC policy, such as the decision to remove support for project studentships on its
research grants.

33. There are at present 46 UK universities that have physics departments 236 , of one form
or another, that offer undergraduate provision 237 . This number has dropped by over 30%
since the late 1990s. Despite the loss of many physics departments, through either closure
or merger, the number of physics graduates has remained reasonably stable.
34. Due to these closures, there are now large areas where potential students and industry
have no convenient access to a local university physics department. As the proportion of
students living at home increases, and as industry becomes more dependent upon high-tech
knowledge, these regions will suffer from a lack of proximity to university physics. The
government, rightly, is keen on increasing the number of women, ethnic minorities, and
lower-social classes in STEM. Among these groups there is a greater likelihood of students
choosing to live at home. But, if they live in the East Anglia region, for instance, where will
they go to study physics, unless they plan to study a degree at the Open University? There is
currently no undergraduate provision for physics at the University of East Anglia, and the
closest university to their region, Cambridge, would not be a realistic proposition for many.
background?
35. More research needs to be carried out into what societal factors influence different
groups in making subject choices, and what practical approaches are proven to work at the
school level to build a culture where STEM subjects are seen as appropriate for everyone.
236 Physics on Course 2012; http://www.iop.org/publications/iop/2011/file_41677.pdf

237 In addition, the University of Portsmouth’s Earth and Environmental Sciences department is now offering a BSc (Hons)
in applied physics; http://www.port.ac.uk/courses/coursetypes/undergraduate/BScHonsAppliedPhysics/
448
36. For some years, the IOP has worked to identify and overcome the barriers to
participation in physics for women, people from ethnic minority groups and people from
lower socio-economic groups. The IOP’s initiatives include Girls in Physics 238 to understand
why only around 20% of those taking physics post-16 are female; the Ethnic Diversity 239 pilot
project to explore the practical approaches that will encourage students from diverse ethnic
background to choose physics; and the Raising Aspirations in Physics project to work with a
school in North East England to investigate how to promote physics to students from lower
socio-economic groups.
37. Research has shown that young people are influenced by a complex range of societal
factors when deciding what to study. But our understanding is incomplete on how these
factors impact on different groups and there is much to be learned about putting this
research into practice to understand what can be realistically done within and beyond
school level to moderate these factors.
38. The IOP is very experienced working with teachers, and its initial efforts to improve
diversity have focused on helping teachers deliver lessons that engage the broadest range of
students. The IOP is now moving towards a view that changing schoolchildren’s perception
of physics involves impacting on a range of societal factors that go beyond what can be
addressed inside a physics classroom. Some of these could perhaps be addressed by
examining the culture of the school as a whole and the messages it gives to pupils and their
parents. The IOP has begun to explore how this could be achieved, working in partnership
with schools.
Postgraduate supply
39. Universities are now well aware of the fact that PhD students need a lot more than just
core STEM skills if they are to be successful in the workplace. It is now becoming routine
for PhD students to receive extensive training in the transferable skills that are coveted by
employers (e.g. business awareness, management, presentation skills, etc.). There is probably
still more to do in this regard, and we must not fall into the trap of training PhD students in
too narrow a range of subjects.

40. A recent report published by HEFCE described the characteristics of starters to

doctoral degree courses in UK HEIs between 1996-97 and 2009-10240 . In physics, the
number of full-time PhD starters increased by 96% (from 425 to 835) between 1996/97 and
2009/10 compared to an overall increase of 81% (from 9,990 to 18,075) in all subjects. Of
full-time starters in physics in 2009/10, 535 were UK domiciled, 150 EU domiciled
(excluding UK), and 155 were domiciled outside the EU.
238 Girls in physics, IOP; http://www.iop.org/education/teacher/support/girls_physics/page_41593.html

239 Ethnic diversity pilot project, IOP; http://www.iop.org/policy/diversity/initiatives/ethnic/page_42663.html
240 HEFCE, PhD Study Trends and profiles 1996-97 to 2009-10; http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_33/
449
41. In terms of quality, the UK’s best PhD students are on a par with their counterparts
from the UK’s competitor nations. But we are well aware of the general view that UK
physics PhD students are well trained in their narrow sub-fields, but can lag behind their
counterparts in countries like Germany in their level of maturity and the range of their skills.
For instance, the level of mathematical skills is a concern, which appears to be linked right
back to school science. Moreover, the length of the UK PhD has traditionally been shorter
than in most other EU countries. Some moves towards reducing this difference have been
made by the research councils. For instance, EPSRC has supported the provision of
collaborative postgraduate teaching and allowed universities to spend their doctoral training
grant flexibly to offer longer studentships – typically an extra six months; but the latter has
been at the expense of supporting fewer students.
42. A major change that will impact on the future number of trained PhD students in the
physical sciences is the decision taken by EPSRC to discontinue the provision of project
studentships on its research grants and fellowships from 31 January 2011. The squeeze on
EPSRC doctoral training account (DTA) funding and increased targeting of that funding by
universities (with encouragement from EPSRC) on large strategic initiatives means it will be
very difficult to allocate studentships to the small-scale projects, which are often the
generators of research breakthroughs and new ideas. As well as the impact this policy will
have on UK PhD students, there is the added concern that the recruitment of high-quality
European students will be severely disadvantaged, as project studentships were the principal
means of funding such students.
43. Discontinuation of project studentships, at a time of reduced DTA awards, is a major

threat, particularly, as we understand that DTA studentships are not costed on an fEC basis,
which creates uncertainty relating to the support of students using equipment and facilities
that have significant costs; project studentships allowed for the true costs of doing PhD level
research to be recognised and properly supported. The EPSRC policy will impact on
research within the UK, its global reach (via those PhD students going abroad to do
postdoctoral research), and on employers.
44. The general perception is that the centres for doctoral training (CDT) have focused
studentships in too small a number of research areas and locations, resulting in a landscape
that is extremely patchy both geographically and across research fields. CDTs do allow good
training in a few highly targeted areas, but many other areas that are key to the UK
economy are completely unrepresented. The organic approach adopted by EPSRC does not
lend itself to an overarching strategy. There are many centres of excellence around the UK,
such as those supported by EPSRC Programme grants, or major funding initiatives such as
the Wellcome/EPSRC Medical Engineering Centres, which have no access to CDT funding.
45. The concept of CDTs has merits (e.g. better provision of skills training), which other
research councils have adopted and are implementing in sensible ways. For instance, BBSRC
is now directing HEIs into consortia with a minimum threshold of funding, to ensure the
background for doctoral training is as strong and supportable as possible. EPSRC seems
stuck in the mode that it will continue with its model in the face of all subsequent
innovations, essentially because EPSRC was the first to do it this way. The model adopted
was created to tackle the very specific issue of building up strength at the life sciences
450
interface, but is wholly inappropriate to the support of doctoral training across the whole
EPSRC portfolio. This is particularly the case for sub-fields that rely upon small and flexible
research teams that work independently and primarily through one-on-one PhD
supervision, such as mathematical physics.
46. Despite our issues of concern, the CDTs have shown that it can be more efficient to
provide training to PhD students in larger cohorts. This economy of scale is particularly
valuable in providing training in generic skills. However, as mentioned, the CDTs also have
the less welcome aspect of channelling studentships into a relatively small number of subject
areas, squeezing other areas which might be more popular with students. Consequently, it
makes sense to find other ways of achieving economies of scale in postgraduate training.
Among the most successful ways of achieving this critical mass have been the regional
alliances, such as SUPA, SEPNet, MPA, etc., all of which offer joint training to graduate
students without the concomitant narrowing of the subject base.
47. In the case of physics, the RCUK Review of UK Physics noted that physics departments
provided a small number of stand-alone Masters degrees compared with other STEM
disciplines 241 . The reason for this could be explained by the change in funding of Masters
degrees by the research councils.
48. The IOP is of the view that state funding should be very much considered for Masters
degrees, especially in areas that are of national importance such as nuclear physics. EPSRC
stopped funding for all nuclear MSc programmes a few years ago, jeopardising many
previously viable courses related to nuclear technology. Currently, there is no funding
mechanism to support MSc courses and a solution to this problem needs to be found
urgently, particularly in the case of nuclear physics, as there is not a strong industry to
finance the courses, but without them, there will be skills shortages in the future.
49. A challenge will be the long-term effect of the HE reforms on the uptake of STEM
subjects at the postgraduate level, in particular, as the increasing burden of debt may have a
deterrent effect on those contemplating an academic research career. At present, it is too
early to tell and the downturn in the economy has obscured any possible decline but this is
an area where it will be necessary to monitor the situation carefully. In addition, as
mentioned earlier, the integrated Masters degree is now the preferred route to
postgraduate study, and many prospective students may decide against studying the fourth
year on financial grounds.
50. In addition, the duration of a PhD course can vary between three and four years and,
while studying a PhD may not cause students to accrue much further debt, they do not
allow loans to be paid off either. As certain industrial and academic sectors require specific
skills and the experience that only PhD study can provide, this may lead to negative
repercussions for the research base in the future and on the long-term health of the
241 RCUK Review of UK Physics; http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/reviews/physics/review.pdf
451
economy. We are pleased to see that postgraduate funding and support will be addressed in
a forthcoming HEFCE consultation exercise, and hope the government will monitor the
impact of the new fees regime on the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate study.
Industry

them?
51. There is much scope for developing STEM students’ generic ‘workplace’ skills over the
course of their degrees and employers can play a positive role by offering summer work
placements or internships. To support such programmes, the IOP is running a ‘work
placements bursary scheme’ to support penultimate-year physics undergraduates who wish
to undertake placements in the UK or Ireland 242 . The scheme provides bursaries of up to
£2,000 to students over the course of eight-week placements, enabling students from all
backgrounds to apply for such positions.
52. In addition, employers have to offer better pay, which certainly has been the case with
the financial sector, which has openly recruited the best physics PhD graduates. As
mentioned earlier, the CBI has stated that employers are finding it difficult to recruit
workers with skills in STEM subjects and therefore have to pay a premium for them2.
53. Because the skills developed by studying physics are so well-regarded by employers,
physics graduates tend to be better paid than those who do most other subjects. This
earnings premium may be a particularly important consideration with the coming increase in
university tuition fees, as students increasingly see a degree as an investment for their future
and want to extract the best value for money from it.
graduates?
54. The previously cited report, Employability Skills Review3, published by the National HE
STEM Programme, recommended the following steps that industry and universities could
take to address such issues:
“Encourage HEIs to explore ways of engaging with employers to develop employability support
plans that will help ensure their graduates have the relevant practical skills that are required for the
workplace; deliver an enhanced capacity for employer engagement supported by training and a
commitment by employers to financially support programmes which provide clear benefit;
encourage HEIs to utilise ‘in-house’ careers advice and guidance support resources; and increase
HEI awareness of the developing methods of providing both direct and indirect experience of
employers, and support their wider adoption across STEM.”
55. We are of the view that there is little hard evidence about what skills employers need.
Much of what they state is anecdotal and parochial, and there is a danger of making HE too
242 Work placements scheme; http://www.iop.org/careers/university/placements/index.html
452
narrow in its provision. Enlightened employers realise that generic skills and flexibility are
the prime virtues of HE training and that specialised training is their responsibility.
56. An issue for both sectors, but particularly universities, is the difficulty in recruiting
technical staff 243 . Most universities have discontinued apprentice schemes and there is no
financial incentive (primarily because technicians do not attract fEC income) or willingness
from the universities to make a long-term career commitment to technical staff. Many
research groups have technicians over the age of 50 who were the last participants on
university technician apprentice schemes. There is no next-generation being trained to
replace such people, and a similar situation has arisen in terms of laboratory assistants in
schools.
of best practice?
57. An issue that has never been properly addressed in the UK is the Bologna Process for
the reform of HE in Europe. Across much of the rest of Europe, this reform has led to
major structural change in HE. One area where the UK is out of line with the process is in
the route to a PhD where, across most our European competitors, the 3+2+3 model has
been adopted. Anecdotally, we are aware of issues where UK trained graduates have
experienced difficulties seeking overseas employment and postgraduate opportunities, due
to the fact they are perceived to be less well qualified than their European peers.
58. The Quality Assurance Agency has asserted that the UK system is consistent with the
Bologna model 244 , so there will be no pressure from government or the funding councils for
universities to change their systems. However, there have already been cases of UK
graduates with four-year integrated Masters qualifications, such as the MPhys, not being
accepted for a PhD in another European country and there is an increasing number of UK
academic positions being taken by scientists who have not been educated in the UK.
Potentially, this situation could lead to serious problems in the future by which time it may
be too late to act.
16 December 2011
243 More information on this issue can be found in the following report which the IOP was involved in: Technicians under
the microscope; A study of the skills and training of university laboratory and engineering workshop technicians;
http://www.gatsby.org.uk/~/media/Files/Education/6%20Paul%20Lewis%20report%20on%20HE%20technicians%20April%202
011.ashx
244 The Bologna Process in higher education;
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/Publications/InformationAndGuidance/Documents/BolognaLeaflet.pdf
453
Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) – Written evidence
16-18 supply:
1. A STEM subject is one which falls into the disciplines of science, technology,
engineering and mathematics. Similarly, a STEM job is one which relates to these
disciplines and uses them to solve problems or create new knowledge. The ability to
think logically and creative problem-solving are highly valuable attributes.
2. Scientists design experiments to find out how things work. They conduct or oversee
those experiments, analyze the results and form theories to explain what the results
mean.
3. Technology could include any occupation that requires technical skill, but usually
refers to information technology or computer related occupations.
4. Engineers use scientific knowledge to solve practical problems within the constraints
of the given environment. They design, develop and test new products such as
computers, machines, buildings and vehicles. They also design, develop, and maintain
systems including assembly lines and power grids.
5. Mathematicians develop new mathematical theories and tools to solve problems.

The application of mathematics is key to the understanding and application of science
and engineering.
• Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be

used to influence supply?
6. The IET carries out annual surveys of businesses to gauge the state of skills in the
engineering and technology sector. The report describes the findings from a survey
of 400 UK employers of engineers and technicians, which took place in April this
year.
7. The survey of 400 organisations shows that although STEM skills are vital to areas of
future growth and employment including advanced manufacturing and low carbon
industries around 48% of employers are currently having difficulty recruiting STEM-
skilled staff. In addition, 18% of organisations not confident that they would be able
to recruit suitably qualified engineering, IT and technical staff in 4-5 years’ time. This
highlights the need for government to take urgent action to raise the quantity and
quality of STEM graduates.
8. Skills in STEM are at the core of innovation in business and industry. Not only do
these subjects open doors to a rich and rewarding vista of STEM careers, they also
foster the type of employability skills that are valued by all employers – analytical
skills, problem-solving and teamwork. The desirability of STEM-related degrees is
broad, with employers often preferring to recruit individuals with STEM-related
454
degrees for their highly desirable skills. STEM reaches beyond its traditional
applications and also plays a role in transforming service industries such as public
health and finance.
9. With business experiencing STEM shortages now it is crucial that the government
supports actions that help teachers and lecturers deliver strong subject teaching.
• Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students
10. STEM subject choice in HE is, to a large extent, determined by subject choice earlier
on in the education system. For instance, in order to study a BEng in Engineering,
most Universities will expect an A Level in Physics and Mathematics. Therefore, if
not enough young people qualify with the appropriate combinations of A’ Level
subjects, then this will limit the number of First Degree entrants to STEM courses in
HE.
11. To this end, it is vital that that action is taken by the government to influence
perceptions and knowledge of young people about STEM opportunities and careers.
This would help to increase the supply of STEM students. We need more people to
be directed towards STEM at an early age if the government is to rebalance the
economy away from the financial sector.
12. The understanding of engineering and therefore of engineering careers in engineering

is generally poor within schools. All students are required to study science, however
the study of the application of that scientific knowledge is not compulsory. The
opportunities for school students to encounter engineering are limited to taking
options such as Design and Technology and the Engineering Diploma. With the
virtual demise of the diplomas, the teaching of Design & Technology in schools plays
a key role in providing the STEM skills required to rebalance our economy. It
inspires children to follow careers in design, engineering and the creative industries –
the careers of the 21st century. We are deeply concerned that D&T is at risk of
being removed from the National Curriculum as it is crucial in supplying the right
skills for the further study of STEM subjects, along with Maths, Physics, Chemistry
and Biology.
The uptake of STEM level 3 qualifications:
• What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of
13. In our opinion, the English Baccalaureate is trying to serve dual purposes (school
accountability and pupils' attainment) and therefore runs the risk of raising the stakes
of some examinations, which in the past has led to the narrowing of curricula in
schools and pupils being entered for inappropriate examinations.
14. One of the aims of the English Baccalaureate is to drive the take up of individual
sciences, however the timetabling pressures introduced by the English Baccalaureate
may result in fewer pupils having the opportunity to study separate sciences. Schools
455
may also concentrate pupils efforts on the two sciences either for which they have
specialist teachers or based on their results in early assessments
15. For the E-Bac to have maximum value it should include subjects of national strategic
importance including engineering. The lack of technical subjects at this stage would
adversely affect the number of young people studying STEM subjects in HE.
Graduate supply:
16. Evidence suggests that the current number of STEM students and graduates
produced in the UK is not sufficient to meet the needs of industry. Working Futures
III, a comprehensive set of UK employment projections for the period 2007-2017,
predicts that the manufacturing sector will need to recruit an additional 587,000
workers to meet replacement demand as workers retire or leave for other reasons.
In addition, Government expects 400,000 jobs to be created in UK green industries
by 2015. To achieve this, action must be taken now to ensure more young people
are enthusiastic and excited by STEM.
17. From a business perspective it is vital that efforts to stimulate demand for STEM are
met by supply of HE places. The outcome that matters for business is that promising
applicants are converted into highly skilled graduates.
18. Companies are increasingly recruiting STEM graduates from countries

outside the UK. Employers who indicated that had difficulties in recruiting
staff with the right skill set, reported that their solution was to recruit from
overseas, or locate the work itself overseas.
• Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education

19. In our experience, employers are concerned about the employability of

STEM graduates – who characteristically lack working experience, have poor
laboratory skills and may also have pursued courses with insufficient relevant
content.
20. The recruitment difficulties expressed by employers are concerns about a lack of
well-rounded candidates with technical skills, broader competencies, such as
mathematical capability, and practical work experience. Evidence for this can be
found in the IET’s 2011 Skills & Demand in Industry Survey which shows that the
main reasons cited for recruitment difficulties were a lack of applicants with the
required qualifications and skills and a lack of applicants with required work
experience.
21. There is a noticeable lack of practical skills amongst STEM graduates who are
emerging from HE. 31% of respondents reported that new engineering, IT and
technical recruits did not meet reasonable expectations for levels of skill. The biggest
456
skills gap amongst new recruits was found to be their lack of practical experience.
For example, 28% of organisations said that graduates did not have sufficient practical
experience. The most commonly cited action to address skills shortages was
improving the profile and image of engineering (30%) followed by making it cheaper
for organisations to offer training.
22. The IET survey also covers whether employers’ expectations are met by their
recruits. Experienced staffs are found to best meet expectations, and practical
experience is seen as most lacking in post graduates, graduates and school leavers.
23. The IET concludes that the survey shows that a gap exists between the output of the
education system and employers’ expectations.
24. Evidence suggests that STEM graduates are in demand by all sectors. They are highly-
valued for their analytical and thinking skills. For all age groups, the challenging nature
of STEM is seen as a desirable quality.
institutions?
25. Our chief concerns with the White Paper are around the twin policies of lifting the
cap on AAB+ students and the allocation of 20,000 places from the core/margin for
low cost provision of less than £7,500 after fee waivers. We believe it is likely that
HE institutions looking to maximise profits will expand provision of low cost subjects
rather than high cost, laboratory based disciplines such as science and engineering.
26. We also see a risk of insufficient high quality engineering graduates required by the
Government’s growth strategy, if provision of accredited engineering degrees and
other strategically important courses such as computer science reduce as an
unintended consequence of the proposals set out in the White Paper. While we do
not know the effect funding will have on universities, Government should be
reminded of the experience of FE during the last recession where engineering and
construction departments were closed and have not been replaced because of the
high capital costs involved. This has led to a reduction in provision nationally.
27. We ask that, whatever reforms to the HE sector are undertaken, the Government
takes a national review of engineering provision in universities on a regional basis to
ensure accessibility to all.
• What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop
28. Research assessment has the tendency to 'silo' research into the Panels of the REF
exercise as it is now. For example, music technology is neither music nor technology
per se and it loses out in the REF because it falls between two "parent" panels. The
idea that music technology is a combination of the two disciplines and, therefore, can
457
be reviewed by both panels, can result in this subject not being acknowledged by
peers who are not on either of these "parent" panels. Hence, starting new and cross-
disciplinary areas is not attractive to research active departments because research
in such areas is not given due recognition by the assessment process.
• What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary

for all universities to teach undergraduates and post graduates and
29. Teaching at university level is about how to find information, how to process it
through thinking and discussion and how to put it into practice. Being around
researchers facilitates this process since that is what researchers do and they
provide a good example.

30. Of the 116 universities in the UK, 91 are located in England. Scotland has the second
highest number of universities with 15.
31. The availability of STEM subjects across a wide geographic spread of institutions is
essential to provide the skilled scientists and engineers vital for a continuing high
quality UK science base and science based industry, and to ensure participation
across all socio‐economic groups. Any shortfall in funding for high cost subjects will
discourage higher education institutions from maintaining capacity in science and
engineering courses. This is likely
to have an impact on many students who plan to attend a university close to where
they live as they are unwilling to take on the extra debt that would be required for
them to live away from home.
background?
32. In the period 2007-2017 the manufacturing sector needs to recruit 587,000
employees. If the government is to achieve this, more must be done to attract
students from different ethnic origins and socio-economic backgrounds. This would
also serve to ameliorate the shortage of STEM graduates as a whole.
33. The projected future demand for engineers coupled with a declining cohort of young
people entering the workforce makes it imperative that young people including those
in danger of becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training) also have
the opportunities and accessible pathways to follow engineering paths. The major
factors influencing HE participation for disadvantaged pupils include poor attainment
at secondary school and financial barriers arising at the point of entry into HE.
Gender:
34. Turning to gender, the UK has the lowest proportion of female engineers in Europe
(8.7%). The IET Skills Survey shows that in the UK women are still very under-
458
represented in both engineering and IT professions. In fact, for all the years that this
survey has been carried out (since 2006) there has been no notable increase in the
proportion of women employed in technical roles. Engineering and technology are
the most unrepresented STEM subject group when it comes to gender. Consistently
for the last eight years the proportion of female applicants has remained at 12%
although the overall number of applicants has increased over this time period.
35. What needs to be done:

- Society still portrays engineering and technology in particular, with science to a
lesser degree, as being male careers from an early age (3 years-old). In this regard,
career targeting has to begin during students’ primary education.
- Better provision at secondary level for careers information, advice and guidance
should be provided. There seems to be a lack of comprehension by school career
advisors that STEM careers are equally valid for both sexes. Careers advisors often
lack any industrial or even academic experience/awareness.
- To reverse the negative view of engineering and make it more accessible and
attractive to females; the creative and people aspects of engineering need to be
better communicated along with access to female role models.
- Engineering employers need to provide a more supportive work environment for
women, in line with many of the other professions.
36. The IET does a considerable amount of work to address the perception of women in
engineering. For example, the IET’s Young Women Engineer (YWE) of the Year
Award highlights the achievements of women in engineering and thereby encourages
more women to enter the profession. In July 2011, the IET launched a Women’s
Network on Facebook to engage with women who work or wish to work in
engineering. The IET also offer financial or in-kind support to the Wise Campaign
and the Women’s Engineering Society (WES), W-Tech and the Equalitech
consortium.
Socio-economic:
37. Engineering in HE has similar representation to Higher Education as a whole in terms

of the lowest four socio-economic groups but the lower half of the socio-economic
scale is still under-represented.
38. This situation could become worse if universities that have been recruiting well from
a ‘widening participation’ cohort are forced to reduce their provision as a result of
the proposals set out in the recent HE White Paper.
39. This under-representation will deepen with associated risk to social mobility if
provision of professionally-accredited engineering degree programmes becomes less
accessible to the more economically disadvantaged applicants.
40. We must be clear that those who cannot afford higher education must be provided
with adequate bursaries and support so that they can still benefit.
459

41. UK students typically are not reading for PhDs and this is to do with debt which is
about to get much higher. PhDs are the backbone of research and of tomorrow's
academic staff and UK numbers are is decline. More fully funded places would be
attractive to UK students who would see a start of earning and not of increasing an
already enormous debt. Students from abroad usually return home afterwards.
• What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and
42. Without a Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), departments in certain areas are really
struggling since those with DTCs can offer a full financially covered experience. The
effect is a paucity of students in cognate areas elsewhere. This cuts off a wealth of
creative supervision opportunities and potentially overloads those staff in
departments with DTCs. There is a belief that the DTC package is far too large as
you either have one or you are in the huge majority who do not have one. How can
5 years of research with 50 studentships (10 per annum) be denied to so many for
the benefit of so few?
• Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the

students?
43. There is little funding for PhDs without a Doctoral Training Scheme which have
mopped up significant funds into very few departments in particular areas of
research. The removal of the ability to add PhD students to EPSRC grants now is a
retrograde step as it means that they can no longer be offered the opportunity to be
involved in major research projects alongside Research Assistants and research
active staff.

44. The new fees regime will discourage students from doing a Masters as to not to
incur occur greater debt. Fees are putting off UK students now and the supply of
researchers is already drying up.
Industry
• What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to

attract them?
- High quality work experience opportunities

- Offering accredited STEM professional qualification (such as chartered or
incorporated engineer) was also noted as a selling point for companies that support
the professional development of their staff
- To attract the female cohort, provision for part-time working and flexibility.
460
45. In particular, SME’s experience difficulty in attracting STEM graduates because

they often do not have the resources or easy mechanisms to connect with
universities to identify potential employees. SME’s have the additional
problem that they may be less well known to the universities or potential
employees, compared to larger firms with established reputations. The
contribution of SMEs to innovation is widely acknowledged and they have
contributed to increased economic growth in the UK. It should be a high
priority to ensure that SMEs are engaged with the right graduates so that
they continue to have the necessary resource to innovate and contribute to
economic growth.
46. Employers are concerned about the employability of STEM graduates who
characteristically lack working experience, have poor laboratory skills and
may also have pursued courses with insufficient relevant content.
47. It is apparent that businesses and universities often do not engage effectively
with each other because they do not recognise the mutual benefits of doing
so nor do they all have the right mechanisms in place. Better communication
between the two would help universities to understand the evolving skills
required in industry. Employers feel that too many courses are not up to
date. In addition, as new technologies emerge rapidly, STEM graduates must
be equipped to respond to ever-changing technologies and be able to apply
basic principles to a variety of novel situations.
48. We advocate that the knowledge and skills taught at universities need to be
evolving constantly in response to advice from industry. Perhaps the changing
industrial needs should be better recognised in accreditation of courses and
HEFCE assessments? The multidisciplinary aspects needed by industry are
often not recognised for their importance.
49. At the IET, we have been involved in setting up strategic sector initiatives as unique
partnerships between industry and academia. A particularly successful scheme has
been the establishment of a Power Academy to address the skills shortage in power
engineering, through a combination of financial support and workplace mentoring for
students. The Power Academy initiative developed by the IET has been enormously
successful in achieving its aims and this strategy can be developed for other sectors
• What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in

50. Internationally the UK’s ability to recruit women onto HE Engineering courses (15%)
is significantly below European (20%) and worldwide (19%) average participation
rates.
461
51. Companies are increasingly recruiting STEM graduates from countries

outside the UK because it is much easier to recruit graduates from Europe
who appear to have a more positive attitude towards STEM employment. It
is also important to note that while large companies have the capacity to
recruit “raw” graduates and provide training this is generally not the case for
SMEs who need more skilled graduates who are equipped to “hit the ground
running” and contribute immediately in the workplace. Employers who
indicated that they had difficulties in recruiting staff with the right skill set
reported that their solution was to recruit from overseas, or locate the work
itself overseas.
16 December 2011
462
Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) – Written evidence
About JCQ
1. The Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) is a membership body comprising the seven
largest national awarding bodies offering qualifications in the UK. These are AQA, CCEA,
City & Guilds, Edexcel, OCR, SQA and WJEC.
2. The JCQ exists to provide:
a) An opportunity for strategic debate, information exchange and expression of

common interest amongst awarding bodies
b) A means to enable the awarding bodies jointly to express views on, and respond
to, national issues as they arise
c) A vehicle for collective approaches, where relevant, to government, political and

other influential parties
d) A means of collective discussion with teachers, their organisations and other

valued stakeholders, on matters of common concern
e) Common administrative arrangements for schools and colleges.
3. Its members cover a range of qualifications that include: Entry Level; GCSE; Diplomas;
GCE; Advanced Extension Award; Vocational; Extended Project; Scottish Highers; Basic
and Key Skills and Functional Skills.
Overview
4. On behalf of its members, JCQ collates and publishes the results for GCSEs and GCEs in
August each year.
5. This submission provides data on the number of students taking STEM subjects in these
qualifications over the period 2009 – 2011.
6. Detailed data showing the breakdown of results, including by gender, are also available
and can be provided to the Committee upon request.
7. It is important to note that awarding bodies also provide a wide-range of vocational

qualifications that deliver competence and knowledge in STEM areas.
STEM subjects at GCE A-level
8. The table below shows the number of students taking STEM subjects at GCE A level in
2009, 2010 and 2011.
463
Subject Male/ 2009 2010 2011* 2009-2011

Female/ No. of No. of No. of % change
Total candidates candidates candidates*
Biology M 23766 25285 26942 13.4
F 31933 32742 35099 9.9
T 55700 58027 62041 11.4
Chemistry M 22021 23062 25329 15.0
F 20670 21138 22753 10.1
T 42693 44200 48082 12.6
Physics M 22999 24368 26011 13.1
F 6557 6685 6849 4.5
T 29556 31054 32860 11.2
Design and M 10226 9819 10543 3.1
Technology F 7265 7333 7706 6.2
T 17491 17152 18249 4.3
Mathematics M 43510 46514 49828 14.5
F 29684 31720 33167 11.7
T 73196 78234 82995 13.4
Further M 7287 8191 8455 16.0
Mathematics F 3331 3832 3832 15.0
T 10618 12023 12287 15.7
*2011 figures are provisional
9. As the figures show, there is a significant long-term increase in the number of candidates
taking STEM subjects at A-level. This is despite a reduction in the size of the 18 year old
cohort, which decreased by 2.5% between 2010 and 2011.
10. Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics are dominated by boys, who are also increasing
their take up of the subjects at a faster rate than girls. Girls are more likely to take
Biology than boys.
STEM subjects at GCSE
11. The table below shows the number of students taking GCSE Full-Courses in STEM
subjects between 2009 and 2011. The science subjects listed are those over and above
what students are required to study and are therefore making a choice to study them.
Subject Male/ 2009 2010 2011* 2009-2011

Female/ No. of No. of No. of % change
Total candidates candidates candidates
Biology M 54783 70127 77877 42.2
F 50390 62614 70027 38.9
T 105176 132742 147904 40.6
Chemistry M 50788 66807 75807 49.3
F 41927 55648 65917 57.2
T 92717 122455 141724 52.9
Physics M 51052 67023 75657 48.2
F 40527 54363 64526 59.2
464
T 91581 121386 140183 53.1

Additional M 196456 174246 149748 -23.8
Science F 202389 180690 156564 -22.6
T 398851 354940 306312 -23.2
Design and M 169478 161036 142868 -15.7
Technology F 136384 126747 110756 -18.8
T 305864 287790 253624 -17.1
Engineering M 5093 4218 1698 -66.7
F 408 374 152 -62.7
T 5501 4592 1850 -66.4
Maths M 375619 379298 384258 2.3
F 380149 385246 388686 2.2
T 755805 764563 772944 2.3
*2011 figures are provisional

12. As the entry numbers for GCSE Engineering decreased over the period, it is
important to note that entry figures for the Engineering Higher Diploma increased from
15 in 2009 to 1,521 in 2011.
13. During this period, there has been significant movement away from Science and
Additional Science to separate sciences (Biology, Chemistry and Physics).
14. It is expected that the increase in the number of students taking separate sciences at
GCSE in 2010 and 2011 will result in a continued increase in the take-up of these
subjects at A-level.
Developing STEM qualifications
15. Awarding bodies recognise the importance of developing qualifications that provide
clear progression and equip learners with the skills and knowledge that meet the needs
of the individual as well as higher education and employers.
16. To achieve this, awarding bodies work closely with a wide-range of education
partners when creating qualifications and designing syllabuses. This includes professional
institutions, such as the Institute of Physics, and universities.
17. That more young people are studying STEM subjects at GCSE and A level is good
news. They are being given the foundations upon which they can continue to develop
their knowledge and understanding and contribute to the UK economy.
15 December 2011
465
LGC Limited – Written evidence
About LGC
1. LGC, previously known as the Laboratory of the Government Chemist, was privatised in
1996 and has since extended its scientific reputation through substantial internal investment,
grown revenue by 800% and created many hundreds of new jobs for the UK. LGC is now
one of the leading private science facilities in the country, employing almost 1500 individuals
undertaking chemical and biological analytical and measurement services for industry and
governments on an international scale, with operations in Europe, Asia, the Americas and
the Far East.
Definition of a STEM subject or a STEM job

2. For the purpose of this submission our definition of a STEM subject as studied at
university or in an alternative higher education institution is one that involves developing a
thorough understanding of a science, technology, engineering or mathematics discipline. A
STEM job is one that directly applies this technical knowledge in day-to-day activities. In
their purest form STEM subjects include chemistry, biology, physics and mathematics. These
subjects underpin the more applied interdisciplinary STEM subjects such as biochemistry,
food science, materials, environmental science, computing, engineering, forensic science and
medicine (to name a few).
3. This year has seen more than 50,000 students study A-level or Advanced Higher
chemistry courses – a significant increase on previous years. There are undoubtedly many
reasons contributing to this figure but, in the light of tuition fees, there may be more
discerning students (or parents thereof) carefully selecting courses offering employment
potential. Of course, with the attraction of the skill set of chemistry graduates and their
potential to move to other employment opportunities post-degree, it should really be no
surprise that more students are choosing to study this subject.
Demand for STEM graduates

4. LGC supplies science-based services and products to a wide range of customers in
industry and in government. LGC is the designated National Measurement Institute (NMI)
for chemical and bioanalytical measurement, and delivers commercial services in the areas of
health sciences (including foods, food supplements and pharmaceuticals analysis),
environmental testing, forensics and genomics. We are also a leading EU supplier of
reference materials (RMs) and proficiency testing (PT) schemes. All of our products and
services require a high level of scientific skill, and this is reflected in the staff we employ.
5. 71% of our workforce is trained to graduate level, and of these 17% have PhDs. Many of
the PhDs reside within LGC Science and Technology, carrying out measurement research in
support of our national functions and under contract for the private sector, and there are
also a number of specialist PhD scientists in LGC Forensics. A high proportion of our
graduates have degrees in chemistry and biology or a closely related science discipline, and
we continue to need high calibre recruits with training in these subjects. We would not
expect the demand for this level of skills to change significantly for at least the next three
years.
Supply of STEM graduates and postgraduates
466
6. To our knowledge there is no established mechanism for influencing the supply of STEM
graduates, based on demand from our industry and we are not aware of a comprehensive
survey of the national demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used to influence
supply. This could be a valuable survey to perform, however we should be wary of the
possible side-effects of introducing a solely ‘demand-led’ culture by linking, too closely,
STEM studies and existing STEM careers. Broader environmental and societal challenges
should also be important factors for motivating students to gain the appropriate skills to
resolve the problems of the future. There are also advantages in training people in science
that will enter other professions (e.g., city, politics), as a more scientifically aware educated
population might provide benefits in better policies, public debate and a greater willingness
to invest in science.
7. For our more specialised scientific roles, often requiring PhDs or post-doctoral
qualifications, we have experienced some past difficulty in finding suitable UK candidates to
fill positions. The current position is somewhat easier following restructuring within the
pharmaceutical sector and reduced attractiveness of careers in the financial sector. This is
likely only to be a temporary state of affairs, so we are not complacent about the need to
promote the visibility of our industry to future graduates. We have built close links with a
number of internationally reputed UK academic institutions as a basis for assisting supply of
STEM graduates in key priority areas for our business. LGC has also established Masters
courses and supported the training of MSc and PhD level graduates in key principles of
analytical quality, to counteract perceived shortfalls in the domain of analytical chemistry.
8. In LGC Forensics, new graduates are somewhat easier to come by, at least in simple
number terms, thanks to the increased popularity of forensic science degrees. However,
due to their broad and necessarily superficial coverage of multiple disciplines the majority of
these courses do not equip students with the right fundamental technical skill-set for
employment in our laboratories; it is therefore an issue of quality rather than number of
graduates. Better sign-posting is required by career professionals and by industry at
universities and, indeed, beforehand in schools to encourage students to choose degrees
that will provide the most relevant basic skills required for employment in STEM
professions.
Origin of STEM graduates

9. Our key requirements for STEM graduates are strong practical laboratory-based training
and a good theoretical understanding of relevant analytical techniques, as well as the ability
to challenge and understand the results obtained from these techniques. For our more
specialised science roles, it has undoubtedly become harder over recent years to find
suitable applicants from UK academia. Indeed the longer, more practical-based degrees
available in overseas universities (e.g. France and Germany) have produced stronger
candidates for this type of work and we have a high number of EU and non-EU scientists
(PhD and post-doctoral level) in our specialised technical areas. In a recent headcount we
had 13 different nationalities represented in a workforce of 80 employees associated with
our National Measurement Institute role. This has been achieved in spite of increased visa
restrictions. The lengthy bureaucracy and time required to recruit non-EU scientists places a
significant burden on our organisation that can delay customer delivery and adversely affect
our financial performance.
Calibre of new STEM graduate recruits
467
10. The broadened interdisciplinary nature of many UK degrees means that the new recruits
with these degrees rarely have sufficient practical laboratory skills or in-depth knowledge of
fundamental science concepts to deliver the required quality of service, and need additional
training in-house. The expectations of such graduates about the nature of the jobs they will
enter are also often ill-founded, and this has led to high turnover of junior staff in some
parts of our business.
11. LGC’s main requirement for new recruits is a capacity to deliver practical laboratory
tasks accurately and reliably and to be able to draw on a solid theoretical basis. The broader
knowledge of associated disciplines, as taught in some currently popular university degrees,
is not usually immediately required and is perhaps better added by on-the-job training in the
industry itself. It would appear that this position has arisen due to academic institutions
interpreting what is required by industry without sufficient proactive industry involvement in
stating requirements for recruits and the opportunities available to them. For example,
whilst there is a clear appreciation of school leavers and graduates who are able to
communicate effectively and with demonstrable team-working skills, these ‘nice to haves’
are solely a differentiator when two or more technically equivalent individuals apply for a
STEM job. Perhaps the balance of academic training has moved too far from the core STEM
topic focus, in the quest to deliver “softer” management skills?
LGC’s response to gaps in training

12. LGC provides new recruits with extensive in-house training in all areas of the business.
In order to address the need for junior recruits with stronger practical laboratory skills,
LGC is participating in the National Apprenticeship Service (NAS). LGC Forensics has
initiated several advanced apprenticeships for laboratory technicians in collaboration with
Birmingham Metropolitan College. These apprenticeships will last for 18 months and will
result in an NVQ level 3 qualification for the apprentices involved. We are very positive
about prospects of using the NAS as an important vehicle for producing staff with the
correct level of training for our more junior forensic science positions. Indeed we are also
examining opportunities through the recently announced science technician qualification and
emerging bioscience apprenticeship scheme in association with the University of Kent.
13. Strong links have been forged with UK universities as previously mentioned and also by
collaborative participation in Technology Strategy Board and EU funded R&D programmes.
The networks formed in these programmes can be a valuable source of recruitment for
post-graduate level scientists. We are hopeful that, by addressing training gaps in the ways
indicated, we will have less difficulty in finding graduates with the relevant skills and
experience for future employment at LGC. We consider that a more tiered approach to
science education that spans practical delivery of core analytical processes and procedures
through to international leadership in technical innovation would be helpful to our industry.
Incentives for STEM graduates to work at LGC

14. LGC is a fast-growing, dynamic and international company with great prospects for a
sustainable economic future. We are a large employer of skilled scientists, but there is
always pressure to offer salaries that are competitive with other employers that also employ
STEM graduates but do not necessarily require the same level of STEM skills (e.g. in the
financial services sector). It is difficult to compete with the remuneration packages available
in some of those industries. Nonetheless, we have a loyal workforce with several talented
scientists staying at LGC for their full careers. As the company grows, opportunities for
career development continually arise and this is attractive for our employees. Furthermore,
468
the interesting STEM work performed in the company and our “science for a safer world”
ethic are key reasons for our scientists’ enthusiasm to come to work at LGC. In our
experience there are factors other than remuneration that contribute significantly to the job
satisfaction of our scientists, such as interesting scientific challenges, the positive societal
impact of our work, career progression opportunities and recognition of their scientific
competence.
15. We acknowledge that more can be done to raise our profile as an exciting organisation
to work for, to promote job opportunities both in the UK and abroad (e.g. through careers
fairs), and to share our enthusiasm for rewarding STEM careers with school children and
university students (e.g. through our company open evenings and STEM ambassador
activities). Where this promotional activity happens, our career proposition is generally
received very positively.
16 December 2011
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LGC Limited, Expedition Engineering and Vectura – Oral evidence (QQ 146-166)
LGC Limited, Expedition Engineering and Vectura – Oral evidence

(QQ 146-166)
TUESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2012

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Krebs
Lord Rees of Ludlow
________________
Dr Julian Braybrook, Director of Strategy, Measurement Research, LGC, Professor

Chris Wise, Founder of Expedition Engineering, and Mr Steven White, Director of
Human Resources, Vectura.
Q146 The Chairman: You are our second panel this morning, and I apologise again
profusely for the slight delay in starting this session. Thank you very much indeed, and I
hope you enjoyed the previous session. We welcome our second panel of witnesses, who
are basically working for SMEs, but in all cases fairly large SMEs if I am honest. I wonder if
you could introduce yourselves for the record. If you want to say something briefly, then
please do so, but otherwise we will get on with the questions.
Dr Braybrook: I am Julian Braybrook. I am Director of Strategy for Measurement Research
at LGC. Very briefly—there are several points that we might come back to and we have
heard a lot of these already—just to give you a picture, LGC has grown very rapidly. We
now have 1,600 people around the world, with 1,000 in the UK. Therefore, recruitment is
clearly an issue to us. Those individuals operate in all our operations around the globe, and
there are differences in recruitment issues between each of the different business
operations and countries in which they are based. I am a chemist by training and manage
research at the inter-disciplinary boundaries, so we might want to come back to that later.
Then, just briefly, I think two points are worth mentioning: popularisation of certain subjects
is something we might want to come back to talk about and the breadth that LGC has;
everything from service—higher throughput, if you want to put it that way, but that is
probably doing them a disservice—right the way through to very specialised postgraduate
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researchers. There are huge differences in issues between both ends of that, and hopefully
we will get a chance to talk about that a little bit more. Thank you.
Professor Wise: I am Chris Wise. I am a founder partner of a smallish company, actually by
comparison with this one, about 50 people, called Expedition Engineering that has been
going about 10 or 12 years. Before that I was 20 years with Arups, a global engineering
consultancy. I have also been Design Professor at Imperial College for a number of years,
and possibly about to start a similar position at UCL, so I have a strong interest in the
educational side of things as well, part time. I also have an interest in the design community
in a larger sense, because I have been Master of the Royal Designers for Industry, which is a
pan-disciplinary design gang of allegedly eminent designers from lots of different disciplines—
everything from shoes through to film and television, including engineering. There are some
differences between the education of designers from some of those sectors and those who
are in the STEM subjects, so maybe I can bring some of that to the table, I hope.
Mr White: Good morning, my name is Steve White. I come from a company called Vectura
who specialise in the development of pharmaceutical inhalation products. We employ about
250 people on two sites, so we are very much the small end of the market—we have 230
people in Chippenham and 20 people in Cambridge. The people in Cambridge are
predominantly engineers. The people in Chippenham tend are predominantly pharmaceutical
chemists. I also chair the BioIndustry Association Personnel Committee.
Q147 The Chairman: To start with, the question I asked the first panel is in on numbers.
Is there a sufficient supply of STEM graduates applying for the posts that you have available?
Dr Braybrook: As I said, there are two answers from our company related to that. At one
end there is not a shortage in terms of numbers. In fact, there is an over-subscription and
having a hundred or more applicants for one post is not unusual. At the other end, though,
we do have a shortage for very skilled research posts. Perhaps these are very niche and
specialist roles, so you would have difficulties in any case but, certainly over the last five to
10 years, I have noticed an increasing difficulty in terms of getting a wide enough panel of
prospective employees in front of you on which you can make a good judgement. So you
are slightly forced down a particular route and, clearly, for a company that is growing as fast
as we are, if we do not recruit, then we are not recovering charges to our customers for
the work that we do, so it has a double effect.
Q148 The Chairman: When I last visited your company, one of the concerns was
graduate trends actually coming in, particularly to do with the forensic science part of your
business. Was that a failure of the universities to provide the right forensic science courses,
or was it a failure of them not having enough chemistry?
Dr Braybrook: The two are probably related and the answer is yes to both, to differing
extents. Just taking the forensic side, we routinely recruit at graduate-entry level and at
Masters level, so let us set that context first. There is clear evidence that the core skills that
are required for analytical chemistry that are the bedrock of forensics and, indeed, biology
and other skills for certain particular aspects, are not as evident as they used to be within
the majority of forensic courses. There are some forensic science-approved courses and
they are very good. They have a high practical training element. They have a good core
understanding element and those are the ones that we prefer to recruit from.
Q149 The Chairman: In terms of numbers, Professor Wise, do you have sufficient
people to choose from?
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Professor Wise: We are quite a niche company, so we have lots of people applying—over
100 per position—but we only take a few graduates a year. But pretty much all of our staff
have come in from graduate level and we have gradually grown them, because we found
that, if we have been bringing people in from other companies, quite often they are deficient
in some of the skills that we need in particular to do our project. In pure numbers we have
plenty. In terms of the quality, I have significant reservations about that. It is very easy to
find people who are good at analysis. It is actually good to find people who have a good
training in engineering science. There are some people around who have a good training in
engineering mathematics. There are very few people around who have training in
engineering, and that is what we are trying to do. Their design skills are weak. Their skills of
judgement are weak, and their skills of conception are very weak. It is not just people
coming through from the universities that we have that trouble with. It is people coming
across from other practices as well. That is an endemic problem certainly in our industry.
The emphasis on research means that you have a science-based mindset, which is very good
if you want to be an engineering scientist—it is fantastic, as we heard from some of the large
engineering science companies. But if you want to do physical projects that come from your
head and go out into the world, we really struggle to find people who have that skill and in
my opinion we are not teaching that at university.
The Chairman: We might come back to that. Steven?

Mr White: We take on about three to five graduates each year, so we have not an
enormous number but a significant number. We were looking to ramp up to 10 this year
but unfortunately physical space prevented that, so we were not able to take those on.
In terms of the quality—and I know we will come on to this a bit later on—we tend to
focus on close relationships with a number of universities, and the quality we get from them
is technically what we require, but I am sure we will come on to the social skills a bit later
on. In essence, the numbers and the quality are coming through that we require. We are
not looking for hundreds of people. We are looking for a small number of niche people.
Q150 Lord Krebs: We heard in the earlier panel from some of the large companies—like
Rolls-Royce and GSK—that they had no difficulty in some areas in recruiting good people,
but they felt that some of their suppliers, smaller companies, were having difficulty. Partly
that was because of the attraction of the global brands of the big companies, which
obviously small companies would lack. Do you agree with that description that with the
smaller SMEs it is more difficult to recruit the appropriate quality and numbers of scientists
and engineers?
Dr Braybrook: I can go first. I covered one end of the business. If we go to the part where
we do have a problem with numbers, then this is at the analytical chemistry-related Masters,
PhDs and post-doc level. As I implied, some of these are quite niche posts, but if you go
back 10 years then I would have had very little qualm and uneasiness about recruiting the
majority of PhDs that were in front of us. With Masters candidates, you would have had a
selection process where you would probably have ended up with good candidates.
Unfortunately, where we sit now—and it is a personal view, not necessarily one for the
whole of the company—is that I do believe that actually we have to vet PhDs far, far more
than we used to. Wherever possible, we actually look for added professional experience, so
possibly somebody that has had a two or three-year post-doc. That does create issues
around salary and things like that but, nonetheless, there has been dilution, not necessarily
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in all the core aspects of what they have, but certainly in the way that they are able to apply
those. This makes it very difficult.
Just one example there—some numbers. We had a recent job application. One-third of the
applicants were from foreign nationals, and three out of the four shortlisted candidates
were from other EU countries. I am not sure whether you saw our end of the organisation,
but we have at least 11 or 12 different nationalities out of the 80-odd people that are
related, largely PhD-based, around our measurement research side. So there is a
fundamental problem here in the UK that we need to address.
Professor Wise: On undergraduate applications, we have absolutely no problem in getting
really, really top notch. In fact, their CVs are usually terrifying. I mean, I would not get a job
with us if I applied now; I mean, they have first-class everything. If we want it, they have a
whole bunch of extra-curricular interests that, when you test them on them, they really are
things that they care deeply about. So at the undergraduate level, we have raw material.
Whether that is a result of the university education I think is a different matter. They maybe
go into the university education process with many of those skills, and they come out with
not many of them necessarily having been developed during the four years they have been
there. You would like to think it was different to that, but that seems to be the case.
At postgrad level, especially at PhD level, we tend not to recruit at that level and we did not
at Arups very much either. The reason for that is the specialism of postgraduate work—I
mean, you need a few people of world-class quality in very narrowly defined areas. If you are
doing engineering projects that have a whole bunch of inter-related complex issues, having
too many of one particular aspect will tend to be counterproductive.
On the PhD side of things, I suppose it would be fair to say we regard them as having done
it for their own interests and not necessarily anything that would be of direct use to the
project. Of course, to demonstrate the determination to see something through and to
pioneer, perhaps, a new piece of thinking is something that is a transferable skill, and so you
can use that elsewhere. So we tend to recruit very few PhDs.
What we are doing now is we have three engineering doctorates running. We have another
two starting this year. So out of a company of 50 people we have five engineering
doctorates running, and they are in areas whose research we can direct. So it is a much
better fit for us to run postgrads who are studying things that in the end they can transfer
back to us, and at the same time they can get experience in how to use those skills as they
go through. So each step of their research is reviewed and then the direction is adjusted as
we go through, and that has been very good. We have two or three really top-notch partial
postgrads because they have not finished yet. So we are doing really ground-breaking things
and that is also definitely helpful.
Q151 Lord Krebs: Are they all UK students?

Professor Wise: No. One of them is an Italian. One of them is a Frenchman. One of them is
a German. No, we do not have any UK students.
Lord Krebs: I wish I had not asked that.
Professor Wise: Sorry.
Mr White: If I look at the population, 80% of our employees are graduates and we have
very little difficulty actually attracting those in. We do not attract from Oxford and
Cambridge. We do from Bath, Bristol and Cardiff. Those which are close to our location
are our usual source. . We do not specifically look for PhDs. They are recruited through the
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normal recruitment advertisement process. Last year, we expanded our workforce by about
50 people, which is quite significant. We attracted the majority of those candidates not as
new graduates but from pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer, Novartis which closed sites.
We also recruited all the new graduates who previously had done work experience in
Vectura and had just left education. So, is there a shortage of qualified people, and do we
have trouble attracting them? No, we do not.
Q152 Lord Cunningham of Felling: I was going to ask you the same question as I asked
the previous panel, but I will try to put it a slightly different way. Professor Wise, you seem
to be saying that you were moulding or finessing the system, the interface between your
activities—I do not mean you personally but the company’s activities—and universities, to
get a better-quality product, better postgraduates and better post-doctoral recruits to your
company. Is that an accurate description of what you were saying?
Professor Wise: Yes. I would say it goes further than that, because one of the reasons that
we have been going into undergraduate courses to try to teach design is to try to improve
the quality of the people that we can get from there as well. A number of people that we
have are former students, and obviously it is a very good recruitment process to go into
universities and teach. But the basic aim is to try to get the curriculum changed to develop
better undergraduates.
So the direct intervention, through the engineering doctorates, is people who have a
particularly high-developed aptitude to do particular things. Actually, you have a lot of
flexibility. I come from civil engineering and structural engineering, and to some extent
environmental engineering and architecture, and in those fields there is a lot of complacency
about what is appropriate for a student to learn. We have been unable to shift that very
quickly because—as we heard from the larger organisations earlier—there is a sense that
we are getting enough from universities. They are not rubbish. They are much better than
rubbish. On the other hand, most of the specific development that is required to fit them to
a particular industry is done within the company. We will take them from universities and
we will sort it out once they arrive.
Q153 Lord Cunningham of Felling: You are on the cusp of responding to my next
question before you have heard it. Do you find a willing, positive response generally in
universities to that approach?
Professor Wise: When I have answered that question before, I have usually ended up with a
bunch of stilettos in my back, because the issue is not to do with willingness. It is to do with
capability. The academic world appears to be extremely willing to listen to what industry
would like it to do in terms of development of students. But given the research imperative,
their careers are heading in a different direction. So the skills that they need to teach the
people the skills that we need are simply not there within the university system at the
moment, and it is because the whole thing is geared around doing more and more research
and less and less teaching of, let us say, a knowledgeable kind. The teaching is research
based and science based, as opposed to practical engineering based. So they are not
unwilling. They say they try, but actually often they are not particularly capable. I am not
being unfair on the academics. They have a different agenda in our world. It is a struggle to
find them.
Q154 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Thank you. Can I ask you, Dr Braybrook, and you,
Mr White, the same questions?
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Mr White: Yes. We have close relationships with three universities, and this year, when we
considered going out to a wider group, we found there was a mixed reaction to us
approaching them. Some were very willing because in some cases we are also looking for
development work with them, but some of the universities were not so willing to partner
us—maybe because of the size, maybe because of our interest, but they did not respond to
our approaches.
Dr Braybrook: I would tend to agree that actually I do not find the willingness the issue. I
think, quality aside, and again, perhaps splitting the two extremes that I have discussed
already, from a forensic side it is largely the very generic appeal. A set of courses have
sprung up to appeal to what people are envisaging is a good career in forensic science. You
can have a very good career in forensic science, there is no doubt about it, but the way it is
portrayed on television is not reality. There is some work that we need to do, as industry
or as recruitment individuals, to create the right environment and give them the right view
on what that role is.
At the same time, and everything is a bit of a two-edged sword, this has brought an appeal
to science and that is very good; it has brought some other providers into the marketplace
to give a generic analytical chemistry background and even if LGC does not recruit those
individuals, they all—according to the Science Council—find jobs somewhere else. I do not
know whether those are all chemistry based or whatever, but I am sure there is data there
that if you do not have already you might be able to ask for.
Obviously over time, as well, our position has changed in forensics. We are now the largest
forensics provider. So our levels of responsibility to the people we recruit, and the way we
interact with universities, needs to change and indeed are changing. When we do approach
the right universities in terms of those that offer the core elements that we want, then we
find that a very easy interface.
Q155 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Am I right to conclude that you are saying this is a
systemic problem in universities, not something that just affects SMEs?
Dr Braybrook: I do not know whether I would say that necessarily. In particular sectors
there can be systemic issues. With recruitment of PhDs, and so on, there clearly is an issue
as to why we are finding it harder to recruit UK-based PhDs and post-docs. They do exist.
We do recruit. We do not have necessarily a problem getting the actual person through the
door at the end of the process, but it is a lot harder to do so, and we have less choice, it
seems. Therefore, we have to cast the net wider. In casting the net wider, we do find that a
lot of European universities have very good grounding in a number of the skills we want—
problem solving, practical skills, a freedom to think and apply their knowledge—and that
seems to have gone somewhat from our PhDs at the moment.
Q156 Lord Broers: I want to ask a question a bit related to this that is triggered by what
Professor Wise just said. We are unique in having the research assessment exercise or
framework—or whatever it is called now—although I think Australia has started something
similar. Does this put the UK in a better position, from your point of view?
Professor Wise: In terms of the critical mass of civil and structural engineering and
architecture, it puts us at a disadvantage.
Lord Broers: A disadvantage?
Professor Wise: Yes. If you look around Europe, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, it is
common for the best engineers also to be professors in the best universities, and there is a
475
direct relationship. We have just done a big tall building in Italy and all of the client’s
independent advisers were not other professionals; they were actually professors in the
universities who had engineering practices as well. I would say if you were looking for
effective engineering design, and particularly engineering design education, to assess the
performance of a university on the basis of its research ability, and in particular its research
science capability, is likely to lead you to a position where, if you are trying to come up with
something new, you are not necessarily that well placed to do it.
Q157 Lord Broers: Shall I go on to the other questions? Is it reasonable to expect

universities to equip STEM graduates with certain employability skills, such as team working,
self-management, understanding of the business context and so on, or should this learning
take place while in employment? You have touched on this but perhaps you would like to all
comment on it again.
Mr White: Certainly from our experience, and from what I pick up from the students who
come in on work placement, they are getting those skills, and I think it is right that the
university has to provide that to a basic level. We expect to provide some of those skills
through management and leadership development programmes but we recruit for attitude
as much as core technical skills. We expect those to be innate within the individual when
we recruit. So I would look to the universities to actually develop the interpersonal skills,
the team work skills and presentation skills during the course.
Q158 Lord Broers: You commented that you are taking students on placements and you
support that and—
Mr White: Yes, very much.
Lord Broers: Dr Braybrook?
Dr Braybrook: I would take a different view, but maybe we are in a slightly different
position in that actually I think we have established training programmes, continued
professional development as part of the organisation, and we see that our role to take what
is given to us and to add to that and convert it into the type of people we as an organisation
want. I think it is fair, though, to say that then there has to be a certain level of basic skills
that universities should be providing as part of their core teaching. If I single out maybe one
or two, then certainly the ones we heard earlier, around oral and written communication,
are probably the most vital. There are differences that we see in individuals before us based
on whether or not they have had that opportunity to practise and to learn their art. Some
are very eloquent and others find it very difficult to get their point across. There are other
things as well that we might look for—numerical skills, perhaps maths. Maths teaching as
part of coursework seems to have also suffered somewhat.
Professor Wise: I do not think it is right to leave all of that training to the employer because
I think it is too late. It is important for it to be recognised that, if you are training to become
an engineer, you need to have some skills of conception, some skills of analysis or testing
and significant skill in judgement, among others. The universities are churning out people
who are very good at analysis and testing. They are actually very good at doing objective
testing as well. They are not very good at subjective tests. So, if you give them an open
problem with a range of solutions, they find it hard to nail an answer and they do not know
how to do it. They have not been trained to do it.
Conception skills are hardly taught at all, and of course if you are trying to design a project,
for anything, you have to start with a blank sheet of paper. At that point, if you have no
conception skills, somebody else is going to give you a suggestion and if all you can do is
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analyse, you are just going to analyse somebody else’s answer, which at best is very
inefficient and at worst is foolish.
In terms of judgement, which comes in part from experience—as was said by some of the
larger players earlier—you can also develop judgement through the study of precedent by
understanding what human beings have been doing on this planet for an awful long time
before we got here, and that is poorly studied as well.
So you need a balance of those things to produce a decent engineer. Just to major on
something that is easy to mark, whether that be a test or a piece of analysis or just
something that can be done in classes of 100 people—because there is an imperative to
have large classes because that is how the university funding system is geared, even though
they are from time-to-time broken down to smaller groups of course—conspires against
developing the personal more subjective skills, which in the end are what an engineer is
going to be judged on. Remembering that we are designing things for everybody else to use,
that it is a very important role in life, and if you do not understand what those people need,
it is very hard for you. I do not think you can test your way to an answer.
Q159 The Chairman: I just want to pick up something from the Wilson report that
came out today, which strongly supported the principle of work placements and, indeed,
sandwich courses. In fact the first panel seemed to be echoing the same comments that that
is where you can gather a lot of these because they are real issues that they are dealing with
rather than theoretical issues. Therefore, do you think it would help if the Government had
some form, for instance, of tax credits to companies to support work placements or if
students got remission from interest on loans? Do you think there needs to be more done
to actually support this whole interface between academe and business and students?
Professor Wise: The financial part of it would be helpful, but I do not think that is the issue.
The issue is whether or not you get real, true partnership between the academic institution
and the practice because, if you are going to take somebody on a sandwich course or on
some mixed arrangement, you need to feel that what they are learning in their academic
training is dovetailing properly with what you are trying to give them by way of work
experience, and so it is a very integrated piece that requires much closer communication
and collaboration than normal. If it is possible to bring that off, that would be wonderful
because it would give you somebody who gradually develops a holistic view of the
engineering world rather than something that is somebody else’s responsibility to define for
you.
Dr Braybrook: I would echo that perfectly. I am not sure whether the money is necessarily
the means. Some means for facilitating or making it easier would be useful, but the value that
you get out of having people in front of you and the value you can give back to them mean
that it is a real test on both sides.
Q160 The Chairman: This is not a silver bullet, then.

Dr Braybrook: No.
Mr White: One thing that I might add is that, with the undergraduates we get coming in on
work placement—and they do a great job and generally we normally recruit them at the
end of their study period—what we find is that the universities do not also come in and
support them during their work experience. They do not come in and check or monitor
their work. So they do not follow through. They do not see what is actually happening
within the industry.
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Q161 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Following up on the point about university links—especially
at PhD level where Dr Braybrook, in particular, expressed concerns—I wonder if you think
we should move towards the American and European-style PhD where there are larger
coursework elements. Do you think there is scope for joint PhD projects with industry,
rather like the old link awards that used to exist, and things like that?
Dr Braybrook: I am not that familiar with the American system but just the words you used
make me say “No” to the taught element. If anything there is too much taught element
within PhDs at the moment, but that is just a personal view. However, I do think on the
second point, yes, there is opportunity. We are moving, as a company and as individual parts
of that company, to react to the different situations that we find ourselves in, and certainly
in the part of the organisation where I am, we use joint projects and secondment
substantially. Four of our current staff are on PhD training funded by the company in
association with universities, not just in the local environment but also further afield. It is
matched to what we want to add to them capability-wise and what they want to get out of
their career. I think that is a crucial element and we need to see more of that wherever
possible.
Q162 Lord Rees of Ludlow: When you said you did not want a taught element, is there
an assumption it would be a Masters-level taught element?
Dr Braybrook: No, beyond Masters. I am a little bit old school, in terms of providing the
basics at school, and I think there is a lot of work that still needs to be done there in terms
of more depth, not breadth. That needs to transpose its way through the system, and at
different levels you are looking for different exit points. So with Masters, clearly the value is
in putting what they are learning into some form of practice by way of a placement if
possible. I would love to see more placement schemes come back.
Professor Wise: I like the engineering doctorate, as I said. It is a more integrated industrial
and academic linkage, and more appropriate for practical-type projects. What is useful for
Masters students—people who, perhaps having done a Masters degree the first time round,
go back and do a specialised Masters—is to be able to build on what people have done
before and not have to start from ground zero. For example, the Architectural Association
does a course on emergent technology, I think it is called, which is about biomimetics and all
that sort of thing. That course, which is really a pioneering course, uses the work of the
previous years as an ongoing PhD, so it builds on and builds on and builds on and builds on,
and that has been a useful cohort of people coming through over the last 10 years or so.
So when you talk about industry-wide, as opposed to the individual, you are looking for a
critical mass of people who are developing a particular way of thinking and you have to do
that by building on the current state of the art.
Q163 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: I think this is our final question. Do you think the
Government should be doing more to match supply and demand? There was a plea earlier
for more mathematics at sixth-form level. Would you go along with that, or do you feel
universities are able to fill up the gaps?
Dr Braybrook: I am not sure you can exactly manpower plan, so I am not sure you will
ever get an exact match of one with the other. As I said, I think the good thing about
fundamental science is it can be used in a number of other disciplines. There are issues
there to untangle, I guess, but nonetheless that is a positive starting point.
There were some other things that we heard earlier that I would endorse-there is more
that could be done around careers advice. We have seen various initiatives by learned
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societies, particularly the RSC a few years ago, that had some impact. Whether that has led
to the current situation of more individuals going into chemistry courses, I do not know.
Hopefully, it is, but we will wait and see. It is too early to tell.
I have touched on the need for depth, not breadth, in schools. I have seen it with my
children as well. There is a tendency sometimes to try to make subjects that appear to
students to be fairly turgid more appealing, by taking some of the really current trends. I am
not against that, but if you do that there is a danger that it is done for the sake of doing it
rather than to match it up with something substantive behind it, so the two have to be
treated very carefully together. You always learn more from enthusiastic individuals. So if
that does mean a way of getting more industry people perhaps, or other trained scientists
back into schools to teach, that would be really good, and I think possibly—no, that is
probably about it actually at the moment. I thought there was one more, but anyway.
The Chairman: Lord Rees, did you just want to come in as a rider there?
Q164 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Yes. On the issue of careers, I wanted to ask what vision
you offer to your recruits. When they go to apply to a big company, like Rolls-Royce, then
the opportunity is to be part of some rather grand, established high-quality outfit. In
contrast, you can offer perhaps the chance to participate in a growing organisation, to get
autonomy more quickly and so on. Would you like to comment on how you can increase
your relative appeal, compared to that of a large, established organisation?
Dr Braybrook: You are right. There is always a feeling—from the previous witnesses—that
money is not so much of an object; they can really take the cream by paying them well. That
becomes more of a problem, certainly, at our level and probably even more of a problem
further down. I guess what I am saying is salary is not the only issue, though, and to a point
you can match expectations with salary and, therefore, come up with very well motivated
individuals. I think LGC is very fortunate, in that it is based around the premise of science
for a safer world, which is slightly glib, but actually what we do. If you analyse it across the
piece work at LGC has some effect upon someone or something, and that is very easy for
people relate to. That combination plus, as you quite rightly said, the fact that in a growing
company there are career opportunities, and we are more and more international, gives
other opportunities for the right candidates obviously. We are therefore fortunate in that
sense and do use it to perhaps offset some of the issues that we are looking at, at the
moment perhaps with our very early-entry graduates—we are not as competitive as we
could be, so we try to sell these wider opportunities as well.
Mr White: Just on that, we offer a different package. We are offering new graduates who
come in and join us the opportunity to go right across the whole business, and we have a
relatively low staff turnover. So, if we are looking at 2% staff turnover, that is very, very low.
It shows that what we (SME’s) are offering and the types of graduates we are attracting fit
the culture that we actually have. The types of graduates that perhaps go to the larger
organisations are looking for rapid career progression as moving through layers of an
organisations, whereas what we (SMEs) are offering is a wider business experience.
Professor Wise: On the question of what the Government could do, there are many things
related to the specifics of the educational programme, but one of the things that would be
really helpful is for the Government to take its responsibility as a patron seriously, because
the commissioning of projects is something that the Government does an awful lot of. We
do not want a discussion about whether it does it well or badly, but there is an opportunity
in all of our interests, as a patron, for the Government to say, “Right, what are the issues
that could really benefit from having small-scale, prototype pieces of work done on them?”
479
and to really attack those firmly. It is more than just incidental commissioning on the basis of
economic pragmatism—you know, get in there and say, “Right, it is really important to
reduce the amount of steel we are using. It is really important to reduce the amount of
energy we are using”. It can be done by a series of techniques, but some of them are a little
bit risky and so far are perhaps unproven or require a change in the approach of a particular
industry. It would be really helpful for the Government to use its position as patron to
commission small-scale prototype projects to give confidence to those who are going to
come afterwards. It is a relatively small investment. It would beget some really good
interesting research, which would actually be practical and useful—as opposed to quite
often trying to slim down the thickness of the steel on a dustbin lid or something that is not
quite so useful.
The Chairman: We have been here before.
Professor Wise: Have we?
Q165 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Are you talking about using public procurement
policy?
Professor Wise: Yes. There are lots and lots of examples. I can give you two examples. One
is the steel beam that has been around for 150 years—120 years in its current form—and it
is at least 30% inefficient because it is the same all the way along. If only you could design
and procure and actually give security of commissions to people who are making the perfect
beam, you would take out 30% of the material in all steel beams everywhere, which is a
huge benefit to energy, to materials utilisation, and all that sort of thing. That is a simple
example. It is not done. Government could put that in as a prototype project and say,
“Right, let us have a go at doing that and see if we can improve the perfect solution”.
Another example is the “Design Bugs Out” piece that the Design Council did, where they
took a bunch of designers and said, “What can you do to reduce cross-infection rates in
hospitals?” The Government did put a little bit of seed money in—I think £1 million or so.
One of the things that came out there were cupboards without backs on, so that the bugs
had nowhere to hide and you could actually clean all the way through, which is a very simple
idea but extremely useful. But as a prototype project, it did not cost any more than a
conventional cupboard. But that thing is really practical, really useful, and the Government
should stand up and take responsibility for doing that, instead of spending money on things
that do not work very well.
The Chairman: On that critique of Government procurement we will end this session. I
thank you all very much indeed for your contribution this morning, and if there is anything
else that you feel that we have not asked, which you would like to add to our inquiry, then
please feel free to write to us. In the mean time, thank you all very much indeed.
Q166 The Chairman: Oh sorry, there was one issue that I have neglected. Do you have
any problem with visas, any of you?
Dr Braybrook: We have had severe problems with visas and still have some issues. They
are getting easier to obtain but they still take a significant amount of time.
The Chairman: If there is an issue, it would be really good to hear from you on that.
Dr Braybrook: We can give you some more details on that, happily.
Mr White: No, we have had no issues at all.
480
Professor Wise: The main one is that really good Australians have to go back to Australia
after four or five years, and we would like to keep them for longer. They seem to be very
commercially aware and practical, so we lose those.
The Chairman: On that note, thank you all very much indeed.
481
LGC Limited – Supplementary written evidence
Question LGC Forensics – DNA analysis NMI chemical measurement R&D General comment
team team
1. Do you recruit fresh Routinely recruit first degree and Chemistry-related Masters graduates, PhDs Yes we recruit new graduates and
graduates or post-graduates? If Masters graduates and post-docs post-graduates, but there are of
not, why not? course also many roles at LGC that
require applicants with several years
of applied professional experience
2a. Have you experienced or are Excess of supply purely in terms of o Low numbers of appropriately-skilled Fashionable sector-specific, multi-
you experiencing difficulties numbers (too many forensics graduates, applicants from UK universities (many disciplinary qualifications not
recruiting STEM graduates or without appropriate practical skills) graduates from multidisciplinary sector- appropriate for LGC requirements
post graduates in terms of specific degrees, lacking in classical/
numbers? fundamental practical chemistry training) Increasingly, job applicants/new
o Tend to get a better choice of candidates recruits tend to lack:
from abroad (more appropriate -sufficient key elements of core
qualification, better practical training, practical training
keen to get work / language experience -ability for self-motivated problem
in UK) solving
-attention to detail/ownership and
ability to admit mistakes
-written and oral communication
skills
2b.Are you able to attract Hard to sift out appropriately skilled We have difficulty scratching together a Difficult to find applicants with
enough candidates in order to applicants from the (mass of) forensics decent number of appropriately qualified appropriate skills, but situation
carry out appropriate selection applicants individuals (recent example -of applicants different throughout the
processes? for two recent jobs,1/2 were foreign organisation
nationals and 3/4 of shortlisted candidates
were from other EU countries)
482
2c. How easy or difficult is it to DNA team have problems with large Our salaries for new graduates tend to be Again situation differs across the
compete with larger employers turnover of staff due to: lower than those available in big organisation, and we are in the
that may be able to offer better -misalignment of recruits’ expectations pharmaceutical firms and the City (for process of addressing some salary
salaries and/or training and (vision of forensic science as depicted example). However we compare favourably issues, particularly at graduate level.
superior working conditions to on TV) on working conditions.
STEM graduates? -salaries, with staff leaving for higher e.g. nice location, advanced technology, There are factors other than
salaries in non-forensic jobs (recent varied and interesting job remuneration that contribute
examples include jobs in City, pharma significantly to job satisfaction:
industry, medical labs, museums) - fast-growing, dynamic and
international organisation, thereby
offering career development
potential
- the positive societal impact of our
‘science for a safer world’
- interesting scientific challenges
- recognition of scientific
competence, with a number of
talented scientists staying for their
full careers
483
team team
3. Do STEM graduates meet Graduates (particularly from multi- Even at PhD level: Lack of practical laboratory skills,
your expectations in terms of disciplinary forensic science degrees) Lack of practical skills and weak maths. weak fundamental understanding of
knowledge, technical skills and lack fundamental laboratory practical Require close supervision and “spoon- scientific principles / techniques,
social competence? What are skills & require a lot of close feeding” (not self-motivated problem poor maths
they lacking, if anything? Has this supervision and training. solvers).
changed over time? New graduates and even post-
This is less of a problem for graduates Often poor communicators, not capable of graduates require closer supervision
with fundamental science degrees e.g. delivering high quality written and oral and management than in past.
chemistry, biochemistry. presentations.
4. Is it reasonable to expect Most management skills are better learnt “on the job” where they can be applied in the every day work environment. LGC
universities to equip STEM has an extensive ‘Academy’ programme for CPD training. We do not need new graduates to have these skills prior to joining
graduates with certain our business, although for those that do, these may act as a differentiator when ‘technical equivalence’ is seen. Experience of
employability skills, such as team working in industry (e.g. during summer vacations of undergraduate degrees) or gap-years / secondments is much more
working, self-management, valuable than most theoretical training courses
understanding of the business
context etc? Or should this One exception, however, is communication skills. It is reasonable to expect graduates, and certainly post-graduates or
learning take place while in above, to be good communicators in written and oral form, and capable of tailoring communications to a variety of
employment? audiences (specialist as well as lay-audiences). We have found these skills lacking in some of our recent graduate recruits.
5. Do you, or could you, take We operate an apprenticeship scheme. Routinely take students on secondments Generally LGC is open to student
students during their course on (Masters level) for 3-6 month periods. We placements and secondments, and
placements of short or long sponsor limited numbers of CASE these can be a valuable source of
duration? studentships, as well as supporting staff future recruits.
members to complete masters courses and
PhDs.
6a. Do you feel that you have Contribute to some university DNA- Student secondments provide input to LGC has very limited influence on
any mechanisms to influence the analysis and genetics training courses. training university syllabuses. We
education of graduates or Sponsor Masters course projects; established ‘best practice in
postgraduates in universities to lecture in other courses. Have built up a close working relationship analytical training’ within specific
better suit your needs with a limited number of universities that university graduate and Masters
484
match our requirements courses to address a perceived gap

in this area of training.
6b. Are some universities better Some courses stand out as providing In our experience there are only a handful We have stronger relationships with
equipped than others to provide better practical training than others. of UK universities that provide good some universities, and these tend to
the sorts of skilled graduates training in chemical measurement R&D be our preferred source of graduate
you look for? Forensic Science Society approved skills at undergraduate level. recruitment
courses (focus on practical training) are
usually suitable. Certain specialist research groups provide
appropriately trained PhD graduates for
LGC scientist roles.
485
team team
7. What role can the The mass of data already collected by various Government offices analysing statistics related to STEM graduates does not
Government play in ensuring a reflect our difficulties in recruiting appropriately trained individuals. We are not aware of any government-facilitated
better match between supply mechanism to feed our demands for graduate skills into the education system, and influence the supply of training.
and demand of STEM graduates
and post graduates? Whilst manpower planning does not seem a realistic proposition, provision of reliable data addressing sector-specific trends
in supply of, and demand for, STEM graduates and post-graduates would be of use to all the different communities with
vested interests in understanding and addressing labour market gaps and dynamics.
The Government could therefore do worse than identify the most appropriate agency and aid their collation and
maintenance, and facilitate availability, of such data.
Supplementary information: LGC has experience of recruiting non-EU nationals into specialist research positions within the NMI chemical measurement
LGC experience of recruitment R&D team. Generally this process is extremely time consuming and can place a significant burden on our management as
of non-EU nationals and the visa well as pressures on the delivery of work caused by delays associated with Visa application. For example, a non-EU candidate
application process was offered a senior role in the team in Dec 2010. He was available to work within one month but the visa application
process meant that he did not start his employment until six months later in June 2011.
Despite recent reforms to the Visa application process, we view the application process as a significant constraint to bringing
high calibre skills into our business. As a result, we will tend to give preference to EU nationals where applicants exist and
technical capability is appropriate for the job applied for.
For more junior roles, non-EU nationals will usually be excluded from consideration.
March 2012
486
Professor Averil Macdonald, University of Reading – Written evidence
Professor Averil Macdonald, University of Reading – Written

evidence
I would like to offer a personal observation on the issue of diversity and wodening
participation in STEM, based upon what I have seen at number of HEIs since the requirement
for an OFFA statement.
All universities are setting up Widening Participation schemes, many of which focus on
under-represented groups in STEM. Sadly at the same time these same HEIs are reducing the
number of student places open to those wishing to study STEM subjects (primarily in order
to increase the capacity of the STEM departments to take in more lucrative overseas
students). In addition many universities are expanding those areas of study that have
traditionally appealed to WP students simply in order to 'get enough in' – such as media
studies.
It seems to me that those HEIs that have set up such activities should also be required to
review their student numbers so that there is a correlation between the activity and the
opportunities for study in that subject. Currently the offer of WP activities is entirely dis-
associated from any intention to recruit students to areas where WP students are
traditionally under-represented.
16 December 2011
487
Professor John MacInnes, University of Edinburgh – Written evidence
1.1
I write as the head of department of Sociology, at the University of Edinburgh, and, as the
Strategic Advisor to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on Quantitative
Methods Training. I sit on the advisory board of the Royal Statistical Society’s getstats
statistical literacy campaign, and the group which oversaw the Advisory Committee on
Mathematics Education enquiry into Mathematics in the Workplace and Higher Education.
ESRC has submitted evidence to the enquiry as part of RCUK, so that this submission is
made in a personal capacity, but reflects my experiences as Strategic Advisor.
2.1
Both might best be defined by a skill set comprising the application of mathematics,
statistics, probability and logic to analyze and solve problems. ‘Application’ is
fundamental since mastery of these core skills is of little use if one cannot recognize
how they might be employed in different contexts, either in research, or in industry
and commerce. Thus STEM subjects and jobs are about more than just these skills,
and, conversely, the development and application of STEM skills is found in a wider
range of subjects in HE than those traditionally regarded as STEM disciplines.
2.2
Given this definition, it makes sense to include those parts of the life and social
sciences which use and apply quantitative methods in the definition of a STEM
subject. The revolution in information technology of the last forty years has
transformed the collection, dissemination and analysis of data in the social sciences.
The range and quality of sample surveys has expanded. Administrative data is now
routinely captured, as well as transactional data from economic activity or use of
social media. The computing revolution has facilitated data fusion of various kinds
(e.g. with geospatial data), led to new techniques of statistical analysis which were
previously out of reach because of the volume of calculation required, and facilitated
both the visualization of data and new forms of public understanding of it.
2.3
Unfortunately, with the exception of economics, UK HE social science has failed to
take full advantage of this revolution. Too many students enter HE with poor maths
skills, little confidence in their maths abilities or vision of their relevance. The
quantity and quality of training in quantitative methods at undergraduate and
postgraduate level is generally below the standard set by many other countries and
compounds this weakness. The result is a shortage of candidates with good
quantitative skills to go forward to doctoral training, and an inadequate supply of
graduates to employment with the kind of quantitative skills that are in demand.
16-18 supply
Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they have the right
488
3.1
Too many students stop studying mathematics on completion of GCSE. Across the
UK, only around 1 in 5 students of life or social sciences enter university with A-
Level or Higher Grade mathematics qualifications. A survey of Sociology students
across the UK by Williams et al (2009) found that two fifths said they’d had a ‘bad
experience of maths at school’ and a similar proportion thought they were not good
at mathematics. Most arrive at university not having practiced mathematics for up to
three or four years. Because of this, many have difficulty managing arithmetic
operations like using fractions and decimals, or understanding basic algebraic
formulae (e.g. a simple linear equation). Few are comfortable with exponents or
logarithms. Their lack of fluency in these procedures makes it much more difficult to
teach statistics, probability and logic, as the students become distracted by how to
wield these tools, rather than concentrate on what is being done with them.
3.2
These difficulties are not confined to those who have only GCSE mathematics. Many
A-Level students appear to have been ‘taught to the test’ and struggle to apply the
mathematics knowledge they do have in unfamiliar contexts. Further evidence of the
mathematics competencies of social science students comes from research done by
Mulhearn and White (2005)
http://pnarchive.org/docs/pdf/p2007509_Assessing_numeracy.pdf
examining a national sample of Psychology students. Mean score on a range of test
items relevant to understanding statistics was only 43%, lower than for comparable
tests undertaken a decade earlier. While those with A levels did better than those
with poor GCSE grades, there was little difference between A level students and
those with a grade A GCSE pass.
3.3
The recent Nuffield Foundation report Is the UK an outlier? An international comparison
of upper secondary mathematics education (http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/uk-
outlier-upper-secondary-maths-education) showed that the UK has an unusually low
proportion of students studying maths post 16. Students who do no mathematics
after GCSE lose the skills they have learnt through lack of practice.
What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM subjects in higher
education?
4.1
Insofar as it encourages more school students to continue the study of mathematics,
it will have a beneficial effect. Insofar as it discourages school students from thinking
in terms of binary opposition between ‘number people’ and ‘language people’ it will
also be beneficial. The Scottish ‘Higher’ qualification, which imposes a less dramatic
specialization of subject choice, does appear to lead to more students continuing
mathematics study. However, the Higher curriculum, like it’s A-level counterpart,
pays too much attention to Euclid, and to the needs of mathematics as a discipline,
and insufficient attention to the application of mathematics as a tool used in studying
other subjects. As contributors to a recent STEM Advisory Forum discussion on
University Entrance Requirements noted, the kind of mathematics skills students
489
need to study mathematics at university are distinct from those needed in other
subjects.
Graduate supply
Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it research, industry or more
broadly within the economy?
5.1
A comment I hear from employers is that they can recruit graduates who have good
technical skills but who then struggle to communicate their work to non-specialists.
ON the contrary, recruits who can communicate well lack a sufficient level of
technical quantitative expertise. One illustration of this demand is the premium that
doing a quantitative social science degree commands in the graduate labour market.
The 2007/8 Destination of Leavers from Higher Education survey found the mean
salary for economics graduates to between 15% and 20% higher than for other social
science graduates. (http://www.hepi.ac.uk/466-1409/Male-and-female-participation-
andprogression-in-Higher-Education.html).
5.2
Employers’ demand for good quantitative methods skills is also confirmed by the
recent report from the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME) on
Mathematics in the workplace and Higher Education.
(http://www.acmeuk.org/media/7624/acme_theme_a_final%20.pdf).
5.3
This suggests that HE social sciences have an unrealized potential to deliver students
who have both good communications skills together with the quantitative methods
skills that employers demand. However, fulfilling this potential will require more
attention to, and greater curriculum space for quantitative methods in degree
curricula, and reversing the relative neglect that quantitative methods suffered in UK
social science in the 1980s and 1990s. ESRC has adopted a national strategy for
quantitative methods, and developed a quantitative methods initiative to improve
training across the whole education a life course from schools to post doctoral
research:
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/Quantitative_Methods_a_National_Strategy_tcm8-
2721.pdf
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/tools-and-resources/research-
resources/initiatives/qmi.aspx
5.4
The key constraints on improvement at undergraduate level are curriculum space
and time, the cost of small group teaching, and staff expertise. A report I presented
to the ESRC
(http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/Undergraduate_quantitative_research_methods_tcm
8-2722.pdf) estimated that the proportion of university academic staff in social
science subjects (excluding Economics and Psychology) with sufficient expertise in
quantitative methods to teach basic skills is low and that interest in quantitative
methods has become marginalised in many departments, with a worrying gulf
between a small minority of staff usually highly proficient in these techniques, and
490
others. At undergraduate level, quantitative methods tends to be taught in specialist

methods options that accounted for a small proportion of final degree credits, and is
rarely integrated into the substantive components of degree subjects, which
encourages students to see quantitative methods as marginal to their programme of
study. Such teaching was also seen as demanding, in part because of the greater
amount of time taken in preparation and assessment, but also because of the low
level of basic mathematics ability of the majority of students.
5.5
The ESRC has been working hard with other stakeholders, including the Funding
Councils, Royal Statistical Society, British Academy and learned societies to improve
quantitative methods training at undergraduate and postgraduate level. My Report as
strategic advisor made a number of recommendations which ESRC and others have
taken up, including:
• With resources from the Funding Councils and British Academy, 20 projects
in Curriculum Innovation and Researcher Development have been
commissioned (total £1.7m) to promote improved undergraduate teaching
and train faculty in quantitative methods teaching.
• The Nuffield Foundation is to invest in six to eight centres of excellence for
undergraduate quantitative methods teaching.
• A web portal established on the ESRC site providing links to quantitative
methods teaching resources.
• Three national workshops have been held for quantitative methods teaching
staff in the social sciences and a mailing/discussion established to build this
community.
• The establishment of Doctoral Training Centres took account of their
capacity to deliver a high standard of quantitative methods and advanced
quantitative methods provision, and work.
• I’m working with the relevant learned societies and professional associations
(BSA, PSA, SPA, SRA, RGS, SWiE) to raise awareness of the need to develop
quantitative methods skills, to build support for the revision of the existing
QAA benchmarks for quantitative methods and to find other ways, such as a
graduate level social statistics qualification, to stimulate curriculum innovation
in quantitative methods teaching across the social sciences .
What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality of degrees and
the supply of STEM courses in higher education institutions?
6.1
The focus on the NSS, and thus on student evaluation of their ‘experience’, can
encourage universities to focus on the latter at the expense of learning outcomes. It
is challenging to design quantitative methods teaching that can overcome some
students’ convictions that they are not capable of doing ‘quants’, that delivers key
skills to these students while maintaining the interest and motivation of their more
able peers, that convinces all students of their relevance and that are also popular
with them. The very best teachers, adequately resourced, can do this, but many
cannot.
491
6.2
Students may not always be the best judges of their own educational or employment
interests. We know that social science students with a good command of quantitative
methods are in high demand in the labour market. However, despite our best efforts,
students often recognize this situation too late.
What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop new and cross-disciplinary
STEM degrees?
7.1
The REF encourages departments to prioritise research over teaching, and rewards
research that sits firmly within the remit of a single Unit of Assessment. Given the
relative marginalization of quantitative methods in some social sciences, it is not clear
to me that all panels have the capacity to assess quantitative work adequately.
What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM graduates in terms
of gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic background?
8.1
More attention to STEM skills in the social sciences is an excellent way of delivering
STEM skills to women, given that in 2009/10, 65% of the 48,000 social science
graduates were women, as were 58% of the 19,000 students completing a
postgraduate social science degree
(http://www.hesa.ac.uk/dox/pressOffice/sfr153/SFR153_table_7.pdf).
Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the balance right between the
9.1
A point which should be borne in mind here is the distinction between degree
programmes and the taught courses that students take to fulfill the requirements of
these programmes. Most doctoral study follows a 1+3 or 2+2 format of Masters level
research methods training courses followed by preparation of the doctorate itself.
The income streams that sustain many of these courses often depend upon fee
income from OVS Masters students. Were HE funding changes to lead to a significant
decline in Masters numbers, this would have an impact on the quality and range of
research training courses available to doctoral students as well. There may thus be a
case for state funding of relevant M level degrees. Given the demand for quantitative
methods skills there is also scope for Masters conversion courses to deliver these
skills to social science degree holders.
What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM subjects in other
10.1
The United States, Belgium and the Netherlands are all examples of countries where
492
students appear to enter HE social science subjects with a better command of

mathematics or statistics skills and where they are encouraged to develop these
further in HE, developing skills that UK students will usually only encounter in
postgraduate level study: For example in the US, the College Board’s Advance
Placement Statistics exam is taken by over 100,000 students annually, even though
the qualification was only introduced in 1997.
10.2
One might contrast the UK expereince with, for example the curriculum project in
New Zealand http://www.censusatschool.org.nz/; which uses visual methods made
possible by information technology to teach principles of statistical inference to pupils
at age 11.
16 December 2011
493
Medical Schools Council – Written evidence
The Medical Schools Council represents the interests and ambitions of UK medical schools
as they relate to the generation of national health, wealth and knowledge through biomedical
research and the profession of medicine. The membership of the Medical Schools Council is
made up of the Heads or Deans of the 31 UK undergraduate medical schools, plus the
postgraduate London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
We welcome the opportunity to submit evidence to the House of Lords Science and
Technology Sub-Committee inquiry into higher education in STEM subjects. The Medical
Schools Council response focuses on undergraduate medical education and research. We
understand that other organisations, such as the Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) will
address aspects of postgraduate biomedical training and that Universities UK will address
wider STEM issues for higher education institutions. We have liaised with both organisations
in preparing our response.
Our key concerns are that:

• The definition of STEM should be expanded to include an extra ‘M’ for medicine
• There is a risk that HE reforms will damage efforts to widen participation in STEM
subjects and dissuade STEM graduates from going on to study medicine
• Research must inform teaching of STEM subjects
• Interdisciplinary focus needs to be a core part of STEM teaching and research to help
develop the teams needed to deliver complex modern healthcare
General questions

We believe that STEM as it is currently defined refers to Science, Technology, Engineering
and Mathematics. We would argue that an extra ‘M’ should be added to include medicine,
which is clearly a distinct discipline that is strategically important and vulnerable.
Our view of a STEM job is that it is one for which a qualification in a STEM subject to at least
A-Level standard is required.
influence supply?
No comment.
16-18 supply
It is our understanding that the evidence suggests that schools and colleges are not supplying
sufficient numbers of STEM students. However, demand for medicine remains high with
sufficient numbers of STEM students applying to and entering medical schools. We anticipate
little change, and certainly no decrease in numbers of applicants for medicine.
494
Members have expressed concerns about the basic numeracy skills of some entrants. We
would note that there is a significant jump from GCSE to A Level STEM subjects, which is a
challenge for some students.
There has been no discernable effect for medicine.
We believe there will be no discernable effect for medicine; members of Medical Schools
Council (MSC) accept applications at the appropriate level.
Graduate supply
Yes, for medicine. Closer links with industry are required to ensure that expectations of
both students and industry are met.

Though the quality of STEM graduates is usually sufficiently high, some members of MSC
have concerns regarding relatively basic numeracy skills in some of the STEM graduate
entrants to medical schools.
Medicine is unusual in that there is a direct route into the next natural career step, with the
outcomes, as defined in the GMC’s Tomorrow’s Doctors (2009), of the curriculum being
designed to prepare medical students to practise.
For other subjects, not all graduates will end up in a career that reflects their first degree.
Whilst clearly this will often be down to personal choice, the evidence also indicates that
this is often occurring because employers do not feel that students have sufficient
‘understanding of work’. For example, CBI (2011) state that 43% of employers have difficulty
recruiting STEM staff, reporting a lack of applications and a shortage of STEM graduates as
significant factors. Employers in the report suggested that applicants lack employability skills
(36%) and workplace experience (37%) 245 . Additionally, analysis by BIS (2011) suggested that
many STEM graduates are attracted to other areas, often due to a lack of knowledge of what
STEM work and careers entail and also due to perception of other areas being of more
interest 246 . This would suggest that shortages in STEM graduates, employability and
perceptions of STEM careers are issues that need to be addressed.
245 CBI (2011) Building for growth: business priorities for education and skills, p.7
246 BIS (2011) STEM Graduates in non STEM jobs, p. 9 http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/s/11-
771-stem-graduates-in-non-stem-jobs.pdf
495
institutions?
The increase in student fees in England is designed to replace the reductions in HEFCE-T
grant. Therefore, provided the ‘cross-subsidy’ between subjects that has previously existed is
retained (i.e. expensive subjects receive a greater proportion of fees than less expensive
subjects) there should be no impact on the quality of teaching. However, if this cross-subsidy
is not maintained there is a risk to the quality of teaching in STEM subjects.
Within medicine in particular, unless there is some continuing (and, preferably, increasing)
subsidy to student fees (e.g. through the NHS Bursary scheme), there is a major risk that the
increased fees will result in a worsening of access to medicine by traditionally under-
represented groups. We would note that the position for the NHS Bursary scheme post
2012/13 has not been confirmed. Establishing the support packages that will be available as
soon as possible is important for maintaining supply.
Members of MSC value their graduate entrants, who participate in both specific graduate
entry medical degrees and also in standard entry medical degrees. The prospect of entering a
medical programme after completing a first STEM degree should not be discouraged through
fears of debt.
In other STEM subjects - for some students the increased potential debt may encourage
them to apply for subjects for which there is employer-demand – so may improve
recruitment. However for some students this will be seen as too distant so may not have an
impact. It is therefore difficult to predict the impact on student demand for these subjects. It
is important that employers clearly state expectations of STEM graduates to ensure students
are informed about their courses will prepare them for. The impact of higher education
reforms must be monitored closely.
We see the development of interdisciplinary teams in healthcare as crucial, and developing
new cross-disciplinary STEM degrees is therefore important. Research assessment has the
potential to be positive – particularly with the focus on innovation and impact.
The relationship between teaching and research is critical and symbiotic. Teaching must be
research based to avoid the risk of teaching becoming ‘out of date’ (particularly important
for STEM subjects with fast moving knowledge bases) and to ensure that students develop
skills and attitudes associated with research, namely asking appropriate questions, developing
hypotheses, designing ways to test hypotheses, critical analysis, synthesising information from
a range of sources and communicating information effectively. The long-term effects of
disaggregating teaching and research are very uncertain and could undermine the supply of
researchers. As outlined in the AMS report, Redressing the balance 247 , ensuring a balance of
incentives for both teaching and research is essential.
247AMS (2011) Redressing the balance: the status and valuation of teaching in academic careers
496
All STEM courses should have a significant research-based component.
Models for delivery could include increased partnership between higher education
institutions to allow them to draw on different strengths. An additional model to learn from
could be Academic Health Science Systems. These NHS-university partnerships provide
research opportunities and the potential for NHS research and practice to increasingly
inform teaching in medical schools. This model could be investigated for other disciplines
and sectors.

Yes, for medicine.
UK medical schools are committed to increasing the diversity of their student population. In
their admissions processes medical schools seek to select the students who will make the
best doctors, and many schools provide extra support in the application process for
applicants from low participation groups. In addition, a number employ adjusted entry
criteria so that those from less advantaged backgrounds who perform better than their
peers have the opportunity to study medicine with lower grades than those usually required.
About a third of UK medical schools run a ‘Foundation’ or ‘Pre-Clinical’ year for those
wishing to study medicine but who might not be eligible for the standard five year
programmes. These programmes may be run as a stand-alone course or as part of an
extended medical degree programme (more information can be found here:
http://www.medschools.ac.uk/Students/Courses/Pages/FoundationPre-clinicalyear.aspx).
Additionally, work with schools and using medical students from under-represented
backgrounds as ambassadors are important parts of outreach work. Some of the wide range
of activities being conducted by medical schools to widen participation in medicine can be
found here, in a guide produced jointly with the BMA:
http://www.medschools.ac.uk/Publications/Pages/Widening-Access-Guide.aspx
We see the priorities for increasing the diversity of STEM graduates as:
- Helping parents and students from under-represented groups understand that STEM
subjects are a realistic option
- Ensuring students are not discouraged from taking STEM subjects at early stages
- Increasing teaching in STEM subjects in school education
- Targeting specific fees support to STEM subjects.
We believe that there is variation in this between higher education institutions.

497
It is our view that current numbers are insufficient to allow the UK to remain globally
competitive. If numbers were to increase supervisors and HEIs would need to recognise that
a significant proportion of their graduates would not continue with an academic career and
would need to be supported to develop work related skills. We are concerned that changes
to the immigration system may act as a disincentive for attracting world class researchers.
We believe that they have improved the quality of PhD students and increased the number
in the subject areas targeted. The impact on overall numbers of PhD students is unclear.
In STEM subjects, Masters degrees provide training in research methods and this is especially
the case in Public Health. Some medical schools are converting their intercalated BSc or
BMedSci degree to a MSc or MRes. Protecting intercalated degrees in medicine by funding is
vital to preserve the supply of future clinical academics.
We believe that the level of debt will discourage significant numbers of students from
pursuing a research career. For medicine this would be hugely detrimental to our nation’s
health and wealth. Close links between industry and the NHS will be crucial for exposing
students to research and potential career paths.
Industry

them?
Movement between industry, academia, health services and charities should be improved.
Ensuring parity with NHS pay scales is an important mechanism for achieving this.
graduates?
No comment.
of best practice?
No comment.
16 December 2011
498
Microsoft Ltd, Siemens, Rolls-Royce and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) – Oral evidence (QQ 120-
145)
Microsoft Ltd, Siemens, Rolls-Royce and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) –

499
million+ – Written evidence
About million+
1. million+ is a university think-tank which provides evidence and analysis on policy and
funding regimes that impact on universities, students and the services that universities and
other higher education institutions provide for business, the NHS, education and the not-
for-profit sectors.
2. Modern universities play a vital role in the provision of STEM and high quality STEM
graduates and million+ welcome the opportunity to respond to this House of Lords Science
and Technology Committee inquiry into Higher Education in STEM Subjects.
STEM Subjects at School

3. STEM A-Levels have risen in popularity. Entries for Chemistry, Mathematics, Biology,
Physics, and Further Maths all rose between 2010 and 2011 although Computing fell slightly
in popularity
4. However the increase in applications has not been uniform. Men remain much more likely
to study STEM subjects than women, with men comprising more than 50% of entrants and
obtaining more than 50% of all A-grades in all STEM A-Level subjects except Biology.
5. In addition young people at private schools are more likely to study STEM A-Levels than
their counterparts at state schools. Independent schools accounted for 13.4% of all A-Level
entries in 20010-11 but 17.9% of Chemistry, 18.1% of Mathematics, 29.0% of Further
Mathematics and 19.1% of Physics entries in the same year.
6. There is still a lack of role models representative of the diversity of the wider population
to help attract young women but also younger students from a range of background to study
STEM and some snobbery attached to the value of STEM related subjects that students
progress to university to study. For example, the study of forensic science at university has
proved to be a popular subject choice and has attracted large numbers of students in recent
years to courses which have very clear science components such as pure chemistry. As a
result subjects like forensic science have added enormously to the supply of STEM graduates
in the workforce but their valued has been questioned - in part because not all forensic
science graduates go on to be employed as forensic scientists. This approach is misguided.
There are different ways to make STEM more attractive and the UK is potentially missing
opportunities to capitalise on interest in STEM-related subjects and to deployment of these
graduates in the workforce.
STEM University Applications

7. STEM applications have increased substantially over the past 5 years. Applications for
STEM subjects increased from 170,952 in 2005 to 258,335 in 2010, an increase of 51.1%
compared to 25.0% for non-STEM subjects. This has been driven largely by an increase in
applications for JACS Subject Group B: Subjects Allied to Medicine although all STEM subject
groups have seen an increase in applications in this period
8. Whilst UCAS figures at 21 November 2011 indicated that STEM applications for 2012-13
had fallen compared to applications received at the same point in the 2011-12 admissions
500
cycle, the fall was of a lesser magnitude than for non-STEM subjects. UCAS applications for
STEM subjects to 21st November 2011 fell by 8.5% compared to 16.5% for non-STEM
subjects. However this may reflect the 15th October deadline for medicine, dentistry and
veterinary science or reflect a broader, long-term shift towards applied subjects.
9. The number of STEM places at universities has also increased over the past 5 years but by
less than the rate of increase in applications. STEM has become more competitive since
2005: there were 170,952 applications and 151,367 acceptances (an 88.5% success rate) in
2005 compared to 258,335 applications and 195,494 acceptances (a 75.7% success rate) in
2010. Acceptance rates vary substantially across subject groups, with Medicine and Dentistry
and Subjects Allied to Medicine the most competitive courses.
10. However it should be noted that in spite of the increase in STEM applications recorded
not all of these subjects are classified as Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects
(SIVs) or HEFCE teaching bands A and B. These means that for STEM-related subjects (such
as forensic and computer science) universities will get no HEFCE teaching funding in the
future. These subjects are primarily taught in modern universities and this policy will have
the effect of driving down the unit of resource in universities which are making a major
contribution to STEM supply and which attract students from the most diverse backgrounds.
The Role of Universities in STEM

11. Universities play a key role in providing information, advice and guidance to prospective
STEM students. This work starts at primary school level and continues on to secondary
school where universities actively encourage the uptake of STEM GCSEs and A Levels
(especially single science and maths), work to change perceptions of STEM subjects as ‘hard’
and ‘unpopular’ and work to increase STEM applications from students from working class
background and low participation neighbourhoods
12. Universities promote and support a number of initiatives including the STEMNET
website, the network of 10 Science Learning Centres across that support high quality
Continuing Professional Development for science teachers and initiatives of the National
Stem Centre Initiatives.
13. Universities have also engaged extensively with the The National HE STEM Programme
which is designed to help universities explore new approaches to recruiting students to
STEM courses, improving STEM curricula and teaching and supporting existing STEM
students. Projects have included:
‐ Adopt a STEM Club (Universities of Derby, East Anglia, Staffordshire and
Wolverhampton) to aid widening participation
‐ Generating Genius charity collaboration with Queen Mary, University of London to
encourage Afro-Caribbean students to study STEM
‐ Choices Together Programme (Universities of Sunderland, Northumbria and Teesside) to
encourage STEM applications young people in care
‐ Spectroscopy in a Suitcase Project (SIAS) developed through Royal Society of Chemistry’s
Chemistry for our Future Project (now copied by Mathematics)
‐ Creation of Mathematics Support Centres at the universities of Kent, Lincoln and York,
London Metropolitan and UCLAN, and plans for six more
501
14. Universities prepare graduates for successful careers through active engagement and
collaboration with employers via schemes such as Birmingham City BEST, Greenwich
Graduate, LJMU World of Work and the York Award
15. Universities undertake STEM projects with local industries, for instance the National HE
STEM Programme with Institute of Physics and Physics Departments at Bath, Birmingham,
Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Hertfordshire, Liverpool, Leicester and UCL.
Challenges
16. Opportunity for all: the majority of STEM students are male, white and/or from private
schools, whilst women, BME students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds remain
under-represented
17. STEM ambassadors: young people need STEM role models but it is not clear that there
are sufficient high profile people or jobs encouraging people into the STEM subjects and
careers. Moreover it is also clear that not all STEM graduates enter STEM employment.
Employers clearly have a role to play in ensuring that STEM employment opportunities are
attractive to STEM graduates.
18. HE White Paper: the HE White Paper and the late intervention in the student numbers
market by BIS in June 2011 have a number of implications for STEM provision, even though
SIVs have now been excluded from the calculation of the margin for 2012-13. Prospective
STEM students are less likely to achieve AAB+ than their non-STEM counterparts; the higher
costs associated with STEM and STEM-related provision will make it hard to support STEM
subjects below the £7,500 threshold for access to margin places; and the core and margin
policy is likely to transfer students to FE Colleges without strong STEM programmes.
19. The emphasis on A-level entry grades completely undervalues the work being
undertaken by universities in respect of STEM students who enter university with lower A-
level grades but who leave university with good degrees. Universities are adding value in a
way which the AAB+ policy fails to recognise. This policy incentivises only those universities
and courses which recruit via high A-level entry grades while disadvantaging other
universities in particular future STEM provision.
20. The Government clearly wishes to liberalise numbers in the future but we would
reiterate the view, shared by UUK, that the impact of the measures which the Government
has introduced in 2012 should be assessed over two admissions cycles. The reasons for this
approach centre on the importance of fully understanding the impact on student and
institutional behaviour of the 2012 changes prior to the Government making decisions about
further deregulation with potentially perverse consequences in terms of the availability of
student and subject choice on a regional and national basis.
21. For example, there would be no merit in finding two years down the line that the
Government’s measures had led to course / subject closures in areas of key significance to
the growth agenda including STEM or that places had been lost from regions with low HE
participation rates to London and the South-East or to universities with more exclusive
student profiles at the expense of participation by students from more disadvantaged groups.
22. Universities will not have final numbers for the 2012-13 year confirmed until the end of
January / beginning of February 2012 but are expected to make offers after 15 January. (In
502
terms of managing admissions this is unprecedented and the result of the Government’s late
intervention in the numbers market via the June HE White Paper). However, the actual
impact on 2012 enrolments of the new fees system and the intervention in student numbers
will not be known until October / November 2012. It is also highly unlikely that Year 1 of
the new fees system will prove to be an accurate guide to 2013.
23. In these circumstances it would appear to be eminently sensible for the Government to
undertake an impact assessment in the autumn of 2013 on the impact on the market of
these changes prior to determining how the student numbers should be further deregulated.
This assessment should include impact on overall demand, subject (including STEM) and
institutional choice, mode of study, cross-border and EU recruitment and the availability of
places on a regional as well as a national basis. An equality impact assessment should also be
undertaken.
24. Postgraduate: The reduction in HEFCE teaching funding for new entrants to university
from 2012 also included the removal of postgraduate taught funding. The result is that
universities will have no option but to increase postgraduate fees with effect from 2012.
Million+ previously highlighted the challenges of maintaining postgraduate provision and the
need for Britain to adopt a more comprehensive strategy in a report published in January
2010 (please check date and add report name). This report highlighted the complex funding
streams available for postgraduate provision, the diverse patterns of postgraduate study but
also the fact that although UK-home postgraduate students had recourse to personal career
development loans, there was no comprehensive strategy or framework in place to support
postgraduate study. However this report did not anticipate the withdrawal of postgraduate
taught funding.
25. The lack of any strategy is particularly important for STEM. Postgraduate study in STEM
attracts many international students. There are already challenges to the UK retaining its
place in the global HE market as a result of changes in the student visa regulations. However,
this position will be further undermined if postgraduate STEM provision becomes even more
reliant on international students. One of the reasons why the UK has been an attractive
destination for these students is because it has provided the opportunity to study alongside
UK-home students. There are suggestions that BIS is seeking to develop a postgraduate loan
scheme with private banks. The risk is that the latter cherry-pick the postgraduate students,
courses and universities which they regard as ‘winners’. If postgraduate STEM provision is to
be protected and incentivised in the future, it is crucial that any loan scheme is
comprehensive and is available to all postgraduate students, whatever and where they study
and whether they study full or part-time and at a low interest rate.
Recommendations
26. Universities should be seen as partners in development of STEM knowledge, skills and
graduates.
27. Financial support for STEM provision should be continued: HEFCE should make
additional widening participation funds available for STEM subjects; ring-fence capital funding
for STEM subjects; ring-fence funding for Band A and B subjects; continue to remove STEM
subjects from Student Number Control (SNC) calculations beyond 2012-13 and review the
subjects categorised as SIVs.
503
28. The impact of the White Paper must be closely monitored and the Government should
defer any further deregulation of the student numbers market until the 2014-15 academic
year in order to enable the impact on STEM of the student number controls introduced in
2012 to be monitored over two admission cycles.
29. Coordinated work to enhance wider perceptions of STEM should be continued.
30. The Government should table a coherent strategy and funding scheme to incentivise
postgraduate provision and opportunities for postgraduate study by UK students which
should include STEM.
19 December 2011
Annex 1
STEM at A-Level
Men Women
% %
% Total Total % Total Total
A-Level Subject
Entrants A Entrants A
Grades Grades
Biology 43.4 40.6 56.6 59.4
Chemistry 52.7 53.0 47.3 47.0
Computing 92.5 90.6 7.5 9.4
Mathematics 60.0 59.8 40.0 40.2
Mathematics
68.8 68.8 31.2 31.2
(Further)
Other sciences 77.2 76.2 22.8 23.8
Physics 79.2 76.0 20.8 24.0
Source: Joint Council for Qualifications 2010-11
FE /
Compreh Academ Sec Maintained Independ
Subject Sixth
ensive y Modern select ent
Form
Chemistry 33.9 10.1 0.9 24.9 12.3 17.9
Computing 28.1 8.9 0.3 50.5 6.8 5.4
Mathematics 34.2 9.6 1.0 26.2 10.9 18.1
Mathematics
(Further) 27.6 8.7 0.3 23.9 10.4 29.0
Physics 36.2 10.6 0.7 21.3 12.2 19.1
Biology 36.2 10.2 1.3 24.9 12.6 14.8
ALL SUBJECTS 36.6 9.6 1.5 29.8 9.1 13.4
Source: Joint Council for Qualifications 2010-11
Annex 2
Applications for STEM Subjects
UCAS Applications 2005 – 2010
504
%
JACS Subject Group 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Change
Change
A Medicine & Dentistry 22,039 21,590 21,393 21,152 21,682 24,354 2,315 10.5
B Subjects allied to
41,441 42,195 41,696 60,213 71,189 91,569 50,128 121.0
medicine
C Biological Sciences 35,614 34,282 36,128 38,109 40,805 46,473 10,859 30.5
D Veterinary Sciences,
4,703 4,523 5,111 5,598 6,405 7,550 2,847 60.5
Agr & Related
F Physical Sciences 14,384 14,499 15,567 16,414 17,458 19,361 4,977 34.6
G Mathematical &
26,250 24,722 25,102 26,500 29,362 32,234 5,984 22.8
Comp Sci
H Engineering 22,858 21,138 22,599 24,736 28,269 30,581 7,723 33.8
J Technologies 1,512 1,630 1,837 2,074 2,373 2,475 963 63.7
Combined sciences 2,151 2,262 2,874 2,951 3,513 3,738 1,587 73.8
STEM 170,952 166,841 172,307 197,747 221,056 258,335 87,383 51.1
Non-STEM 351,203 339,463 362,188 390,942 418,804 439,016 87,813 25.0
TOTAL 522,155 506,304 534,495 588,689 639,860 697,351 175,196 33.6
Source: UCAS Application by HE Subject 2005 – 2010
UCAS Applications to 21st November 2011

JACS3 Subject Group 2011 2012 Diff (+/-) Diff (%)
Group A Medicine & Dentistry 96,438 93,581 -2,857 -3.0%
Group B Subjects allied to
101,945 90,140 -11,805 -11.6%
Medicine
Group C Biological Sciences 65,788 57,616 -8,172 -12.4%
Group D Vet Sci, Agr &
12,754 12,832 78 0.6%
related
Group F Physical Sciences 40,827 37,981 -2,846 -7.0%
Group G Mathematical &
22,286 20,566 -1,720 -7.7%
Comp Sci
Group H Engineering 38,215 35,131 -3,084 -8.1%
Group I Computer Sciences 14,476 12,038 -2,438 -16.8%
Group J Technologies 1,940 1,409 -531 -27.4%
Y Combined Sciences 11,072 9,776 -1,296 -11.7%
STEM 405,741 371,070 -34,671 -8.5%
Non-STEM 409,586 342,008 -67,578 -16.5%
Total 815,327 713,078 -102,249 -12.5%
Source: UCAS Application to 21st November 2011
Applications v Acceptances 2005 – 2010

Subject group (JACS) 2005 2005 2005 2010 2010 2010
A Medicine & Dentistry 22,039 9,008 40.9 24,354 9,246 38.0
B Subjects allied to Medicine 41,441 26,711 64.5 91,569 49,963 54.6
C Biological Sciences 35,614 32,967 92.6 46,473 38,892 83.7
D Veterinary Sciences, Agr &
4,703 4,541 96.6 7,550 5,869 77.7
Related
F Physical Sciences 14,384 15,074 104.8 19,361 18,041 93.2
G Mathematical & Comp Sci 26,250 25,624 97.6 32,234 28,948 89.8
H Engineering 22,858 22,059 96.5 30,581 26,070 85.2
J Technologies 1,512 2,466 163.1 2,475 3,244 131.1
Combined Sciences 2,151 6,269 291.4 3,738 8,097 216.6
STEM 170,952 151,367 88.5 258,335 195,494 75.7
505
Non-STEM 351,203 256,007 72.9 439,016 293,845 66.9

TOTAL 522,155 405,369 77.6 697,351 487,329 69.9
Source: UCAS Applications and Acceptances
506
MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Oxford Instruments, Sandwell and West Birmingham
Hospitals NHS Trust, EDF Energy Nuclear Generation and Expedition Engineering – Oral
MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Oxford Instruments, Sandwell and

West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, EDF Energy Nuclear
Generation and Expedition Engineering – Oral evidence (QQ 348-
365)
507
MyScience – Written evidence
Established in 2004 by the White Rose University Consortium of the Universities of Leeds,
Sheffield and York, together with Sheffield Hallam University, Myscience manages the
network of Science Learning Centres (the National Centre plus nine Regional Centres) on
behalf of the Wellcome Trust and the Department for Education, the National STEM Centre
on behalf of the Gatsby Foundation, the LSIS STEM programme and a number of other STEM
programmes, including some international activity. Myscience exists to improve young
people’s engagement with and achievement in science, technology, engineering and
mathematics (STEM), by developing and supporting teachers, technicians and others working
in STEM education.
1. Key points
This evidence focuses on several factors that can influence STEM subject progression pre-19,
predominantly at school level, summarised in the following key points:
• Quality of teaching is the single most important factor within a school or college in
determining a young person’s progress.
• Young people may not recognise the importance of STEM subject study as
preparation for a broad vista of career opportunities, or the value that employers
place on STEM study more generally. Regular careers-related learning opportunities
should be provided for young people to enable them to make informed choices
regarding their progression in the STEM subjects.
2. STEM qualifications – need and definition

(Ref: What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?)
2.1 Shortage of STEM skills amongst the UK workforce is a widespread concern. In 2011 the
Confederation of British Industry (CBI) reported 43% of employers as having difficulty
recruiting sufficient STEM skilled individuals, rising to 52% expecting to have difficulty in the
next three years 248 .
2.2 Whilst a well-qualified workforce is undoubtedly crucial to STEM industries, the

importance of STEM qualifications to an individual is broader. STEM study develops the type
of analytical and numerical skills which are valued across career pathways. For example, in
2009 the then Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) noted that ‘... to a
greater extent, the recruitment difficulties expressed by employers are broader concerns
about a lack of well rounded candidates with technical skills, broader competencies, such as
mathematical capability, and practical work experiences.’249
2.3 The classification of a STEM subject in the school context is relatively narrow in
comparison to the FE and HE sectors. Whilst pupils at secondary school can follow a range
of qualification routes in mathematics, science, design & technology, and engineering, the
bulk of these are presented within defined curriculum subject choice 250 . The FE STEM Data
Project (funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) indentified thousands
248 CBI (2011) Building for Growth: Business priorities for education and skills.
249 DIUS (2009) The Demand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Skills.
250, Wenchao, J., Muriel, A., & Sibieta, L. (2011) Subject and course choices at ages 14 and 16 amongst young people in
England: insights from behavioural economics. Department for Education.
508
of available STEM qualifications. The Committee will no doubt receive detailed evidence
from that project; for the purposes of this submission we note that, as part of its analysis,
the project has provided a useful working definition for STEM qualifications as, ‘those that are
deeply rooted in science or mathematics, engineering and/or are of a ‘technical’ or ‘technology-
application/use’ nature. STEM qualifications are deemed distinct from other qualifications because
they can, for those who wish it, provide the required foundation for progression into further study or
employment in an S, T, E or M related field.’ 251
2.4 There is a case for inclusion of computing within the common definition of STEM, given
its importance in underpinning work in other disciplines. In putting forward the inclusion of
computing within the classification of STEM subjects, we distinguish computing from the
generic information communication technology (ICT) skills of using applications. Computing
refers to a body of specific subject-knowledge, which may allow an individual to understand
how such applications operate.
3. Uptake of STEM subjects at A-level

(Ref: What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of STEM subjects?)
3.1 The greatest loss of potential STEM practitioners occurs post-16, when many young
people chose not to continue with study for STEM qualifications. In 2004, which saw the
introduction of the Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014 252 , a state of
decline in the popularity of STEM subjects at A-level was prevalent, especially for physics and
mathematics. Since then, a strong improvement has been seen in mathematics, with more
tentative improvement in biology and chemistry. In physics the situation appears more
fragile, ‘...starting from the lowest base and falling continuously between 1999 and 2006.
Provisional 2010 data show that the slow recovery since 2006 has continued, with the number of
entries now standing at 28 thousand, which is 2 thousand fewer than in 1999. Encouragingly, the
8% rise in entries in 2010 was the largest over the period, and double the size of the previous year’s
increase.’ 253
So while there is cause for encouragement, it is essential that our focus on ensuring
progression in STEM subjects is maintained.
3.2 A secondary school pupil at Key Stage 4 (age 14-16) may spend approximately one-third
of their curriculum time studying STEM subjects. Quality of teaching is the single most
important factor within a school or college in determining this pupil’s progress - the report
of the Science and Learning Expert Group 254 indicated ‘... “It is widely acknowledged that no
education system can be better than the quality of its teachers” 255 . Additionally, the quality of
teaching has been shown to be a major determinant of pupils’ interest and achievement in science,
pointing to the importance of the quality of initial teacher education and professional
development 256 . Evidence from our stakeholder consultation, including from young people
251 Royal Academy of Engineering (2011) FE STEM Data Project – July 2011 Report.
252 HM Treasury, Department for trade and Industry, Department for Education and Skills (2004) Science and innovation
investment framework 2004 – 2014
253 DfE (2011) Maths and science education: the supply of high achievers at A-level.
254 Report of the Science and Learning Expert Group (2010). Science and mathematics secondary education for the 21st
century. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

255 Barber for McKinsey.
256 Osborne, J., Simon, S & Collins, S, (2003) Attitudes towards science: A review of the literature and its implications.
International Journal of Science Education, 25 1049-1079

Wiliam, D (2006) Assessment: Learning Communities Can Use It to Engineer a Bridge Connecting Teaching and Learning.
Journal of Staff Development 27, 1, 16-20. Research shows students who get the best teachers learn at twice the rate of
509
themselves, has underlined that the best science and mathematics teachers are subject specialists
with excellent teaching skills.’
3.3 High quality teaching results from both excellent subject knowledge and teaching skills.
To ensure this level of quality, a strong focus on professional development should be
maintained throughout a teacher’s career - this is particularly important in science-related
subjects, where a teacher’s subject knowledge base must keep pace with contemporary
STEM discoveries and applications.
3.4 In England most teachers of science are expected to teach across the sciences up to the
end of Key Stage 3 and commonly to end of Key Stage 4, particularly in schools with limited
numbers of physical science specialists. Those entering science teaching at secondary level
normally have degree-level qualifications in one or more science disciplines. However, very
few have high level qualifications across the sciences. Most teachers at the outset of their
careers have to develop their knowledge and understanding of specific scientific concepts
outside their immediate experience.
3.5 Quality-assured professional development should therefore be encouraged, and

government has recognised this through provision for programmes such as the National
network of Science Learning Centres, Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) STEM
Support, and the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics.
3.6 The model of professional development used by the national network of Science
Learning Centres, which is supported by both government and industry funding, has been
carefully designed to bring challenge and support to teachers, and enable impact in the
classroom. The programme of professional development is planned in collaboration with
teachers, scientists and education researchers. Robust quality assurance processes are used
to ensure that all aspects of course delivery are maintained at a very high level. That the
network has been successful in this is reflected in very high customer satisfaction levels
(98%), and quality of provision is supported by Ofsted evidence: ‘The quality of professional
development received from external providers was variable but that provided by the national
network of Science Learning Centres was consistently reported to be good.’ 257
3.7 Programmes offered by the national network of Science Learning Centres have a positive
impact on teaching quality and outcomes for pupils. In 2011 the National Audit Office
reported benefits to teachers and pupils from the opportunities provided by these
programmes: “There is evidence that participation by teachers in Science Learning Centre
programmes is associated with improved teaching and learning, and higher take-up and
achievement in science at their school.”. 258
3.8 Ofsted also reports favourably on the impact of LSIS STEM support: ‘Learning and Skills
Improvement Service (LSIS) STEM programmes and the nine science learning centres across the
country are well-developed points of contact for resources and professional development activities for
post-16 science teachers. Together with the learning coach programme and the regional subject
networks, the learning centres provide a wide range of updating and training for science teachers.....
Staff attending STEM activities reported on the high quality of the training and acknowledged that
students taught by average teachers; shows that a focus on assessment “for” learning is the most powerful, and yet most
neglected, aspect of teacher practice.
257 Ofsted (2011) Successful Science – An evaluation of science education in England 2007-10.
258 National Audit Office (2010) Educating the next generation of scientists. Department for Education.
510
the networks and training had been instrumental in bringing about real improvements in teaching
and learning in their colleges.’259
3.9 Both the LSIS STEM Support programme and the HE STEM Programme (led by the
University of Birmingham on behalf of HEFCE) have actively sought to collaborate with
existing STEM support networks in their engagement with schools. This co-operation
encourages more effective support for schools and colleges, and better value for money.
4. English Baccalaureate
(Ref: What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM subjects?)
4.1 Since the introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) 260 anecdotal evidence from
schools has suggested a shift in their curriculum offer away from subjects and qualification
types excluded from the EBacc. A recent survey 261 indicates that current Year 9 pupils are
more likely to be opting for EBacc subjects, in comparison to their Year 10 counterparts.
Over half the schools surveyed reported changing their curriculum offer for this Year 9
group as a result of the EBacc, including a decline in the offer of vocational qualifications such
as science BTEC qualifications.
4.2 It is too early to determine the likely consequences of the EBacc on post-16 uptake in
STEM subjects. However, the Committee will no doubt wish to maintain an overview of
progression from excluded qualifications, such as vocational science qualifications and design
& technology.
5. STEM careers information

(Ref: Issues not already covered by this call for evidence that are relevant to the scope of the inquiry)
5.1 The view of STEM that young people experience outside of school is far more complex
than the school subject timetable – with technology and engineering at the fore, drawing on
a broad science base and mathematical expertise. One challenge for STEM subject teaching is
to help young people recognise how the STEM subjects that they study at school can lead to
rich and varied career pathways.
5.2 The Committee will be aware that the Education Act 2011 removes the statutory duty
on schools to provide careers education and guidance from September 2012, and replaces
this with a duty to provide impartial career guidance. Any such change, coupled with the
removal of centrally determined local support, introduces the potential for uncertainty
within schools as to what is required for an appropriate the level of guidance.
5.3 The STEM Careers Awareness Timeline Project (2008-2011) was a three-year
government funded project to explore the potential to embed STEM careers awareness in
the early stages of secondary education. Recommendations from the project’s final report
state that: ‘School leaders should carefully consider the impact of scaling down careers support in
school, in light of the Education Bill. The temptation to interpret the statutory requirements at a
minimum level will be detrimental to pupils’ futures.’ 262
259 Ofsted (2011) Improving science in colleges.

260 DfE (2010) The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper November 2010.
261 Clemens, S. (2011) The English Baccalaureate and GCSE Choices. Department for Education.
262 Centre for Education and Industry (2011) Good Timing: Implementing STEM careers strategy in secondary schools.
University of Warwick.
511
5.4 As part of an ongoing project to contribute to the provision of high-quality careers-

related learning for STEM careers, the National STEM Centre has recently commissioned
the International Centre for Guidance Studies (University of Derby) to explore school
senior leaders’ views regarding their role in ensuring appropriate careers guidance for pupils.
The results of this work will be disseminated across the STEM education sector, to inform
the work of partner organisations that offer careers-related learning support to schools and
colleges.
16 December 2011
512
National Higher Education STEM Programme – Written evidence
Summary: Key Issues for Consideration by the Committee

1 During the course of their inquiry, the National HE STEM Programme asks that the
Committee consider the following key themes:
• Whether the pre-university education system adequately prepares students for the
challenge of studying the STEM disciplines within higher education.
• The potential impact of changes to the funding of STEM provision within higher
education upon the availability of STEM provision and four year programmes of
study.
• The implications of proposals within the HE White Paper on potential modes and
patterns of future higher education study, and upon efforts to widening participation
from traditionally under-represented cohorts of learner.
• How the overall co-ordination and communication of research, best practice, and
details of current activity might be best achieved within the HE sector in the future
to maximise impact and minimise duplication of effort.
Section 1: About the National HE STEM Programme

2 The National HE STEM Programme is a three-year initiative funded by the Higher
Education Funding Councils for England and Wales, focused upon around Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), but primarily supporting the
disciplines of Chemistry, Engineering, Mathematics and Physics. These are STEM
subjects that have been deemed strategically important and vulnerable, and were the
subject of pilot Project activities initiated by the Higher Education Funding Council
for England in 2005 and 2006.
3 The National HE STEM Programme supports higher education institutions in

encouraging the exploration of new approaches to recruiting students and delivering
programmes of study within the STEM disciplines. It enables the transfer of best
practice across the higher education STEM sector, facilitates its wider adoption, and
encourages innovation. Through collaboration and shared working, the Programme
focuses upon sustainable activities to achieve long-term impact within the higher
education sector.
4 The work of the Programme takes place across three related strands:
1. Widening participation within the STEM disciplines at university level, by

supporting higher education institutions to work with those currently within the
school and further education sectors;
2. Higher education curriculum developments focusing upon course delivery and
design and student support, to enhance student knowledge, progression and
skills;
3. Encouraging those currently within the workforce and society to engage with
further study to develop enhanced knowledge and skills.
513
5 With the Programme now into its final year of operation, it has initiated activities in
support of the Higher Education STEM sector within over 80 higher education
institutions across England and Wales (The National HE STEM Programme, 2011).
Section 2: General questions

6 Exactly what constitutes a STEM subject varies between users, and there appears to
be no one definitive single definition. In its broadest sense, ‘STEM’ defines the
discipline areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and while there
was some initial uncertainty regarding the acronym STEM (particularly the ‘M’ where
it was often mistaken for ‘Manufacturing’ or ‘Medicine’), its meaning now appears to
be widely understood. At a political level its prominence is seen as a measure of how
technologically advanced, innovative, and economically stable a nation really is.
7 Defining the individual disciplines that fall within the acronym ‘STEM’, is more of a
challenge, and various different definitions exist. For example, within the National HE
STEM Programme, STEM is defined to be the disciplines of Chemistry, Engineering,
Mathematics and Physics on the basis that these were the STEM subjects deemed
strategically important and vulnerable (SIVS) by the Higher Education Funding
Council for England following a request from the Secretary of State in 2004. The
imprecise definition of STEM is perhaps best summarised by the following which is
taken from a Royal Society report (The Royal Society, 2009), which included, within
some analyses the disciplines of medicine, veterinary, or agriculture-related subjects,
within its definition of STEM:
“…‘STEM’ (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is an imprecise concept,

drawing together many distinct elements. It is often used to mean the ‘public science base’ -
itself an entity that is hard to define.”
8 Nevertheless, there are attempts to define the individual disciplines that comprise the
‘STEM subjects’. For example, in the United States of America, the Department of
Homeland Security, has a STEM-Designated Degree Program List (Department of
Homeland Security, 2011) regarding access to work visas for immigrants who are
skilled in these fields. Within the UK, recent work has taken place to define STEM
subject, and the most comprehensive definition can be found arising from the Royal
Academy of Engineering led FE STEM Data Project (Harrison, 2011).
9 There is a case for considering the meaning of ‘STEM’ more broadly particularly given
that STEM disciplines, for example mathematics, computing and ICT underpin many
others. This will be particularly true when considering the workplace. For example,
there will be the case of employees researching or implementing new technologies
based around direct applications of the STEM disciplines, however, there is equally
the case of STEM-trained employees applying their knowledge and skills within a
wider context, for example in the public or service sectors. It is also important the
cross-disciplinary aspect of STEM be considered, where, for example, the STEM
disciplines interact with other subjects (for example economics, social sciences,
human and physical geography) in ways that lead to knowledge enhancement,
innovation or the effective provision of services. This is a key feature of the
514
workplace where STEM graduates are required to work successfully as part of multi-
disciplinary teams.
10 Perhaps a better term for considering the meaning of ‘STEM’ exists within other
languages. For example, ‘wissenschaft’ formed an ideology of German Universities
during the nineteenth century, and is a term used for any study or science that
involves systematic research and teaching. It incorporates an approach to science,
learning and knowledge, that is based around scholarly practice and inquiry, a way of
thinking, rather than the direct transfer of information. Such a definition perhaps
enables the broader impact of the STEM disciplines upon education and society to be
better considered and articulated.
• Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used to
influence supply?
11 It is well documented that there continues to be demand for STEM graduates, and a
large number of reports and evidence are available. In 2008, the CBI predicted that
by 2014 the UK will need an extra 730,000 people with STEM qualifications
compared to 2007 (CBI, 2008) both to replace an aging workforce and fill new roles
arising in areas such as the green economy, and subsequent CBI Education and Skills
Survey reports cite continuing demand. Additionally, the UK Commission for
Employment and Skills 2010 National Strategic Skills Audit for England (UKCES,
2010) highlighted the need for STEM graduates and STEM trained technicians within a
range of employment sectors (low carbon, advanced manufacturing, engineering
construction, life sciences and pharmaceuticals) to meet the current and future skills
needs of the UK. In addition, STEM graduates are known to be in demand to fill jobs
within non-STEM sectors, primarily as a result of the knowledge and transferable
skills they possess (Mellors-Bourne, 2011). A comprehensive analysis range of
forecasts about the current and future demand for skills, occupations and subjects,
and the priorities for addressing them can be found within Appendix 3 of HEFCE’s
2009 report on Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects (HEFCE, 2010):
“Demand can be identified from employer surveys, labour market forecasts, or quantitative
indicators such as salary or earnings data. Demand can be expressed in terms of a
predicted shortage at some point in the future or an immediate and unfulfilled demand. It
can be identified at national or regional levels, and framed in terms of sectors or
occupations, rather than subjects in HE; demand may relate to specific courses and levels of
study, or to skills attributable to one aspect of these.”
12 While the extent of demand is perhaps well defined, questions still remain as to how
this information is utilised, or indeed whether it can be, to move from a knowledge
of demand to ensuring appropriate supply in specific areas. This is particularly true
given the way in which both graduates, and employers, consider their knowledge and
skills (Mellors-Bourne, 2011):
“Employers and graduates tend not to think of ‘STEM’ but more about degree subject
(groups). Students are anchored in their subject rather than in STEM, and consider
career/occupational directions in relation to their degree subject, rather than in relation to
STEM.”
515
This poses challenges in moving from knowledge of demand to ensuring the

availability of appropriate HE provision to provide adequate supply (HEFCE, 2010):
“The link between an identified employer need and a subject or course within HE is rarely
straightforward.”
13 In addition, consideration needs to be given to the interpretation of the information

provided about demand, and whether it is sufficiently robust to enable the
development of higher education provision (DTI, 2006):
“Robust projections of future employment levels are difficult to derive. Most forecasting
models are based on the assumption that, to a large extent, current trends in demand and
supply will continue. The validity of this assumption is clearly questionable in an economy
subject to both internal and external shocks. Cycles of demand and supply make it difficult
to predict the labour market at a specific date in the future”
14 The question must be asked, given the uncertainties and analysis described above, as
to whether such information can be used to reliably inform the development of
higher education provision. HEI knowledge of employer demand, particularly at a
disciplinary level, can be inadequate, and the vast array of differing reports and
analyses can make it difficult for those designing or modifying higher education STEM
programmes of study. Labour market intelligence (LMI) has a role to play in
supporting employer engagement processes but its use is inconsistent.
15 In considering any such this analysis, we must ensure we do not focus only upon
graduates that are of what might be termed ‘traditional age 263 ’. In recent times there
has been a significant focus upon enhancing the skills and knowledge of those already
in the workplace, particularly given that over 70% of the UK’s workforce in 2020 has
now left compulsory education and that further work was required to increase the
number of UK adults with a Level 4 qualification (Leitch, 2006). Considering those
currently within the workforce without a prior university-level qualification,
universities and further education providers are well placed to undertake the
development and delivery of such provision and this may be specifically focused upon
nationally identified skills needs and gaps.
16 Such provision, however, will not typically consist of the equivalent of three or four-
year degree programmes of study, but smaller credit bearing ‘components’ (perhaps
only 5, 10 or 20 credits), delivered flexibly and targeted at the specific skills gaps and
needs identified by individual companies or sector bodies. Such learners may not be
therefore not be technically termed ‘graduates’, but engaging current employees in
the study of such provision offers an opportunity to address the immediate, or short-
term, skills needs of the UK workforce.
Section 3: 16-18 supply

• Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do
263 That is those first degree programmes offered to students typically under the age of 24 and delivered through three- or
four-year full-time programmes of study.
516
17 Table 1 below shows an analysis of A-level results for both 2005 and 2010, based
upon data published by the Guardian newspaper( (The Guardian, 2005) and (The
Guardian, 2010)). These dates have been chosen so that the coincide with the data
available for university participation within the STEM disciplines, but also in order
that they coincide with a series of major national initiatives designed to raise
participation and achievement within the STEM disciplines at a range of levels.
% of students % of students % Increase in

Number Sat Number Sat students
Subject with A and B with A*, A
(2005) (2010) 2005 - 2010
grades and B grades
Chemistry 38,851 54.1 44,051 59.1 13.4
Mathematics 52,897 62.2 77,001 66.5 45.6

Further
5,933 75.6 11,682 78.7 96.9
Mathematics
Physics 28,119 57.0 30,976 54.9 10.2
All subjects 783,878 46.6 853,933 52.2 8.9

Table 1: Analysis of A-level Results (Source: Guardian Newspaper)
18 Results are also available for the Engineering Diploma in 2010 (Table 2), which are
the first full cohort of two-year Diploma students, and where a total of 1,209
students received grades (SEMTA, 2010). Particularly in engineering, it is important
to consider the full range of qualifications that enable progression to higher education
STEM study (Harrison, 2011).
% of students
Number Sat
Level with A*, A and
(2005)
B grades
Advanced 146 13.0
Higher 871 62.8
Foundation 192 88.0

Table 2: Analysis of Engineering Diploma First Cohorts Results (Source: SEMTA)
19 It is likely many responses to the Committee will include an analysis of A-level entries
over varying time periods, and comprehensive summaries of recent trends are
available (DFE, 2011). The information contained within responses will show a
consistent and general increase in A-level entries and grades over recent years,
although it must be noted that patterns within all STEM subjects are not equally well
studied, with particular focus typically only being given to a sub-set of the STEM
disciplines. This is a general theme the Committee should consider when interpreting
information in relation to A-level (or equivalent) and university-level participation in
the STEM disciplines.
517
20 The transition to higher education study within the STEM disciplines can often be
difficult for students within STEM, with well documented issues being reported in
relation to mathematics (see for example (Savage, 2000) and (Grove, 2011a)),
chemistry (Physical Sciences Subject Centre, 2008), and engineering and physics (IoP,
2011a). Issues are focused around three areas. In all four disciplines, the depth and
breadth of mathematical ability of students on entry is causing learning difficulties for
the student, and posing challenges for the staff members teaching them. In chemistry,
there are concerns of students arriving at university with poor practical and
laboratory skills, and within all disciplines, concern regarding the ability of new
university students to solve problems.
21 In addition to an increase in learners studying appropriate A-level, or equivalent,

qualifications to enable progression to higher education STEM programmes, there has
been a year-on-year increase in those achieving the highest grades. As a consequence,
universities are now seeking higher entry qualifications (The Telegraph, 2011), yet
concerns exist with the knowledge and skills of students at the transition to
university. This strongly implies evidence of issues with pre-university qualifications
rather than the students themselves.
22 In 2004, the Royal Society of Chemistry commissioned a report (RSC, 2004)

following concerns that a lack of good quality laboratory facilities and sufficient
modern equipment in schools may be discouraging young people from pursuing the
study of science and also discouraging graduates from taking up a career in teaching.
A lack of suitable facilities, equipment or appropriately qualified teachers with the
confidence to undertake practical investigations, or the tendency in schools to rely
on demonstrations not just within chemistry but also physics as well, continues to
impact upon students practical skills when they commence university study.
23 A key issue is the different learning and teaching methods used between
schools/colleges and universities. Many academics believe that current mathematics
and physics provision at A-level leads to students learning by rote rather than
through their own independent techniques (IoP, 2011a). This is also evidenced in an
earlier report (Savage, 2009) which not only highlighted similar concerns, but also
linked this to a decline in the ability of undergraduate students to model and solve
problems at the transition to university. In addition, students themselves are now
beginning to articulate concerns in relation to their mathematical skills prior to
university entry (IoP, 2011a).
24 Efforts are now required to address the lack of fluency amongst incoming
undergraduate cohorts in the application of mathematical techniques to unfamiliar
exercises, problems or scenarios. The current A-level system does not allow
students sufficient opportunity to apply their mathematical skills, particularly if they
choose not to study modules of mechanics. Students who responded to the Institute
of Physics survey and had studied components of further mathematics prior to
university entry felt better prepared mathematically for their studies and indicated
they felt they required less support (IoP, 2011a). Interventions, particularly during the
first year of university study, need to focus upon allowing students to model
scenarios, solve problems, and generally have extended opportunities to engage with
the application of mathematics in disciplinary contexts.
518
25 There is also now clear evidence that the number of disciplines impacted by the
mathematics problem has broadened, from its initial impact upon the disciplines of
mathematics, engineering and physics, with issues now being seen within chemistry,
and the biological, health and social sciences. A different contributing factor is
responsible and highlighted in a recent report by the Advisory Committee on
Mathematics Education (ACME, 2011) that found around 210,000 students out of the
330,000 that are studying courses that require mathematical knowledge beyond
GCSE do not have the required skills, leading to challenges for both the universities
and students involved. Here the issue is that students on a wider range of higher
education courses are either not aware that the further study of mathematics would
be highly beneficial to them or universities are not requesting they study it. As a
consequence, students are arriving at universities without having studied the
necessary mathematical courses, and for many, they may not have studied any
mathematics for two or three years prior to university entry.
26 While issues exist with the pre-university curriculum, there has been a positive
response from across the STEM sector. The high-quality activities of the National
STEM Centre and Science Learning Centres have continued to ensure a supply of
professional development opportunities for teachers, and professional bodies such as
the Institute of Physics offer similar support (IoP, 2011b) with around 4,000 teacher
CPD days currently being offered each year in the English maintained sector. Such
continued support remains vital, particular given the findings from a recent report
commissioned by the Wellcome Trust (Lock, 2011):
“ITT courses provide a sound basis for developing subject knowledge and topic specific
pedagogy in key topics. However, it is unrealistic to expect trainees to develop secure subject
knowledge and topic specific pedagogy in all topics in their specialist and non-specialist areas
at Key Stages 3 and 4 (11–16 years) during a one-year ITT course.”
27 The mathematics problem at the transition to university has not been solved, but
significant progress has been made. An ample supply of free, good quality resources
are available to help any students serious about remedying their shortcomings, and to
help academic and support staff who aspire to assist students who struggle at the
school-university interface, and a significant proportion of universities have invested
substantially to put palliative mechanisms in place, for example mathematics support
centres (Croft, 2011), or undertaken significant revision to their provision at the
university transition (see for example (Grove, 2011b)). Such work is particularly
important as mathematics is known to be a barrier to progression, retention (NAO,
2007) and attainment within the STEM disciplines at university level.
• What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of
28 Over the last five years, there has been increased growth in AS and A2 (A-level)
completions and attainment. Directly attributing the reasons for this increase, or a
component of it, to any single activity or initiative is not possible. It is, however,
important to note that a range of major national initiatives and activities were taking
place of this period that will undoubtedly have contributed towards the increases
seen, and it is important to consider their collective impact.
519
29 During this period of growth, and in addition to the work of the National STEM
Centre and the Science Learning Centres, STEMNET, and the Further Mathematics
Network, all of which have been identified as a result of their STEM specific focus,
four disciplinary pilot projects were operating, initiated by the Higher Education
Funding Council for England, during the period 2006 to 2009, and undertaking
activities on a regional basis. The projects were led by four professional bodies: the
Royal Society of Chemistry (Chemistry for our Future), the Institute of Physics
(Stimulating Physics), the Royal Academy of Engineering (London Engineering
Project), and a consortium of mathematical bodies (More Maths Grads).
30 Attempts have been made to evaluate the individual effectiveness of such

programmes (NAO, 2010) to increase take-up and achievement in maths and science,
including those mentioned above. The report noted the difficulty of determining
direct causal effects:
“Schools using the programmes have a greater proportion of pupils studying these subjects,
and several programmes are associated with increases in take-up and achievement of
separate sciences at GCSE, and maths and science at A-level. However, it is difficult to
establish whether this is a direct consequence of participating in the programmes, or
whether schools with an existing focus on science tend to access more such programmes as
a result.”
31 Such difficulties in establishing direct causal effects of specific interventions are

further noted (HEFCE, 2011a), although evidence exists that the initial investment in
activities and interventions continue to be utilised by the STEM sector:
“There is a general trend of increasing student demand for SIVS subjects. However, there is
only indirect evidence that the demand-raising projects contributed to this trend. The initial
pilot projects generated significant learning and expertise which continue to be used and
developed by the National HE STEM programme. Other elements of the pilot projects have
been taken forward by other organisations.”
Section 4: Graduate supply

• Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU and
32 The growth trends at A-level have translated to the higher education STEM sector.
Comparing the equivalent period 2005/06 to 2009/10 (HESA, 2011), overall full-time
student enrolments within higher education increased by over 11% but growth in the
STEM disciplines has, on the whole, greatly exceeded this. Mathematics increased by
over 26% (+5,460 students), physical sciences by 16% (+7,370 students), engineering
and technology by 18% (+13,575).
33 While such headline figures present an overall positive picture, there is variation
within the disciplines that make up the engineering and technology category within
the HESA classification (HEFCE, 2010):
“In Engineering, the number of students in HE programmes has been declining for some
time, but the pattern varies between sub-disciplines. During the last three years, the number
520
of Electrical Engineering students has declined, albeit from a large base, whereas Civil
Engineering and Chemical Engineering numbers have increased at a rate well beyond the
average for all subjects. Other areas of engineering appear to be more stable, although a
significant decline in entrants to Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Engineering
programmes suggests that numbers in this area will decline during the coming years.”
34 The demand for STEM graduates is well documented within the UK, and the annual
CBI Education and Skills Survey reports include a specific chapter dedicated to STEM.
The 2011 report (CBI, 2011) noted that employers of all sizes were struggling to
recruit STEM skilled staff with 43% of the 566 employers who responded
experiencing problems. Such a trend is not restricted to new STEM graduates, over a
quarter indicated problems recruiting STEM skilled staff with workplace experience.
The report demonstrates that 30% of businesses are reporting a shortage in
applications from STEM graduates, and almost 40% are short of STEM graduates.
35 Further reports reinforce this demand for STEM skills within the workplace, and a
comprehensive analysis of both general and sector specific reports can be found
within Appendix 3 of HEFCE’s 2009 report on Strategically Important and Vulnerable
Subjects (HEFCE, 2010). More recently, the report of the Migration Advisory
Committee (MAC, 2011) to the UK Border Agency identified shortage occupations,
many within the STEM disciplines, for which the UK currently needs to recruit from
overseas to meet employer demand.
36 The demand from business and industry clearly indicates the need for more STEM
graduates within the UK, and that the current increases in numbers seen to date
aren’t sufficient.
37 While STEM graduates are valued within traditional STEM roles, they are also valued
within a wide range of other professions. For example, The Work Foundation (The
Work Foundation, 2010) has identified that for every two STEM graduates currently
in the labour market, only one is in a STEM related occupation. In addition, the Royal
Society (The Royal Society, 2009) found that 82% of leavers with a ‘core STEM’ first
degree who were in full-time employment 6 months after graduating were working in
the services sector. This, by itself, should not be seen as a negative, but more a
reflection of the value STEM graduates offer to employers from all sectors.
Nevertheless, a failure to ensure appropriate supply does continue to raise concerns,
and evidence exists that many STEM graduates are choosing not to pursue careers in
science, contributing to existing skills shortages in specific areas.
38 This overall growth seen recently within the STEM sector in higher education,
coupled with such employment trends for STEM graduates, suggests that the key
issues relate to the operation of demand for STEM graduates rather than the volume
of their supply. In particular it may be that HEIs are not producing graduates with the
range of skills that employers demand, a statement continually reinforced CBI
Education and Skills Surveys, or that graduates do not perceive STEM careers to be
attractive and so pursue other options. Addressing this imbalance requires a focus
upon initiatives which more closely align the skills development of graduates with
those required by employers. Work to encourage STEM graduates into STEM
employment as opposed to exploring other careers, is one in which STEM employers
must continue to take a particularly active role.
521

39 In considering whether there are a sufficient number of STEM graduates to meet the
current and future skill needs of the UK, there is also a need to consider issues
associated with the perceived quality of STEM graduates. This must not be
interpreted as a criticism of the graduates themselves, but more of a mis-match
between the skills they possess, or are able to articulate, and the skills employers are
seeking. For example, the CBI (CBI, 2011) report that where STEM employers find
graduates with the right qualifications, many lack the employability skills (36%) and
prior workplace experience (37%) to succeed.
40 The CBI report highlights the importance of the employability agenda within HEIs and
ensuring that graduates not only possess the necessary skills, but can also successfully
articulate these during the recruitment process. During a focus group meeting with
employers, held as part of the National HE STEM Programme, a number of
employers indicated that they felt graduates did possess the necessary skills for them
to be employable within their organisations, but were not capable of articulating
these clearly during the recruitment process. In particular, the employers
participating highlighted concerns with the ability of graduates at interview to
respond to their questions in sufficient detail when citing specific applications of their
skills or individual contributions within a teamworking exercise for example.
41 Such issues are reinforced through a related, but independent piece of work
undertaken through the National HE STEM Programme and focused upon
Engineering. The project (Atkinson, 2011) was prompted by the fact that some
engineering graduates are unemployed despite the fact that a number of engineering
employers state they cannot recruit enough engineers for their needs, and is
exploring the origins of the mismatch. Initial findings from the structured graduate
interviews undertaken so far indicate that about two-thirds made applications for
jobs prior to graduation, but many cite the pressure of academic work as the primary
reason for not commencing this process earlier during their final year of study.
Students themselves also note difficulties in the recruitment process:
“The two biggest areas of difficulty encountered by graduates were the written application
process (either using CV or application forms) and interviews.”
42 The interviews undertaken with employers (Atkinson, 2011), have identified detailed
reasons as to why applicants are rejected at each stage of the recruitment process.
These include poor spelling, punctuation and grammar within application forms, but
common themes at key stages in the application process relate to preparation and
the ability of graduates to articulate their skills:
“Many candidates demonstrated poor interview technique and, specifically, a lack of

adequate preparation. Candidates apparently did not seem to understand what was
happening in the interview and had not come prepared to deal with questions about their
motivation, competence, skills and suitability.”
522
“...other candidates were felt to lack confidence and be unwilling to sell themselves or to
reveal their personality at interview.”
43 Considering employability from the student perspective, the CBI and National Union
of Students (NUS, 2011) found that almost fourth-fifths of the students who
responded (some 2,823 students from 71 universities) attend university to improve
their job prospects. In addition, 66% of respondents felt they would like their
university to provide more support in developing their employability skills. It will be
vital universities ensure this is addressed as we move into an era of higher education
where a greater proportion of the fee contribution is placed upon the individual
student.
44 A question for consideration is how best to enable graduates to progress to careers

in skills shortage areas. Is there a need to ensure a supply of graduates targeted at
specific employment areas, as has been successfully done, for example, within the
financial services sector (KPMG, 2011)? Or should we continue focus our efforts
upon encouraging students to enter the STEM disciplines within higher education,
ensuring the provision appropriately equips them with the knowledge and skills to
progress to a range of future careers, and that they are sufficiently well informed to
make decisions about areas in which they wish to work or engage in further study?
45 A core strength of the UK’s higher education STEM provision is that graduates are
produced with a broad range of skills and knowledge that ensure they are employable
within a wide range of sectors, including skills shortage areas. This is not to say
further work is not needed. In particular more work is needed to raise awareness of
potential careers for STEM undergraduates and postgraduates to facilitate their
progression into shortage careers, and to enhance not only their current skill levels,
but to ensure they appropriately prepared to communicate these effectively to
potential employers.
46 Considering ‘traditional’ undergraduate qualifications, redesigning these completely to

specifically, and perhaps solely, tailor them towards skills gap areas is not necessarily
appropriate. The strength of the UK’s higher education sector is offering a broad
range of provision that provides access to a wide-range of careers, and an
appropriate approach is embedding components of related study, or applications, in
skills gap areas to enable students to gain appropriate expertise and raise awareness
of future career areas. An example of this working to great effect has been seen
through the ‘Nuclear Island’ project of the National HE STEM Programme
(Sudworth, 2011), which has embedded activities to enable students to develop the
skills and knowledge to progress to roles within the nuclear sector, as well as
continuing to enable them to progress to roles within other employment sectors.
This is not an isolated example, and other such models and examples of good
practice exist.
• What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the
institutions?
523
47 The higher education sector is currently undergoing a period of unprecedented

change. The impact of proposals within the HE White Paper (BIS, 2011) and changes
to the higher education funding model will have a long-lasting effect upon higher
education, although their likely impact is at present, uncertain. Nevertheless, a
number of concerns exist that require immediate consideration if the risk to ensuring
a sufficient supply of high-quality STEM graduates is to be mitigated.
48 Current funding models imply a deficit in funding for current Price Group B subjects
(which include engineering, physics and chemistry) unless SIVS or Band B funding is
continued. In contrast, the model provides an uplift of around £2,500 for Price
Group D subjects (humanities). Under initial AAB+ proposals, growth in the arts and
humanities at university level may be favoured as such courses are cheaper to deliver,
and there is more potential for greater growth without the physical restrictions of
the necessary facilities (for example laboratory space) needed for the STEM
disciplines. While it is acknowledged there may ultimately be a progressive ‘shift’ of
the AAB+ proposals (to ABB, BBB, etc.), which would ultimately favour the STEM
disciplines, there is a need to be cautious of short term damage to STEM. The
current proposals favour the arts and humanities, and additional growth might be
prioritised for these areas at the outset which continues to be maintained by HEIs in
the longer term to the detriment of future STEM provision.
49 Cuts in capital funding and the impact upon laboratory refurbishment (for example),
mean greater annual surpluses need to be generated by HEIs to cross-subsidise
capital projects, to enhance student learning experience for current Price Group B
subjects. Annual surpluses derived from Price Group D subjects are only possible at
universities able to command and maintain the highest fees.
50 There is documented evidence that STEM A-levels are more difficult than other
equivalent qualifications (Coe, 2008):
“The STEM subjects are not just more difficult on average than the non-sciences, they are
actually without exception among the hardest of all A-levels.”
Current AAB+ proposals do not encourage HEIs to consider the context within
which students achieved those grades, particularly in most selective and competitive
HEIs. As such there are implications for widening access, for example for students
from schools and colleges that do not have full and ready access to appropriately
qualified and experienced teachers (NFER, 2006) to enable them to achieve the
highest grades necessary for university entry:
“As was the case with science specialists, the analysis by FSM [free school meals] banding
shows differences between the lower and higher bands, with schools with lowest levels of
FSM eligibility having more maths specialist teachers per 1,000 pupils than schools with the
highest level of FSM eligibility.”
51 Overall A-level entry tariffs are increasing, and HEIs are becoming increasingly
selective about their student intake with league tables a foremost concern. A key aim
must be to ensure that a range of STEM provision (with differing entry tariffs)
remains available. This is important to maintain healthy demand, particularly to
ensure that students who might not achieve the very highest (A*, A) grades, still have
524
access to appropriate provision. Having worked hard to stimulate demand for our
disciplines, we would not want to send the message that they might not be accessible
to anyone other than those with the very highest grades and so students explore
other career routes at university.
52 The Key Information Set, standardised information about all undergraduate courses,
will require higher education institutions to focus effort in key areas and inform
student choice. However, initial ‘mock-ups’ (HEFCE, 2011b) show only an initial
analysis on perceived quality and short term measures; the longer-term benefits to
the learner of higher education study are not included. For example, only six-month
post-graduation employment data is currently shown, but the full benefits of STEM
study may not be evident until several years after graduation (EngineeringUK, 2009):
“Three years after graduation 94.3% of full-time first degree leavers in engineering &
technology were in work which was second highest of all subject areas, after medicine and
dentistry. In the same survey the median salary in 2008 for E&T graduates from 2004/05
was £28,000 which was again, third highest of all subject areas after medicine and dentistry
and veterinary science.”
The provision of such longer-term careers information for graduates would allow
prospective students to assess and compare the value of studying STEM programmes.
53 Will collaboration continue between HEIs in the future climate? The sheer strength
and expertise of the sector is demonstrated through collaboration and the sharing of
knowledge. It is important that the changes to the higher education landscape do not
result in institutions being more inwardly focused, less likely to share knowledge and
expertise, or less likely to work together as the competition for student numbers
potentially increases.
54 The HE White Paper proposes to create “a flexible margin of 20,000 places to reward
universities and colleges who combine good quality with value for money and whose average
charge (including waivers) is at or below £7,500”. Such proposals are unlikely to benefit
the STEM disciplines. Laboratory-based courses are higher cost, and well
documented issues exist within STEM in relation to the mathematical preparedness
and skills of students as they make the transition to university. As a consequence,
universities have had to invest significantly in ensuring appropriate support
mechanisms are in place and with no sign of the mathematics problem being solved,
universities will need to continue to invest heavily.
55 Increased fee levels will change student expectations without additional resource
being made available to support their implementation – another reason why quality
STEM provision below £7,500 will be unlikely, although this will be equally true
across all subjects. However, STEM has seen huge growth and STEM departments are
working hard to increase effective contact hours, provide additional small group
sessions and opportunities for feedback, and to embed employability skills. In
addition, there will be a need to ensure an appropriate staff/student ratio is
maintained.
56 There is potential for impact upon integrated Master’s programmes within STEM.
With students required to contribute a greater proportion of the costs of their
525
education, will they continue to be attracted by the additional year and the associated
fee implication?

57 It remains necessary to ensure a geographical distribution of STEM provision remains

available and accessible. While there were once 72 Physics courses across the
country, there are now only 46. Further departmental closures would see deserts of
regional provision, teaching in key areas lost, and a lack of provision accessible to
under-represented groups. In particular, it is unclear how fees will affect patterns of
student participation, might more students, particularly those from widening
participation cohorts, or potentially from middle income families who don’t have
access to bursary or scholarship support, choose to live at home? If so, there are
particular implications if there isn’t a geographical spread of accessible STEM
provision. There exist ‘mathematical deserts’ (Steele, 2007), although recent
developments have seen ‘new’ mathematical sciences provision established across the
higher education sector:
“An analysis of the mathematics course provision based on A-level achievement in the UK
shows significant areas of the UK where there is no broader entry course provision. Course
provision at all entry levels is sparse in the east of England, and absent in North Wales.”
background?
58 The trends in A-level and university participation in STEM represent a positive story,
and indicate the impact of the investment that has been made, but do not mean that
the problem has been solved. However, there is a need to remain cautious and avoid
complacency. Removing support for these disciplines now might mean we revert to
the period of decline seen previously, particularly in a changed higher education fees
environment. There also remains work to be done. A report from the Office for Fair
Access (OFFA, 2010), who are now tasked with promoting and safeguarding fair
access into higher education, indicated that while there had been an improvement in
lower and medium (entry) tariff institutions, the participation rate of the most
disadvantaged 40 per cent of young people in higher tariff institutions was no higher
at the end of the 2000s than it was in the mid-1990s.
59 The higher education sector is a major provider of activities to widen participation

within the STEM disciplines. The Office For Fair Access (OFFA) agreements that each
university is required to provide in support of its fee plans has required universities
to articulate their approach to widening participation and ensuring fair access. Within
the publicly available statements, much good practice is detailed, a key challenge is
ensuring this integrates with other work taking place across the sector, and is
appropriately targeted at widening participation cohorts to maximise its impact.
60 Much national and collaborative work is taking place to increase the diversity of
STEM graduates. The National HE STEM Programme, working in collaboration with
four professional Body Partners (the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications,
526
the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Royal Academy of
Engineering) has much work underway within the higher education sector. The focus
of this work has been upon collaborative activities to maximise impact and transfer
effective practice based upon a knowledge of what actually works (HEFCE, 2011a):
“In this vein the evaluation team notes with approval the approach to the call issued by the
HE STEM programme for proposals that build on proven interventions in effect building on
the knowledge gained in the pilot projects and providing seed money to transfer good
practice between institutions.”
“A positive development is that the HE STEM programme has been working with the
National STEM Centre and STEMNET to coordinate activities”.
STEMNET provides a national ambassador scheme (with over 28,000 volunteers) and
engaging higher education and industry in activities with schools, a STEM club
network, and a Schools STEM advisory network.
Section 5: Post-graduate supply

• Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain
• What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number
of PhD students? Are there alternative delivery models?
61 The focus of the work of the National HE STEM Programme is upon undergraduate
provision within the STEM disciplines. As such, other submissions to the Committee
are more appropriately placed to comment upon issues associated with
postgraduates supply. What we will note is that it is important to ensure that
undergraduate STEM programmes of study continue to produce graduates who can
progress to research careers, both within education and industry. Such progression is
essential if the UK is to remain at the forefront of both disciplinary research and its
applications.
Section 6: Industry
• What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to
attract them?
62 STEM graduates progress to jobs within non-STEM sectors. Many factors may result
in such trends, however a key influencer is likely to be the remuneration offered to
STEM graduates within certain sectors (High Fliers Research, 2011):
“The most generous salaries are those on offer from investment banks (average of
£42,000), law firms (average of £38,000) and oil & energy companies (average of
£32,000). Public sector employers (average of £22,200), retailers (average of £24,000) and
527
engineering & industrial companies (average of £24,500) have the lowest graduate pay
rates for 2011.”
• What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand
graduates?
63 Much good practice exists in university-employer engagement (see for example

(Marchmont Observatory, 2011) or (Cooper, 2011)). Through the National HE
STEM Programme, significant activities to increase the level of engagement between
employers and higher education institutions has been undertaken with a particular
focus upon building longer term capability. Select examples of activities initiated in
new areas include the Institute of Physics is working in partnership with nine physics
departments (Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Hertfordshire, Liverpool,
Leicester and UCL) to develop and establish undergraduate group projects with their
local industries, and an extension of the Nuclear Island initiative (Sudworth, 2011),
following funding to Cogent Sector Skills Council by UKCES which will see individuals
from across different sectors, and at different educational levels, brought together to
work collaboratively on training and development activities to ensure a collective
nuclear workforce is developed with the skills needed in this vital area.
64 In addition to considering the progression of STEM graduates into industry, it is

important not to forget the need for their progression into teaching careers. For
example, the acute shortage of physics teachers is well known and has been a
problem for several years. Both physics and engineering in higher education would
benefit from more and better qualified applicants if more specialist physics teachers
could be found. The Royal Academy of Engineering and Institute of Physics are
collaborating on an activity to raise the number of specialist physics teachers in
schools. The Institute of Physics runs a very successful campaign amongst Physics
undergraduates, raising awareness of school teaching as a career choice, however,
there aren't enough physics graduates to solve the shortage of physics teachers
quickly. There are however many engineering graduates who were successful physics
students when at school and have the potential to make excellent physics teachers. If
only 1 or 2% of the engineering graduates became physics teachers then the shortage
might be solved.
Section 7: International comparisons

• What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in
65 The issues faced in ensuring an adequately supply of graduates with the appropriate
STEM skills is not restricted to the UK. Australia experiences similar concerns to the
UK (NCVER, 2008) and South Australia has recently announced a STEM skills
strategy (Government of South Australia, 2011). Equally issues within the US
(Carnevale, 2011) align closely with those faced in the UK indicating this is a situation
we should not face in isolation:
“As a result, we find that the demand for traditional STEM workers will only grow. In our
projections, STEM is second only to Healthcare as the fastest growing occupational category
528
in the economy. But we also find that the occupations competing for STEM workers are
growing rapidly, too. In fact, the occupations that poach top STEM talent are also among
the fastest-growing and highest-paid in the economy.”
66 The world-leading contribution of the UK in the provision of higher education STEM

study should not be forgotten. This is evidenced by the national initiatives and
organisations that are actively working in this area. The STEM landscape, however, is
crowded, and key challenges remain in identifying those with proven practices and
approaches upon which to build and avoiding duplication of effort. A key success was
the work of the STEM Cohesion Programme (NFER, 2011), led by the National
STEM Centre, which brought together a range of key organisations to undertake the
co-ordinated delivery of activity but within an overarching framework:
“During its lifetime, the STEM cohesion programme has acted as a key driver in the
development of communications and relationships between organisations with a STEM
agenda. Its creation provided impetus for stakeholders to work collaboratively, united by a
shared ambition to improve the availability and coordination of STEM related information
and provision. Evaluation evidence has demonstrated the impact of this work.”
The need for organisations and entities with a sound knowledge of existing evidence-
based practices and who are able to broker and initiate collaborations is often under-
estimated and offers enormous value if we are to bring greater coherence and
efficiency to policy agendas.
67 A key priority for the sector must be a focus upon evidence informed practice, and
several organisations, the National STEM Centre, National HE STEM Programme, and
the Royal Academy of Engineering are particularly active in this area in an attempt to
identify those practices with proven impact. The focus should not necessarily be
upon funding further external evaluation, but more upon ensuring a robust internal
evaluation is appropriately embedded within all projects and work; the emphasis
should be upon building capability within the STEM sector in this area.
16 December 2011
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New Engineering Foundation (NEF) – Written evidence
1 The main point that the New Engineering Foundation would want to contribute to this
inquiry is that a major focus for Higher education in STEM subjects is further education
– an area rather overlooked by the questions set for respondents. It is a significant area
in influencing the supply of undergraduates – and is doubly significant in view of the
critical importance of technical proficiency to the future of STEM industry.
2 To the extent that the STEM problem in the UK is a problem of graduate supply, there
are some important current drivers:
a) The market may address the issue to a limited degree: the trebling of fees is
already impacting on recruitment: UCAS data in November 2011 indicates overall
applications are down by 12%+, but the demand for STEM courses holds steadier.
Maybe more young people are making straight cost/ benefit appraisals of the value to
them of a degree
b) The HE curriculum faces the wrong way: Higher Education continues to create
an undergraduate curriculum based on the interests and expertise of existing staff, an
approach which is nebulous, piecemeal and incoherent in relation to STEM industry
needs. There is a need to connect research and practice better with each other
across HE
c) Non-STEM Post-graduate employment attracts STEM graduates: many
other industries, notably finance, find STEM graduates attractive and succeed in
making things mutual with attractive employment packages
d) The quality of schools science: is restricted by the relatively low numbers of
chemistry and physics graduates who go into teaching and by a curriculum and
qualifications system fixated on passing exams and school league table status above
capacity for later progress. The recent OFSTED report identifies the full range of
problems holding science back
e) Careers advice and guidance is poor: the institutional focus of schools militates
against effective careers guidance, compounded by the lack of available alternative
expertise either one-to-one or well-supported online
f) Ingenuity is not encouraged: the key to STEM success is to inculcate ingenuity in
the young. The school curriculum and its obsession with certificates is not the means
to provide what is needed. Creativity is seen as ‘time off for projects’ where it should
be the cornerstone of all learning and all classes
g) The EBacc is not a solution: the EBacc prescribes a curriculum largely similar to
the one proposed in 1904, both for scope of subjects and reason for their inclusion.
This may mean science and maths retain their prominence but will also mean
relegating applying ideas to practice to an also-ran event for the less able.
h) Maths remains a major weakness: the key to which is how it is taught in
primary schools and the capacity of teachers to develop mathematical thinkers as
opposed to mastering the tricks to perform SATs. (Professor Shayler found (2006)
that the cognitive abilities for 11 year-olds had declined over the period in which the
SAT results had improved).
i) Learning is the key: there is too much of an emphasis on knowledge as
information and too little emphasis on knowledge as the key to ingenuity via
understanding and applying what is known in new situations – the creative process.
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Active learning is the key to the new teaching model that is urgently needed in
education
j) Hitting targets, missing points: the QAA tends to exacerbate the problem by
emphasising the output measures and conditioning HE Institutions to priorities these,
replicating the problems with schools
3 There are some encouraging developments:
a) Higher level apprenticeships could open up new pathways: to producing the

skills and expertise needed to drive STEM industries forward – though it is doubtful
these would be a pathway to conventional models of STEM graduates based on
narrower academic credentials
b) Vocation may drive demand: if STEM industries are seen as a safer bet than most
for the future (an intended outcome of much current economic policy) it is possible
more young people will make better use of both the traditional A – Level and the
less traditional BTEC / similar route to access higher level training. This may also
mean more people seeing less value in A levels as degree places become too costly
versus potential benefits
c) Opening up opportunities helps: a Sussex Sixth Form College has pioneered
teaching strategies for secondary school biologists to teach physics and chemistry
better, seeing a major rise in these subjects as A-level courses as a result; a Northern
Ireland FE College has created a unique STEM centre to encourage primary school
children to develop an interest in science, applications of science and careers in
science
4 STEM subjects: we need a broader rather than a narrower definition. In simple school
subject terms, the list is small – biology, chemistry, maths and elements of IT. It is far
wider in further education spanning everything form forensics and ecology to artificial
intelligence and marine engineering. And it is just as wide in HE. The problem with the
‘subjects’ approach is infinite regress into debate about things like ‘geography’,
‘psychology’, ‘design’ and so on. A better approach may be to define what we mean by
STEM skills: ingenuity, logical reasoning, analysing and synthesising knowledge, practical
intelligence and so on. It might then be possible to see a school curriculum for example
that produced these things deliberately.
5 STEM jobs are: those occupations that are needed by STEM industries and are
undertaken by STEM entrepreneurs. These industries include all types of engineering,
pharmaceuticals, chemicals, life sciences, information technology, energy and major parts
of the food, education and transport industries. STEM jobs are a subset of the much
larger set of jobs in these industries.
11 December 2011
535
Jennifer Newman, London South Bank University, Will Evans, Imperial College London, Fabio
Fiorelli, University College London, Adam Hawken, University College London and Amran
Hussain, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust – Oral evidence (QQ 313-347)
Jennifer Newman, London South Bank University, Will Evans,

Imperial College London, Fabio Fiorelli, University College London,
Adam Hawken, University College London and Amran Hussain,
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust – Oral evidence (QQ 313-
347)
536
Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) – Written evidence
General questions
a. What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?
1. In schools and colleges, STEM subjects encompass a wide range of courses that include
the long-established disciplines of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology as well as
a range of other sciences such as geology, environmental science and applied science.
Alongside the traditional, established science and mathematics subjects are newer design
and technology (D&T) subjects, in particular electronics, systems and control, computer
aided design and manufacture, product or industrial design, and aspects of food science.
Engineering, which is associated with D&T at school level, is often taught at National
Diploma, GCSE and A level by engineering graduates and D&T teachers. Information and
communication technology (ICT) also makes a contribution to STEM, especially in
relation to the development of programming skills and knowledge of systems and
robotics.
2. Qualifications in AS and A-level mathematics and further mathematics incorporate

combinations of some or all of the following branches of mathematics: pure mathematics,
mechanics, statistics and discrete mathematics. A core of pure mathematics is common
to all qualifications that have mathematics in their title. Further mathematics is a fast-
growing subject at AS and A level, in part due to the success of the Further Mathematics
Network. It provides a much stronger grounding than a single A-level in mathematics for
higher education study of mathematics and some other degree subjects such as
computing, physics and engineering. While some students choose to study A-level
mathematics to become mathematicians; others select it to aid their learning in another
subject such as physics; and some do not study mathematics at all despite its importance
in the post-18 study of their chosen subject, such as chemistry. An additional
mathematics qualification has been developed explicitly to support the Level 3 diploma in
engineering. Free standing mathematics qualifications (FSMQs) provide a useful additional
qualifications but take-up is not as wide as it might be.
3. A simple definition of a STEM job might be a job that requires knowledge and skills
relating to one or more of the STEM subjects. However, the skills of STEM graduates,
including their analytical and problem-solving skills, make them attractive to a wide range
of careers and not just STEM careers.
b. Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used
4. One aspect of demand for STEM graduates which is not mentioned explicitly in the
questions posed by the Committee is the supply into the teaching profession. High-
quality teaching by knowledgeable up-to-date subject specialists pre- and post-16 has a
significant positive impact on uptake post-16. The converse also holds true: poor quality
teaching, including by specialists, and weak subject expertise (subject knowledge and
subject-specific pedagogy) has a detrimental effect on students’ achievement and their
interest in continuing with the subject.
537
5. STEM subjects have traditionally been identified as shortage or priority subjects in initial
teacher education (ITE), attracting additional funding for secondary trainees and the
introduction of a number of subject knowledge enhancement courses to develop
relevant subject knowledge prior to training. Because the last three ITE inspection
frameworks have not emphasised the quality of secondary ITE within different subject
areas, Ofsted has little evidence to provide about quality. However, the current
consultation on the new ITE Framework, which is being developed for introduction from
September 2012, includes proposals to introduce a rolling programme of subject
inspections as part of the new framework. In 2007 and 2008, Ofsted conducted a
number of monitoring visits to the subject knowledge enhancement courses in
mathematics and science. The calibre and commitment of trainees was generally high, but
the level to which their mathematics was developed varied from one provider to the
next.
6. Ofsted’s report Mathematics: understanding the score raised concerns about the subject-
specific pedagogical skills of many secondary mathematics teachers as well as the subject
knowledge of non-specialist teachers. 264 A recommendation in the report that all trainee
teachers should receive subject knowledge enhancement has had limited impact.
7. Analysis by the TDA of census data from 2008 shows the match of ITE entrants’ first
degree with their chosen specialism. The percentages of direct or related-subject
matches were 90.6% for biology, 94.8% for chemistry, 88.5% for physics, but only 77.3%
for mathematics. (The 2010 data does not allow such an analysis.) While subject
knowledge enhancement courses in mathematics have enabled a significant number of
non-specialist graduates to train subsequently as specialist teachers, the varying subject-
specific demand of the courses mean that not all trainees are equipped with the subject
knowledge to teach on advanced-level mathematics courses.
8. The government’s new ITT strategy implementation plan offers graduates who have first-
class degrees in physics, chemistry, mathematics and modern foreign languages
significantly better financial incentives to train as teachers. Trainees will receive a bursary
of up to £20,000 in their training year – more than double the current maximum of
£9,000. However, those with third class or ordinary degrees will receive no funding. This
represents approximately 1/6 of mathematics trainees in 2008, yet it is likely that these
teachers know significantly more mathematics than those entering ITE from non-
specialist routes. Not enough mathematics graduates currently enter the teaching
profession. If all students are to continue with mathematics when 11-18 education
becomes the expectation, as is the norm in many other countries, more mathematics
teachers will be required.
16-18 supply
a. Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and
264 Mathematics: understanding the score, (070063), Ofsted, 2008; www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/070063
538
9. Note: a recent study by the Institute for Engineers (author Professor Matthew Harrison)
on behalf of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has set out much of
the data relating to STEM progression and the uptake of STEM qualifications.
10. National shortages of engineers at all levels 265 , and particularly at technician level, suggest
that not enough students are choosing technology and engineering-related studies.
However, while the previous government set targets for A-level entries in science
subjects and mathematics, none was set for other STEM subjects. Entries in mathematics
have risen sharply in the last few years, recovering from the sharp fall that followed the
introduction of Curriculum 2000 and rising further so that the target set for 2014 has
needed to be revised upwards as it has already been met.266 While numbers studying AS
and A-level mathematics have increased, some questions need to be asked about
students’ readiness for A-level study. The change from three to two GCSE tiers has
lessened the amount of algebra assessed at GCSE, leading some sixth-form teachers to
comment that sixth-form students are less well prepared algebraically than previously. A
further issue is the growth of early GCSE entry which is not leading to the highest grades
for all of the most able students. Occasionally, students cease studying mathematics if
they have reached an A*-C grade, or switch to studying statistics in Year 11. Both these
scenarios bring a discontinuity in learning mathematics which can impede uptake of and
success with A-level mathematics.
11. STEM courses, rather than the numbers of students studying them, are well represented
in the post-16 sectors of education and training. National data show that around a third
of all the qualifications achieved by learners in further education and sixth-form colleges
in England in 2009/10 were in STEM subjects. Science courses, mainly at intermediate and
advanced levels were taken by 18% of the STEM learners.
12. Ofsted recently published the results of a survey of good practice in science in post-16
colleges (Improving science in colleges, Ofsted, October 2011). Analysis of the national
data shows that in 2009/10 around 6% of all FE enrolments in science were at entry or
foundation levels compared with 20% at intermediate level and 74% at advanced level.
The colleges visited in the survey had very little foundation provision. Pathways below
advanced level for students in the sciences were still under-developed compared to
other subjects. At A level, 25% of all science qualifications nationally are taught in FE267 ,
mainly (but not exclusively) in sixth-form colleges; some GFE colleges have successful A-
level provision. In sixth-form colleges, A-level biology, chemistry and physics courses
often recruit well but take-up for applied science, electronics, geology and environmental
science is small, even in the largest colleges. Occasionally, AS or A-level science in
society is offered to broaden learners' programmes, but uptake is again small. Similar
numbers overall of male and female students study A-level biology, chemistry and
physics, but this masks the marked gender differences in biology and physics. Roughly
twice as many females than males take biology and more than four times as many males
than females study physics. The gender balance in chemistry, applied science and geology
is broadly even.
265 These national shortages are widely reported. For example, see P Patel, R Bohorquez and C Scott, ‘Market alert:
engineering and project management shortage likely to severely affect development costs and viability’, Cambridge Energy
Research Associates Capital Costs Analysis Forum, 2007; Education for a technologically advanced nation: Design and
Technology in schools 2004/7, Ofsted June 2008; Meeting the challenge: demand and supply of engineers in the UK,
Institution of Mechanical Engineers, September 2011
266 See DfE and BIS statistical first releases on the research and statistics gateway
267 FE STEM data project; July 2011 report. Royal Academy of Engineers
539
13. Careers advice given to Key Stage 4 students in schools about STEM progression post-16
is not always impartial or well informed so that students who would benefit from a wider
choice of subjects or vocational provision do not find out enough information to make
sensible choices. 268 School sixth forms normally offer a limited level 3 programme in
science, typically biology, chemistry and physics. In schools and colleges, careers advice
to students on advanced STEM courses is often focused on medicine, dentistry,
veterinary science and the pure sciences. Teachers and careers advisers do not
consistently have the expertise to advise on the plethora of other career routes in
STEM. This is discussed in Improving science in colleges and in STEM Careers Review
(November 2010): Holman J and P Finegold, Report to the Gatsby Charitable
Foundation.
14. A long-standing discrepancy, not limited to STEM subjects, is the way outcomes are
calculated in schools and colleges. A-level pass rates for science and mathematics in
schools, which are usually high, represent those who completed the qualification
successfully. This contrasts with success rates in colleges which are calculated by
multiplying the retention rate (that is, the proportion of those who complete the course,
compared to those who started two years previously) by the pass rate. This makes FE
look less successful. Recent research shows that retention in A-level mathematics is
clearly an issue in school sixth forms and is under-reported.269 Moreover, weak success
rates in colleges carry funding penalties, but schools receive no such sanction.
15. In D&T, the root of the problem lies in pre-16 provision. The proportion of Key Stage 4
students who study GCSE D&T has fallen steadily in the last decade to 36% in 2011.
Although a wider range of qualifications has become available during recent years, the
proportion of students studying such courses has not been sufficient to stem the overall
flow away from the study of technology. While this is a global trend, research 270 evidence
indicates some nations are moving forward in tackling STEM, investing in technology
infrastructure and in promoting the take-up of student programmes and robotics courses
in parts of the United States, Hungary, Khazakstan, Malaysia, China and, at HE, in India.
16. Knowledge of developments in modern and smart materials271 , the use of computers to
aid the design and manufacture of products and their use by different industrial sectors is
integrated into GCSE and A-level courses in engineering and D&T (particularly product
design, resistant materials, graphic design, electronics, and systems and control).
Depending on the units chosen, it also forms part of the study for National Diploma
courses in engineering and manufacturing. The proportion of girls undertaking study of
these courses is much lower than boys, reflecting embedded attitudes to gender
stereotyping which Ofsted’s survey 272 found is being challenged, although with limited
success in some schools.
268 Paragraph 88 in Ofsted’s October 2011 survey report ‘Improving science in Colleges’, and also our rapid response
published survey from 2010 on guidance for pupils taking science.
269 A Noyes and P Sealey; Investigating participation in Advanced level mathematics: a study of student drop-out. Research
Papers in Education volume 27(1)

270 Evidence gathered through research and meetings with members of the international technology education community
and the Eurydice network at the National Foundation for Educational Research. See also paragraph 128, ‘Meeting
technological challenges? Design and technology in schools 2007-10’. Ofsted, March 2011, No. 100121.
271 Smart materials are those that respond to their environment in some way.
272 Girls’ Careers Aspirations, Ofsted April 2011
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17. Low entries in electronics and systems and control are a concern. In 2007, of the
320,000 students who entered GCSE D&T examinations, only 4.5% opted for electronic
products and just 2.9% for systems and control examinations. By 2010 this had declined
to 4.3% of entries for electronics and 2.2% for systems and control. The latest Ofsted
D&T report, Meeting technological challenges? states that, in a third of the secondary
schools inspected, the teaching of D&T made too little use of electronics, systems and
control, or learning about modern and smart materials.273 Consequently the schools did
not provide students aged 14-19 with opportunities to learn about electronics, systems
and control or to access further courses or examinations in these subjects. This is
because many teachers lacked the knowledge to teach these aspects of the D&T
curriculum to Key Stage 3 students (11-14 years). Schools generally had not made
sufficient use of subject-specific training to enable teachers to continually refresh and
develop their practice to teach the technologically challenging and more modern parts of
the curriculum and to stay up to date with developments in research and innovation.
Consequently, the report concluded that outdated D&T curriculum provision in schools
at Key Stage 3 made a big contribution to students choosing not to continue the subject
at age 14-19.
b. What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of
18. In recent years, initiatives to increase take-up in science and modern languages in Key
Stage 4, and the inclusion of these subjects in performance measures, may have had
unintended consequences on entry rates in some other subjects. Timetabling pressures
of additional courses in science and modern languages may have led some schools to
limit the opportunities that some higher-ability students have to choose to study D&T.
The decreasing trend at age 14-16 is beginning to feed through to A-level entries, which
showed a slight fall during the period 2009-11 although attainment remained steady.
19. Recent changes to the secondary science curriculum have been largely positive. Science
in Years 7 and 8 is much more focused on ‘finding things out’ and establishing the
evidence for scientific assertions. The numbers of students taking three separate sciences
at GCSE is increasing, in part because schools must offer this option to students who
attain National Curriculum Level 6 at the end of Key Stage 3. In addition, the cessation of
national Key Stage 3 science tests has resulted in the majority of schools beginning to
teach GCSE programmes during Year 9. 274 This additional time allows a reasonable
proportion of practical investigation in each of the three sciences and enables many
students to retain a wider Key Stage 4 programme. The double-award GCSE
qualification, which contains two thirds of the programmes of study for each of biology,
chemistry and physics, remains an adequate preparation for A-level study. About 70,000
students in 2011 (of the whole cohort of about 550,000 Year 11 students) were awarded
a BTEC first qualification (the equivalent of two GCSEs at grade C). In total, 350,000
students gained two or more GCSEs in science at grade C or better; this proportion has
been fairly steady for the past few years. About 45,000 students go on to study one or
more of the A-level sciences, and a further 6,000 study level 3 BTEC applied science.
273 Meeting technological challenges? Design and technology in schools 2007-10. Ofsted 2011.
274 Successful science, Ofsted January 2011, and ongoing retrieval from current science survey work.
541
20. Despite the recent increases in the numbers of students choosing A-level sciences and
mathematics, it is of concern that too many high-attaining students do not continue to
study science and/or mathematics post-16. The supply of suitably qualified students from
Key Stage 4 is higher than ever. Ofsted has no evidence that any student has been turned
away from post-16 science courses because of a lack of suitably qualified teachers. Post-
16 provision overall has the capacity to manage a substantial further increase in numbers
of students studying science. It would appear that gaining the higher GCSE grades is a
necessary but not sufficient guarantee of progression to further science study. Recent
DfE work (2009: Ref: 00461-2009PDF-EN-04) on progression in science concluded that
the quality of teaching lay at the heart of good progression rates. Ofsted’s survey
evidence confirms that students who choose science do so because they enjoy learning it
in Key Stage 4, find it interesting in its own right, and relish their developing ability to
explain phenomena. Further work might reveal the relative importance of students’
intrinsic interest in the subject and the extrinsic motivation of ‘needing’ a science
qualification for a proposed future career.
21. Concern has been expressed that some schools use BTEC courses in applied science as a
route to raise their status in performance tables. A recent Ofsted survey 275 found very
few schools providing BTEC exclusively; anecdotal evidence from recent science survey
work suggests a reduction in the BTEC entry, with it being offered to students who
might most benefit from the ‘all coursework’ assessment scheme. However, schools that
offer BTEC level 2 rarely have a clear idea of how such students might progress further
in science at 16.
22. A serious concern in mathematics at GCSE and A level is the prevalence of teaching that
enables students to pass examinations and gain qualifications but which does not secure
the conceptual understanding that underpins good problem-solving skills and confident
application of methods to unfamiliar contexts. Thus students are not all well equipped
for the next stage in their education. Moreover, following changes in the tiering structure
of GCSE mathematics, some schools do not emphasise algebra as much as used to be the
case for the former more demanding higher tier GCSE. Ofsted’s visits to two successful
FE institutions showed that many of their A-level mathematics students had benefited
from studying extra qualifications such as additional mathematics or free standing
mathematics qualifications. The recent report by the Institute of Physics, Mind the gap,
speaks of the benefits of further mathematics for those students studying physics at
university. Because the demand of A-level mathematics has been eased over the last
decade, and particularly during the last few years, the role of further mathematics is
growing in importance in ensuring students are well equipped to study degrees with
demanding levels of mathematical content. Universities, however, do not always explain
the value of further mathematics for such courses.
c. What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM
23. The English Baccalaureate should not make a significant difference to the supply of
students capable of continuing to advanced-level study of science and mathematics, as
most such students already study the required equivalents of two science GCSEs and
mathematics. However, a consequence of emphasising ‘academic’ study of science at the
275 Guidance for Students studying science, Ofsted May 2010. (A rapid response survey of 50 schools and 2,000 pupils)
542
expense of ‘vocational’ may be to underplay the potential success that students could
gain at level 3 and beyond by pursuing a suitably rigorous vocational route. At level 3 and
higher, such science courses are highly rated by users. Anecdotal evidence from recent
survey work suggests that students who are eligible for free school meals are found in
disproportionately higher numbers in science vocational courses.
24. In contrast with the position in mathematics and science, other subject-survey visits to
schools during the last two terms show that the English Baccalaureate is already having
an impact on students’ Key Stage 4 option choices with most schools reporting fewer
Year 10 students taking D&T courses in September 2011. It is likely that this will
exacerbate the downward trend in A-level D&T entries.
The Committee’s remaining questions fall outside of Ofsted’s remit and

therefore we submit no comments on them.
16 December 2011
543
Open Engineering Solutions – Written evidence
1 Introduction
1.1 This paper is a response by the Open Engineering Solutions to the House of Lords
Science and Technology Sub-Committee. An inquiry into higher education in STEM subjects
(science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Firstly - to be competitive in
international industry the UK Government needs to raise the standards of education in
reading, writing and arithmetic – to improve the different forms of early intervention at
different stages in a child’s early year’s development. And introduce STEM education in
primary schools for young children.
1.2 To date, there hasn’t been enough done at grass root level to protect STEM related
subjects at foundation level - there has also been a substantial fall in the number of pupils
taking GCSE in Information Communication Technology (ICT). Ian Livingstone, the life
president of games publisher Square Enix, has been pushing hard for the introduction of
computer science to the national curriculum, and since some of these issues are now being
addressed, which is often isolated resulting into gender gap, youth unemployment, and skills
shortage – hence, inequalities and young people being excluded from STEM careers.
Secondly – a recent article published recently by Nick Gibb, he said: 1,300 schools failing in
basics 276 .
1.3 Nevertheless - there are prospects for educational reform even with the current
economic constraint – therefore, the Government needs to reinvest in the education system
and take on recommendations as to how STEM can be implemented better in schools, to
improve early year’s settings. Open Engineering Solutions are carrying out a research - STEM
survey here: www.surveymonkey.com/s/KVZHPNY to investigate and help with tackling
some of these issues, in terms of gender gap, skills shortages with youth unemployment – we
are hoping to publish the results in April 2012.
1.4 Open Engineering Solutions is a Social Enterprise: www.open-engineering-

solutions.co.uk that creates and designs software solutions in the delivery of Science,
Engineering, & Technology, to improve education for all children & young people and their
families. We are committed and passionate about delivering STEM education to children and
young people – and maintain best practice. We want all children & young people to access
education, through our technical solutions. Open Engineering Solutions is one of the only
Community & Voluntary sector that is designed to be resilient (we don’t rely on funding –
it’s based on a network of professional’s) and independent from the current economic
climate. We analyse and assess different learning styles for young people, whether young
people with learning disabilities or non-learning disabilities. We are always continuing to find
better ways of engaging children & young people into STEM through visual objects, visual
expressions, sound and communication needs. In our last publication we were looking into
better services for young people, submitted
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmeduc/writev/744/syp115.ht
m to the Education Select committee. We pointed out that “Research shows there are
currently over half a million people in the UK with autism” – that’s around 1 in 100 people
our solution can support – and we are already in talks with Sir Charles Parsons Schools.
276 Nick Gibb - http://news.uk.msn.com/uk/1300-schools-failing-in-basics-19
544
1.5 Additionally, skills for people, Newcastle are running a pilot scheme that will support
children & young people with their families with learning difficulties – these are the
incentives we would like to see providers being involved with – we are teaming up with skills
for people and the feedback on ground is that.
1.6 Young people with learning disabilities are using technology in schools such as Facebook
on iPhones, but most schools haven’t been encouraged to use other technologies such as
computer science (mobile apps), that will enable them to gain workforce skills in
programming.
1.7 Consequently, these schools could be missing out from being Digitally Inclusive. Also, the
US are reporting some similarities with the UK STEM – “Students from elementary school
through college are learning on laptops and have access to smartphone apps for virtually everything
imaginable, but they are not learning the basic computer-related technology that makes all those
gadgets work. Some organizations are partnering with universities to change that.” 277
1.8 Obviously, there is a problem with the way UK deliver their current national curriculum
into mainstream schools – even Michael Gove has stated publically the need for computer
science to be taught in schools 278 . There are concerns that the Government have not yet
come up with a workable framework and solution, that will support the UK Education
system, including Sure Start Centres.
1.9 Open Engineering Solutions have identified a few specific failings in the early stage of Sure
Start planning, especially the foundation learning targeting the disadvantaged group. For
example – we were involved with the shaping of Sure Start 0-12 year old service planning
and delivery in Newcastle. Presently, we feel there is already a fundamental problem of how
it will be delivered across the children centres in the City, for instance STEM hasn’t been
incorporated within the new Sure Start model, remember these are services for children
and their families and its essential for STEM to be included at the early stage of planning, and
for the economic interest of young children. If their educators pre-empt early year’s
foundation and learning, one would expect STEM to be at the grass root level of Sure Start –
its inequality, if we only find STEM Clubs in mainstream schools.
2.0 Staffs across local authority, not just teachers at both a national and local level, on
support for early year’s formation - should understand the vital role they play in skills and
learning delivery. Taking into account all different skills, it’s been reported that some staff’s
and teachers lack basic understanding of technology skills, which may prevent effective STEM
delivery. A report: Britain's economic rebuilding and teenagers' job prospects put at risk by ICT
teachers lacking key skills, inspectors find 279 Ofsted. Thus, the government must come up with a
plan to address roles, tasks, responsibilities and skills. Local Government – are at the core of
commissioning , therefore they should play a fair role in commissioning and extending
services to professional partners and eliminate barriers - how do small Voluntary &
Community sector (VCS) maintain being at the forefront of promoting STEM to children and
young people and their family’s needs? – If local Government continues to commission
services to the same providers, then get the same results and no improvement.
277 D.A. Barber, Overhauling Computer Science Education, 12/05/11 http://thejournal.com/Articles/2011/12/05/Overhauling-

Computer-Science-Education.aspx
278 Keith Stuart – Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/06/michael-gove-computer-science
279 Ofsted http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/ict-schools-2008-11
545
2.1 The Public Accounts Select Committee (PASC) said: “Confusion reigns around the Big
Society because there is no coherent implementation plan and small charities face significant
barriers in getting contracts and delivering services, the Public Accounts Select Committee
(PASC)” 280 .
2.3 Again, VCS make the most difference in innovation and effective work in public services.
In addition to the Public Accounts Committee’s statement above, small VCS have discovered
that their ideas have been isolated and they struggle while trying to help with tackling socio-
economic problems affecting children & young people from taking up a STEM subjects. Even
with a skill-intensive economy schools, colleges and families within their community are keen
on engaging small VCS to deliver innovative services to support their needs and hence
prevent young people from becoming disadvantaged from accessing STEM education.
Likewise even with lack of funding some small VCS are willing to engage with schools and
young people, with their great technology idea’s, but are often disadvantaged. However –
another fundamental issue is that we are not preparing our youths with workforce skills to
those whom wish to progress into employment.
2.4 The mismatch seems to be buried within implementation and how we prepare children &
young people into STEM education at an early age. There have been talks about scrapping
Mickey Mouse courses at University’s – which will be good on a short term base, as it will
move young people towards taking up STEM subjects and help with the growing skill
shortage.
2.5 And for the unemployed youth, there are solutions, such as, mobile Apps for
programming course provided by some VCS. So, kids are now being taught how to code
through small VCS, but also schools need to take on their responsibilities and teach children
how to code.
2.6 In terms of graduates, end up working in jobs that do not require a STEM degree - it
depends on the level at which the graduate takes on a STEM job and their interest – if the
graduate is opting for professional registration, i.e., Chartered status, and then a STEM
degree is sufficient.
2.7 The Apprenticeship scheme - fantastic scheme – a work-based learning programme – but
for instance - many youths are not sure about what they are signing up to – and the impact
of the recession is causing inequalities amongst the youth.
2.8 And there are jobs available within the science engineering, including the technology
sector, but no one to do the job, because the youths lack workforce skills.
2.9 The economic deprivation - a lot of young people believe the current education reform
is failing them, especially with the tuition fee crisis and cuts. Hence young people are finding
going to university as a challenge in today’s society.
3 Open Engineering Solutions Recommendation & Vision
280Public Accounts Select Committee (PASC) ‘Big Society isn't helping the 'little society'
http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=18302&utm_source=web&utm_medium=twitter
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3.1 Open Engineering Solutions believe the way forward is, first - tackle the root causes –
yes, there are 1 in 5 youth’s not in education, employment or training (NEET) – but are we
ensuring that these issues we have with our youth won’t be repeated with early learners?
For instance, although the Sure Start Newcastle, has been recently reshaped, but there are
concerns with its model – it does not take account of STEM as indicated above – therefore,
invest in STEM Clubs with skilled STEM staff’s within Sure Starts children centres.
3.2 Consequently, the main impact of the recession have been the increase in youth
unemployment, and lack of workforce skills – therefore, better intelligence on how to deal
with problems of youth unemployment, with respect to designing work based learning
programmes.
3.3 Develop young children with work readiness – equip children with early skills to use
later on in life – example, a recent publication on how the Government in response to a
video game NESTA report 281 – is currently reviewing the National Curriculum to get pupils
to learn computer science and how to code at an early age.
3.4 Therefore - teaching computer science in schools isn’t simply only about learning to
code. It’s also aimed at developing computation (logic), employability, creativity, strategic
thinking and problem solving too. Thus, computer science skills should be implemented
across mainstream primary schools and children centres, to avoid the problems the youth
face today. Work readiness for early learners, will also be vital to when the Government
Raises the Participation Age (RPA) – the minimum age at which young people can leave
education or training to 17 in 2013.
3.5 The Government needs to reinvest in ‘Sandwich’ degrees and make Sandwich degrees
compulsory to all University subjects not just a few subjects. And compulsory for all young
students that enrol unto a University degree – after all - it will prevent graduates becoming
NEET and produce a skilled workforce – Sandwich by the way is very similar to an
Apprenticeship programme – the difference is that students undertake a placement year in
industry, normally after the second year at university.
3.6 Collaboration, develop effective channels to improve partnership working - Ensuring

stakeholders, practitioners and partners to local Government within the local community
work together to strengthen STEM education to a wider community, especially amongst the
ethnic minorities, as this will help with skills shortage problem - an important factor for
strengthening the economy. As, “University recruitment to some STEM subject areas
continues to prove a major challenge, so much so that most STEM subjects are identified as
“strategically important and vulnerable subjects”. Thus, the need to expand and improve
relationship-building skills in the VCS between ethnic minorities delivering STEM services
with non-ethnic minorities. A report by Sir John Holman is Professor in the Chemistry
Department at the University of York, Senior Fellow for Education at the Wellcome Trust
and former National STEM Director said:
“STEM qualifications open the door to a rich choice of fulfilling and well-paid careers, but not all
young people realise this. Often, it is students from less privileged backgrounds who have most to
281 NESTA http://www.nesta.org.uk/news_and_features/assets/features/next_gen_skills
547
gain by choosing to study STEM, yet it is often they who are least aware of the opportunities this
brings.” 282
3.7 In extending provision further, there are a number of areas where action can be taken
including: connecting small VCS with policy makers; and identify small VCS that promote
innovation and alternative work base methodologies283 .
3.8 Increased action to the raising the profile of STEM at local and national level; and
ensuring the quality of training and support are available.
3.9 Greater emphasis on innovation and best practice – Open Engineering Solutions has
invented a solution inspired by key Stage 2, which will now be used to help the youth.
16 December 2011
282 Sir John Holman, Professor in the Chemistry Department at the University of York, Senior Fellow for Education at the
Wellcome Trust and former National STEM Director -
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/cei/news/good_timing_stem_careers_2.pdf
283 TSRC - Little Big Societies: micro-mapping of organisations operating Below the Radar -
http://www.tsrc.ac.uk/Research/BelowtheRadarBtR/Micromapping/tabid/563/Default.aspx
548
Open University – Written evidence
1. We welcome the recognition afforded to part time higher education and the parity of
support now offered to part time students. Our student population is predominantly
work based and studying for career reasons; the knowledge and skills they acquire
are immediately applicable in the workplace with obvious benefits to the national
economy. Our wide portfolio of part-time flexible study routes contributes, to
lifelong learning and the professional development STEM employees across the four
UK nations. Uniquely, we offer high quality STEM education and training on scale
through online tools and learning.
2. The precise definition of STEM boundaries is extremely difficult in a society in which

the exploitation of technologies underpins most daily activities. Academic staff at The
Open University work across traditional discipline boundaries in their teaching and
research activity and, equally, we recognise that our students work in
multidisciplinary environments. We recommend that the STEM boundary is drawn
broadly to encompass subjects such as computing.
16-18 Supply
3. The OU’s students are predominantly adult part time learners, thus we propose to
take a broader view on student supply. We deliver significant impact by re-skilling,
upskilling and enriching the capabilities of the existing workforce. Analyses of the
scientific and engineering workforce conducted by COGENT and other STEM
focused Sector Skills Council’s paint a picture of an ageing population in many
economically critical industries. New 16-18 year old entrants to STEM via traditional
HE routes require several years to enter the workforce. Consequently, increasing
the capacity of the existing workforce is as much a priority as the recruitment of new
graduates. Aggregate registrations (England and NI) on STEM courses have increased
from 15,400FTE in 08/09 to 19,300 in the current year. Fig 1 provides a break down
by subject classification.
Programme 10/11 Undergraduate Module

Counts FTEs
MCT Design and Engineering 9,059 1,867

MCT Mathematics and Statistics 13,635 3,763
MCT Undergraduate Computing and IT 15,176 3,665
OUBS U/g Business & Profess Develop 4,711 666
SCIE Analytical Sciences Awd Group 9 2
SCIE Environmental Science Awd Grp 573 225
SCIE Geosciences Award Group 3,076 774
SCIE Health Sciences Award Group 4,991 1,118
SCIE Life Sciences Award Group 1,858 498
SCIE Molecular Science Award Group 1,082 273
SCIE Natural Sciences Award Group 5,690 1,833
SCIE Physical Science Award Group 2,331 637
549
SCIE Science 316 26

SCIE Science Short Courses Awd Grp 13,598 1,135
SSCI Env Dev & International Studs 2,753 1,372
SSCI Social Sciences 2,633 859
Total 92,733 21,266
4. Employers report positively on the motivation and self organisational skills shown by
OU graduates over and above the inherent value of their enhanced subject based
knowledge and skills. It is imperative that in an environment where the contribution
made by graduates will rise, that we also incentivise employer contributions.
Investment through off-quota students for example should be reconsidered and
encouraged. Employer co-funded places will be of particular interest to younger
students, 18-24 year olds being the fastest growing age cohort for The Open
University.
5. Through our Young Applicants in Schools Scheme (YASS:

www8.open.ac.uk/choose/yass/), 4000 students in 600 schools nationally study Open
University modules, the majority opting for STEM subjects to help them bridge
between school and university level study. The majority currently progress to full
time study at conventional institutions. Thus the OU is playing a role in both the 16-
18 supply chain and in fulfilment of HE qualification aspirations.
6. Demand shows that higher education provision should be geared to mechanisms that
allow people to change direction, or update and increase their skills levels, at any
point in their career. The Open University’s extensive STEM provision performs this
function and is used by 20,000 FTE students each year to meet their aspirations for
initial qualifications, career progression and change. A credit based higher education
where students are free to move their credits between institutions would further
enhance the potential for such flexibility.
7. The quality and impact of HE STEM provision is also critical, and integration with the
professional requirements of STEM professional bodies creates a framework relevant
to qualification and professional experience including the Institutes of Physics, Royal
Chemical Society Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute Engineering
and Technology is necessary to . The university is also consistently ranked in the top
three for student satisfaction, currently 93% between Oxford and Cambridge.
Graduate Supply
8. We note employer’s views on the value of STEM graduates in both specialist and
generic roles 284 . The Open University is engaged in partnership with National Skills
Academies in the development and delivery of modules that support acquisition of
employer identified professional skills by graduates in their early years of
employment 285 . Similarly, The Open University’s Engineering programme enables
progression from BEng to MEng and thus to Chartership whilst in employment.
Following investment in employer engagement systems following the Leitch Review,
these programmes are achieving increased attention by employers. The structures
284 Building for Growth, CBI/EDI (2011): www.cbi.org.uk/media/1051530/cbi_edi_education_skills _survey_2011.pdf.

285 Certificate of Nuclear Professionalism: http://www.nuclear.nsacademy.co.uk/services/certificate-nuclear-professionalism.
550
and systems that have been developed can be deployed to support initial graduate
development in other subject domains.
9. In addition to employers not currently having sufficient young STEM graduates for
their needs, it is intrinsic to most of the STEM subjects that new skills gaps will arise
over STEM graduates’ careers. Likewise, individuals might only discover their need
for HE STEM knowledge and skills once in the workplace, and after graduating
through a conventional route. How these circumstances can be addressed under the
new funding system should be an area of consideration for the Sub-Committee.
10. We would welcome support for students who are STEM graduates seeking to return
to STEM employment following career breaks or prolonged employment in non-
STEM roles. The Open University is a major provider meeting this important need,
with high quality teaching delivered where, when and how students want, often
alongside work and family commitments.
11. We note employer comments regarding a decline in laboratory skills amongst many
graduates. Reduced capital funding (e.g. Science Research Investment Fund) has
caused regrettable pressures on the ability of institutions to offer a state of the art
laboratory experience. Leveraging ICT to provide a virtual laboratory,
instrumentation and field trip activities 286 287 offers cost-effective and high quality
alternatives for training in the workplace. The development of such systems still
requires day to day access to well-founded laboratories to support teaching as well
as research, but scales the benefit of laboratory investment to larger student
populations.
12. The Open University, along will other universities, incurs higher costs to provide
STEM education than for most other disciplines outside medicine. Our current STEM
students enter higher education to achieve their career goals. Mature part-time
students in work, and those with other financial commitments, will be more reluctant
to incur additional debt, particularly with the possible requirement that they repay
whilst studying.
13. Ensuring universities are supported and resourced is crucial to ensure that provision
does not become concentrated on fewer single discipline study pathways. If this
became the case, students may not develop the flexibility that will support mobility
and innovation in their future careers. Reduced subject choice will impact on adult
learners seeking to address whose module selection may be heavily influenced on
very specific employment related needs is yet to be seen.
Impact of REF upon the ability to develop new and cross-disciplinary STEM
degrees
14. The Open University – uniquely among distance education organisations - has a
successful and vibrant STEM research portfolio that was rated highly in the 2008 RAE
exercise. Research excellence is an indicator of the high quality of our academic staff
base. It is directly related to the University’s ability to deliver a highly
286 http://www.open.ac.uk/planetarygeology/p12_1.shtml
287 http://design.open.ac.uk/atelier-d/
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interdisciplinary, often paradigm-shifting curriculum, drawing on several expert areas,

and underpins our ability to provide a first class student experience for a very large
number of students with diverse aspirations. Our research standing also facilitates
our interaction with large, highly specialised STEM employers, for instance in the
manufacturing and nuclear industries. Equally, we have numerous examples where
our teaching model leads to research innovation – for instance by engaging our
distributed student communities to undertake nationwide scientific data collection.
Current REF assessment criteria curtail our ability to exhibit the impact of our
extensive public engagement in STEM through broadcast and web presences (e.g.
iTunes University).
Geography
15. The OU operates in every English region and each of the four nations. In addition,
several large STEM employers (e.g. Nuclear, Marine, etc.) are located in remote rural
areas, where, by virtue of its teaching model, the Open University has reach and
presence.
Diversity
16. Several STEM professions are underperforming on diversity criteria, especially

regarding gender balance. The Open University’s widening participation and Open
Access policies delivers a student population inherently more diverse than those
encountered in traditional institutions. We would welcome support for STEM
diversity initiatives, particularly those targeting women returners, where we have
been working closely with UKRC.
17. It is projected that an increasing proportion of students, particularly those from low
income groups, will seek flexible degree programmes that allow them to combine
work and study. The Open University’s collaboration with 15 campus based
institutions in the Open Plus 288 programme enables students, overwhelmingly from
disadvantaged backgrounds, to follow science degrees to a 2 plus 2 pattern, an
expansion of the programme to engineering degrees is under consideration. The
continuation of HEFCE’s £368m widening participation allocation is crucial to deliver
outreach and support to achieve such results.
Post Graduate provision
18. Collaboration with Sector Skills Council and National Skills Academies to provide
flexible, employment relevant, professional skills programmes tailored to sectoral
needs are a growing aspect of OU STEM activity. It’s system allows the flexibility for
motivated individuals to progress from these courses to specialist masters awards.
Public Engagement
19. The Open University makes a notable contribution to informing and enthusing large
public audiences on the role of STEM topics in national life through its broadcast
media and web-presence. There were 150 million views of OU broadcast
288 http://www8.open.ac.uk/choose/openplus/
552
programmes in 2010/11 with STEM topics featuring in programmes such as The Code;
How to Build; Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity; Bang Goes the Theory and The Secret
Life of Buildings, plus for radio More or Less and Click. This output attracts audiences of
many millions and the University’s Open Media Unit provides journeys for these
audiences from informal to formal learning on our online platforms.
20. For example, links from the BBC Frozen Planet site lead to a variety of Open
University content including a short online course available via the Open Learn site.
The OpenLearn site, which has had 20 million visitors since launch in 2006, presents
topical articles and freely available extracts from our teaching materials. The
University has a strong presence on iTunes University (42.5 million downloads since
its launch in 2008) which includes content from Computing and ICT, Engineering,
Design, Mathematics & Statistics and Environment: www.open.edu/itunes. Through
initiatives such as i-Spot we demonstrate our capability in the promotion of citizen
science. Thus we play a unique role in raising the public profile of STEM and initiating
learning journeys that may culminate in formal study with the OU or other HE
institutions.
21. The Open University’s presence on iTunes University crucially builds on current
public interest stories such as the search at CERN for the Higgs Boson. This
particular iTunes U podcast collection is available here:
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/science/when-higgs-was-
just-twinkle-scientists-eyes.
16 December 2011
553
Open University – Supplementary written evidence
Post Graduate Research Provision
Introduction
OU Response Research – purpose of Masters courses and doctoral provision

From the research perspective, The Open University regards Masters level qualifications as
preparation for doctoral training with respect to research methodologies, critical thinking
and/or discipline specific knowledge and understanding, along with contributing to the overall
research endeavour of the university and the wider community. When not used as a
progression route to a doctorate, they satisfy student (customer) demand and the need to
develop higher-level skills required for career enhancement.
Doctoral training is essential to the fabric of higher education and its research profile. The
qualification provides a training programme for individuals to become independent
researchers, historically pursuing a career within academia, but now by also pursuing careers
in a range of occupations and industries.
With reference to the role of Masters courses and doctoral provision, The Open University
endorses the Wilson Review and its recommendations as a means of engaging with business
in support of building capacity in the knowledge economy. The Open University is well
placed to support this agenda with its track record of supported open learning using the best
of available technologies at scale, its doctoral training provision for part-time geographically
distributed students, full-time students on campus at Milton Keynes and through its
collaborative programme. Additionally, the University is investing in a Virtual Research
Environment (VRE) that will provide parity of experience and training through the
application of established OU pedagogies and online infrastructure to full-time and part-time
research degree students.
OU Response Research – Role of Government

For both masters and doctoral provision, the Government should provide financial support
either directly through PG student loans or indirectly through:
• employer incentives to sponsor students
• established schemes such as HEIF and KTP
• the Research Councils
Additionally, continuing support of VITAE is important in setting a framework for researcher

development that is accessible to universities and business and which enables students to
articulate the outcomes of their research training in a form that is meaningful and relevant to
their careers and employment prospects. The Government could also help to promote the
value of PG provision in improving economic prosperity separately and in addition to its
support for HEIF and KTPs.
554

determined?
OU Response Research – Supplementary questions

• Barriers hindering provision are availability of funding, student debt from UG study,
channelling of funding to DTCs, and to some extent lack of understanding in business
of the value of research degree qualifications.
• Balance of masters and doctoral provision: With regard to the OU and research
degrees, our focus is the doctorate supported by modest Masters level research
degrees provision, as a progression route to and preparation for doctoral study. As
the doctorate becomes more structured and mindful of the Wilson Review
recommendations, the intention is to review our research masters level training and
the skills development in the doctoral programme. We would seek to build on OU
strengths of ‘at scale’ supported open learning using available technologies with
particular reference to the VRE.
• Balance of funding for research and research students: Potential self-funded students
should have access to financial support. However, a larger proportion should be
directed to research in universities or potentially routed through business (which
may commission research from universities). Students could then be supported
through funded studentships, bursaries and other incentives within a research
infrastructure, research-business collaborations and targeted research projects.

OU Response Research
Going forwards, many universities would want to collect data through their enquiry
management systems to ascertain interest in their research degree programmes and
research priorities in order to both attract high calibre applications and to respond to
customer demand. That is certainly the case for The Open University.
Destination data are collected for research students in a diffuse way through the HESA
returns. This could be more systematic and would need to take account of PT students who
are employed throughout their research degree.
Measurement of employability could be achieved through analysis of the destination data as

an indirect and imprecise indicator, given there are many influences on student employment
prospects. Rather than using the HESA returns for collection of this type of data collection,
it might be preferable for universities to monitor performance for their internal purposes
perhaps aligned with minimal criteria for the sake of consistency and ask them to summarise
their findings as an adjunct to the statutory returns.
However, it would be difficult to collect reliably destination data from students, especially
given the individuality of research students and their projects and the varying timescales for
completion.
555
The Open University does not keep this data currently.
Delivery models
studentships?
The strength of the UK higher education system is actually in the breadth and spread of
excellence in the sector (as evidenced in the last RAE). Concentration of funding in a few
institutions based on the traditional full time postgraduate student model will compromise
this position and work against social mobility and widening access at postgraduate level.
Real innovation and technological advances often arise unexpectedly, and smaller universities
or those with smaller PhD populations are often more agile in embracing partnerships and
new research areas than established ones. Large research groups do not automatically
provide better training than smaller groups. A rich environment is best provided through
academic networks embracing areas of excellent research wherever that might be, coupled
with direct interaction between students and their supervisors. Concentration of funding
and focus can also lead to a decline in supervision quality due to capacity issues and missing
the next unforeseen development.
For the economic benefit of the UK, it is important that we train researchers in broad cross-
discipline areas, and diversity of provision is the best way to do this. Individual DTCs, even if
built around a consortium, will struggle to cover the full breadth of a discipline and will be
constrained by practical structural and operational requirements. The existence of DTCs will
not necessarily lead to HEIs without the capability to offer PhDs, though clearly that would
be a tendency, in part in response to perceived lower value/quality of non-DTC HEIs. A
significant threat from the introduction of DTCs is the possible contraction of the national
academic research base. The only beneficiary of the DTC approach is EPSRC, as it reduces
work for the research council, but for the research culture in the UK, its long-term effects
are detrimental. The DTC model lends itself to regional consortia. This is both advantageous
and problematic for The Open University with its national presence within a regional
structure.
Project studentships offer opportunities to respond to student initiatives as well university-

business collaborations, which might be the focus of commissioned research and innovation.
556
The balance of provision should be built around a flexible framework allowing for full-time
and part-time study and different modes of engagement within that. Generally speaking, FT
students are thought of as being campus based, interacting with their supervisors and the
wider research community face to face. While PT students are assumed to be based
elsewhere, communicating with supervisors and the wider community mostly by email and
Skype. The division is not as clear cut as this. Many FT students, for example, spend
significant amounts of time away from the campus conducting their research.
In the future, all students are likely to have mixed modes of engagement with supervisors
and the research environment, for example within a DTC consortium, through an internship,
being based at the base of the business partner. The proposed OU Virtual Research
Environment - with its built in integrated functionality for online skills training, podcasts,
Elluminate, use of social media and discussion fora - will enable continuity of study and
integration into a research environment regardless of geographic location, mode of study or
type of engagement. It would be attractive to collaborative models be they through the
Open University Affiliated Research Centre Programme, for example, or with industrial
partners or indeed individual PhD students be they full or part-time.

research?
The OU research career development programme maps largely against the VITAE
Researcher Development Framework (RDF). The alignment will be developed further over
the next year, especially with the introduction of the VRE. The VRE’s ‘training and
development zone’ will be built around the RDF.
Along with tools and resources on the VITAE website, the framework provides a useful
means of articulating and evidencing the skills developed during doctoral training. This can be
used for skills audit purposes with a view to plugging gaps, for progress monitoring and
applying for jobs.
Quality
Using any measure as a proxy for supervision and training quality is always fraught. The
success of a PhD project depends on numerous variables, including student quality, research
environment, supervision and so forth. It is therefore hard to use proxy measures, though
the quality of research output and the development of independent researchers will always
be paramount. It may be that a PhD yielding a single important publication could be more
557
'successful' than one yielding several small papers. Similarly measuring success by 'time to
completion' may not be the best measure. Overall, a general approach should be adopted
comprised of a number of factors linked to the QAA Quality Code indicators and with
specific reference to Chapter B11. The QAA provides a valuable set of benchmarks for the
factors that contribute to high quality research degrees.
The Open University uses the QAA Quality Code as a framework to establish, monitor,
review and enhance our research degrees for directly registered students and those
registered through our Affiliated Research Centre collaborative programme. For Research
Council funded students, the RC terms and conditions also impact on the standards and
outputs of research degrees. From the OU perspective, when agreeing contractual
arrangements for industry-supported students the QAA Quality Code sets the standards
and expectations for the negotiations and agreement of roles and responsibilities. The
relevant partner may also reference their participation in the negotiations against their
industry specific quality codes.
Not necessarily inhibitions, but certainly areas for careful negotiation and clarity of
understanding are ownership of IP, financial responsibilities, legal status of partner and
importance of university regulations governing research degrees and research degree
students.
Funding
Stand-alone masters used as preparation for doctoral training will have to be funded by
students, their employers/sponsors, internal university funding or integrated into an
extended doctoral training programme. Unless the available funding increases the number of
student places will inevitably decrease.
sufficient?
558
Without it, there would be a reduced pipeline of potential UK research students, which over
time will impact on the breadth and quality of research degree provision, the national
research base and the economic prosperity of the country.
Overseas students
The Open University does not have a large proportion of non-EEA research students other
than through its Affiliated Research Centre programme and then at the overseas institutions
within it – so not directly relevant to this question. Our intent is to increase our
recruitment of overseas students. We do not believe that overseas students do or will harm
provision or limit access to UK students. Indeed, we believe a diverse cohort of research
degree students enhances the research environment and fosters a global mindset. The OU’s
Virtual Research Environment will encourage a global Open University research network.
Unlike many international students, UK students are in considerable debt after

undergraduate study and therefore often reluctant to undertake postgraduate study. This is
the most significant factor in the recruitment of UK STEM students – hence the importance
of part-time postgraduate provision for such students later in their career.
significant impact on the number of overseas students in postgraduate education and
Even taking into account our response to Q9, it would be true to say that recruitment of
non-EEA students has fallen.
14 May 2012
559
Open University – Further supplementary written evidence
Taught Post Graduate Provision
Introduction
determined?
OU Response (Taught Postgraduate) – purpose of Masters courses and doctoral

provision
Taught PG qualifications offer students the opportunity to further develop their existing
graduate skills, gaining knowledge and understanding in a particular subject area, but also
becoming more proficient in cognitive and key skills, e.g. in how they access, assess, analyse
and respond to different sources of information.
Anecdotally, employability is another important consideration for many Open University

postgraduate students. Given the number of graduates looking for work, ‘qualification
inflation’ cannot be ignored and a postgraduate qualification can be attractive to employers.
The other issue that perhaps has more resonance with OU PG students than those at other
universities is a desire for career progression; studying a PG qualification for promotion or
career change. The OU experience of its own part time students is that many are motivated
by mid- career progression opportunities. To address the needs of these part time learners,
the majority of whom are in employment, the OU aims to offer modules addressing both
continuing professional development and formal postgraduate qualification requirements.
The most obvious barrier to gaining a PG qualification is cost, both to the student and to the
university. There are no loans for PG study, very few stipends (if any), and the fees are likely
to rise significantly in the near future. A small number of students are funded by their
employers.
As the proportion of graduates in the national workforce increases it is anticipated that the
flexible provision that we offer will increasingly form the spine of individuals’ long-term
professional development and updating programmes as well as providing step changes in
career development through the attainment of postgraduate and professional qualification.
The OU is currently revising its postgraduate strategy with these factors in mind.
The OU is particularly well positioned to provide flexible technology-enabled delivery that

allows students to engage with their studies at times and places of their choosing.
Employers’ requirements for cost-effective study that does not demand employees to be
away from the workplace for significant periods can be met. Globally distributed workforces
560
and flexible work patterns such as changes to individuals’ work assignments at short notice
can easily be accommodated. The use of virtual labs extends the model to subject areas
traditionally requiring attendance of specialised physical facilities.
Our Business School has significant experience of tailored programmes with FCO and UKTI,
we are able to transfer this experience to our STEM departments to support multinationals
in the science, technology and engineering sectors in developing relationships with major
corporates.
Our professional body accredited Engineering programmes, including an integrated MEng and
MSc Eng are experiencing strong growth in registrations and there is evidence that
employers and professional bodies consider that increases in undergraduate fee levels will
discourage students from completing a four year MEng programme. We believe our ability
to offer a route from B Eng to M Eng through part time study whilst in employment will be
increasingly important to both students and employers.
We are increasingly developing PG qualifications that integrate specific professional

development (such as the attainment of vendor qualifications representing industry standards
required of practitioners) with academic study to meet the needs of students working in the
STEM professions.
The embedding of employability skills is likely to become increasingly important in PG

qualifications mirroring this development at UG levels.

OU Response (Taught Postgraduate)

Employability and destination data are not collected as a matter of routine for postgraduate
OU students. It would be useful for the University to collect this data but with the proviso
that it should record a student’s employability and destination at ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ and their
reasons for study, the point being that OU PG students may study for interest or
employment, and they may study to change career, seek promotion, and so on. In short, OU
PG study might not change the employment status of a student, and it may not directly
change employment status, but it can have a positive effect. It would also be useful to have
data on who pays for study, e.g. students or employers.
Delivery models
studentships?
561


research?
Quality

The QAA’s document, Masters degree characteristics
(http://www.qaa.ac.uk/Publications/InformationAndGuidance/Documents/MastersDegreeCha
racteristics.pdf) provides valuable information to stakeholders on the nature of masters
provision and the characteristics of three broad classes of Master degrees. In its distance
learning provision of taught masters degrees in STEM topics the OU predominantly offers
programmes in the specialised/advanced study category. These are designed to meet the needs
of our part-time student population who are predominantly pursuing postgraduate study for
career advancement.
Increasingly, we are incorporating work-based study into Masters programmes to increase

their professional relevance. In some subjects it is typical for students to be required to
apply their learning to the workplace context as part of the assessment tasks, thereby
delivering value to employers during the students’ learning. This represents evolution of
programmes in the STEM area towards the QAA professional practice category.
The QAA Framework for Higher Educational Qualifications is used in the annual review of
PG qualifications. The learning outcomes on our MSc qualifications fit well with the
Descriptors for a higher education qualification at level 7: Master's degree, for this
framework.

Our Programme Committees have members appointed to provide industry input to the
design and outputs of OU programmes. The Open University’s Business Development Unit
have a group of staff committed to the development and maintenance of relationships with
the corporate sector, there is a two-way flow of information between these staff and the
562
faculties responsible for STEM curricula. We engage with relevant Sector Skills Councils and
the National Skills Academy network in the development of industrially relevant modules.
The University’s development with National Skills Academy Nuclear of a Certificate of
Nuclear Competence for new recruits to the industry, whether recent graduates or those
transferring mid-career from other industries, is an exemplar.
Significant curriculum development projects typically involve input from appropriate

representatives of industry. Curriculum that is recognised by professional bodies is regularly
reviewed by these representatives and they make considerable input to establishing
appropriate learning outcomes.
Major changes in curriculum are typically supported by wide-ranging market research

activities that include consultation with appropriate industry sectors.
The OU Associate Lecturer community includes professional practitioners as well as

academics. We would reinforce the interest that employers express in the development of
technical leadership and commercial awareness skills in STEM graduates during the initial
phases of their careers.
There are instances of tension between stated industry requirements for modules designed
to meet very specific industry needs and the academic requirement to develop advanced
analytical skills necessary for students to demonstrate the intellectual autonomy required at
Masters level study. There are also instances of employers’ reluctance to support their staff
taking Masters qualifications, arising from the belief that achievement of the qualification will
result in loss of employees to competitor concerns. Resolving these tensions is of national
importance if UK STEM industries are to maintain the commitment of a graduate workforce
with an ongoing need to keep abreast of evolving technologies throughout their careers.
Funding

The lack of public funding for taught Masters is likely to result in a smaller and an increasingly
market-driven curriculum. As public funding reduces, students will be required to pay for a
greater proportion of the costs of their study, or seek financial support from other sources,
e.g. employers.
The costing and pricing of postgraduate provision at The Open University has been based on
FEC terms. Our standard operational systems are optimised for delivery at scale hence
provision of specialisms presents a particular challenge for the OU system. Wherever
possible we pursue opportunities for external funding to contribute to the upfront
563
investment costs associated with the development of high quality teaching resources and
then seek to deploy these as flexibly as possible to maximise return on investment.
sufficient?
Overseas students

The proportion of overseas students on the OU’s PG qualifications is much smaller than the
70% listed in the notes from the Select Committee. Our existing STEM postgraduate student
population is predominantly UK and EU based (25% non-UK) hence we do not currently
have the same level of dependence on international students as many other institutions.
As a matter of policy we are re-engineering our postgraduate programmes so that they are
available globally online and accessible to both individual and corporately sponsored
students. Our recently launched masters in Medical Chemistry is an exemplar of a
programme designed for a global audience. Hence, we see international markets as an
opportunity for improving the sustainability of our postgraduate offering in contrast to the
threats to sustainability of face-to-face programmes that are subject to the socio economic
volatility of transnational student markets.
We would positively welcome an increase in the proportion of international students as a

contribution to the internationalisation of our programmes through their participation in
online discussion. The STEM professions are international in nature and direct interaction
with their international counterparts would be of value to our UK population.
There are some challenges in provision for overseas students, specifically for those studying
in a second language and/or those that have studied under different educational systems and
within different cultures.
564

This is not an issue for the OU as students do not need to relocate in order to study with
us.
14 May 2012
565
Oxford Brookes University – Written evidence
Introduction
determined?
Stand-alone Master’s courses have many purposes, but the two most important are for
training leading to professional careers and preparation for PhD study. Doctoral provision
allows us to train the next generation of researchers and academics, but also has a wider
role, namely providing a “people pipeline” to produce highly skilled workers that can carry
out a wide range of technically demanding jobs.
The balance between Master’s and PhD training in my institution is determined mainly by
University strategy and the availability of funding. Master’s courses can be run only in areas
where they are profitable as there is virtually no governmental funding for such courses.
The balance between funding research and research students should be determined by
RCUK – but they should consult widely. Recent EPSRC policies have involved little
consultation and are driven from within by non-experts.

We try to keep these data, but they are hard to maintain. This data should be collected at a
national level in our view. As always, the data protection act (laudable though it may be)
makes the process a great deal harder.
Delivery models
studentships?
566
We understand why the current funding environment favours Doctoral Training Centres as
the key method for delivery of postgraduate training. However, we would like to see further
collaboration between DTCs and universities that fall outside the current DTC network. All
research councils that currently fund DTCs should encourage their network to think about
how they might work with providers and fill any geographic gaps that might exist. Future
rounds of bidding for doctorial training funding should include this element of collaboration
to ensure that research council’s spend on doctoral training reaches all the students that and
universities that might benefit from it. This could also ensure better value for money for the
significant investment that is made by research councils nationally. Note that joint supervision
models can be investigated in this respect.
A situation where some Universities can offer no PhD studentships acts as a concentration
measure that diverts funds to the research-intensive universities. This is usually mitigated by
the universities concerned using their own funds to sponsor students. Even a small number
of funded PhD studentships can make a huge difference.
This imperative will come into sharp focus when we head into the next Comprehensive
Spending Review. The HE sector and research community needs to make the case for PhDs
and their value to ensure the future health of the research base and ensure that there are no
adverse ‘pipeline’ issues because of national changes to fees and funding.

research?
We use the framework (and others like it) to guide a number of aspects of our doctoral
provision. We also use it more generally for researchers of all kinds. We believe that the
Vitae RDF does a valuable job and should be adopted by as many HEIs as possible.
Quality
We believe that ratings of research output can only ever be used as a proxy measure for
judging the quality of postgraduate training. We are unaware of any evidence that that
demonstrates a correlation between quality outputs and the quality of PG training. Indeed,
567
there are many examples of high quality PG training environments in research units with 3*
rated research and vice versa, the mere existence of 4* rated research within a research unit
by no means guarantees a high quality PG training environment. It is therefore important for
the funding judgement over training and supervision to be based on a direct and robust
measure its quality and nothing else.
Whilst the QAA has enhanced its ability to look at the quality of postgraduate education, the
nature of these degrees, the primacy of research independence and institutional autonomy
means that QAA’s methods used to review undergraduate education, do not always read
across to this landscape. External examiners play an often hidden, but important role in
ensuring that the quality UK’s postgraduate education (both in teaching and research)
remains robust, and maintains UK HE’s reputation for excellence.
Industry has a significant role in setting the standards and outputs for PG STEM provision.
Many PG courses involve an industrial steering committee (or a similar organisation) whose
input is crucial in determining course content, suitability of material, and a host of other
properties of the programme. As far as we are aware, there is no reason that industrial
cannot be used fully in this respect
Funding
The continual erosion of public funding for stand-along Masters has indeed led to their
disappearance in many areas. As a result, the UK in general tends only to run stand-alone
master’s courses that are clearly instantly profitable. RCUK has largely withdrawn from
Master’s funding, for it claims only to fund research. Industry feels that it cannot foot the
complete bill for Master’s provision, and the result is stalemate. As a result, the spectrum of
Master’s courses that UK students can access is severely limited.
sufficient?
Though HEFCE SIVS funding has undoubtedly had some effect on PG provision, the dearth
of STEM Master’s courses is still a problem. The funding is insufficient and cannot be
accessed by a wide enough range of institutions. Overall, we do not believe that the SIVS
classification should be widened.
Overseas students
568
International students come to the UK For a “British” experience. This cannot be provided
in classes that are full of students from a single overseas nation. The answer is to develop a
portfolio of international students, and not rely on a single nation. We do not believe that
the proportion of international PG students has had much effect on the supply of academic
staff in UK HEIs.
The changes have had a lasting impact. In the long term, serious damage will be done to the
finances of the sector. One of the key cornerstones of the coalition’s withdrawal of public
money from teaching in HEIs was that the £9,000 fee was affordable only if international
student numbers were maintained. Having removed the teaching money, they are now
removing this source of income. By including students in the definition of “immigrants” the
UK is threatening approximately £20bn worth of exports. International students are a free
good. They are educated at somebody else’s expense and pay us large sums of money to be
educated here. The vast majority return home at the end of their course. The current
policies are a calamity that will cost UKPLC billions of pounds and severely damage UK HEIs.
8 May 2012
569
Oxford Instruments, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, EDF Energy
Nuclear Generation, Expedition Engineering and MRC Clinical Sciences Centre – Oral
Oxford Instruments, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS

Trust, EDF Energy Nuclear Generation, Expedition Engineering and
MRC Clinical Sciences Centre – Oral evidence (QQ 348-365)
570
Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning – Written evidence
Summary
With an increasing proportion of the UK economy based on the science, technology,

manufacturing and financial services industries, Pearson recognise the importance of there
being a sufficient supply of graduates with the right skills in STEM subjects equipped to work
in these sectors. In particular, we see mathematics as key to underpinning the advanced
study and practice of science, commerce and new technologies including those that are web-
based and data-driven. We therefore see a focus on maths both pre and post 16 being
critical to a successful future economy.
While specialisation in STEM subjects post 16 and crucially at University will be important in
specialised jobs, a good understanding of mathematics, science and technology has also been
a growing requirement over the last 20 years in many non specialised roles. We believe this
trend will continue and probably at an ever increasing rate. As a consequence, the
employment prospects of all of today’s students will be increasingly dependent on a good
basic knowledge and competency in STEM subjects and an ability to apply them in a fast-
moving world.
This paper reflects the clear need for support and attention to be given to students wishing
to study STEM at each stage as they progress through their education. It draws on Pearson’s
international experience and the emphasis other countries have put on the study of STEM
subjects. It also sets out our current thinking on how the supply and quality of STEM
graduates could be improved as part of the changing HE market in the UK.
A foundation knowledge in STEM
Pearson currently provides qualifications and resource materials across the STEM range of
subjects in both the academic and vocational pathways including BTEC and Apprenticeships.
Our Maths and single Sciences GCSEs have all increased in take up over the past three years.
For our vocational qualifications we work closely with key stakeholders such as SEMTA and
Cogent to ensure our qualifications are aligned to labour market requirements and provide
strong progression routes up to Higher National level. For our academic qualifications, we
have constantly tried to innovate through for example the use of innovative specifications
such as Salters Nuffield Advanced Biology and Salters Horners Advanced Physics as well as
online tools and resources.
There is considerable debate at present about the nature of ICT in schools and how far it
reflects the computer literacy skills that the IT sector is looking for. Indeed, we do not
believe, that ICT remains a helpful label for the type of content which should be taught at
Key Stage 4 and beyond – the term “Computer Science” or “Digital Science” better reflects
the body of knowledge and skills young people need if they are to understand how
technology works and be able to use it to solve complex problems – computer architecture,
programming, data representation, internet technology and so on. As the computer gaming
industry’s “Next Gen” campaign has highlighted, it must be a rigorous, intellectually
challenging subject, capable of firing young people’s imagination and fostering their creativity
and invention.
571
One of the barriers to high quality ICT teaching and learning is that the skills taught tend to
be determined by the expertise of the staff within schools and colleges rather than the needs
of the employer and the industry.
We see a number of ways that this might be overcome. Through our private Training
provider Pearson in Practice, our major provision is Information technology and
Telecommunications Professional Apprenticeships for 16-18 year olds at Level 3. The
Apprenticeship model used through Pearson in Practice has the potential to be applied and
delivered to schools and colleges to improve teaching in these areas.
The Autumn Statement’s announcement of specialist 16-18 provision for Maths for 16-18
year olds under the Free Schools provision, could also be extended to other STEM subjects
(e.g. computer science, cleantech and biotech etc) and supported through leading
universities.
International perspective
It is important that what knowledge young people need to progress in the 21st Century is
properly reviewed and evaluated. As the current Curriculum Review pointed out, this means
looking internationally. We need to understand what capabilities our competitor economies
are building in their young people, and look at what knowledge, skills and understanding the
most innovative and successful employers demand.
An initial review of this suggests to us that the National Curriculum should focus heavily on
STEM subjects and that a national STEM education strategy, including a school technology
strategy is required. Countries including China and India have realised that with strategic
changes to their own education systems, they could compete better in the new world
economy, including for ‘knowledge jobs’ such as research and development, which was once
dominated by ‘developed’ nations. They have started educating their children earlier and
longer, with greater emphasis on maths and science in particular. We strongly believe
therefore that computer literacy should be included in the core curriculum up to the end of
Key Stage 3, so as to ensure that all young people are digitally literate and have the skills
they need for today’s global digital economy.
In turn, the UK’s approach to STEM is also being considered by other countries. Through
Pearson in Practice we have just established IT provision in Dubai delivering a National
Diploma in information Technology, and plan to extend this to other Middle Eastern
countries.
In addition, as part of the research programme through the Pearson Centre for Policy and
Learning (our independent think tank,) we are undertaking a major research project on the
nature and development of STEM subjects. Titled ‘Blueprint for Success,’ this project will
consult the large and diverse global STEM community to try and understand what a coherent
national strategy for STEM education should include and what criteria for success should be
developed for the future. Details on this and other leading research such as that on higher
education can be seen on the Centre’s website www.pearsoncpl.com
HE and specialisation
572
While a foundation in STEM subjects for all pupils is important, we also recognise the need
for an appropriate supply of specialist graduates who have studied these subjects. Crucially,
they will also require the necessary practical skills and to know how to apply their
knowledge in the work place.
As changes are made to the Higher Education system in England and Wales over the next
twelve months Pearson will remain fully engaged in this process. We are keen to play a
positive part in this system over the long-term, and currently plan to offer degrees in STEM
subjects including five types of specialised engineering courses over the next 2-3 years
(mechanical, electrical, electronic, civil, manufacturing) as well as appropriate IT and
Computing degrees. We believe this type of specialised offer to students will play an
increasingly significant role in the HE sector in the future as HEIs respond to the growing
demand from employers for students with these types of skills.
To ensure graduates leave with the right set of skills, our degrees will also be highly
practical, with strong industry input combined with high quality academic expertise,
delivered through two distinct routes. The first will be for part-time students already
working in relevant jobs, and will allow them to use that work experience as part of their
degree studies. The second is for full-time students which will include specialised workshops
to ensure they do not miss out on invaluable work based learning. As part of this, we are
redeveloping our Higher National Diplomas (HNDs) offer particularly in the STEM discipline
areas to ensure end-to-end Higher Apprenticeships progression routes. We believe by
introducing these new routes and specialised courses, students will have added choice and
flexibility to progress to the highest levels in engineering without having to take the limited
route that exists at present.
As further details on how the HE market will operate are agreed over the coming months,
we hope to develop our plans further and look to diversify our offer to other STEM
subjects. We will be guided not only by market needs as expressed through the new HE
arrangements but also by Government strategies such as the Plan for Growth and the
Innovation and Research Strategy.
About Pearson
Pearson is the world’s leading learning company. For more than one hundred years we have
provided teachers with books, learning resources, qualifications and assessment services, and
support packages, through names including Edexcel, Longman and Heinemann.
Working in 70 countries, Pearson has built an international network of expert education

practitioners and researchers. The scale and range which come from operating a publishing,
technology and assessment business mean that Pearson is uniquely placed to provide joined-
up support to improve outcomes and learning.
We believe learning should be personalised and engaging. It must be worthwhile too,

underpinned by a rigorous approach which ensures high standards. These principles are
embedded in our development of resources, qualifications and technologies at every
educational level, across our offer in academic and vocational qualifications, work-based
learning and professional education.
573
Pearson contributes to this inquiry as the parent company, since 2003, of the awarding body
Edexcel. Edexcel is the UK's largest awarding body offering academic and vocational
qualifications and testing to schools, colleges, employers and other places of learning in the
UK and internationally.
12 December 2011
574
Physiological Society – Written evidence
The Physiological Society is a learned society which brings together over 3000 scientists
from over 60 countries. Physiology is the study of the normal functioning of genes, cells,
tissues and organs and how these in turn influence the whole animal or person.
Consequently some physiological research needs to be undertaken on living animals or
people so as to integrate the insights that come from studying isolated cells and tissues.
Working with living animals or people requires additional skills in the care and welfare of the
experimental subjects, on top of the underlying investigative skills needed by all researchers.
For animals that combination is generally referred to as 'in vivo skills'.
Since its foundation in 1876, the Members of The Physiological Society have made significant
contributions to the knowledge of biological systems and the treatment of disease. Our aims
are to support physiologists - from researchers starting out in the field to those that are
more established in their career, promote the discipline to ensure it remains at the forefront
of biological and medical research, and to raise awareness of physiology among non-
specialists. A key focus of our work is to ensure physiology remains an attractive career
option and we work with teachers, lecturers and researchers from both academia and
industry to achieve this.
Summary
‐ Physiology is a laboratory based research discipline, involving the study of the normal
functioning of genes, cells, tissues and organs and how these in turn influence the
whole animal or person, and should always be included with definitions of STEM. As a
translational discipline which links work carried out on the cellular level to a whole
organism, physiology is crucial aspect of the biomedical and life sciences sector.
‐ Some specific areas of the biomedical and life sciences sector are vulnerable, and
should be considered as ‘Strategically Important and Vulnerable Sciences’. This
includes training in the use of whole animals in biomedical research including
physiology. The specific provision in these areas for Masters and PhD level training,
including financial support, need urgent review so as to put this training on a
sustainable footing.
‐ The standard of numeracy and literacy at school leaver stage is far below desirable
and with the current funding and length of degree courses it is difficult to catch up to
achieve standards of laboratory skills suitable for future careers, especially in
research.
‐ There are number of substantial reforms taking place in Higher Education, and the
impacts of these changes are interlinked. As such, it is not easy to predict the
outcome and there is concern in the sector relating to the impact these reforms may
have upon the national skills base.
General questions

1) This definition can vary in different contexts and organisations, and it is regrettably not
always clear what is considered a ‘STEM subject’. It is of considerable concern that the
575
term 'biological sciences' may itself not be used in a consistent manner. For instance,
biomedical sciences such as physiology are often excluded.
2) HEFCE categorises physiology as a STEM discipline 289 , but in other contexts it may be
categorized under ‘health-sciences’, disciplines usually associated with medicine and
dentistry and health practice. Physiology is a laboratory based research subject that aim
to understand how cells, tissues and organs interact in living systems, and should always
be considered a STEM subject.
3) In addition it is of note that physiology, whilst identified by HEFCE as a 'STEM' subject,
has never been classified as one of the ‘Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects’
(SIVS) 290 . HEFCE provided additional funding to support STEM based SIVS on the basis
that they were “very high cost, strategically important to the economy and society, but
vulnerable due to low student demand”.
4) Despite the 2009 BBSRC report ‘Strategically important and vulnerable area of UK
Bioscience Expertise’ 291 identifying ‘Animal Physiology’, including in vivo skills 292 , as a
strategically important skills area that was likely to become vulnerable, HEFCE have not
provided additional support to whole animal physiology or to courses that provide
training in in vivo techniques.
5) Several reports, including from industry 293, 294 and government have highlighted a skills
shortage in this area and the need for explicit funding to cover the considerable costs of
the training needs.
6) We would urge there to be joined-up and transparent thinking by all institutions involved
in the issue of support for STEM subjects from various institutions, including the
Government and Higher Education Funding Councils such as HEFCE, as well as other
organisations such as the Higher Education Academy (HEA).
7) The Physiological Society has a particular concern about the inconsistent inclusion of
biomedical sciences such as physiology. In particular we urge that these laboratory-based
disciplines be consistently included under the STEM umbrella.
influence supply?
8) There is widespread agreement on the lack of basic numeracy and literacy skills among
graduates of many disciplines. This is of particular concern in vulnerable science areas
because of the need for such well-qualified graduates to enter the research profession.
There is a need for pressure on both schools and universities to address these failings.
9) More specifically, the bioscience sector has identified some specific gaps in the skills
pipeline. Training in the use of living animals in biological and biomedical sciences is one
such area of concern to this Society (see below).
Graduate supply
289 Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects (HEFCE, 2011) http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_24/

290 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/funding/201213/DefinitionofSIVS_byJACS30.xls
291 Strategically Important and Vulnerable Capabilities in UK Bioscience, BBSRC Bioscience Skills and Careers Strategy Panel
(2009): http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/web/FILES/Reviews/0905_bioscience_research_skills.pdf
292 In vivo is here taken to refer to research involving the use of living animals, techniques that require a high degree of
training to be conducted in a scientifically and ethically appropriate manner

293 Sustaining the Skills Pipeline (ABPI, 2005): http://careers.abpi.org.uk/your-
career/undergraduates/Documents/_publications_pdfs_2005-STEM-Ed-Skills-TF-Report.pdf
294 Skills Needs for Biomedical Research (ABPI, 2008): http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/library/industry/Documents/skills-
biomedical-research.pdf
576
sectors not directly connected with STEM? Is the quality of STEM graduates
emerging from higher education sufficiently high, and if not, why not?
10) It is not merely the current number of STEM students and graduates that needs to be
considered, but also the numbers of STEM students and graduates there are likely to be
in the future. Additionally, it is crucial to take into account the skill set of those entering
the work-force, as a shortage situation is created if there is a skills gap.
11) Two areas of skills shortage of particular concern to this society are those required for
investigating function in whole animals (referred to here as in vivo skills) and those
required for linking work on the cellular level with the whole human body, a field termed
‘integrative human physiology’.
12) Reports produced by ABPI in 2005 and 2008295 , 296 and by the BBSRC in 2009 297
identified undergraduate and graduate skills shortages in physiology and in vivo sciences,
recommending additional financial support for courses in these areas. These reports,
produced before the tuition fee cap was raised identified key concerns specific to
physiology that the proposed Higher Education Reforms will only exacerbate.
13) Some exposure to animal based protocols is crucial to inform undergraduates of the
options and need for research careers in whole animal physiology, and but there are high
financial and administrative burdens associated with providing such exposure. These
burdens have been the cause of the substantial decrease in the number of HEI's offering
any such practical work as well as in the number of classes by those HEIs still providing
some exposure. Those courses with such content that still operate can only do so
because of additional funding from industry and/or learned societies, but such support is
always short-term, precluding a sustainable basis for the skills provision.
14) As the HEFCE teaching fund is cut and HEI's are encouraged to become more 'efficient',
market forces make it very likely that HEI's will chose to cut animal practical classes and
in vivo training. In addition, with the pharmaceutical sector currently undergoing
contraction in the UK, HEI's will find it increasingly difficult to source funds from this
sector.
15) Since the release of the reports by ABPI and BBSRC, in vivo sciences have seen increased
support from central funds. An example of this has been the Integrative Mammalian
Biology Initiative (IMBI), in which Research Council (BBSRC and MRC) funding was used
in association with charity (Wellcome Trust) and industry funding. However, these
programmes and their funding have always been short-term; IMBI funding will be ending
in 2012, and the funding shortfall, will leave the sustainability of these centres of specialist
expertise very much in doubt.
16) The skill set associated with integrative human physiologists was also identified above as
an area which is currently at risk. Due to a reductionist molecular approach over the last
few decades, it is becoming increasingly difficult for integrative human physiologists to get
research funding. As PhD students can only be trained in active research laboratories
which receive funding, it is becoming increasingly difficult to train this specific type of
295 Sustaining the Skills Pipeline (ABPI, 2005): http://careers.abpi.org.uk/your-

career/undergraduates/Documents/_publications_pdfs_2005-STEM-Ed-Skills-TF-Report.pdf
296 Skills Needs for Biomedical Research (ABPI, 2008)http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/library/industry/Documents/skills-
biomedical-research.pdf
297Strategically Important and Vulnerable Capabilities in UK Bioscience, BBSRC Bioscience Skills and Careers Strategy Panel
(2009): http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/web/FILES/Reviews/0905_bioscience_research_skills.pdf
577
scientist in the UK. This is problematic as integrative human physiology is crucial for
translational work in humans.
17) There is anecdotal evidence from both industry and academia stating that the numeracy
and literacy skills of too many bioscience graduates are inadequate for many employers,
particularly those involving research, whether in academia or industry. The roots of this
are widely perceived to lie in school-level education, where core ability and confidence in
numeracy and literacy are lacking in too many university entrants.
institutions?
18) The large number of significant Higher Education reforms taking place simultaneously
leave many within the sector feeling that it is not possible to safely predict the outcomes
for the long-term supply of the graduate skills that the UK needs.
19) The Government announced that it wishes funding to follow students; raising the tuition
fee cap to £9,000 whilst simultaneously decreasing the teaching funding supplied through
HEFCE. This creates a severe shortfall in finance for laboratory based biomedical
sciences, especially in vivo science, even when taking into account the additional HEFCE
supplement of £1,500 for students taking Band B subjects.
20) High-standard scientific courses with significant levels of advanced practical and
laboratory work for students provide the laboratory skills required for research.
Therefore these courses are exactly what employers in industry and academia require,
and yet without sufficient funding, it is these courses which are likely to suffer. Indeed
there is already anecdotal evidence of many HEI’s planning to ‘rebalance’ degree
provision from costly laboratory programmes towards courses with a wider profit
margin, such as humanities.
21) Providing incentive for HEI’s to rebalance away from laboratory based bio-sciences is in
direct contrast to statements released by this Government, such as the recently
launched ‘Strategy for Life Sciences’ 298 . Statements such as this recognise that the life
sciences is an area in which the United Kingdom is a world leader, and an area from
which the Government believe economic growth will come.
22) Physiology is a translational discipline and its practical adoption is a core requirement
for research into drug development and other clinical developments, as well as providing
an integrative approach which enables understanding of how genomic insights translate
into a better understanding of whole organism phenotypes. Without sufficient funding for
degrees such as those containing substantial practical physiology and in vivo components,
the UK's position as a world-leader in life sciences will come under threat. This threat is
significant as BRIC countries invest increasingly in building their STEM capacity.
23) We support the call from the Society of Biology for the Government to perform
longitudinal studies on the impact of the HE reforms on the willingness of graduates to
study STEM subjects at undergraduate and post-graduate levels, as well as the number of
those entering into research careers This will provide hard data for the future, and
enable Government to monitor any potential loss in skills. This ought to be initiated
within this academic year so as to capture data from students prior to the raising of the
tuition fee cap.
298Stragey for Life Sciences (2011): http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/s/11-1429-strategy-for-uk-life-

sciences.pdf
578
24) Many HEIs are reacting already to the Research Excellence Framework, before the final
criteria have been set, and it is of concern that many appear to be acting against
statements released in the REF documentation. One example of this is that there is
anecdotal evidence from our membership that managers within HEI’s are putting
pressure on academics to publish in high impact journals. This is despite a statement
within HEFCE documentation that “No panel will make use of journal ranking or journal
impact factors in the assessment”299 . Given the other changes within the HE sector, it is
unsurprising that HEI’s are very nervous about the introduction of REF.
25) Neither teaching nor laboratory-based project supervision is recognised within RAE or
the new REF, and this is to the detriment of academic departments. With REF being
instrumental in the allocation of QR funding, a substantial income source for many HEI's,
there is the risk that the perceived importance of teaching will decrease, at exactly the
time when Government states it wishes for an increase in teaching standard.
26) Research-informed teaching is beneficial to STEM graduates, both so as to promote a
high level skill-set (e.g. critical thinking and problem-solving) and to inculcate an
appreciation of practical research gained through exposure to an active research
environment.
27) Not all STEM subject teaching needs to take place in a research-active environment.
However, where the aim is to produce the next generation of researchers, then it is vital
that there is exposure to researchers and first-hand experience of research at
undergraduate level. This is so as to (a) train students appropriately and (b) provide them
with the insight into research required to guide their future career choices.
28) Public perceptions of the new fee structure are such as to dissuade those from less
affluent backgrounds from undertaking more arduous and/or longer courses that will
both accrue more loans and limit time for part time working. STEM subjects are often
both longer, with increased movement towards 4 year MSci degrees, and are likely to be
more time consuming (eg. placements requiring full time attendance).
29) Recruitment to STEM subjects from those normally more reluctant to engage will
therefore be difficult - especially if there is no major salary incentive for graduates of that
subject, as is the case for those who enter academia. The future is hard to predict here,
but the new system certainly doesn’t help.
299 Consultation on draft panel criteria and working methods (HEFCE, 2011):
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/pubs/2011/03_11/03_11.pdf
579
30) PhD students can only be trained in active research laboratories receiving funding for
their facilities from competitive sources. The range of PhD topics on offer, and the
techniques used within the course of study, are therefore influenced by the policies of
research funders such as research councils and charities.
31) The balance of such research support may or may not align to the specific needs of
employers; for instance academic research may look to new techniques that may take
many years to be incorporated into industry. However, the core research skills acquired
are largely independent of the specific techniques utilised, so the bigger issue is to ensure
that PhD training is undertaken in high quality research environment. That is currently
broadly the case.
32) A separate issue is that the standard 3 year UK PhD programme is substantially shorter
than equivalents in other countries, and UK graduates are therefore sometimes found to
be inexperienced compared to their international counterparts, both in terms of
research and teaching experience. This can impact adversely on international
employment prospects.
33) Some areas of research are more sensitive to this than others, and the in vivo sciences
are one such. The higher than normal level of training in practical and technical
competence cannot adequately be achieved in 3 years, and funders are increasingly (but
not universally) recognising that some such areas merit 4 year PhD programmes. This is
to be welcomed and encouraged.

34) The Research Councils are reducing the number of doctorate studentships they offer in
STEM subjects, moving towards an increased resource spend per student. Whilst this
may be a positive consideration, possibly resulting in an increased skill set acquired by
students, and therefore higher quality researchers, there is the risk that the decreased
numbers of PhDs will result in a reduction of people looking to enter research careers.
35) Unless closely monitored, any gaps in numbers embarking upon research careers won’t
be noticed for a few years, by which time it will be a struggle to regain the relevant
competency in the national skills base.
36) Achieving a national skills base takes many years. It cannot realistically be adjusted to
match the economic cycle and short-term fluctuations in employment prospects. This
causes a difficulty, but it is high risk to reduce training whenever there is a downturn in
the economy because while the economic bounce-back may be fast (a year or two),
replenishing a depleted skills base takes many years.
37) As indicated above, it is essential that PhD training is undertaken in quality research
laboratories. Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) should provide that. However it is a
mistake to assume that there are no high class laboratories outside those with DTC
status, and training potential will be seriously curtailed if PhD training is limited to DTCs.
[There is also a wider issue of researchers denied funding potential being driven out of
580
low research environments, to the detriment of the teaching and training in those
institutions.]
38) This is a large topic that will vary substantially between subject areas and employment
prospects.
39) Where an area is accepted as a SIVS, there is a strong case for state funding for Masters
level training so as to promote an adequate supply of graduates with subject-specific
training either for direct employment or entry onto PhD programmes. The Physiological
Society therefore supports the idea of state funding being used to support students
undertaking Masters courses, in vulnerable subject areas such as in vivo science, although
not at the expense of PhD funding.
40) It should be noted that whilst integrated masters qualifications are increasingly being
provided at HEI’s, these courses are typically 120 credits points, as opposed to the 180
provided by a stand-alone Masters course. Whilst many HEI’s in the UK are satisfied
these courses provide sufficient training to embark upon a doctoral research degree, it is
at the bottom of the Bologna requirements, and therefore seen across Europe as second
best.
41) Prediction is a dangerous game, and we will only be able to determine actual outcomes
quite a few years hence. However, with the undergraduate fee cap raised substantially,
there are strong concerns that many students will feel unable to afford to enter into the
post-graduate study required for a research career.
42) As mentioned above, many students require a Masters degree before entry on to a PhD.
With limited funding available for research Masters and none for taught Masters, many
students currently fund these courses themselves. With higher undergraduate tuition
fees, many students may feel unable to take on more student debt.
43) The funding situation for Masters level training will affect several interlinked aspects. If
the costs are excessive then fewer students are likely to apply. The resulting reduced
intake is quite likely to render the course uneconomic to run, leading either to its
withdrawal or to an increase in the, at present, unregulated fees charged. Consequently
there may be a serious loss of stand-alone Masters training provision.
44) The increased costs to students is compounded because research careers are (a)
insecure for the first few years at Masters and PhD level, and in postdoctoral posts; (b)
the period of a PhD adds years during which a former student is not earning above the
threshold to begin to pay back tuition fees, thus adding to the interest and increasing the
total debt; and (c) even long term research scientists are typically not well paid relatively
to those with equivalent abilities in other professions.
45) It should also be borne in mind that the restructuring of grant support for academic
research will concentrate funding and reduce the number of well-funded laboratories in
which quality postgraduate training can be provided. Particularly in the life sciences
sector there are areas of research that do not require ‘big science’, and the changes in
research support scarcely support the Government’s claim of wanting to create a
thriving science, and specifically “Life Sciences” sector.
581
46) In conclusion, it is important to be aware that anything which affects student choice now
will affect the skills supply many years ahead. The down-stream impacts of this are
difficult to predict accurately but seem likely to be substantial.
Industry
graduates?
47) There currently seems no means by which the numbers of graduates being trained is
matched to the number required. The removal of restriction on subjects studied by
students gaining AAB+ at A level, and the right of universities unilaterally to ‘rebalance’
to non-STEM subjects that are more profitable under the new funding arrangements,
both motivate against balancing supply with demand.
48) Despite this there are some moves in a few vulnerable STEM areas. For instance, the
Society of Biology are currently conducting pilot studies for Degree accreditation. One
of the pilot areas are degrees containing a substantial in vivo component. The
Physiological Society will help the Society of Biology to engage with the in vivo
community, and provide links to the expertise stored within HEI’s. This Degree
Accreditation Programme will require HEI’s to work with industry (SMEs, CROs etc) to
find placements for students, thus helping to forge links between the two.
16 December 2011
582
Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) – Written evidence
Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) – Written

evidence
About QAA
1 QAA's mission is to safeguard standards and improve the quality of UK higher

education.
2 The primary responsibility for academic standards and quality rests with individual
institutions. We review all UK higher education institutions, report on how well
they meet those responsibilities, identify good practice, and make recommendations
for improvement.
3 We work with the higher education sector across the UK to produce the UK
Quality Code for Higher Education (the Quality Code) - the essential reference
materials and key guidelines on how academic standards should be set and
maintained, and on the quality and improvement of learning opportunities.
4 We offer confidential advice on applications for degree awarding powers and

university title to the devolved administrations, the Westminster Government and
the Privy Council.
5 We assure the standards of the Access to HE Diploma, a qualification designed to

facilitate entry to higher education for adults with few or no traditional entry
qualifications. The Access to HE Diploma helps to widen participation to higher
education, with many holders of the qualification coming from underrepresented
groups. We also regulate the national recognition scheme for Access to HE in
England, Wales and Northern Ireland, advising higher education institutions on
making offers to Access to HE Diploma students.
Quality and graduate supply
6 The quality of STEM research, as well as industry, relies on a good supply of STEM
graduates.
7 The quality of the education offered by UK institutions is one of its strengths and
the basis of its strong reputation. QAA's role in maintaining consistency of quality
and comparability of standards underpins this reputation.
8 QAA reviews and makes judgements at an institutional level. We do not make any
distinction in our review reports by subject or single out STEM departments.
Internal reviews by institutions at programme level are, however, an important part
of the quality assurance system, and form part of the evidence base for QAA
reviews.
9 Much of the guidance that we publish for institutions is reference points for the
management of quality and academic standards institution-wide.
583
10 We do, however, produce subject benchmark statements 300 , developed with and
for the higher education sector and other stakeholders. Subject benchmark
statements set out expectations about standards of degrees in a range of subject
areas. They describe what gives a discipline its coherence and identity, and define
what can be expected of a graduate in terms of the abilities and skills needed to
develop understanding or competence in the subject. These benchmarks are part of
the Quality Code.
11 We review subject benchmark statements, and respond actively to demand for new
statements. We encourage academics and representative bodies to approach QAA
with expressions of interest for statements in new subject areas, and we work
closely with subject communities to monitor and review subject benchmark
statements to ensure that they remain relevant and useful.
Preparing graduates for industry
12 Many institutions foster good relationships with industry, through schemes such as
programmes with work placements, seeking accreditation by industry bodies and
employers, or research contracts with companies. Links with industry support the
economy by helping to ensure that graduates have relevant and up-to-date
knowledge and skills for the world of work. We support institutions in this
approach, and good practice in fostering productive links with industry is regularly
commended in our reviews of institutions.
13 We work closely with professional, statutory and regulatory bodies (PSRBs) to

develop subject benchmark statements. Through this collaborative approach, a
number of PSRBs now use subject benchmark statements as part of their
accreditation, making the process simpler and reducing the duplication of effort by
institutions to ensure that courses meet both national expectations for quality and
academic standards, and any specific criteria for PSRB accreditation.
14 For example, our subject benchmark statements published in the last year for
architecture and master's level computing form part of the accreditation guidelines
issued by the Architects' Registration Board and BCS, The Chartered Institute for
IT, respectively, while our subject benchmark statement for engineering adopts the
learning outcomes published by the Engineering Council in its UK Standard for
Professional Engineering Competence.
15 We are keen to develop this work and welcome the use of subject benchmark
statements by PSRBs for their qualification accreditation, bridging guidance on the
national expectations for quality and academic standards in the UK with the
expectations PSRBs have of the higher education courses that they accredit. This
approach reduces duplication of work for institutions and making the process
simpler.
300A full list of current subject benchmark statements is available at

http://www.qaa.ac.uk/AssuringStandardsAndQuality/subject-guidance/Pages/Subject-benchmark-statements.aspx
584
16 We work with the UK Inter-Professional Group to host the PSRB forum, a regular
discussion forum that aims to promote debate on a range of issues and information
sharing between QAA and professional bodies.
17 We are in regular contact with approximately 100 PSRBs in England, and more
across the UK. We will continue to build on this engagement, working in
partnership with the organisations that represent employers and industry to
improve guidance for institutions.
The relationship between teaching and research
18 Research is a vital part of the higher education sector in this country, with the
quality of research at UK institutions recognised internationally.
19 We publish guidance, as part of the Quality Code, to support institutions'

management of the quality and standards of research degree awards. While we do
not review research, we do look at the experiences of an institution's research
students as part of our review methods.
20 Research can and regularly does inform good teaching at lower levels, but it is just
one of a number of variables that can have a positive impact on the learning
experience on offer to undergraduate and taught postgraduate students. Institutions
should not rely on a good research reputation; instead they should actively work to
provide a good quality learning environment for all students.
21 Higher education is not just delivered by institutions with degree awarding powers.
A significant number of higher education students study for courses delivered
through partnership arrangements at further education colleges. Our reviews of
higher education delivered in further education colleges regularly report instances
of good practice at these teaching-focused colleges.
22 QAA reviews applications for degree awarding powers by organisations. We make

recommendations to the Privy Council, after assessing according to criteria set by
Government and the devolved administrations. We assess applications for
Foundation Degree awarding powers, taught degree awarding powers (allowing
providers to award both taught undergraduate and taught postgraduate degrees),
and research degree awarding powers.
23 Institutions without research degree awarding powers may offer research degrees
validated by another institution, or may choose to concentrate on provision of their
own taught awards. Our review reports regularly highlight instances of good
practice in teaching and assessment at different types of institution, including both
research-led and teaching-only institutions.
24 Different students have different needs and wants from their education. Some
students may have a strong preference to study at a research-led institution, while
some may have other priorities. Institutions and colleges that do not have a distinct
research environment may, for example, provide access to higher education for
students that need to study locally. It is important to maintain this local link -
585
whether the provider is a centre of research or not - to help widen access to higher
education.
Access to HE and 16-18 supply
25 The QAA-managed Access to HE Diploma continues to grow in popularity. This

qualification for adults returning to education is widely accepted by universities and
other higher education providers. We believe that the Access to HE diploma could
have an even greater role in encouraging interest in STEM subjects among potential
higher education students. We would welcome further collaboration with
institutions and partner organisations to establish how best to generate and
accommodate demand through the Access to HE Diploma.
26 There appears to be significant demand from students interested in Access to HE

Diplomas in STEM subjects. QAA maintains a database of available Access to HE
Diploma courses. It can be accessed publicly on the Access to HE website to help
applicants to research options. Recently collected web data shows that 'Science' is
the second most popular keyword search term entered, while 'Science and
Mathematics' is the second most subject search, making up 11% of searches.
27 Figures provided by UCAS for the Access to HE Joint agency statistical report 2011 301
show that significant numbers of applicants with an Access to HE Diploma were
accepted onto a range of STEM subject courses in 2010. Of the 27,725 former
Access to HE students that year, 50.4% were accepted onto STEM courses (as
defined by UCAS course code). A further 2% of former Access to HE students
were accepted onto combined courses including one or more science subjects.
28 Of these, many former Access students chose to study science-based, vocational

higher education courses, such as nursing and other subjects allied to medicine. This
accounts for 34.4% of the Access to HE Diploma students accepted onto higher
education courses through UCAS in 2010 (by UCAS course code).
29 It is important to consider the potential of all students. Focusing efforts on 16-18

supply neglects the role that mature students - including the increasing number of
applicants with an Access to HE Diploma - can play as part of a STEM subject
community.
16 December 2011
301 http://www.accesstohe.ac.uk/partners/statistics/2011/UCASreport2011.pdf
586
(QQ 167-215)
Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), Higher Education Academy and

Vitae – Oral evidence (QQ 167-215)

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Krebs
Lord Lucas
Lord Rees of Ludlow
________________
Anthony McClaran, Chief Executive, the Quality Assurance Agency; Professor Craig
Mahoney, Chief Executive, Higher Education Academy; and Ellen Pearce, Director, Vitae.
Q167 The Chairman: Good afternoon, and welcome to this oral session on higher
education in STEM subjects. Welcome to our panellists, and also welcome to members of
the public. If I could remind you that we are being webcast and that any minor comment, or
major comment, will be broadcast around the world and will appear on every broadcast
station. So just be warned of that.
We have two panels this afternoon so we are trying to go forward at a fair pace, so if you
could be as brief as possible with your answers we would be grateful. If I could ask each of
the panel—starting with you, Professor Mahoney—to introduce yourself, say where you are
from, and if you want to make the briefest of statements you may do so, but otherwise I will
get straight into the questions.
Professor Mahoney: My name is Professor Craig Mahoney. I am Chief Executive of the
Higher Education Academy, which is a UK body designed to assist in the development of
academic staff to enhance the student learning experience. We work across the UK, across
28 subject disciplines, and support the academic and student experience as I have described.
Ellen Pearce: I am Ellen Pearce, Director of Vitae. Vitae is the UK organisation championing
researchers’ employability in careers, so our perspective is very much on the professional
development of researchers and career motivations and impact.
Q168 The Chairman: For the record, may I just ask who actually funds Vitae?
587
(QQ 167-215)
Ellen Pearce: We are funded by the UK Research Councils.
The Chairman: Okay. Thanks.
Anthony McClaran: I am Anthony McClaran. I am Chief Executive of the Quality Assurance
Agency for Higher Education, and we have responsibility for safeguarding standards and
quality in higher education across the UK.
Q169 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Anthony, if I may start with you
because you have mentioned those two golden words, which are “quality” and “standards”.
We would very much like to ask you: what are the responsibilities of HEIs, the QAA, HEA,
HEFCE, and others, for ensuring those two very important issues of standards and quality in
higher education? Where do the responsibilities lie, because we are finding that quite difficult
to pin down?
Anthony McClaran: The primary responsibility for quality and standards lies with
institutions themselves, autonomous bodies that have that key responsibility for the quality
and standard of their academic provision. There is then a statutory duty upon the funding
council in England, HEFCE—and similar arrangements apply in other parts of the UK—to
ensure that the bodies that they fund have appropriate arrangements for the external
assurance of their quality. We are contracted to supply that external assurance of the quality
and standards in institutions.
We have another role, though, which is also about supporting institutions in the continuous
improvement of their quality and standards. So we have a relationship both with the
institutions and with the funding bodies and both of those roles together essentially
constitute what we do.
Q170 The Chairman: In terms of co-ordinating the work of these different

organisations, is that your job, or whose job is it?
Anthony McClaran: In terms of the contractual relationship, the co-ordination of work is
the responsibility of the funding council. We have an annual contract with the funding
councils—plural—and in the course of agreeing those contracts we undertake a programme
of work for the coming year, and there are similar contractual arrangements with other
organisations that you have listed in—
Q171 The Chairman: Then, in terms of standards of what happens, you have nothing to
do with that. That is determined by the institutions; you just simply take what they say as a
standard and measure against that?
Anthony McClaran: No, far from it. Because we have another responsibility and that is to
maintain and develop what is currently called the Academic Infrastructure, which is in the
process of becoming the UK Quality Code. Essentially that is a framework of benchmarks,
which set standards and provide programme specifications for individual courses that have a
framework of higher education qualifications and all of that, together with codes of practice
about key areas of university activity, such as admissions or the treatment of disabled
students. There is a whole range of areas of codes of practice, and we are responsible for
maintaining that, which we do in partnership not only with institutions but also with relevant
professional bodies, with expertise sometimes from employers and, increasingly, with input
from students as well.
588
(QQ 167-215)
Q172 The Chairman: Do you mind if I just bring in the benchmarking issue, because you
raised that. In terms of benchmarking, let us take a subject or an area like engineering. Who
sets the benchmark for engineering?
Anthony McClaran: The subject benchmark for engineering is essentially set by an expert
group, which comprises representatives from the subject community for engineering, the
Engineering Council, as the appropriate regulatory body, and participation from the Higher
Education Academy. We will then put together a benchmark that reflects the views, at any
given time, of the subject community operating across the country.
Q173 The Chairman: You will put it together?

Anthony McClaran: Yes. Part of our role is to ensure that we maintain that framework,
part of which is the subject benchmarks.
Q174 The Chairman: So every subject, every Honours degree will have that benchmark?
Anthony McClaran: Every broad subject. Most subject areas will have that benchmark.
Sometimes new subject areas appear and at that point a subject community will come
forward—as was recently the case with early childhood studies, for instance—and say, “This
is now a subject that we believe requires a subject benchmark. This is an emerging area of
study and it requires a subject benchmark”. Sometimes professional bodies will come
forward to us and say, “It is now time to review the subject benchmark because the
discipline has moved on”, or the professional requirements that the professional body and—
on from them—that the employers require have moved on and they need to be
incorporated in the subject benchmark.
Q175 Lord Krebs: If I could just follow up on that. Is this a benchmark for quality or
standards or both?
Anthony McClaran: This is a benchmark for the threshold standards that apply within a
particular subject area.
Q176 Lord Krebs: Okay, could you—-and perhaps others on the witness panel as well—
elaborate a little bit on what the metrics are? So, how do you define the standard, how do
you measure it and how do you check in an institution whether the standard is being met?
Anthony McClaran: It is not principally a metric-based approach because what we are not
doing through the subject benchmarks is prescribing a national curriculum for the higher
education sector. What we are doing with the subject benchmark, having defined it—when
we go into review an institution it is one of the measures we use in order to determine
whether or not that institution is meeting the required standard in terms of its qualifications.
Q177 Lord Krebs: Have you ever found an institution that did not, and what did you do?
Anthony McClaran: No. Generally we have found that the subject benchmarks are
extremely well embedded in institutions. In a way that is not surprising, particularly in the
areas that I think you are looking at as a Committee, because of the very strong involvement
of professional bodies. The professional bodies will be intimately involved in the creation of a
subject benchmark, and indeed—as I mentioned earlier on—if there is a change in those
requirements, they will stimulate a development of the subject benchmarks. Their own
professional regulations will cross-reference the subject benchmarks, and from the work
they do, in regulating particular courses at particular institutions, they will often specify in
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their requirements that the starting point must be that the institution complies with the
QAA subject benchmark for that area.
Q178 The Chairman: Could we get an opinion from the rest of the panel to my first
question, which is about the plethora of organisations that are in this space. Do you feel
that, in fact, the co-ordination works well; that standards and quality within these
organisations led by QAA actually works? Ellen, could I ask you?
Ellen Pearce: I am coming from a very specific area, but in the area of professional
development for doctoral researchers I think that the organisations responsible for quality
have a very good working relationship. We have a new Researcher Development
Framework, which now underpins the professional and career development training for
doctoral researchers, and that is embedded in the new QAA Quality Code. We work very
closely with the funding councils, the Research Councils and the Higher Education Academy,
so I think that comprehensive approach, in that specific area, has worked well and the
universities are now in the process of implementing that framework.
Q179 The Chairman: Professor Mahoney, on the same question?

Professor Mahoney: Yes. The way I would answer the question is that there is a
complementarity that exists in organisations working in higher education, which recognises
the independence of their mission and their purpose, but a complementarity in the way in
which they work. You heard Anthony very clearly articulate the role of the QAA, which is
very much around the quality and standards. The Higher Education Academy is very much
about the enhancement of the activities that occur in universities, which we see as a
complementary activity to the measurement of quality and standards. So we are working
with institutions—particularly academics—at discipline level, to ensure that they are
engaging with best practice, or becoming aware of best practice, and that then leads on to
the student experience being the best that it can be. So our role is very much about the
enhancement of that teaching and learning experience, overseen separately by QAA in this
particular case.
Q180 Lord Lucas: What you are saying is there is, for instance, a universal standard—I
see from the website on engineering—and therefore, a degree in engineering from
Cambridge is the same as a degree in engineering from Bedford because they both have the
same basis?
Anthony McClaran: We are talking about a couple of things. We are talking about the
setting of threshold standards. We are not talking about the distance beyond the threshold
that any particular qualification may go, but we are talking about threshold standards. The
other thing that is important to remember is that since 2002 QAA has not reviewed at
subject level, so we are not going in and directly reviewing—to take your example—an
engineering degree at Cambridge. What we are doing is maintaining the standard nationally,
for what could reasonably be expected from a graduate from any university that is meeting
this standard in those disciplines.
Q181 Lord Lucas: So this is the lowest common denominator?

Anthony McClaran: It is a threshold.
Lord Lucas: But a very low one.
590
(QQ 167-215)
Anthony McClaran: I do not think it is a low one because it is calibrated against a
framework of higher education qualifications, which itself is calibrated against international
standards such as those that operate in Europe and beyond; so I do not think it is a low one,
but it is a threshold.
Q182 The Chairman: Just before I move on, can you just answer briefly? In terms of
these benchmarks, they are set by bringing this community together—I understand that.
How often are they reviewed?
Anthony McClaran: The longest gap would be about seven years. Sometimes it is more
frequently than that if there is a particular reason that requires earlier review.
The Chairman: Seven years?

Anthony McClaran: Yes, that would be the longest period between.
Q183 The Chairman: So what is the average?

Anthony McClaran: The average will vary from discipline to discipline, but we would not
let it go longer than that period without reviewing it. So for instance in the areas—
The Chairman: Homeopathy. How often would you review homeopathy as a benchmark?
Anthony McClaran: We do not have a benchmark for homeopathy.
Q184 Lord Krebs: Just briefly to come back and follow up Lord Lucas’s point. Every
university meets the standard, which is described by Lord Lucas as the “lowest common
denominator”; you described it as “a threshold”. We are told by some employers that
graduates of certain universities are not sufficiently equipped with the necessary knowledge
and skills to enter the employment market in STEM subjects. Does that mean the employers
are too fussy or the standards are too low? It must be one or the other.
Anthony McClaran: Certainly, if that is the case, then it will mean that there is a mismatch
between those sets of expectations.
Q185 Lord Krebs: Do you ask employers whether the standard—

Anthony McClaran: We certainly do ask employers.
Q186 Lord Krebs: So you get a different answer from the answers we got?
Anthony McClaran: We do, at the level of the subject nationally. We are not asking the
employer specifically about the provision of subjects at a particular institution, although
when we review a particular institution we may ask employers as part of the overall view of
that institution.
The Chairman: Do you want to continue, Lord Krebs?
Lord Krebs: I do not want to hog the conversation too much.
The Chairman: No, but you are going into question 2 I think.
Q187 Lord Krebs: I thought we were in question 2, but maybe we can switch just very
briefly, and then I will hand on to the next question.
We talked about standards, but what about quality? You are responsible for assessing the
quality of teaching. Declaring an interest as one who has been an academic and a teacher for
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many years in a university, the view often was that the QAA assessment of teaching quality
did not go to teaching quality, per se. It was more a tick-box exercise—“Have you filled in
the forms that show the students have attended practical classes?” and so on. How do you
assess the actual quality of teaching as opposed to processes?
Anthony McClaran: Having been on both sides of the institutional review, as someone who
used to work in universities as well, I do not recognise the tick-box description. What we
are seeking to do when we review an institution is two things—and this may be part of an
answer to the point that Lord Lucas was raising—we are seeking to establish whether or
not the threshold standards are secure; but beyond that, we are seeking to establish what
we term “quality”, which would be the ways in which those threshold standards are actually
communicated to a group of students in an institution. What is the quality of the learning
environment? What is the quality of the way in which the subjects are assessed? What is the
way in which learning resources are deployed to assist students in reaching that standard?
In order to do that, we take an enormous amount of evidence, not simply from the staff of
the university but increasingly from the students of the university. We also have a lot of
direct oral evidence, operating in a not dissimilar way from today when we go into an
institution, against which we test any claims that have been made in the written evidence
submitted by the institution, and we have a written submission given to us in advance by the
students. The whole exercise is one of trying to establish not only that the threshold
standards are secure but that the way in which universities help students to reach them is
one which can be described as having quality, and that begins to link to the work that
Professor Mahoney’s agency takes on of enhancement. In other words, we are not simply
there to identify and remedy problems; we are there to see how effectively institutions are
improving the experience of the students that they are responsible for.
The Chairman: Sorry, I have to halt you in mid-sentence there. There is a Division, which
we have to go to, so I shall suspend the Committee for 10 minutes. Thank you very much.
Q188 The Chairman: I will come back to Lord Rees when he gets back. You talked
about the benchmarking. In terms of engineering, on the current benchmark in 2006 there is
one employers’ organisation only, and in the previous one there was only one employer. Do
you think that is suitable, really?
Anthony McClaran: No. We would be the first to acknowledge that that involvement of
employers should expand. That is one of the issues, as we move into the new review
method that we have just begun in England, where we want to expand the involvement, both
of students on the one hand and employers on the other. We are having some discussions
with CIHE in relation to ways in which we can get expert input from employers to particular
areas that we are redeveloping, so I would acknowledge the point you have made.
The Chairman: That is fair enough.
Q189 Lord Krebs: If I could go back to this question of standards and ask the question,
supposing you came across a course that had good standards, it met the threshold but the
content was lacking, so they met the threshold standard for what they taught but they did
not teach enough of the appropriate material. Is that something that would emerge from
your analysis?
Anthony McClaran: It would not necessarily always emerge because, as I have explained,
we do not review at course level. We do not review individual courses any more. But it
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might emerge as part of us trying to establish whether or not an institution has secure
mechanisms for delivering standards. Therefore, if it did, it would almost certainly form part
of the recommendation that would come from institutional review and which the institution
would be required to address.
Another route in which it might come is that, in addition to our cyclical reviews, we also
have a procedure for investigating concerns about quality and standards. That is a procedure
that steps outside cyclical review and leads to an immediate investigation by a team just
focusing on one particular area. That is often triggered by complaints, particularly from
students but occasionally from members of academic staff as well.
Q190 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I wanted to ask whether you assess the examination
standards and the grading, and whether the external examiner system is rigorous enough to
really ensure the comparability that you are seeking.
Anthony McClaran: We do not assess standards in grading, in the sense of the boundaries
between the degree classifications. We do look at the health of the external examiner
system, and we were very much part of the recent review of the external examiner system
that I think Sir Alan Langlands mentioned during his evidence to you. Our concern there—
and this will be reflected in the UK Quality Code—is to ensure that there is a consistency, a
practice in the sector, about the identification, support and use of external examiners as part
of the mechanisms a university has for ensuring its standards.
Q191 The Chairman: Who reviews the courses there?

Anthony McClaran: The courses will often be reviewed by professional bodies, particularly
in the areas within STEM. There is no individual subject review. That was discontinued in
2002. We could go into the reasons why, but that is probably another subject.
The Chairman: No, okay. Are you happy?
Lord Krebs: Yes.
Q192 The Chairman: Professor Mahoney, can I just ask you—you indicated earlier that,
in terms of your particular role, it really is about adding quality. Is that—
Professor Mahoney: Adding value I would describe it as.
The Chairman: Sorry, all right.
Professor Mahoney: You could measure it by quality, but we are enhancing the activities of
academic staff and, as a consequence of that, the student learning experience, to make it
more positive, contemporary and fit for purpose.
Q193 The Chairman: At what point are you brought into an institution, then, to do
these enhancing things?
Professor Mahoney: That is a good question. “Brought in” is perhaps not the way to
describe the way the organisation operates. We are a company that is funded by the four
funding bodies, but also by subscription income from 165 subscribers delivering higher
education in the UK. So we have a partnership relationship with 165 providers of higher
education level qualifications. That relationship is an intimate one where we engage with
them and they engage with us. They make use of our services. They ask us to come and
support things that they need to make change with, which could be the curricula delivery of
a particular subject, or it could be about the design of classroom spaces to be more effective
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with contemporary knowledge, so that relationship is quite intimate depending on what their
needs may be.
Relating back to the question that has just been asked, we run workshops and support
programmes on external examiners. If an external examiner is new to that role they may not
understand what is required of them, so we run workshops to help new external examiners
understand their role, put it into context for the university they are involved in, and help
them explore where their knowledge and experience may be relevant, or may need some
development before they can do that role properly. It is not a mandatory role, it is not a
mandatory requirement, but it is there as a service we offer. Typically, the things that we do
do are services that are provided rather than mandatory requirements.
Q194 The Chairman: Do you look at teaching?

Professor Mahoney: Yes.
Q195 The Chairman: You accredit teachers at university?

Professor Mahoney: We do. We oversee a process called accreditation in higher
education. As I am sure many of you will realise, primary and secondary state-funded
teachers are required to be qualified to teach. That is not the case in higher education, so
the academy oversees an accreditation programme, which has been built by the sector for
the sector and we have been given the responsibility of overseeing that. Of the 180,000
academics working in UK higher education, there are currently 30,000 academics registered
on our books as being qualified to teach, having completed a postgraduate certificate in
higher education, or having completed a recognition programme through our organisation,
which aligns at the same standard against a professional standards framework, which is that
UK standard threshold.
Q196 The Chairman: So five-sixths have not?

Professor Mahoney: It is unfair to say that, because not everybody will have necessarily
gone through an approved route that we oversee. They could have come from another
country, they could be doing a qualification separately and they may not have chosen to tell
us that they have a qualification, so I like to double that number and suggest it is probably
60,000. There is still a shortfall.
Sorry, I just need to add a point. That is not to say, however, that teaching in higher
education in the UK is not of an appropriate standard. I think we would all verify, in lots of
different ways and metrics, that the quality of teaching in higher education is in fact
something to be proud of.
The Chairman: If we have time, we will come back to that.
Q197 Lord Broers: How do you interact with industry to ensure that STEM courses are
of high quality at undergraduate and postgraduate level?
The Chairman: Perhaps could you start on that, Ellen.
Ellen Pearce: Yes. From the perspective of Vitae, which is around ensuring that doctoral
researchers have good preparation for future careers, I suppose a couple of things. One is
around the Researcher Development Framework, which has been very widely consulted on
and very closely endorsed and linked with employers. For example, we are working with the
Engineering Council to look at the chartered status requirements and how they map on to
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the Researcher Development Framework. The framework is there to ensure that we are
training and developing researchers fit for purpose for a whole range of future career roles.
We know that three-and-a-half years after graduation only 35% of doctoral graduates are
working in research roles, so we know that they are making a very wide contribution.
The other key theme at the moment is around work experience, and that was one of the
recommendations from the Wilson review. For doctoral researchers and their engagement
with employers, the opportunity to experience work in a range of sectors first-hand is quite
important. We know from our own surveys that around only 35% of doctoral researchers
have an opportunity to do that, but they value it very highly and that often leads to
employment. We are of the view that work experience needs some more wrappers around
it to make sure that it is a valuable process, and that we should look more widely at
opportunities for researchers to gain a broader range of career experiences.
Q198 Lord Broers: We spoke to industry and, while they would agree that the work
experience is very positive, we also heard that the higher education system provides
relatively greater incentive to academics for research rather than for teaching. In their view,
this was detrimental in its effect on the ability of students to develop practical, real-world
skills and reduces the commitment to experimental learning. What is your view of that? We
heard this from several employers that we talked to.
Ellen Pearce: Can I just clarify the question? The academic setting predominantly develops
academic skills, rather than preparing people for a wider—
Lord Broers: Yes. The emphasis was more on research than on the quality of the teaching.
I think we have seen that everywhere and academics are under great pressure to produce
their research publications, which is a function of the research evaluation framework, or
whatever it is. We heard fairly universally that this was not regarded as helpful.
Ellen Pearce: There are two points. Doctoral researchers work in the context of academia,
so all of their role models and the direct experience that they have is obviously in that
setting. The second point is that, actually, the skills and capabilities that people need to be
really successful in research careers are often very similar to those that you need to be
successful in business. The other thing is on careers advice, we know that only around a
third of doctoral researchers go to their career services to seek careers advice, and those
that go find it very helpful. The question is about how people are influenced when they are
thinking about career choices, how we can broaden the experience and the set of
opportunities that people understand are available to them.
Q199 Lord Broers: Do employability skills feature in quality measurement?

Anthony McClaran: Is that for me?
Lord Broers: Sorry, yes.
The Chairman: I would like the whole panel to come in on this.

Anthony McClaran: Indeed, yes, sure. Very much so, in terms of the skills that are built
into both the framework of higher education qualifications, which talks about higher
education at each of its levels, but also, in terms of the subject benchmarks, there certainly is
a description of skills, including the skills that might be applied by the graduate once they
have gone into employment.
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In response to the point that has been made to you by employers, for the QAA there is a
recognition that there is more that is required to support teaching and learning. In the
revised Academic Infrastructure to be turned into the Quality Code there will be a section
explicitly on teaching and learning. I am not suggesting that that, in itself, will correct what
might be an imbalance between the emphasis on research and teaching and learning, but I
think it is a recognition that there is more that needs to be done.
The Chairman: Professor Mahoney.
Professor Mahoney: I would comment along a similar line. I think it is fair to say that in the
past 20 years of research assessment exercise and our research action framework, we have
perhaps seen a change in the nature of the support given to academics. Longitudinal studies
that we have done in the academy have shown that promotions criteria, more commonly, do
recognise research characteristics and research achievements than teaching achievements. I
think we are seeing a rebalancing of that at the moment. That is timely and appropriate, and
from my organisation’s point of view most appropriate, so the change is happening and
therefore we are seeing that highlight shift.
In terms of how employability skills and engagement with employers is changing, again we
are seeing a shift here—predicated previously by the last Government—in creating more
work-based learning opportunities. Universities are very heavily engaged in employability,
workplace learning, placement learning, internships and a variety of other mechanisms by
which students can gain experience of the workplace, and then gain better employment or
gain employment following their degree. That is changing the pedagogy in universities as well,
because universities need to recognise that teaching a classroom of students is very different
from being involved in overseeing work-based learning or placement learning, and the
pedagogy around these is very different. Again, that is where the Higher Education Academy
has taken some responsibility in being involved in academics and employer groups. For
example, in Scotland we work with the Scottish Higher Education Employment Forum,
which is designed specifically to help academics relate better to employment situations for
students and create curricula that meets those needs.
Anthony McClaran: Might I add one more thing, very briefly? We are currently consulting
on guidelines for higher education, on the ways in which specifically skills to do with
enterprise and entrepreneurship can be embedded in curricula. Again, I think a recognition
of the movement that Professor Mahoney has just been describing.
The Chairman: Just before I bring Lord Lucas in, it would be useful if you could let the
Committee have a note of the evidence you have to support what you just said about this
significant shift, from what we heard from employers and from what you have said today,
because we have no evidence in our paperwork, so far, that indicates that that is actually
happening.
Q200 Lord Lucas: Something that has also been said—at least to me—is that a lot of
senior academics are under contracts that provide for very little teaching, particularly
compared to American universities, and are you seeing that changing? If I can pick you up on
the engineering framework. It mentions ethics, it mentions sustainability but nowhere does it
mention commerce in the characteristics of engineering graduates.
Anthony McClaran: We are just out to consultation, as I mentioned a moment ago, on
how those skills can be much more embedded in curricula, so I think you will see a change
there.
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Professor Mahoney: There was another question there. Do you want me to pursue it?
The Chairman: Yes please.

Professor Mahoney: The first part of the question was about senior academics being less
engaged in teaching. That is a phenomenon that I am not sure is changing. It is fair to say that
as academics progress through their career—and I am an academic, as I know some of you
are—then the tendency is that your responsibilities shift and change and your classroom
facing activity becomes less. However, that does not mean that you are not there as a
mentor and a support for the guidance of other people coming through in academic
pathways, to help them understand what they can do best to be an effective teacher.
Q201 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Has any organisation, yours or any other
organisation or organisations, tried to define the essential attributes that they think every
STEM graduate should have?
Anthony McClaran: I think we certainly approach that through the work that we do with
subject communities and professional bodies in the subject benchmarks. There are attributes
there. We are engaged in further work in trying to define the attributes at the postgraduate
level, where the subject benchmarks apply only in a generic way rather than a subject-
specific way. Also, in the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications, again there is
reference there to the attributes that graduates at the various levels of higher education
might be expected to have.
Ellen Pearce: That is what we have attempted to do in our Researcher Development
Framework, which is specifically aimed at doctoral graduates and it is a very comprehensive
framework that was developed by interviewing successful researchers. It essentially identifies
64 descriptors of skills and attributes that successful researchers have, and then what we
have looked to do is to do a meta-analysis of the attributes and the skills that employer
organisations say that they are looking for in doctoral graduates. What we will have at the
end of that is what we are calling an employability lens, so it brings to the fore the skills and
attributes that are specifically useful for transitioning into non-academic posts.
Q202 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Just as a matter of interest, as an aside, what

percentage of postgraduate students does your work impact on?
Ellen Pearce: We work with all of the UK higher education institutions and the Researcher
Development Framework is referenced in the QAA Quality Code, so it should impact all
doctoral researchers.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: Professor Mahoney.
Professor Mahoney: It is a very good question, and I am not sure there is an easy answer to
it. Universities have taken a lot of interest in recent years to understand what graduate
attributes look like, more generically than specifically perhaps towards subject areas. But my
evidence and my experience would be that in universities there is a clear interest in trying to
find employability skills that are relevant to subject areas. In STEM subjects we know that
employers value their analytical skills, their problem solving ability, but sometimes the
pathway into higher education perhaps does not prepare students as well as we might like
them to, in being able to develop their STEM skills to the level we would prefer, or perhaps
in some other countries you may see this happening.
The supply chain perhaps needs to be looked at as well. I am not criticising pre-university
education, as I am not criticising university education, but at the moment we do not have a
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seamless pathway through, and not to suggest Scotland is any better but Scotland’s
Curriculum for Excellence programme is designed to create a greater parallel between
primary, secondary and tertiary education. We do not see that in the rest of the UK.
Q203 Lord Cunningham of Felling: How does the approach to quality measures try to
deliver these attributes then?
Anthony McClaran: When we review institutions, the evidence we are looking for is that
they have used the Quality Code and all its component parts, including subject benchmarks,
in the way in which they develop new courses, review existing courses and improve the
academic provision that they offer. We are looking at the ways in which the identification of
skills, attributes and outcomes are used by institutions in designing their academic provision.
Where we find that is done well we commend it; where we find it needs further work we
make a recommendation of the kind of work that needs to be done. That is not a metrical
kind of measurement but it is a measurement that takes the work that is being done, in
relation to particular subjects, in the context of the way in which the whole institution is
run.
Q204 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Several of the industrial witnesses have said to the
Committee that they are particularly concerned about weakness or inability in mathematics,
for example, and they believe that more students should study maths to 18. Should every
STEM graduate have A-level maths, do you think?
Anthony McClaran: In my experience, the vast majority of courses for STEM subjects—and
probably referring back to my UCAS experience now—did require A-level mathematics. It
certainly was a very common requirement for entry to many STEM courses. I do not think
that I would prescribe that every university must require A-level mathematics, but if
employers believe that, and if the professional bodies, which are looking from a professional
point of view at the standards, were to require that, that would be extremely influential.
Q205 Lord Cunningham of Felling: One of their points is that the overlap now
between science subjects is so great, and increasing so significantly, that without competence
in mathematics a lot of these people are just never going to make it. Does this appear in
your quality assessment in any way?
Anthony McClaran: We would be talking about the skills that are being sought for a
particular programme; we are not about prescribing the entry conditions for individual
universities. They must reach that judgement themselves.
Q206 Lord Cunningham of Felling: I understand that. But since you are measuring
“quality”, does mathematics not feature anywhere in those considerations?
Anthony McClaran: We are trying to assess the way in which an institution responds to
benchmarks that the academic community and the relevant professional bodies, collectively,
have determined are the right areas of knowledge and preparation for that particular subject.
I do not think what we are trying to do is to go in and second-guess what the academic
community and the professional bodies should be requiring for particular subjects.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: But as Lord Broers has pointed out, it is not academic
institutions that are raising these questions; it is industry and commerce and manufacturing.
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Q207 The Chairman: If 92% of biology graduates do not have an A-level qualification in
maths, surely there is something not quite right there? If you are benchmarking against
standards, then surely there ought to be something in there.
Anthony McClaran: It seems to me that the mechanisms are there, in terms of the way in
which the subject benchmarks are constructed that, if it emerged that A-level mathematics
was a critical component of the preparation for a particular subject, the mechanisms are
there to embed that. As I say, it is a fine line between that and trying to prescribe the entry
conditions that individual institutions might put in place for entry to a particular degree
qualification.
Q208 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Chairman, I hope our witnesses see the point that
what industrialists are saying is too many of the people coming out, in their terms, are not
really up to it because of this weakness in mathematics. Does that not register with anyone?
Anthony McClaran: Absolutely. It registers very strongly.
Professor Mahoney: Another way of looking at this might be to say, okay, what happens to
biology graduates? On the example given—and I note that one of your previous reviews
with the vice-chancellors identified that number that you have referred to—if biology
graduates are not getting jobs and are not gainfully employed in that industry, then perhaps
there is a concern. But if they are gainfully employed, then perhaps that requirement that
you believe should be mandatory—
Lord Cunningham of Felling: I am not giving you my opinion here.

Professor Mahoney: No, but I am saying—
Lord Cunningham of Felling: I am asking the questions. I am not expressing opinions; I
am expressing evidence given to the Committee by other witnesses.
Professor Mahoney: Nonetheless, it is really about whether or not we are creating people
who are employable in the industry, for which the degree that they are pursuing may
provide them with opportunities. If mathematics is perceived not to be required at that end-
point, then there is no reason to have it at the start-point either. I can share your concern
about mathematics. There is clear evidence that people with maths skills at a high level open
opportunities and careers in a range of different areas that are quite phenomenal, and I am
delighted to say my first degree is in maths, but that is coincident. Whether that is where we
should be now I do not know. Previously, English and maths were both required to do
degrees. These days they are very seldom required in universities to pursue into higher
education, other than at GCSE level. Times are changing.
Q209 Lord Cunningham of Felling: For the better?

Professor Mahoney: I suppose it is not for us to judge that at the moment, but it is
certainly our responsibility to try to prepare people for future careers, and a variety of
careers, because it is unlikely that a person leaving university with a degree in biology will
pursue a biology career for the next 40 years. That is almost certainly not going to happen.
Anthony McClaran: I was just going to add, subject benchmarks and the quality code are
not the only way in which this might be approached. The increasing emphasis that will be
placed on the provision by institutions of public information to potential students, where
there will be an indication of the employability of graduates, brings pressure to bear from
another direction in relation to the point that employers have been raising with you, and the
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point that Professor Mahoney has picked up. Indeed, if it is the case that graduates in a
particular area are failing to become employable, then that will become visible very quickly.
Q210 Lord Lucas: Could you share with us your 64 points of employability for doctoral
students, and could you share with us the current state of the draft on the engineering
threshold? You say you are looking at changes; it would be very useful to know what sort of
changes you are looking at and how far they are going.
Anthony McClaran: In answer to the previous question, I think I was trying to indicate the
process by which we review the various subject benchmarks and anticipating the kind of
elements that might be there in the next revision.
Q211 Lord Lucas: Which is due when?

Anthony McClaran: I think that engineering was last reviewed last year.
Q212 Lord Lucas: So in six years’ time?

Anthony McClaran: No—generally, in five years’ time, but no longer than seven years, and
sooner if required by the requisite professional bodies.
The Chairman: Baroness Hilton, do you want to come in?
Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: No, I think my question has been covered, thank you.
Q213 The Chairman: Is there anything else any Member of the Committee wants to ask?
Can I just finally say there, that students are being told that when they look at the KIS—that
is a lovely word—in terms of applying to a university, that will give them a real indication of
quality. Are you happy that that will be the case?
Anthony McClaran: I do not think that the KIS would be the only indication of quality. The
KIS is part of the information students ought to be looking at in future, when they consider
whether or not to go to a particular institution, on the basis that, after all, it reflects the
fields that students themselves indicated in surveys were the most important to them. I
certainly do not think they would only be looking at the KIS, as there are many other factors
that make up the decision about which institution to apply to.
Q214 The Chairman: May I finish with a comment for you to reflect on. When we met a
group of vice-chancellors from a whole host of different universities, universally they said
that the lack of mathematics was having a severe effect in terms of their ability to deliver
high quality STEM graduates, both to the workplace and into research. All of them said that,
including the vice-chancellor from Cambridge. Employers have said to us that one of the
great problems is that students are not arriving with sufficient mathematical skills, and yet
here we have a panel, responsible for standards and quality in the higher education system,
who feel that that is not part of your responsibility; it can just be left to someone else. I am
not saying that in a derogatory way—I am, actually—but what I am saying is that that is a
frustration for us, as to how do we get into that to actually raise those standards?
Anthony McClaran: Can I just say one point in response to that. I do not think I was saying
for the QAA that it is not our responsibility. I was trying to distinguish between what we are
able to prescribe and those areas of development where we need to work with the
academic subject communities and the professional bodies. That was not to say that the
issue you have raised was not significant, or has not been recognised by many in higher
education.
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Professor Mahoney: Can I make two observations about it? The first would be that the
vice-chancellors have the authority to determine what the intake standard is for students
coming on to STEM programmes. They have total control over that, so if they are getting
students of an insufficient standard, they can raise the standard. The other point is my
previous point, and that is perhaps the pre-development programme for students coming
into universities needs to be reviewed as well. That is not our jurisdiction whatsoever. It is
the feed chain that we have coming into universities for which perhaps serious review is
required.
The Chairman: Lord Cunningham, yours is the last word.
Q215 Lord Cunningham of Felling: I hope the witnesses will have the last word,
Chairman, since I would like to ask them a question, and it is this. When we had the vice-
chancellors—as the Chairman said—I put it to them that this situation of weakness in maths
in the United Kingdom has not just arisen in the last five or 10 years; it has been around for
decades. So I am inclined to agree with you, Professor Mahoney, that this is not the
universities’ problem; it is a pre-university problem. If we are not getting enough well-
qualified mathematicians out of the universities in the first place, this is a bit of a circular
discussion. We do not get enough high quality mathematics teaching in schools, and we do
not get children motivated by mathematics in schools and, therefore, when they get to
university they get into courses where they do not even have A-level maths, which seems
extraordinary. Is that what you were saying?
Professor Mahoney: That is more or less what I was saying. People sometimes say that the
best academic students coming through the degree pathway make the best students. I do not
share that opinion. Great teachers come from lots of different places. What we want is to
encourage great teaching in primary and secondary education, to enable those people who
have mathematics capable skills to be developed to their fullest, and that is perhaps where
the concern lies at the moment. Whether the curriculum is right in pre-university
programmes is not for me to decide, but clearly what we are seeing, and what many people
say is referenced every year when A-level results come out, is that we are having a watering
down of standards and achievements. You are more experienced in the UK than I am. I
cannot answer that question, but perhaps that is where the review also needs to spend
some time in understanding what is happening to the pathway through to university for
STEM students.
The Chairman: On that note, we will conclude the session. I thank you all very much
indeed. I apologise for the break because of the vote. But we have enjoyed very much, as
always, talking to you and thank you very much indeed.
601
Queen Mary, University of London – Written evidence
Recent changes in UK immigration policy have had a direct impact on STEM student
recruitment at QM. The imminent withdrawal of the Post Study Work visa route has had an
effect on prospective postgraduate students for S&E in particular. Traditionally, these
students funded their studies by bank or family loans secured against the expectation that
they would work in the UK after graduation.
The QM overseas PGT S&E enrolment figures for 2011 as compared to 2010
were as follows:
October
Final 2010 October2011
13th 2011
Overseas
Above or
Enrolments Enrolments Target below
targets
Astronomy Unit 4 3 0 3
Biological and Chemical Sciences 4 0 12 -12
Electronic Eng & Computer Science 111 72 160 -88
Engineering and Materials Science 51 30 55 -25
Mathematical Sciences 1 2 2 0
Physics 0 1 3 -2
Total S&E 170 108 232 -124
This equates to a financial loss of c.£ 1,270,000 for the Science and Engineering faculty as a
whole.
The QM overseas undergraduate and pre-degree S&E enrolment figures for

2011 as compared to 2010 were as follows:
Final
2010 October 13 2011
Overseas Overseas Overseas
Enrolments Enrolments Target above/below target
Biological and Chemical
Sciences 25 40 41 -1
Computer Science 18
64 74 -10
Electronic Engineering 33
Engineering and Materials
Science 80 52 85 -33
Mathematical Sciences 26 25 30 -5
Physics 3 5 5 0
International SEFP 107 58 90 -32
Total S&E 292 243 325 -82
602
The ISEFP was particularly badly hit by the introduction of mandatory Secure English
Language Tests. The removal of the Post Study Work visa route is not so important for this
group of students (pre-degree) although it is an issue for some undergraduates.
The policy also appears to be having a direct impact on the number of students
choosing the UK for higher studies following completion of the QM-BUPT Joint
Programme:
Destination of students from QM-BUPT joint programme for further study:

2008 2009 2010
China 17.9% 20.7% 20.7%
UK 55.2%% 49.5% 40.7%
US 20.5% 18.2% 27.7%
Others 6.4% 11.6% 10.9%
Should you have the opportunity, we would like to ask you to raise the issue of Advanced
Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS) clearance delays. The slow processing of ATAS
applications has had a knock on effect on students’ ability to apply for their visas in a timely
manner and leads to subsequent delays in enrolment. There is also contradictory advice
currently in circulation with regards to which STEM courses actually require ATAS
clearance.
It is too early to say what the impact will be on student recruitment this year, and of course
there are other factors at play, but if the recent application statistics are anything to go by,
the early signs are not good.
March 2012
603
Research Councils UK (RCUK) – Written evidence
1. Research Councils UK (RCUK)

i) Research Councils UK (RCUK) is a strategic partnership of the UK's seven
Research Councils who annually invest around £3 billion in research. We
support excellent research, as judged by peer review, which has an impact on
the growth, prosperity and wellbeing of the UK. To maintain the UK’s global
research position we offer a diverse range of funding opportunities, foster
international collaborations and provide access to the best facilities and
infrastructure around the world. We also support the training and career
development of researchers and work with them to inspire young people and
engage the wider public with research. To maximise the impact of research on
economic growth and societal wellbeing we work in partnership with other
research funders including the Technology Strategy Board, the UK Higher
Education Funding Councils, business, government, and charitable organisations.
Further details are available at www.rcuk.ac.uk.
ii) This evidence is submitted by RCUK and represents its independent views. It
does not include, or necessarily reflect the views of the Knowledge and
Innovation Group in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
The submission is made on behalf of the following Councils:
• Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
• Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
• Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
• Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
• Medical Research Council (MRC)
• Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
• Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
i) RCUK welcome the opportunity to respond to the House of Lords’ Call for
Evidence on Higher Education in STEM subjects. We agree with the Sub-
Committee that well trained graduates are vital to our economy. Our Strategic
Vision 302 makes clear that RCUK will continue to develop highly skilled
researchers to achieve impact across the whole economy, as well as developing
the next generation of researchers to maintain national capability. This theme is
continued in the RCUK Delivery Plan 2011/12-2014/15 303 which spells out our
aims to inspire young people and help sustain a supply of future researchers to
support the research base; to attract the best into research and ensure that
they receive world-class training; to develop excellent and impactful researchers
and to ensure effective exchange of skilled people between the research base
and user communities.
302http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/policy/Pages/StratVision.aspx
303 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUK_delivery_plan_2011_15.pdf
604
ii) The postgraduate training supported by RCUK provides high-level skills and
specialist expertise for a wide range of sectors and offers a key route to
knowledge exchange between research groups in the UK’s world class research
base and the organisations which use or benefit from research.
2.2. What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?

i) Whilst subjects can be classified as STEM or non-STEM RCUK believe it is
potentially more useful to think in terms of STEM skills and research
methodology skills (experimentation, empirical observation and the ability to
apply a systematic and critical assessment of complex problems and issues.304 )
These skills are required across all research areas including the Arts, Humanities
and Social Sciences. In this response, RCUK include subjects relevant to all
Research Councils, i.e. across the full range of research in the UK.
ii) A research report commissioned by BIS highlights that “a STEM job or STEM
career is not a clear concept" 305 it identifies that the reasons for a STEM
graduate “leaving” STEM are many and varied, although the following factors
feature quite strongly: limited awareness of STEM career options and;
perceptions from some STEM employers that the mix of skills on offer from
STEM graduates does not fulfil what they need - unsuccessful applicants may
then turn elsewhere.
iii) At postgraduate level, doctoral graduates enter a range of occupations with the
majority being outside Higher Education. Whilst the subjects of study can be
distinguished into STEM and non-STEM subjects this has not been done for
employment. Analysis of destinations and impact 3.5 years after graduation 306
shows that, regardless of the subject of degree, doctoral graduates are able to
be innovative (92%) or make a difference in the workplace (90%) indicating a
wide relevance of doctoral degrees. The report Talent Fishing (CIHE 2010)
shows that doctorates are recruited as much for their analytical thinking and
problem solving skills as for their technical skills or subject-specific
knowledge 307 .
3. 16-18 Supply
3.1. Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and
i) Although numbers of A level entries are higher than in 1996 for mathematics
biology and chemistry, as a proportion of the total estimated cohort aged 17
304 Graduates for the 21st Century: Integrating the Enhancement themes
http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/publications/graduates-for-the-21st-century-institutional-activities.pdf
305 BIS research paper on STEM Graduates in Non STEM Jobs prepared by CRAC – the Careers Research and Advisory
Centre (2011) http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/s/11-771-stem-graduates-in-non-stem-

jobs.pdf
306 What do Researchers Do? Doctoral graduate destinations and impact three years on for RCUK by Vitae (2010)
http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/107611/What-do-researchers-do-.html
307 Talent Fishing (CIHE 2010) http://www.cihe.co.uk/talent-fishing-what-businesses-want-from-postgraduates/
605
the rate of entry has fallen for biology, chemistry and physics over the years
1998-2009. The increase in entries has not kept pace with the increase in the
population over the same period. However, looking at a shorter timescale since
2002 places maths and further maths amongst the fastest growing subjects in
recent years.
ii) Provisional data for 2010 showed marked increases in rates of participation for
all three sciences. Chemistry has come back up to 1998 levels, biology just
below the 1998 peak and physics beginning to recover after a long period of
decline. AS level entries for all four maths and science subjects increased in
2010, suggesting further A level increases in 2011. The proportion of entrants
achieving grades A or B has increased significantly since 1998. DfE (2011) ‘Maths
and science education: the supply of high achievers at A level 308 .
iii) In the case of physics, A-level is a basis for HE studies in engineering and
technology as well as physics itself. There are also concerns raised by some
Research Councils regarding the mathematics skills of their early-career
researchers (biologists etc; as opposed to researchers in fundamental
mathematics). Because of these differences, RCUK suggest the following for
consideration:
iv) Government and agencies continue to disaggregate the individual subjects so as
to be able to identify and focus on issues
v) Government and agencies keep up attention and initiatives helping physics
teaching at school and college level.
vi) further study is made of ways of improving the mathematical skills of students
16-19 who are likely to choose any STEM subject for further study or training,
e.g. at University.
3.2. What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake
of STEM subjects at advanced level?
i) The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) Science and Society
(SIS) Strategy 309 includes an aim to ‘increase the number of people who choose to
study scientific subjects and work in research and scientific careers’. Five expert
groups were set-up to deliver the SIS strategy, including in this area a group
looking at ‘Science and Learning’ and a group looking at ‘Science for Careers’.
The Science and Learning Expert Group 310 have been tasked with creating an
effective learning system that the science and business communities regard as fit
for purpose and delivering a scientifically literate society. The remit of the
Science and Careers Expert Group 311 is to raise awareness of the opportunities
for those who study science, and provide increased information on the range of
science careers on offer to make the scientific workforce more representative
of the diversity of modern society.
308 https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/DFE-RR079.pdf
309 http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/science/science-and-society
310 http://interactive.bis.gov.uk/scienceandsociety/site/learning/
311 http://interactive.bis.gov.uk/scienceandsociety/site/careers/
606
ii) There are good enrichment and enhancement activities as part of science
education. To this end BIS funds STEMNET 312 , the Science Technology
Engineering and Mathematics network and STEM Ambassadors programme
which has over 19,000 ambassadors acting as role models in schools across the
UK.
iii) In line with the government strategy, RCUK are committed to a public
engagement strategy (www.rcuk.ac.uk/per) which as one of its three aims
encourages links between schools and the UK research community in order to
secure and sustain a supply of future UK researchers.
iv) RCUK also want to help make sure that more young people get to know about
the wide range of career opportunities available to them through research.
Most young people start making choices about their future career options from
age 12 onwards, which is why we believe it’s important to reach secondary
pupils of all ages not just the post-16 age group.
v) RCUK employ a number of mechanisms including influencing educational policy
to increase the role of contemporary research in the school curriculum,
Teacher Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and facilitating direct
contact between researchers and young people in order to offer enrichment
and enhancement across all subject disciplines including STEM313 .
vi) RCUK have evidence on the positive impact of using researchers as role models
to inspire young people. A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) 314
shows that schools participating in programmes such as Researchers in
Residence (RinR), a programme placing early-career RCUK-funded researchers
in secondary schools for placements of 14 hours contact time, and STEM Clubs
see a greater increase in the number of students taking sciences at GCSE. The
NAO report also shows that schools participating in the RCUK Researchers in
Residence scheme see more of the year group achieving grades A to C grades in
A Level maths than those schools not participating in a scheme. Encouraging
engagement between young people and researchers continues to be a key
element of the RCUK strategy. Although the RinR Scheme will close in January
2012 after 17 years, RCUK are working closely with partner organisations to
explore more effective delivery models to support researchers to connect with
schools in the new policy landscape. RCUK are also reflecting on the
government White Paper 315 and its implications for CPD and are keen to work
with the DfE and Teaching Schools. The new network of Teaching Schools will
be outstanding schools, which will take a leading responsibility for offering
professional development and links to universities for schools in their region.
vii) RCUK consider engagement with teachers to be a key route to reaching and
inspiring the next generation of researchers and fund a programme of Teacher
312 http://www.stemnet.org.uk/
313 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/per/Pages/Schools.aspx
314 Department for Education: Educating the next generation of scientists (NAO report, November 2010)
http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/1011/young_scientists.aspx
315 The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper 2010 (Department for Education)
http://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/CM-7980.pdf
607
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) entitled ‘Bringing Cutting-edge

Science into the Classroom’. The programme is designed to help secondary
school teachers across the four nations deliver some of the more challenging
aspects of the curriculum in a way that captures and retains the interest of
learners by bringing contemporary research into the classroom. It is also
designed to support teachers’ development of specialist knowledge and to
facilitate links between teachers and contemporary research. The Teacher CPD
courses have been developed and delivered by the Science Learning Centre
Network in conjunction with leading RCUK researchers and are clearly linked
to the science curriculum. Bursaries are provided for teachers from state-
funded secondary schools. A list of the courses are as follows: Drug Discovery
and Development, Lifestyle and Health, Biodiversity, Performance in Sport, New
Materials and Nanotechnology, Earthquakes and other Natural Disasters,
Archaeology – Evidence in Context, Food Security and Agriculture, Genetics,
Climate Change, Astrophysics and Sustainable Science.
viii) RCUK cover more than just the STEM disciplines and as a consequence is able
to support cross-disciplinary learning initiatives which enable students and
teachers to link STEM challenges, issues and values to wider society and societal
debates. This facilitates a deeper understanding on the part of students and
teachers of why it is important to understand and appreciate social and ethical
concerns arising from research and scientific debate and why it is important for
researchers and the public to engage in such discussions. The Bringing Cutting
Edge Science into the Classroom – Teacher CPD programme is a good example
of a programme which successfully links STEM to other subject disciplines
including the humanities, physical education and social sciences. The programme
has attracted a number of non-STEM teachers, leading to STEM knowledge
being disseminated to students not traditionally engaged with STEM subjects,
and fostering a deeper understanding of STEM connections to a variety of
disciplines and careers.
ix) RCUK and other major research funders have also launched the 'Concordat for
Engaging the Public with Research' 316 . The Concordat outlines the expectations
and responsibilities of research funders with respect to public engagement, to
help embed public engagement in universities and research institutes. This will
support more researchers to engage with the wider public and young people.
3.3. What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of
i) The impact of the English Baccalaureate on uptake of STEM subjects in higher
education will depend on its uptake, however if more students post-16 are
continuing to develop their mathematical literacy this can only have a positive
impact on maths competency levels among undergraduates and the workforce
as a whole.
ii) The recent Government White paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’ notes that
at the moment only around 15 per cent of students secure this basic suite of
316 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/per/Pages/Concordat.aspx
608
academic qualifications and fewer than four per cent of students eligible for free
school meals do so. To encourage the take-up of this combination of subjects,
special recognition will be given in performance tables to those schools which
are helping their pupils to attain this breadth of study.
iii) Alongside the number of students who secure five good GCSEs including English
and mathematics, the performance tables will record the number who secure
the combination of GCSEs which make up the English Baccalaureate. Those
schools which succeed in giving their pupils a rounded academic education will
be more easily identified. This will provide a powerful incentive for schools to
drive the take-up of individual science subjects, humanities such as history and,
especially, foreign languages.
4. Graduate Supply
4.1. Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU
i) As the single largest funder of doctoral candidates (25% of all full-time doctoral
candidates) RCUK’s major concern is that sufficient quality graduates are
attracted into doctoral training. In that PhD places are filled the research base
currently appears to be able to attract sufficient candidates, however,
international competition for PhD candidates (e.g. from China and the emerging
economies) means that the UK HE sector must continually monitor the
situation to ensure that it remains competitive.
ii) The most recent HEFCE report on ‘Strategically Important and Vulnerable
Subjects 317 ’ paints a mostly positive picture 318 . “Analysis of the latest data on the
flow of undergraduates suggests that at a time of wider expansion in
undergraduate numbers, those in SIVS have seen a continued expansion, and at
a rate higher than other subjects during recent years. However, some concerns
remain, for example among the engineering and modern language disciplines,
and with regard to the accessibility of SIVS provision via part-time programmes
and at post-1992 institutions”. In addition, ESRC recognises a skills deficit in
quantitative research methods and has been working with HEFCE to support
and improve teaching methods at an undergraduate level within UK social
sciences 319 .
iii) ESRC appointed a Strategic Advisor for Quantitative Methods Training,
Professor John MacInnes (Edinburgh) from 2009 to develop a coherent
programme of activity aimed at enhancing undergraduate teaching of
quantitative methods across the social sciences through stimulating curriculum
change and student development, and to provide training for teachers of
quantitative methods. In the last few years, ESRC has supported approximately
20 postgraduate students with an additional stipend to build capacity in
317 Chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics within STEM; quantitative social science; and modern foreign languages
and related area studies
319 http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/tools-and-resources/research-resources/initiatives/qmi.aspx
609
advanced quantitative methods training, as part of our postgraduate strategy to

build capacity in quantitative methods.
4.2. Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education

i) The Research Councils fund approximately 40% of UK domiciled doctoral
students and rely on the UK education system to supply the majority of those
that they support. Quality is a key issue and we have seen evidence that the
number of quality candidates for PhD places has reduced in recent years at
some research-intensive universities. This is such an important issue that we
flagged our concern about the continued supply of high quality graduates to the
Browne Review 320 . We also intend to co-operate with HEFCE and BIS when
they monitor participation in postgraduate study, following the changes to
undergraduate funding.
ii) In addition to overall quality of supply we also see evidence that research
communities have concerns about the skills of potential researchers in
particular areas, such as:
• Advanced in-vivo skills
• Mathematics, statistics and computation in a range of disciplines from clinical
research and epidemiology to modelling natural environments and quantitative
social research methods at both a basic and advanced level
• Modern languages 321
• Data handling/analysis skills
• Biomedical imaging
• Multidisciplinary skills
• Taxonomy and systematics
iii) We note the attention given in recent years to research-informed teaching, for
example the recently published report from the QAA (Scotland) enhancement
theme ‘Graduates for the 21st Century’ 322 includes Research, Scholarship and
Enquiry as a common graduate attribute in Scottish Higher Education. We
believe that it is important that graduates acquire a sufficient awareness of
research during their undergraduate degree to make informed choices about
entering research training.
iv) The Society of Biology’s Industry Survey on Accredited Degrees (August -
December 2010) was an opportunity for business needs to shape an
accreditation programme. The industry survey ran from August to December
2010 and sought the views of UK industry on the employability of bioscience
graduates. It aims to help employers identify those bioscience graduates with
the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for employment in today’s
bioscience-related industries.
320 www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2010news/Pages/101011.aspx
321 www.britac.ac.uk/policy/language-matters.cfm and www.britac.ac.uk/news/bulletin/language_matters11.pdf
322 Graduates for the 21st Century: Integrating the Enhancement themes
http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/publications/graduates-for-the-21st-century-institutional-activities.pdf
610
5. Post-graduate supply
5.1. Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers
i) The employability and career planning of researchers has received significantly
increased attention over the last few years. The need to do so was highlighted
in the ‘SET for Success’ report by Professor Sir Gareth Roberts (2002).
Following this report RCUK invested some £12m a year from 2004-2010 in
transferable skills 323 training for postgraduate research students (‘Roberts’
funding). Until 2010 RCUK made ring-fenced ‘Roberts’ payments. This has now
ended and funding for researcher development is embedded in RCUK research
training grants. A survey has indicated the majority of universities will maintain
their levels of provision for students 324 .
ii) In addition to providing direct funding to research organisations RCUK fund the
Vitae® programme with a vision for the UK to be world-class in supporting the
personal, professional and career development of researchers. Vitae plays a
major role in the drive for high-level skills and innovation and in the UK's goal
to produce world class researchers. Vitae works with the HE sector to embed
personal and professional development in the research environment and also
provides high quality materials to deliver training.
iii) A report for the 1994 Group of universities in 2009 concluded that the Roberts
funding had “raised awareness of and skills in knowledge transfer” and
“broadened employer engagement and researcher-specific careers’ advice”. It
reported that “Opportunities for researchers to engage with external
employers and access researcher-specific career advice and support have been
greatly enhanced by the allocation of Roberts’ funding at most 1994 Group
universities” 325 . A review of progress for RCUK in 2010 found major
improvements noting that “Career development and training in transferable
skills, as part of the preparation of PhD students for the job market, is starting
to emerge in research organisations as a recognised and essential part of many
doctorates in the UK.” 326 In the 2011 PRES survey, transferable and research
skills were the two areas where respondents most felt their expectations had
been met or exceeded 327 Error! Bookmark not defined..
iv) Whilst career advice and information is generally a matter for universities,
RCUK are working, through Vitae®, to improve information on doctoral
careers. The ‘What Do Researchers Do?’ series published by Vitae® includes
analysis of employment sectors and the skills used by doctoral graduates328 .
These studies show that the skills developed through doctoral research across
the research base are relevant to a wide variety of employment sectors and
323 Skills transferable to a range of employment destinations.

324 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/reports/Pages/AnalysisofResearcher.aspx
325 '1994 Group (2009) Survey on the Impact of the Roberts' Fund at 1994 Group Institutions'
http://www.1994group.ac.uk/documents/public/Research_Policy/090115_RobertsFundReport.pdf
326 Review by an Independent Panel chaired by Dr Hodge (RCUK, 2010)
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/policy/Pages/hodge.aspx
327 HEA, 2011 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/postgraduate/PRES_2011_report
328 Vitae (various dates) ‘What Do Researchers Do’ series: www.vite.ac.uk/wdrd
611
occupations and over half are employed outside higher education. A large
majority of doctoral graduates are engaging in research activity and using
knowledge and skills developed as a research student. For example three and a
half years after graduation respondents report using their disciplinary knowledge
(96%), research skills (94%) and their generic skills (98%) in their current
employment 329 .
v) Better career advice to potential postgraduate researchers is crucial to allow
them to make informed choices about the type of training that is most
appropriate for them and their career aspirations. Prospective students need to
be encouraged to think ahead to the type of careers they may wish to enter in
order to ensure that their postgraduate studies provide the training and
experience they need 330 . Universities have reported increasing involvement of
career advisors in researcher development 331 and this echoes the report for the
1994 Group of universities 332Error! Bookmark not defined..
vi) Several studies have addressed the value of doctoral graduates to employers.
The general picture that emerges is that employers do not systematically
capture the impact of employees. When surveys of employers have been carried
out it is clear that those who actively recruit doctoral graduates are positive
about their valueError! Bookmark not defined.353 333 . However there
remain large sections of the economy where employers either do not target
doctoral candidates or are unaware of the potential benefits that they can
deliver 334 335 .
5.2. Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to
Number
i) RCUK are not aware of any evidence that shows an immediate problem with
the number of PhD graduates that we produce. The annual output of
doctorates from UK universities is around 17,000 of which around 6,000 are
Research Council funded. The number who remain in the UK will be lower as
42% of doctoral students are non-UK and may return overseas after graduation.
Conversely a significant number of researchers come to the UK to work in HE
research which means that the supply is not solely dependent on either UK
funders or the UK HE system. If meeting the annual recruitment of around
5000 336 into the academic research base is taken as a measure of demand, then
329 From ‘What do researchers do?’ series: Doctoral Destinations and Impact three years on (Vitae, 2010)
www.vitae.ac.uk/wdrd.
330 One Step Beyond (BIS, 2010) noted Postgraduate students need appropriate support, information and advice to get the
most from their experience

331 RCUK (2008) Summary of reporting on the use of career development and transferable skills training payments
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/researchcareers/08repsum.pdf
332 http://www.1994group.ac.uk/documents/public/Research_Policy/090115_RobertsFundReport.pdf
333 http://www.cihe.co.uk/talent-fishing-what-businesses-want-from-postgraduates/
334 Survey of Employer Practice (Vitae, 2009) http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/368431/Survey-of-employer-
practice.html
335 Value of Graduates and Postgraduates (CIHE, 2009)
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/researchcareers/VoGFinalreport.pdf
336 HESA data on full time academic staff starters (Resources publication, HESA, table 14a)
612
numerically the supply is sufficient. Another indicator is that only between one
quarter and one third of UK doctoral graduates progress to research or
teaching and lecturing roles in universities (19% and 22% respectively, three
years on from graduation) 337 .
ii) RCUK fund around 40% of UK-domiciled and 25% of all doctoral graduates
from UK universities. We are conscious of the need to ensure a healthy supply
of both UK-domiciled and overseas students. Whilst we recognise the
desirability of opening recruitment to attract the best international talent into
excellent UK research and training environments – particularly in areas of skills
shortage, this must be balanced with the benefit to the UK of providing public
funding to international students and the availability of opportunities for UK-
based graduates. We have therefore adopted principles338 regarding the
recruitment of non-UK domiciled candidates to Research Council funded
studentships. These principles should enable the Research Councils to: attract
the best PhD candidates to the UK; promote access for competitive UK
students; give priority to scare strategic skills and demonstrate benefits for the
UK.
iii) The strong emphasis in our Strategic Vision and Delivery Plans is on high quality
PhD provision and on helping HEIs to attract the best graduates into challenging
and original research projects and ensure critical mass in strategic areas. We are
also alert to the increasing global competition for the best students and we are
taking steps in our delivery plans to ensure that our funding helps universities to
continue to attract the best students into the UK research base. The quality of
the research base plays a significant role in this, the UK is a world leader in
research, and is a world leader in terms of article and citation output, both per
researcher and per unit of research spending 339 and significant benefit from
being internationally collaborative. We therefore have no evidence of an overall
problem with supply of quality researchers.
Quality
iv) As we have indicated the issues with supply are less about total numbers and
more about the quality of candidates, quality of training and the strategic mix of
skills. It is also important to recognise the substantial lead-time of 6-8 years
(depending on route and discipline) between enrolment as an undergraduate
and a doctoral graduate entering the employment market. Changes to doctoral
training approaches and structures may also take several years to impact on
employment 340 .
v) RCUK also welcome the linking, by HEFCE, of the research degree programme
element of ‘QR’ funding to quality. RCUK agree with the principle that
337 What do researchers do? Destinations and impact three years on (Vitae, 2010) pg 3 and 4.
338 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/researchcareers/postgrad/Pages/home.aspx
339 Report for BIS by Elsevier (2011): http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/science/docs/i/11-p123-international-
comparative-performance-uk-research-base-2011.pdf
340 For example, EPSRC issued a call for new doctoral training centres in March 2008, following a competitive peer review
process the centres had a formal start date of October 2009. Doctorates involve a significant research component (typically
over 3-4 years) and there may also be a period of ‘writing up’ before submission of the thesis.
613
allocations of the research degree supervision grant should be more explicitly

linked to research quality than student numbers and that funding should be
selective on the basis of only internationally excellent research.
vi) We have already mentioned in section 5.1 the changes to transferable skills
training following the Roberts report ‘SET for Success’ and the improved
information on career destinations of doctoral graduates available from Vitae 341 .
Section 5.3 addresses changes to doctoral training through the doctoral training
centres. Sustainability of the UK Research Workforce 342 , a report by Research
Councils UK, describes the range of activities that are intended to help inform
the UK research community and policy makers about the sustainability of the
UK research base. One element of the report focuses on potential skills gaps in
the research sector. It identifies key areas of research, such as language-based
area studies, green technologies and health economics, which exhibit an
increased need for further expertise in their fields.
vii) Research Councils continue to work with their constituencies in the research
base to provide well-rounded researchers who are equipped not only with the
skills, knowledge and research techniques required to make a contribution to
knowledge and gain their qualification, but also with a broad understanding of
their discipline and the personal and professional skills that will enable them to
maximise the use of their expertise in subsequent employment, whether this is
within or outside higher education.
viii) A statement of the skills that doctoral research students funded by the
Research Councils are expected to develop during their research training has
been in place since 2001and is formally linked to the QAA code of practice for
research degree programmes 343 . Over the last few years, this statement has
undergone substantial review and has been replaced by the Researcher
Development Statement, endorsed by RCUK and other HE sector
organisations. Underpinning this there is a new Researcher Development
Framework (RDF) 344 . The RDF articulates the knowledge, behaviours and
attributes of successful researchers and encourages them to aspire to
excellence through achieving higher levels of development.
ix) Flexibility in the length of the PhD is essential, with greater customisation to
meet the needs of the individual and their career aspirations, combined with
broader training and opportunities to widen horizons e.g. spending time outside
the normal research environment in a user organisation or overseas. There is a
strong case in some areas for a 4 year PhD, for example interdisciplinary
projects and where students need enhanced skills. This should not, however,
preclude flexibility to vary the length of the PhD to suit the student and project.
341 What do researchers do? Series (Vitae, various) www.vitae.ac.uk/wdrd

342 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/reports/Pages/Sustainability.aspx
343 The RCUK Joint Skills Statement (JSS) is appended to the QAA Code of Practice, Section 1: Postgraduate Research
Programmes
344Careers Portal section of the Vitae website is available at: http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/1270/Careers.html
614
5.3. What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and
i) RCUK fund centres of doctoral training through a range of models. A common
theme throughout is recognition of the benefits of funding cohorts or a critical
mass of postgraduates in excellent training environments. Such centres will
draw on research excellence to produce highly skilled and talented researchers
who are able to address challenging research problems. At present two
Councils (EPSRC and ESRC) have well developed doctoral training centre
portfolios and others are considering whether the approach can be applied in
their areas.
ii) The ESRC approach is to award all of its studentship funding directly to the
institutions which make up its network of 21 DTCs. The DTCs cover the full
range of social science disciplines as well as areas of interdisciplinary research.
The DTCs were accredited as ESRC training providers following a competitive
peer review process and they have provided clear evidence that they can deliver
the highest quality training provision.
iii) EPSRC has chosen to place part of its studentship portfolio into Doctoral
Training Centres or Industrial Doctorate centres (this latter includes
Engineering Doctorate Centres). Both centres and Doctoral Training Accounts
will remain key ingredients in its future training programme. EPSRC believes
that a programmatic, cohort approach to training, with inspiring leadership,
accessible role-models and mentors, and opportunities for building professional
networks can be an attractor for potential doctoral candidates. RCUK believe
that postgraduate researchers benefit from being within a large and supportive
network of colleagues. However, whilst the long-standing centres such as
Engineering Doctorates have been reviewed and the doctoral graduates are
much sought-after, there is, as yet, less evidence regarding newer centres and it
will be some years before the doctoral researchers complete their studies. For
example, EPSRC is currently undertaking a mid-term review of doctoral training
centres
iv) Employability and skills transferable to a range of careers are also being further
embedded through RCUK funding for doctoral training and through RCUK
funding for doctoral training centres 345 .
v) Although recent attention has focussed on the establishment of doctoral
training centres, Research Council funding for postgraduate research is not
restricted to centres. A range of modes of delivery of postgraduate research
training are likely to continue to be needed to address research capacity, the
requirements of specific disciplines, or the needs of users and beneficiaries of
research. For example:
• Collaborative doctoral studentships may be allocated through a variety of routes,
such as:
Doctoral training centres include block grant partnerships, centres for doctoral training, industrial doctorate centres,
345
doctoral training grant partnerships etc.
615
o CASE are allocated to academic partners who build collaboration with a

partner through the co-supervision and sponsorship of a postgraduate
researcher.
o Industrial CASE are where businesses take the lead in arranging projects
with an academic partner of their choice.
• Doctoral Training Grants may be allocated according to evidence about the
excellence of the research environment or in response to peer-reviewed
proposals including a business case. Such awards offer significant flexibility to the
university.
• Research Councils may call for proposals for a small number of projects in
particular subject areas.
5.4. Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the
students?
i) RCUK’s view is that the main distinction at postgraduate level is between taught
degrees and research degrees. The Research Councils strategic vision346 states
that “We will emphasise high quality PhD provision in preference to support for
taught masters courses.” In practice future funding at Masters level will either
be focussed on research degrees – often en route to a doctorate as in the ESRC
1+3 year or 2+2 year doctoral training model – or aimed at Masters Level CPD
modules as in the BBSRC Advanced Training Partnerships.
ii) We do not have a view on the overall balance between Masters degrees and
PhDs.
5.5. What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of
i) RCUK believe it is too early to determine the effect of the reforms in England.
Despite the many predictions in the press that applications to universities will
fall, the evidence from previous changes in the UK and Australia seem to
indicate that after an initial adjustment period of 2-3 years, recruitment to HE
will not be significantly affected. We also note that the changes to
undergraduate funding from 2012/13 will not affect the transition to PhD until at
least 2015 and 2016.
ii) We note that the White Paper stated that “Professor Sir Adrian Smith’s
Postgraduate Review Group reconvened in spring 2011 to advise on this issue.”
We are also aware that the White Paper also stated that HEFCE will be
reviewing participation in postgraduate study, following the changes to
undergraduate funding. HEFCE’s Business Plan reflects this and proposes the
establishment of an observatory to monitor HE in England which will include:
student demand and participation levels; and trends in students entering
postgraduate teaching and research programmes. We will be co-operating with
346 RCUK Strategic Vision 2011-2015 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/policy/Pages/StratVision.aspx
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HEFCE and BIS on this issue to ensure that progression to Postgraduate

Research Degrees is understood and early indicators of problems are identified.
6. Industry
6.1. What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to
attract them?
i) There are employers who seek and value postgraduates, have targeted
recruitment and who report success in attracting doctoral recruits, albeit with
areas where HEIs and businesses must work together regarding the skills and
knowledge available. Key sectors for this group are those with the highest levels
of business expenditure on R&D (pharmaceuticals/chemistry and
aerospace/engineering) 347 .There are employers who would like to attract
postgraduate researchers and may recruit them serendipitously, but surveys
have identified that if recruitment is on the same basis as first degree graduates,
this is not usually successful. There are also employers who are not aware of
the skills and attributes on offer. These latter will include smaller and less
research-intensive organisations 348 .
ii) The advanced knowledge and capability of postgraduates has been identified as
highly prized by business and the public sector and critical for tackling major
business challenges and driving innovation and growth 349 and as we have already
mentioned just over half of UK and EU domiciled doctoral graduates are
employed outside HE. One incentive available to private sector employers is
enhanced salaries and RCUK observe there is a salary premium associated with
postgraduate degrees 350 351 . During their degree some 20% of doctoral students
will also have worked on collaborative projects which give them direct
experience of an industry, business or other non-academic environment and in
the SET subjects this proportion can be over one third. The level of
unemployment for doctoral graduates, at 3.1%, is also lower than for other
graduates 352 .
iii) A survey of employer practice showed more than 70% of employers would
welcome more job applications from postgraduate researchers and those who
actively recruit doctoral graduates have many practices in place to increase the
likelihood of attracting and retaining the best 353 . The report identified that 11%
of the respondents used a separate recruitment process to select postgraduate
recruits, whilst “employers who simply encourage researchers to apply on the
347 Report on the Economic Impact of PhDs (DTZ for EPSRC, 2010)
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Publications/reports/PhDImpactPhase1Report.pdf
348 Talent Fishing (CIHE, 2010) http://www.cihe.co.uk/talent-fishing-what-businesses-want-from-postgraduates/ and
Recruiting researchers: survey of employer practice (Vitae, 2009)

349 One Step Beyond: Making the most of postgraduate education (BIS, 2010)
350 O’Leary and Sloane (2005).
351 What do Researchers Do? Three years on (Vitae, 2010) www.vitae.ac.uk/wdrd
352 For example, in 2007, ‘believed unemployed’ was 3.1% for doctorates, 3.7% for masters and 5.5% for bachelor levels:
What do researchers do? First destinations by subject (Vitae, 2009) table 5

353 Recruiting researchers: survey of employer practice (Vitae, 2009) http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/368431/Survey-
of-employer-practice.html
617
same basis as other graduate recruits are not usually successful in recruiting
doctoral graduates”. The report also said that “employers who are interested in
targeting the researcher labour market may find that practice highlighted in the
survey (such as enhanced salaries, strong links with universities, use of
placement schemes etc) is useful in increasing their attractiveness to doctoral
researchers”.
6.2. What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that
demands for STEM graduates matches supply in terms of numbers, skills
i) The university-business interface is particularly important to RCUK and our
strategic vision and the RCUK Delivery Plan includes our aim to drive
innovation in knowledge exchange through enhancement of knowledge
exchange skills in the research base and encourage movement of highly skilled
people between the research base and user communities at all career stages.
The CIHE report on what Businesses want from postgraduates348 includes that
“there is a high demand for, and strong satisfaction with higher degrees, but ...
there are still areas where HEIs and businesses must work together to ensure
postgraduates have the skills and knowledge that employers need – particularly
leadership skills and work experience”. We have provided significant input to
the Review of Business-University Collaboration being lead by Professor Tim
Wilson and we anticipate its recommendations in this area.
ii) A review in 2010 for RCUK on progress regarding employability and career
development of PhD students and research staff expressed concern about the
relatively limited systematic interaction between research organisations and
employers (particularly those outside academia) either in setting or
implementing skills development programmes. It recommended the
development of “…systematic and frequent interactions such that the focus on
employment needs is the driver for future developments of transferable skills
training.” 354
iii) There is a long horizon for identifying future demands 355 and it is particularly
challenging where there is a wide diversity of sectors and business sizes, and
comparatively small numbers of doctoral recruits. Where the scale of
collaboration and structures for working systematically with universities do not
exist, there is an ongoing challenge. At present, there is no overview of the
needs of smaller organisations, or sectors with a large proportion of smaller
organisations.
354 Independent assessment of progress in implementing the recommendations of the ‘Roberts’ Review’ regarding
employability and career planning of PhD students and research staff
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/policy/Pages/hodge.aspx
355 It will typically be at least eight years (excluding breaks), to gain a doctorate following entry to higher education -
typically three year degree plus masters or four year ‘M’ level degree, three or four years of postgraduate research. There
may also be a ‘writing up’ period that continues beyond the research project.
618
iv) Companies particularly value doctoral graduates with practical business skills
and awareness 356 . RCUK investment in collaborative research training (e.g.
CASE) with private, public or third sector research partners is being increased
(currently around 21%). For example:
• ESRC has set targets for the number of studentships within DTCs that are
collaborative. Collaboration can take different forms, including CASE, internships
and placements.
• BBSRC is increasing its relative investment in dedicated CASE schemes and is
requiring doctoral training partnerships to introduce schemes for professional
internships for PhD students (PIPs).
7. International comparisons
7.1. What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM
i) In many ways the UK is seen as successful in delivering high quality and
innovative doctoral programmes as evidenced by the 42% of doctoral students
who have come to the UK from the EU and elsewhere. UK universities have
also played a key role in the Doctoral Programmes Project of the EUA which
contributed to the Bologna process. Good practice examples for UK
universities feature particularly strongly in the final report of the programme 357 .
This success comes from a strong focus on excellence, a world class research
environment and infrastructure and a rigorous attention to standards and
quality assurance. In specific areas of doctoral provision such as transferable
skills the UK is also seen to be well advanced compared to other European
countries 358 and the Hodge review 359 for RCUK reported that “…the UK
approach has been at the forefront internationally in the development of
transferable skills training and researcher career development”.
ii) The UK is willing to learn from others and participates fully in the appropriate
EU structures such as the Steering Group for Human Resources and Mobility.
When the recent SGHRM report of a ‘Mapping Exercise on Doctoral Training in
Europe "Towards a common approach"’ 360 was published it was immediately
apparent that what is regarded as good practice in Europe essentially reflects
the situation in the UK.
iii) The BIS research paper on STEM Graduates in non-STEM jobs4 notes that “An
international comparative study (the ROSE project) found that young people’s
desire to choose a career in science and technology was related to a country’s
356 Value of Graduates and Postgraduates (CIHE, 2009) page 19.

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/researchcareers/VoGFinalreport.pdf
357 Doctoral Programmes for the European Knowledge Society (2005)
http://www.eua.be/eua/jsp/en/upload/Doctoral_Programmes_Project_Report.1129278878120.pdf
358 European Commission, 2008. Report of the ERA Expert Group: Realising a single labour market for researchers. (page
27) http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/pdf/research_policies/era_green_paper_eg1_lowres.pdf
359 Review by an Independent Panel chaired by Professor Alison Hodge (RCUK, 2010)
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/policy/Pages/hodge.aspx, page 35
360http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/pdf/research_policies/Report_of_Mapping_Exercise_on_Doctoral_Training_FINAL.pdf
619
HDI index (a measure of well-being combining health, education, GDP, life

expectancy, etc), see Sjøberg and Schreiner, 2007”.
iv) The recent Government Schools White Paper, ‘The Importance of Teaching’,
sets out Government plans to invite some of the best higher education
providers of initial teacher training to open University Training Schools. These
are used widely in Finland as a means of training teachers in practice. There are
similar successful models in the US, including for example ‘lab schools’ in
Chicago.
16 December 2011
620
Research Council UK (RCUK) – Oral evidence (QQ 68-92)
Evidence Session No. 3 Heard in Public. Questions 68 - 92

Members present
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (Chair)

Lord Broers
Lord Krebs
Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Patel
Lord Rees of Ludlow
Lord Winston
________________
Examination of Witness
Dr Steven Hill, Head of Strategy Unit, Research Councils UK
Q68 The Chairman: We welcome Dr Steven Hill from RCUK. Sorry we are starting just
a little late this afternoon. I remind the Committee that we are being webcast this afternoon,
so any comments will be picked up on the microphones and will be beamed across the
universe as we speak. As for the evidence you give this afternoon, if you want to add
anything afterwards, if there is something you have missed and you would like to send us a
note, or if there is something you feel that you have not been able to say, then please feel
free to do so. Would you please just for the record say who you are and what you do?
Dr Steven Hill: I am Steven Hill. I am the head of the Research Councils UK Strategy Unit.
The RCUK Strategy Unit exists to work with the seven Research Councils, helping them to
work together in areas like policy on graduate students.
Q69 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. You currently fund about 40% of UK-
domiciled and 25% of all doctoral graduates from the UK universities. How has that figure
changed over a period of time? Are we getting more?
Dr Steven Hill: Yes. Those figures are estimates. I can give some of the detail around the
trends. It is just worth prefacing those remarks with, as ever, the complexity in interpreting
some of the statistics around this aspect of university business. I am mostly basing this on
statistics from the Higher Education Statistics Agency. It is important to distinguish between
statistics on starters of PhD courses, which includes those who are starting on research
621
Masters, many of which will lead into PhDs, and graduations, which are a separate set of
statistics and measure a different thing. The relationship between starters and graduates is
reasonably complex. Starters in a given year will graduate across a range of years in the
future, so those statistics are complicated to interpret but I will always try to be consistent
in the types of numbers that I give you in the next few minutes.
In terms of the Research Council-funded studentships as a percentage of the total, looking
back to around 2002 that figure was around 19%. It increased steadily up to 2007-08 where
it reached 25%. In the last two years that we have data for, which are 2008-09 and 2009-10,
it has dropped to around 20%. That is the proportion of Research Council-funded students
as a percentage of the total. During that time both of those numbers, the numerator and the
denominator, have been increasing but at different rates, which explains the fluctuation.
Q70 Lord Krebs: Is that just STEM or across the piece?

Dr Steven Hill: That is across the piece. That is all graduates. Looking at the total graduating
students and the total graduating in STEM, those have been roughly in step with one another
over the period that I am talking about. So between 2002 and 2008 there was a 19%
increase in both the total number of PhD graduates, according to HESA data, and a 19%
increase in the number of STEM graduates, again according to HESA data.
The Chairman: What is the proportion between STEM and non-STEM at the moment?
Dr Steven Hill: In terms of graduates, the latest data that is available is for 2008-09 and the
numbers are: total graduating, 17,710 and STEM graduating, 11,720, so roughly—
The Chairman: Has that kept relatively stable over that period, since 2002?
Dr Steven Hill: It has, yes. Since 2002 both of those numbers have increased by around
19%, so proportionately they have remained in balance with one another.
Lord Krebs: What I actually wanted to know, if I may, Lord Chairman, is what percentage
of STEM postgraduates are funded by the Research Council. You told us that it is 20% or
thereabouts of all, but what about of STEM?
Dr Steven Hill: Yes, I do not have that number in front of me.
Lord Krebs: Would it be possible to find that out?

Dr Steven Hill: It would be possible to find that out. Of the total number of graduate
students funded by the Research Councils, a significant proportion of them are in STEM
subjects, so I can give the detailed figure on that.
The Chairman: Also that trend, if you could. Lord Rees, did you want to add anything?
Q71 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Again, between Masters and Doctors—some go on from one
to the other, but can you say how many of these numbers are doing a Masters degree and
not going further?
Dr Steven Hill: Not with these numbers, although there is other data that has been
analysed by HESA, so I can give you some comparative numbers in starters. For the year
2009-10, the total number of starters for PhD was just over 18,000. The total number of
starters for research Masters plus PhD was around 26,000. The important thing in that to
remember is that the difference in those two numbers does not give you the number of
people who leave after Masters, because some of them will continue on to PhD.
622
The Chairman: What would be useful for us—and we will leave this at this point—would
be to have a note from the Research Councils’ point of view about what that trend is across
the whole piece over that period from 2002, if that is possible.
Dr Steven Hill: Yes, and I can give you those figures broken down by individual Research
Council.
The Chairman: That would be really useful. Thank you.
Q72 Lord Cunningham of Felling: You say you have seen evidence that the number of
quality candidates for PhD places has reduced in recent years in some universities. The
evidence is not in your submission. Can you share that evidence with us?
Dr Steven Hill: I can share it at one level. The difficulty for us in answering that question is
that of course the Research Councils do not select or admit the students. It is the
universities that do that. So we are one step removed from this question of the quality of
applicants. The way in which we handle that is we keep open lines of communication with
the universities to make sure we understand the pressures that they are facing.
The evidence that we referred to in the submission was anecdotal evidence from a single
university, albeit a large research-led university—I am afraid I cannot tell you which one it
is—and their observation was that over a 10-year period they have seen a decline in the
number of applicants for Research Council-funded studentships, from a situation of where
they were getting eight, nine, 10 applicants for a studentship to where they were only getting
two. That was an observation over a 10-year period that ended in 2005, so from 1995-2005.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: So it is anecdotal evidence from one university.

Dr Steven Hill: It is, and I think you need to—
Lord Cunningham of Felling: It is not something to base a conclusion on then, is it?

Dr Steven Hill: There is other evidence that we have, for example from the EPSRC centres
for doctoral training, that universities report a very healthy uptake there: 10 applicants per
studentship place, so there is very healthy competition for those places. The conclusion that
we would draw is that we need to monitor that, but there does not seem to be any
evidence of a problem in terms of attracting high-quality students into Research Council-
funded studentships.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: When you say you are going to monitor it, without some
hard evidence, written down and analytically researched, it does not really add up to very
much, does it?
Dr Steven Hill: We rely on the universities to provide us with that evidence because we are
not responsible for selecting the students.
Q73 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Then is it your intention to take any steps to
improve the quality of prospective PhD students?
Dr Steven Hill: Over a number of years, following on from the report SET for Success from
the late Gareth Roberts, we have taken a number of steps to improve the attractiveness of
PhD study. We have done that by increasing the financials—the stipend available to PhD
students so that it now matches the average graduate salary and is of the same order of
magnitude—lengthening the period of study, so making it much more substantial, and
increasing the transferable skills training provision within that, both through supplying
623
resources to universities and through supplying money to enable them to do that. So there
have been many steps in order to make the PhD more attractive, and over that period of
time there has been a substantial increase in the numbers of PhD students and—
Lord Cunningham of Felling: Forgive me, that is about making it more attractive, but the
question was about whether you were taking any steps to improve the quality of the
prospective applicants. That is a different question.
Dr Steven Hill: By making the PhD studentships attractive you encourage people to apply,
which means that the best people will apply, so I think the two things are related. In terms of
quality, one of the key issues is the number of undergraduates studying the subjects that feed
into PhDs. Much of our effort, or some of our effort at least, has been put on to encouraging
research skills to be communicated in schools and to encourage schoolchildren to consider
careers in research right at the end of their school time and at the beginning of their
university careers, and I think that is a very important point.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: What you are doing to make it more attractive, is that
documented?
Dr Steven Hill: It is. Yes.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: Perhaps you would share that with the Committee.
Dr Steven Hill: Certainly.
Q74 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Another figure would be the proportion of those getting
firsts who opt to do a PhD rather than going directly into work or going abroad. Is there any
data on that?
Dr Steven Hill: I am not aware of any data on that, but I could certainly look into that and
provide that information if it is available. That would be an interesting question. Certainly we
know that—perhaps, not surprisingly—the quality of the degree class is a strong predictor of
whether or not someone will move into graduate study. That is not particularly surprising
but there is evidence for that.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: But they are accepted if they have their degrees. Is that right?
Dr Steven Hill: Not for Research Council-funded studentships but maybe for other funders.
Q75 Lord Broers: In fact, Lord Rees asked my question but I would like to add an
addendum to it. Would it not be sensible to know not only how many got firsts but the
degree grade of all the people you give studentships to, and the fraction of the graduating
class that did research. That is what we were intensely interested in. I know I speak for
myself, but when I was in the engineering department in Cambridge we had, say, 20 people
get a first in the electrical sciences tripos and we would strive to get as many of those as
possible staying on for research. That was a very good indicator of the general level of
interest of our postgraduate students. I am very surprised you do not collect those data.
Dr Steven Hill: I am not saying we do not collect those data. I suspect we do. I do not have
those data available to me at the moment. I will look into that and see whether we can make
those available. Clearly, in order to qualify for a Research Council studentship there are
certain requirements in terms of class of degree, so that data is available, but the question is
the form that it is in and whether it is useful. I will look into that and provide that if it is
available.
624
The Chairman: We have made a note of what you will do.
Q76 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I wonder if you could elaborate on what you say in
your submission about the provision of PhDs in engineering and modern languages—you say
you have concerns about that—and about the accessibility of SIVS provision via part-time
programmes at post-1992 institutions.
Dr Steven Hill: Yes. I understand the part of our submission that you are referring to. I
have to apologise that it was not clear in that section. We were referring to undergraduate
courses in those subjects, not postgraduate provision. What we were referring to was a
report on the SIVS—strategically important and vulnerable subjects—work, which was
published by HEFCE. It indicated that with an overall 16% increase in undergraduate
numbers there had been only a 9% increase in modern languages, and engineering declined
by 2%. So that was the point that we were referring to but that was in the context of
undergraduate teaching. In contrast, we were pulling out the areas where performance has
not been as good, but, overall, that report suggests that the interventions that primarily
HEFCE, sometimes in partnership with the Research Councils, have been taking have been
effective. There is this question around part-time provision in SIVS and in some of the post-
1992 universities.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: That is a question of quality.

Dr Steven Hill: It is a question of numbers in those subjects that have been identified as part
of a SIVS programme.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: Are numbers going down in part-time programmes?

Dr Steven Hill: I am not aware of the details. There has been a decline in part-time students
in those subjects identified as SIVS.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: I understand that.
Dr Steven Hill: Again, I emphasise that was referring to the undergraduate study not to
postgraduate.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: Yes. I understand. You say also at post-1992 institutions
that is a decline again which you are concerned about.
Dr Steven Hill: Yes.
Q77 Lord Broers: Industry warns that UK business could be damaged unless more UK-
domiciled students undertake postgraduate research and that firms could take their research
and development work abroad in the future if home-grown talents are not nurtured. Do you
agree with this and, if so, what more could be done so that more UK-domiciled students
take up postgraduate studies in STEM?
Dr Steven Hill: The conversations that we have had with industry suggest that they are
concerned about the quality and the number of PhD students and whether they are available
to work in their businesses but that they are less concerned about the nationality of those
students. I am not sure I completely recognise the suggestion that a lack of UK PhD-qualified
students is necessarily regarded as a problem. Having said that, the numbers of UK PhD
students are reasonably healthy, so of the total 18,000 PhD starters in 2009-10 they account
for about half, so just over 9,000 of those, and certainly in the last few years they are the
fastest-increasing group. Between 2007 and 2009 the numbers of UK-domiciled students
625
increased by 21% in contrast with EU students, excluding the UK, which increased by 14%,
and international students, which increased by 3%. So the numbers are reasonably strong
and are increasing at a rate greater than that for students from other nationalities. Our focus
is very much on the quality of the experience that students receive. We are very happy to
train high-quality overseas students as well as high-quality UK students.
The Chairman: Excuse me, Lord Broers, could I just put a rider in there? In terms of areas
like defence, where it is absolutely crucial to have UK-domiciled students coming in, do you
keep any sort of record on that and does that feature at all across the Research Councils,
particularly in terms of the engineering, physics and maths-based disciplines?
Dr Steven Hill: Of course, you are correct that there are businesses that for security
reasons require UK nationals. Obviously we know the nationality of the students we fund,
but we have not kept any particular records.
Q78 Lord Broers: Do you have the means to control numbers and quality in given
subjects? Where is that set? If you decided that one of these matters was a serious problem,
could you decide to allocate more studentships in physics or engineering, for example?
Dr Steven Hill: Yes. The Research Councils of course are free to allocate their funds in that
way if necessary. Of course it is important to remember that across the patch the Research
Councils are only funding 25% of the students, so any change that we might make in our
funding is only to that 25%. The others funders of PhD students are obviously free to make
their choices as well. I should also say that the other major funders of PhD students are the
universities themselves.
Lord Broers: Is that a meeting you have every year? If so, at what level is that decision
made or is it just an historical thing that carries on and that is how you divide it up even if it
is only 25%?
Dr Steven Hill: The division between funding training and other activities that each of the
Research Councils do will ultimately be made at the level of Council by the members of the
Research Councils and their other groups and committees. Broadly speaking, it is made on a
spending-review basis, across the spending-review period, but of course it can be adjusted
and individual Councils are able to do that as they wish. It is important to remember that for
any change you want to make in the numbers of PhD students there is inevitably a lead-time.
So if I were to decide this afternoon that we needed more PhDs in physics, for example, that
might just about be possible to get that through the starters in the autumn of this year, but
then it would still be four years before they were available on the job market. There is a
long lead-time.
Q79 Lord Patel: To follow on from Lord Broers’s question, can you give examples of
how you interact with industry to ensure that doctoral graduates have the necessary skills
and knowledge that industry wants?
Dr Steven Hill: The Research Councils interact with business and industry and, indeed, the
other users of research at a number of levels. In answer to Lord Broers, I mentioned that
decisions about balances between funding for training and funding for research are made at
Council level, and all of the Research Councils will have a number of representatives of
business, industry or other user communities that can feed into those discussions. There are
also many examples of doctoral training activities that are carried out in partnership with
business and industry. For example, in doctoral training centres, one of the lines of evidence
that we would be looking for in a bid from a university to host a doctoral training centre
626
would be evidence that they were building the links appropriately with business and industry
so that they could make sure the training provision they were giving was tuned into the
needs of industry.
There are also a number of specific mechanisms whereby specific PhD work is linked into
industry. The so-called CASE studentships are an example of that. There are industrial CASE
awards as well. Only this morning BBSRC have announced some new investments into
doctoral training partnerships with the universities, as well as new industrial studentships—a
total package of around £67 million. There are a lot of examples, and we have evidence that
tells us that 21% of the PhD projects we fund have some sort of formal link with industry.
That will involve a collaborative project, the students spending some time with the industrial
partner and so on.
In terms of a specific case study, an example is the engineering doctorates, a scheme funded
by the EPSRC. There are 19 centres and they work together to interact with the industry to
make sure those doctorates are providing the training that industry and business need. So
there is a diverse set of mechanisms, at all sorts of different levels, which allow that matching
to occur.
Lord Winston: Forgive me, Doctor, but I am finding it quite difficult to hear everything.
The acoustics in these rooms are not very good and probably I am a bit deaf too, which
does not actually help, so if you do not mind please speak as clearly as possible, because the
mics do not give us much amplification.
Dr Steven Hill: I will try to speak up.
Q80 Lord Winston: I am interested in the CASE studentship scheme in particular, and I
wondered how you evaluate how effective that is in forming relationships with industry. It is
my impression—certainly from having run a few CASE studentships—that industry is pretty
remote sometimes from what the CASE student is doing. I wonder if you would comment
on that and whether you have any metrics by which you can see how effective the scheme is.
Dr Steven Hill: My comment would be that I suspect your view is right, in the sense that
there are examples of good practice and examples of less good practice within that set of
schemes. In terms of specific evidence about the effectiveness of CASE, I am sure there have
been evaluations of that. I do not have those at my fingertips this afternoon for you but I will
investigate that further and get back to you on that point.
Q81 The Chairman: Just before I bring in Baroness Neuberger, clearly we are likely to
see a drop in funding and many of the Research Councils under the CSR have had a drop in
funding, which has affected the number of PhD students they can support. Given that that is
like to occur within the next Comprehensive Spending Review, do Research Councils have
any policy towards making decisions about how they are going to allocate even tighter funds
into key areas, or is that not on your radar?
Dr Steven Hill: It is on the radar and the Councils have all looked quite hard at that
question. Clearly, in times of constricting budgets, you have to look at the balance of funding
between different activities, and the Councils have very clearly prioritised PhD funding as an
important area to protect. Having said that, that does not mean that numbers will be
maintained or increased and, in fact, over the spending review period we will see a decline.
The Chairman: Perhaps you will let us have a note on this. It is not just about the
numbers. I am talking about the specific areas where we are trying to encourage more places
627
and to protect particular areas. If there is thinking about that going on, it would be really
useful for the Committee to have a quick note on that.
Dr Steven Hill: Yes.
Q82 Baroness Neuberger: I want to ask you about diversity, because if the numbers are
going down then very often you see the efforts that have been made to increase diversity
among a pool actually reduce. I was going to ask you whether you have concerns about the
diversity of the PhD students you fund, and what initiatives you have in place to ensure
access to studentships by women, people from ethnic minorities and people from lower
socioeconomic backgrounds. Also, given the likely reduction in the numbers, what you are
going to do to protect such measures as you have in place?
Dr Steven Hill: One thing I would encourage you to consult on this subject is an evidence
summary that was carried out in 2010 by Paul Wakeling and Chris Kyriacou at the University
of York. I think that that very cogently summarises our current understanding of this issue.
Their key conclusion is that it is particularly clear that there has been a great advance in the
number of women doing doctorates, but it is still not there. There are some
underrepresentations of some ethnic minorities and, indeed, some overrepresentation of
some ethnic minorities within PhDs. On the socioeconomic side, they come to some quite
interesting conclusions. There is a slight lack of evidence in that area but no strong evidence
that socio-economic background, per se, is a strong influence, but there are some secondary
effects around the types of university that people from certain socioeconomic backgrounds
are more likely to go to and around the follow-through from those universities into PhD
training. The evidence is there and available and I would encourage the Committee to look
at that.
In terms of what we are doing, again we are partly influenced or limited by the pool of
people from whom the graduate population is drawn, so some of the focus has to be on
measures to ensure proper representation of all groups within the undergraduate
population. It would be a challenge to address the number of female physics PhD students
without addressing the number of female physics undergraduates. I think it is important to
remember that.
One of the things that we are very keen on is making sure that principal investigators and
supervisors of PhD students are themselves fully equipped to deal with the issues of
diversity. Through the organisation that we fund, Vitae, there is work going on at the
moment that is supported by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the
other higher education funding bodies; it is called “Every Researcher Counts”—I did not
make up the name—and what that is about is providing training materials to universities to
ensure that their principal investigators and supervisors are well versed and equipped to deal
with these issues, which is a very important component in terms of making sure that
selection processes are as fair as possible.
Baroness Neuberger: Do you monitor any of that? Or, if you do not, who does?
Dr Steven Hill: Clearly the Higher Education Statistics Agency monitors the outcomes of
that. We keep a close eye on that.
Baroness Neuberger: You keep a close eye on the practice of the universities.
Dr Steven Hill: Indeed.
Baroness Neuberger: Thank you.
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Q83 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Going back to the doctoral training centres, is there yet
much evidence on whether they have helped to produce better graduates, and what impact
do you expect changes in this kind of postdoctoral training provision will have in terms of
the number of students studying for PhDs and their quality?
Dr Steven Hill: The answer to your first question is that it is a little too early to have
evidence of the impact of those activities. The engineering doctorates are the longest-
running. They are well received by business and are popular and oversubscribed by students,
so I think there is some evidence there at least that they are valuable. In terms of the
doctoral training centres themselves, the EPSRC doctoral training centres are the furthest
down the track. They started in 2009. EPSRC have recently been conducting a mid-term
review of those doctoral training centres, which will be published later in the year. I do not
have any specific evidence of the quality of doctoral training centres to give you today, but
there will be some emerging in the course of the year.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: Thank you. Could you say what impact they are having on the
viability of some university departments, because there are winners and losers in this system,
aren’t there?
Dr Steven Hill: There are winners and losers. One of the things that you will see if you look
at the list of doctoral training partnerships that have been announced by the BBSRC today is
that many of those successful bids are from consortia of the universities. That is something
that we would very strongly encourage. That is also true in the Economic and Social
Research Council bids. That is a very important way of maintaining breadth of provision of
doctoral training across institutions while bringing together the benefits of the cohort
approach of bringing together students in a group to receive their training. Could I just
comment on your question about numbers?
Lord Rees of Ludlow: Yes.
Dr Steven Hill: I think it is important to recognise that there are two separate
conversations to be had within the Research Councils: one about the number of graduate
students that we support and the other about the modality of delivering that graduate
training. I would not make a linkage between a move towards doctoral training centres and a
particular change in numbers. The change in numbers is largely driven by what we can afford.
The change to doctoral training centres is driven by a desire to improve the quality of the
training.
Q84 Lord Winston: I am slightly conflicted with this question because, as you know, I am
a member of EPSRC, but I am sure you are aware that there are some universities that are
somewhat concerned about the postdoctoral training centres. I wonder whether you could
comment on what plans there are to expand this programme. Could you give us a little bit
more detail about the metrics to measure and evaluate how well they are doing before that
expansion, if any, occurs?
Dr Steven Hill: In terms of expansion, that would be a matter for individual Councils. I
believe that, for example, EPSRC has set its number of students for the course of the
spending review period and they will be delivered through the doctoral training centre
model. In terms of the metrics, I have not been involved in the detail of the mid-term review
that EPSRC are doing. I would imagine they would be looking at a range. With mid-term
reviews it is quite hard to look at very hard metrics, so I would imagine they would be
looking at a range of approaches to evaluate, involving interviews and discussions with
people involved in the centre, and looking at the quality of the research as well as they can
629
evaluate it at this stage. I can certainly provide you with more detail about the EPSRC mid-
term review.
Lord Winston: That would be helpful. Thank you.
The Chairman: It would be helpful, too, given the fact that certainly the Research Council
of which I am a Council member is going in the same direction and the RCUK overall is
looking at how we judge the quality of this, because we are interested in quality, not
numbers. A great deal of your evidence this afternoon is about numbers. That is not a
criticism of you; please, do not cry or anything like that. But really what we are trying to get
out of RCUK is how in fact we drive up quality or maintain quality in those particular areas.
Sorry, Lord Krebs.
Q85 Lord Krebs: Yes. The first bit of my question is just a supplementary to what we
have been discussing. Was there any thought among the other Research Councils of waiting
until HEFCE had carried out its mid-term review before they all charge down the same
track? Or was it the view in EPSRC and so on that this was all such a good idea that we will
go there anyway even if it has not been evaluated.
Dr Steven Hill: I cannot speak for individual Councils, but I think the general feeling is that
there are considerable benefits to be had through this model.
Lord Krebs: That is surely prejudging the outcome of the mid-term review.
Dr Steven Hill: The review will provide evidence of whether that supposition is correct, but
there is reasonable confidence in that supposition and that is why other Councils are moving
in that direction.
Q86 Lord Krebs: Let me move on to my main topic. We are running out of time so I
guess we should keep this brief. With the big changes in funding for undergraduates that
come in in September 2012—the next crop of students—have RCUK done modelling or
survey work or other analysis of what you think the impact of this will be on recruitment of
postgraduate students, given that they will graduate with maybe £40,000 or £50,000 of debt?
Dr Steven Hill: Yes. There is clearly a plausible hypothesis that says that that situation will
lead to a decline in the numbers. There is an equally plausible hypothesis that says that, faced
with a system that writes off that debt after 30 years, embarking on something that gets you
four years closer to that 30-year cut-off without paying anything might become more
attractive, so there are two sides to this. In terms of monitoring and looking for evidence for
this, it is really too early to be able to do that. We are talking about a number of years
before this—
Lord Krebs: It is too early to analyse the results, I would agree, but I would have thought
the folk in charge of postgraduate education would have at least tried to do survey work or
some modelling about the elasticity of demand and so on.
Dr Steven Hill: In the White Paper, HEFCE were charged with monitoring the system to
investigate potential effects.
Lord Krebs: That is monitoring. I am talking about trying to look ahead and anticipate.
Dr Steven Hill: We are working very closely with HEFCE to make sure that we are
involved in that observatory and that that monitors the flow-through to postgraduate. You
can look at international evidence in this context. The evidence from Australia, which
introduced a not dissimilar fee system, was that there was a small drop and then a recovery
630
in uptake. That gives some comfort that there will not be a major perturbation in the flow-
through of people into postgraduate. Our perspective is that it is too early to gain any
concrete evidence on that but we will monitor that situation very carefully. It is important
not to rush into precipitate activity until we have some evidence that there is a problem to
be solved.
Q87 Baroness Perry of Southwark: From some of your answers, I get the feeling that
you think that the quality of postgraduates is not so much an issue for RCUK as for either
HEFCE or the individual Research Councils. Am I right in that? Is that a clear policy?
Dr Steven Hill: No. I do not think so. If you read the documents we published around the
spending review, there was a clear statement that the quality of graduate training provision
was the key driver, and that was in many ways more important than numbers.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: The key driver for you—for RCUK?

Dr Steven Hill: Yes. RCUK is simply the collection of the Research Councils, so if it is the
key driver for the Research Councils it is also the key driver for RCUK. The one thing I
would say, as I have said already, is that we fund 25% of the PhD studentships; those are
prestigious studentships. They are desirable and attractive and, as a result, if there is a quality
problem in the system it is much more likely to occur in students that are funded from
other sources than from ours. That is not to say there are not counter-examples in both
directions, but we are funding at the prestigious and high-quality end of the spectrum.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: But you have said that HEFCE is also charged with
looking at the quality. How do you see the interaction between you and HEFCE on that?
Dr Steven Hill: On the issues of quality? I think the key one is that HEFCE have been
charged with looking at the effects of the higher education reforms on the distribution of
subjects and the distribution of students between subjects, and that is the key area that we
are very interested in. Clearly the number of physics postgraduates is limited by the number
of physics undergraduates or is related in some way to that, so we are very interested in
that.
Q88 The Chairman: Dr Hill, I am just slightly confused because in RCUK’s evidence to
the Committee you make reference to ESRC’s doctoral training centres, which in fact
preceded EPSRC’s training centres, and you say that doctoral training centres “were
accredited as ESRC training providers following a competitive peer review process and they
have provided clear evidence that they can deliver the highest quality training provision”.
Now what is the basis of that?
Dr Steven Hill: I will go back to the ESRC and get you some detail on that.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. We are trying to rush the last questions.
Q89 Lord Cunningham of Felling: One very brief question. When I asked you about
the decline in the quality of candidates for PhD places, you said you had based that on
anecdotal evidence from one university, but if you have, as you do, 25% of all doctoral
graduates, have you noticed any change there?
Dr Steven Hill: Change in?
Lord Cunningham of Felling: Quality.
631
Dr Steven Hill: Again, as funders we are one step removed from the students themselves.
The students do not interact with the Research Councils directly. We rely on the
universities if they have an issue with quality and we will—
Lord Cunningham of Felling: You did emphasise that these were prestigious awards.
Therefore, one would assume that, if anything, the quality would be going up. Is it flatlining?
Is it declining? Is it increasing?
Dr Steven Hill: I understand you took evidence from some university vice–chancellors last
week. I do not know whether this issue was raised with them. In a sense, it is for the
universities to comment on that.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: They did not put anything like this in their submissions.
The Chairman: No, okay. I wonder, Lord Krebs, if you would mind if I just go to Lord
Winston to ask about quality internationally. You are happy, are you? All right, Lord
Winston.
Q90 Lord Winston: What we would like to know is whether, in your opinion or
experience, PhDs in the UK are of similar quality to those in other countries and other
universities. What can we learn from other countries?
Dr Steven Hill: Yes. I think one indicator of how the UK PhD is regarded in other countries
is the number of students who wish to come to study for their PhD here in the UK. As we
have already said, 42% of PhD students, a significant proportion, are from outside the UK.
That suggests that there is a perception of quality elsewhere in the world. One of the
differences between the UK PhD and that in some other countries is its length. It is on the
shorter end of the international range. That is sometimes suggested as being a bad thing—
that our PhD students are not as experienced as those from some other countries. Equally, I
have heard that being suggested as a good thing, an attractive thing that gets researchers
who are still fresh and not encumbered by lots of preconceptions out into the research
world very quickly. So there are positives and negatives in that comparison.
There is one other line of evidence that you might wish to look into. There is a European
Commission group called the Steering Group on Human Resources and Mobility. It is part of
the framework programme. That has recently carried out a study called Mapping Exercise on
Doctoral Training in Europe—Towards a Common Approach, and essentially the recommended
approach that they are heading towards is very much a UK–type of PhD approach. So again,
that is an international examination across Europe that has led to the UK model being seen
as attractive. It is not a systematic review of all nations’ approaches to PhD training but
some anecdotes that suggest there are at least some positive things about the UK, and it
confirms it internationally.
Lord Lucas: I have a feeling that my colleague Lord Rees wants to come in, but your
answer does sound a little complacent to me.
Q91 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I just want to say that I think it is still the case that the
coursework component of the UK PhD is less than that in other countries, which has the
risk of producing less flexible PhD graduates. Do you think that we need to move further
towards greater flexibility and more coursework?
Dr Steven Hill: Yes, but that also needs to be looked at in the context of changes in the
undergraduate approach and the undergraduate study. In physics and chemistry now it is
very common to do a four-year course that ends with a Masters qualification as opposed to
632
a Bachelor qualification, so that additional provision may be being provided elsewhere in the
system and not necessarily in the PhD.
Q92 Lord Winston: What about comparisons with the United States?
Dr Steven Hill: I do not have any specific information about that. Again, I could look into
that and see whether there is anything that we have where direct comparisons of quality
have been looked at. It is very hard to compare. The difficulty is that there are so many
variables in those sorts of comparisons that drawing conclusions from them is very difficult,
but I will see if we have anything available.
The Chairman: On that note we will conclude this particular session. Thank you very
much, Dr Hill. It is a very lonely position being there on your own without anyone to deflect
questions to, so we thank you very much indeed for your evidence. We look forward to the
responses you are going to give us in the tome which will be coming to us in future days.
Thank you very much indeed.
633
Research Councils UK (RCUK) – Supplementary written evidence
The percentage of STEM postgraduates funded by RCUK, against the total

number of RCUK graduates (Transcript Q70)
1. STEM has a rather broad definition and it is difficult to assess which particular
studentship awards are considered to address a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering
and Maths) subject area from Research Council data. In the following analysis it is
assumed that PhD studentships funded by BBSRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC and STFC are in
STEM subjects, whereas those funded by AHRC and ESRC are not. On this basis around
76% of RCUK-funded are in STEM subjects as illustrated by the data in the following
table. Comparison of the 2009-10 data below with data published by HEFCE 361 also for
2009-10 shows that Research Councils support 34.5% of PhD new starts in STEM
subjects and 16.6% in non-STEM subjects
Fig 1 - Research Council-funded PhD Studentships (new starts) 2008-10, split by broad STEM
subject area:
PhD Studentships
Starts /FY
Research Council 08-09 09-10 10-11
Research Councils not primarily engaged in STEM
subjects
AHRC 587 737 732
ESRC 686 719 730
Total studentships from 1273 1456 1462
Non STEM Councils
% of RCUK-funded 22% 23% 25%
studentships
Research Councils engaged in STEM subjects
BBSRC 503 539 555
EPSRC 3003 3301 2863
MRC 457 426 426
NERC 316 334 325
STFC 258 240 225
Total studentships from 4537 4840 4394
STEM Councils
% of RCUK-funded 78% 77% 75%
studentships
Total funded Studentships 5810 6296 5856
A note from RCUK on the trend in numbers of Masters and PhD studentships
since 2002 (Transcript Q71)
361 PhD Study Trends and Profiles 1996-97 to 2090-10 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_33/ Table 6 p12
634
2. With regard to Masters level training: the RCUK Strategic Vision states that we will
“emphasise high quality PhD provision in preference to support for taught masters
courses”. In line with this for the CSR period (2011-2015) this EPSRC, ESRC, NERC 362
and STFC currently make no stand-alone provision for taught Masters level training.
Some strategic support is provided by MRC363 - to build research capacity in scarce skills,
AHRC - for research and professional preparation masters and BBSRC – who’s
Advanced Training Partnerships can involve developing training at a modular level for
masters degrees.
3. The Councils position prior to 2011 was reflected in our input to the Postgraduate
Review 364 where we noted that prior to 2009 the Research Councils did not have a
major role in the direct funding of taught Master’s degrees and in total funded fewer than
<5% of all taught Master’s. Further extracts of that input including the strategic reasons
for providing support are provided at Annex A.
4. Fig 2. shows the change in the number of total UK-funded PhD studentships from
2002/03 - 2010/11 and projected studentship numbers for 2011/12 - 2013/14. It should
be noted that the number s for the period 2005-06 to 2010-11 include EOPSRC project
studentships awarded through research grants and which have now been discontinued.
Fig 2. Numbers of new start PhD studentships and projections from STEM Research Councils
and grand total for all Research Councils (including those where masters obtained en route).
362 From October 2011, NERC discontinued funding for masters level training
363 MRC funds 60 Advanced Research Masters places per annum, to build research capacity in scarce skills identified by
academia and industry as strategic, e.g. in vivo (animal) sciences, biomedical imaging; and maths, stats and computation
applied to biomedical research
364 One Step Beyond – BIS 2010 http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/BISCore/corporate/docs/p/10-704-one-step-beyond-
postgraduate-education
635
Fig 3. Numbers of new PhD studentships (including those where Masters qualification is
obtained en route)
Year Research
Council-funded
PhD
studentships
2002/03 4666
2003/04 4775
2004/05 4858
2005/06 6037
2006/07 6030
2007/08 6195
2008/09 5810
2009/10 6296
2010/11 5856
5. The data, including a breakdown of studentships by Research Council (and associated

caveats) for these figures can be found in Annex B.
What RCUK is doing to make PhDs more attractive (Transcript Q73)
6. Collectively and in line with our Strategic Vision we have been progressively introducing
new approaches to training in recent years. These developments are aimed at attracting
and nurturing talented and skilled researchers and key elements are the establishment of
centres, critical mass, partnerships and cohort-based approaches. These are in addition
to existing mechanisms such as CASE or collaborative doctoral awards and Doctoral
Training Grants (DTGs). Taken together these approaches will bring:
• Improvements to the PhD experience – flexible stipends, transferable skills

training, MRes and other structured training, training partnership agreements,
• An emphasis of quality over quantity of studentships
• Targeted investment in scarce, strategic skills
• Measures to ensure fitness for employment and postdoctoral opportunities in

academia and industry
• Better alignment of HEIs’ PG training delivery priorities and mechanisms with RC

priorities.
7. More specifically:
636
• Since 2003 Research Councils have collectively provided additional financial

support to universities and through the Vitae® (previously UKGRAD)
programme, to significantly enhance provision of generic and transferable skills
training (Roberts’ funding), the success of this funding has been reviewed and with
RCUK encouragement from 2011 it has been incorporated into PGR fees b y the
Universities.
• Councils have published clear expectations for the training offered to their
students which may include development of the next generation of world-class
researchers, opportunities for international or professional internships,
enhancement of skills to meet the needs of users, formal programmes of taught
coursework and extended support to enable the very best students to continue
their academic research post-PhD.
• Research Council Training Grants also allow universities significant flexibility to

pay stipends above the national minimum (currently £13,590 tax free) which can
be used to attract students to areas of scarcity. Studentship stipend ‘supplements’
are also often available for students undertaking CASE studentships, the exact
amount being at the discretion of the hosting organisations.
• In terms of attracting the best individuals into postgraduate studentships who

might otherwise not consider doctoral training vacation bursaries can provide
funding for the best undergraduate students to gain practical first-hand
experience of research in a UK university to help them consider a research
career.
• Other features of studentships can include international placements and visits,

opportunities to work with a non-academic partner, the benefit of working as
part of a research team and the opportunity to attend subject-specific summer
schools.
8. Further information detailing individual Research Councils efforts to make PhD

studentships more attractive can be found in Annex C.
The proportion of first degree qualifiers with firsts who opt to do a PhD (rather
than going directly into work or going abroad) (Transcript Q74)
9. Whilst the surveys of the destinations of leavers of higher education (DLHE) show the
numbers of leavers who go onto higher degrees mainly by research, this data is not
linked to student information (including degree class). As a result, it is not possible to
determine the proportion of students with first class degrees who opt for higher
research degrees from existing datasets.
The degree grade of all RCUK studentships and the percentage of the
graduating class who performed research. (Transcript Q75)
637
10. The HEFCE publication HEFCE PhD Study Trends and Profiles 1996-97 to 2009-10365
includes the trend for starters of full-time PhD courses by their qualification in the year
prior to entry. This is not necessarily the highest qualification they have achieved.
11. In 2009/10, through direct progression in the year following qualification, 1,640 of the
9,420 UK domiciled starters to full-time PhDs had firsts (17.4%). The number of UK-
domiciled qualifiers who had firsts in the preceding year (2008/9) was 37,460. So 4% of
these went on directly to PhDs. The table detailing this information can be found in
Annex D.
12. Information provided by Research Organisations does not currently provide a consistent
enough perspective to allow for an accurate figure of the percentage of the graduating
class who performed research.
13. An breakdown of RCUK-funded studentships by previous qualification prior to year of

entry can be found in Annex E.
Information on how RCs evaluate the effectiveness of CASE students and how
they form relationships with industry (Transcript Q80)
14. Research Councils regularly review CASE studentships to consider the extent to which
the scheme remains relevant to the needs of the research community and non-HE
organisations. The extent of each review differs between Research Councils but
common goals are to:
• examine the role of CASE studentships;

• review academia-industry collaborations and their effectiveness;
• assess drivers and barriers which influence industry, academia and student
participation and;
• to ascertain the strengths and any areas for improvement and development.
15. Such reviews generally involve seeking the input of current industrial partners, former
and current CASE students and non-participating industry partners.
16. Several Research Councils request a ‘portfolio agreement’ with studentship training
providers, these agreements should allow providers to represent their total studentship
portfolio as a whole, celebrate the providers’ contributions (including industry partners),
and form part of the practical communications, reporting and evaluation processes.
17. In addition to this many CASE studentships are offered via Industrial Case awards, where
businesses take the lead in arranging projects with an academic partner of their choice.
The aim of these awards is to provide PhD students with a first-rate challenging research
training experience, within the context of a mutually beneficial research collaboration
between academic and partner organisations.
18. Further information detailing individual Research Councils efforts to evaluate the
effectiveness of CASE studentships and industry links can be found in Annex F.
638
A note on the specific areas where RCUK are trying to encourage more
studentships and to protect particular subjects. (Transcript Q81)
19. Each Research Council has a number of mechanisms to encourage uptake in particular
subject areas.
20. For instance, Centres for Doctoral Training and Doctoral Training Centres (CDTs and
DTCs) allow the creation of enhanced skills in key areas such as digital economy, energy
and advanced manufacturing.
21. The remit of each Centre for Doctoral Training has been developed with consideration
of national needs and priorities. Assessment criteria for these centres has included
national need, international standing of the research group and quality of the training
environment.
22. Research Councils also target strategic skill shortages through long-term training
investments in Research Council Institutes and various capacity building programmes.
23. Further information detailing individual Research Councils efforts to protect and
encourage studentships in priority areas can be found in Annex G.
Detail about the EPSRC mid-term review of the move to DTCs. (Transcript
Q84)
24. In 2009 EPSRC made a major investment in Centres for Doctoral Training. A mid-term
review was held in 2011 which required the Centres to demonstrate progress and
impact in their areas. This was an early health check on the Centres as none of the
students working in the 2009 tranche of centres have yet completed their PhDs. Each
Centre provided entry information on two cohorts of students plus some numerical
information on the third cohort (who started in the same year as the review). EPSRC
currently has 80 centres, 59 of which (who were at an appropriate point) were
reviewed.
25. The review panel recognised that the CDT approach was an effective way of training a
cohort of students and allowed students more time to gain some specific skills. It noted
that many of the centres had succeeded in leveraging substantial industrial funding using a
variety of approaches. It also noted that many Universities and other funders were
adopting a cohort or centre-based approach to supporting PhD students. Finally, the
panel noted that the centres can act as a catalyst for bringing people together, and can
act as a nucleation site to bring together good activities.
Evidence and basis for ESRC delivering the highest quality training provision
(Transcript Q88)
26. As set out at section 5.3.2 in the response to the House of Lords STEM Inquiry, the
ESRC approach is to award all of its studentship funding directly to the institutions which
make up its network of 21 DTCs. The DTCs cover the full range of social science
disciplines as well as areas of interdisciplinary research. The DTCs were accredited as
ESRC training providers following a competitive peer review process and they have
provided clear evidence that they can deliver the highest quality training provision.
639
27. Institutions applied for doctoral training centre status as part of an in-depth
commissioning process. Institutions were required to set out a case for them having a
sufficiently strong environment in which to receive funding for training students, including
detailed responses to core and advanced training and the subject areas- including
interdisciplinary – in which they wished to host students. Institutions were also required
to submit data from their 2008 RAE submission. This was assessed by up to 6 peer
reviewers per application, then assessed by two members of the ESRC Training and
Development Board (TDB, now the Training and Skills Committee) and evaluated by the
TDB as a whole at a Committee meeting.
Comparison of UK funding model with the US (Transcript Q92)

28. RCUK are not aware of any studies that allow a direct comparison between graduate
studentships in the UK and US.
27 February 2012
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Research Councils UK (RCUK) – Further supplementary written evidence
Research Councils UK (RCUK) – Further supplementary written

evidence
Inquiry into the supply of STEM Skills 366

HoL Inquiry Request received 22nd May 2012
1 Numbers of Masters and PhDs

1. Breakdown over ten years, for each Council of the annual spend on:
* Masters courses (divided by taught and research)
* PhD provision (divided by funding category, for example Doctoral Training Centre,
Project studentships, or Doctoral Training Grants), specifying whether funding is spent
directly on student places, or on other activities such as training courses (if this is known).
Please could you also present the figures as a percentage of the annual overall spend by each
Council.
1.1 Annual spend Figures (£M)

EPSRC NERC
Separately identifiable masters (SIM)
Separately identifiable masters (SIM)

Doctoral (including non-separately
Doctoral (including non-separately

% of total RC budget on doctoral
% of total RC budget on doctoral

identifiable masters, KE etc)
Total EPSRC Budget
identifiable masters)
Total NERC Budget

(including non-SIM)
(including non-SIM)
% on SIM
% on SIM
spend
spend
Year
2001/2 19.6 4.5% 77.9 18% 431 0.1 0.0% 15.3 5% 294
2002/3 18.3 3.3% 81.5 14% 563 0.3 0.1% 15.5 5% 283
2003/4 16.4 3.5% 88.8 19% 471 3.3 1.0% 16.3 5% 321
2004/5 6.3 1.2% 131.3 26% 510 3.5 1.0% 19.3 6% 338
2005/6 0.7 0.1% 149.9 26% 573 3.5 0.9% 20.6 5% 396
2006/7 0.0 0.0% 174.8 27% 655 3.7 1.1% 21.6 6% 334
2007/8 0.0 0.0% 186.4 25% 751 4.0 1.1% 23.0 6% 366
2008/9 0.0 0.0% 197.8 25% 793 4.0 1.0% 23.0 6% 382
2009/10 0.0 0.0% 219.1 26% 854 3.6 0.9% 23.3 6% 412
2010/11 0.0 0.0% 224.3 26% 861 2.9 0.7% 24.3 5% 447
366The Inquiry has a focus on STEM skills. Whilst ESRC does not fund STEM subjects it does fund the development of
STEM skills particularly in economics and advanced quantitative methods (AQM). Both of these areas have been priorities
for ESRC studentship allocations since 2006 and are therefore included. AHRC data has also not been included.
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BBSRC MRC
separately identifiable masters)
separately identifiable masters)

Separately identifiable masters
Separately identifiable masters

doctoral (including non-SIM)
doctoral (including non-SIM)

Doctoral (including non-
Doctoral (including non-

% of total RC budget on
% of total RC budget on
Total BBSRC Budget
Total MRC Budget

(SIM) spend
(SIM) spend
% on SIM
% on SIM
Year
2001/2 1.3 0.5% 23.9 10% 244 0 0 17.7 4%
2002/3 1.4 0.5% 25.8 9% 276 0 0 19.4 5%
2003/4 1.4 0.5% 26.6 9% 285 0 0 20.6 5%
2004/5 1.5 0.6% 28.4 11% 268 0 0 21.8 5%
2005/6 1.8 0.6% 33.4 11% 304 0 0 24.1 5%
2006/7 2.0 0.6% 38.1 11% 351 0 0 23.6 4%
2007/8 2.1 0.6% 39.9 11% 380 0 0 25.0 4%
2008/9 2.2 0.5% 42.0 10% 418 0 0 27.7 4%
2009/10 2.3 0.5% 44.4 9% 469 0 0 31.9 4%
2010/11 2.4 0.5% 46.2 10% 473 0 0 33.1 4%
STFC
% of
total RC Total
Masters budget STFC
Year spend % PhD on PhD Budget
2001/2 0 0 7.49 3% 227
2002/3 0 0 8.37 3% 257
2003/4 0 0 8.97 3% 279
2004/5 0 0 9.55 3% 312
2005/6 0 0 11.62 3% 334
2006/7 0 0 12.73 4% 330
2007/8 0 0 14.66 3% 512
2008/9 0 0 15.30 3% 559
2009/10 0 0 18.87 3% 585
2010/11 0 0 18.80 3% 607
1.2 Notes to the tables

1.2.1 Please see the note at Annex 1 for ESRC support for Advanced Quantitative
Methods and Economics.
1.2.2 EPSRC spend is further broken down by type of funding (including Centres,
project studentships and Doctoral Training Grants) in table 3.
1.2.3 In addition, MRC funds Clinical Research Training Fellowships, competitive
awards for clinicians to undertake PhD (or equivalent research training), while
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receiving a salary rather than a stipend. In 2010/11, the MRC expenditure on

these awards was in the order of £10m.
1.3 Doctoral Studentship funding

1.3.1 The RCUK funding for doctoral studentships includes Stipends, Fees (which
include £200 pa for researcher development and transferable skills from
2010/11), Research Training Support Grant (between £1k and £5k dependent
on discipline), travel and subsistence and other allowances eg Disabled students
allowance. The average doctoral studentship cost per annum is approximately
£19k.
2 Funding and Centre approaches

2. The number of students in total funded each year (divided by taught Masters, research
Masters, and PhD) and the funding allocation provided to each student.
Please can you also specify for the figures above if the students were UK, or non-UK
domicile students (divided into EU and non-EU countries).
3. For the current spend on DTCs - under questions 1, please can you provide additional
information about the current funding allocated specifically to DTCs or equivalent groups
within each Council, by breaking it down into the areas of research covered by each Centre.
In your response please can you outline if the coverage of such centres has resulted in a
geographical gap in discipline coverage.
2.1 Overview for Doctoral training

2.1.1 The original submission to the House of Lords inquiry identified that Research
Council funding for postgraduate research is not restricted to centres. The role
of centres was outlined, but that there are also other funding routes (section
5.3 referred).
2.1.2 For example, EPSRC fund doctoral training grants alongside Centres for
Doctoral Training, and Industrial Case. Centres do not preclude the use of
other research council funding for research training in subject areas related to
those funded through centres. ESRC Doctoral Training Centres are not
organised by area of research but cover the full range of social science
disciplines and interdisciplinary research.
2.1.3 Information on the numbers of new student starts for the past ten academic
years is at table 1 and includes minimum stipend levels.
2.1.4 There is information on the nationality of EPSRC funded students at table 2.
Information on the nationality of those funded by other research councils is not
available in similar format.
2.2 Overview regarding Masters

2.2.1 Our current approach to Masters training is summarised in the RCUK Strategic
Vision covering the spending review period 2011-2015 where we emphasise
high quality PhD provision in preference to support for taught masters courses.
All Research Councils’ Delivery Plans for 2011-2015 have a focus on doctoral
training.
2.2.2 Prior to the current delivery plans the Research Councils funded a very small
proportion of masters level training (less than 5% in 2008). This was to:
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• Support strategically important skills areas for research and specialist roles
in business, industry and the public sector: promote inter-disciplinarity and
strengthen the supply of people in specific areas (for example,
mathematical modelling, statistics and operational research, taxonomy,
informatics, computational biology, quantitative skills in social or
environmental sciences, interpreting and translation, conservation and
heritage science, in vivo sciences, stem cell sciences).
• Facilitate the exploitation of research through Knowledge Exchange
(particularly in the environmental sciences), partnership and collaboration
and CPD.
• Provide advanced training for employment in strategically important
industries and sectors (eg design), including newly emerging ones such as
bioenergy and prospectively the NGO sector.
• Provide specialist training for graduates who go on to undertake research.
2.2.1. With large blocks of funding for programmes of knowledge transfer or doctoral
training, Universities have flexibility in how they achieve the aims of the
programme as a whole and funds may be used for a range of knowledge
exchange and training related costs including course development, stipends,
fees and other costs. Therefore, in some instances, Research Council funding
associated specifically with masters-level courses cannot be separately
identified.
2.3 Doctoral Student funding

2.3.1 Over the last ten years, the minimum stipend level that RCUK expects RC-
funded doctoral students to receive has roughly doubled. Increases above
inflation started before the SET for Success (Roberts) review was published in
2002 and continued using the additional government funding which the report
recommended. Since 2005/06 PhD stipends have broadly kept pace with
graduates’ salary expectations (recommendation 4.1). RCUK funding for
doctoral training has also reflected longer PhD programmes.
2.3.2 The amount of funding provided by the Research Councils has, accordingly,
increased above inflation over the last ten years, whether through direct
studentships, training grants or centres. With doctoral training grants (EPSRC,
MRC, STFC, NERC, BBSRC) research organisations were given increased
flexibility to determine stipend levels (provided it is at least the minimum) and
the duration for which the student receives funding (between 3 and 4 years)
according to the needs of the project and student.
2.3.3 The cost of Centres for Doctoral Training varies from centre to centre.
EPSRC provides funding for setting up new centres and additional costs
associated with networking and supporting the cohort of students. However, a
significant part of the increased costs are due to longer periods of training.
Centres generally offer training over 4 years.
2.3.4 In some areas, enhanced stipends have been offered to attract high quality
students in strategically important areas or where there are skills shortages,
such as Economics and Advanced Quantitative Methods, veterinary research,
some areas of medical research, energy research, engineering and other
industrial doctorates. Some of these are funded through centres, but not all.
Further information on EPSRC centres is at table Paragraph 3.
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2.4 Nationality of RCUK Doctoral Students

2.4.1 Generally, non-EU students form a very small proportion of Research Councils’
funding. For most Research Councils, this was via Dorothy Hodgkin
Postgraduate Awards which peaked in 2005 at 130 awards across all
participating Research Councils (~2% of new starts), reduced to 26 in 2008 and
2009 and is now closed 367 .
2.4.2 In 2011, RCUK agreed a common statement, recognising the desirability of
attracting the best international talent into excellent UK research and training
environments in areas of skills shortage and where there is benefit to the UK.
For example the EPSRC website includes that “…to further strengthen the
research base, during the next Delivery Plan we intend to open up 10% of all
our studentships to the very best students whether EU, international or
otherwise”. Information is available about the nationality of EPSRC funded
students and is given at table 3.
2.4.3 Non-UK EU students may be eligible for full awards on the same basis as UK
students if they can demonstrate a relevant connection with the UK, usually
through residence in the UK for at least three years. Otherwise, they will be
eligible for fees only. Prior to the Bidar case in 2005, candidates from the rest
of the EU could demonstrate a relevant connection only if their period of
residence was not for the purposes of higher education. So prior to 2005,
fewer EU nationals were eligible for full awards.
2.5 ESRC
2.5.1 ESRC funds STEM skills within Advanced Quantitative Methods and Economics.
Please see Annex 1 regarding ESRC.
3 EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training

3.1 Background
3.1.1 A cohort approach to doctoral training through Centres was pioneered by
EPSRC through Engineering Doctorate (EngD) Centres ( established in 1992
and focussing on collaborative, applied research) and more recently (2002)
with the Life Science Interface (LSI) Doctoral Training Centres. Studentships
are funded for 4 years and include technical and transferable skills, as well as a
research element. These approaches have been reviewed and have shown the
benefits of the cohort approach in for example enhancing the student
experience, producing broader students, (with both breadth and depth), and
enabling new ways of collaborative and multi/inter-disciplinary research.
3.1.2 As a result of this previous experience EPSRC funded 45 new Centres for
Doctoral Training in 2009. Additional exercises were carried out following the
main exercise in 2009 to fill potential gaps in the portfolio so for example,
subsequently centres in Mathematics, ICT and Manufacturing were funded. A
complete list of centres plus their lead themes is in Table 5.
3.3 Geographical Coverage of EPSRCs studentships

3.3.1 To understand the impact of EPSRC’s Centres for Doctoral training on a
geographical basis, the general context of EPSRC’s studentship support is
367April 2010, Review of the DHPA Scheme available at:

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/researchcareers/dhpa/DHPAReview2010.pdf
645
relevant. EPSRC currently supports doctoral studentships through three main

routes:
1. Doctoral Training accounts with Universities. (introduced in 2001) These are
training grants or partnerships to Universities which are allocated on an
algorithm related to research grant income. These grants give universities
flexibility to allocate studentships across the EPSRC portfolio. Currently over
40 Universities over a wide geographical spread are in receipt of a Doctoral
Training Account. Universities are free to use these allocations to fund
studentships in any topic within EPSRC’s remit.
2. Centres for Doctoral Training (Including Industrial Doctorate Centres) These
are focussed on a specific topic, often interdisciplinary and often collaborative
with business. EPSRC currently has more than 70 Centres for Doctoral
Training. (See Table 5 for list of centres ) Many of these centres are
collaborative between universities. For example, the Doctoral Training
Centre in Condensed Matter Physics led by the University of St Andrews
includes the Universities of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt, Structural Metallic
Systems for Gas Turbine Applications, includes the Universities of
Birmingham, Cambridge and Swansea and the Centre for Digital
Entertainment involves the University of Bath and the University of
Bournemouth. However, expenditure for the centres goes through the lead
university.
3. Industrial CASE studentships are allocated to companies who choose the
academic partner from an appropriate university.
3.3.2 Consequently EPSRC support for postgraduate training is widely available

geographically across its remit. While CDTs are located in specific universities,
our other two main sources of support, the Doctoral Training Account and
Industrial Case are available across a greater range of universities.
3.3.3 Table 3 provides an overview of all studentship spend for EPSRC, including
spend on Centres.
3.3.4 Table 4 gives the 2012 DTG allocation and number of Centres by institution.
3.3.5 Table 5 lists the EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training
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Table 1: Numbers of new doctoral starts funded by the Research Councils and Stipend Levels
PPARC Minimum stipend
AHRC BBSRC EPSRC ESRC MRC NERC TOTAL Fee level
/STFC1 level
2000/01 600 707 1801 588 366 181 4243 £2,740 £6,800
2001/02 670 672 1781 601 338 181 4243 £2,805 £7,500
2002/03 601 655 1786 679 345 191 4257 £2,870 £8,000
2003/04 595 683 1855 710 224 322 189 4578 £2,940 £9,000
2004/05 642 636 1916 747 240 328 201 4710 £3,010 £10,500
2005/06 673 639 2984 726 253 328 218 5821 £3,085 £12,000
2006/07 726 605 2870 835 257 321 212 5826 £3,168 £12,300
2007/08 827 617 2844 889 283 324 281 6065 £3,240 £12,600
2008/09 587 503 3003 686 307 316 258 5660 £3,300 £12,940
2009/10 737 539 3301 719 276 334 240 6146 £3,390 £13,290
2010/11 732 555 2863 730 251 325 225 5430 £3,466 £13,590
1PPARC merged with CCLRC to become STFC on 1st April 2007
General Note: Fee and stipend levels do not include contributions to the costs of training a student, fieldwork, conference attendance etc. These may vary according to
subject and Research Council
EPSRC Note: Actual numbers including project students identified as starting in the financial year.
MRC notes: Notional numbers. Due to changes in the systems used, numbers of notional students before 2003/04 are not available. Figures include doctoral training grant
awards, CASE studentships and Capacity Building studentships. Partner universities in receipt of doctoral training grants may lever further funding and the number of actual
students is therefore approximately 50% higher than the figures quoted above. Figures do not include students funded directly in units and institutes or studentships awarded
to medically qualified clinical researchers. Approximately 100 students a year start their studentship in one of MRC’s units or institutes. Approximately 45 clinical research
training fellowships (studentships awarded to medically qualified clinical researchers) are awarded each year.
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Table 2: Information on the domicile of EPSRC funded students
UK rest of EU non-EU unknown total

2006/07 1,804 76% 365 15% 202 9% 2 2,373
2007/08 1,776 75% 404 17% 171 7% 10 2,361
2008/09 1,802 77% 344 15% 174 7% 9 2,329
2009/10 2,003 79% 410 16% 130 5% 7 2,550
2010/11 1,903 81% 327 14% 89 4% 16 2,335
Data before 2006/07 is not available. The above table does NOT include project studentships, which had open eligibility.
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Table 3: EPSRC Spend on Postgraduate Training and Collaborative Training
project studentships % of total RC

Partnerships % of total RC budget
Direct studentships % of total RC
Total training columns including

Direct studentships spend (£M)
Project studentships % of total
including project studentships

Centres % of total RC budget
Masters % of total RC budget
SUM total training columns

Other % of total RC budget
CTAs % of total RC budget
Partnerships spend (£M)
Project studentships
Financial
Centres spend (£M)

Masters spend (£M)
Other spend (£M)

CTAs spend (£M)
Year
Total RC budget
RC budget
budget
budget
(£M)
2001/02 19.55 4.5% 46.70 10.8% 9.00 2.1% 0.00 0.0% 0.00 0.0% 10.00 2.3% 12.20 2.8% 97.45 22.6% 430.51
2002/03 18.32 3.3% 34.73 6.2% 24.24 4.3% 0.00 0.0% 0.00 0.0% 11.50 2.0% 11.00 2.0% 99.79 17.7% 563.14
2003/04 16.38 3.5% 22.25 4.7% 40.99 8.7% 1.98 0.4% 9.00 1.9% 5.62 1.2% 9.00 1.9% 105.22 22.4% 470.65
2004/05 6.29 1.2% 13.76 2.7% 64.70 12.7% 28.07 5.5% 4.45 0.9% 4.78 0.9% 15.50 3.0% 137.55 26.9% 510.42
2005/06 0.72 0.1% 11.20 2.0% 73.20 12.8% 34.87 6.1% 4.25 0.7% 10.50 1.8% 15.90 2.8% 150.64 26.3% 573.42
2006/07 0.00 0.0% 5.80 0.9% 76.60 11.7% 48.22 7.4% 5.40 0.8% 19.38 3.0% 19.40 3.0% 174.80 26.7% 654.85
2007/08 0.00 0.0% 7.70 1.0% 79.88 10.6% 48.74 6.5% 7.50 1.0% 21.53 2.9% 21.00 2.8% 186.35 24.8% 751.05
2008/09 0.00 0.0% 7.58 1.0% 77.65 9.8% 59.10 7.5% 12.30 1.6% 19.20 2.4% 22.00 2.8% 197.83 25.0% 792.50
2009/10 0.00 0.0% 6.06 0.7% 81.98 9.6% 57.80 6.8% 36.57 4.3% 15.54 1.8% 21.10 2.5% 219.05 25.7% 853.50
2010/11 0.00 0.0% 4.54 0.5% 83.16 9.7% 42.70 5.0% 57.19 6.6% 16.18 1.9% 20.50 2.4% 224.27 26.0% 861.28
Notes:
1 Figures on expenditure are taken from annual report and accounts except project students
2 Masters includes Masters Training Packages and Advanced Course Studentships but not MRes
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3 Direct Studentships or standard research studentships - also includes CASE, and Industrial CASE until their incorporation into CTA and Dorothy Hodgkin. There was no spend on
standard research studentships after 04/05
4 Partnerships is effectively the Doctoral Training Grant (introduced in 2001) which took over from the direct studentship route. It also includes a small amount of the International
Doctorate Scheme
5 CTA (Collaborative Training Award) was Collaborative Training Grant before 2006/7 From this time the CTA included funding for Collaborative activities such as people exchange
activities, Masters Packages, EngD Centres and Industrial Case.
6 Centres. From 2003/4 this column includes spend on both Life Science and Engineering Doctorate Centres, However, from 2006/7 to 2010/11 Eng D was included in CTAs and
therefore excluded from this column. From 2010/11 spend on centres includes Industrial Doctorate Centres (which include EngD).
7 Other includes some smaller training activities and Roberts skills funding
8 In 2005/6 additional funding was made available to Research Councils following the decision to fund universities on a Full Economic Cost basis. The increase in total budget in
subsequent years reflects this change in policy. Trend comparison before and after this does not therefore compare like with like.
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Table 4: EPSRC DTG allocation and Number of Centres by Institution

HEI 2012 DTG Number of CDTs
allocation (as Lead institution)
Brunel University £412,123
Cardiff University £1,190,555
Cranfield University £351,314 1
Durham University £1,692,227 1
Heriot-Watt University £1,439,339 1
Imperial College London £8,397,917 6
King's College London £680,129
Lancaster University £768,713 2
Loughborough University £827,042 2
Newcastle University £1,270,157 1
Queen Mary, University of London £1,270,834 1
Queen's University of Belfast £1,733,038
Royal Holloway, Univ of London £70,746
Swansea University £767,043 1
The University of Manchester £4,321,716 5
University College London £4,341,885 9
University of Aberdeen £330,525
University of Bath £1,469,558 2
University of Birmingham £1,800,786 4
University of Bristol £3,373,142 6
University of Cambridge £6,531,711 2
University of Dundee £315,188
University of East Anglia £282,292
University of Edinburgh £3,103,643 2
University of Exeter £786,771
University of Glasgow £2,287,705 1
University of Kent £346,424
University of Leeds £2,838,663 3
University of Leicester £323,993
University of Liverpool £1,991,979
University of Nottingham £3,280,890 4
University of Oxford £5,061,118 4
University of Reading £690,898 1
University of Salford £257,648
University of Sheffield £3,974,964 3
University of Southampton £5,355,400 3
University of St Andrews £1,874,137 1
University of Strathclyde £2,170,199 4
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University of Surrey £1,098,647 2

University of Sussex £288,291
University of Warwick £2,970,665 6
University of York £1,159,985 2
Total £83,500,000 80
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Table 5: EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training

Lead
Organisation Centre Name Lead Theme
Industrial Doctorate Centre in Skills
Technology, Research, and Management
Cranfield University (STREAM) for the UK Water Sector Engineering
Multidisciplinary Centre for Doctoral Training
Durham University in Energy Energy
Heriot-Watt Industrial Doctorate Centre in Optics and
University Photonics Technologies ICT
Imperial College Doctoral Training Centre in Science and
London Application of Plastic Electronic Materials ICT
Imperial College Doctoral Training Centre in Controlled
London Quantum Dynamics Physical Sciences
Imperial College Doctoral Training Centre in Theory and
London Simulation of Materials Physical Sciences
Imperial College Industrial Doctorate Centre in Non-Destructive
London Evaluation Engineering
Imperial College
Doctoral Training Centre in Chemical Biology
London Physical Sciences
Imperial College
London Energy Futures Doctoral Training Centre Energy
Lancaster STOR-i (Statistics and Operational Research
University Doctoral Training Centre) Mathematical Sciences
Lancaster
University HighWire Doctoral Training Centre Digital Economy
Loughborough Industrial Doctorate Centre in Innovative and
University Collaborative Construction Engineering Engineering
Loughborough Doctoral Training Centre for Regenerative Healthcare
University Medicine Technologies
Newcastle Industrial Doctorate Centre in
University Biopharmaceutical Process Development Engineering
Queen Mary,
University of Media and Arts Technology
London Digital Economy
Industrial Doctorate Centre in Manufacturing
Advances Through Training Engineering
Swansea University Researchers (MATTER) Manufacturing
Nuclear Fission Research, Science and
The University of Technology Doctoral Training Centre (Nuclear
Manchester FiRST) Energy
The University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in Nuclear
Manchester Engineering Energy
The University of The North West Nanoscience Doctoral
Manchester Training Centre Physical Sciences
The University of Doctoral Training Centre for Integrative Physical
Manchester Systems Biology Sciences/Mathematical
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Sciences
The University of Doctoral Training Centre in Computer Science

Manchester ICT
University College
Doctoral Training Centre in Security Science
London ICT
University College Industrial Doctorate Centre in Urban
London Sustainability and Resilience Engineering
University College Industrial Doctorate Centre in Molecular
London Modelling & Materials Science Physical Sciences
University College Doctoral Training Centre in Financial
London Computing Digital Economy
University College Industrial Doctorate Centre in Bioprocessing
London Engineering Leadership Manufacturing
University College Doctoral Training Centre in Photonic Systems
London Development ICT
University College Doctoral Training Centre in Energy Demand
London Reduction and the Built Environment Energy
University College Industrial Doctorate Centre in Virtual
London Environments, Imaging and Visualisation ICT
Doctoral Training Centre for Mathematics and
University College Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental
London Biology (CoMPLEX) Mathematical Sciences
Doctoral Training Centre in Sustainable
University of Bath Chemical Technologies Physical Sciences
Industrial Doctorate Centre for Digital
University of Bath Entertainment Digital Economy
University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in Formulation
Birmingham Engineering Engineering
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Hydrogen, Fuel
Birmingham Cells and their Applications Energy
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Structural Metallic
Birmingham Systems for Gas Turbine Applications Engineering
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Physical Sciences of
Birmingham Imaging for the Biomedical Sciences Physical Sciences
Doctoral Training Centre in Complexity
University of Bristol Sciences Mathematical Sciences
University of Bristol Doctoral Training Centre in Chemical Synthesis Physical Sciences
Advanced Composites Centre for Innovation
University of Bristol and Science Engineering
University of Bristol Industrial Doctorate Centre in Systems Manufacturing
Doctoral Training Centre in Functional
University of Bristol Nanomaterials Physical Sciences
Doctoral Training Centre in Future
Communications: People, Power and
University of Bristol Performance ICT
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University of
Cambridge Centre for Analysis
Cambridge Mathematical Sciences
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Assembly of
Cambridge NanoMaterials and NanoDevices Physical Sciences
University of Industrial Doctoral Centre for Offshore
Edinburgh Renewable Energy (IDCORE) Energy
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Neuroinformatics
Edinburgh and Computational Neuroscience ICT
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Cell & Proteomic
Glasgow Technologies Physical Sciences
Doctoral Training Centre in Technologies for a
University of Leeds Low Carbon Future Energy
Doctoral Training Centre in Tissue Engineering Healthcare
University of Leeds and Regenerative Medicine Technologies
Doctoral Training Centre in Basic Technologies
University of Leeds for Molecular-Scale Engineering Physical Sciences
University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in Efficient Fossil
Nottingham Energy Technologies Energy
University of Horizon Doctoral Training Centre for the
Nottingham Digital Society Digital Economy
University of From Targeted Therapeutics to Next Healthcare
Nottingham Generation Medicine: Doctoral Training Centre Technologies
University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in Manufacturing
Nottingham Technology Manufacturing
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Systems Healthcare
Oxford Approaches to Biomedical Science Technologies
University of
Systems Biology Doctoral Training Centre
Oxford Mathematical Sciences
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Healthcare
Oxford Innovation Digital Economy
Doctoral Training Centre in Bio-
University of nanotechnology, Medical Imaging and
Oxford Bioinformatics Physical Sciences
University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in Technologies for
Reading Sustainable Built Environments Engineering
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Advanced Metallic
Sheffield Systems - Challenges in Global Competitiveness Engineering
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Interdisciplinary
Sheffield Energy Research (E-Futures) Energy
University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in Machining
Sheffield Science Manufacturing
University of
Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science
Southampton Digital Economy
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Complex Systems
Southampton Simulation Mathematical Sciences
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University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in Transport and

Southampton the Environment Engineering
University of St Doctoral Training Centre in Condensed Matter
Andrews Physics Physical Sciences
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Wind Energy
Strathclyde Systems Energy
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Medical Devices
Strathclyde and Related Materials Engineering
University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in Advanced
Strathclyde Forming and Manufacture Manufacturing
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Next Generation
Strathclyde Accelerators Physical Sciences
Industrial Doctorate Centre in Micro & Nano-
University of Surrey Materials and Technologies Engineering
Industrial Doctorate Centre in Sustainability for
University of Surrey Engineering and Energy Systems Engineering
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Complexity
Warwick Science Mathematical Sciences
University of Mathematics and Statistics Centre for Doctoral
Warwick Training (MASDOC) Mathematical Sciences
Mathematical
University of Sciences/Physical
Warwick Doctoral Training Centre in Systems Biology Sciences
University of Doctoral Training Centre in Molecular
Warwick Organisation and Assembly in Cells (MOAC) Physical Sciences
University of Industrial Doctorate Centre in High Value, Low
Warwick Environmental Impact Manufacturing Manufacturing
University of Integrated Magnetic Resonance Centre for
Warwick Doctoral Training Physical Sciences
University of York Fusion Doctoral Training Network Energy
Industrial Doctorate Centre in Large-Scale
University of York Complex IT Systems ICT
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Annex 1: ESRC funding for STEM Skills

While ESRC does not fund STEM subjects, it does fund the development of STEM skills
particularly in economics and advanced quantitative methods (AQM). Both of these areas
have been priorities for studentship allocation since 2006.
ESRC spends around £40m per annum on post graduate training. This is currently managed
through our 21 DTCs which are not organised by area of research, but cover the full range
of social science disciplines. The ESRC is monitoring the allocation of studentships across
disciplines and DTCs; a full evaluation of the network is planned for 2014/15.
The table below details the number of studentships awarded in STEM related areas over the
last 10 years. We have not calculated the spend partly because stipend levels have changed
considerably over the last 10 years so an increase in expenditure does not automatically
indicate an increase in the volume of students either in economics or using advanced
quantitative methods across the remaining ESRC disciplines. Also, the amount of ESRC
expenditure would be relatively small next to the major STEM councils but we hope the
increase in the proportion of students funded in these areas demonstrates our commitment
to increasing student numbers.
ESRC have not funded separate masters and PhDs since 2002. Since 2002 we have offered
two main structures of funding, 1+3 (which is a masters followed immediately by a PhD) or
+3 (PhD only). Historically there has been an approximate 50:50 split between the two
models although there was a slight shift in 2011/12 to funding more +3 awards.
These figures reflect awards made in Economics for the last 10 years and AQM since it was
introduced in 2006. In 2006 ESRC introduced an enhanced stipend for students in
economics or using advanced quantitative methods. This was £3000 above the standard
stipend rate.
The figures for 2011 include both new studentships funded through our Doctoral Training
Centres (that were introduced in October 2011) and 19 students who started their awards
in 2010 but received the enhanced stipend for AQM from 2011.
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ESRC 1+3 and +3 awards in AQM and Economics

Academic Economics AQM Total Percentage
year number of of new
new awards to
studentships AQM/ econ
2002/2003 88 712 12%

2003/2004 60 631 10%
2004/2005 56 593 9%
2005/2006 66 641 10%
2006/2007 74 46 762 16%
2007/2008 76 39 743 15%
2008/2009 73 41 686 17%
2009/2010 85 31 719 16%
2010/2011 85 22 727 15%
2011/2012 82 83 645 26%
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Rolls-Royce – Written evidence
Changes to Higher Education Funding and potential impact on STEM subjects
I am aware that a sub-committee of the Science and Technology Committee is currently

reviewing the implications that changes to Higher Education funding may have for STEM
subjects, and I thought it might be helpful to share with you a business perspective on this
matter. Rolls-Royce continues to be one of the major recruiters of graduate engineers in
the UK, and we believe that a strong pipeline of graduates in STEM subjects is key to our
success in continuing to deliver high-value engineering and manufacturing in the UK. We
acknowledge the need to review funding arrangements for HE, but we have some concerns
about the proposed arrangements and the potential impact they could have on the funding
of STEM subjects, the graduate pipeline, and our cost of doing business in the UK.
A number of the Vice-Chancellors providing evidence to the sub-committee have

highlighted the need, under the new arrangements, to subsidise STEM provision from other
funding. This would appear to be supported by the plans of most universities for 2012/13,
which involve charging the maximum level of tuition fees for most subjects, regardless of the
cost of provision. Under the new arrangements, and in the event that market forces prevail
and “profits” from lower cost subjects are seen as beneficial, there must also be a risk that
Universities will come under pressure to reduce the cost or the provision of science and
engineering programmes. We believe it is imperative that this situation is closely monitored,
and every effort is made to protect the funding and quality of STEM provision in universities.
Although we note that applications to university have increased in recent years against a
back-drop of increasing tuition fees, we are very concerned that the new arrangements
could result in a drop in graduate numbers at a time when our requirements are increasing.
We note that the latest application figures for UK universities are 7% down on this time last
year, however, it may be too early to draw conclusions based on the UCAS report of
reduced university applications for 2012/13, and other reports of increasing numbers of UK
school-leavers applying to universities outside the UK, but this situation will need to be
monitored very closely. Although some observers are suggesting that the new arrangements
are likely to provide an incentive for students to pursue vocational degree subjects, we are
particularly concerned that there could be a particular disincentive to participation in four
year programmes. Rolls-Royce currently requires engineering applicants in the UK to be
qualified to Meng, of MSc level, requiring at least four years study. In the event that there is
a reduction in applications to these programmes, and we are required to reduce our
applications criteria, this would result in us bearing the additional employment and training
costs associated with getting graduates to the level we require, or else increasing the
proportion of recruits for continental Europe with appropriate qualifications.
Under the new arrangements a graduate required to take the maximum loan for tuition fees
and living costs for a four year programme, will start work with a debt of more than
£60,000. We have conducted some analysis based on typical levels of pay progression
experienced by graduate engineers at Rolls-Royce, and this indicates that most of our
engineers will continue to pay the additional 9% “graduate tax” on their earnings over
£21,000 until the 30 year “write-off” rule applies. We also note that typical graduates will
659
need to earn at least £100,000 per year before their repayments even match the loan
interest at current RPI levels.
Also, we understand it is likely that an additional levy could be applied to any early
repayment of loans taken by graduates, and we are concerned that this will limit the options
for those graduates who may wish to reduce their exposure to very high levels of interest
charges over a prolonged period, and limit the ability of companies like our own to pay-off
all or part of the loan. The consultation exercise on early repayment refers to the option of
employers reimbursing graduates for the cost of tuition. We estimate that this would cost
Rolls-Royce in the region of £10m each year, and do not consider this affordable. Clearly
any additional levy would further increase this cost.
Establishing market competitive levels of pay will be challenging given the different levels of
debt applicable to graduates from the different countries within the UK. Those Scottish
students studying in Scotland, for instance, will not be charged for tuition fees, and will
therefore be impacted very differently from the English colleagues they will be working
alongside, following graduation. Our remuneration practices will not make this distinction,
and it is likely that over time the additional ‘tax’ for English graduates will inflate salary costs
for all these graduates. It will also provide a strong incentive for English graduates to seek
employment outside the UK.
In summary, we are very concerned about the potential implications these changes could
have on the provision of STEM subjects at UK universities, the supply of well qualified
graduates in these subjects, and the impact on the costs of employment. We believe that it
will be particularly important to monitor the impact of these changes closely, and to ensure
they do not compromise our ability to attract high calibre students into engineering areers
in the UK, or reduce the attractiveness of the UK as a location for STEM education or
industrial investment.
8 February 2012
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Rolls-Royce, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Microsoft Ltd and Siemens –

TUESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2012

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Krebs
Lord Rees of Ludlow
________________
Colin Smith, Director of Engineering and Technology, Rolls-Royce, Dr Malcolm Skingle,

Director of Academic Liaison, GlaxoSmithKline, Stephen Uden, Head of Skills & Economic
Affairs, Microsoft Ltd, and Dr Paul Beasley, Head of Strategic Development, Siemens.
Q120 The Chairman: Good morning. I apologise for the slight delay in starting this
morning’s session. It is because we were so excited at your presence that we needed a little
more time to prepare—but thank you very much indeed—for our evidence session, which
is looking at the views of employers with regard to higher education in STEM subjects and
how it in fact serves your particular industries. We are being broadcast this morning, and so
any comments that are made will be picked up by the microphones and will be spread
around the globe. Could I ask each of our witnesses this morning to briefly introduce
themselves, to say where they are from, just for the record—thank you very much—
starting with you, Mr Smith?
Colin Smith: My name is Colin Smith. I am the Director of Engineering for Rolls-Royce PLC
across the world.
Dr Skingle: I am Malcolm Skingle. I am Director of Academic Liaison at GlaxoSmithKline
Research.
Stephen Uden: I am Stephen Uden. I am Head of Skills for Microsoft in the UK.
Dr Beasley: Paul Beasley from Siemens, Head of Strategic Development in the UK.
Q121 The Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed. I wonder if I could start with you,
Mr Smith. Throughout the inquiry—and one of the reasons we actually began this inquiry—
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is that we are hearing views of a shortage of STEM graduates and then we hear there is an
oversupply of STEM graduates. From your point of view, have you experienced any difficulty
in recruiting STEM graduates or postgraduates, simply in terms of numbers? We will come
on to quality later.
Colin Smith: The answer to that is, yes, we have. Last year we recruited 130 graduates,
which was 10 fewer than we wanted to. That is engineering graduates directly in the UK.
Obviously we recruit them around the world. The skills that we are short of in the UK that
meet our criteria—and our criteria are fairly high, as we expect a 2:1 or above and an MEng
from one of the top 10 or 11 universities in the UK for our graduate and our leadership
scheme—are particularly electrical skills, manufacturing skills and nuclear skills that are in
short supply. To supplement that we generally recruit about 20% from the European
universities to come and work in the UK, and so some extent they fill some of those gaps.
Our concern going forward is twofold. First of all, we are at the top of the engineering
ladder for recruitment in the UK. We pay pretty high starting salaries, but some of our
supply chain really, really struggle when they are second or third tier. The second thing—
and I am sure we will come back to it—is that the next or the current proposal for funding
higher education I think is going to be disastrous for STEM subjects.
Q122 The Chairman: We will come back to that. Can I just pick you up on the issue of
some of your suppliers? What evidence do you have to support that?
Colin Smith: A number of conversations. In the aerospace group—that is, the ADS
industries—the average age of employees in the country is 52, which is a little bit
demographically weakened. Certainly from talking to some of them, when they go for
graduate schemes they struggle getting their whole complement, and they certainly struggle
getting the level of expertise that they expect. They always are—for want of a better
word—slightly jealous of us with our reputation and our name, so I cannot give you
specifics. Certainly one of our joint ventures, AEC in Birmingham, has struggled a little bit
and had to spread the net a bit wider. So we are fortunate we have a lot of university
contacts with the nature of the research that we do, and we clearly have the reputation, the
name, the size and the FTSE 100 to go with it.
Q123 The Chairman: Dr Skingle, do you have a similar problem in terms of recruiting
numbers?
Dr Skingle: I do not think we do. I think the GSK Research brand and name goes before it.
So people want to come and work in the organisation. It is a difficult question, because you
can go to different parts of the same organisation and get different answers, so I do not envy
you your task in trying to collate this information. In R&D we want people who are very
strong in their particular discipline, for us chemistry or biology, and certainly that is what
you look for in an R&D setting. For the softer skills, you might then train those because as
we have the infrastructure to do that. However, if you go to manufacturing, even within our
organisation, or certainly to biotech, they want the person who has all the skills who hits
the ground on day one and is impactful. For us in R&D the most important thing is to have a
strong core of scientific disciplines.
Q124 The Chairman: So you are recruiting mostly post-docs, are you, into that
business?
Dr Skingle: Yes, more post-docs than graduates.
The Chairman: Mr Uden?
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Stephen Uden: Microsoft is a household name so, to be perfectly honest, we do not
struggle to have—as others have found—people applying to us. But we are the tip of 30,000
IT companies and we are dependent on them for our revenue. They employ 330,000 people
compared to our 3,000. I spend most of my time working with those organisations and what
I find is there are significant skill shortages. They do not have the people to go out and
engage with graduates. They do not have the brands to attract people into what are very
good, very high-skilled jobs. As you asked for evidence earlier, I should say that the CBI
skills survey last year showed 39% of employers—it is not just IT—have shortages of STEM
graduates. Certainly that fits very closely with the issues that I see on the ground, with small
businesses that want to expand and are in attractive, growing areas of the economy but
cannot find the skilled STEM people they need to fuel the growth of their business.
Q125 The Chairman: Could I ask you specifically about computer science and whether
in fact that is an important criterion for both yourself and indeed for your supporting
businesses? Is there a perceived shortage of computer science graduates?
Stephen Uden: Yes, there is. As a result of that, only 50% of the technical people that join
engineering roles come to us with a computer science or IT degree. Because IT pays quite
well and people are prepared to cross-train, what happens is we are pulling people from
STEM who might otherwise work for other companies in other sectors, so the other 50%
will be chemists, engineers, mathematics—that is my training, as a mathematician—and
other areas of STEM. The bottom line is there are too many organisations that value STEM
skills, because they are in growth areas of the economy, that are pulling from a pool that is
not declining but, frankly, is not growing to match the pace. So we would much prefer to
hire a high proportion of people with computer science, but we are forced not to because
there is not the availability.
Q126 The Chairman: Dr Beasley, I wonder if when you are responding you could
perhaps give us a broader perspective of your company as well, as to whether in fact—say,
in Germany—you would be having the same problems in terms of recruiting graduate
numbers as you would in the UK.
Dr Beasley: Starting with the UK, I think we have been reasonably successful in recruiting
graduates, particularly mechanical engineers. I completely agree with Colin on the electrical
engineers. There is really an area here that needs to be addressed.
Looking towards Europe, no, we tend to recruit reasonably well there. There are more
electrical engineers, but it is taking longer in order to get graduates to come through the
interview process—again in the order of 100 applicants per vacancy but only a small
proportion (<10%) of those have the correct skills that we require.
Q127 Lord Cunningham of Felling: May I ask you each in turn whether, given what you
have told us about recruiting at the top end of graduates and post-graduates, the people you
do recruit meet your expectations? Do they have the technical skills but, in addition, do
they have social competence? How many of them stay the course?
Colin Smith: It is a mixture, as always. When we recruit people, we recruit round people as
well as quite narrow individuals. When we do recruitment fairs, we deliberately test some
of their social skills and teamworking skills, because engineering is pretty much a team sport.
Having said that, some of our specialists or our rocket scientists actually do not want to be
that socially forward. We deliberately encourage both people who are deliberately narrow
and want to stay in a certain technology for their whole career—we encourage that through
fellowship schemes and professor schemes, and many of them are visiting professors—and
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people who are capable of interacting with teams. We get a pretty good selection, but we
deliberately pick a cross-section of it. In general, as an employer, my preference would be to
get the people in with the basics and we will teach them about the simple stuff, like
programme management or social interaction. You can just do that. You do that every day.
But if they do not have the basics—the maths, physics, chemistry—it is useless and there is
no point in employing them.
I got into conversation with David Lammy a couple of years ago. He said, “We’re going to
teach innovation in school”, and my response—I will be slightly politer than I was to him
then—was, “You can innovate but if you do not know anything it is worthless, and no
employer will take you on”. So you have to have the basics to be able to build from that.
Q128 Lord Cunningham of Felling: If I asked you what was the biggest failing of the
recruitment system, would it be what you said in the beginning—just a shortage generally—
or are there other weaknesses too?
Colin Smith: I would say generally it is a shortage. Clearly, the City is still an attractive place
for a lot of people with the basics. If you can calculate physics you can do pretty well in the
City, which is a form of gambling in my opinion. The other thing that hurts us as an
engineering company, or predominantly an engineering and science company, is that there is
also the gender gap. We have signed up as a board to try to get 25% or 30% of board
members. Nobody coming through the current company at the next level below me is
female, partly because we are all engineers. In the whole of the UK there are only 200
female engineers doing mechanical engineering—divide that by three, so that is 70 a year. I
recruit only from the top universities. I am getting 50% of mechanical engineers coming out
who have the right qualities. So there is a huge issue with gender in engineering, more so
than pure science as well.
The Chairman: Lord Broers, do you want to come in on that point?
Q129 Lord Broers: No. I want to come in on the point of PhDs—the difference between
hiring Masters, presumably, or PhDs—and I would like to hear that from all of you. I am
afraid it is another issue, and it is an international issue. It has been my perception that
American companies hire PhDs to do their research, whereas that it is not so much the
case here.
The Chairman: Can you try to combine that with Dr Cunningham’s question rather than
coming in on that separate point?
Colin Smith: PhDs we bring in in direct entry, so directly usually. As I think you are aware,
we do most of our long-term research in the universities with our University Technology
Centres, which is a higher level—it is currently called a UTC, by the way. We bring PhDs
straight in for there, or we put people out and bring PhDs in, so they are directly recruited.
Many of our UTCs in this country are staffed by overseas people coming to do their PhDs,
and that is an issue, particularly with security constraints in China, but we get some cracking
PhDs as well.
The Chairman: Back to you, Lord Cunningham.
Q130 Lord Cunningham of Felling: I would like to hear from the other three
witnesses on the same question, really. It will be interesting to see whether we get the same
answer.
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Dr Skingle: From GSK’s perspective, I guess it is pretty much as I have already said that a
strong core discipline is what we would require and the softer skills we can train in-house if
somebody had that particular deficit. I guess one of the things that is yet to be mentioned is
that increasingly we need scientists who can work at the interfaces of the various disciplines.
For example, we need graduates or post-graduates with combined medicinal chemistry and
molecular biology skills and also mathematics, which is sometimes lacking. We had a
conversation only last week in our organisation about how we were either going to recruit
or train people in process chemistry, with the ability to work across several disciplines. I
think we do value Masters-level courses in some areas, particularly where there are deficits
in the industry skills base, as in things like toxicology, for example.
Stephen Uden: From our perspective, it is not in the nature of employers to be entirely
satisfied with graduates; I suspect it was not in my day and it is not today. If you look at
things like the CBI skills survey, there were questions raised about the employability skills—
something like 37% felt that young people were lacking.
Q131 Lord Cunningham of Felling: Forgive me for interrupting you at that point. Is the
situation in that respect getting better or worse?
Stephen Uden: This is one of the questions that was looked into. I cannot give you any
hard data on it, but if you look at the trend over time just in the CBI survey, it seems to be
pretty constant. Maybe the demands are getting higher, but I do not think there is
fundamentally an issue there. Where we have an issue specifically within our sector—I
would completely echo the point about needing to have strong core discipline—is IT is a
very fast-moving sector and we have an issue with the pace at which the courses that are
being offered keep up-to-date with a sector that is moving quite fast. We have a group that
tries to engage with institutions to help them develop their thinking. We think we can
combine the relevance of what is going on in industry with the rigour and transferability of
what universities do and, to be frank, there are some institutions that are very keen to
partner with us and work closely, and there are many other institutions that do not. If we
could increase the relevance as well, it would reduce the amount of time that IT employers
have to spend retraining people. I guess we will do it if we have to, but it is diverting us in
terms of the speed at which people will get up and running. It also adds a cost to business, if
the relevance of what is being taught at university does not relate to what employers are
looking for.
Q132 Lord Cunningham of Felling: You are a mathematician, you said?

Stephen Uden: Yes.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: Is the company short of mathematicians?
Stephen Uden: That is a great question. Mathematics is a discipline that underpins just
about every other discipline, so I guess I am a little biased. I think that having more people
studying mathematics—certainly to age 18—will be very welcome because it will underpin
STEM elsewhere. One of the reasons I feel that not enough people choose STEM degrees is
that they are concerned about their ability to do mathematics, physics, chemistry and
engineering—all of those disciplines. We have a lower participation rate, I think of about
20%, in post-16 mathematics in the UK. In some other countries it is as high as 60% or 70%.
If we could do something around that, I feel it would help increase the flow.
In terms of your Lordship’s question about PhDs, Microsoft Research Cambridge certainly,
as with many other global companies, looks for people coming in at that level to do
research. We have taken about 100 people in as interns and collaborators at that level.
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Firstly, because we are based in Cambridge, and also because the UK has a really strong
higher-education sector at the very top end, when I speak to my colleagues there I do not
get any sense of very strong shortages, both in terms of quality or quantity, but maybe if you
pulled that down to the fine details of particular disciplines, I suspect that they would report
some issues.
Dr Skingle: I was just going to make a point on this, actually. I used to sit on the User Panel
for EPSRC and then I sat on the Strategy Board for BBSRC. It was kind of interesting that
when you look at the UK maths community, they are strong but they do not get out very
much; they do not engage with industry as much as they might. Certainly, from a BBSRC
perspective, there are definitely not enough mathematical biologists. There is a definite
shortage there.
Dr Beasley: Yes, within Siemens, as I say, there appear to be problems certainly with verbal
and written communication, particularly for STEM graduates. Our main concern around
students is that they go to university and study the STEM subjects, but when they come into
industry they do not appear to have the same skills of problem solving. They initially like to
have problems well defined for them, and it seems easier to actually simulate rather than go
out there and experiment and learn from what is going on in some of the factories and
some of the jobs we are doing. So that is certainly one of the big issues.
Coming back to my first point, one of the main areas that we are struggling with is electrical
and electronic engineering, particularly in universities here. There seems to be a shift away
from some of the basic technology and basic understanding of the principles. We have
noticed more of the university courses tailored towards things like telecommunications,
imaging, computer systems and things like that, and less emphasis on the basic skills there.
These electrical engineers are honestly very, very key for things like next-generation power
stations, renewable energy and smart grid, so I think it is a key area for us really in order to
develop those types of people.
Coming on to the point on research, similar to Rolls-Royce, we do quite a bit of our
research at universities, not just in the UK but around the world. Where we work and get a
good collaboration with a student, we tend to recruit those PhD students and take them on
direct entry rather than into graduate programmes.
Q133 The Chairman: There is a mix on the panel, in that you are the first, Dr Beasley,
who has questioned the relevance of the curriculum that is being offered, particularly with
electrical engineering. Do I take it that the rest of the panel are happy with the curriculum
and that students are getting the basics as undergraduates and are getting good basic training
as PhDs?
Colin Smith: One of the reasons we have gone to four-year courses is to make sure that
the contents are the same as a three-year course used to be 10 years ago, so that probably
answers some of the question. With electronics in particular, I think they would probably
concur with that: you need a fundamental understanding of the physics and the maths
behind most of these and then we can add the application on top of it.
The Chairman: I think we will come back to what you can do to influence this more, but
meanwhile I will pass on to Lord Krebs.
Q134 Lord Krebs: Thank you very much, Lord Chairman. I wanted to pick up on
something that Colin alluded to, which is that STEM graduates are going into non-STEM
careers—you referred to them going into the City. Certainly, my experience at Oxford
suggests that a lot of quantitative STEM graduates do go into the financial sector. I
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wondered, from each of the panellists, what your insight into the reasons for that might be.
Is it largely to do with the money? Is it to do with the way that you sell yourselves as career
opportunities or what?
Colin Smith: If I may answer first, I think it is a mixture of all of that. Clearly the City has
been very attractive financially, and of course they all think they are going to end up fighting
for the big bonuses, and of course the fallout rate is slightly higher than that. But, as you are
aware, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the other professional bodies are trying an
awful lot to make the image of science courses and engineering courses much more
attractive. There is also a generic malaise in the UK, which I think we are all aware of. With
technology in Germany, my German employees are clearly top of the pole—top of the
bunch—so it is an endemic thing within the UK. In Singapore, Germany, Canada and
America, where we recruit, engineering is much, much higher in professional status, and I
think the same is true more or less for the STEM. I do not think we can fix that issue within
the UK per se. If the reality for the skills that we teach is that scientists and engineers and
mathematicians are attracted to the finance industry, we need to get more coming in at the
bottom as opposed to training to become hairdressers or whatever.
Dr Skingle: I do not see a problem with STEM graduates ending up in non-STEM-related
jobs. If you have scientifically literate people in other areas, in other sectors, I see this as a
positive thing, as long as there is enough obviously to fuel the biotechs and the large pharma
companies in my space. A lot were recruited by the City. I think since the financial bubble
has burst, there are fewer going into the City, which is perhaps not a bad thing. So, no, I do
not see that as a major problem to us.
Stephen Uden: As I mentioned earlier, 50% of people in our engineering roles are from
non-computer science backgrounds, so it has very much been core to the growth of our
sector. Also a lot of the interesting discoveries that are getting made in science are at the
boundaries between the disciplines, so the idea that if you are trained in one thing you
should stay in it is not a notion that we would want to encourage. As my colleagues have
highlighted, the problem is, because there is a lack of supply, people are going and looking
for people from outside of their discipline. Primarily, the problem is to do with not enough
people coming in rather than any particular sector—whether it is finance, IT or otherwise—
poaching engineers or whatever from other sectors.
Dr Beasley: I complete concur with what my colleagues have said. Rather than add more to
what they have already said there, I would probably look at the lower end, coming back to
my comments on the verbal skills. Certainly, there are a large number of STEM engineers
who come to us for interview who, because they do not have the ability to put over their
competence and their skill and whatever, tend to be dismissed by the industry and have to
find alternative employment. But at the high end, yes, I completely agree with what has been
said.
Q135 Lord Broers: I would like to ask this question of all of you, but particularly Dr
Beasley. I have anecdotal evidence that some German companies that operate both here
and in Germany pay their graduate engineers much more in Germany than they pay here.
They do not have to pay so much here because the engineering industry here, over the
broader aspects of it, pays relatively low salaries because they see that is all they have to
pay. Would you like to comment on that?
Dr Beasley: I disagree with that comment. Certainly in Germany, with companies like
Siemens, there is a big attraction for engineers and STEM graduates in this particular area to
be attracted to companies like Siemens, because we have a large proportion of people who
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have stayed within the company for a long amount of time, and in fact previous family
members are there. So I think it is more the case that people are attracted to Siemens
because of that stability. Salaries are probably a little higher in Germany to start off with but
not in the same reference as going into the City or something like that.
Lord Broers: Are there any other comments?
Stephen Uden: I have nothing to add to that.
Colin Smith: I broadly agree, and we pay our UK graduates slightly more than our German
graduates, as it happens, but I broadly agree with the previous comments.
Q136 Lord Rees of Ludlow: The problem is I am a professor at Cambridge, and it

dismays me what a big fraction of the really top-rate engineers go into finance in the City.
Of course they go there for the money and the perception that high flyers will get
recognised more quickly and more quickly get autonomy and so on. I do wonder whether
the engineering sector is being a bit fatalistic in saying that they cannot compete by simply
making their careers competitive. It would seem a pity for the UK if we cannot make
careers competitive, because these people are not anti-engineering; it is just that they do
not perceive the career path as being as attractive.
Colin Smith: If I may, Lord Rees, let me say a number of things. One is that engineering, and
I think many other sciences, are experience based, so you can be as bright as a button but
to some extent you have to do a bit of hands-on learning. It is quite hard to pay £40,000 to
£50,000 a year for graduate engineers when you do not know if they can deliver. You could
probably take the risk if you are in the City. We work really, really hard to try to give
professional skill and professional salaries, and we pay 37% above the going rate in the
Midlands for our engineering team, and we make sure we benchmark that so we do not end
up in the salary issue. But the issue is attracting them in the first place. A point I would like
to come back to is the funding of education is just going to be a bigger disincentive for
STEMs in the future so, given what has happened in the past, I think we are going to have a
real problem going forward.
Q137 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: If we can go back to your relationship with

universities—and I have a three-headed question, really—should the universities be doing
more to provide the right quality and quantity of STEM graduates for you? Is there a role for
Government? What is your relationship with universities and what are you doing to
improve the situation with them? If we start off again, Mr Smith.
Colin Smith: I think the universities are doing a pretty reasonable job but, in my view, the
issue is starting at school level, and the issue-wide problem at school is there is no
coherence in this country about a joined-up approach. If you want to be a scientific or
knowledge-based industry, you had better be coherent from top to bottom. By the time you
have made your A level selections, if you do not have maths you are useless to the science
community.
Q138 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: So the Government could do more at that level,
do you think?
Colin Smith: Yes. Again, I am a school governor at a little junior school. Half the teachers
are scared of maths, so how are you going to teach good maths when you have no maths-
trained graduates in the schools? It is even worse for most of the other engineering or
science-based subjects, because it is not a very attractive profession for people with good
degrees to go into, for a whole host of reasons of which image is one.
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Dr Skingle: I have lots of examples in this space where we have worked with universities to
influence the output, if you like, so my job is benchmarking across. I have a couple of people
who work from the US and some at Stevenage here in the UK and we put contracts out to
universities globally, such that is very easy for me to benchmark. We, GSK, are currently
working with more than 50 UK universities, including all of the Russell Group at various
levels. In the last decade I have personally sat on, probably, half a dozen advisory boards for
universities.
When Sir Bill Wakeham was at Imperial, I worked on a Masters level in a bio-imaging
course, because frankly the technology had moved a bit quicker in the industry than perhaps
in academia, and so we were transferring industrial knowledge into academia—so we
provided lecturers and we provided course materials. We used the course as part of a
continuous professional development course for our own employees, which was
subsequently embedded into the Masters level training within Imperial.
We are just currently working up a doctoral training centre, an EngD type of doctoral
training centre, but interestingly within industry at Stevenage. So we are going to have a
cohort of students starting at Stevenage in chemistry. We are funding eight this year and
eight next year, all with GSK funding—no public purse funding. Our standards of training are
high, and we have been accredited by the University of Kent and Strathclyde University. We
have been working with Strathclyde in the chemistry space for probably 20 years. Each of
the students on the GSK/Strathclyde DTC programme will have an academic and an
industrial supervisor, so we share best practice. They also take our problems back into the
university space. We are doing an additional four studentships per year at Strathclyde
through the EPSRC industrial case quota scheme, so it is a cohort of two dozen in the next
two years. We also have 20 employees who are doing MPhils/PhDs with Strathclyde but in a
work-based environment, so you can see we are creating a critical mass with a cohort of
students just in that one area, so in five or six years’ time there will be four dozen people
trained in state of the art chemistry techniques.
I have personally found universities very responsive. The UK is a great place to be able to
pick up the telephone to the chief executive of the research councils or the Wellcome
Trust, or indeed the universities, and make things happen. We should not undersell that. It
is a great place for us to engage and collaborate.
Stephen Uden: So from our perspective, let us start with what Microsoft does. We have a
team whose job it is to engage with and partner with universities to help them think about
how their curriculum can map to the needs of industry. I will not detail them all, but there
are a number of collaborations that have come out through that.
As I highlighted and mentioned earlier, we do have an issue. Some of the elite universities in
the UK we have found, frankly, slightly harder to engage with. They have not felt the same
need to engage industry in that particular way around the curriculum, although we still have
a good relationship with them in terms of placements. We take about 100 interns into
Microsoft and also 100 post-grad interns into Microsoft Research, so there is again very
excellent collaboration there. It is a case of universities possibly could do a little more, and
it may be that some of the pressures they are under to provide a good experience will drive
them a little bit more in that direction, but I think I would say we are coming from quite a
strong base and there is very extensive collaboration.
In terms of what Government could do, I would build on the points that my colleagues
made earlier about being involved earlier in the system. There are many schools that ration
the number of young people who do triple science, which is a key foundation for almost
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anything else you go and do, and they do that for reasons of numbers—you know they have
one set that does triple science. I would like to see any young person who is capable of
doing triple science at the very least being encouraged to do so and making that opt-in a far
more natural thing, so we get every young person who is capable of following their science
to be able to do so.
I would like to see the Government build a little more on the good work it has done
through things like the graduate teacher programme that brings people in from industry as
specialist teachers, because you will get a better experience of physics or mathematics if you
are taught by somebody who has some real-world experience of it.
At the moment, computer science is not classified by HEFCE as a strategic, important and
vulnerable subject. Their argument is, “Well, the numbers are quite high”. I would like the
criteria to be as much about supply and demand where there is a clear mismatch and,
therefore, that would mean that there was more support for computer science. It would
then mean we did not go and recruit the engineers and physicists, which my colleagues here
are looking to recruit, and it would help grow the supply.
The fourth thing that Government can do—I know there is some work in progress around
this, and there is a lot to do—is around careers advice. Lots of young people think, for
example, “If I do chemistry that means I have to be a chemist”, and it does not. It actually
opens the way to a fantastic range of great careers. Young people are not aware that if you
have a mathematics A level, on average you earn 10% more, all other things being equal,
than if you do not. If we can connect young people with some of the opportunities that are
presented—and I think there is a role for industry to roll its sleeves up and get engaged and
help do this—then more young people might feel capable of doing STEM subjects and might
then choose to do so at school, and it would ease the issues all the way through the rest of
the system.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for that.
Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: That was good. Dr Beasley?
Dr Beasley: Again I concur, really. Universities are doing a pretty good job. They are kind of
responsive. In key areas around electronic engineering, as I said earlier, we have partnered
with universities and set up dedicated schools, particularly in the University of Lincoln,
where we have a new School of Engineering there dedicated to some of the technology we
are looking at. But the point here is to look back at schools. There is a big area here,
particularly around careers advice, and probably teachers are also not aware of what is
going on in industry and the working environment here.
Maybe not just picking up on all aspects of physics, chemistry and maths, there needs to be a
push on design and technology in this area. Simple things, like hands-on pieces of equipment,
would be very useful in making engineering kind of fun and sexy so that people want to get
involved and build and trial things. Those things are now lacking from school. It is all
methods and you do these set areas, whereas there is a lot that can be done, in that
particular area. Siemens itself is looking to engage in these areas by offering some of our
design software free of charge to schools across the whole range in order for them to get
involved. We are trying to train some of the teachers, so that they again can help people use
this and get a touch and feel for what is going on, rather than sitting back and not getting
involved at all.
Q139 Baroness Perry of Southwark: All four of you are representing blue-chip
companies, and I gather from what you have said about your links with universities that,
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with one exception, you mentioned what I would call blue chip universities—the Russell
Group universities. Have you ever had a pleasant surprise and made a link with a university
that was not in the Russell Group, and found that there were skills and matches with your
requirements that you had not expected? Perhaps we could start at the other end this time,
because you did mention a non-blue-chip university.
Dr Beasley: Yes, as I say, at Lincoln we have quite a large factory there that specialises in
turbines, so it was ideal to team up with the university. We established a new School of
Engineering there, and that has worked out really, really well. The facilities are first class.
We supply some of the training there; some of the engineers from Siemens come in and do
teaching at the university. We also get some of our staff trained there, so it is a very good
relationship. We do actually do some research with other universities as well, but they are
more targeted at specific problems, whereas probably the Russell Group can offer a broader
range for us to collaborate with them. That is probably the difference.
Stephen Uden: We collaborate across the spectrum, so we do not have a preference
towards elite universities necessarily. As I said previously, we often find some of the newer
universities are very focused on providing good employment opportunities for the young
people. They are really interested to talk to industry about how we can provide placements
and curriculum that are relevant. Some of them train people on some of the industry
qualifications that exist in our sector that will increase their employability, and we just find
that they tend to have a really laser-sharp focus on working with industry. So we probably
find it easier working with those institutions, but I would stress we work with a range, from
Cambridge and the Russell Group, across the whole spectrum.
Dr Skingle: I have a lot of examples in the Russell Group. In the interests of time, the one
that sticks in my mind is the University of Greenwich course on powder properties and
powder handling. I have never been there, but everybody tells me they are world-leading,
and underpin a range of sectors.
Colin Smith: It is a mix. We recruit from all over the place, but at different levels. To get
on our graduate leadership programme, people are usually from the Russell Group, but if
someone comes as a direct entry from somewhere else and does really well, they will get to
the top of the company as well as anybody else. So it is a mix. I just wish we could call them
polytechnics, personally. It makes it a lot easier.
Q140 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Do you find that it is fair, on your part? I know
Mr Smith said that you were happy as long they have the basic skills to teach them the social
skills and the team skills once they got into industry. As a group, do you think—I mean,
your group of companies—it is fair to expect universities, as well as giving them all the basic
science and engineering skills, to give them the social team skills, management skills and so
on, as well? Would you expect that from a university?
Dr Beasley: Students need some sort of basic grounding, maybe not to the level we need
within industry, and certainly not at the cost of diluting the academic content. There are a
number of universities looking at some fairly novel ways of introducing that. I know that
John Moores University, I think, does a work programme on a Wednesday afternoon, which
is really good at getting students ready for work, helping develop their CV, interview
training and things like that. If they have a basic grounding, then, yes, we can take them on
and develop that, but they need to get their point over and be able to demonstrate they
have the capability.
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Stephen Uden: I would not want universities to divert one second that they could be
teaching mathematics, computer science or physics to doing anything else, but having said
that there are some skills that you can acquire—for example, independent self-study and
problem solving—if part of the teaching involves you having to present to groups and argue
your case in front of them. That is a very effective learning technique, but also it is
something that is very much desired by employers. So I would like to see universities think a
little bit about how we teach people, enabling them to pick up some skills as they do the
absolutely critical learning they do that will also resonate with many employers. Employers
do not agree on many things, but we seem to have quite a strong consensus about the kind
of workplace skills that we are looking for and they can pick that up as they do the learning
in their discipline.
Q141 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Do you find some universities are doing that or
are you just wishing that more would?
Stephen Uden: If I am completely honest, I am probably wishing that more would. Some
do, though, and they do to different degrees. They do it, though, driven by what is their
choice from an academic perspective. Most of them—and I might be doing them a
disservice—do not seem to be thinking of it from the viewpoint, “Let us talk to industry and
understand what industry is doing and then see how we can modify the way in which we
teach our course”. I would like there to be a little more dialogue, potentially, around how
we might do that.
Dr Skingle: We need effective communication between the industrial scientists and the
academic scientists. One thing we have not spoken about today, which I feel quite strongly
about, is placements at all levels. I think we should do anything that we can to promote
placements. I was with David Willetts and Sir Tim Wilson yesterday launching Tim Wilson’s
review, and recommendation 3 of that review includes some sensible ideas for actually
driving this agenda forward. We need to share best practice. Some technologies are being
developed quicker in industry than in the academic base and we need to share that. I chair
the biopharmaceutical and bioprocessing EngD board at the University of Newcastle, and I
have encouraged them to support both SMEs and large blue-chips across several sectors,
and we learn from each other. So wherever there are people swaps between academia and
industry, you are going to have technology transfer on the hoof and make the other
institution a better place.
Colin Smith: I broadly agree with that—and just to say that some universities encourage
team-based working when you do laboratory work or other sorts of work, and also extra-
curricular activities, even if it comes to managing the local bar. It all helps that social
interaction and that should be encouraged, but generally, keep it basic and we will do the
rest.
The Chairman: I am very conscious of time. There are a couple of quick questions still to
get in. You mentioned placements, Dr Skingle, and that leads us on to Lord Broers.
Q142 Lord Broers: Do you accept students on short-term placements of any kind during
their studies, and what benefits do you gain from offering short-term placements?
Colin Smith: We certainly encourage internships in the summer holidays and we pay for
internships as well. It is a great way of recruiting because it is a long interview technique and
it encourages them, and we do all sorts of things from the age of 13 up in schools as well, so
yes.
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Q143 Lord Broers: Are you increasing that, or has that decayed a bit over the years?
There is some data in this Wilson report that the number of placements is falling rather
than rising.
Colin Smith: From a company point of view, as we are growing we are increasing it linearly.
We certainly have not pulled back on it.
Dr Skingle: We took 90 in R&D this year. They all started on the same day, so there is a
sense of cohort. I think we had 46 chemists this year. We send them down to Bristol to get
up to speed on safety training and general lab training for a week, and then they all come
back. It works well for us. We also co-fund approximately 60 case studentships a year, so
there is a steady state where we are funding more than 200 postgraduate students at any
one time. It is a big part of how we interact with the science base.
Stephen Uden: I concur with that and, given the time, I have not much to add to it. We
take 100 or so into Microsoft in Reading and 100 into Cambridge. We gain a lot from them
over the year they spend with us. What I am trying to do now is to extend it into the SME
community that we work with because we think they would benefit from it as well. I was
sad to see—they used to call them “sandwich degrees” or whatever—that the notion that
you spend some time in industry seems to have gone off the radar; certainly our experience
is it has grown quite significantly over the past few years, and that is very welcome.
Dr Beasley: Yes, within Siemens we all see a large growth in the number of placements,
both summer placements and internships within that.
The Chairman: Lord Rees, I give the last word to you.
Q144 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Thinking about overseas students, do you have problems
with being able to get visas for overseas students who graduate from this country, or indeed
for students who have studied abroad who apply to work with you afterwards?
Colin Smith: We have had a problem. Certainly a year ago it was a problem. The rules have
changed. It is much less of a problem currently and it also affects mid-career as well for
outside. So it has been a constraint on the business, and it has certainly caused some issues
with lower to medium-level managers or experts that we have tried to bring in. But
generally in graduates, most of them are European and broadly okay.
Dr Skingle: We take the best scientists from wherever we can, and we encourage diversity.
We run chemistry and summer schools for groups from Africa, India, and this coming year
Brazil, and frankly we are going—
Lord Rees of Ludlow: No visa problems?
Dr Skingle: I do not know enough about that to give a sensible answer but will get back to
you in writing
Stephen Uden: A bit like Mr Smith, we had some issues about a year ago. Ours is a global
industry, and also jobs are highly mobile, so it is a relevant issue for us, but some changes to
the rules around inter-company transfers, for example, have enabled us to now get it to the
point where it is not a major barrier. It is of some concern that in the top universities for
computer science—in UCL, I think—something like 75% of the students are from overseas,
though. We would like those places to be competed for by UK students who want to do
them, as per the conversation previously. But overseas students form an important part of
our talent pool, particularly when it comes to the research side where talent is absolutely a
global commodity.
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Dr Beasley: I completely agree. We have had problems with graduates renewing their visas.
There seems to be a lot of ambiguity in the criteria that were set out. Certainly, if there
were more transparent guidelines, that would help enormously. At present it just prolongs
the process and increases the amount of work that we need to do in order to do that. Just
when you think you have it right, you phone up and confirm that everything is there and you
have to go through another hoop, which is frustrating, both for the company and for the
student as well.
Q145 The Chairman: On that note, I thank you all enormously. As a Committee, we
have enjoyed your contribution very much indeed this morning.
There are two issues that we were not able to deal with. One is the issue that you raised in
your supplementary evidence to us, Mr Smith, about the effects of the higher education
reforms on STEM recruitment into your companies, and we thank you for that. But if any of
you have any other comments you would like to make about that issue, about how you
perceive the reforms affecting recruitment in your business, then if you could write to us,
we would be very, very grateful for that.
The second issue that we have not been able to deal with is how you assess quality. A
number of companies are kite-marking courses at particular universities. If you have time to
write to us on whether you feel that that would be a useful way of being able to influence
what goes on at universities—in terms of being able to add your kite-marks to particular
courses or particular departments—we would be very grateful. Meanwhile, I thank you
enormously again for your contributions this morning.
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Rolls-Royce – Supplementary written evidence
Thank you for the opportunity to give evidence to the committee last Tuesday 28th
February.
You concluded by requesting further written input to relevant subjects and I would like just
to comment on two – namely higher education fees and kite marking.
Regarding the increase of higher education tuition fees, we fear this may have disastrous
consequences on the take up of STEM subject once it becomes fully recognised. In
summary, the interest rate charged will be RPI + 3%, this is then compounded.
Under the new arrangements a graduate required to take the maximum loan for tuition fees
and living costs for a four year programme will start work with a debt of more than
£60,000. We have conducted some analysis based on typical levels of pay progression
experienced by graduate engineers at Rolls-Royce, and this indicates that most of our
engineers will continue to pay the additional 9% “graduate tax” on their earnings over
£21,000 until the 30 year “write-off” rule applies. We also note that typical graduates will
need to earn at least £100, 000 per year before their repayments even match the loan
interest at current RPI levels. For our typical graduate after 30 years the loan would be
written off as at that point they will still owe £160,000.
There is therefore a very clear incentive for students who have paid the higher fees to
either take a lower cost course or immediately work abroad, and inevitably there will be a
decline in interest in the four year Meng or Msc degrees that we currently require.
University education for the majority of STEM subjects is significantly more expensive than
most other subjects, and a number of the Vice-Chancellors who have provided you with
evidence pointed to the existing practice of cross-subsiding STEM provision. The fact that
most of them are charging the maximum fee of £9,000 for most courses in 2012/13,
regardless of the cost of provision, would suggest this will continue. In the event that
market forces prevail and ”profits” from lower cost subjects are seen as beneficial, there
must also be a risk that Universities will come under pressure to reduce the cost or the
provision of science and engineering programmes. We believe it is imperative that this
situation is closely monitored, and every effort is made to protect the funding and quality of
STEM provision in universities.
The major issue with the higher education fees proposed is the compounding of RPI + 3%.
If the RPI escalator was dropped this would become much more tenable and frankly more
easily understood.
For information, we have compared these fees with the equivalent charges in our major
recruitment areas of Germany, USA and Singapore. The UK system is by far the most
draconian and will in our view drive a combination of higher employment cost and lower
STEM take up. The differences in arrangements that will exist within the UK itself are
particularly difficult to reconcile, and will result in many English graduates paying the
“graduate tax” for thirty years, while many Scottish graduates will have no repayment
burden. Our remuneration policies will not be able to make this distinction, and it appears
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likely that the arrangements in England will inflate employment costs for all graduates over
time.
In summary, we are very concerned about the potential unintended consequences of the
changes to Higher Education funding, and believe that much greater policy coherence is
needed if we are to retain a strong pipeline of STEM graduates into high-value manufacturing
in the UK.
The linkage between this pipeline and immigration policy is another example where this is
highlighted. Although our ability to employee non-EEA graduates may not be an immediate
concern, we are concerned that international students may be deterred from applying to
UK universities because their ability to work in the UK following graduation is more
uncertain than in other countries. This uncertainty, added to the perception that the UK is
not supportive of immigration, could result in reductions in international students, and this,
in turn, would impact the funding available to universities, dilute the undergraduate
experience for UK graduates, and weaken the graduate pool we draw on.
Regarding kite marking, we are really not convinced that this will significantly enhance the
quality or visibility of good courses, and would be concerned if this became either a
bureaucratic exercise, or a distraction to universities.
7 March 2012
676
Rolls-Royce – Further supplementary written evidence
In response to the questions from the Committee, we’d like to submit the following
thoughts:
Immigration:
Most of you said at the evidence session that you have had problems with visas around a
year ago but things were now better. What has changed?
It is fair that most Employers believe the UK immigration quota system settled when the 11-
12 annual national quota of 20,700 Tier 2 General visas was introduced from 6 April-11.
Supply currently exceeds demand - largely due to the depressed economic climate – hence
Employers have largely been granted all Tier 2 General visas they applied for. This has been
the case for RR. Relative certainty and stability for Employer prevails.
Prior to this period (in 2010), HMG introduced temporary Tier 2 General quotas. The
temporary quota set was Employer specific – based on utilisation in an assessment period
covering 2009-10 – reduced by 15%. The assessment period was itself a very depressed
economic period, subsequently many Employers were allocated a temporary quota which
was highly restrictive – some major UK Employers had single digit quotas. This generated
major frustration and challenges to employers many of whom were starting to recruit again.
As a result, a process was introduced whereby Employers could apply to a monthly UKBA
panel for additional visas – but the key issue was there was no certainty in the system – and
it was slow. Today, with supply exceeding demand – certainty prevails for the time being.
We have heard from other employers that they are frustrated at not being able to recruit
overseas students because their visas do not allow them to work after graduation. Do you
find this is a problem?
From a Tier 2 General visa quota perspective – this is not an issue for us today. But the
perception of candidates is different. Recruitment data shows the % of non-EEA nationals
applying for UK RR vacancies (all levels) has dropped by nearly 40% in the past couple of
years – challenging the notion the UK is open for business. Whether we are seeking to
switch a Graduate with a Post-Study Work (PSW) in to Tier 2 (RR sponsorship), or directly
sponsor them via Tier 2 from the outset - there is enough ‘slack’ in the current quota to
facilitate this.
The PSW category closes in April. This will result in more demand for the Tier 2 General
visas. Non-EEA graduates whom have studied in the UK can be sponsored on unrestricted
Tier 2 General visas. Unrestricted means they aren’t in the quota. But if we wish to sponsor
a non-EEA graduate who has studied outside of the UK – we will have to dip into the
20,700 quota. This is where the challenges could arise.
It is positive that the MAC recommends that the 12-13 quota is maintained steady at
20,700. Utilisation levels in 11-12 are less than 60% of this figure. There will be additional
demand generated when Employers need to use Tier 2 to sponsor non-EEA graduates
whom have studied outside the UK. The greater pressure will occur if UK Employers start
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to ramp up recruitment of non-EEA nationals when the economy grows again. If demand
exceeds quota supply – visas will be awarded on a points system. PhD educated individuals
will be awarded with extra points. But generally speaking, points will be awarded based on
salary levels. Therefore we will be in direct competition with all industries including the
banks. In fact grads from all sectors are likely to be ‘squeezed’ out if they are competing
against experienced hires on higher salaries as all will be vying for a visa from the same
quota pool.
30 March 2012
678
Royal Academy of Engineering – Written evidence
Summary: Key themes for the Committee to consider
1 We urge the Committee wish to consider these key themes during the course of
their inquiry:
• Whilst this inquiry is about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

(STEM) subjects in Higher Education (HE) our submission focusses on engineering.
Engineering (when taken to include Technology subjects) is an important point of
focus as it represents 60% of STEM Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects
(SIVS) – (Saraga, 2011).
• We are pleased to note that the scope of the inquiry begins with the statement: “A
healthy science base and a supply of suitably trained STEM graduates are vital for our
economy to enable the UK to do well as a nation” however we remind the
Committee to correctly distinguish between science and engineering. We reinforce
this by urging to Committee to focus their attention on matters that can rebalance
the UK economy and return it to sustained economic growth. In particular, we
recommend that the Committee investigates any link between the acquisition of
engineering skills and successful entrepreneurialism (as exhibited for example in the
case of ‘Silicon Roundabout’ in London).
• Engineering HE courses have been historically underfunded (RAEng, 2007) These are
higher cost courses because of the need for laboratory work, group design projects
and other intensive support. We see potential unintended consequences for
Engineering HE in the proposals made in the HE White Paper – Students at the heart
of the system. We are particularly concerned about the potential loss of engineering
provision if Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) become unable to sustain higher
cost Engineering provision through cross-subsidising with earning gained elsewhere
in the HE system (postgraduate courses, overseas student provision, surpluses
gained from lower cost courses).
• The potential compound impact of a number of proposed changes to HE funding: in

undergraduate teaching, postgraduate teaching, reductions in capital funding,
reductions in research funding (including concentration of funding under the
Research Assessment Framework and at the Research Councils).
• Concerns are frequently expressed in the media over the proportion of STEM
graduates who are diverted from STEM jobs into working in non-STEM jobs and
sectors. Does it matter if not all engineering graduates go into ‘engineering’ careers?
• The particular case of prospects for longer STEM courses: the 4 year MEng or
MPhys, postgraduate taught courses and PGCEs.
• Issues around the diversity of students undertaking Engineering and other STEM HE
courses.
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General questions from the Call for Evidence
2 The most comprehensive definition of STEM subjects is to be found in the FE STEM

Data Project (Frost et al, 2010 – analysis extended in Harrison et al, 2011). Quoting
from Frost et. al, 2010):
Whilst we acknowledge that ‘STEM’ is open to interpretation there is broad

agreement that S, T, E and M learning (Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics) is important to the national economy. In developing a list of
qualifications the working group followed the following working principles:
For the purposes of this project:

• STEM qualifications contain learning outcomes that are deeply rooted in science or
mathematics, engineering and/or are of a ‘technical’ or ‘technology-application/use’ nature.
• STEM qualifications are deemed distinct from other qualifications because they can, for
those who wish it, provide the required foundation for progression into further study or
employment in a STEM-related field.
• To take account of the modular nature of some qualifications, they are deemed to lie within
STEM when the majority of the assessment objectives are Science, Technology, Engineering
or Mathematics focused (and /or the qualification is recognised as a pre-requisite for
progression in STEM).
• They are deemed to be ‘STEM-related’ when Science, Technology, Engineering or
Mathematics features in many learning objectives (and / or the qualification provides a
degree of learning that will aid progression in STEM).
• They are deemed to be ‘outside STEM’ if STEM does not feature in at least some learning
objectives for all learners (not just those who take STEM-related options within the
qualification).
A comprehensive account of the rationale for the categorisation of S,T, E and M

qualifications is provided in Annex A. In addition we draw the Committee’s attention
to the particular roles played by both Mathematics and Computing in STEM. Both
are subjects and disciplines in their own right but also both play under-pinning roles
in other STEM disciplines. We believe that the Government recognises this for
Mathematics but suspect they have yet to realise that the same is true for
Computing.
3 The Committee’s attention is drawn to two recent comprehensive definitions for a

STEM job. Neither defines any specific ‘Mathematics jobs’. Whilst occupations may
require mathematical skills or the holding of a qualification in Mathematics (as a
means of sorting between candidates) there seems to be a consensus that the
concept of ‘working in Mathematics’ does not make sense outside of teaching and
research (for which subject-specific breakdown is not possible from the Labour
Force Survey and other available data).
680
The first definition is based on a classification of STEM of Standard Occupational

Classification (SOC) codes (Greenwood et al., 2011) which has been coded S, E and
T according to the protocols developed in (Frost et al. 2010) and later used in
(Harrison et al., 2011).
The second definition (Dodd et al., 2011) uses the terms ‘Primary science’ and
‘Secondary Science’ to describe what other researchers would term Science,
Technology and Engineering, quoting:
In order to develop a definition for the science workforce, the research consulted with the
Science Council’s New Registers Advisory Group which guided the identification of:
• Primary science workers: workers in occupations that are purely science based and require
the consistent application of scientific knowledge and skills in order to execute the role
effectively. E.g. Chemists, Science & Engineering Technicians, Pharmacists &
Pharmacologists or Bio Scientists and Biochemists.
• Secondary science workers: workers in occupations that are science related and require a
mixed application of scientific knowledge and skills alongside other skill sets, which are often
of greater importance to executing the role effectively. E.g. Civil and Mechanical Engineers,
Conservation & Environmental Protection Officers, Environmental Health Officers, Teaching
Professionals.
• Non-science workers: workers in occupations that are not science based and have no
requirement for science based knowledge or skills. E.g. Travel Agents, Town Planners,
Musicians, Legal Professionals, and Housing & Welfare Officers.
We do not agree with the above definition of ‘engineers’ as ‘secondary science

workers’. The QAA ‘Subject Benchmark Statement’ for Engineering provides a better
definition (QAA, 2010).
4 Further (less comprehensive) definitions of STEM subject and STEM occupation is

presented in (Mellors Bourne net al., 2011).
5 The picture of STEM in the UK labour force is particularly sensitive to the inclusion or
otherwise of the science-based workers in the health service. When included (as in
Dodd et al., 2011) then occupations relating to healthcare are the most common STEM-
related occupations. When excluded, Engineering occupations dominate the STEM-
related skills landscape (Table 7, Greenwood et al., 2011). In the US technology (IT)
occupations dominate (Carnevale et al. 2011).
6 University degrees are the most commonly held STEM qualification for people working
in STEM occupations. Many, but by no means all STEM occupations require a university
degree. Harrison 368 post-processed the Labour Force Survey data given in (Greenwood
et al., 2011) to identify the STEM qualifications most commonly held by 16-64 year olds
working in STEM occupations:
• First / Foundation degree: (3986 LFS respondents out of a sample of 20,073)
368 Matthew Harrison, Lecture to the Institute of Education, 17th November 2011
681
• HNC or HND: (2014)

• City & Guilds Level 3: (1847)
• Higher degree: (1327)
• ONC / OND: (1085)
• City & Guilds Level 2: (856)
• NVQ Level 3: (671)
• BTEC Level 3: (394)
• Vocational degree / professional qualification: (157)
• HE Diploma: (138)
• BTEC First Level 2: (61)
influence supply?
7 The most comprehensive assessment of issues of supply and demand amongst STEM
graduates is offered by (Saraga et al., 2009) and updated in attenuated form in (Saraga et
al., 2011). Quoting from the 2009 report
There are two areas in which the views of employers are consistent enough to inform national
HE policy. Firstly, evidence commissioned by the group and in numerous other reports suggests
that employers consistently identify a demand for STEM graduates, which arises from a broad
requirement for numeracy aligned with specific technical skills. Secondly, employers are
consistently concerned about the quality of graduates emerging from HE, and they associate
this both with broad employability and specific technical skills.
8 Additional broad discussion of the issues is provided in (CSE, 2009). Further empirical
demand data is provided in (CBI, 2010 & 2011). Modelling of demand scenarios for
individual economic sectors is presented in (UKCES, 2009). One very specific example
of an economic sector facing shortages of STEM qualified people is the computer
gaming and visual effects industries. A vivid case for demand is made in the Livingstone
& Hope review (NESTA, 2011). Another such example is the power electronics sector,
the subject of a recent BIS review (BIS, 2011).
16-18 supply
9 The Joint Council for Qualifications website offers updates on the supply of certain 16-
18 STEM qualifications. Comparing the 2010-2011 results with 2009-2010
A level Maths up 8.9% for males, 6.0% for females

A level Physics up 7.0% for males, 2.7% for females (but still only 6849 female
candidates)
A Level Chemistry up 10.2% for males, 8.0% for females
A Level Biology up 6.8% for males, 7.6% for females
682
A Level Technology (ICT, Computing, D&T) subjects up 1.2% for males, down 4.3% for
females (dropping to only 7076 female candidates)
Source: JCQ
10 However, the most comprehensive analysis of 16-18 STEM is found in (Harrison et al.,
2011). This shows that of the 1,582,000 STEM qualifications completed in England in
2009-10 (the latest figures available), 60% were taken in the FE & Skills system (the
definition of which includes 6th Form Colleges as well as other Colleges of Further
Education). Almost 1 million of these qualifications were taken at Level 3 and therefore
are relevant in terms of progression to HE – and most of those were AS and A Levels
(although around 100,000 were vocationally related qualifications, almost all of which
are either in engineering or technology). Further analysis is available in the Skills
Commission report (Halstead et al., 2011).
11 Although the preceding paragraphs show signs of success in the supply of STEM
qualified 18 year olds, there are threats too. The falls in the number of people taking
qualifications in Computing and Design & Technology are a concern. In addition,
research from the Institute of Physics (IoP, 2011) shows that undergraduates studying
physics and engineering need on going tuition in mathematics.
“The vast majority (92%) of academics said that their department/school offered some form of
support to students to help them deal with the mathematical content of their degree. A large
proportion (92%) of academics felt that a lack of fluency in mathematics was an obstacle to
students achieving their full potential in the long term, and more than four in five (85%) agreed
that a lack of fluency affected their department’s ability to deliver an optimal programme of
study”.
The path to a STEM degree is a hard path. We are not convinced that there are
enough well-prepared 18 year olds to meet the demands of a rebalanced
economy.
12 As submissions from other organisations will no doubt emphasise, more than five years
of emphasis on STEM subjects in schools and Colleges in England has resulted in year-
on-year increases in GCSE, AS and A2 STEM completions. Mathematics and Further
Mathematics have seen the steepest rises at A level. However, these successes mask
problems with the ICT curriculum in schools which has been the subject of much public
criticism in recent years.
13 However, These rises are not seen in all Level 3 STEM provision. Harrison et al (2011)
shows that STEM provision at Level 3 has been decreasing as a proportion of total Level 3
in the FE & Skills sector in England over the period 2007-2010. The decrease is not
uniform over the STEM subjects.
683
14 English Baccalaureate subjects (taken as GCSEs or iGCSE) are an additional benchmark

for schools. It is likely that there will be unintended consequences for those technical
subjects (the E & T in STEM) such as Design & Technology (currently taken by more
than 250,000 young people) and Engineering or Computing (taken by a much smaller
cohorts):
We fear that in times of limited school budgets, headteachers who invest in getting the best
teachers, environments and resources for English Baccalaureate subjects will not be able to
invest similarly in technical subjects. The student experience will suffer and availability, including
at lower and higher key stages, will drain away. We make a case that this will have significant
impact on the nation’s skills in engineering and the productive industries.
Source: National Committee for 14-19 Engineering Education
Graduate supply
15 Employers clearly demand STEM skills today. 72% of firms surveyed by CBI employ
STEM-skilled staff (CBI, 2010):
84% of employers surveyed (STEM and non-STEM) have concerns over the availability and
quality of STEM graduates; 66% of respondents were not confident that they could access high
level skills in the future.
43% of employers currently have difficulty recruiting [STEM] staff….. [with] 52% expecting
difficulty over the next 3 years.
16 Quoting from (CBI, 2011)
In particular, STEM skills are vital to areas of future growth and employment including
advanced manufacturing and low carbon industries. But skills shortages may hold back
progress – 45% of employers are currently having difficulty recruiting STEM-skilled staff, with
almost six in ten (59%) of firms expecting difficulty in the next three years”
17 Future occupations will demand increasing STEM skills. Quoting the UK Commission
for Employment and Skills (UKCES, 2009)
58% of all new jobs will be STEM related. There will be significant growth in jobs but massive
replacement demand. Economically valuable skills will matter most (intermediate and higher
STEM skills).
18 The importance of replacement demand in engineering needs to be emphasised as it is a

substantial part of all future job openings. This means that even occupations which will
face net job losses will still remain viable sources of employment resulting from the
need to replace workers leaving for various reasons - mainly due to retirement –
(Cedefop, 2010). Replacement demand is particularly significant in engineering where
the median age of the chartered engineer in the UK is now 57 years (Engineering UK,
684
2011). This demand is an important message for young people (and their parents) who
seek secure sources of employment. The continuing demand for engineers in the
economy justifies them being trained well for the important work they do and this is
relatively costly to achieve (RAEng, 2010) and (JM Consulting, 2007).
19 Public investments in renewable energy, lower carbon housing, water, energy supply
and distribution, transportation will require steady supply of engineering graduates over
long periods of time if the nation is to obtain long term value from initial investment.
Skills needs tend to be articulated in sector-specific analyses – for example nuclear
(RAEng, 2010b), transportation and planning (Franklin & Andrews, 2008).
20 Quoting from (Saraga et al., 2009)
In order to move beyond labour market forecasts and employer surveys, researchers
commissioned by the group were tasked with understanding what employers mean when they
express a desire to recruit STEM graduates, how they do so, and what happens when they are
unable to recruit the people they want. Interviews were conducted with key senior decision
makers among large companies and their representative bodies including MW Kellog, Barclays,
the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and Procter and Gamble.
The research finds, firstly, that employers typically expect more from STEM graduates than
they did in the past. More advanced technology means that UK based industries are addressing
more complex scientific and business challenges. STEM graduates are increasingly required to
draw upon disciplines such as design and social sciences to solve real world problems. The
globalisation of production and research can require employees to work in teams that rarely
meet face to face or work together at the same time, and may include people from different
cultures speaking different languages. For some employers, the UK may be a small part of
worldwide business in companies that are located in and directed from locations worldwide
(and vice versa). Where the workforce comes from may, therefore, be immaterial to the
company, if not its local managers and national governments. This dynamic raises the
importance of employees’ ‘soft’ skills and their adaptability.
21 An article from researchers at the University of Birmingham 369 which is mentioned in

the Call for Evidence to this inquiry, comments on the proportion of engineering
graduates who go directly into engineering jobs on graduation. The relatively low
proportions were used to suggest that there were not enough engineering jobs for the
number of graduates being produced (supply exceeding demand). The question
Does it matter if not all engineering graduates go into ‘engineering’ careers?
is considered in the following paragraphs.
22 Harrison 370 post-processed the Labour Force Survey data from 2004-2010 given in
(Greenwood et al., 2011) to identify the STEM qualifications that lead to the greatest
proportion of people working in SET occupations:
369 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14823042
370 Matthew Harrison, Lecture to the Institute of Education, 17th November 2011
685
• ONC / OND: (52% of LFS respondents with STEM ONC/OND qualifications were
working in SET occupations)
• HNC or HND: (51%)
• Higher degree: (48%)
• City & Guilds Level 3: (46%)
• BTEC Level 3: (46%)
• First & Foundation degree 371 : (45%)
• NVQ Level 3: (42%)
• BTEC First Level 2: (40%)
• City & Guilds Level 2: (39%)
• Vocational degree / professional qualification 372 : (24%)
• HE Diploma: (20%)
The low (generally less than 50%) proportions match or exceed the findings reported in
the Birmingham article. And this is hard evidence gathered over 6 years for workers
aged between 16 and 64 years of age – both sides of the economic crisis that emerged
in 2008. Therefore it is generally true that significant proportions of STEM
qualified people get diverted into non SET occupations and this is a
consistent pattern over many years and even over generations. And the issue
is not just about STEM degrees and other HE qualifications but is generally true for
STEM qualifications at all levels. The situation is clear – STEM qualified people are
attractive to employers across the labour market and not just in STEM-
intensive sectors – and always have been.
23 These realities are by no means unique to the UK. Writing of the situation in the US
(Carnevale et al. 2011)
We find that the disagreement between those who argue that STEM workers are
undersupplied or oversupplied can be resolved by the fact that large numbers of people with
STEM talent or degrees are diverted away from STEM careers either in school or later in their
careers.
We conclude that our education system is not producing enough STEM-capable students to
keep up with demand both in traditional STEM occupations and other sectors across the
economy that demand similar competencies. The demand for STEM competencies outside
STEM occupations is strong and growing.
People with STEM competencies have lots of opportunities in school and in the labor market.
STEM students and workers divert from STEM because their competencies are valued in a
growing share of highly paid non-STEM occupations and because students and workers have
both personal and work values and interests that are better satisfied in non-STEM occupations.
371 The conflation of First and Foundation degrees masks some important distinctions between these two types of degree –
however the LFS does not disaggregate the two
372 ‘Vocational Degree’ is an LFS classification and should not be confused with say a BEng or MEng which would be
classified in the LFS as ‘First Degree’
686
24 It is important to note that many qualifications exhibit additional wage premia when in
STEM subjects and significantly greater premia when used in STEM occupations
(Greenwood et al., 2011)
Statistically significant evidence for substantial additional wage premium is found for many but
not all STEM qualifications, particularly when used in SET occupations:
• First / Foundation degrees (up to 12% additional wage premium)

• HNC / HND (up to 11%)
• Level 3 NVQ (up to 10%)
• Level 3 City & Guilds (up to 14%)
The premium for working in STEM occupations is substantial
• 19% premium for STEM overall (average over all levels of occupation – best relative returns
at occupations below Managerial)
• 10% premium for Science occupations
• 33% premium for Technology occupations
• 15% premium for Engineering occupations
25 Therefore, as employers are clearly willing to pay significant premia for

people with STEM qualifications working in STEM occupations there does
not seem to be any evidence for over-supply of STEM qualified people.
Rather, some of those with STEM qualifications may simply choose to take their skills
into non-STEM jobs. Employers pay wage premia for STEM: and those working in
engineering and technology occupations receive the highest premia.
26 A recent BIS study of STEM graduates in non-STEM jobs (Mellors Bourne et al. 2011)
adds further discussion of the issues with additional survey data of graduates and
employers. The authors usefully point out that ‘STEM job’ or ‘STEM career’ are not
clear concepts and that their survey suggests that not all STEM graduates are seeking
STEM jobs at the completion of their courses:
The vast majority of final-year students, at undergraduate, masters and PhD level, report that
they do want to pursue a career related to their degree subject, although that proportion varies
somewhat with degree subject, and some are more definite about this than others. As many as
two-thirds of those in more ‘vocational’ subjects like Engineering definitely want a degree-
related career, but nearer to a half in other subjects. However, between a half and a third are
not fully decided.

high, and if not ,why not?
and
27 Quoting from (Saraga et al., 2009)
687
The notion of ‘quality’, to unpack this idea further, may vary depending on the employer
questioned. R&D intensive employers, for example, may express a need to recruit STEM
graduates, post graduates and post doctoral students of the highest intellectual calibre. The
numbers required here may be small, but they are vitally important to these businesses. For
others, a concern about ‘quality’ may be associated with aspects of the modern STEM
curriculum, such as the move to more flexible or modular learning, or a limited focus on
practical experimentation. Others again may identify ‘quality’ with the social or cultural capital
apparent in candidates who demonstrate team work, communication skills, leadership potential
and business acumen. Some employers may associate these attributes with a particular set of
universities, typically with high entrance requirements or a track record of working with
business, and so may restrict their recruitment efforts to a very narrow field.
28 The Royal Academy of Engineering reports Engineering Graduates for Industry (RAEng,
2010) and Educating Engineers for the 21st Century (RAEng, 2007) show that employers
seek engineering graduates trained for modern multi-disciplinary engineering. They also
note that excellent engineering education cannot be achieved without sustained
investment. The role for employers in providing experience led engineering education is
noted. This impacts positively on the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills but
also on the development of business acumen, innovation and entrepreneurship
institutions?
29 We see a risk of insufficient high quality engineering graduates required by

Government’s growth strategy if provision of accredited engineering degrees and other
strategically important courses reduces as an unintended consequence of the proposals
set out in the HE White paper and in the cross-referenced HEFCE consultation
document. We also see risks to so-called squeezed middle provision of strategically
important courses at universities unable to make long term investments in higher cost
and capital-intensive courses due to lack of stability in the funding system compounded
by changes to capital and research funding.
30 We have made detailed submissions to BIS on the HE White Paper and to HEFCE in
response to their Teaching funding and student number control consultation. We will not
repeat the detail here but rather provide the overview which was included in our
recent letter to Professor Sir Adrian Smith at BIS:
In addition to making detailed submission to the HE White Paper, my senior staff and I
have met with many senior officials in BIS to deliver our key points:
• We highlighted the chronic underfunding of engineering higher education in our

Engineering Graduates for Industry report. We see a risk of insufficient numbers of the
high quality engineering graduates required by the government’s growth and
infrastructure strategy if this long-term underfunding of accredited engineering
degrees and other strategically important courses is allowed to continue. The
proposals in the Higher Education White Paper do not address this vital issue and
we see this as a worrying disconnect in public policy. We made this point forcibly in
our submissions to HEFCE, BIS, the Wilson Review and in a recent meeting with
Martin Williams.
688
• We believe a lack of suitable proposals in the Higher Education White Paper,

compounded by a 72% cut in teaching capital funding and 58% cut in research capital
funding, will make engineering an even more vulnerable subject than it has been
previously.
• We are concerned for the provision of engineering courses at universities that will
have their allocation of student numbers reduced to make room in the system for
the AAB and core / margin proposals. These universities are less well placed to
compete for AAB+ students than the most attractive institutions and are unable to
provide an average fee level of £7,500. Such provision is being described as being in
‘the squeezed middle’ and represents a significant proportion of the degrees
awarded in strategically important subjects each year.
• We are concerned that universities will be disincentivised from providing high-cost

courses, introducing the real possibility of reducing student numbers in strategically
important subjects such as engineering. Fee waivers and inducements will be
particularly attractive to students considering longer courses such as the engineering
MEng, but universities in the squeezed middle can ill afford to provide financial
inducements for higher cost courses. Important niche areas of provision and courses
that are worthwhile but harder to recruit to could become economically unviable
and vulnerable to closure.
31 The integrated engineering Masters degree (MEng) ) offers a fast track route towards
professional qualification as a Chartered Engineer and sets a globally-recognised
standard which has been recognised in the Washington Accord 373 , the principal
international recognition agreement for engineering degrees. It is demanded by many
leading employers. However, the extended length of this course (four years) makes it
less attractive to students concerned about debt. Put another way, fee waivers and
other financial inducements will be particularly attractive to students considering longer
courses but universities in circumstances of the squeezed middle can ill afford financial
inducements for higher cost courses without significant cross-subsidy from Price Group
C and D courses.
32 The loss of squeezed middle provision in strategically important subjects is a concern

for reasons beyond straightforward loss of capacity:
• Students in certain locations may be denied access to local or regional provision.

This has an impact on widening participation.
• Research informed teaching of a next generation of specialists may be lost in key

sub-disciplines if universities undertaking such research are forced to close or
reduce their taught provision.
373The Washington Accord was signed in 1989. It is an agreement between the bodies responsible for accrediting
professional engineering degree programs in each of the signatory countries. It recognizes the substantial equivalency of
programs accredited by those bodies, and recommends that graduates of accredited programs in any of the signatory
countries be recognized by the other countries as having met the academic requirements for entry to the practice of
engineering. The Washington Accord covers professional engineering undergraduate degrees
689
• The additional pressure felt on teaching income may compound pressure on

research funding already resulting from the concentration of research funding by
the Research Councils.
33 Stability in the funding of strategically important and vulnerable subjects is critical to

sustaining provision as universities face pressure on capital funding (72% cuts in HEFCE
teaching capital funding, 58% cuts in HEFCE research capital funding, 58% cuts in
Research Council capital funding and ongoing pressure on estates funding) and some are
threatened financially by the ongoing concentration of research funding. Reductions in
capital and research funding mean that universities will need to generate greater annual
surpluses to cross-subsidise capital projects, the enhancement of the student
experience and the up to date laboratory equipment required for excellent Price Group
B teaching. Annual surpluses from Price Group D provision will only be possible at
universities able to command and maintain the highest fees. Elsewhere we expect
intense competition for Price Group D students to develop between universities and
this is likely to drive fees down thereby reducing surpluses and the potential for cross-
subsidy.
34 The limited scope for cross-subsidy means that any future reduction in Price Group B
funding for strategically important and vulnerable subjects must be recovered through
additional SIVS supplements – the two mechanisms must be seen as inextricably linked
for strategically important subjects such as engineering.
35 Good teaching is refreshed and enlivened by the research carried out by academic staff.
Those who are active in research are constantly being stimulated intellectually and are
better able to keep their subject knowledge up to date. Research in collaboration with
industry also keeps staff in direct contact with the technical and professional standards
required by industry and constantly provides the the imperative to keep undergraduates
up to the mark required for the best employment outcomes. The combination of
teaching and research is therefore part of our world class university system.
36 The important role of taught postgraduate provision for specialist and niche areas of
STEM is emphasised. This can be relatively small scale, can often rely on high
proportions of non UK-domiciled students and hence can be vulnerable to relatively
small fluctuations in funding.

37 When considering the geographical coverage of STEM provision, the Committee is

reminded to include the HE in FE provision. The 157 Group of larger FE colleges in
particular may provide a significant proportion of STEM courses in areas where there
are no or few HEIs. The data underpinning (Harrison, 2011) can provide insight.
690
background?
38 Taken as an average, engineering has similar representation of the lowest four socio-
economic groups as Higher Education as a whole (Maillardet et al., 2007) but the lower
half of the socio-economic scale is still under-represented. Reasons for this include the
relatively low participation rates in A Level Mathematics and Physics of pupils who are
most economically disadvantaged (DfE, 2011). This could worsen if universities that
have been recruiting well from a ‘widening participation’ cohort (frequently with BTEC
and other non-A Level qualifications) are forced to reduce their provision as a result of
the proposals set out in the HE White Paper.
39 Under-representation will deepen with attendant risk to social mobility if professionally-

accredited engineering provision becomes less accessible to less economically
advantaged applicants for reasons of:
• Higher contributions expected from students on longer courses noting the greater
aversion to debt found in the widening participation cohort.
• Loss of local or regional provision.
• The UK is well behind all other European countries in gender inclusion in

engineering. It is a struggle to attract the best students into engineering, including
women, and this will be harder still if the student experience suffers from a lack of
long term investment driven by uncertainties around Price Group B funding, SIVS,
capital funding and research funding.
In addition, the AAB+ proposals in the HE White Paper do nothing to encourage

universities at which competition for admission is most intense to consider the context
in which candidates achieved their A Level and other qualifications. The use of
contextualised admissions practices are important to raising the proportion of students
from disadvantaged backgrounds gaining admissions to the most prestigious universities.
40 There is evidence that STEM A Levels are harder (CEM / SCORE 2008)
“at A Level, the STEM subjects are not just more difficult on average than the non-sciences,
they are without exception the hardest of all A Levels”.
Therefore removal of student number controls via the AAB+ proposed in the HE
White Paper mechanism appears to advantage non-STEM subjects.
41 As noted earlier, the integrated engineering Masters degree (MEng) offers a fast track
route towards professional qualification as a Chartered Engineer. However, the
extended length of this course (four years) makes it particularly vulnerable if increased
tuition fees cause applications to higher education to drop. Engineering has similar
representation of the lowest four socio-economic groups as Higher Education a whole
(Maillardet et al., 2007) but the lower half of the socio-economic scale is still under-
691
represented. Under-representation will deepen with attendant risk to social mobility if

MEng provision becomes less accessible to less economically advantaged applicants.
42 In addition there is antipathy amongst young people towards engineering as a career

choice which makes a four year MEng more vulnerable still. Only 37% of 12-16 year
olds and 31% of 17-19 year olds in the UK see engineering as a desirable career
(Engineering UK, 2010). This varies with gender as another survey found (Becker, 2010)
that in the UK 18% of young women and 50% of young men are willing to become
engineers. The international ROSE study undertaken in 40 countries shows that whilst
young people and adults are generally positive towards science and technology, young
people in the richest countries such as England are much more ambivalent or even
sceptical – with girls being more sceptical than boys (Rose, 2010).
43 The Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of
Chemistry and the National HE STEM Programme are all undertaking projects to raise
the levels of diversity in their subjects / professions. At The Royal Academy of
Engineering, these efforts are under-pinned by knowledge of what works in widening
participation in engineering Higher Education gained through first-hand experience in
the long running London Engineering Project and its sister in Cumbria the Barrow
Engineering Project.
44 No particular concerns over the training of Engineering PhD students were identified
during the consultations amongst Fellows of The Royal Academy of Engineering on
which this submission is based.

and
45 Whilst we have no particular concerns over the quality and training of Engineering PhD
students there are concerns over their number, particularly those who are UK
domiciled. If the number of UK domiciled undergraduates falls as a consequence of HE
reforms then we have concerns over the thinner spreading of those graduates who
elect for Doctoral studies. Concentration in centres (such as Doctoral Training
Centres) with critical mass will become even more important than it is already. This
may reduce the breadth of topics available for young researchers and the growth of
engineering research will become vulnerable to the local success of a few institutions.
46 There are high quality PhD programmes undertaken in universities which do not have
Doctoral Training Centres. Many of those PhDs are in collaboration with industry e.g.
through CASE studentships which is a very successful and well established mechanism.
692
The establishment by many universities of Graduate Schools has significantly improved

the base of skills and wider interaction which students are gaining through their PhD.
We also emphasise the important role played by the EngD in linking excellent
engineering research with the needs of industry and in providing an environment in
which engineering leadership skills can be developed.
47 We recognise the need to make the stipend for a UK domiciled PhD student more
equivalent to the salary of a new graduate going into one of the high status industrial
graduate schemes.
48 Yes. We see risk of a failed market here and hence the need for public funding
intervention (in the form of access to student loans, to scholarships, to funding support
for key programmes and courses). UK domiciled students are in the extreme minority
on many taught STEM masters courses. In addition, courses relating to important STEM
sectors that are seldom in the public eye (water, materials science, processing for
example) find it harder still to recruit UK domiciled students – noting the visa
restrictions on overseas students this creates skills shortages in these important
sectors.
49 The funding base to engineering education is particularly vulnerable to loss of income

from overseas students if visas become more restricted as a relatively high proportion
of engineering undergraduates are from non-EU countries (Saraga 2009; 2011)
(reflecting the quality and reputation of engineering higher education in the UK
attracting students from around the world – a real success story). This situation is
significantly more marked for the case of postgraduate and research degrees where the
UK domiciled Masters and PhD students are now in the minority compared with EU
and non-EU domiciled students in key engineering disciplines such as mechanical and
civil engineering (Royal Society, 2008). The requirement for non-EU postgraduates to
return to their home countries after graduation puts the UK engineering research base
at threat as well as restricting the supply of higher education teaching staff in
engineering.
Industry

them?
50 The issue of the diversion of STEM graduates into non-STEM sectors and jobs is a
complex one. Certainly consideration needs to be given to the often high rewards
offered to STEM graduates in certain sectors. Industry (taken here as a proxy term for
STEM-sector employer) cannot compete with these in many cases. Notwithstanding
this, as noted earlier, there are wage premia on offer to STEM graduates who choose to
work in STEM occupations ((Greenwood et al. 2011; Conlon et al., 2011)
693
51 Industry is deeply involved in engineering higher education and has a long tradition of
providing direct funding for the creation and delivery of courses (co-funding of
provision). However, changes to funding arrangements for co-funded employer
engagement could result in a significant reduction in the number of students benefiting
from vocationally relevant programmes. Co-funded numbers provide a vehicle for
widening access to HE and it would therefore appear to be counter to other
Government proposals in this area. The position on employer co-funding needs
clarification. Can employers carry on paying the current fee levels as a contribution?
Will it be easy for students to apply for a top-up fee (i.e. the difference between the
employer contribution and fees)?
52 Employers seem very happy with their current engagement in co-funding part-time
provision but how will they react to fees that increase by perhaps a factor of 2.5? Many
will be deterred from co-funding, preferring to let employees take a loan for the entire
cost. The position on part-time loans remains unclear.
graduates?
53 The engineering profession, including employers and universities, is doing a great deal to
build on the demand amongst employers for STEM and other strategically important
skills by: funding outreach in schools, providing mentoring and work experience,
supporting University Technical Colleges, funding CPD support for STEM teachers,
providing bursaries and providing wage premia for STEM graduates (Greenwood et al.
2011; Conlon et al., 2011). In return we expect HEFCE to intervene in a strategic way
to ensure that the supply of graduates can match stimulated demand. This provides
grounds for maintenance of a Price Group B contribution from HEFCE as well as
maintenance of the SIVS programme. If the UK does not grow its own engineers then it
is strategically vulnerable to world events.
54 The Skill Shortage Occupations list 374 produced by the Migration Advisory Committee
identifies skill shortages in engineering occupations – in particular amongst geological,
electrical, chemical, design, planning and production and process engineers - highlighting
the lack of UK engineering graduates in key areas for the economy. Industry would
naturally seek to recruit these skills globally but this is being hampered by the visa
system in the UK.
of best practice
55 Questions over supply and demand in STEM are not unique to the UK. Quoting from a
recent, comprehensive study in the US (Carnevale et al. 2011):
374 UK Border Agency shortage occupation list. Migration Advisory Committee. www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk
694
We conclude that our education system is not producing enough STEM-capable students to
keep up with demand both in traditional STEM occupations and other sectors across the
economy that demand similar competencies. The demand for STEM competencies outside
STEM occupations is strong and growing. While STEM earnings are high, the earnings of
comparably skilled workers in many other high-skill occupations are higher and increasing
faster. As a result, traditional STEM occupations ofentimes cannot compete in terms of pay
and working conditions. In other words, even when the numbers indicate that we are producing
enough STEM graduates for STEM occupations, we do face STEM scarcity in some occupations
because STEM capable workers divert from STEM into non-STEM occupations, particularly
Managerial and Professional and Healthcare Professional occupations.
56 The Government’s growth strategy places skills at the centre of the economic recovery
and emphasises the need for a rebalanced economy (BIS, 2010).
“We need a more competitive, rebalanced economy, which is environmentally sound and
resource efficient, and we need to reduce the deficit. There should be no illusions about the
scale of the challenge we face. Our working age population is less skilled than that of France,
Germany and the US and this contributes to the UK being at least 15% less productive than
those countries (ONS 2010)”
57 Providing an adequate supply of high quality engineering graduates is vital in order to

maintain international competitiveness. The vulnerability of the UK situation is
demonstrated by our competitors in China; with over 400,000 new engineering
graduates per annum and India; with over 130,000 new engineering graduates (these are
2004 figures 375 soon to be updated in a study commissioned by Engineering UK).
58 The UK is well behind all other European countries in gender inclusion (Engineering
UK, 2010) and young women in the UK have a more sceptical attitude to science and
technology than in any other nation in the ROSE study (ROSE, 2010). It is a struggle to
attract the best students into engineering when the female half of the population is
ambivalent or sceptical and under-funding will make this harder still if the student
experience suffers.
13 December 2011
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Data Summary report, October 2010, Blue Alumni / Royal Academy of Engineering
www.thedataservice.org.uk/statistics/other_statistics_and_research
Matthew Harrison (project leader) 2011, FE STEM Data Project July 2011 report, Royal
Academy of Engineering
www.thedataservice.org.uk/statistics/other_statistics_and_research
Charley Greenwood, Matthew Harrison, Anna Vignoles (2011), The labour market value of
STEM qualifications and occupations, Institute of Education / Royal Academy of Engineering
www.raeng.org.uk/news/releases/shownews.htm?NewsID=701
375 Report by Duke University for the National Academy of Engineering, 2006
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Fiona Dodd, Jon Guest, Andrew License (2011), The current and future science workforce,
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jobs, BIS, March 2011
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www.cew.georgetown.edu/STEM
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Department for Education, 2011
Annex A
Summarised from FE STEM Data Project (Frost et al, 2010 drawing on analysis extended in
Harrison et al, 2011)
Rationale for categorisation
Qualifications were identified as Science on the following basis:
• Qualifications containing identifiable scientific content, whether they contribute wholly or partly
to progression in Science are deemed to be within the definition of a Science qualification. In
this context progression leads to further study of science as a discipline or an occupation that is
primarily concerned with increasing our knowledge of the natural world.
• For reporting purposes a single classification ‘Science’ has been used for all qualifications that
have mandatory components in science. The impact of a narrower definition of ‘Science’ could
be analysed using the electronic presentation of the data. A possible exception could be
qualifications in Food Safety, Food Processing and Manufacture, which could be regarded as
‘Science related’, as the majority of these qualifications would not lead to progression in Science.
Qualifications were identified as Technology on the following basis:

• ‘Technology’ is not a discipline per se but a working definition was evolved for this project. The
National Curriculum for England and Wales (1990; 1995) National Curriculum foundation
subject of ‘Technology’ included Design & Technology and IT/ICT. So for the purposes of this
project (core) Technology was taken to include:
• IT/ICT practitioner qualifications

• Electronics / systems & control
• Music technology
• Production technology and technical theatre (light; sound; media)
• 3-D design
697
• CAD/CAM
• Interactive media
• Design & Technology GCSEs and GCEs
• IT/ICT GCSEs and GCEs
• Technology-related areas were taken to include IT/ICT user qualifications - although all need to
be fluent users of IT/ICT; and general Art & Design – because a general Art & Design
grounding is necessary to progress to, for example, 3-D/industrial design.
Qualifications were identified as Engineering on the following basis:

• ‘Engineering’ is a profession encompassing a wide range of disciplines. For the purposes of this
project, ‘Engineering’ was taken to include the following Sector Subject Area Tier 1
classifications:
• Construction and the Built Environment
• Engineering
• Information Technology
• Manufacturing and Product Design
• Engineering qualifications were taken to be those within these Tier 1 classifications that are
likely to support progression to engineer or engineering technician roles. Engineering related
qualifications are those from the same Tier 1 classifications, and a few from other Tier 1
classifications, which equip people for work in engineering or engineering-related environments
but in roles other than that of engineer or engineering technician.
Qualifications were identified as Mathematics on the following bases:

• Entry to Level 5 qualifications which include mathematics and numeracy in the title are all
relevant.
• The classification ‘Mathematics’ is used to classify qualifications identified as having
mathematics as their primary content.
• The working group classified qualifications as ‘Numeracy’ if the development of numeracy is
the primary purpose of that qualification and the qualification is unlikely to support
development in mathematics or a STEM related subject, without additional mathematical
learning.
• Qualifications which include Accounting, Book keeping, finance and related areas are deemed
to include mathematical skills are classified as ‘Mathematics-related’.
• Accountancy and finance based qualifications at Level 3 and above were generally not assessed
as supporting progression in STEM subjects, as by this level the individual is likely to have
committed to a finance-related pathway.
• Qualifications which include business, and do not major in finance were generally rated ‘N’ (not
STEM).
698
Royal Astronomical Society – Written evidence
1. With more than 3500 members (Fellows) the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is the
leading UK body representing the interests of astronomers, space scientists, planetary
scientists and geophysicists.
2. The RAS is therefore pleased to submit written evidence to this inquiry. This
submission, approved by our governing Council, covers three of the key questions
posed by the Committee.
What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality of
degrees and the supply of STEM courses in higher education institutions?
3. The majority of universities plan to charge home students £9000 per annum for first
degrees, a sum insufficient to cover the cost of laboratory- and fieldwork-based courses
such as physics, astronomy and geophysics. The reforms to funding under discussion by
the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) are therefore expected to
include a premium paid to subsidise the teaching of science courses, as proposed in the
2010 Browne Review of Higher Education Funding which led to the new tuition fees
regime.
4. At present however the size of this additional subsidy remains uncertain. If the extra
funding does not cover the additional teaching costs of more practical STEM subjects
(the mooted value of £1500 per student per annum would be too low to do this), some
universities may elect to support more arts and humanities courses at the expense of
science provision. Those STEM courses that remain will effectively be subsidised by fees
for arts courses, thus creating an unhealthy and unwelcome tension between different
areas of academia.
5. Alongside this, the HEFCE reforms due to come into effect over the next two years
include the removal of at least some of the additional funding that Strategically
Important and Vulnerable Subjects (SIVS) attract at present. It is not clear what if
anything will replace this investment.
6. The Society therefore asks peers to investigate whether HEFCE and / or BIS will
continue the policy of offering additional support to lab- and fieldwork-based STEM
disciplines, at a level which allows them to be offered on an equal basis with other
subjects. We also strongly recommend that the lighter restrictions on recruitment for
these subjects are retained, in recognition of their wider importance. If these measures
are in place, they will go some way to preventing the closure of more physics
departments, a key concern of the RAS, Institute of Physics (IOP) and many other
bodies with an interest in STEM in higher education.
7. In 2006 the British Geophysical Association report on “Geophysics Education in the

UK” highlighted both the severe shortage of and the strong demand for geophysics
graduates by industry, with universities reporting that these graduates have a very high
rate of recruitment to degree-related employment. After representation from the RAS
this subject received some extra funding in 2007. HEFCE however reports that despite
699
its recognised value geophysics is not covered by the current SIVS list and we thus call
for it to be eligible for additional support and for lighter restrictions on recruitment (in
line with other physical sciences) in the new policy regime. If this is not forthcoming we
are concerned that many geophysics courses will be forced to close.
Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the balance right between
the number of Masters degree students and PhD students?
8. We would like to draw peers’ attention to the 2011 decision by the Natural
Environment Research Council (NERC) to withdraw funding for taught MSc courses,
despite the importance of these postgraduates to industry. There seems little prospect
of private companies offering financial support on the same scale and we suggest that
NERC should review and if necessary reconsider this action once its full impact
becomes clear.
What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of graduates to pursue
a research career?
9. Since the reforms to higher education funding came into effect, the Government has
worked hard to persuade prospective undergraduate degree students that the new
system of tuition fees and student loans is affordable over the span of a typical graduate
career. Although the repayments in any given year are typically modest, the Society is
nonetheless concerned that a high debt (perhaps more than £60000 after graduation
once loans for living costs are included) may deter many graduates from pursuing study
at PhD level. Such a change will damage the status of research in areas like astronomy
and space science, where the UK is ranked second in the world after the United States.
10. A number of Fellows of the Society point to the earlier example of the impact of the
introduction of tuition fees at a maximum level of £3000 in 2004. Applications to
undergraduate courses in astrophysics declined from that year until 2008 and many
students were reluctant to consider postgraduate study as a result of the associated
increase in their overall personal debt.
13 December 2011
700
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) – Written evidence
1. The Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers)

welcomes this opportunity to comment on the inquiry into higher education in STEM
subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
2. We would like to remind the Committee that there are a number of science
subjects, in addition to the traditional core science-STEM disciplines of physics, chemistry
and biology, that contribute soundly to STEM learning and research and to the STEM
workforce. These include physical geography, environmental science, archaeological science
and parts of psychology. Geography – the discipline that we represent - has been formally
recognised by HEFCE as a part-STEM subject for both teaching and research in Higher
Education. This recognition took into account investments of the Science Research
Investment Fund (SRIF); the nature of the research submitted to RAE2008; the journals that
the research is published in; and the research councils and charitable funding sources that
support it. We urge the Select Committee to adopt a full understanding of STEM and the
importance of part-STEM disciplines in providing the skills, knowledge and understanding
required by many employers and society more generally.
3. What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job? The part-STEM
recognition for Geography is based on the fact that the discipline is an intellectually
challenging subject that requires understanding and application of scientific logic, principles,
methods and laws that govern the natural environment; an ability to develop and test
hypotheses and to integrate ideas; and analytical capabilities to collect/select, analyse,
present and interpret primary and secondary datasets, especially spatial data, and to
understand and visualise complex data. Geographers are routinely trained in field, bench-lab
and computer-lab work; some receive training on computer-based modelling.
4. A STEM job is one that requires a combination of the knowledge and skills learned
in a STEM training, whether at undergraduate or postgraduate levels, for the execution of
the job.
5. What do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could
be used to influence supply? The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) can comment
only from its perspective of demand for employment for geographers. We know that
demand for geographers from employers is high as a whole and that they are relatively well
paid compared with non-STEM graduates. This view is backed by several sources including
an employer’s survey by ESRI – UK published in 2010; first destination statistics; analysis of
sample data from the Quarterly Labour Force survey; and the NERC Research Funders’
Forum report (see below).
6. The environment sector is a varied, vibrant and vital part of the UK economy and
society. It relies on highly skilled people who, through their knowledge, skills and innovation,
ensure that the UK provides international leadership and solutions to the long-term
challenges we face; continues to attract inward investment of high-value business; and
becomes a world leader in new areas of growth such as low carbon goods and services. The
NERC/Environmental Research Funders’ Forum report (2010) on professional skills needs in
the environment sector, which draws on the perspectives of more than 140 employers,
701
highlights 15 critical skills gaps. A training in geography contributes significantly to the

development of between five and seven of those skills areas, depending on the specific
geography programme studied.
7. What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of
STEM subjects in higher education? We particularly welcome the development of the
English Baccalaureate, with its requirement for study in a core of academic subjects,
including geography. The Department for Education’s response (26 October 2011) 376 to the
Education Select Committee’s report into the English Baccalaureate states that recent
independent research commissioned by the Department for Education with nearly 700
schools suggests that the EBacc is having an immediate impact with an expected increase in
those studying geography GCSE at school.
“the survey indicated that 47 per cent of pupils taking GCSEs in 2013 will be doing a
combination of subjects that could lead to an EBacc compared with just 22 per cent of GCSE-stage
pupils entered for the EBacc in 2010. In particular, it suggests that the English Baccalaureate is
reversing declines in entries to languages, history and geography, returning them to the levels of a
decade ago … Approximately 33 per cent of pupils have opted to take geography—up seven
percentage points and back to the level of 2002 entries”.
8. We wait to see if this increases the uptake of geography in higher education but in
any case that intake is strong and has remained broadly unaffected in recent years by the
declining numbers studying GCSE.
background? The Society actively promotes geography through its schools ambassadors
programme, making particular efforts to reach inner city schools and those with a high
proportion of disadvantaged pupils. The gender balance in geography is good; the uptake by
ethnic minority groups is improving and perhaps our biggest challenge is among those from
low socio-economic backgrounds.
10. About the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG): Formed in 1830, our Royal
Charter is for 'the advancement of geographical science'. We are the UK’s learned society
and professional body for geography. As a professional body we offer the chartered
accreditation (C. Geog) and work closely with employers. As the learned society we
support the discipline of geography and its practitioners in research and higher education,
school teaching and fieldwork, policy and wider public engagement. We work collaboratively
with all Higher Education (HE) geography departments in the UK.
13 December 2011
376Education Select Committee (2011)

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmeduc/1577/1577.pdf
702
The Royal Society – Written evidence
The Royal Society has noted with interest the Science and Technology Sub-Committee
inquiry into higher education in STEM subjects. This is an area where the Fellows of the
Royal Society, who are researchers and teachers in the higher education system in the UK,
have a great deal of expertise.
In 2006, the Society issued a report, A degree of concern 377 , considering the future supply and
demand for science, technology and mathematics graduates, concentrating on undergraduate
supply. We followed this in 2008 with A higher degree of concern 378 , which looked at
postgraduate education. These two reports, which I attach for your information, do not
contain the most up to date data, but the general messages remain valid.
1. UK HE courses in STEM continue to provide a sound foundation for students, and

develop skills and knowledge which are essential in the workforce for both STEM
careers, and broader areas of employment.
2. STEM graduates provide essential skill sets; positive action is required to ensure that
the provision and take up of science courses is not significantly diminished and that
the skills base graduates take into the broader economy is maintained.
3. In order to ensure that STEM courses are responding to the requirements of
employers, more emphasis must be given to a collaborative approach to learning
between universities and industry, including some employer engagement with
curriculum development.
4. Students are increasingly mobile; the UK is competing in a global market for
international students, but also, for UK domiciled candidates. The UK currently
performs well in terms of attracting overseas students. However, it must not be
complacent or place more barriers in the way of students coming to the UK,
because new providers are beginning to challenge well established locations of study.
Any study in this area today will have to consider the potential implications of the Higher
Education White Paper. Some concerns have been raised about the potential for new
regulations on student numbers to make STEM subjects less attractive, particularly as
numbers seem to currently be rising for applications in some science and engineering
subjects. We welcome the recent announcements, following their consultation for 2012/13,
by HEFCE that SIVS recruitment below AAB will be excluded from the cut to non-AAB
places on condition that institutions maintain at least their entrant levels to those courses. 379
The Royal Society has conducted significant work in recent years in analysing the ‘state of
the nation’ in relation to STEM education between the ages of 5-19. The most recent, and
final, report in our series, published in February 2011, specifically looks at school and college
science in the context of the transfer to higher education. 380 Again, I include a copy for your
reference, but in specific response to your consultation queries, we can draw out the
following:
377 http://royalsociety.org/policy/publications/2006/degree-of-concern/
378 http://royalsociety.org/policy/publications/2008/higher-degree-of-concern/
379 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/funding/201213/faq.htm#q6
380 http://royalsociety.org/State-Nation-Increasing-Size-Pool/
703
1. The Royal Society’s final ‘state of the nation’ report on UK science and mathematics
education found that across the UK in 2009 just 17% of 16–18 year olds completed
one or more core sciences A-levels or equivalent qualifications. 381 Such a small
proportion means that progression to university STEM degrees is limited and this is
confirmed by data from previous years. Over time this appears to have led to a
deficit of high quality graduates available to enter employment in commerce, industry
and as specialist science and mathematics teachers in schools and colleges. Scottish
students who study Highers, however, currently have greater flexibility, are
encouraged to take a broad range of subjects, and are therefore more likely to have
a more appropriate preparation for (STEM) higher education. There are concerns
however that this may change with the development of new Scottish qualifications
(Curriculum for Excellence).
2. Science and mathematics are compulsory in the UK up to age 16 (science only until
age 14 in Northern Ireland), yet only a small proportion of students chooses to
study these subjects post-16. There is little clarity yet about the impact on this of the
introduction of the English Baccalaureate in early 2011 and the raising of
participation in education in England to age 17/18 over the next few years382 . There
may be unintended consequences, such as on the uptake and availability of triple
science GCSE which, although not suitable for all, does provide an excellent base for
progressing to science, engineering and mathematics study post-16. Prior attainment
is the single biggest factor in predicting whether pupils study these subjects post-
16, 383 and influences on educational performance can be traced throughout children’s
educational careers from the very earliest stages. 384 There are a number of other
factors, many of which interrelate in complicated ways, which affect students’
attainment and progression to post-16 science and mathematics. These include:
students’ socioeconomic status (SES), ethnicity and gender; their attitudes towards
science and mathematics; science and mathematics curricula, qualifications,
assessment and resources; and policy making and educational reform which has a
direct bearing on science and mathematics.
3. A teacher’s knowledge of their subject has been shown to affect pupils’ attitude to
and attainment and progression in science and mathematics education. 385 Specialist
teachers are likely to be more confident and enthusiastic in teaching their subject,
including (especially in respect of science) running practical sessions. At post-16 level,
18%, 12% and 43% of institutions in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland failed to
present any physics A-level candidates in 2010 and this clearly links with the poor
availability of specialists in this particularly badly hit subject. The Coalition
Government’s recent Initial Teacher Training strategy is aiming to address both this
shortage and other issues related to the supply of sufficient specialist teachers in
science and mathematics at both primary and secondary levels in England.386 Other
key action areas required from the relevant UK education authorities are:
381 http://royalsociety.org/State-Nation-Increasing-Size-Pool/
382 Participation in education or training in England will be extended to age 17 from 2013 and age 18 from 2016 (Education
Act 2011)
383 http://royalsociety.org/State-of-the-Nation-Science-and-Mathematics-Education-14-19/
384 http://royalsociety.org/State-of-the-Nation-Science-and-Mathematics-Education-5-14/
385 http://royalsociety.org/State-of-the-Nation-The-UKs-Science-and-Mathematics-Teaching-Workforce/
386 Training our next generation of outstanding teachers: Implementation plan Released 8 November 2011
http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/careers/traininganddevelopment/a0078019/training-outstanding-teachers
704
i. Ensuring access to subject-specific continuing professional development

(CPD) for science and mathematics teachers throughout their careers.
ii. Maintaining satisfactory levels/quality of qualified technicians,
laboratories, equipment and computing hardware in secondary schools
and colleges, and ensuring that practical/field work is appropriately
provided for and supported.
iii. Ensuring subjects which are significant for industrial growth, especially
computing, are appropriately taught in schools. The Royal Society will be
publishing a report on the teaching of computer science on 13 January
2012.
iv. Facilitating the provision of a solid and inspirational grounding in science
and mathematics for all students through the right curriculum content
and associated pedagogy.
v. Allowing assessment methods to genuinely support students’ progress
and not be focused on narrowly constructed measures of school
performance (accompanied by ‘teaching to the test’ lessons), as well as
ensuring the provision of appropriate and meaningful qualifications to
support this.
vi. Providing the necessary information, advice and guidance for pupils on
careers that relate to science and mathematics.
vii. Supporting research on how children learn science and mathematics and
applying this to inform teaching practices.
The Royal Society will continue to monitor the provision of STEM education in the UK, at
all stages from primary through to postdoctoral training.
16 December 2011
705
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) – Written evidence
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is the UK Professional Body for chemical scientists
and an international Learned Society for advancing the chemical sciences. Supported by a
network of over 47,000 members worldwide and an internationally acclaimed publishing
business, our activities span education and training, conferences and science policy, and the
promotion of the chemical sciences to the public.
The RSC welcomes the opportunity to respond to the House of Lords ‘Call for Evidence:
Higher Education in STEM Subjects’ and our comments are summarised below.
Key Points
• At school level, the upturn in numbers following a pathway involving chemistry at A-
level must be maintained; in this regard it is essential that drivers of HE choice (such
as the AAB+ policy) do not result in unintended outcomes such as choosing non-
STEM subjects
• The reforms of HE funding require careful monitoring - as well as the potential to
affect student choice, policies such as the ‘20000 margin’ also have the potential to
affect the ability of universities to support STEM subjects that require costly
laboratory infrastructure and running costs; taken together, there is the potential to
seriously damage the teaching of undergraduate science and to damage the skills
pipeline.
• A geographical mix of flexible approaches to study needs to be encouraged and
maintained
• A strategy for postgraduate training in the chemical sciences that involves all
stakeholders is urgently required
1. The chemical sciences form a core discipline within the STEM umbrella, which
requires the developing of hypotheses, predicting, planning, gathering evidence,
testing, interpreting and drawing conclusions. The chemical sciences are further
targeted towards the invention, design and synthesis of new materials with specified
properties, and the development of new techniques and methodologies both to
construct new materials and to analyse and measure materials in a range of matrices
with ever more sensitivity and lower levels of detection. The chemical sciences
develop an understanding of the world in which we live from an atomic and molecular
viewpoint, and, drawing on the development of new knowledge and understanding of
the properties of substances and the interactions between different types of matter
and analytical and problem-solving skills, help us to tackle societal problems such as
health, energy, climate change, resource efficiency, food and water supply and so on.
For example, chemistry is at the forefront of medicine, not only designing and
creating novel therapeutic but also in developing diagnostic techniques to detect ill
health.
2. The definition of a STEM job should include the following points: a STEM job will
require core STEM competencies, a STEM related job would prefer the skills acquired
706
by a STEM graduate compared to other skill sets, and finally a non-STEM job gives no
preference or priority to a STEM graduate.
influence supply?
3. The importance of producing sufficient numbers of highly skilled STEM graduates is

vital to ensuring the UK’s future competitiveness on the world stage. Figure 1
demonstrates that the number of physical sciences graduates who are employed six
months after completion of their degree is at least 90%. 387 Moreover, 80% of physical
sciences graduates of the 2006/7 academic year indicated that their education was an
important factor in obtaining employment or helping them to carry out their required
duties (Figure 2). 388
4. An economic study of the benefits of chemistry research to the UK 389 demonstrated

that it contributed 21% to GDP (£257bn). Areas that rely on such research, and
therefore on graduate chemists, include the chemistry-producing industries that
manufacture chemicals and chemical products, including basic chemicals, (such as dyes
and pigments, rubber, plastics, and fertilisers), pesticides, paints, varnishes,
pharmaceuticals, soap and detergents, and synthetic fibres, and the chemistry-utilising
industries such as the aerospace, automotive, electronics, health and textiles
industries. Given the ongoing need for innovation in areas such as pharmaceuticals,
energy, smart materials, nanomaterials, the low carbon economy, resource efficiency,
food production, diagnostics for health and security etc., the demand for graduates of
the chemical sciences is only going to increase.
5. The analytical, problem-solving, data handling and communication skills that are
essential to the education of chemists, and more generally STEM graduates, have
value for a wide range of careers, not simply those that utilise subject knowledge
directly. The percentage of STEM graduates in a range of industries is shown in Figure
3 390 .
Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM graduates and do
6. The number of people studying chemistry at GCSE, AS and A-Level has been
consistently increasing over the last 6 years. 391 At GCSE level, the number studying
chemistry as a single subject has increased from just under 57,000 in 2006 to almost
142,000 in 2011. The number of students studying chemistry at AS-level chemistry
has increased from around 51,000 in 2006 to just less than 80,000 in 2011. And, in
2011 more than 48,000 thousand students studied chemistry at A-level, compared to
40,000 in 2006. This increase corresponds to similar increases in other STEM subjects
387 Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), 2010, Destination for Leavers from Higher Education Survey.
http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2206&Itemid=278
388 Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2007 (HESA), Destination for Leavers from Higher Education Survey.
389 The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2010, The Economic Benefits of Chemistry Research to the UK.
http://www.rsc.org/images/Economic_Benefits_of_Chemistry_Sep_2010_tcm18-191337.pdf
390 Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) - Occasional Paper NO. 6, 2006, Innovation in the UK: Indicators and Insights.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/files/file31569.pdf
391 The Joint Council for Qualifications, 2011, Examination Results. http://www.jcgq.org.uk/national_results/
707
(Figure 4). In Scotland, there have been similar increases in the numbers of students
taking chemistry at Higher and Advanced Higher levels: in 2006, 9200 studied at
Higher level and 2000 at Advance Higher; the corresponding numbers for 2011 were
10300 and 2500, respectively.
7. The numbers of applications and acceptances to study for a chemistry degree at

university have shown modest increases over recent years (Figure 5). In 2010, the
number of students accepted to study a chemistry degree or other undergraduate
chemistry study was 4760. The ratio of applications to acceptances is currently 5.2.
Chemistry is also an essential, or highly desirable, A-level for many other disciplines
including, inter alia, pre-clinical medicine, veterinary science, and dentistry, pharmacy,
chemical engineering and biochemistry; so, alongside those studying chemistry, at
least another 16000 or so are using their A-level chemistry directly for higher
education study.
8. There is a general feeling in the community that, while there are some high quality,
very able students on undergraduate chemistry courses, two areas of knowledge are
consistently raised as being particularly weak with regard to first year undergraduates:
mathematics and practical skills.
9. The number of students studying chemistry at A-Level has increased consistently

since 2003 (Figure 4). To assign this increase to one particular factor is difficult. One
factor is likely to be the increased opportunity for students to study chemistry as a
single subject at GCSE level. Another is the AimHigher programme. Additionally, the
HEFCE/HEFCW-funded Chemistry for our Future and HE-STEM programmes are other
potential factors.
10. In addition, the current economic climate and the increase in tuition fees are further
factors that appear to be having a major impact on subject decision; students (and/or
their parents) are choosing, and subsequently investing in, study paths that are likely
to give themselves the best opportunities for employment.
What effect if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM
11. In 2010, 70% of maintained schools entered students for a GCSE in the three
separate sciences; 392 it is unlikely that the English Baccalaureate (EB) will incentivise
schools to drive the take up of the separate sciences any further. The current trend
for students taking the separate sciences at GCSE level is highly positive. However,
the EB requires only two science grades. This is a concern, because timetabling
pressures could well end up reducing the numbers of pupils taking GCSEs in all three
separate sciences. If this were to result in a student studying no chemistry
whatsoever at GCSE level the RSC would have serious cause for concern.
392The SCORE submission to the Education Committee’s Call for Evidence on The English Baccalaureate, 2011.
http://www.rsc.org/images/call_for_evidence_on_the_English_Baccalaureate_tcm18-204757.pdf
708
overseas) sufficient to meet the needs of the industry, the research base, and
other sectors not directly connected with STEM?
12. The RSC is pleased that the number of chemistry students in higher education
increased in 2010 by 10.4%, to 4,290, more than any other core science increase. 393
Moreover, physical sciences graduates are highly employable; a poll conducted by the
Department of Business Innovation and Skills found that employers currently are
struggling to find enough STEM graduates, and that this problem is set to get
worse. 394 A major reason for this shortage of STEM graduates is that they are
enthusiastically recruited by non-STEM career sectors due to their highly desirable
skill sets (Figure 3). With such demand it is vital that we continue to pursue ways to
increase the number of students studying chemistry and other STEM subjects. It is
worth noting in relation to the size of the graduate cohort, that approximately 1,000
chemistry postgraduate research students are recruited each year of whom some 675
are UK-based, and the Training and Development Agency for Schools has set
recruitment targets for trainee chemistry teachers of just over 1,000 in both 2011
and 2012. Together, just these two areas account for some 40% of the annual cohort.
13. A significant worry is that as the percentage of overseas students studying STEM
subjects is quite high (39%) 395 if they decide to return to their home country to work
rather than stay in the UK, this would leave UK businesses vulnerable.

high, and if not why not?
14. The quality of graduates in STEM subjects is quoted as an issue by many employers,
with recruiters of the more specialised roles now searching for candidates at Masters
level where previously a first degree would have sufficed. The HESA first destination
figures for 2009/10 in science, mathematics and engineering graduates suggest a
satisfactory level of success in securing employment or further study six months after
the completion of their studies, at between 88% and 91%. 396 This high employment
percentage would imply that the STEM graduates are highly competitive in the
current employment market.
15. UK HEIs deliver excellent value for money, being both highly productive and efficient.
The proportion of our national income spent on our HEIs, at 1.2%, is similar to that
of Germany and France, which spend 1.2% and 1.45% and somewhat lower than the
USA which spends 2.75% respectively. 397 The quality of the chemical research
conducted in UK universities, which is performed in the main by postgraduate
students who are themselves the output of undergraduate programmes of study, can
be measured by the number of citations per article that they produce. Table 1 (see
393 The Universities and Colleges Admissions Services, Data Tables.

http://www.ucas.com/about_us/stat_services/stats_online/
394 Department for Business Innovation and Skill (BIS), 2011, STEM Graduates in NON-STEM Jobs.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/s/11-771-stem-graduates-in-non-stem-jobs.pdf
395 The Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE), 2007, STEM Review: The Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths
Supply Chain. http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/CIHE-impact-of-roberts-on-STEM-Mar-07.pdf

396 Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), 2010, Destination for Leavers from Higher Education Survey.
397 http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/61/17/48630884.pdf
709
Appendix) shows that the UK, at 15 citations per publication, compares favourably to
both Germany (14) and the USA (18.7).
16. A distinction should be made between education and training. While Higher
Education Institutions (HEIs) provide an education for STEM graduates and ensure
they have an appropriate level of knowledge and skill in a given subject area, a certain
amount of additional industry-specific training will always need to be provided after
graduation.
research, industry or more broadly with the economy.
17. In 2010, six months after the completion of their studies 35.6% of chemistry
graduates and 36.6% of physics graduates went into further education.398 The single
biggest area of employment for chemistry graduates was scientific research (17.9%)
while for physics graduates the most popular employment option was the business
and finance work sector (16.2%). Almost 50% of chemistry graduates are working in a
sector that is not R&D or further education, demonstrating that the skills they have
acquired are recognised as important to other employment sectors.
18. The unemployment figures for STEM graduates are low when compared with other
graduates (Figure 1) indicating that the skills STEM graduates acquire makes them
competitive candidates for employment.
institutes?
19. We have number of concerns. First, the cost of teaching chemistry was shown to be
in excess of £1,000 per student in 2007. A student fee of £9,000 plus the HEFCE
band B/Band C Differential of ca £1,500, is unlikely to cover the current cost of a
chemistry degree.
20. Second, most chemistry students follow a 4-year integrated masters MChem
programme of study, rather than a 3-year BSc. The MChem is considered the
appropriate preparation for anyone wishing to follow postgraduate study or go into
industry. However, it is unclear how the new fee structure will affect uptake on these
courses; any student wishing to follow such a programme will accrue an additional
year of debt of ca £18,000 in student loans (on top of the £50,000-60,000 for a 3-year
programme).
21. Third, the Government has allocated 65,000 places to be made available for students
achieving AAB grades or above (AAB+) at A-level or equivalent, and that initially,
20,000 places will be allocated to HEIs whose average charge is at or below £7,500.
The core quotas for HEIs will be lowered according to the existing numbers of
students achieving AAB+ equivalent, following which an HEI can freely recruit as
many students at this level as it is able to attract and accommodate. With all HEIs
398 The Science Council, 2011, The Current and Future UK Science Workforce.
710
competing freely for the students with the highest exam results of above AAB+
equivalent, there is a risk that some may prioritise the recruitment of high-performing
students to non-science subjects where the cost of teaching is significantly lower. Will
all A-level subjects be considered equal? Will subject combinations be taken into
account? Will there be a differentiation between subjects that are more difficult
relative to others? If not, this could lead to a decrease in the numbers of students
taking science and mathematics subjects at A-level, for which the grading is more
severe, if students, instead, choose to study other A-level subjects that may increase
their chances of achieving AAB+ equivalent grades.
22. Fourth, the 20,000 places allocated to HEIs whose average charge is at or below
£7,500 will either directly or indirectly adversely affect science places. The implication
of this policy is that the national provision of science courses could reduce as certain
HEIs take on more students in lower cost subjects. No university that teaches
chemistry charges less than £8,500. Any reallocation of core places to those charging
fees of £7,500 or less means that either (1) a direct loss of science places from
universities charging higher fees, or (2) a loss of opportunity for those universities
teaching science courses to cross-subsidise the provision of those courses. As the
20000 is set to grow in following years, this effect will only become exaggerated over
time. For more on the thoughts of the RSC please refer to the RSCs joint response
on this topic. 399
23. In addition, sufficient capital funding must be made available to invest in teaching
facilities and laboratories to ensure that they provide an experience that prepares
students to enter the modern research and industry environment. It also needs to be
recognised that if the AAB+ policy is to be properly implemented across STEM
subjects capital infrastructure resource will be required. The ability to take additional
students in the chemical sciences, and STEM subjects more widely, is restricted by
the capacity of laboratory space and facilities that are available to any one institution.
24. The effect of research assessment upon degree development is hard to assess.
Research assessment has concentrated Funding Council derived research funds into
fewer universities and tended to reduce the number of departments. However, there
are of the order of 50 universities offering degrees in chemistry as a single discipline
and over 80 offering courses that involve chemistry with other disciplines; these
outnumber the 33 chemistry submissions made to the 2008 RAE exercise.
25. Two of the primary functions of a university are the generation (research) and
dissemination (teaching) of new knowledge. A third is scholarship, which can
encompass a range of activities, including: discipline-based investigation of published
399 The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2011, A joint response from the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the
Society of Biology to the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills’ consultation on the Higher Education White Paper.
http://www.rsc.org/images/JointHEWPresponse_tcm18-207596.pdf
711
knowledge that extends an area of academic discipline; scholarship for teaching and
learning including the investigation of pedagogy in relation to approaches to teaching,
assessment and learning design; scholarship in support of professional practice.
26. Accordingly, undergraduate programmes of study in the chemical sciences include

final year research projects that expose students to the research process; these
projects not only prepare them for higher level study in the discipline, but also,
through the development of generic research skills, for undertaking research projects
in other areas of endeavour.
27. Moreover, particularly in the final year of study programmes, students are exposed to
cutting edge research topics, in the main delivered by the scientists who are involved
in the research themselves. Research and teaching are therefore inextricably linked
and it is essential that this is reflected in the learning experience that is delivered to
students.
28. This synergy between teaching and research demands a more coherent approach to
the funding provided by higher education and research funding councils. For example,
the former have been following a ‘salami slicing’ approach in their response to funding
changes whereas the latter have followed an approach that concentrates funding in
‘framework’ universities (80% of EPSRC funding goes to 20 universities). The White
Paper on HE Reform acknowledges that: “…this reform focuses on higher education
teaching but our universities have a much wider role”. By publishing the White Paper
now and holding back its strategy for research and innovation to be published as a
separate document later this year, the Government reveals its lack of joined-up
thinking on this issue. In science subjects, one cannot divorce teaching from research.
There is an intricate relationship between the two, in terms of space and facilities,
financial sustainability, student contact with researchers, academic staff time and
workload, and the supply chain of new researchers. Access to research facilities in
undergraduate science programmes is needed even in teaching intensive departments.
A more coherent approach to teaching and research in the sciences by the
Government is essential.
29. Successive Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs) have had a major impact on
reducing the number of chemistry departments in the UK as universities focused on
research excellence. 400 Should the upcoming Research Excellence Framework
exercise result in even further concentration of Research Council funding then it may
be necessary to consider alternative models for provision of research and teaching.
Consequently, we might expect a greater diversity in mission and profile of
‘successful’ chemistry departments, with a range of USPs, and a wider mix of
teaching/scholarship, full time/part time, RCUK/industry research income etc.
Flexibility will be key, not necessarily the size of department. It will be increasing
important for departments to have a broad range of income streams so that they
become less dependent on one funding source.

400The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2006, Reform of Higher Education Research Assessment and Funding.
http://www.rsc.org/images/RSCfinal%20Response_tcm18-66616.pdf
712
30. Applications for the STEM subjects for each region of the UK, and the population that
live in that region are shown in Table 2.401,402
31. There is some variability in the level of access in all the UK regions for STEM courses
at undergraduate level. This is best indicated by the ratio of acceptances onto
chemistry undergraduate courses compared to population (Table 2, final column).
The eastern region of England appears to be significantly lower than the national
average. The current level of regional accessibility to chemistry undergraduate
degrees needs to be maintained at least at its current level, to ensure that chemistry
is accessible for all prospective students. This is especially so in a fee environment
that is likely to result in students choosing a university that is close to their parental
home. However, given the importance of chemistry undergraduates and the chemical
industry to the UK economy, the current level of availability of chemistry courses is
the minimum acceptable.
32. As well as a sufficient geographical spread, there is also a need for a sufficient spread
of flexible approaches to study that encompass both full- and part-time, and also a
mixture of the two. The Open University ‘OpenPlus’ scheme 403 which partners with
15 other universities is an example of one such approach.
background?
33. The STEM workforce is not yet truly representative, with a significant gender
imbalance in many areas. 404 Chemistry is one of the STEM subjects with a more even
distribution of males and females. In 2011, of the 142000 GCSE chemistry candidates
47% were female, and of the 4800 A-level chemistry candidates 47% were female. In
2010, at undergraduate level 41% of the 4300 entrants to chemistry courses 41%
were female, 405 while at postgraduate level 39% of the 1025 PhD starters were
female. 406
34. In undergraduate chemistry, black Caribbean students are significantly under-

represented relative to the overall numbers in the population. In contrast, Indian and
Chinese students are more likely to read undergraduate chemistry than white
students: Indian students are twice as likely, and Chinese students are three times as
likely. 407
35. It is difficult to accurately predict how the current the economic climate will affect
the behaviour on the pattern of study of chemistry by those from varying economic
401 The Universities and Colleges Admissions Services, Data Tables.

http://www.ucas.com/about_us/stat_services/stats_online/
402 DATA4NR Date For Neighbours and Regeneration. http://www.data4nr.net/resources/population/665/
403 http://www8.open.ac.uk/choose/openplus/?samsredir=1324548854
404 The Institute of Physics, 2006, Girls in the Physics Classroom.
http://www.iop.org/education/teacher/support/girls_physics/review/file_41599.pdf
405 The Joint Council for Qualifications, 2011, Examination Results. http://www.jcgq.org.uk/national_results/
406 HEFCE, PhD Study Trends and profiles 1996-97 to 2009-10; http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_33/
407 The Royal Society of Chemistry and The Institute of Physics, 2006, Representation of Ethnic Groups in Chemistry and
Physics. http://www.rsc.org/images/Ethnic%20Web_tcm18-53629.pdf
713
backgrounds. The RSC is eager to see investigated the effects that the current
economic climate and the changes to tuitions fees are likely to have on student
attitude to studying chemistry.
36. PhD students now receive a broad range of training that encompasses career-
transferable skills alongside discipline- and project-specific knowledge and skills. The
Vitae programme supported by RCUK and delivered by CRAC ensures that
standards are set for universities and supervisors in this regard. 408
37. By giving PhD students good and clear career advice we give them the opportunity to
tailor their studies to ensure that they have the best chance to achieve a successful
career in their preferred employment area. A PhD in chemistry for example will
focus the skills and training for a career in R&D, but there should be room for any
PhD student to acquire additional, career relevant skills.
38. The vast majority of final-year students at PhD level, report that they do want to
pursue a career related to their degree subject, although that proportion varies
somewhat with degree subject. As many as two-thirds of those in engineering
definitely want a degree-related career, but nearer to half of those in chemistry and
physics desire to work in careers related to their degree area. 409

39. The number of full-time chemistry PhD students starting in 2009/10 was 1025, up
from 945 in 2007/8. Of these 1025, 675 were from the UK, 130 from the EU, and
220 were international.
40. As shown in Table 1, the quality of the publication output (largely achieved by
postgraduate students) matches competitor nations, as measured by the average
number of citations per paper published.
41. A major concern regarding the future postgraduate training provision is mentioned in
paragraph 46.
42. Only 10.3% of physical science postgraduates are unemployed, a number which
compares favourably to other subjects. This indicates that the quality of STEM
graduates is high enough to enable them to compete with graduates in other subject
areas. 410
408 The research Council UK, 2009, Research Councils Implementation Plan 2009, for the Concordat for the career management
of researchers. http://www.researchconcordat.ac.uk/documents/rcukimplementation.pdf
409 Oxford Research Policy, 2011, The Doctoral Experience and Career Intensions: Retaining Female Talent in Science.
http://www.ch.qub.ac.uk/swan/oxford-research.pdf
410 The Council for Industry and Higher Education (CHIE), 2007, STEM Review: The Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths
Supply Chain. http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/CIHE-impact-of-roberts-on-STEM-Mar-07.pdf
714
43. A number of employers have stated that not only is it becoming harder to find STEM
graduates, it is also harder to find good quality STEM post-graduates. To address this
situation employers and universities need to open direct lines of communication so
both parties are working together to produce and employ a well-trained and highly-
knowledgeable workforce.
44. There are some very successful Doctorial Training Centres (DTC) in chemistry. We
have received anecdotal comment from departments that host such centres that
there is no difference between the training offered to those in a DTC and those who
aren’t.
45. A major issue is the impact that several EPSRC policy decisions have had on the
landscape of PhD training in chemistry. DTC’s were instituted when a significant
proportion of postgraduate training was delivered through studentships attached to
project grants. In future, no studentships will be available through EPSRC project
grants. This shift can be seen through the following numbers. Five years ago there
were around 2500 physical sciences postgraduate students hosted by project training
grants, 5000 by Doctoral Training Accounts (DTAS) and 800 Industrial CASE
students. Currently there are 5000 studentships in Doctoral Training Accounts, 2500
supported in Doctoral Training Centres and there are still around 800 Industrial
CASE awards. Thus, there has been a shift of about 30% of the available studentships
from support through project grants to support through Doctoral Training Centres.
However, the distribution of DTCs, both in terms of areas of science and also
geographical location, is rather skewed. For example, there is no Doctoral Training
Centre in a chemical science subject in Scotland, and only one, in Bristol, for synthetic
organic chemistry, a major UK strength.
46. The current landscape of postgraduate training in chemistry is not one that reflects
any sense of a national strategy. The RSC is eager to facilitate the development of
such a strategy that involves all stakeholders.
Should state funding be used to promote Masters Degrees and is the balance
right between the number of Masters Degree students and PhD students?
47. The HESA data for 2009/10 indicate that 67% of postgraduates in chemistry are
undertaking doctorate training; this seems appropriate. The type of independent,
innovative and analytical skills developed in the PhD is vital to UK plc. The integrated
masters (MChem) plays a critical role in preparing students for research, while taught
masters (MSc) address the niche markets of employment sectors that require
employees with specific skills in areas not covered in the standard chemistry
syllabuses, e.g. nuclear chemistry and advanced analytical science. State funding, for
both students and departments is essential for maintaining this skills pipeline.
715
48. The RSC believes that it is too early to offer a definitive judgement on the full impact
of the higher education reforms but the following should be noted. 411
49. The four-year integrated Masters degree – the MPhys/MChem/MBiol/MSci – is now

the norm for those considering a career in university or industrial R&D, as it is the
preferred route to professional recognition and PhD entry. Financial constraints are
certainly a factor in some able students choosing to study a three-year degree, and
not taking-up the extra year which means another year of debt accumulation. HEFCE
teaching funding provision should ensure that science departments can continue to
offer four-year courses.
50. In addition, PhD courses which are essential to certain industrial and academic
sectors now generally take four years. During this time, loans from earlier study are
accruing additional interest. This could have negative impact on future student choice
to take up postgraduate research. It is therefore essential that the Government
monitors the impact of the new fees regime on the uptake of postgraduate study.
What incentives should industry offer STEM graduates in order to attract them?
51. Employers seem ready to offer competitive salaries to STEM subject graduates
although HESA data shows that those that have studied engineering disciplines
dominate the top earning STEM graduates. R&D in sectors such as pharmaceuticals
and electronics do attract good numbers of applicants, but the manufacturing and
materials areas have much more difficulty. Salaries offered by the financial services
sector, where many STEM graduates can and do thrive, have outcompeted the
commercial and academic sectors substantially for some time. Some STEM graduates
will continue to be drawn there. However, it is not just the salary that deters them –
as one employer puts it “either they want to do engineering, or they don’t and can’t
be persuaded”.
52. Professional career paths and growth structures can be designed for those that do
choose a technical career, so that they can advance without needing to move into
large managerial roles. In addition, industry and HEIs could collaborate more to offer
industrial placements as part of degree programmes to develop work-related skills.
graduates?
53. The RSC believes that there are a number of good schemes being run around the UK
to help get industry engaged with students, such as the Industrial Advisory Boards
(IABs), but there appears to be a lack of a national strategy. The year-in-industry
placements that are available appear to have been poorly populated and efforts
should be made to address this, as these placements are excellent learning
opportunities.
54. The question of curriculum development in the STEM subjects in higher education
has a substantial bearing on employer involvement. Larger employers commonly have
411 See footnote 396.
716
a series of links with academic departments, offering the opportunity to contribute to

course design. Some report 412 that HEIs are slow to take up the offer, and note the
contrast with American universities which use such collaboration as a feature of their
marketing to prospective students.
55. The EU platform for sustainable chemistry, SusChem, and the European Chemical
Industry Council, Cefic, are investigating the need to build skills capacity to achieve a
sustainable chemical industry sector. 413 One outcome from this is the need for
chemistry degree programmes to develop competencies that will enable graduates to
function in a broad range of industries associated with chemical endeavours, and not
to have too narrow a focus.
22 December 2011
412 The Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE), 2006, International Competitiveness: Businesses Working with UK
Universities. http://www.cihe.co.uk/category/knowledge/publications/
413 http://www.suschem.org/upl/3/default/doc/Skills-for-Innovation-in-the-European-Chemical-Industry.pdf
717
Appendix
Figure 1 HESA employment data for a range of undergraduate degree subjects.
718
Figure 2 HESA data on the importance of the undergraduate degree taken

different job sectors.
Figure 3 DTI data showing the range of careers of STEM graduates.
719
Figure 4 The number of students taking chemistry A-Level
A-Level entries
100000
90000
80000
Chemistry
70000
Physics
60000 Biology
50000 Maths
40000 English
French
30000
Business Studies
20000
10000
0
1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011
Figure 5 The number of applications and acceptances to study chemistry at UK

HEIs (HESA data)
Relationship Between
Applications and Acceptances to
Chemistry
25,000 5.8
5.7
20,000 5.6
5.5
Number of Chemistry
5.4
Number of Students
15,000 Applications
5.3 Number of Chemistry
5.2 Aceeptances
10,000 Ratio of Applications to
5.1
Acceptances
5
5,000 4.9
4.8
0 4.7
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Year
720
Figure 6 Work sectors of STEM graduates: core – science knowledge required;

related – science knowledge helpful; non-science – science knowledge
unnecessary)
Table 1 Articles produced and citations received for the UK, Germany and the US.
Year 2001-2011 UK USA Germany
No of articles 65,558 222,750 93,739
No of Citations 984,674 4,158,156 1,304,024
Average Citation per
article 15.02 18.67 13.91
Table 2 Acceptances to STEM undergraduate course per region of the UK, compared to the
population of each region.
Acceptances
Maths & Population/ 103 x
Region Biological Physical Computer Million Acceptances/
Sciences Sciences Science Engineering Total Population
Scotland 3134 1554 2488 2982 10158 5.25 1.94
Wales 2499 957 952 960 5368 3.0 1.79

Northern
Ireland 632 377 806 620 2435 1.75 1.39
East
Midlands 2180 1155 1711 1976 7022 4.25 1.65
Eastern 1383 400 1573 811 4167 5.5 0.76
Greater
London 3564 1201 4591 3773 13129 7.25 1.81
721
North
East 1746 849 1466 906 4967 2.5 1.99
North
West 3633 1718 2675 1957 9992 7.0 1.43
South East 2966 1886 2747 1973 9572 8.25 1.16

South
West 2540 1424 1759 1531 7254 5.0 1.45
West
Midlands 2333 1024 2291 1898 7546 5.25 1.44
Yorkshire
& the
Humber 3265 1408 2512 2575 9760 5.25 1.86
Total 29884 13953 25571 21962 91370 60.25 1.52
722
Russell Group – Written evidence
The Russell Group represents 20 leading UK universities which are committed to

maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and
unrivalled links with business and the public sector. The subject of this inquiry is an
important one to us, and we are pleased to respond to the committee’s call for evidence.
We have not addressed all of the questions in the call for evidence but have focused in our
response below on those that are most relevant to our interests.
1. What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?
1.1 ‘STEM’ is simply a shorthand term used to refer to a very broad range of subjects,
comprising all the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics. STEM
subjects are often discussed in relation to two other subject groupings, and the
distinctions between these should be noted. The related terms are as follows:
• Strategically important and vulnerable subjects (SIVS). In England, HEFCE

has co-ordinated a programme of work to support SIVS since 2005. This has often
focused on selected subjects within STEM, but has not normally treated all subjects
on a uniform basis. For example, HEFCE created a mechanism for universities to
shift student numbers into ‘vulnerable STEM subjects’ in 2010-11. Eligible STEM
subjects for this initiative were Chemistry, Engineering, Physics and Maths.
Therefore STEM and SIVS overlap, but they are not interchangeable terms. (The
non-STEM subjects within SIVS are modern foreign languages, area studies and
minority foreign languages, and quantitative social science.) HEFCE has recently
published a list of subjects which it considers to fall within both the STEM and SIVS
categories. 414
• High-cost subjects. This term has no formal definition. It is often used to refer to
all subjects funded by HEFCE in price bands A and B (including clinical and
laboratory-based subjects). Again this grouping intersects with STEM, but is not
synonymous with that term.
2. Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students
2.1 It was encouraging to see another overall increase in the number of students
taking and achieving good passes in A-level sciences and maths in 2011. We are
pleased that efforts by our universities and others to persuade students to
consider carefully the benefits of taking science and maths appear to be paying
dividends. Similarly a further increase in the numbers taking single science GCSEs
in 2011 was a welcome indication of a growing awareness on the part of schools
and young people of the importance of STEM subjects to future academic and
career choices.
2.2 However, we remain concerned that too few students overall study STEM
subjects, potentially creating long-term problems. We are particularly concerned
that too few students from state schools opt for single science GCSEs, and too
few take science and maths A-levels, restricting their options at university and
closing off certain career paths. We have published Informed Choices, a guide to
414 See response to Q7 on their FAQ page: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/funding/201213/faq.htm#q7
723
post-16 study options 415 , which aims to improve information about how subject
choices at school can impact on university applications.
2.3 As well as differences in subject choices, we are also concerned about the
attainment gap between state and independent schools, which affects access to
Russell Group universities, including their courses in STEM subjects. In 2011, 1.3%
of all A level entries from maintained schools were in Further Maths, compared to
3% of all entries from independent schools, and 23.9% achieved an A* compared
to 39.1% of independent school entries 416 .
2.4 The availability of high quality subject-specialist teachers will obviously be

important if we are to see an increase in the number of young people choosing
and succeeding in STEM subjects at GCSE and A-level (or equivalent).
3. What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of
3.1 As we explain in Informed Choices, some advanced level subjects can open up or
close off university options. In a similar way, pre-16 choices can affect the options
open to a student post-16. If the English Baccalaureate changes incentives so that
more young people have the opportunity to take GCSEs in subjects which keep
open the option of taking the A-levels that lead to STEM degree courses, this will
be welcome. It is essential that all students, whatever type of school they attend,
still have the opportunity to study separate sciences at GCSE as they are
important preparation for A-level study. Pupils who take separate sciences at
GCSE are more likely to take STEM subjects at A-level and to get higher grades in
A-level science compared to those who take double science. 417 We would be
concerned if the introduction of the English Baccalaureate discouraged schools
from entering pupils for separate sciences.
4. Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education

4.1 Employers are increasingly emphasising the need for graduates with STEM skills.
Russell Group universities make a major contribution to the supply of highly
skilled individuals with STEM qualifications. In 2009-10, around 30% of STEM
graduates qualified at Russell Group universities. This includes nearly 80% of
graduates in medicine and dentistry.
4.2 There is evidence to suggest that the research-led nature of the teaching provided
at Russell Group universities is linked to a high quality of STEM provision. 418
Research suggests that when undergraduate study in STEM subjects is linked with
research, students are more likely to remain interested and involved in STEM after
they graduate, and are more likely to engage in postgraduate research themselves.
415 http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/informed-choices/
416 DfE: GCE/Applied GCE A/AS and Equivalent Examination Results in England, 2010/11 (Provisional)
417 The likelihood of getting an A or B at A level chemistry in the maintained sector is increased by 76 per cent for pupils
who take three separate science GCSEs compared to those who took double science. Source: Science and Innovation
Investment Framework 2004-2014: Next Steps (March 2006), p.47. Available from
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/7/8/bud06_science_332v1.pdf
418 Russell, S., Evaluation of National Science Foundation Support for Undergraduate Research Opportunities, 2006, p.5. Available
from www.sri.com/policy/csted/reports/university/documents/URO%20ES%20Synthesis%20for%20Web.pdf
724
HEFCE has stated that the benefits to students of being exposed to research at
university are particularly pronounced in STEM subjects. 419
4.3 One example of the contribution that Russell Group universities are making to the
development of STEM provision is our engagement with the National HE STEM
Programme, hosted by the University of Birmingham, with activities within London
and the South-East overseen by the University of Southampton. The Programme
promotes enhancement to curriculum delivery and seeks to widen access to STEM
degrees. Fifteen of the seventeen Russell Group universities in England and Wales
are involved, with many working in collaboration. Particular examples of innovative
provision include significant changes to the undergraduate curriculum at the
University of Leeds to enable students to develop mathematical modelling and
problem solving skills, the Nuclear Island project at Imperial College which is
attracting national attention and further support, and work to embed group
projects with local industry into the undergraduate physics curriculum at the
universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and UCL.
4.4 Surveys by the CBI, CIHE and IoD all highlight broader ‘employability’ skills or
‘soft’ skills as employers’ most important requirement for graduate recruits. The
focus on ‘employability’ skills suggests that abilities such as independent and critical
thinking, communication skills, problem solving and an entrepreneurial attitude are
those which are prioritised by employers. The research-led learning environment
at Russell Group universities helps students to develop their employability skills,
and they are informed and supported by exposure to international research
excellence and leading thinkers in their fields. Through this experience they learn
to take a self-reliant, independent approach to learning and tackling new problems.
4.5 In some cases Russell Group universities offer courses that develop particular
skills valued by employers. Notable cases include the LSE 100 course 420 and the
Career Management Skills modules at the University of Manchester421 and the
University of Bristol 422 . The University of Sheffield also has an accredited
‘Developing Career Skills’ module 423 as well as ‘Molecules to Market’. In some
cases, employability skills are explicitly built into course curricula – they form a
core part of engineering courses at the University of Birmingham, for example.
4.6 The research-led learning experience at Russell Group universities benefits our
graduates in an extremely competitive employment market. They receive
approximately a 10% salary top-up over other graduates 424 and are among the
most sought after worldwide. Six of the top 13 universities in the world, as ranked
by employers, are Russell Group institutions. 425
419 HEFCE, Review of Research, 2000, Annex F p.1.

420 See http://www2.lse.ac.uk/intranet/students/LSE100/Home.aspx for more information
421 See http://www.careers.manchester.ac.uk/recruit/cms/ for more information
422 http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/handbook/general/unit.jsp?unit=COMS20804
423 See http://www.shef.ac.uk/bms/undergrad/modules/bms227
424 This approximate wage premium can vary considerably according to the subject studied and university attended.
Chevalier, A. and Conlon, G. “Does it pay to go to a prestigious university?” Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE
(March 2003)
425 World University Rankings 2011 – Employer Review http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-
university-rankings/2011/indicator-rankings/employer-review
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5. What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching,
the quality of degrees and the supply of STEM courses in HEIs?
5.1 Whilst graduate contributions are important, it is also vital that the Government
continues to invest directly in higher education teaching, particularly in high-cost
subjects, if our world-class universities are to continue to perform their vital role
as the engine room of economic recovery
5.2 Subjects such as medicine, engineering, chemistry and physics are extremely
important to the future success of the UK’s economy and cannot be sustained on
tuition fee income alone. Their teaching costs are significantly higher than other
subjects because of the requirement for expensive laboratories and equipment.
There are also particular cost pressures associated with maintaining such provision
in a world-class research-intensive university. HEFCE’s proposed teaching grant in
England of just £1,500 per student for subjects in Band B in 2012-13 is not
sufficient to enable universities to sustain high quality research-led provision in
these subjects in the medium to long-term. We note also that the funding rate of
£1,500 is subject to change, and could be reduced if recruitment in these subject
areas increases at a national level. It is therefore essential that the remaining
teaching grant available to HEFCE is targeted at high-cost and strategically
important subjects in order to secure their financial sustainability. We have urged
the Government to ensure that any overspends on the student support budget do
not lead to a cut in HEFCE funding for these vital subjects. 426
5.3 In recent years, HEFCE has provided funding of around £1,200 per student
through a targeted allocation titled ‘Additional Funding for Very High Cost and
Vulnerable Subjects’. This has helped to meet additional costs associated with
teaching chemistry, physics and some engineering courses, which are of strategic
importance to the economy, but vulnerable due to low or fluctuating student
demand. This additional funding has proved essential to ensuring the sustainability
of taught provision in these subjects in recent years. It will be important to
continue supporting the additional costs associated with these subjects for both
continuing and new students in 2012/13 and in following years.
5.4 We recognise that the high cost of the student support package requires some
controls in student numbers and believe that maintaining quality is more important
than increasing overall student numbers. We also agree that universities with high
demand for courses from highly-qualified students should be allowed to expand,
should they wish to do so, as long as this does not increase the overall costs to
government or compromise the quality of provision.
5.5 The changes HEFCE have recently announced to the original student number
control proposals are welcome, recognising that they posed a potential risk to the
provision of some courses in strategically important but vulnerable subjects. 427 The
decision to exclude these courses from the ‘core and margin’ policy will make it
426 See Russell Group response to HEFCE consultation on teaching funding and student number controls for 2012/13
http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/uploads/HEFCE-consultation-response-2Sep-FINAL.pdf and Russell Group response to the
HE White Paper consultation, http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/uploads/RUSSELL-GROUP-WHITE-PAPER-RESPONSE-
FINAL.pdf
427 See HEFCE publication ‘Student Number Controls for 2012/13 (HEFCE 2011/30)
726
more likely that our leading universities will be able to maintain the number of
places available on their science, engineering and language courses.
5.6 However, the ‘core and margin’ policy is still problematic. We do not believe that
a bidding competition to re-distribute those student places to institutions charging
lower fees will do anything to drive up quality or improve student choice. The
student number controls for 2012 represent a radical change from recent years,
and it will be important to monitor the impact on the supply of places in individual
subjects, in case there are any unintended consequences, including any impact on
applications across the rest of the UK.
5.7 Reductions in both teaching capital and research capital funding present a further
risk to quality given the need for universities equip and maintain laboratories to
the standards necessary for modern scientific education and research.
6. What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary

for all universities to teach undergraduates and postgraduate and conduct
6.1 The culture of enquiry-based, independent learning in a world-class research

environment is at the heart of the student experience in Russell Group
universities 428 . Students engage in research processes, work with their field’s
leading experts, have access to first-rate libraries and facilities, and are part of a
highly motivated and talented peer group. Research-led learning actively engages
students in their learning experience, encouraging them to pursue new knowledge
and to develop the independence of thought, critical thinking and entrepreneurial
skills and ability to handle uncertainty and new problems – skills that are integral
to the graduate-level jobs that develop our knowledge economy.
6.2 The research-intensive environment provides the circumstances in which

research-led learning can flourish, enhanced through institutional culture and
strategy. As large institutions, Russell Group universities are able to instil a culture
of research across the breadth and depth of the academic community (from staff
to students), as well as provide the resources and facilities to support and exploit
the relationship between teaching, learning and research for the benefit of
students. The size and success of the research endeavour in Russell Group
universities enables them to offer a student experience where teaching and
learning are enriched and informed by leading-edge, world-class research. As
noted at paragraph 5.2 above, these benefits are likely to be particularly
pronounced in STEM subjects.
6.3 The Russell Group believes that funding should ensure that the next generation of
researchers receive world-class training and support. Resources should be
directed towards the institutions most capable of delivering excellent provision, to
maximise UK competitiveness globally. This view was shared by the 2010 review
of postgraduate education – Professor Adrian Smith recommended that to get the
best value from public investment in postgraduate research, funding should ‘be
targeted in areas of excellence.’
428‘Research-led learning: the heart of a Russell Group university experience’

http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/uploads/Learning-in-a-research-intensive-environment.pdf
727
6.4 Leading research-intensive universities act as a magnet for global talent and
investment, attracting large numbers of the brightest academics, researchers and
students across a wide range of disciplines. The critical mass of talent, resources
and research infrastructure in leading research-intensive universities has a positive
and lasting effect on the career paths of research students, and provides the best
environment in which postgraduate research degrees should be undertaken.
Talented PhD students are an essential component of ‘doing’ excellent STEM
research. Therefore, appropriate mechanisms need to be in place to reward high-
quality research environments, in recognition of truly world-class research, and
high concentrations of excellence across a breadth of disciplines. At the same time,
it should be acknowledged that we have a very diverse workforce in the UK and
that not all graduates will need the very high-level skills fostered in this kind of
environment. Not every university needs to be a research-intensive institution.
background?
7.1 Russell Group universities undertake a range of activities with schools to raise
aspirations and attainment in science and maths amongst students who might not
otherwise have continued with these subjects 429 . For example, the Inspire
programme at Imperial College aims to bridge the gaps between scientific
research, universities and schools. Top researchers in physics and chemistry enter
a 9-month programme combining a PGCE with activities in schools, such as master
classes, science clubs, workshops, demonstration lectures and university visits430 .
Oxford’s successful UNIQ summer schools for targeted state-educated students
include nine courses focused on STEM subjects, out of 25 courses available in
2011. Details of other programmes to increase the diversity of applicants for
STEM courses are available on universities’ website and in their access agreements.
7.2 Eliahou Dangoor Scholarships, launched with a £3 million donation from Dr Naim
Dangoor, offer a £1000 scholarship for students who wish to study STEM subjects
at a Russell Group or 1994 Group university. Precise selection criteria vary
between institutions but all Russell Group universities prioritise students from
under-privileged or non-traditional backgrounds. 431
8. Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers

8.1 As noted in our submission to Professor Adrian Smith’s review of postgraduate

education, all Russell Group universities provide doctoral students with
transferrable skills as a core part of their programmes. This is likely to include
communications skills, leadership, management and team working, as well as
entrepreneurial skills, such as IP management and writing a business plan, where
this is appropriate to the degree programme. Evidence available from institutions
and business suggests that this is highly valued by students and employers, and it is
internationally recognised as a positive attribute of UK PhDs. All of this training is
429 http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/uploads/Raising-aspirations-and-attainment-in-science_1.pdf
430 http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/inspire
431 http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/Dangoor.aspx
728
in addition to the specialist skills that are an inherent part of doctoral

programmes.
8.2 Companies and other employers engage in the development and delivery of
doctoral programmes in Russell Group universities in a variety of ways, including:
• Joint development and/or funding of doctoral programmes including identification of

key skills requirements and research areas to be addressed
• Provision of sponsorships or bursaries for students
• Site visits, seminars, lecturers and study days with businesses and employers
• Co-supervised projects focused on research challenges identified by the employer,
conducted partly or wholly within a workplace setting (this is particularly true for
STEM and other practically based courses)
• Provision of employer mentors for students
8.3 Employer engagement in doctoral provision varies widely, but a significant degree
of employer engagement is likely in disciplines such as engineering, computer
sciences, biochemistry, architecture and design-based subjects. Examples include:
• EngD (Southampton) - the Engineering Doctorate combines the intellectual challenge

of a PhD with taught courses from the Southampton Executive MBA Programme and
commercial experience gained through conducting research in collaboration with an
industrial sponsor. Sponsoring companies range in size from multi-nationals to
University spin-outs and Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
• EngD in Biopharmaceutical Process Development (Newcastle) – an innovative four
year programme run at the Biopharmaceutical Bioprocessing Technology Centre. A
focus on industry helps students understand how industry thinks, what industry is
looking for, industrial timescales and challenges.
9. What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and
9.1 As mentioned above at paragraph 6.4, we support the view that available funding
should be targeted at those institutions most capable of delivering the very best
research and postgraduate provision, particularly in current economic conditions.
We support funding for doctoral training centres and other block grant funding for
doctoral programmes provided by the Research Councils. This is a cost efficient
and effective means of supporting postgraduate research. A major strength of this
approach is the flexibility institutions have in identifying strategic areas of research,
meeting the circumstances and preferences of individual students, and meeting the
needs of other collaborative partners. Further development of partnership funding
for doctoral programmes would be valuable.
9.2 World-class universities have strong track records in technology exploitation, and
are highly effective in facilitating the exploitation of research for economic or
social gain. Evidence suggests that this is in part due to the presence of a critical
mass of expertise, infrastructure and resources, enabling larger, research-intensive
729
universities to undertake more excellent research, educate more doctoral

students, and have more effective systems for knowledge transfer. 432
10. Should state funding be used to promote Masters Degrees and is the
students?
10.1 The Russell Group believes that it remains important to continue to invest a
wide range of postgraduate provision – both in terms of subject area and mode of
delivery. Providing a breadth of educational opportunities as well as those which
are obviously relevant to specific careers is desirable because it is not possible to
predict what knowledge, expertise or skills the UK might need in the future.
11.1 The Russell Group has welcomed the Government’s recognition that
participation in postgraduate courses (both taught and research degrees) should
be carefully monitored in the coming years to determine any impact on
progression to postgraduate study resulting from changes to undergraduate
funding. We are concerned that the new fees regime could have a negative impact
on the propensity of some UK and EU students to pursue postgraduate study if
the student support system for postgraduates is not strengthened and look
forward to seeing more details about how this will be monitored. Postgraduates
are critically important to the economy and for the longer-term health of the
sector.
11.2 With public funding significantly constrained during the current CSR period,
we recognise that it may be difficult to find additional public funds to support
postgraduate students, for example through provision of income-contingent loans
on the same basis as for undergraduate students. However, some innovative
alternative models have recently been proposed, which may be worth further
consideration 433 . A range of alternative finance options were also proposed during
the period of the Browne Review, including options involving private finance and
banks. While the Browne Review found that those options were not ideal for
implementation across the whole sector at undergraduate level, it would be worth
investigating if private finance schemes could be developed in a more targeted way
to support some form of student loan to postgraduate students434 .
12. What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that
12.1 A key aspect of developing employability skills for many students is the
opportunity to gain first-hand experience of the workplace during their studies.
The CBI has placed great emphasis on the advantages of workplace experience in
432 Wellings, P. Intellectual Property and research benefits (2008)

433 See for example Leunig, T. Mastering Postgraduate Funding, Centre Forum, Oct 2011.
434 The Russell Group provided an overview of private finance options in its second submission to the Browne Review, and
we have suggested that the Government consider the applicability of these, and any other private finance options, for
providing support to postgraduate students.
730
helping students to understand what it is like to work at graduate level, what skills
they will need, and how to apply their learning. Students at Russell Group
institutions have considerable opportunities to engage in such placement schemes
and other arrangements that offer them experience of the workplace.
12.2 Many degree courses at Russell Group universities incorporate work

placements as a central part of the student’s learning experience, and even where
these are not a credit-bearing aspect of the programme, students are encouraged
to take placements to develop their understanding of academic knowledge. The
University of Warwick has a bursary scheme for work experience, and the
University of Birmingham offers placements with industry partners. In some cases,
though, financial constraints are affecting the ability of industry to provide
meaningful placements and opportunities are being lost, and dialogue with industry
is essential. The Employer Liaison Group in the Faculty of Science at the University
of Sheffield is one example of an effective forum for this.
12.3 As mentioned at paragraph 4.4, Russell Group universities offer courses that
develop particular skills valued by employers. They often work with commercial
partners to develop their curricula, and in some cases provide tailor-made courses
for businesses. For example, the University of Southampton works with a
commercial partner in delivering a custom-made training course for the
commercial partner’s staff members (Case Study attached as annex).
15 December 2011
731
ANNEX
Case study: From Research Skills to Bespoke Training, University of
Southampton
Picture courtesy of Halyard, available from http://www.halyard.eu.com/index.html
The Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at the University of Southampton has
developed a productive strategic partnership with Halyard, a manufacturer of marine
exhaust systems.
Halyard specialises in noise reduction systems for boats and yachts. In 2003, responding to
new EU regulations limiting the permissible noise generation on leisure craft, the company
initiated a research project to investigate the key elements of noise generation on boats.
The project was co-funded by the EU, and led to a fruitful research collaboration with the
ISVR at Southampton.
The research identified marine exhaust systems as being the key noise-generating element
on leisure craft. Furthermore, it led to the development of a novel noise measurement
device, which allowed Halyard to gain an advantage over its industry rivals.
The research project also identified a lack of awareness of noise reduction devices and
measurement tools among Halyard staff. It highlighted the need for training in this area to
improve the support Halyard staff could offer to clients.
Halyard then approached the ISVR about developing a bespoke course on noise and
vibration awareness for its sales and development staff. The 12 month course is delivered in
a flexible format, where employees can choose to attend those sessions most relevant to
their work, with the further possibility of ad hoc sessions where necessary.
The course has been hugely beneficial for Halyard: its staff are now able to apply technical
expertise to an early stage in the design process, and customer satisfaction has improved,
with clients evidently impressed by the technical knowledge of Halyard staff; the company
was recently rated 9.3 out of 10 for customer satisfaction in this area.
732
Lord Sainsbury of Turville – Written evidence
I see that a Sub-Committee of the Lords Science and Technology Committee, under your
chairmanship, is conducting an inquiry into higher education in STEM subjects.
I am sure you will have received numerous submissions of evidence from a range of
interested parties, but I wanted to draw your attention to one issue which I feel goes to the
very heart of the debate. It is the pressing need for the key stakeholders (including young
people, university vice-chancellors, and policy-makers) to be regularly presented with
reliable, useable data and market intelligence about the supply of, and demand for, STEM
graduates.
If this need is to be met, I am convinced that a single agency – probably HEFCE or UKCES –
must be tasked by government to collate all of the relevant information and data from the
numerous different agencies which currently collect it. This same agency should further be
required to publish, annually, a small set of highly readable digests of the information. It is
not possible to do long-term manpower planning, but it is important if the labour market is
to work well that everyone has information on the current position.
It is vital that these annual digests are written in a style that meets the needs of the key
stakeholders – those people who are actually in a position to affect the flow of graduate-
level STEM skills. The stakeholders might be categorised into three groupings, each
requiring a digest tailored to their specific needs: university vice-chancellors and FE college
leaders; young people, their parents and career advisers; and local and national policy
makers.
Each of these digests – or ‘state of the nation’ report if you will – would need to include:
a) data relating to the current supply of undergraduates. Crucially, this needs to include
an analysis of, and commentary on, any trends emerging from the data. It would not,
for example, be sufficient simply to publish a table of undergraduate numbers by
subject. What is required is for the agency responsible to flag up emerging trends
such as, say, a steady but persistent decrease in the number of chemical engineering
students, or a rapid rise in the number studying psychology;
b) destination data by subject, again identifying trends where employment rates or wage
returns for certain subjects differ significantly from the average or where they are
changing over time, possibly reflecting a change in demand from employers;
c) an assessment of the current labour market, (identifying any current undersupply or

oversupply of graduates by subject and sector), and Sector Skill Council predictions
for relative growth in vacancy rates by sector, including analyses of demographic
data. Employers facing shortages could be asked to input into this assessment.
I, and many others who have examined the issue, have long been convinced that more
students would choose STEM subjects at university if only more of them were aware of the
extremely positive story (better wage returns, increased employability, wider career choice,
etc) that the data relating to STEM courses tell.
733
Equally, universities and FE colleges will only be able to provide courses that more closely
match the needs of employers if they are in possession of up-to-date, useable information
on the labour market and its demand for STEM skills. And of course policy-makers will only
be able to target scarce resources appropriately and monitor the impact of their
interventions if they have access to a clear and full picture of the STEM skills landscape.
I believe most strongly that the provision of such information, in formats that are of genuine
use to young people, universities and colleges, and policy-makers is long overdue. I would
urge your Sub-Committee to examine this issue as part of your inquiry.
13 December 2011
734
Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, EDF Energy Nuclear Generation,
Expedition Engineering, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre and Oxford Instruments – Oral
Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, EDF Energy

Nuclear Generation, Expedition Engineering, MRC Clinical Sciences
Centre and Oxford Instruments – Oral evidence (QQ 348-365)
735
The Science Council – Written evidence
1. The Science Council is an umbrella organisation of over 30 learned societies and

professional bodies in the UK drawn from across science and its applications: a list of
member organisations is attached.
2. In addition to providing a mechanism for the sector to work collectively, the Science
Council develops and leads collaborative projects working with member bodies and
the wider scientific community: examples include the Future Morph 435 web site
designed to provide information about careers opportunities, and LMI analysis of the
UK Science Workforce. 436
3. The Science Council also works to advance the professional practice of science and
since 2004 has awarded the professional qualification of Chartered Scientist (CSci). It
is now leading an initiative that aims to raise the profile, aspirations and retention of
technician and graduate scientists by developing new professional registers at these
levels (Registered Scientist and Registered Science Technician) which will be launched
early in 2012.
4. Collectively our member bodies represent more than 400,000 individual members,
including scientists, teachers and senior executives in industry, academia and the
public sector.
5. The Science Council has consulted its member organisations in the preparation of
this submission.
General questions
6. STEM is a confusing term. Although the acronym specifically includes science,

technology, engineering and mathematics, many remain unsure whether specific
subject disciplines and professions are included or not. It is noted that there is
considerable overlap between science, technology and engineering.
7. Within the Science Council we have chosen to focus on science, pure and applied.
We often also make reference to the ’core disciplines’ of science, i.e. physics,
chemistry and biology, and mathematics. The Science Council has defined science as a
methodology 437 , rather than as a subject or group of subjects. In our definition the
term ‘science’ embraces a wide range of both pure and applied subjects as well as
professional sectors including technology, engineering and medicine. There are
several different approaches even within government as to what is, and what is not,
included as a STEM subject and in LMI research there are a further set of variances.
The Science Council supports the BIS Science for Careers group recommended in its
report published in March 2010 that there should be greater consistency in the
definition of what was is and is not STEM. 438
8. In general, we do not find the term ‘STEM’ particularly helpful and rarely use it when
working with external audiences.
435 www.futuremorph.org
436 http://www.sciencecouncil.org/content/science-workforce
437 Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a
systematic methodology based on evidence.

438 Science for Careers: Report of the BIS Science and Society Expert Group March 2010
736
9. Many, particularly within academia, tend to think of ‘scientists’ as those with PhDs
working in academia or research, describing individuals as ‘leaving’ science if they
work in other sectors. The Science Council takes a much broader view of what a
professional scientist might be and includes applied scientists. The most obvious ways
to define different types of scientists is to draw on the central discipline underpinning
their work: physics, chemistry, biology, soil science, psychology etc. Professional
bodies also work around sectors such as energy or water but this does not help to
describe what people actually do in their work. In order to give some shape to this
the Science Council has developed descriptors of 10 types of scientist:439 These are:
• Explorer
• Investigator
• Developer/Translational
• Service provider/operational
• Monitor/regulator
• Entrepreneur
• Communicator
• Teacher
• Business/Marketing
• Policy maker
10. Many of these roles will have a common underpinning in terms of the essential
scientific knowledge but they will be combined with a different range of skills and
aptitudes. These definitions have proved to be most helpful in exploring policy and
training needs for scientists working in different sectors and types of role, as well as
in developing discussion about career opportunities.
11. There is also an unhelpful tendency to use the language of vocations when talking
about degrees in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), something that
is not done when discussing humanities and arts degrees. Medicine, dentistry,
veterinary science, nursing etc can properly be considered ‘vocational’ where the
qualification is also a license to practice, or the first step towards this: typically 90%
or more of these graduates would enter the linked occupations. Having a degree in
physics, chemistry, biology, natural sciences or mathematics does not automatically
create a physicist, chemist, biologist, natural scientist or mathematician in a career or
professional sense and is no more ‘vocational’ than a history, anthropology, classics, a
language or philosophy degree. While those who wish to enter research careers in
these areas are likely to require a specialist degree in the subject, for the most part
the preparation will be good grounding for a very wide range of both science and non
science career options.
12. STEM graduates provide value in employment across the economy, not just within
academic and research sectors. These “hidden” aspects of the demand for graduates
add to the difficulty of quantifying the numbers required, but all indications are that
demand from all sectors is steady or increasing. The Science Council believes that
there is real value in people having a science based degree and for them to take that
knowledge and skill into all areas of the economy. Some people describe these
graduates as ‘leaving’ science and some complain that the best science students are
going to well paid jobs in accountancy and finance rather than staying in research. The
data does not support that argument: just 4% of physical science graduates go into
439 http://www.sciencecouncil.org/content/10-types-scientist-%E2%80%93-science-jobs-are-not-all-same
737
finance and 2% of engineers and it is unsurprising that 20% of mathematics graduates

move into financial sectors where their specific skills are in high demand. 440
13. Recent research undertaken for the Science Council shows that science skills have
become increasingly important across all sectors of the UK economy and society,
with 5.8 million people now employed in science-based roles: this is projected to
increase to 7.1 million people by 2030. This research looked at the UK workforce in
its entirety, thus enabling an understanding of the true size and scope of the science
workforce across the whole economy, rather than limiting the research to
considering only those working in a narrow band of so-called science sectors.
14. In this research the definitions used were:
Primary science workers: workers in occupations that are purely science based and
require the consistent application of scientific knowledge and skills in order to execute
the role effectively, for example, Biochemists, Chemical Engineers, Science and
Engineering Technicians and Medical Radiographers.
Secondary science workers: workers in occupations that are science related and
require a mixed application of scientific knowledge and skills alongside other skill sets,
which are often of greater importance to executing the role effectively: for example,
actuaries, Animal Husbandry Managers, Chiropodists, Civil Engineers, Environmental
Protection Officers, Pharmaceutical Dispensers, Teaching Professionals and Software
Professionals.
Non-science workers: workers in occupations that are not science based and have no
requirement for science based knowledge or skills, for example, Travel Agents,
Musicians, Legal Professionals and Housing and Welfare Officers.
Core science sectors: sectors that are primarily science based in their core activity.
Related science sectors: sectors in which the primary activity is not necessarily
science based, but has a strong relationship to science.
Non-science sectors: sectors which have no science based or related activity.

15. The research identified that 20% of the current workforce is employed in science
roles, a total of 5.8 million people (1.2m primary science workers and 4.6m
secondary science workers). The research results serve to emphasise the
interconnectedness and cross-disciplinarity of science in today's economy and
highlight the proliferation of secondary science workers, people who are dependent
on science knowledge and skills as part of their role and who will not previously have
been identified as part of the science workforce. Significant numbers of scientists
were found in employment sectors as diverse as health and social care, education,
food and farming, communications, finance, retail and public sector services.
16. The science workforce consists of those with postgraduate qualifications and
graduates as well as people with non-graduate qualifications. Within the science
sectors (core and related) 34% of the science workforce is non-graduate (with 17%
QCF level 3&4); 32% are graduate and 26% are postgraduate. In comparison with the
non science sectors and the economy as a whole there are significantly more
graduates and postgraduates in the core and related science workforce.
440 DIUS, 2009. “The Demand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Skills”
738
influence supply?
17. The wide distribution of science graduates across workforce sectors illustrated by
the Science Council workforce research indicates that the demand for graduates goes
beyond the traditional science employers. We also know from some research
currently in progress that 58 % of STEM graduates are employed by SMEs. These
factors indicate a substantial need for STEM graduates but one that it is very hard to
quantify due to the nature of the “hidden” sectors and with the way most LMI is
currently generated around SIC and SOC codes. The CBI and others have voiced
their concerns regarding the supply of graduates and made some statements
regarding the anticipated growth in demand. The CBI’s Building for Growth education
and skills survey 2011 441 stated that 52% of employers expect difficulty recruiting
STEM staff in the next three years.
18. The 2010 UKCES National Strategic Skills Audit442 highlights areas of growth in the
economy including the following STEM related sectors: advanced manufacturing, life
sciences and pharmaceuticals, low carbon economy, professional and financial
services, digital economy, and engineering and construction. In addition the UK will
need to develop a new generation of wealth creation sectors in such areas as fashion,
creative industries and energy generation, all of which are likely to increase demand
for graduates with STEM skills and awareness. Other areas identified with growing
demand include health, agriculture and aquaculture and environmental sciences.
19. A number of sectors have a looming problem with an aging workforce, for example,
agriculture and aquaculture, metals and professional organisations and consultancy
where an above average proportion of science workers are in older age groups.
Some of the ageing effects also have strong regional dimensions. Another indication of
this problem is the length of time workers have held their current role and with
sectors such as agriculture and aquaculture data shows that an above average
proportion of workers have been in their role for more than 20 years.443
20. It should also be noted here that recent BIS research 444 looking at the motivations for
students choosing STEM degree courses has shown that interest in the subject and
enjoyment are given greater emphasis (77% and 67% respectively) than the career
opportunities afforded by the course (52%).
21. In some specific areas shortages are already apparent. For example, in food science
and technology it is evident that demand exceeds supply for UK-derived graduates;
this evidence is from research conducted jointly by the Institute of Food Science and
Technology and Improve Ltd (the Food & Drink Industry Sector Skills Council). Food
industry companies have developed some strategies to ensure maintain the supply of
graduates to meet their own needs. This includes direct interactions with
undergraduate students before graduation as well as recruiting from the EU and
overseas, (but it must be remembered that recruiting from overseas from a finite
student market can hinder the agri-food development of third world countries).
441 http://www.cbi.org.uk/business-issues/education-and-skills/in-focus/stem-skills/
442 http://www.ukces.org.uk/ourwork/nssa
443 The current and future UK science workforce, TBR for the Science Council, Sept. 2011
http://www.sciencecouncil.org/content/science-workforce
444 STEM graduates in non-STEM jobs, BIS Research Paper Number 30, March 2011
739
22. Responses to our consultation commented that workforce planning was rarely a
precise process and that it was very difficult to aim for ‘just enough’ STEM graduates,
especially when these skills were clearly sought after in many non STEM areas of the
economy. A larger pool of STEM graduates enables employers to choose the best and
most able to undertake key science and technical roles, something that was largely
welcomed by our respondents. It is also worth noting that only the best graduates
will be able to compete at the highest level with the competition from China, India
and elsewhere for jobs with leading global science and technology employers.
16-18 supply
Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they
23. In recent years we have seen increases in the numbers choosing to study STEM
subjects post 16. However, all disciplines report a lack of mathematical skills and
would like to see A levels and other post 16 qualifications preparing undergraduates
for the mathematical content of degree courses.
24. Many individuals studying post 16 vocational or applied courses will progress to
higher education. The validity of this route, where students have often had greater
experience of independent study, and its potential to attract a broader range of
students should not be forgotten.
What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of STEM
subjects at advanced level?
25. We are starting to see encouraging increases in the uptake of STEM A levels and a
wide range of factors will be playing a role in this, including an increased media focus
on science which is leading to greater awareness of the opportunities. There are a
great many initiatives aiming to increase the uptake of science and whilst many
undertake evaluation it remains difficult to isolate evidence of effect for any one
project. Investing in, and supporting science teacher will be a key part of the picture
and is likely to have contributed to improvements.
26. There are risks associated with policies which reduce the number of routes through
to advanced level study of science. While the increase in numbers studying three
separate sciences is increasing, and there is correlation between triple science and
take up of sciences post 16, this trend is not so strong for girls and most of the
increase in post 16 science has been with boys. There are some indications that
separate science GCSE’s fail to encourage girls to progress to advanced level. The
progression of girls post 16 is an issue that needs further research: the 2011 increase
in A level candidates for physics was encouraging, however, 90% of the increase was
accounted for by boys. Similar figures show that for mathematics 70% of the increase
was male candidates and for chemistry it was 60%. 445 There is much more to be
done to encourage girls and minority groups to pursue all areas of science.
27. Focusing on the study of three separate sciences will, due to timetable constraints,
inevitably reduce the subject options for young people: it may therefore have the
unintended consequence of reducing the uptake of science study post 16. There may
also be a link between the preference of girls to be interested in, and motivated by,
445 http://www.jcq.org.uk/national_results/alevels/
740
wider, multi-disciplinary topics in science and the relevance of science to the world in
which they live. 446 447
28. For those not yet clear about the direction of their future careers options, the
possibility that a substantial proportion of their overall curriculum will be taken up
with science could make the study of science less attractive at a time when the UK
needs to encourage more students to study science. We believe therefore that
effects of the drive for three separate science subjects at GCSE should be closely
monitored.
29. It is hard to predict the effect of the English Baccalaureate at such an early stage but
the profile it provides for science as an essential subject for any future path is helpful.
The measure may have a positive effect in driving demand for specialist science
teachers to deliver separate sciences and it is very helpful that the detail of the
requirements discourage pupils from dropping any of the sciences since study of all
three core sciences pre-16 is important for those who pursue further study of
science.
30. However, there is also potential to narrow the number of routes in to science A
levels at a time when we need to be broadening the cohort attracted to studying
science, for example, to include those who engage best with applied learning.
Graduate supply
See paragraphs 16-21 above.
31. As discussed above the employment destinations of STEM graduates and as indicated
above almost all workforce surveys indicate strong current and future demand for
graduates with science skills. Although difficult to quantify, the demand for STEM
graduates from new and existing employment sectors is highly likely to grow.
Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently high,
and if not, why not?
32. The responses from our Member Bodies to our consultation on this aspect have been
largely positive with regard to the overall quality of graduates in their respective areas
of interest.
33. Input from Member Bodies indicate a general acceptance that they would not expect
HE to produce BSc graduates with exactly the right knowledge and skills base for
every specific industry sub-sector. However, there is a clear consensus that there
needs to be the right range of tailored MSc courses to enable graduates to specialise
for particular sectors of the economy and for specific roles and careers. This is also
important in areas where the science is changing and there is a need to update skills.
Examples include, environmental science, renewable energy, food and farming and
many areas in health sciences.
446 The Relevance of Science Education Project (ROSE) in England: a summary of findings E.W. Jenkins and R.G. Pell, 2006
447 ‘Science in my future' conducted by the Nestlé Social Research Programme
741
34. One particular area of concern therefore is funding for Masters courses. It is noted
that NERC has recently abandoned its MSc sponsorship, even in areas where there
are skills shortages. Students who originally select to study for a three year BSc
programme rather than a 4 year MSc programme find that they cannot change this
later in the course and are disadvantaged by not being able to access student loans
for an single year Masters course. Changing this restriction, and additionally providing
Government funding for MSc courses, would enable many more students to explore
the potential of science based careers: we consider a measure of this kind would also
increase the potential for encouraging more young women to remain in science and
attract back those who may have moved away from technical based science roles.
Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it research,
industry or more broadly within the economy?
35. STEM courses undoubtedly develop skills alongside subject knowledge but there is a
lack of clarity about the skills gained and those required for scientific or technical
careers and those skills that have broader currency and may take individuals to
careers ‘from’ and ‘in’ science rather than ‘as’ a scientist. Inconsistency in the language
used to describe skills across sectors, HE, colleges, schools and employers adds to
the confusion and can perpetuate the myth of lack of transferability of skills.
36. A growing emphasis on translational mechanisms for science research will bring with
it particular skills needs both for graduates and post graduates including
multidisciplinary working.
37. It is often stated by employers that STEM graduates lack the practical skills needed
for employment in science and technology environments, particularly in relation to
laboratory skills. With this in mind the Science Council commissioned to look at the
availability of work experience for STEM students and graduates. 448
38. The research identified that for graduate internships, the number of vacancies in
STEM industries seems to be much lower than in many other sectors, including
finance and business and that it is easier for a STEM graduate to find an internship in a
business-oriented environment than in a scientific or technical one. The research also
identified that while STEM students are more likely than non-STEM students to
undertake a sandwich placement (approximately 14,000-17,500) not all sandwich
study opportunities are taken up and STEM graduates appear to be less likely than
other graduates to pursue internships.
39. Given the call from employers for graduates with higher levels of practical and
technical skills, it was surprising therefore that there are very few genuinely scientific
or technical internships for graduates: STEM undergraduates seeking to develop their
technical and scientific skills are more likely to be able to find an appropriate work
placement as an undergraduate than after graduation.
What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality
of degrees and the supply of STEM courses in higher education institutions?
40. The reforms of higher education will impact on student choice strengthening the
need for quality information to support informed decision making. The Science
Council is pleased that HEFCE’s Key Information Set (KIS) acknowledges the value of
accreditation of courses by professional bodies as a mark of quality and transferability.
However, in some disciplines there is limited market penetration for this activity
448 http://www.sciencecouncil.org/sites/default/files/Work%20Exp%20Summary%20and%20Recommendations.pdf
742
which provides opportunity for confusion. Where accreditation is unavailable other

measures will need to be considered.
41. The Science Council supports the need for measures of external quality control for
STEM degrees and the need for increased information to enable both students and
employers to make an informed choice about degree options. There is, however, a
danger that this will turn into a drive towards 'kite marking' of degrees for particular
employers or employment sectors which could become bureaucratic, costly and
fragmented and thereby fail to respond to the needs of either students and a very
broad range of science employers.
42. Specific approaches such as kite-marking may be appropriate for vocational degrees
where graduates are being prepared for a particular career or employer/industry
sector, such as medicine, nursing or law. In reality, few science/STEM degrees fit such
criteria. However, accreditation for a professional qualification (such as Chartered
Chemist, Physicist, Chartered Scientist or Registered Scientist) is a very different
exercise indicating the acceptability of a degree as part of the qualification route to
professional status, something that has built-in transferability. One of the benefits of
professional accreditation is that it is informed by the needs of employers but is
independent of any individual employer. Accreditation by an overarching professional
body (such as the Science Council) is one way to achieve consistency across broad
areas – both of subjects and employment sectors. This system is working effectively
in engineering and is being implemented in many science areas such as Life Sciences
(led by the Society of Biology): the Science Council recognises that there is more to
be done to include cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary subject areas in the
accreditation process and is currently considering options to address this.
43. Our member organisations are concerned by the proposals allowing HEI’s to freely
recruit as many AAB+ students as they wish since there could be a temptation for
HEI’s to prioritise recruitment to non-science subjects. The additional laboratory
costs of science subjects increase the cost of teaching and therefore by recruiting to
non-science subjects the HEI’s will be better able to cover the cost of teaching with
the income from tuition fees. HEFCE has made some adjustments to the model for
this proposal to protect SIV subjects, however, some sciences such as the majority of
the biosciences and geophysics are not categorised as SIV.
44. The Science Council member bodies are concerned about the potential effects of HE
reform on funding for STEM subjects and many have responded to the consultation
on the proposals with detailed input relevant to their subject areas.
What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop new and
cross-disciplinary STEM degrees?
45. There are some concerns that the development of cross disciplinary STEM courses is
stifled by the RAE which puts pressure on HEI’s to focus on their research strengths
and may not fully recognise the value of cross-disciplinary research.
46. However, feedback from member bodies suggest that research assessment has not
had a negative effect on the ability of HE to develop degrees that are appropriate for
specific sectors and the IFST told us that in their area which by its very nature is
multidisciplinary, they have not detected a problem and comment that many HE units
which provide for such degrees have achieved high gradings in Research Assessment.
universities to teach undergraduates and post graduates and conduct research? What
other delivery model should be considered?
743
47. The Science Council would also support the case that the best teaching is research-
led.
Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education institutions

offering STEM courses?
48. We have no evidence to suggest geographical distribution is an issue in the supply of
STEM courses. Science Council member bodies recognise that science based courses
are expensive to develop and deliver and, particularly with regard to multi-disciplinary
courses, may be dependent on relatively small specialist departments that can be
sensitive to cut backs. However, if cutbacks occur in essential subject disciplines, then
the knock on effect is to call into question the educational effectiveness of many
multi-disciplinary courses.
49. Leadership is necessary from within science/STEM if good practice is to be embedded
across the sectors. This will not necessarily mean that gender must be separated
from wider diversity issues, and indeed there is potentially much to gain from
embedding ambitions regarding women’s participation in STEM within the wider
programmes.
50. However, it will still be important for there to be a pan-STEM UK-wide approach to
the issues, especially with regard to collection of data and monitoring progress. With
the demise of the UKRC it remains unclear how this will be achieved: we understand
from BIS that the intention is that the Royal Academy of Engineering will provide
leadership and development for engineering and technology, and the Royal Society
will do the same for science. At this time strategies and priorities from these two
bodies are still unclear.
51. Professional bodies and learned societies recognise that they have a key role to play
in developing and supporting women pursuing careers in science. Almost all Science
Council member bodies have specific programmes and activities which aim to support
women in science. Some examples of the specific programmes are:
o BCS the Chartered Institute for IT, which has run its BCS Women egroup for over
ten years and holds regular events for women
o Royal Society of Chemistry has a women members network
o Institute of Physics has been very active for many years through research and
providing support, this has included site visits for university physics departments and
resources for school teachers.
52. It should not be forgotten that there are a very large number of organisations
working to increase the numbers of women in the STEM workforce. Many of these
organisations focus on a single aspect of the issue such as an employment sector,
geographical area, age group or similar. Many are very effective in this and Science
Council member bodies are some excellent examples.
53. Many of the smaller specialist organisations feel undervalued, isolated and
marginalised from government and from the larger public sector led initiatives and yet
they have continued to offer a wide range of services and support for women across
the UK. Most are not engaged directly with either the Royal Academy of Engineering
or the Royal Society. It will be important that a central point of contact and network
is established as we move forward, and that this central resource is able to facilitate
and encourage the smaller specialist organisations to work together and to share
expertise, resources and insights.
744
54. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) risked penalising women taking maternity
leave and we welcome the changes to the panel criteria adopted by all four UK
funding bodies which will allow one less output per submission for each period of
leave.
Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain the
research base and are they of sufficient quality?
55. The EPSRC has discontinued project studentships on its research grants from 31 Jan
2011, this and other measures including a focus on strategic initiatives is likely to
impact on the number of PhD studentships.
56. There is some concern within the sciences that UK post-graduates are failing to
compete with international applicants for research positions as overseas students are
seen as having had a greater length of training in research.
57. Many individual member bodies are responding specifically with regard to PhD
training in their fields.
What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of PhD
students? Are there alternative delivery models?
Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the balance right
between the number of Masters degree students and PhD students?
58. Conversion Masters are a very effective way of meeting demand in some areas and at
the same time these increase the employment opportunities of those taking these
Masters courses. Two important examples of STEM based professions where
individuals often enter following conversion from a non-STEM first degree are
meteorology and environmental science. Subjects such as marine science, climate
change, and meteorology are mainly taught in the Geography curriculum in schools
and there is frustration that these topics are not covered more often within the
chemistry or physics curricula. Many of those who would then like to pursue a career
in these areas enter the HE system through a non-STEM subject (often as a result of
poor careers advice) but find that they can ‘convert’ to meteorology, environmental
science or agricultural science through a specific Masters programme. A Royal
Meteorology Society survey of weather service providers found that they struggle to
find enough first degree STEM graduates to meet their requirements but that this is
being addressed by the development of Masters courses in meteorology with strong
mathematics and physics content. These Masters programmes also need to be
supplemented with further vocational qualifications and courses offering deeper
science content and updating for professionals.
What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of graduates to
pursue a research career?
59. The EPSRC has previously withdrawn funding for MSc courses which has had an
impact on the viability of courses such as those designed for the nuclear industry. In
2011 NERC has also made a decision to withdraw funding for taught MSc courses,
despite the importance of these postgraduates to industry. There seems little
745
prospect of private companies offering financial support on the same scale and we
suggest that NERC should review and if necessary reconsider this action once its full
impact becomes clear.
60. In the biosciences there are early signs of a trend towards HEIs preferentially taking
PhD students holding Masters degrees and the integrated Masters is already the
preferred route for some sciences. If this trend continues the funding model for
Masters degrees could impact on the numbers of PhD students. The acquisition of
further debt may dissuade students from choosing a four year integrated Masters
option impacting on their opportunities to move on to postgraduate study, since this
is now the preferred route.
61. The fact that loans will be accruing interest during years of further study may also be
a disincentive to delaying repayments in favour of additional study.
Industry
What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to attract them?
What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand for
STEM graduates matches supply in terms of numbers, skills and quality of graduates?
62. Our consultation showed some optimism with regard to the potential for industry
and other employers to sponsor students at both undergraduate and Masters levels
but we are unable to comment further at this time.
16 December 2011
Appendix I
Member Bodies of the Science Council December 2011
1. Association for Clinical Biochemistry*

2. Association of Neurophysiological Scientists*
3. Association for Science Education**
4. British Academy of Audiology
5. British Computer Society*
6. British Psychological Society*
7. Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management*
8. Energy Institute*
9. Geological Society of London*
10. Institute of Biomedical Science*
11. Institute of Brewing and Distilling*
12. Institute of Clinical Research*
13. Institute of Corrosion*
14. Institute of Food Science and Technology*
15. Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology*
16. Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining*
17. Institute of Mathematics and its Applications*
18. Institute of Measurement and Control
19. Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine*
20. Institute of Physics*
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21. Institute of Professional Soil Scientists*

22. Institution of Chemical Engineers*
23. Institution of Environmental Sciences*
24. London Mathematical Society
25. Mineralogical Society*
26. Nuclear Institute*
27. Oil and Colour Chemists’ Association*
28. Royal Astronomical Society
29. Royal Meteorological Society
30. Royal Society of Chemistry*
31. Royal Statistical Society
32. Society for General Microbiology
33. Society of Biology
34. Society for Cardiological Science and Technology
35. Society of Dyers & Colourists
* Licensed to award Chartered Scientist – CSci

** Licensed to award Chartered Science Teacher – CsciTeach
747
Scottish Qualifications Authority – Written evidence
1 SQA – What we do
1.1 SQA is the national accreditation and awarding body in Scotland. In our accreditation role,
we authorise vocational qualifications in Scotland.
1.2 As an awarding body, we work with schools, colleges, universities, industry, and
government, to provide high quality, flexible and relevant qualifications. We strive to ensure
that our qualifications are inclusive and accessible to all, that they recognise the
achievements of learners, and provide clear pathways to further learning or employment.
1.3 SQA provides qualifications from levels 1 to 11 on the Scottish Credit and Qualifications
Framework – the SCQF. The Framework aids understanding and progression of learners
into:
- Employment
- Further education
- Higher education
The web link below shows the relationship between SQA qualifications and Higher
Education qualifications: http://www.scqf.org.uk/features/Framework.htm
2 Focus of this submission
2.1 This submission is presented in the context of SQA being the main provider of qualifications
that learners use to gain access to Higher Education in Scotland and the rest of the UK.
2.2 SQA has provided responses, below, to those questions that have a direct relationship with
our role as a national Awarding Body.
2.3 The focus of this submission is on the qualifications that provide learners entry into or
articulation with Higher Education programmes of study, namely:
- School qualifications at SCQF Levels 6 and 7 (broadly equivalent to QCF Levels 3 and
4) that provide entry into Year 1 of a degree program in Scotland. The qualifications that
generally fall into this category are:
o Highers
o Advanced Highers
o Scottish Baccalaureate
- Further education qualifications at SCQF Levels 7 and 8 (broadly equivalent to QCF

Levels 4 and 5) provide articulation with Year 2 or 3 of a degree program in Scotland.
The qualifications that generally fall into this category are:
748
o Higher National Certificates

o Higher National Diplomas
2.4 The Scottish Higher and Advanced Higher attract the following UCAS Tariff Points. The
corresponding A Level and AS Level points have been included for comparison:
A* A B C D E
Scottish Advanced Higher n/a 130 110 90 72 n/a
GCE A Level 140 120 100 80 60 40
A* A B C D E
Scottish Higher n/a 80 65 50 36 n/a
GCE AS Level n/a 60 50 40 30 20
Source: http://www.ucas.com/students/ucas_tariff/tarifftables/
3 Response to the General Questions
3.1 Our definition of a STEM subject is one that prepares learners for further education or
employment in a STEM related field.
A STEM subject would instil the fundamentals of the particular subject as well as the skills of
analysis, enquiry, research, problem solving and analytical thinking.
3.2 We consider the following to be representative of a STEM subject:
- Mathematics
- Physics
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Computing
- Engineering
Appendix 1 lists all the SQA qualification titles that we consider as STEM subjects.
3.3 We consider a STEM job to be one that requires the application of knowledge and skills that
are derived from one of more STEM subjects, rather than a predetermined or defined list of
occupations.
3.4 In terms of supply and demand for STEM graduates our role involves us in supplying suitably
qualified school leavers that can progress into graduate provision.
3.5 It is pleasing to see that overall demand for SQA STEM provision is increasing year on year.
Higher entries have grown from 59,377 in 2006 to 64,671 in 2011. Advanced Higher entries
have grown in the same period from 8,859 to 10,547.
749
3.6 As a percentage of all Higher entries, the proportion comprising of STEM subjects has
fluctuated in recent years but over all has decreased since 2006 – from 37.6% in 2006 to
36.1% in 2011. This is a trend we will continue to monitor.
Entries Entries Entries Entries Entries Entries

SCQF Level 6
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
HIGHER STEM
59,377 59,846 60,876 61,594 63,946 64,671
ENTRIES
HIGHER ENTRIES
158,053 160,988 162,576 167,792 175,614 178,925
TOTAL
STEM as % of TOTAL 37.6% 37.2% 37.4% 36.7% 36.4% 36.1%
3.7 As a percentage of all Advanced Higher entries, the proportion comprising of STEM
subjects has increased between 2006 and 2011 with a peak of 49.4% in 2009.
Entries Entries Entries Entries Entries Entries

SCQF Level 7
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
ADVANCED HIGHER
8,859 8,637 9,073 9,713 9,914 10,547
STEM ENTRIES
ADVANCED HIGHER
18,258 17,825 18,854 19,648 20,585 21,431
ENTRIES TOTAL
STEM as % of TOTAL 48.5% 48.5% 48.1% 49.4% 48.2% 49.2%
Appendix 2 shows the breakdown of demand for our school based STEM subjects at SCQF
levels 6 and 7.
For further statistics visit http://www.sqa.org.uk/statistics
3.8 The increase in Advanced Higher entries could in part be due to the introduction of the
Scottish Baccalaureate in Science - developed as part of the curriculum development
programme in Scotland. 449
SQA introduced Scottish Baccalaureates in both Science and Languages in academic session
2009/10. The Scottish Baccalaureate in Science has been designed to provide a challenging
and rewarding experience for candidates in fifth and sixth year of secondary school.
To achieve the Scottish Baccalaureate candidates must pass three STEM related subjects –
two at Advanced Higher level, and one at Higher – one of which must be Maths or Applied
Maths.
Candidates also undertake an Interdisciplinary Project which offers added breadth and value
and helps to equip the candidate with the generic skills, attitudes and confidence necessary
to make the transition into Higher Education and/or employment.
449 Curriculum for Excellence aims to achieve a transformation in education in Scotland by providing a coherent, more
flexible and enriched curriculum from ages 3 to 18. For more details see: http://www.sqa.org.uk/cfe
750
Specific information relating to the Scottish Baccalaureate in Science can be found at

http://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/42884.html
3.9 Feedback from Scottish and UK universities has been positive regarding the contribution the
Scottish Baccalaureate in Science has made in preparing candidates for entry into a STEM
discipline at undergraduate level. There are examples of Scottish Universities providing
entry directly into year 2 of a relevant Science or Engineering degree programme:
“The University recognises the opportunity the [Scottish] Baccalaureate provides for specialisation
whilst not restricting the traditional breadth of study available within the Scottish school curriculum.
Where applicants have already achieved the breadth and level required for entry to first year, the
University will consider applicants completing the Science Baccalaureate for advanced standing in
some related degree programmes in Science and Engineering.”
Edinburgh University
In addition the Interdisciplinary Project attracts UCAS Tariff Points in its own right following
consideration by a representative panel in 2009 comprising membership of several Scottish
HEIs: http://www.ucas.ac.uk/documents/tariff/tariff_reports/scotip.pdf
3.10 In Scotland, over 95% of all Scottish schools presented students for Higher Mathematics in
academic year 2010/11. Indeed the top five STEM subjects were offered by over 65% of all
Scottish schools. At Advanced Higher level, over 77% of Scottish schools offered Advanced
Higher Mathematics:
Number of Delivering
HIGHER % of TOTAL 450
Centres 2010/11
Mathematics 421 95.25%
Chemistry 404 91.40%
Physics 399 90.27%
ADVANCED Number of Delivering
% of TOTAL2
HIGHER Centres 2010/11
Biology 292 66.06%
See Appendix 3 for further details.
4 Response to 16 – 18 supply questions
4.1 SQA Higher National Certificates (HNC) and Higher National Diplomas (HND) are well
established qualifications that are supported by the Scottish Government, the Scottish
Funding Council (SFC), employers, and HEIs.
450Calculated as 442 schools in academic year 2010/11 – 372 Local Authority Schools as cited in the Scottish Government
publication ‘Summary Statistics for Schools in Scotland, December 2011’ and 70 Independent schools as cited by Scottish
Council of Independent Schools.
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4.2 Scottish Higher National qualifications make an important contribution to the economy and
high level vocational skills development, and as long standing components in models of
direct articulation. One such model is the ‘2+2 model of articulation’ whereby students
complete two years of an HND followed by direct entry into year three of an
undergraduate degree programme for the final two years of an Honours degree.
4.3 These articulation models form an important part of the HE continuum for around 20 per
cent of undergraduates in Scottish higher education, including those moving into STEM
undergraduate programmes. Currently, most students are only able to articulate into
degree programmes in the post-1992 institutions.
4.4 For the pre-1992 universities, opportunities for ‘partial’ articulation (i.e. HND into year 2 of
a degree) appear to be more likely than full articulation. However, anything other than full
articulation leaves students at a distinct financial disadvantage from the longer period taken
to achieve a degree and a further year of deferred earning potential.
4.5 Additionally, many HN students articulating into degree programmes are statistically less
likely to continue onto the Honours year of a degree, which needs to be addressed if such
graduates are going to be able to compete in an increasingly competitive graduate
employment market. The Scottish Government is aware that these are issues that need to
be addressed if we are to ensure that we have the appropriate number of STEM students
and Graduates to meet the needs of industry, the research base and other sectors not
directly connected with STEM.
4.6 The five highest performing HNCs are noted below. HNC Computing is by far is the most
popular with three and a half times the number of entries of the second most popular.
4.7 Similarly, at HND Level the two computing awards account for more than double the next
popular, which is again, Mechanical Engineering
Total Total
HNC Title entries HND Title entries
2006-2010 2006-2010
Computing 4,877 Computing: Technical Support 2,657
Mechanical Computing: Software
1,364 2,262
Engineering Development
Electrical Engineering 1,208 Mechanical Engineering 2,031
Applied Sciences 1,204 Nautical Science 1,179
Construction 1,198 Architectural Technology 960
4.8 Uptake of STEM HNCs that appear in the top 50, as a proportion of all HNC entries has
fluctuated between 19.7% and 22.8% in the years 2006-2010. At HND level this figure has
been decreasing year on year from 17.8% in 2006 to 16.4% in 2010:
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HNC STEM ENTRIES THAT APPEAR IN HND STEM ENTRIES THAT APPEAR IN
TOP 50 HNCs TOP 50 HNDs
% of all % of all
STEM MALE FEMALE STEM MALE FEMALE
YEAR HNC YEAR HND
ENTRIES % % ENTRIES % %
entries entries
2010 4,175 22.2% 88 12 2010 2,656 16.4% 86 14
2009 4,059 22.8% 86 14 2009 2,949 18.6% 85 15
2008 3,529 19.7% 86 14 2008 2,356 16.8% 88 12
2007 3,943 22.1% 86 14 2007 2,282 16.7% 90 10
2006 3,834 20.7% 90 10 2006 2,506 17.8% 88 12
4.9 As can be seen from Appendix 4 the gender split in term of uptake of HNC has been
between 85% and 90% male oriented. Whereas the split across all HNCs is 45-47% male.
4.10 Similarly, from Appendix 5, the gender split in term of uptake of HND has also been
between 85% and 90% male oriented. Whereas the split across all HNDs is 49-54% male.
5 Science and Engineering 21 – An Action Plan for Education
5.1 The committee will be aware of the Scottish Government’s Science and Engineering Action
Plan which builds on the Curriculum for Excellence and paves the way for stimulating ambition
in the teaching and learning of science, engineering and technology, encouraging more young
people to consider progressing to the world of work and raising public understanding of
science and in which SQA has a key role to play.
6 Industry
6.1 SQA wok closely with the Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) who have a responsibility for liaising
with the STEM industries. In the main, the SSCs we work with in relation to STEM subjects
would be:
• Semta: Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies

• Summit Skills: Building Services Engineering
• ProSkills: Process and manufacturing sector
• Lantra: Environmental and Land-based
• Improve: Food and Drinks Manufacturing and Processing
• E-skills UK: IT and Telecoms
• Energy and Utility Skills: Energy, Waste and Utilities
• Construction Skills: Construction
• Cogent: Chemical and Pharmaceutical, Oil, Gas, Nuclear, Petroleum and
Polymers
Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) are recognised by Governments throughout the UK as the
independent, employer-led organisations which provide the employer leadership to address
skills needs within and across sectors.
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Through their sectoral reach, SSCs:
• analyse what skills are needed

• articulate the voice of employers on skills
• develop innovative skills solutions
• galvanise employer ambition and investment in skills
• develop national occupational standards that describe what someone in a particular
occupation needs to do to be occupationally competent
• develop and issue Apprenticeship frameworks.
Source: http://www.sscalliance.org/HomePublic/SectorSkillsCouncils/SectorSkillsCouncils.aspx
15 December 2011
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Appendix 1: List of qualifications considered to be STEM subjects
SCQF Level 6: ‘Highers’

Architectural Technology Lifestyle and Consumer Technology
Biology Human Biology
Biotechnology Information Systems
Building Construction Managing Environmental Resources
Chemistry Mathematics
Computing Mechatronics
Geography Physics
Geology Product Design
Fashion and Textile Technology Technological Studies
Health and Food Technology
SCQF Level 7: ‘Advanced Highers’

Applied Mathematics Mathematics
Biology Physics
Chemistry Product Design
Computing Technological Studies
SCQF Level 7: ‘Higher National Certificates’

3D Computer Animation Electrical Engineering
Agricultural Science Electronics
Aircraft Engineering Electronics: Operations Management
Allied Health Professions: Diagnostic Imaging Engineering Practice
Allied Health Professions: Radiotherapy Engineering Systems
Applied Sciences Fabrication, Welding and Inspection
Architectural Technology Fashion Technology and Manufacture with
Design
Automotive Engineering Food Science and Technology
Bioscience Information Technology
Building Services Engineering Manufacturing Engineering
Chemical Engineering Marine Engineering
Chemical Process Technology Measurement and Control Engineering
Civil Engineering Mechanical Engineering
Computer Aided Architectural Design & Mechatronics
Technology
Computer Aided Draughting and Design Petroleum Engineering
Computer Games Development Petroleum Process Technology, Operations &
Control
Computer Networking and Internet Quantity Surveying
Technology
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Computing Shipbuilding
Computing: Software Development Structural Engineering
Construction Sustainable Building Technology
Construction Engineering Water Operations
SCQF Level 8: ‘Higher National Diplomas’

3D Computer Animation Electrical Engineering
Agricultural Science Electronic Engineering
Aircraft Engineering Electronics
Applied Biological Sciences Electronics: Operations Management
Applied Bioscience Engineering Systems
Applied Chemistry Fashion Technology and Manufacture with
Design
SCQF Level 8: ‘Higher National Diplomas’ (cont)

Applied Sciences Food Science and Technology
Applied Sport Science Green Technology
Architectural Technology Horticultural Science
Biomedical Sciences Information Technology
Biotechnology Interactive Multimedia Creation
Building Services Engineering Manufacturing Engineering
Chemical Process Technology Measurement and Control Engineering
Civil Engineering Mechanical Engineering
Computer Aided Architectural Design &
Mechatronics
Technology
Computer Aided Draughting and Design Petroleum Engineering
Computer and Network Support and Petroleum Process Technology, Operations &
Administration Control
Computer Games Development Quantity Surveying
Computer Networking and Internet
Technology
Computing: Software Development
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Appendix 2: Uptake of SQA School Based STEM Qualifications
HIGHER Entries Entries Entries Entries Entries Entries

SCQF Level 6 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Mathematics 18,533 18,786 19,636 19,638 20,657 20,552

Chemistry 9,128 9,489 9,505 9,582 10,179 10,293
Biology 8,995 9,169 9,132 9,107 9,308 9,771
Physics 8,565 8,580 8,765 9,002 9,018 9,447
Human Biology 3,720 3,710 3,755 3,992 4,078 4,269
Computing 4,341 4,177 4,256 4,307 4,356 4,128
Product Design 2,261 2,139 2,127 2,391 2,462 2,445
Information Systems 1,904 1,653 1,484 1,413 1,433 1,407
Home Economics: Health &
Food 705 774 755 733 864 799
Technology
Technological Studies 769 770 758 621 728 683
Home Economics: Lifestyle &
163 208 232 294 325 300
Consumer Technology
Home Economics: Fashion &
Textile 114 88 126 181 166 223
Technology
Managing Environmental
65 84 135 126 210 220
Resources
Geology 57 59 58 56 63 64
Biotechnology 28 44 35 28 27 27
Mechatronics 29 24 13 25 26 26
Architectural Technology - 60 65 62 39 17
Building Construction - 32 39 36 7 0
Total 59,377 59,846 60,876 61,594 63,946 64,671
% of TOTAL 37.6% 37.2% 37.4% 36.7% 36.4% 36.1%
HIGHER ENTRIES TOTAL 158,053 160,988 162,576 167,792 175,614 178,925
ADVANCED HIGHER Entries Entries Entries Entries Entries Entries

SCQF Level 7 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Applied Mathematics 280 285 305 305 263 279
Biology 1,885 1,927 1,955 2,095 2,177 2,288
Chemistry 2,014 2,039 2,143 2,183 2,226 2,472
Computing 450 349 366 411 414 461
Mathematics 2,598 2,484 2,752 3,027 2,936 3,098
Physics 1,437 1,380 1,403 1,550 1,736 1,757
Product Design 67 76 59 57 72 111
Technological Studies 128 97 90 85 90 81
Total 8,859 8,637 9,073 9,713 9,914 10,547
757
% of TOTAL 48.5% 48.5% 48.1% 49.4% 48.2% 49.2%

ADVANCED HIGHER
18,258 17,825 18,854 19,648 20,585 21,431
ENTRIES TOTAL
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Appendix 3: Scottish Schools Delivering STEM Qualifications
Number
of % of
HIGHER
Centres TOTAL
2011
Physics 399 90.27%
Biology 349 78.96%
Computing 291 65.84%
Product Design 241 54.52%
Human Biology 184 41.63%
Information Systems 126 28.51%
Home Economics: Health and Food Technology 96 21.72%
Technological Studies 74 16.74%
Home Economics: Lifestyle and Consumer Technology 33 7.47%
Home Economics: Fashion and Textile Technology 27 6.11%
Managing Environmental Resources 23 5.20%
Geology 11 2.49%
Biotechnology 3 0.68%
Mechatronics 2 0.45%
Architectural Technology 2 0.45%
Building Construction - -
Number
of % of
ADVANCED HIGHER
Centres TOTAL
2011
Biology 292 66.06%
Physics 280 63.35%
Computing 117 26.47%
Applied Mathematics 49 11.09%
Product Design 28 6.33%
Technological Studies 27 6.11%
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Appendix 4: SQA STEM Higher National Certificates Appearing in Top 50 HNC Entries 2006-2010
PERCENT PERCENT PERCENT
2010 ENTRIES M F 2008 ENTRIES M F 2006 ENTRIES M F
Computing 847 88 12 Computing 831 86 14 Computing 1,255 84 16
Electrical Engineering 488 97 3 Mechanical Engineering 286 92 8 Engineering: Mechanical 312 96 4
Mechanical Engineering 454 93 7 Construction 261 89 11 Engineering: Electrical 308 98 2
Applied Sciences 284 39 61 Applied Sciences 250 46 54 Construction 246 90 10
Engineering Systems 274 96 4 Multimedia Computing: Web Development 223 72 28 Multimedia Computing: Web Dev 215 80 20
Construction 243 93 7 Engineering: Electrical 194 94 6 Engineering: Electronics 203 96 4
Interactive Media 203 81 19 Electrical Engineering 186 98 2 Applied Sciences 152 38 63
Computer Aided Draughting & Design 185 83 17 Computer Aided Draughting & Design 162 85 15 Electrical Engineering 135 98 2
Computer Games Development 161 97 3 Civil Engineering 152 93 7 Computer Aided Draughting 134 90 10
Computer Networking 150 92 8 Information Technology 145 67 33 Engineering: Mechatronics 119 93 7
Information Technology 146 73 27 Engineering Systems 140 96 4 Interactive Multimedia Creation 109 80 20
Engineering Practice 135 98 2 Engineering 129 96 4 Engineering: Fabrication Welding 104 100 0
Electronics 127 94 6 Engineering: Mechanical 128 98 2 Engineering 100 97 3
Aircraft Engineering 108 93 7 Aircraft Engineering 117 97 3 Civil Engineering 91 90 10
Measurement and Control Engineering 97 100 0 Computer Networking 113 96 4 Mechanical Engineering 90 97 3
Fabrication, Welding and Inspection 94 97 3 Measurement and Control Engineering 111 95 5 Aircraft Engineering 89 96 4
Architectural Technology 91 77 23 Architectural Technology 101 70 30 Engineering: Manufacturing 86 99 1
Civil Engineering 88 90 10 Total 3,529 86 14 Electronics 86 100 0
Total 4,175 88 12 19.7% Total 3,834 90 10
22.2% Total HNC entries 17,879 45 55 20.7%
All HNC Entries 18,767 47 53 Total HNC entries 18,524 44 56
PERCENT PERCENT
2009 ENTRIES M F 2007 ENTRIES M F
Computing 963 85 15 Computing 981 84 16
Mechanical Engineering 433 93 7 Engineering: Electrical 260 96 4
Electrical Engineering 399 97 3 Multimedia Computing: Web Development 255 84 16
Engineering Systems 296 96 4 Applied Sciences 240 34 66
Applied Sciences 278 39 61 Engineering: Mechanical 231 96 4
Construction 231 90 10 Construction 217 84 16
Computer Aided Draughting & Design 225 84 16 Engineering 203 95 5
Manufacturing Engineering 174 97 3 Mechanical Engineering 191 94 6
Information Technology 142 71 29 Computer Aided Draughting & Design 175 89 11
Computer Games Development 141 99 1 Electrical Engineering 159 99 1
Aircraft Engineering 129 98 2 Engineering: Electronics 129 97 3
Engineering Practice 126 94 6 Civil Engineering 122 89 11
Civil Engineering 116 86 14 Engineering: Mechatronics 110 94 6
Computer Networking 116 96 4 Architectural Technology 104 75 25
Electronics 115 93 7 Computer Networking 99 95 5
Quantity Surveying 91 74 26 Interactive Multimedia Creation 99 79 21
Interactive Media 84 76 24 Information Technology 98 63 37
Total 4,059 86 14 Computer and Network Support 93 84 16
22.8% Engineering: Practice 93 98 2
All HNC Entries 17,819 45 55 Electronics 84 96 4
Total 3,943 86 14
22.1%
Total HNC entries 17,819 45 55
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Appendix 5: SQA STEM Higher National Diplomas Appearing in Top 50 HND Entries 2006-2010
PERCENT PERCENT PERCENT

2010 ENTRIES M F 2008 ENTRIES M F 2006 ENTRIES M F
Computing: Technical Support 560 84 16 Computing: Technical Support 484 87 13 Computing: Software Development 620 88 12
Computing: Software Development 403 82 18 Computing: Software Development 370 81 19 Engineering: Mechanical 599 97 3
Nautical Science 365 96 4 Mechanical Engineering 302 96 4 Computing: Technical Support 533 86 14
Mechanical Engineering 255 94 6 Nautical Science 248 96 4 Architectural Technology 177 80 20
Computer Networking & IT 213 85 15 Architectural Technology 191 85 15 Nautical Science 141 95 5
Civil Engineering 193 90 10 Interactive Multimedia Creation 148 80 20 Interactive Multimedia Creation 130 76 24
Architectural Technology 188 83 17 Civil Engineering 143 90 10 Multimedia Computing: Web Dev 129 81 19
Quantity Surveying 110 81 19 Multimedia Computing: Web Dev 140 84 16 Computer Networking & IT 92 96 4
Engineering Systems 106 95 5 Engineering: Mechanical 128 95 5 Engineering: Electrical 85 98 2
Information Technology 105 81 19 Computer Networking & IT 106 95 5 Total 2,506 88 12
Interactive Multimedia Creation 83 87 13 Quantity Surveying 96 76 24 17.8%
Interactive Media 75 72 28 Total 2,356 88 12 Total HND entries 14,109 54 46
Total 2,656 86 14 16.8%
16.4% Total HND entries 14,056 52 48
All HND Entries 16,214 49 51
PERCENT PERCENT
2009 ENTRIES M F 2007 ENTRIES M F
Computing: Technical Support 561 88 12 Computing: Technical Support 519 85 15
Mechanical Engineering 486 98 2 Computing: Software Development 460 83 17
Computing: Software Development 409 87 13 Nautical Science 201 97 3
Nautical Science 224 96 4 Interactive Multimedia Creation 197 82 18
Civil Engineering 217 95 5 Architectural Technology 188 86 14
Architectural Technology 216 85 15 Civil Engineering 146 93 7
Computer Networking & IT 192 77 23 Mechanical Engineering 134 96 4
Multimedia Computing: Web Development 162 75 25 Engineering: Mechanical 127 95 5
Information Technology 121 69 31 Computer Networking & IT 109 93 7
Interactive Multimedia Creation 117 76 24 Multimedia Computing: Web Dev 104 81 19
3D Computer Animation 100 79 21 Engineering: Electrical 97 94 6
Quantity Surveying 75 80 20 Total 2,282 90 10
Electrical Engineering 69 97 3 16.7%
Total 2,949 85 15 Total HND entries 13,638 52 48
18.6%
All HND Entries 15,821 54 46
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Semta – Written evidence
1. Introduction:
i) This submission focuses on Employer Demand for STEM Skills in the Advanced
Manufacturing and Engineering Sector and what works in terms of best practice
between industry and HE collaboration. We also provide comment on the
current barriers and what can be done to overcome them.
2. About Semta:
i) Semta is the Sector Skills Council (SSC) for Science, Engineering and
Manufacturing Technologies. We are licensed by government to address the
sector's skills needs, providing expert support to companies of all sizes to
improve their performance and growth. A crucial part of this is to work with
companies to shape the skills landscape and provide solutions to meet their
diverse needs.
ii) Semta is the lead SSC for STEM matters across the network of Sector Skills
Councils and chairs the SSC STEM Cluster made up of Semta, Cogent, Energy &
Utilities, Improve, Proskills, Lantra, e-skills, Skills for Justice and Construction
Skills. Semta also represents the SSC STEM Cluster on the Wilson Review
Advisory Group.
iii) Semta just launched a Higher Education Sector Strategy Group to strengthen
university employer relationships building on the work Semta has been doing
with Higher Education Institutions across the UK. Priority issues for the group
will be: Employer engagement (particularly SME employers) with Higher
Education; the changing landscape of Higher Education with a particular focus on
funding and the impact this has on employers, employees and students;
employability skills and workforce development.
3. Evidence:
Understanding Employer Demand for STEM Graduates and implications for

Supply
i. Higher level skills are vital to the success of employers in our footprint. Future
employer demand can be summarised as being about ‘higher level skills’ – that is
Level 4 and above. In order to meet this demand it is imperative that a range of
high quality and flexible pathways into HE are available. This will require the
scaling up of the innovative collaborative work already happening in some regions
and sectors between employers and higher education institutions.
ii. Many employers are concerned that degree courses don’t always prepare
graduates adequately for jobs both in a technical sense and business cultural
sense.
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iii. The requirement for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
skills in the UK workforce is a priority. STEM subjects underpin Advanced
Manufacturing and Engineering; and other new technologies which will drive
economic growth and productivity.
iv. Our employers have clearly articulated 451 a need to move up the value chain to
skills at level 4 and above for themselves and their UK-based supply chains in
order to remain globally competitive and innovative.
v. Improving STEM skills is a strategic imperative which sectors in Semta’s footprint

have identified through our Sector Skills Assessments and Labour Market
research 452 . The CBI survey Building for Growth (2011) also found that “STEM skills
shortages are widespread – 43% of employers currently have difficulty recruiting
staff, rising to more than half of employers (52%) expecting difficulty in the next
three years”.
vi. Semta forecasts that there will be a total requirement for 54,000 people (10,800
per annum) with higher-level skills (technical + non-technical) in the Advanced
Manufacturing and Engineering (AME) sector in the UK over the period 2012-
2016.
vii. Semta has been working closely with Warwick University’s Institute of
Employment Research (IER) on a forecasting model for employer demand. The
IER have completed an analysis and forecasting of demand for STEM subjects to
2017 453 . The results corroborate Semta’s own work with employers, showing that
demand for most STEM subjects is likely to grow faster than for other disciplines
over the coming decade. In addition there is likely to be increasing competition
for STEM graduates by non- STEM employers who greatly value the skills of
STEM graduates.
viii. It is important to recognise that employer demand is neither homogenous nor

static. There is a great deal of variation, not only between small and large
employers, but within and between sectors and sub-sectors and size of company.
Semta is working on a range of initiatives to address these needs which are
outlined below. What is critical is the need for a flexible range of pathways into
HE.
16-18 supply – the importance of a range of flexible pathways into Higher

Education
i. In order to meet this growing demand from employers, the current range and
style of pathways leading into higher education and qualifications being offered
need to be maintained and expanded, particularly the more applied and
vocational routes such as Higher Apprenticeships and Diplomas. The value of
these routes for employers lies not only in the technical skills developed, but also
451 Semta, 2010, Sector Skills Assessments.

452 Semta, 2011, Skills and the future of UK Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies.
453 Wilson, R. 2009, The Demand for STEM Graduates: some benchmark projections, Warwick Institute for Employment
Research
763
the employability skills such as team work and communication and innovative
thinking skills.
ii. Semta welcomes the establishment of the University Technical Colleges (UTC’s)
and, if structured well, they will be an important vehicle for producing the high
quality skilled people our sector need. Semta is actively building links with UTCs
such as the Black Country UTC based in Walsall and the proposed development
at Warwick.
iii. Engineering Apprenticeship frameworks developed by Semta are mapped to the

UCAS tariff. Engineering Advanced Apprentices at many companies go on to
complete degree-level qualifications, but this is dependent on good local
provision including part-time provision which follows the model of
apprenticeship delivery (usually day release). Flexible learning models which
apprentices can access alongside their existing employment are key.
iv. There is confirmed demand in Engineering for Higher Apprenticeships, however

the barriers have been largely around the complexity of funding processes. There
needs to be a clear and simple process which employers and individuals can
understand.
v. Semta has been awarded Pathfinder Funding by the National Apprenticeship

Service to lead the development of a new higher apprenticeship framework in
Advanced Manufacturing (AMHA), which will be available from April 2012.
Semta’s aim is to develop a flexible, employer led framework to support the
development of higher level skills in new and existing technology areas.
vi. The new framework will be based on a variety of pathways to accommodate the
needs of different sectors. We envisage that the current Engineering Leadership
Higher Apprenticeship will be replaced by the new framework. The new AMHA
will allow greater focus on higher level technical skills- as opposed to
leadership/supervisory skills. This is something employers have been asking for.
The framework will also link to professional accreditation.
vii. The AMHA will operate at levels 4 and 6. The need for level 5 will be tested
during consultation. The framework at Level 6 will include a range of options
including a full Bachelor in Engineering degree.
viii. In terms of A-levels, there has been a marked improvement in take up over the
last two years, especially in Mathematics which has increased by 12% (with
Further Mathematics up by 20%). Semta has worked closely with the
mathematics community to achieve this through initiatives such as the More
Maths Graduates Project and the development of the Further Mathematics
Network. Continued Government funding for the Further Mathematics Network
is essential for our STEM sectors.
Graduate Supply – Expanding the pool to ensure high quality
i. The value of higher apprenticeships is recognized within the sector as many

graduates coming through this route have a broader range of skills fitted to the
764
work place than those entering the workforce direct from university. For those
following a pure HE route, top quality degree provision where content matches
employer needs and programmes include periods of work placement is
increasingly important.
ii. Whilst some may argue that the current ‘mismatch’ of STEM graduates going into
non STEM jobs is an issue, Semta does not want to see a reduction in STEM
courses as a consequence. STEM graduates are good for the UK economy as a
whole due to the transferability of their skills regardless of their destinations.
There needs to be a critical mass of graduates to ensure a sufficient quality pool
of suitably qualified STEM graduates for actual STEM jobs. Appropriate
Information Advice and Guidance will be key for the AME sector.
iii. The Government announced in its Autumn Statement that Semta and other
STEM-focused Sector Skills Councils, with support from the Confederation of
British Industry, will lead an industry group to kite-mark degree programmes,
helping students understand better which courses are valued by employers.
Students will be able to access initial information on employer endorsement as
part of the 2012 Key Information Sets.
Industry Collaboration with Higher Education – The Challenge of Engaging with

SMEs
i. It has been widely recognised that a major challenge for higher education
institutions is engaging effectively with micro, small and medium sized enterprises
(SMEs). This is particularly so in the AME sector.
ii. The pace of technological advancement continues to increase, driving the need
for highly skilled and creative talent across the AME sector. The success of the
large companies is inextricably linked to the innovation and competitiveness of
their supply chains. To be competitive in a global market requires UK employers
to be at the forefront of technology, innovation and product/process
development.
iii. Whilst the majority of large companies in the sector actively engage with
universities, provide placements and employ undergraduates, graduate and post-
graduates, this is not the case for the majority of SMEs who make up 99% of the
sector.
iv. The problem for SMEs is one of perception in terms of barriers e.g.: Relevance of
HE engagement to an SME; Value and return on investment by SMEs in recruiting
a graduate; Resources to support an undergraduate, work placement, internship,
graduate training and post-graduate support.
v. Overall, 15% of SMEs had used HE to provide teaching or training compared to

69% of large companies. (Source: NESS 2009)
vi. Semta has been working with the UK Electronic Skills Foundation (UKESF) over
recent years to address this issue through its Electronics Sector Strategy Group
765
made up of key employers both large and small within this sector. The UKESF
have developed and tested a successful model for industry and HE collaboration.
vii. Through the government’s Employer Investment Fund Round 2, Semta has now
begun working with UKESF on a project to scale–up this model to SMEs in other
AME sectors including Aerospace, Automotive, Composites, Electrical, Marine,
Mechanical and Low Carbon (renewable energy) related activity.
viii. The project aims to improve the quality and effectiveness of SME employer
engagement with Higher Education, increasing the number of SMEs who recruit
STEM graduates through providing solutions to the identified barriers and
applying current ‘Best Practice’ from the Electronics sector, across the AME
sector. One of the key outcomes would be degree courses that better prepare
graduates for employment and for the SMEs to better understand the value of
graduates to their business.
ix. By establishing a clear set of solutions to address the barriers preventing SMEs
engaging with HE and recruiting graduates; by developing Best Practice
engagement toolkit and models to enable SMEs to recruit graduates; and a range
of compelling case studies which illustrate how effective engagement with HE can
deliver demonstrable value and Return on Investment, we believe this project
will provide a solid platform to help address the Committee’s concerns about
how to ensure that demand for STEM graduates matches supply.
16 December 2011
766
Siemens, Rolls-Royce, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Microsoft Ltd – Oral evidence (QQ 120-
145)
Siemens, Rolls-Royce, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Microsoft Ltd –

767
Professor Michael Singer, University of Edinburgh – Written evidence
Professor Michael Singer, University of Edinburgh – Written

evidence
Summmary
This is an individual submission. I am a Professor of Mathematics at the University of

Edinburgh and served as Head of School of Mathematics there between 2006 and 2011.
The focus of my evidence will be at the higher levels: the availability and quality of training at
PhD level and the availability of positions at post-doctoral level: the crucial first step on the
career path of researchers in STEM subjects, enabling them to move from supervised
student to independent researcher, and ultimately research leader.
Discussion of these issues will inevitably lead to a discussion of the role of the Research
Councils who, traditionally at least, have been the main funders of PhD places and post-
doctoral positions in the UK for research in fundamental science. I will argue that recent
decisions taken by EPSRC, which is the research council which includes the Mathematical
Sciences in its portfolio jeopardizes the flow of the best researchers in this subject. I will
argue further that this is a symptom of a larger problem (which may, of course, be outside
the remit of the present inquiry): namely that EPSRC appears to be turning its back on the
evidence of its own discipline-specific reviews and is instead pursuing an agenda of its own
creation which lacks the confidence and support the mainstream academic community. I
believe this is little short of a scandal at a time when public money is so scarce.
1. Background: The need for fundamental research
1.1. I take it as more-or-less self-evident that the future of any country is critically de-
pendent on its ability to support scientists pursuing their own projects, entirely driven by
curiosity and the spirit of adventure, as well as its ability to translate applied research into
new technologies and innovations. Going back at least as far as Faraday (who replied with
great prescience ‘One day, sir, you may tax it’ when asked by Gladstone about the practical
value of his investigations into electricity) examples abound of critical discoveries coming
from curiosity-driven, blue-skies research, whose monetary value has only been fully realised
many decades later.
1.2. I expect that this inquiry will have ample evidence supporting the case that even when
times are hard, it is a false economy to concentrate only upon research with immediate
economic benefits, and will not pursue this further here.
1.3. In relation to this inquiry, a key issue is the way that a research base which is largely
free to pursue its own research agenda contributes to the viability and sustainability of the
STEM subjects. I see this is a virtuous circle: by having the best researchers working in UK
universities, on the subjects they choose, the next generation is inspired by the spirit of
scientific enquiry and discovery, and is drawn into the study of STEM subjects, where they
will enjoy contact with world leaders in their research fields. Some will be drawn into
academia, where they will go on to inspire and lead the following generation, others will go
into industry or will use their skills in other crucial ways in our knowledge-based economy.
The best researchers will only be drawn to and remain in the UK if we can offer facilities
that compete with the best around the world. Thus it is essential to put public money into
blue-skies research, to ensure the health and sustainability of the discipline, and to make it
768
as straightforward as possible for researchers to apply for the resources that they need.
2. Early-career researchers: PhD students and post-docs
2.1. Career progression in STEM subjects. The supply of well-trained individuals in STEM
subjects is critically dependent on a sensible career path. The best undergraduates should
have the opportunity to pursue research at the PhD level, and the best PhD students should
have opportunities as beginning post-doctoral researchers: this is a crucial first step in the
career of a starting researcher who is trying to establish himself/herself as an independent
thinker and future leaders.
2.2. In this context, EPSRC’s current approach to fellowships and doctoral training is
particularly worrying. The general fund for doctoral training has been reduced to accom-
modate the Doctoral Training Centres (DTC) and Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT).
Along with many others, I am sceptical about this approach to doctoral training in the
context of the mathematical sciences. Be that as it may, it certainly reduces the opportu-
nities for studentships outside of these centres. It also means that students with excellent
qualifications may well miss out on a PhD opportunity if their research interests don’t
happen to coincide with those supported by a DTC/CDT. It seems clear that there is not
enough money in the training fund for PhD studentships in the mathematical sciences, given
the size and excellence of the UK research base.
2.3. Alternative model: Graduate TA’s. The alternative model, certainly for mathematics,
involves the creation of Graduate Teaching Assistantships (TA’s). This is prevalent in the US.
PhD students in the mathematical sciences in the US are typically paid to contribute to the
teaching effort of their department. They don’t need to worry about fees. In my experience
at the University of Edinburgh, it is remarkably difficult to replicate this culture in the UK.
There are many reasons for this: different employment markets and tax laws are certainly
part of the equation, as is the issue of fees to be paid by PhD students. One should also
mention that the tightening up of visa regulations has a serious adverse impact on the
attractiveness of the UK as a place to study, further eroding our competitiveness when
compared with other countries.
In any case, the TA model is attractive to faculty in the US because it allows the funding of a
large number PhD students (essentially through the teaching budget) and simultaneously
spreads the undergraduate teaching load of the department. This frees up faculty time to
deliver advanced courses aimed at PhD students, and these are an essential part of the
graduate training. It is attractive to the PhD students because of the thorough training they
get through taught courses in their first year(s) as well as the teaching experience they gain
while studying for their PhD. It is extremely hard for most maths departments in the UK to
compete with the thorough and rounded training (and the financial package) that is offered
to graduates in the US, though the UK taught course centres are a step in the right
direction.
2.4. Fellowships and post-docs. There are well-documented issues 454 about EPSRC’s current
approach to fellowships 455 . By restricting the subject areas available for fellowships, the UK
will miss out on a generation of future leaders in the mathematical sciences who, in previous
years, were able to come to the UK on EPSRC-funded fellowships. While EPSRC funding for
454 http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~bt219/epsrc.html
455 http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/fellows/Pages/epsrcfellowships.aspx
769
early-career researchers is available through standard research grants, these lack the
essential ‘leadership’ element for the young researcher trying to establish his/her own
research agenda. They rely on finding a suitably qualified and willing senior academic to
serve as ‘Principal Investigator’ on the grant. This is a big ask for an early-career researcher
and hardly encourages such researchers to develop into future leaders.
3. Current concerns with EPSRC
3.1. Shaping Capability. I assume that this inquiry will be aware of many of the issues 456
surrounding EPSRC’s shaping capability goal 457 .
3.2. It seems to me that the underlying issue here is one of governance and accountability
of EPSRC decision- and policy-making. It is perfectly clear that recent decisions made by
EPSRC in relation to mathematics funding do not have the support and confidence of the
UK mathematical sciences community - worse, they run counter to many of the
recommendations of the 2010 International Review of Mathematical Science458 which was
itself commissioned by EPSRC. Objections to these decisions, raised at government level,
appear to have been met with the mantra of the Haldane principle: that politics should not
influence science funding 459 . Of course, politics is currently influencing science funding, but
that is not the point I want to make here. The scandal is that EPSRC is turning its back on an
evidence-based approach to nurturing and developing the mathematical sciences in the UK
(the IRMS 2010) and is instead pursuing its own agenda. Thus in my opinion, EPSRC is
gambling precious public money on untried instruments and funding mechanisms which will
plainly have a negative impact on the overall excellence of the mathematical sciences in the
UK.
3.3. Some key questions. I would ask what evidence EPSRC had for the efficacy of Doctoral
Training Centres before they were introduced. I would ask also whether the earmarking of
all post-doctoral fellowships this year to Statistics and Applied Probability was a wise
decision which was likely to be effective in the development of these subject areas. I would
ask why the extremely positive IRMS report did not lead to an increase in resources for the
mathematical sciences, especially since they received a savage cut in 2009/2010. And I would
ask why there are still no really effective channels of communication and consultation
between the mathematical sciences community and EPSRC, despite this being the second
recommendation of the IRMS report 460 .
16 December 2011
456 See webpage cited in footnote 451

457 http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/plans/implementingdeliveryplan/goals/shapingcapability/Pages/default.aspx
458 http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/pubs/corporate/intrevs/2010maths/Pages/default.aspx
459 Letters to the Prime Minister and to David Willetts and some of the replies, can be found on the web-page cited in
footnote 451
460 EPSRC’s response to IRMS 2010 appeared in November 2011:
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2011/Pages/irmactionplan.aspx some 9 months after the review. While

communications are recognized as an issue in the response, no timescales are given for initiatives designed to improve
them.
770
Cathy Smith, Institute of Education – Written evidence
1. Context: this evidence comes from my independent research project 'Choosing more
mathematics' (2005-2011) analysing the impact of the FMNetwork on widening participation
in further mathematics A-level in under-represented areas. I interpret this in the light of my
fifteen-years' experience of teaching and interviewing for mathematics and mathematics
education at Cambridge University.
2. I address the areas of 16-18 and graduate supply: "What have been the effects of earlier
government initiatives on the uptake of STEM subjects at advanced level?" and "What is
being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM graduates in terms
of gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic background?"
3. The longitudinal study on the effect of FMNetwork promotion and tutoring in three
educational sites without previous access to further mathematics showed a rapid increase in
Year 12 students' willingness to value mathematics and further mathematics as pathways to
university success. Interview and questionnaire data was gathered from 24 students over
two years, following students to university where possible (Smith 2010). The retention rate
of these students was high with 80% of AS-level further-mathematicians applying for STEM
subjects, compared to the 50% retention rate found elsewhere amongst similarly qualified
students (Reiss et al. 2011). In addition the sample showed that a significant number of
students without a science A-level but who had studied with the FMNetwork then chose to
continue in a mathematics-plus-another subject degree course. The FMNetwork has thus
been significant in enabling a diverse group of students to become qualified and interested in
mathematical career trajectories. This is significant as the decline of further mathematics
was affecting the number of suitably qualified British-educated applicants to mathematics
degree courses. Students in the majority of schools, where teaching simply prepares
student to pass mathematics A-level, do not have enough experience of mathematical
concepts or thinking to engage with interview questions.
4. Alongside this overall finding, interviews showed considerable tensions in continuing to

study further mathematics. Discouraging factors consisted of: lower grades than in other
subjects; high risk in tackling less-structured mathematical topics and questions; requirement
to work alone; a finite model of time/effort and an emphasis on balance so that students
were guided to drop further mathematics at AS if they needed to improve in a 'main' subject
other than mathematics. Encouraging factors were: increased challenge, opportunities to
work together independently of the teacher; opportunities to prove oneself despite adverse
school circumstances. Encouraging school factors were: meaningful, engaging mathematics
lessons in year 11 when students have taken early entry GCSE; the promotion of
mathematics (for example with FMNetwork events) and informal availability of qualified staff.
The importance of maintaining interest beyond GCSE suggests that the focus in designing
curriculum and strategies to increase post-compulsory participation should be 14-18.
5. Students reported that the FMNetwork was particularly effective in preparing them to
learn independently while at school and at university. In several cases the quality of the
tutoring and administration allowed them to overcome school barriers and succeed in both
further mathematics and mathematics. This was particularly notable in the cases of
working-class young women, and young men from socio-economically disadvantaged areas
771
who needed support (in the form of access to good teaching) to sustain their aspirational
efforts (Smith 2010, 2011).
Reiss, M., C. Hoyles, S. Simon, et al. 2011. Understanding Participation rates in post-16
Mathematics and Physics (UPMAP) Newsletter (Winter 2010/Spring 2011).
Smith, C. 2010. Choosing more mathematics: happiness through work? . Research in
Mathematics Education 12 (2):99-116.
Smith, C. 2011. 'Sometimes I think Wow I'm doing Further Maths…’: balancing tensions
between aspirations and belonging. In Mapping Equity and Quality in Mathematics
Education, ed. B. Atweh, M. Graven, W. Secada and P. Valero. New York: Springer.
16 December 2011
772
Society of Biology – Written evidence
The Society of Biology is a single unified voice for Biology: advising Government and
influencing policy; advancing education and professional development; supporting our
members, and engaging and encouraging public interest in the life sciences. The Society
represents a diverse membership of over 80,000 - including practising scientists, students
and interested non-professionals - as individuals, or through the learned societies and other
organisations listed below.
Summary
• Trained scientists are of enormous value to the population in a range of research

and non-research careers, and many employers welcome applicants with a scientific
background to non-research based roles due to the transferable skills common to
many STEM graduates including problem solving, critical thinking, analytical skills.
• We need more 16–18 year olds studying the appropriate combinations of sciences
and mathematics at A level to ensure we produce enough STEM undergraduates to
provide the UK’s science base. Any cuts to funding for 16-19 education and
subsequent increasing class sizes or decreasing resources available will have negative
implications on practical teaching in sciences, when universities already report new
undergraduates to lack these skills. Mathematical ability is widely quoted as
insufficient in new STEM undergraduates.
• The STEM graduate career pipeline is not simply a route to an academic research
position, and as such, graduates need to gain a range of transferable skills during their
course in order to equip them for a range of potential roles. Reports from
employers highlight that graduates are lacking generic transferable skills and research
skills and experience, particularly basic mathematical and statistical capability, ability
to apply scientific and mathematical knowledge, and practical and analytical skills.
43% of employers report a problem recruiting staff with the right STEM skills and
increasingly employers tend to recruit candidates with at least Masters level
qualification to ensure they have more of the desired skills.
• In order to ensure that sufficient numbers of graduates with the appropriate levels of
skills are generated, employers need to play a key role in promoting study of STEM
subjects and careers at all levels through training funds, bursaries, academic prizes
and CASE studentships. Increasing the number of student placements offered and
integration of these opportunities into degree programmes will highlight the
potential vocational nature of STEM subject degrees.
• Research informed teaching is crucial in order to produce STEM graduates with the
high level skills required for employment. The current focus of the Research
Excellence Framework does not incentivise or recognise teaching and will lead to the
emergence of further divisions between academics who focus on research and those
with teaching responsibility. The decrease in HEFCE teaching funding will create a
serious funding shortfall for laboratory subjects which are costly to teach such as the
773
biosciences. The new level of HEFCE funding is wholly inadequate and some HEIs
may decide that science programmes are unaffordable under the new funding regime.
• Until the system of fees and funding for Masters courses is developed, it is difficult to
know how this will affect the uptake of Masters courses, and subsequent supply of
PhD students. An increasing trend for HEIs and employers to accept only applicants
who have a Masters qualification means that this will become increasingly important.
Financial constraints will become an increasing factor in some able students choosing
to continue studying beyond a three year undergraduate degrees.
• There is some concern that the training that UK postgraduate students receive does
not compare favourably with research training abroad, where postgraduate training
takes longer. Anecdotal evidence suggests that postgraduate students from the UK
lose out on postdoctoral research positions to overseas applicants due to their
decreased research training.
General questions
What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job? Do we understand

demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used to influence supply?
1. STEM subjects include science, technology, engineering and maths, although some
views include medicine. There is a common misconception that biology is not a STEM
subject. This may be partly due to the fact that - unlike the other core sciences and
maths - the biosciences, with the exception of biotechnology, have not been identified
as a ‘Strategic and Vulnerable Subject’ (SIV)461 . Although strategically important, the
biosciences as a whole have not been considered vulnerable. This is in spite of the
fact that understanding of biological systems (and many important discoveries)
depends on utilising knowledge of chemistry, physics and mathematics. Further, there
is a mismatch between supply and demand in professional skills in many biological
disciplines and the BBSRC 462 identified whole animal physiology, industrial
biotechnologies, plant and agricultural sciences and systematics and taxonomy as both
strategically important for the UK and as vulnerable or likely to become so.
2. A recent report for the Science Council 463 found that 20% of the workforce is
employed in science roles - a total of 5.8 million people, and these figures are set to
grow. Of the current figures, 1.2m are classed as primary science workers - workers
in occupations that are purely science based and require the consistent application of
scientific knowledge and skills - and 4.6m are secondary science workers - workers in
occupations that are science related and require a mixed application of scientific
knowledge and skills alongside other skill sets.
3. This workforce included people working in a diverse range of sectors including

research & development, education, ICT, health and consultancy as the largest fields.
461 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/funding/201213/DefinitionofSIVS_byJACS30.xls
462 Strategically Important and Vulnerable Capabilities in UK Bioscience, BBSRC Bioscience Skills and Careers Strategy
Panel (2009) http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/web/FILES/Reviews/0905_bioscience_research_skills.pdf
463 The current and future UK science workforce, Science Council (2011)
774
The transferable skills common to many STEM graduates – including problem solving,
critical thinking, analytical skills - are valued by many businesses outside of STEM464 .
16-18 supply
4. The proportion of post 16 students taking maths and the sciences at A level is
increasing 465 , although reports still state that we need more 16–18 year olds studying
the sciences and mathematics at A level 466 to ensure we produce enough STEM
undergraduates to provide the UK’s science base.
5. Biology is the most frequently studied of the sciences at A level 467 , however a large
proportion of students who study biology at A level chose to study biology with no
additional sciences. Too many students later decide they would like to take biology
further only to discover their choices limited future progression as most universities
require students to have studied both biology and another science or maths subject
at A level. This issue highlights a disparity in the quality of advice that young people
are receiving at a critical point in their education. We welcome publications such as
the Russell Group’s Informed Choices guide 468 which provide students with
information on the subjects required for admission to particular degree courses, and
which highlights the importance of taking chemistry and maths alongside biology in
order to study biology at HE.
6. Due to perverse accountability measures, schools are driven to put students through
multiple re-sits with the focus of ensuring students get good grades (A-C), and this
comes at the cost of preparing them adequately for university. Particular skills which
universities cite as lacking in many students are critical thinking, the ability to study
independently and specific practical skills and transferable skills including literacy and
numeracy. In April 2011 the Gatsby Charitable Foundation 469 commissioned research
on the standard of laboratory skills possessed by new undergraduate students in the
15 Russell Group universities in England (excluding the LSE). This report found that
100% respondents felt that new undergraduates lacked confidence in the lab and 57%
felt that the level of laboratory skills had declined over the last five years. Universities
find themselves in the position of having to incorporate these skills components into
their teaching, when in fact these activities should begin at school. Mathematical
ability is widely quoted as insufficient, and chemistry has also been highlighted as
lacking.
464 Ready to grow: business priorities for education and skills, CBI/EDI (2010)
465 Joint Council for Qualifications data (2011) http://www.jcq.org.uk/national_results/news_releases/2011/
466 Preparing for the transfer from school and college science and mathematics education to UK STEM higher education
Royal Society (2011) http://royalsociety.org/education/policy/state-of-nation/higher-education/

467 Preparing for the transfer from school and college science and mathematics education to UK STEM higher education
Royal Society (2011) http://royalsociety.org/education/policy/state-of-nation/higher-education/

468 Informed Choices, Russell Group (2011) http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/informed-choices.aspx
469 http://www.gatsby.org.uk/Search-
results.aspx?searchStr=Practical%20experiments%20in%20school%20science%20lessons%20and%20science%20field%20trips
775
7. We support comments from SCORE 470 . that ‘practical work should be intrinsic to the
curriculum and be used not only to develop a pupil's understanding of scientific enquiry and
practical skills but also to further a pupil's scientific knowledge and understanding’ Practical
science is costly to teach, in terms of time, and providing resources such as
appropriate laboratory space and reagents and costs for travel for field trips. Any cuts
to funding for 16-19 education 471 will have negative implications on practical teaching
in sciences. Resulting measures such as increasing class sizes or decreasing resources
available will threaten quality, with adverse effects on students progressing to higher
education.
8. One of the aims of the English Baccalaureate is to increase the uptake of academic
subjects at GCSE, including the individual sciences. We welcome this aim, although
we have concerns that practical issues arising from the introduction of the English
Baccalaureate may limit the number of students studying sciences at key stage 4 and
beyond.
9. In order to accommodate the English Baccalaureate subjects within the timetable

some schools may find themselves unable to offer the three separate sciences.
Additionally, the marking system in which only the top two grades achieved from the
three separate sciences are counted, may induce schools to pre-emptively
concentrate teaching efforts on only two sciences. This could lead to decreased
engagement with particular science subjects and potentially a decreased number of
students studying STEM subjects at HE. We suggest the government conducts
longitudinal research into the effects of the English Baccalaureate on the uptake of
triple science and study of STEM in HEIs 472 .
Graduate supply
sectors not directly connected with STEM? Is the quality of STEM graduates
emerging from higher education sufficiently high, and if not, why not? Do STEM
graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it research,
10. Approximately 10% of UK degrees awarded every year are classed as biological
sciences 473 (although the definition of the biological sciences used for these statistics
is very broad). A greater issue for the biosciences is the numbers of graduates with
the desired skills for employment. Increasingly both employers, and HEIs searching
for PhD students, tend to recruit candidates with research experience gained through
470 http://www.score-education.org/policy/wider-learning-experience/practical-work-in-science
471 16-19 Funding Formula Review, Department for Education (2011)
http://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=consultationDetails&consultationId=1777&external=no&menu
=1
472 Evidence to the Education Select Committee inquiry on English Baccalaureate, SCORE (2011) http://www.score-
education.org/media/7895/ebacweb.pdf
473 HESA data, (2008/09) http://www.hesa.ac.uk/
776
an MSc/MRes or MSci/MBiol (rather than BSc) to ensure they have more of the
desired skills and 43% of all employers report a problem recruiting staff with the right
STEM skills 474 . There is a significant mismatch between employer expectations and HE
output - employers complain that there are not enough graduates with the right skills
while students are unable to find jobs in the sector.
11. Reports on STEM graduates in general 475 , and also specifically on bioscience
graduates 476,477 highlight that graduates are lacking both generic transferable skills and
research skills and experience. These reports show that employers are most
concerned about bioscience graduates lacking basic mathematical and statistical
capability, ability to apply scientific and mathematical knowledge, and practical and
analytical skills. Specific scientific skills change relatively rapidly as technology
advances and techniques are adapted to different purposes (and are frequently
automated), so to properly prepare a workforce in training it is important to teach
basic skills, critical thinking, experimental approaches and ethics, as well as imparting
fundamental knowledge.
12. There is a danger that these numerical skills are downgraded in bioscience courses
and particularly in student assessment. Quantitative skills training is something
that biological sciences students may individually seek to avoid in many cases, having
chosen biology on the mistaken grounds that it is not a quantitative science.
Universities may seek to avoid teaching essential but unpopular skills in the face of
activities such as the National Student Survey.
13. However, we do note that not all graduates want or need advanced research skills, as
they may not want to become researchers in the future. The STEM graduate career
pipeline is not simply a route to an academic research position, and as such, graduates
need to gain a range of transferable skills during their course in order to equip them
for a range of potential roles. We stress the need for relevant careers advice for
students, graduates and postgraduates, that remains current with the rapidly changing
employment market, and that is accessible to as many people as possible. There is no
dearth of advice available but not everyone who needs it will come looking for it and
will think critically about its reliability and relevance to them. Also many students
consider careers advice to be irrelevant when they are still unsure about careers and
so do not engage with careers advice early enough.
14. We would also like to highlight the need to ensure that appropriate numbers of non-
EU overseas STEM students and graduates are attracted to the UK, and warn of the
potentially damaging implications for UK science and engineering of Government
plans to end the right of migrants to settle in the UK.
474 Building for Growth, CBI/EDI (2011)

476 Skills needs for biomedical research, ABPI (2008) http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/library/industry/Pages/skills-
biomedical-research.aspx
477 Report of Industry Survey on Accreditation of UK Bioscience Degrees, Society of Biology (2011)
http://www.societyofbiology.org/documents/view/832
777
institutions?
15. The Society of Biology has provided responses to many of the recent consultations
on the higher education reforms; these can be found on our website478 . Below we
summarise some of the main consequences that we anticipate the proposed higher
education reforms will have on the quality of STEM degrees and subsequent supply of
skilled STEM graduates.
16. The decrease in HEFCE Teaching funding will create a serious funding shortfall for
subjects which are costly to teach well, and this certainly includes all of the
biosciences. The HEFCE additional funding of £1500 which is available to supplement
fees from students taking Band B subjects is wholly inadequate and unrealistic. Science
subjects are inherently costly to teach, and there are few cheap options for teaching
them well, principally due to the vital elements of laboratory and fieldwork, which
place demands upon both resource budgets and staff time. TRAC data indicate that
the differential in teaching cost between laboratory-based sciences (the biosciences,
chemistry, physics) and class-room based subjects, averaged across the sector, is
currently of the order of £3000- £3500. In light of this HEIs may decide that science
programmes are unaffordable under the new funding regime and will reduce them
accordingly, focusing their attention on less costly subjects such as the humanities.
Alternatively if HEIs aim to increase their bioscience undergraduate intake and reduce
their unit costs by achieving ‘economies of scale’ this will inevitably damage the quality
of teaching and of the student experience, through eliminating or reducing the highly-
valued, but high-cost, elements of bioscience study such as small-group teaching,
individual contact time, laboratory and field work and individual research projects. It
also imposes practical limitations on the subject matter which can be approached and
the hands-on skills which can be taught. A major driver for the year on year loss of
practical work from bioscience programmes has been their cost, yet the skill set
provided by such experience is precisely what employers want.
17. The Government has stated that 65,000 places are to be made available for students
achieving AAB grades or above at A-level or equivalent and, by implementing a 'core
and margin' model, 20,000 places will be allocated to HEIs whose average charge is at
or below £7,500 479 . These proposals could initiate an unwelcome approach to
provision by incentivising the development of a low-cost element to the HE sector,
with prioritisation of recruitment of high-performing students to non-science
subjects. Many HEIs may focus their recruitment efforts on AAB+ students to non
STEM subjects, given the financial incentive for recruiting students to classroom-based
courses rather than to science courses. Many organisations, including ourselves480 ,
have expressed concerns over the effects of this proposal on the overall numbers of
STEM students. HEFCE responded to these concerns by excluding SIV course non
AAB+ students from the cut in order to create a margin. As the biosciences, with
478http://www.societyofbiology.org/policy/consultations
479Higher Education White Paper: Students at the heart of the system, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
(2011) http://discuss.bis.gov.uk/hereform/white-paper/
480A joint response from the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Society of Biology to the
Department for Business, Innovation & Skills’ consultation on the Higher Education White Paper
http://www.societyofbiology.org/documents/view/799
778
the exception of biotechnology, are not classed as a SIV, the potential for a negative
impact on teaching in the biosciences is retained.
18. With the government's creation of the concept of the "good student" with AAB+
grades in any subjects, students who wish to study sciences at university may find it
more difficult to get the highest grades than do those who wish to study humanities.
University offers for science subjects will often include multiple required A level
subjects, whereas for the humanities, students will typically have one or no A levels
specified for their course, allowing them more power to choose the A level subjects
which are likely to give them the highest grades.
19. We are keen that there are measures put in place to review the effect of these new
proposals on student and graduate choices in strategically important disciplines such
as the sciences. We ask that the Government perform longitudinal studies on the
impact of the HE reforms on the willingness of graduates to study STEM subjects at
HE and to pursue research careers.
What is the relationship between teaching and research? What effect does
"research assessment" have upon the ability to develop new and cross-
disciplinary STEM degrees? Is it necessary for all universities to teach
undergraduates and post graduates and conduct research? What other delivery
model should be considered?
20. Research informed teaching is crucial in order to produce STEM graduates with the
high level skills required for employment in STEM careers. This teaching should
include appreciation and delivery of the component skills of research, as well as
exposure to an active research environment in order to embed knowledge,
understanding and skills.
21. The current focus of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) does not incentivise
or recognise teaching or research laboratory-based project supervision, which will
lead to the emergence of further divisions between academics who focus on research
and those with teaching responsibility. Whilst academics perceive that the only way
to promotion is via grants and papers, the perception of the importance of teaching
will decrease and its priority will be devalued. This loss of collegiality erodes the
student experience at the higher end and weakens skills delivery and added value. It
is important that undergraduates are taught by research active scientists who have
experience of the latest techniques. We encourage measures to highlight the
importance of teaching at HE, such as such as HE teaching awards, Continued
Professional Development focusing on teaching in Higher Education, and clear routes
to promotion which recognise the importance of teaching as well as research. The
Society of Biology 481 and several of our Member Organisations offer such schemes.
22. In terms of alternative delivery models we strongly oppose any move towards fast-
track two-year degrees as a new norm for strongly skills-based disciplines like the
biosciences. It is important to note that our international commitments under the
Bologna agreement push us in a different direction, proposing a minimum of three
years for undergraduate degrees. It is our belief that science degrees will increasingly
481 http://www.societyofbiology.org/education/hei/competition
779
require four years of study; Chemistry and Physics have already moved significantly
towards four year integrated Masters degrees as the entry route to research based
careers, and this is an increasing trend in the biosciences.

23. As research resources are increasingly focused into narrower ‘islands of excellence’,
even in research active institutions the proportion of well-funded researchers falls. In
these cases strenuous effort must be made to maintain integration of these staff into
the teaching agenda, and ensuring that degrees in STEM subjects are not lost. The
concentration of research into a few elite institutions will lead to geographical
limitations on studying STEM which would certainly have widening participation
implications, particularly if it occurs in areas of low university density. More students
are staying closer to home in order to reduce costs of higher education. A more
interesting question to ask is whether there is a sufficient geographical spread of high
quality STEM courses.
subsequently undertake? Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD
studentships to maintain the research base and are they of sufficient quality?
24. A recent report from the Science Council 482 highlighted the importance of scientific
training to the workforce. It splits the working population into primary science
workers in occupations that are purely science-based; secondary science workers in
occupations that are science related and require a mixed application of scientific
knowledge and skills alongside other skill sets, and non-science workers. Trained
scientists are of enormous value to the population in a range of research and non-
research careers, and many employers welcome applicants with a scientific
background to non-research based roles due to their analytical skills.
25. The skills required for a successful research career in the past have been largely
undefined. At present many graduate schools are beginning the process of identifying
these skills and are putting in place more targeted training programmes. Despite the
availability of several excellent resources for postgraduate researchers such as the
Vitae website 483 , not all early career researchers are aware of the diverse range of
careers facilitated by research; in some situations the advice and resources offered
during this training lag behind.
26. There is some concern that the training that UK postgraduate students receive does
not compare favourably with research training abroad, where postgraduate training
takes longer. Anecdotal evidence suggests that postgraduate students from the UK
lose out on postdoctoral research positions to overseas applicants due to their
decreased research training. Concern has been expressed that through increasing
482 The current and future UK science workforce, Science Council (2011)
483 Vitae http://www.vitae.ac.uk/
780
the formalities required by postgraduate students such as upgrades and appraisals,

this further decreases the time students spend in the lab. We recommend that
postgraduate students are encouraged to publish their research findings in peer-
reviewed journals and collaborate with researchers in other institutions and/or
industry during their PhD study to increase their research experience.
27. The Research Councils are reducing the number of PhD students in STEM areas by
focusing on priority research areas, and increasing the resource per individual student
to extend studentships to four years. It is unclear whether this reduced number of
PhD students will result in a contraction of opportunity. In the medium term the
reforms to the higher education system are likely to reduce the number of graduates
intending to and/or available to follow a research career. However this may be a
positive move if increased quality of training and career advice provides the
opportunity for these graduates and employers to more fully appreciate the quality of
the training and therefore the skills of qualified postdoctoral researchers.
28. Until the system of fees and funding for Masters courses is developed, it is difficult to
know how this will affect the uptake of Masters courses, and subsequent supply of
PhD students. An increasing trend for HEIs to accept only PhD applicants who have
a Masters qualification 484 – either a stand-alone MSc or MRes or an undergraduate
Integrated Masters qualification such as an MBiol or MSci – is likely to drive an
increased uptake in Masters degree courses in order for students to gain the skills
needed to be accepted for a PhD position. We welcome the fact that postgraduate
funding will be addressed in the next HEFCE consultation on HE funding and suggest
that state funding should be used to support students undertaking Masters level
qualifications, through a system of loans, although not at the expense of PhD funding.
We also note that Masters courses need to meaningful, and not simply taken by
students as they are unsure of what to do next in their career, and again stress the
importance of relevant careers advice.
29. With the increased costs of undergraduate study, many students may feel unable to
afford to continue into postgraduate study, particularly as there is no current route
of funding for students to take taught Masters courses. With the new fee system,
financial constraints will become an increasing factor in some able students choosing
to continue studying beyond a three year undergraduate degree. In turn this will
have a negative impact on the sector, potentially with Masters level courses closing,
having a knock on effect on further study. We are pleased to see that postgraduate
funding and support will be addressed in a forthcoming HEFCE consultation, and hope
the Government will monitor the impact of the new fees regime.
30. Factors which decrease the willingness of graduates to pursue research careers
include the lower comparative pay for British scientists in comparison to those in the
484 PhD study: Trends and profiles 1996-97 to 2009-10, HEFCE (2011) http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_33/
781
USA or Germany, or in comparison to other sectors outside research; the lack of job
stability and stress that comes from frequent job hunting; the red tape and regulation
of the research industry; and the contracting HE sector which, even if only short-
term, influences student decisions and therefore the long term skills supply.
Industry

them?
31. The CBI/EDI education and skills survey 485 identified that 52% of employers expect
difficulty recruiting STEM staff in the next three years. In order to ensure that
sufficient numbers of graduates with the appropriate levels of skills are generated,
employers need to play a key role in promoting study of STEM subjects and careers
at all levels.
32. Incentives for STEM students could include industry training funds and bursaries for
undergraduate students; offers to contribute towards paying off student loans on
employment; and sponsoring research council PhD CASE studentships; as well as
academic prizes for younger students to help promote the study of STEM subjects to
students at a younger age, and inspire them towards a future in STEM. Increasing the
number of student placements offered – which can range from four weeks to a year -
and work experience or shadowing opportunities offered by companies would help
to make STEM graduates more likely to pursue careers in this area. Integration of
these opportunities into degree programmes would highlight the potential vocational
nature of STEM subject degrees, and provide crucial training opportunities for the
skills employers require.
graduates?
33. We broadly support the aim set out in the Government’s Higher Education White
Paper, Students at the Heart of the System,486 earlier this year to encourage
interaction between universities and businesses, and welcome the Wilson Review of
Business-University Collaboration. On issues such as widening participation and
promotion of STEM as a subject of choice, where industry and HEIs are each working
independently, joint programmes may be both more effective and more economic.
34. With the changing landscape of the pharmaceutical industry, HEIs are finding it more
difficult to develop links with such organisations, and it is harder to monitor many
relationships with smaller organisations than it was to foster links with a small
number of large organisations. Umbrella organisations such as the Association of the
British Pharmaceutical Industry and the Bioindustry Association have a key role to
play in facilitating discussions and particularly the Society of Biology in our unique
position to act as one voice for the biosciences. The Society of Biology’s vision is to

486 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Higher Education White Paper: Students at the heart of the system 2011
http://discuss.bis.gov.uk/hereform/white-paper/
782
represent all who are committed to biology in academia, industry, education and
research; to facilitate the promotion and translation of advances in biological science
for national and international benefit, and to engage and encourage public interest in
the life sciences.
35. In particular the development of our Degree Accreditation Programme 487 features
industry and academia working together to recognise academic excellence in the
biosciences, highlighting degrees which educate the research and development leaders
and innovators of the future. When fully rolled-out across all the biosciences,
accreditation will recognise outstanding biosciences courses across the UK that focus
not only on core knowledge but also on experimental and analytical skills. It is our
hope that Degree Accreditation will provide employers with assurance over the
levels of laboratory and fieldwork experience provided by a degree, and the coverage
of key areas of expertise required for further employment in specialist scientific
careers. Accreditation will also make it easier for students to choose degrees which
will equip them for future scientific careers.
16 December 2011
We gratefully acknowledge the specific contributions of a Task Force (Chair: Dr Hilary

MacQueen, Open University; Dr Sandra Kirk, Nottingham Trent University; Dr Jeremy
Pritchard, University of Birmingham; Dr Malcolm East, University of Southampton; Prof
Jeremy Ward, Kings College London; Dr Ruth Bastow, GarNET; Karen Devine, British
Ecological Society; James Lush, Biochemical Society; Jess Strangward, British Pharmacological
Society; as well as written submissions from Thomas Mercer, Cardiff University.
The Society of Biology is pleased for this response to be publically available. For any
queries, please contact Society of Biology, Charles Darwin House,12 Roger Street, London,
WC1N 2JU. Email: education@societyofbiology.org
Member Organisations represented by the Society of Biology
Full Members
Anatomical Society
Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour
Association of Applied Biologists
Biochemical Society
Biosciences KTN
Breakspear Hospital
British Andrology Society
British Association for Lung Research
British Association for Psychopharmacology
British Crop Production Council
British Ecological Society
British Lichen Society
British Microcirculation Society
British Mycological Society
British Neuroscience Association
487 http://www.societyofbiology.org/education/hei/accreditation
783
British Pharmacological Society

British Phycological Society
British Society for Ecological Medicine
British Society for Immunology
British Society for Matrix Biology
British Society for Medical Mycology
British Society for Neuroendocrinology
British Society for Parasitology
British Society for Plant Pathology
British Society for Proteome Research
British Society for Research on Ageing
British Society for Soil Science
British Society of Animal Science
British Toxicology Society
Experimental Psychology Society
Fisheries Society of the British Isles
Genetics Society
Heads of University Biological Sciences
Heads of University Centres of Biomedical Science
Institute of Animal Technology
International Biometric Society
Laboratory Animal Science Association
Linnean Society of London
Marine Biological Association
Nutrition Society
Royal Entomological Society
Royal Microscopical Society
Science and Plants for Schools
Scottish Association for Marine Science
Society for Applied Microbiology
Society for Endocrinology
Society of Environmental Medicine
Society for Experimental Biology
Society for General Microbiology
Society for Reproduction and Fertility
Society for the Study of Human Biology
SCI Horticulture Group
The Physiological Society
Tropical Agriculture Association
UK Environmental Mutagen Society
University Bioscience Managers' Association
Zoological Society of London
Supporting Members
Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI)

Association of Medical Research Charities
AstraZeneca
BioIndustry Association
BioScientifica Ltd
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Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)

BlueGnome Ltd
GlaxoSmithKline
Huntingdon Life Sciences
Institute of Physics
Lifescan (Johnson and Johnson) Scotland Ltd
Medical Research Council (MRC)
Oxford University Press
Pfizer UK
Royal Society for Public Health
Syngenta
The British Library
Unilever UK Ltd
Wellcome Trust
Wiley Blackwell
785
Society of Biology, Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), Engineering Council, and
Cogent (QQ 216-245)
Society of Biology, Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE),

Engineering Council, and Cogent (QQ 216-245)
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Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) – Written evidence
Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) – Written

evidence
Introduction
1. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) is the leading trade
association for the UK motor industry, providing expert advice and information to its
members as well as to external organisations. It represents companies throughout the
automotive sector ranging from vehicle manufacturers, component and material
suppliers to power train providers and design engineers. The automotive industry is a
vital part of the UK economy accounting for £49 billion turnover and £10 billion value
added. With over 700,000 jobs dependent on the industry, it accounts for more than
10% of total UK exports and invests £1.3 billion each year in automotive R&D.
2. SMMT welcomes the opportunity to provide written evidence to the House of Lords
Science & Technology Sub-Committee I on ‘Higher education in STEM subjects’. SMMT
and the automotive industry is committed to ensuring that skills provision within the UK
meets the ever-changing and increasing demand of the sector, and calls on government
to ensure that this provision is supported through sustained support and incentives for
investment and an effective and comprehensive skills infrastructure.
3. The response outlines the key STEM issues for the automotive sector. Specifically in
relation to Higher Education in STEM subjects the automotive industry would like to
highlight:
• Concern over the current uptake and image of STEM subjects and numbers
of engineering graduates in the UK
• Need for higher education STEM courses to have content that directly
provides graduates with the skills set they will require in the work
environment
• Need for improved knowledge, and dissemination of information in the
higher education system over the long-term career opportunities and salaries
in manufacturing industries compared to other parts of the economy
• Industry engages closely with universities, particularly on innovation, however
understanding is needed on engagement between the manufacturing sector
and universities on course content and graduate numbers
STEM – skills for growth
4. The UK automotive industry provides 737,000 jobs to the UK workforce, with

approximately 150,000 being directly involved in the manufacturing process. In year
2009-2010, 14,530 apprentices started their placements in the automotive sector, up 9%
on the previous year. Of the 14,530 starters, over 6,000 were Advanced apprenticeships
(NVQ Level 3). 488
488 Source: SMMT – 12th Sustainability Report http://www.smmt.co.uk/sustainability#executive-summary
787
5. Skills policy, and specifically STEM, is a key priority for the automotive industry, and vital
to ensuring the long-term sustainability of economic growth in the UK. Government’s
stated ambition to “rebalance the economy” towards manufacturing can only be
achieved through the recognition of the current shortfall in skills provision in the UK,
and the swift implementation of measures to counter these deficits.
6. The automotive industry in the UK is a vibrant and dynamic sector, which invests heavily
in R&D and new technologies. Highlighting industry’s drive for progress, the Automotive
Council has set out strategic investment priorities for the move to lower carbon
technologies, identifying five ‘sticky’ or priority technology groups where the UK has
the potential for a significant return on investment, and which industry, government and
R&D funding bodies should strategically exploit and support. The ‘sticky’ technologies
are: energy storage and management, electric motors and power electronics, internal
combustion engines, lightweight vehicle and powertrain structures, and intelligent
mobility 489 . Ensuring the mechanisms are in place to meet the ever-changing skills
requirements that these new technologies and activities demand, is of vital importance
to exploit these opportunities for growth. Therefore an increase in the uptake of STEM
subjects within higher education, and consequently the enlargement of the talent pool
available to industry, is critical. Industry itself has made some progress in developing the
structures to upskill and train for a growing ultra low carbon vehicle market, one
example being SMMT’s work with the IMI to develop hybrid-electric vehicle technical
qualifications to meet the needs of an emerging market490 .
7. For many supply chain companies, the availability and quality of skills in the UK is a
critical issue. A recent SMMT survey of automotive suppliers as part of the BIS mid-sized
business growth review (£25m-£500m) revealed that 50% of mid sized supply chain
companies surveyed felt that government did not assist their businesses enough in
improving their capabilities and skills. Industry is keen to work with government to
address this trend.
8. SMMT has urged government to support the industry in addressing the identified
shortfalls in skills, competencies and qualification across the automotive workforce
through appropriate and flexible funding mechanisms. Train-to-Gain was a welcome and
effective instrument. There is a lack of understanding across the sector on the business
support measures following changes to regional governance.
STEM subjects – critical to automotive
9. The automotive industry believes that prioritising STEM subjects is crucial in opening up
employment opportunities at every level within the automotive sector. STEM subjects in
both their ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ forms are expensive to deliver, and require significant
investment in facilities and specialist subject tutors. If more people are to be equipped to
enter STEM careers, STEM must receive appropriate funding and encouragement from
the government.
489http://www.automotivecouncil.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Tech-Road-Maps-RD-Capability-Final.pdf
490http://www.imiawards.org.uk/qualifications/details/level-2-award-in-hybrid-electric-vehicle-operation-and-maintenance-
qcf--954.html
788
10. The UK automotive industry’s focus, investment, and expertise in R&D and new
technologies, requires that a high-calibre of engineers are available for employment in
order to sustain the prominence and growth of this sector. Therefore ensuring that
there is a steady supply of highly qualified, highly skilled, STEM graduates who are ready
to work in manufacturing, is of utmost importance to industry.
11. Improving the perception of STEM subjects, the image of the manufacturing sector, and
the knowledge of careers advisers is vital to encourage the highest calibre of individuals
into the automotive industry. All volume manufacturers in the UK undertake outreach
activity such as taking current apprentices into schools to tell them about their
experiences and attending careers fairs. For more see examples see paragraphs 15-17.
12. Through the national curriculum, government should ensure that students are
encouraged to choose STEM subjects at every opportunity. SMMT supports the Design
and Technology Association’s ‘Believe in D&T’ campaign to keep Design & Technology
as a subject on the national curriculum, and as an option under the baccalaureate
system, as government considers the submissions to its National Curriculum Review.
13. An increased take-up of STEM subjects alone is not enough. More effort is required to
ensure universities and colleges have an understanding of the skills and technical
requirements (i.e. train the trainers) that will be in demand in coming years so that
investment reaches the appropriate areas, and the correct skills needs to drive the
industry forward, are catered for.
Image of manufacturing – promotion of STEM careers
14. The image of STEM subjects and careers in manufacturing which utilise the skills learned,
have suffered from image and perceptions issues over many years. Addressing these
perceptions of learners, careers advisers and teachers at all levels of the education
system in the UK is critical to increasing the uptake of STEM subjects and ultimately
growth in these industries.
15. In 2011 the Automotive Council and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills
(BIS) coordinated the ‘See Inside Manufacturing’ initiative aimed at changing outdated
perceptions of UK manufacturing, and encouraging young people into the sector.
Automotive companies have demonstrated their leadership in this drive to alter the
public image of manufacturing, to ensure these perceptions match 21st century realities
and make the broad range of attractive and rewarding careers available across the
industry visible to pupils, students and those that advise and guide them in their future
educational and careers’ choices. This effort to encourage more young people into the
automotive sector is both reliant on, and should assist in, the promotion and uptake of
STEM subjects within higher education.
16. On 29 June 2011, a specific programme of activities was put together to inform key
career influencers about the initiative. Manufacturers across the UK welcomed careers
advisors and teachers into their factories and R&D facilities, as a preview to the launch
for students, and to ensure the breadth of opportunities available within manufacturing
was understood by all key stakeholders. From 10 - 21 October, over 20 automotive
companies opened their doors to students across the UK, at over 100 events spread
across the fortnight period. In addition to the benefits in raising awareness and the
789
perception of industry to the students that attended, these events received wide-ranging
press coverage, at both a local and national level, further promoting industry and the See
Inside Manufacturing initiative.
17. Industry is keen to see that such an initiative is maintained, as feedback from the See
Inside Manufacturing events, showed positive outcomes, with 95% of those surveyed
stating that their knowledge about the careers and opportunities available in the
automotive sector improved through attending the event, 82% stating that their
perception of the career opportunities within the automotive industry has become more
positive, and 82% of those surveyed stating that they are more likely to advise their
students/contacts to consider a career in the automotive sector. 491
Apprenticeships – a key focus for STEM
18. The popularity of apprenticeships as alternatives to pursuing ‘traditional’ higher

education routes presents a key opportunity for those wishing to develop their STEM
skills vocationally whilst gaining valuable and credible qualifications.
19. Industry supports increased take-up of STEM at a higher level, but stresses the need for
skilled workers to enter businesses at all job levels. The UK automotive industry is one
of the largest providers of engineering apprenticeships, and undertakes significant
training and investment in staff up-skilling and development. It is actively recruiting at all
levels and welcomes extra government support for, and focus on, apprenticeships, which
SMMT believes is crucial to supply the industry with young, ready to work individuals.
20. The automotive sector works closely with Sector Skills Councils (SSCs), namely SEMTA
and the IMI, on ensuring skills provision and training for the automotive industry meets
the needs of the sector. In collaboration with SMMT, SEMTA has engaged with the
automotive sector and its supply chain, supporting companies to train and develop their
workforce, including through the use of apprenticeships. By linking training programmes
to business improvement through a focus on return on investment, involvement in
significant long-term training programmes such as apprenticeships has been expanded in
automotive companies.
21. Industry particularly encourages further government support for advanced and higher
apprenticeships; which should be seen as part of the higher education offering in the UK.
SEMTA analysis shows that engineering apprenticeships typically last 3-4 years, are
relatively expensive compared to other sectors, especially at advanced level, and are
estimated to provide companies with a payback from increased productivity only after 3-
4 years on average.
22. SSCs should continue to be supported in the work being undertaken through labour
market intelligence gathering which assesses future and current skill needs, necessary for
training provider investment in facilities and qualifications development in new subjects.
15 December 2011
491 Source: BIS http://nds.coi.gov.uk/content/detail.aspx?NewsAreaId=2&ReleaseID=422062&SubjectId=2
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South East Physics Network (SEPnet) – Written evidence
On behalf of the South East Physics network, a consortium of seven university Physics
departments in the South East of England 492 , please find attached our submissions for the
HOUSE OF LORDS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SUB-COMMITTEE Call for Evidence:
Higher Education in STEM Subjects.
SEPnet was formed in 2008 with funding from HEFCE to sustain Physics in this region of the
UK. We believe much progress has been made to support Physics and also those wishing to
study other STEM subjects in which physics is an essential or desirable discipline. We are
concerned that the emerging environment of student fee changes, changes to student
number controls and changes in Research Council funding will destructively interfere with
one another to adversely effect Physics demand and provision at middle sized, middle
ranked and specialised institutions.
We believe SEPnet has programmes for outreach and employer engagement that could be
models for other regions and other STEM disciplines to follow. Its ability to facilitate
collaboration between its members is also a possible mechanism to address the risks and
vulnerabilities to subjects such as physics.
I attach our more detailed response.
Contributors to this response:

Dr James West FBCS CITP CEng FRAS, Executive Director, SEPnet
Charlotte Thorley, Director of Outreach, SEPnet
Claire Potter, Director of Employer Liaison, SEPnet
Employer Contributors:
Alan Beesley, SELEX Galileo
Alison Hodge, Independent member of the SEPnet Employer Advisory Panel
Dr John Lillington, Chief Technologist, Serco
General questions
1. Responding on behalf of the South East Physics Network. Physics is a fundamental science
that does not need further defining in the context of STEM.
Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used to influence supply?
2. We feel there is a high demand for Physics graduates in particular and STEM graduates
generally, even if many or most do not gain employment in their direct specialty.
Anecdotally one hears that industry claims to have big shortages of STEM graduates but also
that most STEM graduates enter non-STEM jobs. It is important to reconcile these positions
and determine the facts.
The partners in the SEPnet consortium are the Universities of Kent, Portsmouth, Queen Mary University of London,
492
Royal Holloway University of London, Southampton, Surrey and Sussex
791
16-18 supply
Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they have the right
3. A: The numbers of students taking triple science at GCSE has increased in recent years.
However, these still tend to be found in Independent Schools, Grammar schools and state
schools in wealthier areas with high intakes from higher socio-economic groups. This then
skews the numbers taking Physics at A-level to students from such schools simply because
they have better and more accessible opportunities to study at this level. It is a concern to
us that this then reinforces the trend in applicants for Physics at degree level to largely
white, middle class male students. We believe initiatives to increase the numbers overall
taking Physics at A-level (which then benefits the supply of applicants to engineering, IT,
mathematics, medicine and other STEM subjects at degree level) should be maintained,
increasing the numbers and quality of students taking physics at GCSE and A level in schools
with high lower socio-economic intakes and to make physics a more appealing subject to
qualified ethnic minority groups and women, who typically prefer medicine and dentistry to
other physical science subjects.
4. We are concerned at the practical laboratory skills that students entering universities
have. Laboratory experiments are not merely about getting the “right answer” but
understanding sources of error and their treatment, instilling the ability to understand what
happens when things go wrong and their problem solving, and understanding experimental
results and their theory. Moreover, irrespective of whether students then proceed to take
STEM subjects at degree level, a better understanding of practical methods would improve
the understanding of scientific issues in the public generally.
5. We believe that issues to do with attracting Physics students in particular and STEM
students in general have to be tackled much earlier in secondary school from age 11 (or
even earlier) rather than at GCSE or later. If school children are not inspired by science at
this age and appreciate its intellectual challenge as well as relevance to their lives, then they
will be less inclined to wish to specialise later on. Programmes to address this can also be
targeted to address issues of widening participation. SEPnet Outreach has primarily
concentrated on the general public, GCSE and A-level students in its first phase to establish
good practice in accessible public and schools engagements in the partner departments. We
are now building on this to incorporate a more holistic approach to science literacy and
promoting physics at all ages.
What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of STEM subjects at
advanced level?
6. SEPnet’s outreach programme (an initiative sponsored by HEFCE) has been very effective
at increasing the supply and quality of students taking A-level physics. It has increased the
numbers applying for and taking Physics and astronomy degrees in the partner universities in
SE England which have been substantially higher than increases observed in the rest of
England. These increases cannot be explained simply by the “Brian Cox” and “Big Bang
Theory” effects, though these have obviously been contributory factors. We believe that
other STEM subjects nationally and Physics in other regions of the UK could learn from the
success of these programmes which depend on the delivery of programmes by specialist
outreach personnel. We are concerned that as universities attempt to meet their access
792
agreement commitments they may centralise their outreach programmes and reduce or
eliminate the subject specialists upon which Physics outreach depends.
What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM subjects in higher
education?
7. As Science is part of the English Baccalaureate on its own it probably will not contribute
to the study of STEM subjects at HE. It is more likely to assist vulnerabilities in subjects like
modern languages. To influence entry to STEM subjects, triple sciences would need to be
part of EBacc which, whilst arguably desirable, is unlikely to be practical or achievable in the
short to medium term.
Graduate supply
Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU and overseas) sufficient
to meet the needs of industry, the research base, and other sectors not directly connected with
STEM?
8. This question is best answered by the employers. The provision of physics undergraduate
courses nationally can undoubtedly provide the numbers of physicists that both research
and industry needs. However, physics degrees provide a much broader set of qualifications
than training in physics. The analytical skills, numeracy, problem solving and many other
transferable skills are applicable in many careers. Moreover, because physics departments
can gain economies of scale in teaching a larger population than simply those who are
intending to undertake “physics” careers then this enables more institutions to offer physics
courses and ensures more UK institutions can be highly ranked worldwide because they
offer a diverse range of subjects.
9. SEPnet has polled its Employer Advisory Panel and gained the following insights:
10. ‘STEM’ employers vary greatly with their needs and as such, the answer to this question
is a mixed picture. Some have little trouble filling vacancies with candidates with the
correct STEM skills, which they attribute to their highly targeted recruitment methods.
They acknowledge that this situation may be against the national trend.
11. In the nuclear industry, the situation has been influenced by the stagnation of the
industry as a whole. No new builds and no recruitment means that the workforce
profile is aging. With the resurgence in Nuclear power, the industry is playing catch-up
on recruitment. Although the industry has seen an increase in students with the
required skills for this sector, there needs to be more to meet future requirements.
12. Anecdotal reports from Careers Advisers are that it is hard to find UK graduates with
the correct skills in this field, and that many companies are looking for recruits abroad.
Conversely, there are still Physics graduates who are unable to find work in their chosen
fields, and are mystified by reports of a ‘STEM skills shortage’. Roles for Physicists can
be hard to find.
Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently high, and if not, why
not?
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13. SEPnet’s Summer internship scheme is aimed at providing Physics undergraduates with
direct and relevant work experience to build up their transferable skills. We believe such
schemes, in partnership with industry, are extremely important to improve the
employability of physics graduates and could serve as a model in other STEM subjects,
especially those in subjects where there is no specific industry or employers who would
naturally employ such graduates.
14. The employers we surveyed tended to target their recruitment at Universities with a
strong STEM reputation. A common theme is that the quality of candidates is generally high,
despite University curricula needing to cover work that was contained in the A-Level
syllabus a decade ago.
Graduates are reported to have ‘wider but less deep’ skills than in the past, and have good
technical and computer related skills.
15. A common issue is that Physics graduates are not as adept at ‘first principle’ problem
solving as you might expect. This could be down to an over-reliance on software, with a lack
of understanding of the principles behind the software. This could also be related to another
common discussion topic at the SEPnet Employer Advisory Board: Laboratory skills are
markedly less prevalent in recent graduates, and many are not well-versed in the scientific
method, measurement, testing etc.
Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it research, industry or more
broadly within the economy?
16. Physics graduates generally have little explicit training that develops transferable skills that
industry typically looks for and which also benefits those undertaking research, especially in
large collaborations typical in much of physics. The IoP standards for physics UG degree
courses concentrate on the technical skills only to the exclusion of “employability” skills.
SEPnet’s Employer Advisory Panel has fed back to us perceived issues in the physics
curriculum but without IoP endorsement, institutions have little motivation or ability to
incorporate these into an already full curriculum.
17. Our employers told us that at some level the answer has to be 'no' otherwise the
graduates would presumably be going straight to their next career move! Career moves
require experience that can only be gained from the working environment as opposed to
that while being a student. Although the academic skills gained at University provide enough
understanding of the concepts and principles behind technical challenges, often it is only
experience that brings skills necessary for a business environment: working in teams,
decision making, flexibility and adaptation, leading a team, etc. Our employers report that
STEM graduates tend to start from a slightly lower base with regards to soft skills, when
compared to other disciplines.
18. Graduates from Generation Y, in general have very different expectations that of
Generation X, and tend to be less willing to compromise their work/life balance in order to
advance their career.
19. A topic which is often discussed at the SEPnet Employer Advisory Panel is where the role
of the University ends; does adding more vocational elements to degree programs water
down academic excellence? There are no easy answers to this particular question.
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20. The standards and expectations for accredited degrees and subsequent CEng, CPhys
awards remain unchanged; the emphasis on the traditional technical strengths are
increasingly out of line with the commercial requirements for many roles.
21. A word of caution is that ‘STEM’ jobs are greatly varied, and a common definition of such
a job is impossible.
What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality of degrees
22. We are concerned that the HE reforms, both the introduction of “full fees” and the
marketisation changes introduced in the 2011 HE white paper will have an adverse effect of
physics provision nationally. We believe this will extend to other high cost STEM subjects.
We believe that the most prestigious establishments will continue to attract the very best
students but that the ability of middle ranked institutions to continue to attract high quality
students and remain financially viable is a huge risk. This is likely to result in the provision of
physics UG programmes to be reduced with consequent impact on the supply of physics
graduates to industry and research and the impact on world class research programmes in
UK universities.
What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop new and cross-disciplinary
STEM degrees?
23. The Research Assessment incentivises departments to determine the unit of assessment
that benefits the research in that department. In some cases this can be healthy such as
submitting physics research in with relevant materials, electronics and other fields. In other
cases it may act to discourage collaboration between institutions and with other disciplines
if the institution cannot get recognition for that collaboration. This can have perverse
consequences in continuing to reward those that are already highly placed leading to less
diversification and risk taking. It also has adverse effects of "impact" upon blue-skies
research: departments that focus upon high-quality academic impact are being severely
disadvantaged, and the landscape is being skewed much more in favour of applied research
with short payback timescales. Without the underlying pure research it will be much harder
to maintain the quality of existing degrees, let alone to develop new and cross-disciplinary
programmes. In much of physics, the impact is typically much later than applied research and
engineering, yet much of engineering began life as pure research in physics departments.
What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary for all universities to teach
undergraduates and post graduates and conduct research? What other delivery model should be
considered?
24. In subjects such as physics there is a tight coupling between teaching and research: the
quality of research at an institution attracts the best researchers who provide the teaching
resources and whose current knowledge in their field enables them to provide high quality
teaching. Of great importance also is the flow of research grant income into the physics
departments. Together with the teaching income (now a combination of fees and HEFCE
support and in the future largely from fees) the physics departments have the income to
support the teaching staff and the high cost laboratories and other physical resources
needed to sustain physics in these departments. One of SEPnet’s achievements has been to
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grow both the undergraduate numbers and the teaching and research staff to ensure both
these income streams are, in principle, sustainable. We know of no institution that
specialises in teaching UG physics without a strong research base whereas we know of
examples of the reverse (Research but no UG such as at the universities of Portsmouth and
Hertfordshire).
25. However, the University of Portsmouth has recently embarked upon an “Applied Physics”
undergraduate course. This is aimed at lower achieving (but not necessarily lower potential)
A level students and is provided in partnership with local industry. This approach could
provide an alternative model to provide physics graduates for more direct industry needs,
such as engineering as well as act to widen the participation of less represented socio
economic group. It should be pointed out, though, the teaching staff for this course are
largely drawn from the physics research staff in Portsmouth.
26. Given that the provision of physics UG courses is therefore very dependent on a strong
research base, we are very concerned that the effect of changes in undergraduate funding
and number controls combined with the concentration of research funding by the research
councils (especially EPSRC and STFC) will put at risk small and medium sized physics
departments performing specialised, but world class, research. This will impact the provision
of physics graduates nationally and the fundamental physics research base.
Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education institutions offering STEM
courses?
27. Currently, Physics provision is well spread geographically (we might note that in SW and
Eastern England there are big gaps) though relative to population it may not be as strong in
SE England as in other parts of the country (if one excludes Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial
and UCL which attract students nationally). The growth we have seen in UG numbers in the
past 5 years may well have rectified that situation but to ensure this remains the case it will
require continued effort in outreach.
What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM graduates in
28. SEPnet’s outreach programme is working with state schools to support teaching staff in
the provision of physics teaching. The support of individual sciences at such schools is
bolstered by support for GCSE physics leading to an increased pipeline of those able to take
physics at A-level, a pre-requisite for physics and many engineering subjects at degree level.
This programme is particularly effective for those schools that do not have physics-specialist
science teachers, which tend to be 11-16 schools in low participation areas. Whilst the
availability of physics-specialist teachers generally is a major concern, in schools in lower
socio-economic areas it remains a crisis. Without addressing this core problem, the ability
to attract high potential students from such backgrounds into physics and to prepare them
for the rigours of A-level physics and maths will continue to be a huge problem.
Programmes like SEPnet outreach can only go so far to redressing this shortfall.
29. As far as ethnic minorities are concerned physics appears to be less attractive to many
well qualified ethnic minorities than medicine and related subjects. It is likely that such
students are attracted by the immediate entry into a recognised profession rather than as
for physics and many STEM subjects taking a general degree with many career options. It
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appears to be an assumption that subjects like physics lead either into research for a small
number or into careers where the relevance of physics is low for the majority. Yet physics
open up a wide range of career options where intellectual rigour, analysis and numeracy are
advantages. Programmes prior to A-level choices need to be put in place to increase the
awareness of these choices to high achieving minorities. It is likely that more specific
community programmes are needed, not just for the students but for their parents and
families who influence their choices.
30. The low uptake of physics and most STEM subjects by women remains a stubborn
problem to address. The Institute Of Physics has looked in details at what needs to be done
in schools, and SEPnet Outreach programmes follow their guidelines. SEPnet Outreach
maintains inclusivity as a core element of its activities, for gender as well as ethnic
background. We use student ambassadors of both genders and all backgrounds in delivering
our programmes, and develop all activities to have content and delivery elements that
appeal to all.
Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers they subsequently
undertake?
31. As well as their postgraduate training that equips them for undertaking research in their
chosen field, more needs to be done to enhance employability skills in PhD students.
Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain the research base
32. The effect of the Research council funding to concentrate funding into fewer, larger grants
is likely to impact smaller, specialised institutions and hence their ability to attract and
produce high quality PhD students. The loss of EPSRC project studentships specifically and
the algorithmic approach by the RCs generally in allocating doctoral training grants
disadvantages smaller, less diversified institutions also with the result that fewer PhD places
are available at those institutions. With weakened research capability, this will have an
adverse effect on physics teaching at such establishments and weaken the UK’s physics
research base overall. The effect of increased student fees is also likely to lead to fewer
taking four years integrated masters courses or to take an MSc after a first degree leading to
fewer research capable graduates to enter a diminishing supply of places. Reddressing the
reduction in Research Council PhD places would go a long way to providing the
underpinnings for high quality research that leads to PhD graduates to enter both academia
and industry.
What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of PhD students? Are
33. For those who have DTCs they undoubtedly have been positive. There are none in
physics in the SE of England and none are foreseen at present. The DTC model has
advantages. An alternative model would be to allocate them on a regional basis to multiple
institutions rather than concentrate them in institutions that already benefit from
concentrated funding from other sources.
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Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the balance right between the
34. It is very likely that the market for Masters courses will fall dramatically as the effect of full
UG fees comes into force, HEFCE’s contribution to PGT courses reduces and the number
of PhD places falls. Masters courses will remain attractive to those who have no immediate
career goals (whether by choice or not), for vocational courses (which lead directly to
employment) and for the independently wealthy.
What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of graduates to pursue a
research career?
35. On the assumption that a three year degree leaves the graduate with £60K in debt then it
is hard to see how most graduates who need a 2:1 BSc to take a career in industry would
wish to take on a further £20K of debt to take the fourth year of an integrated MPhys/MSci
or to take on a one year MSc so they can pursue a PhD. It is even harder to see how a
graduate from lower socio-economic groups who reaches that far to be willing to take on a
research career. This will further concentrate university research (and hence the gateway to
future academic careers) with those from wealthier backgrounds. Physics graduates are very
attractive to investment bank, IT and many other lucrative careers so from a national
economy point of view, it may not be especially worrisome were more physics graduates to
take up such careers and actually pay off the student debt they have incurred! However,
fewer may be motivated to take up engineering, teaching and academic careers where the
remunerations are not as attractive but which will be essential to the national economy.
36. We are concerned that the removal of student number controls on AAB+ students and
the marketisation of some courses will make it less attractive for students to take A-levels
that lead to STEM subjects and also will make it less affordable for some institutions to offer
high cost STEM subjects.
Industry
What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to attract them?
37. This question is very sector-specific and it is therefore difficult to generalise. However the
fact that financial companies are able to offer higher salaries certainly affects STEM graduate
career choices.
38. Industry sectors should be as informative to potential recruits as possible, to ensure that
the graduate is making an informed career choice. Common themes around what industry
can offer graduates are: interesting work and challenges, opportunity for career progression,
being valued and given autonomy and responsibility, and competitive rates of pay. It is also
important for companies to ensure that the graduates are able to make the transition from
studying to a productive member of the workforce as smooth as possible
39. Industry could assist by providing subsidies, bursaries, fee contributions to STEM students
whilst they are studying. Such assistance would most likely be dependent on students
agreeing to work for these employers for a defined period upon graduation. Employers
could repay part or all of loans on graduation (assuming there are no penalties on early
repayment this would be attractive for graduates and the Treasury).
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40. SEPnet has found its summer internship scheme for penultimate year a very effective way
for placing students to gain employability skills and for employers to identify potential
graduate hires. We would suggest that schemes like this be adopted in other regions and in
other STEM subjects. However, such schemes lack scale and it would be better for
employers to offer such internships to undergraduates (and to postgraduate students) to
firstly help them develop skills needed in future careers that are not taught in their degree
courses and to help their graduate hire programmes identify talent.
What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand for STEM
41. Some industrial sectors are more engaged with education than others – an observation
from the SEPnet Employer Advisory Panel is that industries that need very specific skills, and
industries that are suffering from a lack of these specific skills, are more engaged with
Universities than those with no skills shortages.
42. In the nuclear industry, there has been a significant increase in industry/university
engagement over the past few years. New agreements exist or are being negotiated
between industry and the major 'nuclear universities' for collaboration in business, research
and teaching. Industry provides external lecturers and examiners to post-graduate MSc and
PhD courses in many universities; industry staff also hold visiting professorial chairs and so
on. This promotes much greater visibility and interaction between the industry and
students and vice versa and helps to attract students into the industry.
43. Employer Advisory Panels provide a meaningful platform for Universities and industry to
discuss their respective needs, common goals, and to break down barriers. They can be
instrumental in aligning thinking and changing perspectives.
44. Student placements are a valuable and increasingly common way for industry to help
increase students’ employability skills, and to gain insight into the University system.
45. Companies need to influence career choices at an early stage – Schools Liaison
Programmes promote concrete and practical relationships between employers and schools,
including visits, work experience and school visits. This is less about trying to indoctrinate
youngsters in the merits of joining your particular organisation, than it is ensuring that they
receive enough information during their formative years about making informed choices
about A levels, University subjects and only later in life, their ultimate career choices.
What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM subjects in other
46. Input from our Employers: The huge difference outside the UK is that STEM and STEM
professionals are RESPECTED and VALUED in business and society, the media, schools etc.
In the UK, STEM often faces ridicule, called names like “nerdy”, “geeky” etc, and not paid
comparative salaries to peers such as lawyers, vets, medical doctors etc! This has
discouraged entry to the STEM professions. Compare mainland Europe, eg Germany,
Sweden, Italy, then in the USA, China, India – STEM is highly valued and respected, and
companies depend on STEM and STEM graduates.
16 December 2011
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South Eastern Regional College – Written evidence
Summary
1. South Eastern Regional College (SERC) is one of six regional colleges in Northern
Ireland (NI). It has a proven track record of embracing the STEM agenda through its
higher education (HE) provision:
〉 SERC’s HE enrolment in 2010/11 was 1359 students
〉 42% of SERC’s HE enrolments were in STEM subjects
〉 SERC’s enrolments in STEM subjects have grown by 16 % between 2008/09 and
2009/10
〉 51.76% of SERC’s HE students are part-time and 48.24% are full-time
1. SERC’s focus is to build sustainable economic growth by providing a highly skilled

and flexible workforce. In 2010/11 SERC worked with over 1,000 companies to up-
skill and reskill the workforce and provide technical support in line with current
STEM research.(1)
2. The six Regional Colleges deliver a significant proportion of NI’s HE provision:

〉 Colleges delivered approximately 18% of all HE delivered within NI, with 4,474
full-time and 6,928 part-time HE enrolments in 2009/10
〉 Between 2008/09 and 2009/10 College HE enrolments increased by 11%
〉 HE enrolments (11,402) accounted for 7% of College enrolments in 2009/10
〉 Over 72% of all College HE enrolments are in the areas of Health, Public
Services, Care; Engineering & Manufacturing Technologies; Construction,
Planning & the Built Environment; Information & Communication Technology;
and Business, Administration & Law
〉 Enrolments in these five areas accounted for 78.5% of all part-time HE
enrolments in NI’s six colleges
〉 HE places (both full and part-time) are restricted within the NI education system
3. Colleges have the flexibility to be at the heart of new models of delivery for HE
through increased part-time options, work-based learning (WBL), blended/e-learning
and accreditation of prior learning (APL). They have a track record of delivering cost
effectiveness, being accessible and reaching disadvantaged communities, and working
in partnership with local businesses and other education providers. Further
developments are frustrated by bureaucratic response from awarding bodies and
restrictions on funded places.
4. SERC believes that FE colleges have demonstrated that they are well placed to
deliver work-ready STEM graduates if a number of key issues are addressed:
〉 Ill-defined entry and exit points across HE which restricts the supply of, and
discourages, potential entrants from those with a disadvantaged background
and non-traditional entry qualifications
〉 The informal role of employers in shaping HE STEM education
〉 Inflexibility in the HE framework to facilitate the interchange of modules
between qualifications and awarding bodies
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〉 Dated career advice leading to STEM drop outs from the university system
from this already limited pool of STEM skill outputs.
5. Based on SERC’s experience of implementing the STEM agenda, the following

solutions are suggested to address the key issues:
〉 Develop the capacity of colleges to deliver economically viable forms of HE
to supply higher technical skills at level 4 in multi-disciplinary areas including
sustainable energy and renewable technologies and health and life sciences.
〉 Review and reform the role of business networks within higher education to
shape STEM programmes
〉 Develop the principles of the Qualifications Credit Framework (QCF) to fully
embrace higher education providing entry flexibility and progression
〉 Further invest in STEM careers advice and career planning from aged 11 to
reduce the growth in Not in Education or Training (NEETS)
Evidence
6. Current research (1) has shown that to supply STEM graduates the HE system must
be:
〉 Responsive to the needs of the economy;
〉 Flexible in the delivery of provision to meet the changing needs of learners
and employers;
〉 Efficient and effective in the delivery of HE to enable the maximum numbers
to benefit within an affordable system;
〉 Collaborative to ensure the best use of resources, reduce duplication and
promote complementarity and progression.
7. Colleges are developing a reputation for being ‘in touch’ with market forces, aware
of the demands of the commercial world and being sufficiently flexible to meet them.
Through the employer-led Regional Workforce Development Forums in NI and links
with Sector Skills Councils, Colleges are aware of skills needs, gaps and
opportunities.
8. SERC has a proven track record of supporting businesses through multi-disciplinary

platforms by up-skilling and reskilling the workforce and providing technical and
professional support. In 2010/11, SERC worked with over 1,000 companies
including the STEM areas of sustainable energy/renewable technologies, polymers,
software development, creative multi-media and financial management, working with
multi-nationals including Bombardier, BT and Coca-Cola. Knowledge Transfer
Partnerships have included working with Redraven Racing NI to design and bring to
market an innovative product to keep riders’ goggles clean during off-road cycling
and racing. The success of the College was acknowledged in November 2011 by
winning the prestigious Green Gown Award for delivering environmental skills
beating competition from major UK colleges and universities. Investing £3.7m to
develop a multi-award winning Environmental Skills Centre, SERC works with
industry partners including Ferroli, Willis, Dimplex and Baxi groups to ensure that
the Centre is fully equipped with the latest industry standard equipment and
facilities. SERC provides specialist training and support in Heat Pump Installation,
Biomass and Solar Technologies, Energy Assessment, The Code for Sustainable and
Passive and Zero Carbon Homes. Following discussions and successful exchange
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visits, an accord was signed between SERC and Toyama National College of
Technology in 2010 to extend international understanding in STEM.
9. Despite success in some STEM areas, the partnerships between employers and
education rely solely on good will. Feedback from the local employer network
shows frustration as to their lack of direct influence on the content and currency of
programmes. SERC makes considerable effort to woo and retain the interest of
local employers who have little incentive to commit valuable time without immediate
impact or influence. The timescale of employers tends to be short-term and
education longer. To build strong partnerships there must be a framework that
encourages consistency and mutual benefits. Despite the many initiatives
undertaken, the process is fragmented and the core skill messages lost.
10. The role of the Sector Skills Bodies and National Skills Academies could be reviewed
and reformed to provide employers with greater control over programme content.
This model could be extended fully to the HE sector to establish a national
understanding of employer requirements and opportunities. To ensure ‘buy in’ from
employers, the practice in the Austrian apprentice system could be examined where
employers are incentivised to have real ownership to shape and deliver graduates
with sector and job-ready skills. This would reduce the fragmentation that currently
exists between industry and higher education. It would facilitate a smooth
progression through the STEM skills levels from secondary to higher education with
a continuous flow of skills requirements from employers.
11. As part of this reform there would be a need for Government to set long-term
priorities and to respond appropriately in the area of funding. (Currently students
studying construction attract a higher weighting than those studying ICT within the
NI FE sector.) The roles of all bodes involved are complementary but need clear
definition. Skills bodies to shape wider industry needs and inform programme
content particularly in the short-term, government to encourage and shape long-
term need, universities to supply research and further education to supply higher
technical STEM skills and development.
12. The economy requires many exit and entry points to STEM education to provide the
rich diversity of relevant graduates who are competent across the higher education
spectrum from technical level 4 to post-doctoral level 8. The school, college and
university sectors have each a valuable complementary role in developing STEM skills
which needs to be recognised and strengthened as part of a national approach.
Colleges offer many STEM courses that combine academic and practical elements in
a way which is more attractive to students who would otherwise be less likely to
follow an academic STEM course. This combination of academic and practical work
along with work placement is particularly suited to courses at sub degree level.
13. Colleges have developed innovative ways to increase flexibility in the delivery of
courses by offering combinations of full-time, part-time and block release to suit the
needs of individual learners and employers. Initially the Foundation Degree provided
an employer led solution to graduate supply by combining academic and practical
STEM skills to produce work ready and experience graduates. It was notable for
offering progression opportunities from apprenticeship programmes to intermediate
HE courses through the provision of more flexible HE provision targeted at people
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already in the workforce. Colleges are very well placed to meet this demand.
However, increasingly university procedures for validation have reduced
effectiveness and timely response to industry demands. Currently a minimum two
years is required to prepare and validate most HE qualifications.
14. An opportunity exists to widen the QCF framework to develop a bank of accredited
modules that can be matched into a STEM higher education qualification which
meets local, national and international industry needs. This would reduce the time
and expense required to unnecessarily write similar modules common to a number
of programmes and would ensure consistent standards of achievement. The
universities could retain their awarding body powers but work collaboratively on
quality assurance.
15. The speed at which the knowledge economy is progressing demands a speedy
response from education to meet the needs. This response needs to go beyond the
traditional focus on 16-19 year olds. Colleges have a proven track record of
providing opportunities for those from a disadvantaged background and those with
non-traditional entry qualifications. The Northern Ireland Widening Participation
Strategy highlights that 19.9% of enrolments in HE in the Colleges were from the
20% most deprived areas of NI, and that there is a significantly better balance age-
wise with 47% of enrolments in FE aged 25 or over. During 2009/11 SERC met the
45% increased demand for STEM University Access programmes, demonstrating
flexibility in encouraging and supporting access to HE for those who have a non-
traditional background in education. The College has also taken a lead role in the
recognition of prior learning thus providing a greater degree of flexibility for learners
to progress through the recognition of their previous experience.
16. The definition of STEM skills is unclear with the division to traditional subjects
beginning early at age 11-12. The multi-disciplinary approach needs to begin earlier
in secondary education to provide flexibility and embed STEM at an earlier point. A
multi-disciplinary approach with clearly defined STEM skills at each level of study
could provide a wider base from which to make career choices. Currently, career
education is limited with an over-reliance on the traditional routes when making
choices. Career advice needs to develop apace with industry opportunities and
requirements. While it is unrealistic to expect the school sector to resource this,
enhanced partnerships and innovative delivery could extend STEM awareness.
Building on good practice including the national Careers Academy(2) to develop
partnerships between key stakeholders would raise the quality of career guidance
and available choices. SERC has already acted as a bridge between 43 local schools
and STEM employers and provides career events and tasting sessions through which
students can talk to current STEM professionals.
References
1 NI Science Industry Panel (October 2008) First Report of Matrix NI Science Industry
Panel, Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment
2 Career Academy cited at: http://www.careeracademies.org.uk/
15 December 2011
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Syngenta – Written evidence
1. Introduction
1.1 Syngenta is one of the world's leading companies with more than 26,000 employees
in over 90 countries dedicated to our purpose: Bringing plant potential to life. Through
world-class science, global reach and commitment to our customers we help to increase
crop productivity, protect the environment and improve health and quality of life. Syngenta
has several sites in the UK including two manufacturing plants, a large R&D site,
headquarters of its UK business and plant breeding operations. At Syngenta’s Research and
Development site in Berkshire we invest in the region of $200m pa and employ around 800
people with a wide range of skills and expertise. Currently 420 of the people at Jealott’s Hill
are graduates and 170 have PhDs, mostly in STEM subjects.
1.2 We believe that UK science, technology, engineering and mathematics contribute to

our global success in a significant way. For example the UK was the world’s 6th largest
manufacturer in 2009 493 , the third highest producer of high quality research publications 494
and has a university sector which had an income of £23.4 billion a year in 2007/08
(equivalent to 2.3 % GDP), gross export earnings of £5.3 billion and employed more than 1
per cent of the UK’s total workforce495 .
1.3 To ensure this success continues it is vital that training and education within the UK
can supply enough high quality potential employees to meet the demand for STEM graduates
from many sectors of the economy.
2. Is the current number of STEM graduates and post-graduates sufficient to

meet the needs of industry?
2.1 Over recent years we have noticed that it is increasingly difficult to find high
quality job applicants in several STEM disciplines. In particular we struggle to find
statisticians, analytical chemists, formulation chemists, engineers, whole organism plant
scientists including plant physiologists, soil scientists and ecologists. Skill sets where we have
many more applicants to select from include molecular biologists, synthetic chemists and
protein scientists.
2.2 Our shortage in certain areas is mitigated by the fact that as a large global company
we are in the position to be able to attract international applicants from countries such as
Spain, France and Germany. For other employers, particularly in engineering and defence
sectors, a dearth of British nationals would be a significant risk to their businesses; this is a
particular worry for Ph.D.’s.
2.3 The recent CBI/EDI education and skills survey 2011 found that business has a
strong preference for STEM graduates but that 43% of all firms have difficulty recruiting
STEM skilled staff at some level 496 . We see a lot of competition for high quality STEM
493 http://www.pwc.co.uk/eng/publications/the_future_of_manufacturing.html
494 http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2011/4294976134.pdf
495 http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/Publications/Documents/EconomicImpact4Full.pdf
496 CBI/EDI Education and skills survey 2011
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graduates from other sectors, this is evidenced by the fact that we get more high quality
applications from STEM students for our Industrial Placement positions than we do from
STEM graduates for our permanent vacancies. The CBI report also reflects this, when it
states that ‘Around a third of employers (30%) report a lack of applications and 39% are
short of STEM graduates.’ In addition to finding it harder to recruit high quality STEM
graduates, we are also finding that the numbers of applicants for our CASE PhD
studentships has reduced significantly in recent years.

3.1 We are very concerned about the effect that the increase in tuition fees will have on
the numbers of people willing to stay on and study for a Ph.D. It is also unclear to us what
the position is with regards to tuition fees for PhD students. If tuition fees were to apply
doing a 3 year degree plus a 4 year PhD could cost £63000 in tuition fees alone. We are
aware that a large engineering firm has significant concerns that qualified engineers facing
repayment of giant debts may be more easily tempted to pursue careers in other countries.
Many of our top business and R&D leaders have historically been qualified at Ph.D. level,
often with additional postdoctoral study as well. UK businesses need this top talent in
order to remain competitive, so solutions that allow our brightest young people to continue
to study to Ph.D. level without increasing their existing student debts is important.
4. What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that
4.1 We recognise that, in a number of areas of applied science, we will have to develop
the skills we require within the company, e.g. in toxicology and risk assessment. In addition,
many scientists joining the company in R&D move into different business functions during
the course of their career, so it is important that graduates and Ph.D.’s have broad
transferrable skills, in addition to their depth in a relevant STEM subject. As a high
technology company, we are committed to the concept of lifelong learning and all staff will
agree personal and professional development plans, the latter often in partnership with
higher education establishments.
4.2 We have several mechanisms in place to encourage people to undertake STEM

training and publicise the STEM career paths that are available in our industry. At our
Jealott’s Hill R&D site this includes; i) taking on work experience students and vacation
workers from the local community ii) sponsoring research council PhD CASE studentships
and running an annual CASE student conference for students and their supervisors; iii)
offering Industrial Placement positions for students studying a STEM degree with a year out
in industry and iv) engaging with schools and other interested groups through a wide variety
of mechanisms from tours of our research site to visits into schools.
5. Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and
5.1 Much of the work we carry out at our R&D site is of an experimental nature
requiring employees with good practical skills. It is, therefore, very important that as well as
inspiring children to select STEM subjects, we also equip them with the necessary skills to
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take to University and into the wider marketplace. Getting teachers who have the
confidence to teach both theoretical and practical science into each and every school is
essential to provide the foundation from which to create the supply of high quality STEM
graduates needed to meet the demands from the many different sectors of the economy.
Both the CBI and SCORE have produced much valuable evidence highlighting the desperate
shortage of teachers with science training and the consequences this is having on current
generations of school children.
6. What lesson can be learnt from other countries?
6.1 As well as secondary and higher education, further education can also play an
important role providing training in STEM skill sets. Although this is an area in which we feel
the UK has become particularly weak since the conversion of the technical colleges and
polytechnics to universities, we can look to other countries in Europe to see what can be
achieved. For example, in Germany and Switzerland there are specific vocational institutes,
which are designed to provide a strong level of technical training. In Switzerland this is
further built upon by the rule that any company with more than six employees must take on
an apprentice, whilst in Scandinavia, one year placements in industry during degrees are
much more widespread.
7. Making sure the voice of SMEs is heard
7.1 It is widely known that in the UK SMEs provide many of the STEM opportunities for
employment and much of the potential for growth. However, these companies often cannot
afford to free up the resource to respond to inquiries such as this. We feel that it is
important that the views of some of these organisations are actively sought during this
inquiry to ensure that the needs of this important group of businesses are also captured.
8. Summary
8.1 In summary we feel that strengthening primary and secondary STEM education and
increasing the quality of vocational STEM training through specialised education centres and
placements in the workplace will help us deliver enough high quality STEM graduates to
drive the UK economy forward in the future.
14 December 2011
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Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) – Written evidence
Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) – Written

evidence
Question: Is the current number of STEM students and graduates sufficient to meet
the demands of industry, the research base and other sectors not directly connected
with STEM?
1.1 In order to maintain a sufficient supply of STEM graduates to meet the needs of
industry, research and other sectors, there must be a sufficient and stable supply of
quality STEM teachers entering the profession.
1.2 Each year the DfE remits the TDA to recruit approximately 35000 candidates into
teacher training. The focus of the remit is on the number and quality of STEM
graduates entering training.
1.3 To fulfil the remit the TDA has a number of strategies that have been devised to
attract higher numbers:
1.4 The TDA has joined forces with the Institute of Physics (IOP) and the Royal
Academy of Engineering to pilot a new teacher training programme, which combines
physics with maths. The courses are also designed to appeal to engineering
graduates, whose specialist subject knowledge in physics and maths could provide
schools with specialist physics teachers, which have traditionally been in short supply.
1.5 Attractive bursaries are on offer to those who want to train as physics teachers.
Trainees who hold a First class degree qualify for a £20,000 bursary, while holders of
a 2:1 degree can receive £15,000.
1.6 Alternatively, physics trainees with a 2:1 or first class degree can apply for an
Institute of Physics (IoP) Teacher Training Scholarship. The scholarship will be worth
£20,000 and be instead of the standard bursary. It will have additional benefits such
as membership of the IOP and mentoring support.
1.7 A new enhanced service, Premier Plus, is available to those who wish to start
training for a shortage subject such as physics, in the academic year 2012/13. The
service offers exclusive benefits including personalised advice from a named adviser,
bespoke events and access to the School Experience Programme, which offers a
sample of what it is like to be a teacher in a modern secondary school.
1.8 For the last ITT year (2010-2011), Physics and chemistry recruitment is higher than
at any point since records began (see Table 1). The results for the last recruitment
year are in line with a trend that has seen STEM recruitment numbers increase
overall over the last few years, and can be seen as a reflection of the successful
implementation of TDA strategies to increase the numbers of STEM graduates
entering training.
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Table 1: Total number of applicants and acceptances via post-graduate entry

at GTTR. Mainstream postgraduate places applied to via GTTR represent
about 85% of the overall recruitment figure.
Source: GTTR end of year reports
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Maths Applicants 2518 2461 3629 4038 3593
Accepts 1446 1496 1885 2134 1981
Target 2830 2735 2685 2635 2635
Chemistry Applicants 677 636 876 1131 1364
Accepts 419 426 496 679 894
Target N/A 940 1005 1070 1070
Physics Applicants 449 397 594 715 754
Accepts 286 273 346 470 550
Target N/A 785 900 925 925
Question: Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education

2.1 Though the agency cannot comment on the quality of graduates emerging form
higher education, we continue to develop strategies that increase the quality of
STEM teaching. Giving students better access to quality teaching, should in turn lead
to better outcomes for STEM graduates in terms of qualifications.
2.2 The quality of teacher training applicants as measured by degree classification shows
a 5% rise in applicants with a 2.1 or above (see Table 2).
Table 2: Degree classifications levels for applicants in 2011 compared to 2010.

Applicants
2011 1st, 2:1 Total
STEM (inc PC) 3,210 6,495 49%
Chem 589 1,082 54%
Phys 332 729 46%
All Subjects/Phases 24,028 43,314 55%
2010 1st, 2:1 Total

STEM (inc PC) 4,061 8,897 46%
Chem 393 887 44%
Phys 241 596 40%
All subjects/Phases 23,308 46,194 50%
Source: GTTR end of year reports. NOTE: these figures are indicative based on 85%
of the total number of entrants.
2.3 Acceptances to secondary with a 2.1 or above are up by 3% and acceptances to

primary with a 2.1 and above are up by 4% (see Table 3).
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Table 3: Degree classifications levels for accepted applicants in 2011 compared

to 2010.
Acceptances
2011 1st, 2:1 Total
STEM (inc PC) 1,788 3,389 53%
Chem 407 744 55%
Phys 265 566 47%
All Subjects/Phases 11,694 18,521 63%
2010 1st, 2:1 Total

STEM (inc PC) 2,500 4,950 51%
Chem 275 557 49%
Phys 183 429 43%
All subjects/Phases 11,868 20,177 59%
Source: GTTR end of year reports – NOTE: these figures are indicative based on 85%
of the total number of entrants.
2.4 This increase is due to policies such as Transition to Teaching, which targets high-
quality graduates currently working in industry and who are interested in a change of
career, Subject Knowledge Enhancement (SKE), which builds on existing subject
knowledge to create specialist STEM teachers, and Starting Out, a two year
mentoring pilot programme for science and mathematics teacher trainees and early
career teachers.
2.5 While these indications are encouraging, we acknowledge that there is still work to
be done, and strategies have been devised to build on the achievements so far.
2.6 Our future strategies include a shift in marketing and communications messaging,
which will focus on high performing graduates, and continuing the success of SKE
including its expansion to offer this in-depth specialist training to in-service teachers
and returners to the profession.
2.7 Financial incentives, such as those mentioned in paragraphs 1.5 and 1.6, will also
contribute to an increase in the overall quality of STEM teaching.
Question: What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of
STEM graduates in terms of gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic background?
3.1 The question of gender is not a prime focus when the TDA looks at recruitment
strategies for teacher training. One area in which there has been activity is that of
recruiting male teachers into the primary sector.
3.2 There is currently a question as to whether this strand of recruitment activity will be
included in the Premier Plus initiative referred to in paragraph 1.7, but no decision
has yet been taken.
3.3 In terms of STEM teacher recruitment from BME communities, strategies continue
to be developed that aim to attract better quality BME candidates through changing
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perceptions of teaching as a career, whereas currently it is not seen as a high-status

profession within this ethnic group.
3.4 Barriers to recruitment from within minority ethnic communities include late
applications to ITT when less places are available, and the ‘clustering’ of applications
around a small number of providers which are located close to, or within, large BME
communities.
3.5 There will also be a move to encourage BME applications to alternative providers
within a one hour commute, also referred to as ‘rim’ providers, to address the
clustering issue.
3.6 While the impact of changes to bursaries for non-priority subjects on applications
cannot be ignored, there is no specific evidence to point towards a socio-economic
bias in the decision-making process which does, or does not, result in an application
to teacher training.
3.7 By re-focusing the payment of bursaries and scholarships on degree class and subject,
it is hoped that a level playing field will be created from which candidates from all
socio-economic backgrounds will have the opportunity to enter teacher training.
17 December 2011
810
Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) – Written evidence
Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) – Written

evidence
Introduction
1. UCAS is the UK’s provider of shared admissions services for higher education (HE).
Our mission is to help applicants to HE make the right choices for the right reasons
with the right outcomes, and to benefit our members through the provision of
shared services. As a charity UCAS provides information, advice and guidance;
course information; entry requirements; and application services to around 700,000
applicants to HE at 304 universities and colleges each year. Currently our services
support applications for full-time HNCs, HNDs and foundation degrees as well as
undergraduates and some postgraduate degrees.
2. UCAS data provides a rich source of information about those applying to full-time
undergraduate degrees with STEM qualifications, the choices those individuals make,
and where individuals are accepted and on which STEM degrees.
3. This evidence is provided on behalf of UCAS and focuses specifically on those issues
which relate to admissions to HE. We have enclosed a spreadsheet with UCAS data
covering the period 2007 to 2011:
Table 1: UK-domicile applicants and accepted applicants by subject area (Clinical-

STEM; practice-based STEM; STEM; and non-STEM) and UK country of domicile
Table 1a: Female UK-domiciled applicants and accepted applicants by subject area
(Clinical-STEM; practice-based STEM; STEM; and non-STEM) and UK country of
domicile
Table 1b: Male UK-domiciled applicants and accepted applicants by subject area
(Clinical-STEM; practice-based STEM; STEM; and non-STEM) and UK country of
domicile
Table 2: UK-domiciled applicants and accepted applicants aged 19 and under by

subject area (Clinical-STEM; practice-based STEM; STEM; and non-STEM) and
qualification (i.e. A levels versus no A levels)
Table 3: UK-domiciled (excluding Scotland) accepted applicants aged 19 and under

with A levels by HE course subject area (Clinical-STEM; practice-based STEM; STEM;
and non-STEM) and A level subjects taken
Table 4: UK-domiciled applicants and accepted applicants by POLAR2 quintile by

subject area (Clinical-STEM; practice-based STEM; STEM; and non-STEM)
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Table 5: UK-domiciled applicants and accepted applicants by subject area (Clinical-

STEM; practice-based STEM; STEM; and non-STEM) and ethnicity
Supplementary worksheets: JACS2 classification, STEM categorisation of A level

subjects, JCQ data on A level STEM subjects take up 2003-2011, including gender
breakdown.
Also enclosed is a presentation given by the UCAS Chief Executive, Mary Curnock
Cook, in September 2011 (not published here), which explores differences in
achievement and gender in primary through to higher education and employment.
4. UCAS would be willing to meet with Committee members or Committee staff to

discuss the potential use of UCAS statistics if that would be of interest.
General questions
5. Together with HESA, UCAS is responsible for the development of the Joint
Academic Coding System (JACS) which is used for coding HE courses and individual
modules. Although JACS was designed for academic purposes it is widely used as a
means for classifying STEM and other subject groupings. UCAS currently uses
version 2, including HEFCE’s mapping of JACS codes to STEM subjects and
strategically important and vulnerable subjects.
6. The third version of JACS was released earlier in 2011 and UCAS and HESA are
discussing the need for a more fundamental revision of course subject classifications.
This could provide an opportunity to take on board a range of views about what
defines a STEM subject. For the purposes of the data submitted with our evidence
the breakdown is as follows:
STEM subjects: Anatomy, physiology & pathology, pharmacology, toxicology &

pharmacy, medical technology, biological sciences, agricultural sciences, physical
sciences, mathematical & computer sciences, engineering, technology
Clinical STEM subjects: Clinical medicine & dentistry, clinical veterinary medicine,
clinical veterinary dentistry
Practice-based STEM subjects: Physiotherapy, pharmacy, nutrition, ophthalmics,

aural and oral sciences, nursing
Non-STEM subjects: all other subjects
7. To give more granular picture of how JACS codes relate to actual courses UCAS
could provide additional data, for example the top 20 courses titles (by acceptances)
for each JACS code.
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they have the right skills to study STEM first degrees
8. Whilst it is not appropriate for UCAS to comment on the “right number” of STEM
students or the skills needed to successfully complete STEM degrees, UCAS data can
be used to look at the demand for STEM degrees, the composition of the STEM
applicant cohort, their choices, and their UCAS application outcomes.
9. Highlights from the data covering the period 2007 and 2011 suggest:
• Around 30% of all UK-domiciled applicants make at least one STEM choice,
compared to 19% making a least one practice-based STEM choice, and 4% at least
one clinical STEM choice (table 1)
• The total number of UK-domiciled applicants including at least one STEM choice has
increased by almost 30,000 between 2007 and 2011, however in light of the
increasing number of UK-domiciled applicants the level of demand has remained
stable as a percentage of all UK-domiciled applicants. The proportion of applicants
including at least one clinical STEM choice has also remained stable although there
has been a large increase in the number of UK-domiciled applicants making at least
one practice-based STEM choice over the same period (an increase of 56,000, up
from 13% to 19% if the total UK applicants) though a large part of this will be due to
the integration of nursing and Midwifery for Adults (NMAS) scheme into the main
UCAS scheme (table 1)
• In 2011 23% of all UK-domiciled accepted applicants were accepted onto a STEM
course, 11% to a practice-based STEM course and 2% onto a clinical STEM course.
These proportions have remained relatively stable since 2007 with the exception of
the growth in the percentage of applications and acceptances to practice-based
STEM courses 0 although this will be in large part due to the integration of NMAS
(table 1)
• Qualifications data show that there has been an absolute rise in the number and
percentage of young people taking STEM A levels (from 190,000, 24% in 2007 to
238,000 in 2011, 27%) particularly in mathematics (JCQ data)
• In terms of UK-domiciled young people (19 or under) applying to HE, A levels
continue to be the preferred qualifications for clinical STEM courses (89% of
applicants and 88% of accepted applicants had A levels in 2011), and also remain
preferred for STEM subjects (76% of applicants and 79% of accepted applicants to
STEM courses in 2011 had A levels) (table 2)
• Data on young (19 or under) UK-domiciled accepted applicants who took A levels
shows that biology and chemistry A levels are a pre-requisite for most clinical STEM
courses (held by 96% and 98% respectively in 2011). A broader mix of A levels are
held by accepted applicant to STEM subjects, with around one third holding biology,
or physics or chemistry, 54% holding maths, and 75% other non-STEM A levels (table
3)
10. UCAS could offer additional analysis such as data on the breakdown of applicants
and accepted applicants to STEM courses by domicile (UK, other EU, international),
or statistical reporting on strategically important and vulnerable subjects (SIVS).
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What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality of
11. The introduction of the AAB+ threshold in relation to student entry number
controls in England could impact upon the choice of qualifications and subjects taken
by learners, their predicted grades, the range of courses and subjects that different
institutions are able to offer, application behaviour and the flexibility that institutions
have in offer making. For example, there is a risk that the AAB+ proposals will
inadvertently favour well-informed and advantaged applicants who are more likely to
have access to the range if qualifications favoured be selective institutions.
12. As well as academic rigour, entry requirements are to some degree a reflection of
the student demand for a particular course and the supply of places available. Popular
courses can and do set higher entry thresholds. However, entry requirements can
vary year on year in response to a wide variety of factors. As the HEFCE analysis
shows, there are differences in the population of AAB+ students between subject
areas e.g. STEM subjects typically have lower qualification or Tariff entry
requirements at many institutions. The AAB+ flexibility in numbers could have
unintended consequences for institutions in terms of the sustainability, and incentives
for provision, of some courses in SIVS and other STEM subjects, and for applicants in
terms of their choice of courses in particular geographical locations. However, the
decision by HEFCE to exclude numbers associated with SIVS should help to mitigate
potential adverse effects.
13. UCAS is monitoring subject choices throughout the 2012 admissions cycle and will
be able to report on a number of factors relating to STEM, including changes in
choice and acceptance patterns, as well as changes in applicant profiles (age, gender,
ethnicity, POLAR2), and location (live at home students).
background?
14. Although UCAS does not promote STEM preferentially, we do aim to ensure that all
learners irrespective of their age, interests or educational or employment
background, have access to consistent, unbiased information about HE opportunities
and entry requirements. UCAS provides information and advice to learners via its
web services, publications and training for schools, colleges and advisers on HE
admissions e.g. UCAS Course Search, providing data for Unistats, & schools
conventions.
15. In 2012 UCAS will be launching its new Course Finder service which will give
learners significantly improved functionality to compare, bookmark and save course
information. This will incorporate the new “key information set” which includes
information about teaching and assessment methods, student satisfaction, and
student destinations, and critically information about the qualifications and
qualification subjects held by successful applicants to courses.
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16. UCAS also holds an extensive body of data which enables the analysis of trends in
applications in terms of gender, ethnic origin and socio-economic background. This
information could also be used to track the impact of major interventions, if planned
in at a sufficiently early stage. Highlights in relation to current gender, ethnic and
socio-economic background are below.
Gender
17. Tables 1A and 1B provide comparable date on UK-domiciled applications and

acceptances to HE broken down by gender. Although there has been significant
growth in the number of females applying for and being accepted into HE, there
remains a stark difference in subject choice and acceptances by subject. Whilst the
percentages of males and females amongst applicants applying for clinical STEM
subjects is identical, there is a marked difference in applicants making at least one
STEM choice (19% female compared to 43% male), and accepted applicants to STEM
courses (13% female compared to 35% male). The opposite is seen in practice-based
STEM courses with 25% of females making at least one choice compared to 11% of
males, and 15% of accepted applicants being female compared to 5% male.
18. The enclosed presentation (not published here) provides more detail of changes in
academic achievement by gender from primary education through to HE and
employment. In particular, UCAS would like to draw attention to slides 8 to 25
which focus on admissions to HE. These show that:
• In population of UK-domiciled 18 year olds where there are over 20,000 more males
than females, significantly more females are applying and being accepted to HE than
males (slide 8). However, a higher proportion of male applicants (72%) are accepted
compared to female applicants (68%) (slide 9)
• In the young (17-19) UK-domiciled cohort, males who are less well qualified are
more likely to apply and be admitted than females with equivalent qualifications.
There is no gender difference amongst better and highly qualified applicants (slide 13)
• Acceptance rates are typically higher for applicants with A levels as opposed to other
qualifications. A genfer analysis shows that males are more likely to hold non-A level
qualifications than females (slide 16)
• Differences by gender in subject choice at A level (slides 21 & 22) feed through into
HE application choices and acceptances (slide 23)
• STEM courses (excluding clinical STEM) tend to have slightly lower entry
requirements than non-STEM courses. Collectively, the choices made by males in
taking level 3 qualifications more orientated towards STEM subjects, coupled with
less demanding entry requirements, results ina greater proportion of males with
lower achievements being accepted onto STEM courses (slides 24 & 25) and may
account for the higher overall acceptance rate for males and females.
Ethnic background
19. UCAS asks applicants to provide information about ethnic origin and national
identity. However this is voluntary and not all applicants provide this information.
815
20. Table 5 provides application and acceptance data by ethnicity. This shows that there
are differences in both application choices and acceptances by ethnicity. Amongst
UK-domiciled applicants those declaring themselves as Chinese, Indian, Pakistani,
Bangladeshi or other Asian are make proportionately more application choices
including at least one STEM subject tan the UK total. Those declaring themselves as
African or Caribbean make fewer STEM course choices than the total.
21. Although the numbers are small there are other less obvious changes, for example
the total numbers of applications from Chinese and Indian applicants including at
least one STEM choice have remained stable since 2007, but have declined as a
percentage of the total for each group, whereas the numbers of applicantions from
ethnic groups have risen significantly over the same period.
22. Acceptance data shows that a higher proportion of Asian accepted applicants (Indian,
Chinese, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other Asian) are accepted to STEM subjects
compared to the UK total. There is also a higher proportion of accepted applicants
in relation to clinical STEM subjects, especially for Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and
other Asian accepted applicants. The percentage of Black Caribbean accepted
applicants taking STEM subjects is significantly less that the UK total.
Socio-economic background
23. UCAS holds and publishes information on the applications using POLAR2. This
categorises applicants as coming from small areas that are characterised as having
either high or low rates of young HE participants. Quintile 1 (Q1) is the 20% of
applicants from the lowest rates of participation; Quintile 5, (Q5), the 20% from the
highest rates.
24. The data for UK-domiciled applicants (table 4) shows that there are differences in
application choices. Around 2% of applicants making at least one choice of a clinical
STEM subject are from the lowest participation neighbourhoods (Q1) compared
with 6% of applicants from the highest participation neighbourhoods (Q5). For STEM
courses the percentages for both Q1 and Q5 are around 30%.
25. In terms of accepted applicants, 22% of Q1 UK-domiciled applicants were accepted

onto STEM courses in comparison with 24% of Q5 UK-domiciled accepted
applicants. The figures for clinical STEM subjects are 0.8% (Q1) and 3.3% (Q5).
19 December 2011
816
Table 1: UK Applicants by domicile and where at least one application is made to the listed subject area: 2007 – 2011
Please note applicants can have made choices in all four subject areas and there will therefore be an element of 'duplicate' counting
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
England Applicants 380,077 424,596 461,421 495,884 498,119 England Applicants 380,077 424,596 461,421 495,884 498,119
Clinical STEM 17,140 16,750 17,042 18,823 19,676 Clinical STEM 4.5% 3.9% 3.7% 3.8% 4.0%
Practice-based 45,520 65,366 75,508 89,816 93,549 Practice-based 12.0% 15.4% 16.4% 18.1% 18.8%
STEM 117,100 120,584 129,558 140,216 141,617 STEM 30.8% 28.4% 28.1% 28.3% 28.4%
Non-STEM 281,753 299,781 319,904 338,597 337,609 Non-STEM 74.1% 70.6% 69.3% 68.3% 67.8%
N.
17,149 17,116 17,864 19,682 20,242 17,149 17,116 17,864 19,682 20,242
Ireland Applicants N. Ireland Applicants
Clinical STEM 894 885 927 1,015 980 Clinical STEM 5.2% 5.2% 5.2% 5.2% 4.8%
STEM 6,462 5,977 6,375 7,104 7,332 STEM 37.7% 34.9% 35.7% 36.1% 36.2%
Non-STEM 13,439 13,048 13,394 14,465 14,760 Non-STEM 78.4% 76.2% 75.0% 73.5% 72.9%
Scotland Applicants 35,496 38,035 40,053 46,347 46,015 Scotland Applicants 35,496 38,035 40,053 46,347 46,015
STEM 14,727 15,263 16,892 17,338 17,728 STEM 41.5% 40.1% 42.2% 37.4% 38.5%
Non-STEM 25,925 27,150 28,021 29,244 28,995 Non-STEM 73.0% 71.4% 70.0% 63.1% 63.0%
Wales Applicants 21,426 22,714 24,947 24,908 24,974 Wales Applicants 21,426 22,714 24,947 24,908 24,974
Clinical STEM 875 917 928 969 947 Clinical STEM 4.1% 4.0% 3.7% 3.9% 3.8%
STEM 6,467 6,770 7,565 7,460 7,307 STEM 30.2% 29.8% 30.3% 30.0% 29.3%
Non-STEM 14,775 15,626 16,833 16,698 16,528 Non-STEM 69.0% 68.8% 67.5% 67.0% 66.2%
Total Applicants 454,148 502,461 544,285 586,821 589,350 Total Applicants 454,148 502,461 544,285 586,821 589,350
STEM 144,756 148,594 160,390 172,118 173,984 STEM 31.9% 29.6% 29.5% 29.3% 29.5%
Non-STEM 335,892 355,605 378,152 399,004 397,892 Non-STEM 74.0% 70.8% 69.5% 68.0% 67.5%
817
UK Accepted applicants by domicile and subject area accepted to: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
England Accepted 306,959 343,608 360,236 360,208 368,316 England Accepted 306,959 343,608 360,236 360,208 368,316
STEM 68,367 73,645 77,206 79,920 81,758 STEM 22.3% 21.4% 21.4% 22.2% 22.2%
Non-STEM 211,158 226,951 235,899 233,732 241,748 Non-STEM 68.8% 66.0% 65.5% 64.9% 65.6%
N.
13,001 13,430 13,601 13,507 13,792 13,001 13,430 13,601 13,507 13,792
Ireland Accepted N. Ireland Accepted
STEM 2,828 2,919 3,044 3,243 3,286 STEM 21.8% 21.7% 22.4% 24.0% 23.8%
Non-STEM 8,288 8,480 8,458 8,218 8,459 Non-STEM 63.7% 63.1% 62.2% 60.8% 61.3%
Scotland Accepted 27,218 29,391 31,030 32,248 30,800 Scotland Accepted 27,218 29,391 31,030 32,248 30,800
STEM 8,085 8,811 9,931 9,281 8,890 STEM 29.7% 30.0% 32.0% 28.8% 28.9%
Non-STEM 16,647 17,903 18,335 17,498 16,709 Non-STEM 61.2% 60.9% 59.1% 54.3% 54.3%
Wales Accepted 17,366 18,595 20,196 18,671 18,327 Wales Accepted 17,366 18,595 20,196 18,671 18,327
STEM 3,944 4,211 4,863 4,338 4,237 STEM 22.7% 22.6% 24.1% 23.2% 23.1%
Non-STEM 11,277 12,125 12,799 11,923 11,661 Non-STEM 64.9% 65.2% 63.4% 63.9% 63.6%
Total Accepted 364,544 405,024 425,063 424,634 431,235 Total Accepted 364,544 405,024 425,063 424,634 431,235
STEM 83,224 89,586 95,044 96,782 98,171 STEM 22.8% 22.1% 22.4% 22.8% 22.8%
Non-STEM 247,370 265,459 275,491 271,371 278,577 Non-STEM 67.9% 65.5% 64.8% 63.9% 64.6%
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Table 1a: UK female Applicants by domicile and where at least one application is made to the listed subject area: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
STEM 46,241 46,282 47,947 51,313 51,688 STEM 21.9% 19.1% 18.4% 18.2% 18.3%
Non-STEM 163,942 174,857 185,160 196,182 196,032 Non-STEM 77.5% 72.3% 70.9% 69.7% 69.5%
N.
10,026 9,953 10,102 11,057 11,334 10,026 9,953 10,102 11,057 11,334
Ireland Applicants N. Ireland Applicants
STEM 2,852 2,532 2,515 2,711 2,823 STEM 28.4% 25.4% 24.9% 24.5% 24.9%
Non-STEM 8,004 7,785 7,826 8,320 8,379 Non-STEM 79.8% 78.2% 77.5% 75.2% 73.9%
Clinical STEM 885 890 899 961 1,075 Clinical STEM 4.5% 4.2% 4.1% 3.5% 4.0%
STEM 6,417 6,343 7,034 7,053 7,227 STEM 32.3% 29.9% 32.1% 26.0% 26.9%
Non-STEM 15,604 16,443 16,771 17,615 17,530 Non-STEM 78.6% 77.4% 76.5% 65.0% 65.3%
STEM 2,487 2,625 2,795 2,755 2,734 STEM 20.0% 19.8% 19.5% 19.2% 18.8%
Non-STEM 8,840 9,516 10,062 9,973 9,916 Non-STEM 70.9% 71.8% 70.3% 69.4% 68.0%
STEM 57,997 57,782 60,291 63,832 64,472 STEM 22.8% 20.2% 19.6% 19.1% 19.3%
Non-STEM 196,390 208,601 219,819 232,090 231,857 Non-STEM 77.3% 72.9% 71.5% 69.5% 69.2%
819
UK female Accepted applicants by domicile and subject area accepted to: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
STEM 23,361 24,801 24,939 25,733 26,004 STEM 13.9% 12.9% 12.5% 12.9% 12.8%
Non-STEM 124,968 134,298 139,016 138,172 143,303 Non-STEM 74.4% 69.8% 69.4% 69.3% 70.7%
N. Ireland Accepted 7,392 7,635 7,509 7,386 7,474 N. Ireland Accepted 7,392 7,635 7,509 7,386 7,474
STEM 1,020 1,055 1,028 1,031 1,123 STEM 13.8% 13.8% 13.7% 14.0% 15.0%
Non-STEM 4,942 5,067 4,947 4,828 4,853 Non-STEM 66.9% 66.4% 65.9% 65.4% 64.9%
STEM 2,921 3,027 3,425 3,099 2,999 STEM 19.6% 18.9% 20.6% 16.8% 17.0%
Non-STEM 10,198 11,049 11,216 10,840 10,401 Non-STEM 68.5% 68.9% 67.5% 58.9% 59.1%
STEM 1,272 1,422 1,527 1,369 1,362 STEM 13.0% 13.3% 13.5% 13.1% 13.1%
Non-STEM 6,873 7,537 7,810 7,302 7,205 Non-STEM 70.1% 70.7% 69.1% 69.6% 69.4%
STEM 28,574 30,305 30,919 31,232 31,488 STEM 14.3% 13.4% 13.1% 13.3% 13.2%
Non-STEM 146,981 157,951 162,989 161,142 165,762 Non-STEM 73.5% 69.7% 69.2% 68.4% 69.6%
820
Table 1b: UK male Applicants by domicile and where at least one application is made to the listed subject area: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
STEM 70,859 74,302 81,611 88,903 89,929 STEM 42.1% 40.6% 40.8% 41.5% 41.6%
Non-STEM 117,811 124,924 134,744 142,415 141,577 Non-STEM 69.9% 68.3% 67.3% 66.4% 65.5%
N. Ireland Applicants 7,123 7,163 7,762 8,625 8,908 N. Ireland Applicants 10,026 9,953 10,102 11,057 11,334
Practice-based 798 785 853 964 1,146 Practice-based 11.2% 11.0% 11.0% 11.2% 12.9%
STEM 3,610 3,445 3,860 4,393 4,509 STEM 50.7% 48.1% 49.7% 50.9% 50.6%
Non-STEM 5,435 5,263 5,568 6,145 6,381 Non-STEM 76.3% 73.5% 71.7% 71.2% 71.6%
STEM 8,310 8,920 9,858 10,285 10,501 STEM 53.1% 53.1% 54.3% 53.4% 54.8%
Non-STEM 10,321 10,707 11,250 11,629 11,465 Non-STEM 66.0% 63.7% 62.0% 60.4% 59.9%
Practice-based 786 815 862 994 1,129 Practice-based 8.8% 8.6% 8.1% 9.4% 10.9%
STEM 3,980 4,145 4,770 4,705 4,573 STEM 44.4% 43.9% 44.8% 44.6% 44.0%
Non-STEM 5,935 6,110 6,771 6,725 6,612 Non-STEM 66.2% 64.6% 63.6% 63.8% 63.6%
STEM 86,759 90,812 100,099 108,286 109,512 STEM 43.3% 42.0% 42.3% 42.8% 43.0%
Non-STEM 139,502 147,004 158,333 166,914 166,035 Non-STEM 69.7% 68.0% 66.9% 66.0% 65.2%
821
UK male Accepted applicants by domicile and subject area accepted to: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
STEM 45,006 48,844 52,267 54,187 55,754 STEM 32.4% 32.3% 32.7% 33.7% 33.7%
Non-STEM 86,190 92,653 96,883 95,560 98,445 Non-STEM 62.0% 61.3% 60.5% 59.4% 59.5%
N.
5,609 5,795 6,092 6,121 6,318 5,609 5,795 6,092 6,121 6,318
Ireland Accepted N. Ireland Accepted
Practice-based 253 291 337 294 330 Practice-based 4.5% 5.0% 5.5% 4.8% 5.2%
STEM 1,808 1,864 2,016 2,212 2,163 STEM 32.2% 32.2% 33.1% 36.1% 34.2%
Non-STEM 3,346 3,413 3,511 3,390 3,606 Non-STEM 59.7% 58.9% 57.6% 55.4% 57.1%
STEM 5,164 5,784 6,506 6,182 5,891 STEM 41.9% 43.3% 45.1% 44.7% 44.7%
Non-STEM 6,449 6,854 7,119 6,658 6,308 Non-STEM 52.3% 51.3% 49.4% 48.1% 47.8%
STEM 2,672 2,789 3,336 2,969 2,875 STEM 35.3% 35.1% 37.5% 36.3% 36.2%
Non-STEM 4,404 4,588 4,989 4,621 4,456 Non-STEM 58.2% 57.8% 56.1% 56.5% 56.1%
STEM 54,650 59,281 64,125 65,550 66,683 STEM 33.2% 33.2% 33.9% 34.7% 34.6%
Non-STEM 100,389 107,508 112,502 110,229 112,815 Non-STEM 61.0% 60.3% 59.4% 58.3% 58.5%
822
Table 2: UK Applicants aged 19 & under by qualification and where at least one application is made to the listed subject area: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Clinical- Clinical-
13,416 13,411 13,330 14,293 14,626 13,416 13,411 13,330 14,293 14,626
STEM Applicants STEM Applicants
A levels 12,070 11,447 11,397 12,839 12,975 A levels 90.0% 85.4% 85.5% 89.8% 88.7%
No A levels 1,346 1,964 1,933 1,454 1,651 No A levels 10.0% 14.6% 14.5% 10.2% 11.3%
Practice- Practice-
34,438 38,513 40,353 47,035 50,208 34,438 38,513 40,353 47,035 50,208
based Applicants based Applicants
A levels 27,251 27,005 27,647 33,356 36,590 A levels 79.1% 70.1% 68.5% 70.9% 72.9%
STEM Applicants 110,703 111,393 119,173 127,146 128,269 STEM Applicants 110,703 111,393 119,173 127,146 128,269
A levels 87,039 79,933 84,314 95,811 97,166 A levels 78.6% 71.8% 70.7% 75.4% 75.8%
Non-STEM Applicants 239,385 248,720 262,588 274,809 274,384 Non-STEM Applicants 239,385 248,720 262,588 274,809 274,384
A levels 191,855 181,575 190,892 213,515 214,065 A levels 80.1% 73.0% 72.7% 77.7% 78.0%
A levels 250,060 240,949 254,011 288,055 292,138 A levels 80.1% 72.7% 72.3% 77.2% 77.7%
823
UK Accepted applicants aged 19 & under by qualification and subject area accepted to: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Clinical- Clinical-
6,879 6,852 6,682 6,679 6,414 6,879 6,852 6,682 6,679 6,414
STEM Accepted STEM Accepted
A levels 6,096 5,569 5,535 5,974 5,668 A levels 88.6% 81.3% 82.8% 89.4% 88.4%
No A levels 783 1,283 1,147 705 746 No A levels 11.4% 18.7% 17.2% 10.6% 11.6%
Practice- Practice-
14,480 19,284 20,322 20,897 21,191 14,480 19,284 20,322 20,897 21,191
based Accepted based Accepted
A levels 11,783 13,238 13,683 15,234 16,009 A levels 81.4% 68.6% 67.3% 72.9% 75.5%
STEM Accepted 62,852 66,619 70,220 72,470 74,095 STEM Accepted 62,852 66,619 70,220 72,470 74,095
A levels 50,127 48,160 50,064 56,251 58,353 A levels 79.8% 72.3% 71.3% 77.6% 78.8%
Non-STEM Accepted 178,306 188,082 195,186 194,109 200,154 Non-STEM Accepted 178,306 188,082 195,186 194,109 200,154
A levels 146,120 138,498 143,251 155,565 161,932 A levels 81.9% 73.6% 73.4% 80.1% 80.9%
A levels 214,126 205,465 212,533 233,024 241,962 A levels 81.6% 73.2% 72.7% 79.2% 80.2%
824
Table 3: UK (excl. Scotland) Accepted applicants aged 19 & under with A levels by subject area accepted to and A level subjects taken: 2007 –
2011
Please note applicants can have taken A levels in all six subject areas and there will therefore be an element of 'duplicate' counting
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Clinical Clinical
6,096 5,569 5,535 5,974 5,668 6,096 5,569 5,535 5,974 5,668
STEM Accepted STEM Accepted
Biology A level 5,663 5,222 5,205 5,770 5,457 Biology A level 92.9% 93.8% 94.0% 96.6% 96.3%
Physics A level 1,353 1,184 1,170 1,266 1,158 Physics A level 22.2% 21.3% 21.1% 21.2% 20.4%
Chemistry A level 5,801 5,326 5,318 5,851 5,545 Chemistry A level 95.2% 95.6% 96.1% 97.9% 97.8%
Maths A level 3,478 3,385 3,612 3,957 3,844 Maths A level 57.1% 60.8% 65.3% 66.2% 67.8%
Further Maths A Further Maths A
197 233 241 304 282 3.2% 4.2% 4.4% 5.1% 5.0%
level level
Other A levels 3,799 3,425 3,225 3,503 3,216 Other A levels 62.3% 61.5% 58.3% 58.6% 56.7%
Practice- Practice-
11,783 13,238 13,683 15,234 16,009 11,783 13,238 13,683 15,234 16,009
based Accepted based Accepted
Physics A level 750 701 818 888 1,003 Physics A level 6.4% 5.3% 6.0% 5.8% 6.3%
47 77 70 71 110 0.4% 0.6% 0.5% 0.5% 0.7%
level level
STEM Accepted 50,127 48,160 50,064 56,251 58,353 STEM Accepted 50,127 48,160 50,064 56,251 58,353
4,538 4,855 5,568 6,781 7,377 9.1% 10.1% 11.1% 12.1% 12.6%
level level
Non-STEM Accepted 146,120 138,498 143,251 155,565 161,932 Non-STEM Accepted 146,120 138,498 143,251 155,565 161,932
Further Maths A 1,079 1,224 1,351 1,798 1,817 Further Maths A 0.7% 0.9% 0.9% 1.2% 1.1%
825
level level
5,861 6,389 7,230 8,954 9,586 2.7% 3.1% 3.4% 3.8% 4.0%
level level
826
Table 4: UK Applicants who made at least one application to the listed subject area by POLAR2 quintile: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Quintile 1 Applicants 51,335 59,907 67,667 75,025 76,097 Quintile 1 Applicants 51,335 59,907 67,667 75,025 76,097
Clinical Clinical
1,273 1,293 1,307 1,552 1,566 2.5% 2.2% 1.9% 2.1% 2.1%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
7,765 12,350 14,649 17,811 18,395 15.1% 20.6% 21.6% 23.7% 24.2%
based based
STEM 15,590 16,120 18,332 20,393 20,840 STEM 30.4% 26.9% 27.1% 27.2% 27.4%
Non-STEM 37,687 40,778 44,862 49,081 50,201 Non-STEM 73.4% 68.1% 66.3% 65.4% 66.0%
Clinical Clinical
2,340 2,225 2,396 2,556 2,711 3.3% 2.8% 2.7% 2.6% 2.8%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
10,036 14,247 16,799 20,397 21,053 14.3% 17.9% 19.1% 21.1% 21.6%
based based
STEM 21,830 22,925 24,830 27,513 27,853 STEM 31.0% 28.8% 28.3% 28.5% 28.6%
Non-STEM 51,954 55,376 59,780 65,011 65,488 Non-STEM 73.8% 69.5% 68.1% 67.3% 67.3%
Clinical Clinical
3,363 3,176 3,467 3,650 3,852 3.9% 3.4% 3.3% 3.3% 3.4%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
11,309 14,961 17,505 21,692 22,740 13.2% 16.1% 16.9% 19.4% 20.3%
based based
STEM 27,480 27,479 30,447 32,586 32,688 STEM 32.1% 29.6% 29.3% 29.2% 29.2%
Non-STEM 63,380 65,555 71,748 75,861 75,508 Non-STEM 74.0% 70.5% 69.1% 68.0% 67.5%
Clinical Clinical
4,781 4,761 4,889 5,324 5,531 4.6% 4.2% 4.0% 4.1% 4.2%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
12,384 15,780 18,165 22,550 23,119 11.9% 14.0% 14.8% 17.2% 17.7%
based based
STEM 33,722 34,324 36,833 39,495 39,535 STEM 32.5% 30.4% 30.0% 30.1% 30.3%
Non-STEM 77,305 80,667 86,435 89,975 88,748 Non-STEM 74.4% 71.5% 70.5% 68.5% 68.0%
Clinical Clinical
8,468 8,175 8,139 9,069 9,412 6.2% 5.6% 5.2% 5.5% 5.7%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
14,989 17,900 19,600 24,418 25,665 10.9% 12.3% 12.6% 14.8% 15.6%
based based
827
STEM 44,514 44,432 48,150 50,235 50,774 STEM 32.4% 30.5% 31.0% 30.5% 30.8%
Non-STEM 101,344 104,689 110,563 114,155 112,134 Non-STEM 73.8% 71.9% 71.1% 69.2% 68.1%
Unknown Applicants 5,661 11,505 6,860 7,272 8,818 Unknown Applicants 5,661 11,505 6,860 7,272 8,818
Clinical Clinical
203 348 215 247 305 3.6% 3.0% 3.1% 3.4% 3.5%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
570 1,602 1,012 1,428 1,898 10.1% 13.9% 14.8% 19.6% 21.5%
based based
STEM 1,620 3,314 1,798 1,896 2,294 STEM 28.6% 28.8% 26.2% 26.1% 26.0%
Non-STEM 4,222 8,540 4,764 4,921 5,813 Non-STEM 74.6% 74.2% 69.4% 67.7% 65.9%
Clinical Clinical
20,428 19,978 20,413 22,398 23,377 4.5% 4.0% 3.8% 3.8% 4.0%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
57,053 76,840 87,730 108,296 112,870 12.6% 15.3% 16.1% 18.5% 19.2%
based based
STEM 144,756 148,594 160,390 172,118 173,984 STEM 31.9% 29.6% 29.5% 29.3% 29.5%
Non-STEM 335,892 355,605 378,152 399,004 397,892 Non-STEM 74.0% 70.8% 69.5% 68.0% 67.5%
828
UK Accepted applicants by subject area accepted to and POLAR2 quintile: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Quintile 1 Accepted 39,796 46,678 50,818 50,908 52,197 Quintile 1 Accepted 39,796 46,678 50,818 50,908 52,197
Clinical Clinical
373 407 369 450 408 0.9% 0.9% 0.7% 0.9% 0.8%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
3,272 6,780 7,565 7,381 6,777 8.2% 14.5% 14.9% 14.5% 13.0%
based based
STEM 8,770 9,414 10,607 10,921 11,302 STEM 22.0% 20.2% 20.9% 21.5% 21.7%
Non- Non-
27,381 30,077 32,277 32,156 33,710 68.8% 64.4% 63.5% 63.2% 64.6%
STEM STEM
Clinical Clinical
813 823 866 752 826 1.5% 1.3% 1.3% 1.1% 1.2%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
4,287 7,711 8,757 8,734 8,091 7.7% 12.2% 13.0% 12.9% 11.7%
based based
STEM 12,359 13,635 14,425 15,074 15,329 STEM 22.2% 21.6% 21.4% 22.2% 22.1%
Non- Non-
38,218 40,969 43,220 43,400 44,961 68.6% 64.9% 64.3% 63.9% 65.0%
STEM STEM
Clinical Clinical
1,329 1,309 1,405 1,349 1,317 1.9% 1.8% 1.7% 1.7% 1.6%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
4,924 7,996 9,134 9,530 9,156 7.2% 10.7% 11.3% 11.8% 11.2%
based based
STEM 15,769 16,554 18,077 18,181 18,183 STEM 23.0% 22.1% 22.3% 22.5% 22.3%
Non- Non-
46,402 48,916 52,543 51,595 52,762 67.8% 65.4% 64.7% 64.0% 64.8%
STEM STEM
Clinical Clinical
2,200 2,254 2,220 2,186 2,118 2.6% 2.4% 2.3% 2.3% 2.2%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
5,510 8,271 9,536 10,146 9,832 6.5% 9.0% 9.8% 10.5% 10.1%
based based
STEM 19,349 20,957 22,080 22,538 22,651 STEM 23.0% 22.8% 22.7% 23.3% 23.2%
Non- Non-
57,157 60,630 63,451 61,894 62,997 67.9% 65.8% 65.2% 64.0% 64.5%
STEM STEM
Clinical Clinical
4,260 4,184 4,032 4,200 4,103 3.8% 3.5% 3.3% 3.4% 3.3%
STEM STEM
829
Practice- Practice-
6,635 9,283 10,030 11,045 11,009 5.9% 7.8% 8.1% 9.0% 8.8%
based based
STEM 25,999 27,146 28,750 29,027 29,465 STEM 23.2% 22.8% 23.3% 23.5% 23.6%
Non- Non-
74,976 78,567 80,439 79,000 80,219 67.0% 65.9% 65.3% 64.1% 64.3%
STEM STEM
Unknown Accepted 4,561 9,141 5,280 5,075 6,019 Unknown Accepted 4,561 9,141 5,280 5,075 6,019
Clinical Clinical
84 154 87 87 101 1.8% 1.7% 1.6% 1.7% 1.7%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
263 807 527 621 749 5.8% 8.8% 10.0% 12.2% 12.4%
based based
STEM 978 1,880 1,105 1,041 1,241 STEM 21.4% 20.6% 20.9% 20.5% 20.6%
Non- Non-
3,236 6,300 3,561 3,326 3,928 70.9% 68.9% 67.4% 65.5% 65.3%
STEM STEM
Clinical Clinical
9,059 9,131 8,979 9,024 8,873 2.5% 2.3% 2.1% 2.1% 2.1%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
24,891 40,848 45,549 47,457 45,614 6.8% 10.1% 10.7% 11.2% 10.6%
based based
STEM 83,224 89,586 95,044 96,782 98,171 STEM 22.8% 22.1% 22.4% 22.8% 22.8%
Non- Non-
247,370 265,459 275,491 271,371 278,577 67.9% 65.5% 64.8% 63.9% 64.6%
STEM STEM
830
Table 5: UK Applicants who made at least one application to the listed subject area by ethnicity: 2007 – 2011
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
White Applicants 345,300 377,873 413,570 450,979 447,206 White Applicants 345,300 377,873 413,570 450,979 447,206
Clinical Clinical
12,684 12,411 12,564 13,779 14,113 3.7% 3.3% 3.0% 3.1% 3.2%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
40,151 53,822 62,132 77,136 78,248 11.6% 14.2% 15.0% 17.1% 17.5%
based based
STEM 109,266 111,466 122,062 131,751 131,811 STEM 31.6% 29.5% 29.5% 29.2% 29.5%
Non-STEM 261,826 274,775 294,719 314,858 311,387 Non-STEM 75.8% 72.7% 71.3% 69.8% 69.6%
Asian - Applicants 4,042 4,612 5,249 5,823 6,323 Asian - Applicants 4,042 4,612 5,249 5,823 6,323
Bangladeshi Clinical Bangladeshi Clinical
280 284 293 325 370 6.9% 6.2% 5.6% 5.6% 5.9%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
623 798 871 1,059 1,161 15.4% 17.3% 16.6% 18.2% 18.4%
based based
STEM 1,445 1,530 1,672 1,833 2,063 STEM 35.7% 33.2% 31.9% 31.5% 32.6%
Non-STEM 2,914 3,257 3,701 3,977 4,244 Non-STEM 72.1% 70.6% 70.5% 68.3% 67.1%
Chinese Clinical Chinese Clinical
387 370 392 382 416 9.4% 8.6% 9.2% 8.5% 9.2%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
506 512 553 590 679 12.3% 11.8% 13.0% 13.1% 15.0%
based based
STEM 1,817 1,789 1,759 1,829 1,817 STEM 44.3% 41.4% 41.4% 40.6% 40.0%
Non-STEM 2,638 2,781 2,617 2,758 2,683 Non-STEM 64.3% 64.3% 61.6% 61.3% 59.1%
Asian - Indian Applicants 16,582 17,217 18,183 19,065 19,534 Asian - Indian Applicants 16,582 17,217 18,183 19,065 19,534
Clinical Clinical
2,087 1,961 2,087 2,173 2,298 12.6% 11.4% 11.5% 11.4% 11.8%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
3,215 3,405 3,571 4,080 4,514 19.4% 19.8% 19.6% 21.4% 23.1%
based based
STEM 6,025 5,965 6,235 6,605 6,608 STEM 36.3% 34.6% 34.3% 34.6% 33.8%
Non-STEM 10,499 10,646 11,022 11,139 11,309 Non-STEM 63.3% 61.8% 60.6% 58.4% 57.9%
Asian - Other Applicants 5,615 7,087 8,332 9,858 10,673 Asian - Other Applicants 5,615 7,087 8,332 9,858 10,673
Asian Clinical Asian Clinical
background 968 970 1,003 1,132 1,158 background 17.2% 13.7% 12.0% 11.5% 10.8%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
1,160 1,608 2,022 2,713 2,950 20.7% 22.7% 24.3% 27.5% 27.6%
based based
831
STEM 2,285 2,757 3,129 3,621 4,041 STEM 40.7% 38.9% 37.6% 36.7% 37.9%
Non-STEM 3,010 3,671 4,154 4,742 5,122 Non-STEM 53.6% 51.8% 49.9% 48.1% 48.0%
Pakistani Clinical Pakistani Clinical
1,252 1,210 1,325 1,554 1,582 10.4% 9.1% 9.1% 9.2% 8.8%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
2,691 3,012 3,233 3,820 4,469 22.4% 22.7% 22.2% 22.7% 24.8%
based based
STEM 4,488 4,602 5,023 5,818 6,215 STEM 37.3% 34.6% 34.5% 34.6% 34.5%
Non-STEM 7,781 8,394 9,186 10,364 11,046 Non-STEM 64.7% 63.1% 63.0% 61.6% 61.3%
Black - Applicants 18,129 22,820 27,543 32,960 36,340 Black - Applicants 18,129 22,820 27,543 32,960 36,340
African Clinical African Clinical
907 943 1,008 1,180 1,260 5.0% 4.1% 3.7% 3.6% 3.5%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
3,725 6,448 8,314 11,156 12,707 20.5% 28.3% 30.2% 33.8% 35.0%
based based
STEM 6,008 6,239 7,152 8,240 9,021 STEM 33.1% 27.3% 26.0% 25.0% 24.8%
Non-STEM 12,009 13,639 15,927 18,598 20,059 Non-STEM 66.2% 59.8% 57.8% 56.4% 55.2%
Black - Applicants 6,773 8,138 9,144 10,286 10,383 Black - Applicants 6,773 8,138 9,144 10,286 10,383
Caribbean Clinical Caribbean Clinical
117 116 128 126 163 1.7% 1.4% 1.4% 1.2% 1.6%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
845 1,515 1,648 2,153 2,278 12.5% 18.6% 18.0% 20.9% 21.9%
based based
STEM 1,834 1,880 2,045 2,266 2,214 STEM 27.1% 23.1% 22.4% 22.0% 21.3%
Non-STEM 5,452 6,050 6,717 7,508 7,388 Non-STEM 80.5% 74.3% 73.5% 73.0% 71.2%
Mixed - Applicants 4,310 4,732 5,128 5,784 6,175 Mixed - Applicants 4,310 4,732 5,128 5,784 6,175
Other mixed Clinical Other mixed Clinical
background 270 287 256 268 304 background 6.3% 6.1% 5.0% 4.6% 4.9%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
447 553 651 831 913 10.4% 11.7% 12.7% 14.4% 14.8%
based based
STEM 1,220 1,252 1,381 1,539 1,669 STEM 28.3% 26.5% 26.9% 26.6% 27.0%
Non-STEM 3,284 3,516 3,740 4,188 4,412 Non-STEM 76.2% 74.3% 72.9% 72.4% 71.4%
White and Clinical White and Clinical
Asian 319 304 370 394 417 Asian 7.6% 6.4% 7.0% 6.7% 6.7%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
405 490 596 693 791 9.6% 10.4% 11.3% 11.7% 12.7%
based based
STEM 1,406 1,453 1,594 1,862 1,952 STEM 33.5% 30.7% 30.2% 31.5% 31.4%
832
Non-STEM 3,036 3,420 3,690 4,161 4,296 Non-STEM 72.3% 72.3% 69.9% 70.3% 69.2%
Black African 70 60 80 90 96 Black African 4.6% 3.4% 3.7% 3.8% 3.7%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
159 258 296 390 436 10.5% 14.6% 13.6% 16.6% 16.8%
based based
STEM 441 512 560 636 722 STEM 29.0% 28.9% 25.8% 27.1% 27.8%
Non-STEM 1,145 1,283 1,594 1,631 1,817 Non-STEM 75.3% 72.5% 73.4% 69.6% 69.9%
Black 74 65 71 81 95 Black 2.1% 1.5% 1.4% 1.4% 1.6%
STEM STEM
Caribbean Practice- Caribbean Practice-
357 627 743 929 966 10.3% 14.8% 15.0% 16.0% 16.0%
based based
STEM 909 1,053 1,258 1,421 1,521 STEM 26.2% 24.9% 25.5% 24.5% 25.2%
Non-STEM 2,860 3,299 3,802 4,481 4,617 Non-STEM 82.6% 78.1% 77.0% 77.1% 76.4%
Other ethnic Applicants 6,729 6,858 7,395 8,493 8,876 Other ethnic Applicants 6,729 6,858 7,395 8,493 8,876
background Clinical background Clinical
588 515 539 607 700 8.7% 7.5% 7.3% 7.1% 7.9%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
1,005 1,243 1,365 1,677 1,862 14.9% 18.1% 18.5% 19.7% 21.0%
based based
STEM 2,097 1,972 2,167 2,430 2,583 STEM 31.2% 28.8% 29.3% 28.6% 29.1%
Non-STEM 4,642 4,484 4,746 5,363 5,462 Non-STEM 69.0% 65.4% 64.2% 63.1% 61.5%
Unknown or Applicants 21,364 24,783 18,530 8,167 6,436 Unknown or Applicants 21,364 24,783 18,530 8,167 6,436
Prefer Not Clinical Prefer Not Clinical
To Say 425 482 297 307 405 To Say 2.0% 1.9% 1.6% 3.8% 6.3%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
1,764 2,549 1,735 1,069 896 8.3% 10.3% 9.4% 13.1% 13.9%
based based
STEM 5,515 6,124 4,353 2,267 1,747 STEM 25.8% 24.7% 23.5% 27.8% 27.1%
Non-STEM 14,796 16,390 12,537 5,236 4,050 Non-STEM 69.3% 66.1% 67.7% 64.1% 62.9%
Clinical Clinical
20,428 19,978 20,413 22,398 23,377 4.5% 4.0% 3.8% 3.8% 4.0%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
57,053 76,840 87,730 108,296 112,870 12.6% 15.3% 16.1% 18.5% 19.2%
based based
STEM 144,756 148,594 160,390 172,118 173,984 STEM 31.9% 29.6% 29.5% 29.3% 29.5%
Non-STEM 335,892 355,605 378,152 399,004 397,892 Non-STEM 74.0% 70.8% 69.5% 68.0% 67.5%
833
UK Accepted applicants by subject area accepted to and ethnicity: 2007 – 2011

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
White Accepted 277,767 306,043 326,235 331,491 333,198 White Accepted 277,767 306,043 326,235 331,491 333,198
Clinical Clinical
6,374 6,440 6,204 6,466 6,282 2.3% 2.1% 1.9% 2.0% 1.9%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
17,322 29,041 32,992 35,319 33,249 6.2% 9.5% 10.1% 10.7% 10.0%
based based
STEM 62,113 66,343 71,910 74,239 74,511 STEM 22.4% 21.7% 22.0% 22.4% 22.4%
Non- Non-
191,958 204,219 215,129 215,467 219,156 69.1% 66.7% 65.9% 65.0% 65.8%
STEM STEM
Asian - Accepted 3,249 3,705 4,040 4,308 4,685 Asian - Accepted 3,249 3,705 4,040 4,308 4,685
Bangladeshi Clinical Bangladeshi Clinical
76 80 70 66 83 2.3% 2.2% 1.7% 1.5% 1.8%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
250 354 373 454 416 7.7% 9.6% 9.2% 10.5% 8.9%
based based
STEM 781 865 928 1,057 1,163 STEM 24.0% 23.3% 23.0% 24.5% 24.8%
Non- Non-
2,142 2,406 2,669 2,731 3,023 65.9% 64.9% 66.1% 63.4% 64.5%
STEM STEM
Chinese Clinical Chinese Clinical
193 171 187 166 173 5.5% 4.7% 5.4% 4.8% 4.8%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
224 255 276 246 309 6.4% 7.1% 8.0% 7.1% 8.6%
based based
STEM 1,143 1,167 1,147 1,169 1,168 STEM 32.7% 32.3% 33.4% 33.7% 32.4%
Non- Non-
1,936 2,024 1,824 1,891 1,955 55.4% 56.0% 53.1% 54.5% 54.2%
STEM STEM
Asian - Indian Accepted 13,815 14,256 14,723 14,388 14,906 Asian - Indian Accepted 13,815 14,256 14,723 14,388 14,906
Clinical Clinical
931 861 922 802 818 6.7% 6.0% 6.3% 5.6% 5.5%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
1,571 1,679 1,874 1,852 1,916 11.4% 11.8% 12.7% 12.9% 12.9%
based based
STEM 3,480 3,568 3,764 3,948 3,918 STEM 25.2% 25.0% 25.6% 27.4% 26.3%
Non- Non-
7,833 8,148 8,163 7,786 8,254 56.7% 57.2% 55.4% 54.1% 55.4%
STEM STEM
Asian - Other Accepted 4,231 5,311 5,939 6,661 7,305 Asian - Other Accepted 4,231 5,311 5,939 6,661 7,305
Asian Clinical 352 335 334 306 311 Asian Clinical 8.3% 6.3% 5.6% 4.6% 4.3%
834
background STEM background STEM

Practice- Practice-
451 777 965 1,110 1,093 10.7% 14.6% 16.2% 16.7% 15.0%
based based
STEM 1,375 1,667 1,889 2,150 2,442 STEM 32.5% 31.4% 31.8% 32.3% 33.4%
Non- Non-
2,053 2,532 2,751 3,095 3,459 48.5% 47.7% 46.3% 46.5% 47.4%
STEM STEM
Pakistani Clinical Pakistani Clinical
324 363 408 440 383 3.5% 3.5% 3.7% 3.7% 3.0%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
1,138 1,362 1,436 1,504 1,595 12.3% 13.1% 13.0% 12.6% 12.5%
based based
STEM 2,243 2,587 2,811 2,992 3,194 STEM 24.2% 24.9% 25.5% 25.1% 25.1%
Non- Non-
5,578 6,085 6,378 6,972 7,538 60.1% 58.5% 57.8% 58.5% 59.3%
STEM STEM
Black - Accepted 12,556 15,809 17,643 19,247 21,427 Black - Accepted 12,556 15,809 17,643 19,247 21,427
African Clinical African Clinical
162 201 186 184 188 1.3% 1.3% 1.1% 1.0% 0.9%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
1,363 2,988 3,637 3,679 3,863 10.9% 18.9% 20.6% 19.1% 18.0%
based based
STEM 3,257 3,476 3,849 4,333 4,841 STEM 25.9% 22.0% 21.8% 22.5% 22.6%
Non- Non-
7,774 9,144 9,971 11,051 12,535 61.9% 57.8% 56.5% 57.4% 58.5%
STEM STEM
Black - Accepted 4,982 5,982 6,383 6,683 6,914 Black - Accepted 4,982 5,982 6,383 6,683 6,914
Caribbean Clinical Caribbean Clinical
30 34 32 22 35 0.6% 0.6% 0.5% 0.3% 0.5%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
281 742 746 800 798 5.6% 12.4% 11.7% 12.0% 11.5%
based based
STEM 890 935 1,009 1,064 1,080 STEM 17.9% 15.6% 15.8% 15.9% 15.6%
Non- Non-
3,781 4,271 4,596 4,797 5,001 75.9% 71.4% 72.0% 71.8% 72.3%
STEM STEM
Mixed - Accepted 3,367 3,691 3,866 4,065 4,410 Mixed - Accepted 3,367 3,691 3,866 4,065 4,410
Other mixed Clinical Other mixed Clinical
background 96 114 95 86 98 background 2.9% 3.1% 2.5% 2.1% 2.2%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
200 274 325 327 356 5.9% 7.4% 8.4% 8.0% 8.1%
based based
STEM 669 716 784 801 901 STEM 19.9% 19.4% 20.3% 19.7% 20.4%
835
Non- Non-
2,402 2,587 2,662 2,851 3,055 71.3% 70.1% 68.9% 70.1% 69.3%
STEM STEM
Asian 150 149 185 183 162 Asian 4.3% 3.9% 4.5% 4.1% 3.4%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
183 233 282 294 327 5.3% 6.0% 6.9% 6.5% 6.8%
based based
STEM 829 914 945 1,129 1,170 STEM 23.9% 23.7% 23.1% 25.1% 24.3%
Non- Non-
2,306 2,562 2,682 2,886 3,164 66.5% 66.4% 65.5% 64.2% 65.6%
STEM STEM
Black African 28 22 27 24 31 Black African 2.4% 1.7% 1.7% 1.5% 1.7%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
52 119 164 156 172 4.4% 9.0% 10.2% 10.0% 9.3%
based based
STEM 243 275 308 323 381 STEM 20.7% 20.8% 19.2% 20.8% 20.6%
Non- Non-
852 909 1,102 1,053 1,268 72.5% 68.6% 68.8% 67.7% 68.5%
STEM STEM
Black 27 21 29 27 28 Black 1.0% 0.6% 0.8% 0.7% 0.6%
STEM STEM
Caribbean Practice- Caribbean Practice-
127 319 378 383 372 4.7% 9.8% 10.1% 9.4% 8.4%
based based
STEM 468 574 644 663 800 STEM 17.3% 17.6% 17.2% 16.3% 18.1%
Non- Non-
2,083 2,351 2,695 2,999 3,209 77.0% 72.0% 71.9% 73.6% 72.8%
STEM STEM
Other ethnic Accepted 5,025 5,101 5,274 5,651 6,056 Other ethnic Accepted 5,025 5,101 5,274 5,651 6,056
background Clinical background Clinical
167 165 174 158 153 3.3% 3.2% 3.3% 2.8% 2.5%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
420 617 655 660 704 8.4% 12.1% 12.4% 11.7% 11.6%
based based
STEM 1,124 1,145 1,211 1,261 1,390 STEM 22.4% 22.4% 23.0% 22.3% 23.0%
Non- Non-
3,314 3,174 3,234 3,572 3,809 66.0% 62.2% 61.3% 63.2% 62.9%
STEM STEM
Unknown or Accepted 19,425 22,664 17,052 6,640 4,935 Unknown or Accepted 19,425 22,664 17,052 6,640 4,935
Prefer Not Clinical Prefer Not Clinical
To Say 149 175 126 94 128 To Say 0.8% 0.8% 0.7% 1.4% 2.6%
STEM STEM
836
Practice- Practice-
1,309 2,088 1,446 673 444 6.7% 9.2% 8.5% 10.1% 9.0%
based based
STEM 4,609 5,354 3,845 1,653 1,212 STEM 23.7% 23.6% 22.5% 24.9% 24.6%
Non- Non-
13,358 15,047 11,635 4,220 3,151 68.8% 66.4% 68.2% 63.6% 63.9%
STEM STEM
Clinical Clinical
9,059 9,131 8,979 9,024 8,873 2.5% 2.3% 2.1% 2.1% 2.1%
STEM STEM
Practice- Practice-
24,891 40,848 45,549 47,457 45,614 6.8% 10.1% 10.7% 11.2% 10.6%
based based
STEM 83,224 89,586 95,044 96,782 98,171 STEM 22.8% 22.1% 22.4% 22.8% 22.8%
Non- Non-
247,370 265,459 275,491 271,371 278,577 67.9% 65.5% 64.8% 63.9% 64.6%
STEM STEM
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STEM categorisation of JACS 2 subject groups/lines/codes

Provided by HEFCE, August 2010
JACS 2 group/code JACS 2 Description Category
A Clinical medicine and dentistry CLINICAL STEM
B1 (not B160) Anatomy, physiology and pathology STEM
B160 Physiotherapy PRACTICE-BASED
B2 (not B230) Pharmacology, toxicology and pharmacy STEM
B230 Pharmacy PRACTICE-BASED
B8 Medical technology STEM
Rest of B Nutrition; Ophthalmics; Aural and oral sciences; Nursing PRACTICE-BASED
C6 Sports science NON_STEM
C8 Psychology NON_STEM
Rest of C Biological sciences STEM
D1 Clinical veterinary medicine CLINICAL STEM
D2 Clinical veterinary dentistry CLINICAL STEM
D7 Agricultural sciences STEM
Rest of D Other non-science agriculture and related subjects NON_STEM
F Physical sciences STEM
G Mathematical and computer sciences STEM
H Engineering STEM
J Technology STEM
K Architecture, building and planning NON_STEM
L Social, economic and political studies NON_STEM
M Law NON_STEM
N Business and administrative studies NON_STEM
P Mass communication and documentation NON_STEM
Q Linguistics, classics and related subjects NON_STEM
R European languages, literature and related subjects NON_STEM
T Non-European languages, literature and related subjects NON_STEM
V Historical and philosophical studies NON_STEM
W Creative arts and design NON_STEM
X Education NON_STEM
838
STEM categorisation of A level subjects
Category Description MARVIN Subject Code
Biology Human Biology BIO-HM

Biology BIOL
Physics Physics PHYS
Physics A PHYS-A
Physics B (Advancing Physics) PHYS-B
Chemistry Nuffield Chemistry CHE-NF
Chemistry CHEM
Chemistry B (Salters) CHEM-B
Maths Pure Mathematics MA-PU
MEI Pure Mathematics MA-PUM
Use of Mathematics MA-USE
Mathematics MATHS
Statistics STATS
Further Maths Further Maths - Additional FM-AD
MEI Further Maths - Additional MA-FAM
Further Mathematics MA-FU
MEI Further Mathematics MA-FUM
All subjects not listed above All codes not listed above
Other
839
JCQ A level data 2003 – 2011
840
UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC), the British Computer Society (the
Chartered Institute for IT) and the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC)
– Written evidence
UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC), the British

Computer Society (the Chartered Institute for IT) and the Council
of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) – Written evidence
Submission to be found under British Computer Society (the Chartered Institute for IT)
841
UK Deans of Science – Written evidence
1. UK Deans of Science (UKDS, www.deansofscience.ac.uk ) is a national body that seeks to

represent the individuals (usually formally designated as Deans) who are responsible for
science in HEIs across the UK and who generally hold the budgets for science including
any research budgets. Its primary aim is to ensure the health of the science base through
the promotion of science and scientists and of scientific research and science teaching in
the UK’s HEIs. For clarity this response attempts to reply to the individual questions
posed, though, of course, there is considerable overlap between the issues raised. UKDS
would be pleased to supply additional information and commentary if required.
General questions
Question 1. What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?
2. Whilst not wishing to propose a definition for the wide set of disciplines as those
covered by STEM, we trust that the Committee will take into account the particular
nature of all STEM disciplines in that, unlike many other areas of study, they build upon a
hierarchy of knowledge. Thus STEM university education relies on knowledge gained
from early schooling through to 16-19 education and, for mature students, their later
education and experiences. It frequently also requires a deep understanding of, and an
ability to manipulate, numbers and mathematical concepts. Thus pre-university STEM
education needs high quality laboratory and other facilities and must be assessed by
rigorous and demanding qualifications.
Question 2. Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used to
influence supply?
3. There seems to be no single source of credible data on the demand for STEM graduates.
However, we respectfully suggest that this is a non-question as it presupposes a
straightforward and agreed definition of ‘demand’. Regardless of numbers graduating in
STEM, until there is no shortage of subject-qualified graduates wishing to train to teach
certain science disciplines in schools there is clearly a shortage in supply. We would
counsel the Committee against proposing any form of manpower planning that attempts
to predict the number of STEM graduates (including postgraduates) needed by the UK.
16-18 Supply
Question 3. Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they
4. It is important to recognise that the supply, particularly in some universities, is not just at
18+/19+, but includes more mature candidates. We are very concerned that such
students will be differentially discouraged from study as a result of changes in funding.
5. Questions have been raised about the quality of the intake, for example, the mathematical
ability and subject knowledge of some students. The recent allegations relating to the
competitive methods of Awarding Bodies again highlighted the concerns we have
previously expressed as to whether there is a need for several Awarding Bodies.
842
6. It has been suggested that the new Curriculum for Excellence in secondary schools in
Scotland may result in a reduction in the number of STEM subjects taken at school level.
We believe that the Government should monitor this carefully in case any lessons can be
learnt that are applicable to the rest of the UK.
Question 4. What have been the effects of earlier government initiatives on the uptake of STEM
subjects at advanced level?
7. The independent Curtis and Cartwright report for HEFCE

(http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2011/rd05_11/rd05_11.pdf) strongly suggests that
funding for strategically important and vulnerable subjects, combined with the strong
commitment of professional bodies and many individual scientists has at least managed to
sustain, and in some cases increase, the proportion of students wishing to study some
STEM degrees. We do, however, have a major concern about the limited extent to which
home students wish to continue their studies of science at postgraduate level.
Question 5. What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM subjects
in higher education?
8. No comment
Graduate supply
Question 6. Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK, EU and
overseas) sufficient to meet the needs of industry, the research base, and other sectors not
directly connected with STEM?
9. While universities have been very successful at attracting EU and international students
to STEM subjects there is evidence that the Border Agency controls are now having a
very negative effect. The Committee needs to be aware that several of the countries
from which many students have come in the past are becoming increasingly attractive to
them as locations where they believe they will have very rewarding STEM careers when
they complete their studies.
Question 7. Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently high, and
if not, why not?
10. Although Faculties of Science employ STEM graduates we would prefer that
employers outside the education sector respond to this question.
Question 8. Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be it research,
11. Undergraduate science degrees have adapted considerably over the past decade to
ensure that graduates recognise and develop their broader personal, professional,
innovation and career development skills and are much more employable in a fuller range
of roles than has previously been the case. Industry does generally find the graduates it
needs, evidence that we are ‘producing’ the skills that are needed. Notwithstanding this,
there is a continuing challenge to produce graduates with the higher skills necessary to
undergo doctoral study. Different industries often demand very specific skills at different
times in addition to broader subject knowledge and generic skills. However, we believe
843
that STEM graduates are generally very adaptable and capable of progression through a
very wide range of careers across the UK economy.
Question 9. What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of teaching, the quality of
12. UK Deans of Science have already given their views to the Government on the
Higher Education White Paper, ‘Students at the Heart of the System’. Whilst welcoming
the recognition that higher education is of fundamental value in itself we have concerns
about:
• the almost singular emphasis on funding rather than on the fundamental nature of a
university as a place for the creation and dissemination of knowledge and learning (this
being in direct contrast to the main thrust of the Schools White Paper)
• the emphasis on undergraduate education
• the risks to science of the application of the rules for contestable student numbers
• the intention to allow use of the university title to organisations (whether for-profit or
not) which have no discernible research activity
• a lack of any obvious plan to monitor the effects of all the changes in order to pick up and
act on any adverse effects before they cause irreversible damage.
13. UK Deans of Science have deliberately not formed a view of the decision to increase
the ceiling on fees but have deep concerns about the potential deterrent effect of the
new fee regime on:
• increasing social mobility that is part of the Government’s agenda
• the study of science, especially the extended four year Masters programmes
(please see also paragraphs 14 and 25)
• undergraduate students’ willingness to progress to Masters degrees and/or PhDs,
both of which are essential steps towards many STEM careers, especially in
research and development (please see also paragraph 25).
14. There is a major risk to long term STEM student numbers and the quality of the
STEM degrees from the reduction in the HEFCE teaching grant for Band B programmes.
Two possibilities exist: universities may decide to maintain a policy to keep fees for all
subjects approximately the same or over time some classroom-based subjects may adjust
fees downwards below £9,000 to reflect their true costs. In the former case, while the
substantial research base of STEM Faculties may be superficially attractive to Vice-
Chancellors we are very concerned that very small amount of Band B funding promised
by HEFCE will be insufficient to be able to deliver as good a student experience in
laboratory-based subjects as that in classroom-based disciplines. Any initial cross-subsidy
to STEM subjects is likely to be transient as departments work to protect their student
and staff numbers. Alternatively, if fees are lowered for some classroom-based disciplines
we expect some students from less well off backgrounds and those with an aversion to
debt to gravitate away from STEM towards the cheaper alternatives. One action that
could be taken to help science disciplines would be for HEFCE Band B funding to better
reflect the nature and cost of teaching STEM subjects as is the case for medicine,
dentistry and veterinary science.
Question 10. What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop new and
cross-disciplinary STEM degrees?
844
15. The effect of research assessment is almost certainly negligible. Where a market for
a new or cross-disciplinary programme is recognised a Faculty will offer it, subject, of
course, to appropriate facilities and staff expertise. Of course, the relationships between
student demand, what universities believe might be popular and what is useful for
employment, are very complex and require carefully considered business plans. However,
even a well designed, business-facing programme will not necessarily attract students.
Question 11. What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary for all
universities to teach undergraduates and postgraduates and conduct research? What other
delivery model should be considered?
16. We believe that an undergraduate in science can only be inspired or taught to an

appropriate level in a ‘community of scholars’ within an environment enriched by high
quality research, where the progression from undergraduate to postgraduate can be seen
to be a seamless process. It is often the research of a Faculty presented by passionate,
enthusiastic researchers during open days that persuades potential students that they
should study science.
Question 12. Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education institutions
offering STEM courses?
17. There is reasonable coverage at present but if the higher education reforms mean
that many more students decide to live and study at home action will be needed to
maintain an appropriate spread of STEM provision and not allow it to become
concentrated only in major centres of population. Interestingly STEM subjects are
geographically well represented across Scotland.
Question 13. What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM
18. Many of the outreach activities to encourage students to study science have targeted
various under-represented groups. We have no magic bullet that we believe would
significantly alter the current position. However, it is worth noting that most studies of
under-representation have concentrated on single disciplines. We suggest there is a need
for a major project to look across all STEM disciplines, including medicine, dentistry and
veterinary science investigating both negative and positive factors that affect student
choice, taking account of both over- and under-representation of certain groups in
certain disciplines and professions. Notwithstanding this the funding reforms are likely to
impact negatively on diversity.
Question 14. Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of careers they
19. The changes that have taken place, encouraged by Roberts’ funding, mean that most
STEM students are well prepared for, and aware of, many different careers.
Question 15. Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain the
research base and are they of sufficient quality?
845
20. We feel that PhD funding by Research Councils is currently being squeezed and that
this may ultimately have a detrimental effect on STEM disciplines. The reductions in
grants for PhD studentships and the corralling of PhD places into DTCs are both having a
negative effect on staff morale. In the past academics were able to apply for funding and
maintain their own PhD students and contribute to the health of their laboratories. This
is becoming more centralised with DTCs and other actions so the research base may no
longer be driven from the bottom. It is difficult to predict whether this will lead to better
outcomes.
21. The acceptability and national and international profile of Professional Doctorates
need some attention from Government and the Research Councils. These qualifications
can have a major impact on those in mid career and can lead to substantial changes in
practice in the workplace.
Question 16. What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of PhD
students? Are there alternative delivery models?
22. DTCs can be of benefit in increasing critical mass of researchers and raising the
profile of research and other training. However, there is probably insufficient experience
of DTCs to make definitive comment on their usefulness in relation to the resources
they consume. There is also some worry that DTCs are being located in only a few
centres across the country which may ultimately mean that research activity in STEM
disciplines gravitates towards these centres.
Question 17. Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the balance right
between the number of Masters degree students and PhD students?
23. The simple answer to this question is: ‘Yes’. As indicated elsewhere there is deep
concern that the increase in undergraduate fees may reduce the numbers of UK students
willing to undertake Masters degrees and four year MSci qualifications. We expect that
when this is finally recognised by the Government in the period around 2014-16 it will be
panicked into measures to deal with the crisis.
24. A three year undergraduate degree is insufficient in many areas of science to educate
students to international graduate levels. Taught one year Masters and/or the four year
integrated MSci programmes are necessary to achieve world competitive standards, both
in terms of the research ‘pipeline’, that is, preparing people for PhD study, and in
delivering high level skills at exit from university education. Integrated masters
programmes are necessary to maintain high quality competitive science and engineering
education and as the academic requirement for professional levels of accreditation for
scientific and engineering professional bodies. Where STEM graduates have taken 3 year
degrees, Masters programmes allow them to specialise, enhance skills, and have an edge
in the jobs market because they offer something extra for the employer. MSc
programmes can also be successfully targeted at areas where there is societal/industrial
need more quickly and with more efficiency than UG programmes - but only if these
places are funded. To give just one example, funded MSc places are needed to deliver
enough qualified statisticians to enable pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs
through appropriate clinical trials.
Question 18. What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of graduates to
pursue a research career?
846
25. Although this issue is addressed in several paragraphs of this response it is very
difficult to give a definitive reply to this question. When UG fees were introduced earlier,
taught PG numbers continued to rise (though significantly through increased numbers of
international candidates and not home students). However, the economic situation is
different now and the changes in fees are much greater. We therefore have major
concerns about the future supply of UK postgraduate taught and postgraduate research
candidates. We believe the reforms were introduced with no thought for the four year
STEM Masters programmes. A student from a family of relatively modest means, who
studies away from home, is charged the full £9,000 fee and borrows the full amount
allowed would graduate with a debt between £58,000 to £66,700 before any interest
begins to be added. Whatever way the repayment of such a debt is ‘spun’ this is bound to
act as a huge disincentive to continue into a doctorate and postdoctoral work.
Industry
Question 19. What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to attract them?
26. Most of the scientifically based industries offer interesting employment for those
wishing to pursue their scientific interests with reasonable career progression. However,
to compete with banks and others keen to employ the very best science graduates we
believe that industry needs to offer substantial ‘golden hellos’ and display a readiness to
help the paying off of debts incurred during undergraduate study.
Question 20. What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand for
27. A science degree is an excellent preparation for a range of jobs. Many subjects
produce graduates that are highly regarded, but who don't follow a career 'in their
subject' (e.g. History, English). The question seems to assume that, perhaps because lab-
based subjects are costly, the graduate numbers in science should match the graduate
jobs in science. The UK needs scientifically literate people across all sectors of the
economy.
28. There is still a need to put industry, the professional bodies and universities together
to thrash out, once and for all, a blueprint for STEM undergraduate and postgraduate
programmes that will give industry what it believes it needs to succeed in the UK.
Question 21. What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM subjects in
other countries? Which countries provide the most helpful examples of best practice?
29. No comment
Final Comments
30. Although some data is collected on student numbers (for example, by the Higher
Education Statistical Agency on undergraduate and postgraduate students and by HEFCE
on doctoral completion rates) we are not aware of any detailed data being collected and
properly analysed on an annual basis. Following the recent reforms of funding of higher
847
education the Government must begin to monitor very closely to check for any
unintended consequences caused by the new student funding arrangements. This should
include detailed analysis of changes in numbers of students, both part-time and full-time,
in each year of each type of undergraduate and postgraduate taught and postgraduate
research programme detailed separately for each subject area.
31. One specific area that would benefit from attention is computer science. There is an
argument for the development of a robust curriculum for schools in computer science
(not computer appreciation) programmes that might encourage more of the most able
students to study the subject at university.
16 December 2011
848
UKRC – Written evidence
Introduction
The UKRC is the UK's lead organisation for the provision of advice, services and policy
consultation regarding the under-representation of women in science, engineering,
technology and the built environment (SET). 497
It has an extensive suite of products, services, know-how and experience built up for
equality and diversity in STEM. Over 300 organisations have reported positive changes and
results from working with the UKRC. The UKRC has run career support programmes for
over 3,500 women.
Currently the UKRC’s offer includes:

• Enabling leadership from the professions through transfer of knowledge and
resources
• An approach to support champions and change agents
• A fresh approach while avoiding reinvention
• A role as a STEM equality and diversity specialist in the new landscape.
In particular the UKRC supports businesses and organisations to put equality and diversity at
the heart of the way they do business, engage leaders, undertake diagnosis and needs
analysis, develop strategy and build equality and diversity know-how. The UKRC produces
organisational change and women’s career advancement resources.
1. Focus and scope

This submission focuses on three of the questions posed in the call for evidence from the
House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on Higher Education in STEM
subjects:
Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they have
taken in conjunction with:
What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand for
Except in descriptions of the UKRC and in section 3 where the expression SET is used to
include mathematics, in line with usage in the source publication, we will use the expression
STEM. There are ongoing difficulties and debates about the definition of STEM and the
‘STEM’ workforce which we readily acknowledge but do not intend to comment on here.
2. Recommendations
Each section ends with a recommendation.
497 http://www.theukrc.org/
849
3. We do not have gender parity in STEM – the evidence:

The analysis in Women and Men in science, engineering and technology: the UK Statistics
Guide 2010 498 reveals that only 5.3 per cent (674 thousand women), or about one in twenty,
of all working women are employed in any SET occupation, compared to 31.3 per cent for
all working men (nearly one in three), in a total of 5.5 million women and men in SET
occupations. This means that a man is six times more likely to work in a SET occupation
than a woman. 499
The Guide shows how the number of girls and women studying STEM has improved.
However STEM graduates do not always work in SET occupations.500 Female STEM
graduates of working age 501 in the UK (a total of 620 thousand women) are more likely to
take up employment in non-SET than in SET occupations. Only 29.8 per cent (185 thousand)
of all female STEM graduates of working age in the UK are employed in SET occupations
compared to half (782 thousand) of all male STEM graduates of working age. Nearly 100
thousand female STEM graduates are either unemployed or economically inactive. 502
Although girls and women are entering SET employment, education and training, sometimes
in greater numbers or proportions than in the past, there is still a pronounced trend
whereby the numbers and proportions drop at key stages or over time. Attrition begins to
be pronounced at ‘A’ level (after the national curriculum stage) and continues through post
compulsory education and training, into employment. Attracting more women scientists,
engineers and technologists into the economy is a public policy challenge. It demands public,
private and third sector solutions because the problems are complex and interdependent.
Key Questions
• Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and do they have
taken in conjunction with
• What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the diversity of STEM
4. Skills shortages and how we can address the STEM pipeline leaks (attrition)
Prior to the recession, there was a widespread acceptance that the UK needed a more
highly skilled population and that this included the STEM subjects. Recent CBI reports
suggest that there are continuing problems as perceived by employers. 503
The UK Commission on Employment and Skills current work programme supports the idea
that employers and industry have a greater role to play.
The HE STEM programme is seeking to embed lasting change. Its six strands are: HE
engagement with schools and colleges; curriculum enhancement and innovation; graduate
498 http://www.theukrc.org/resources/ukrc-statistics-guide-2010
499 SET occupations = SET and health professions and associate professions and SET skilled trades.
500 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is the term used in an educational context, while SET (science,
engineering and
technology) is used in relation to occupations and industries, in the official data sources used here.
501 Term ‘working age’ includes individuals who are in employment, unemployed and economically inactive.
502 More detail in Appendix A and the UKRC’s Statistic Guide 2010
503 Building for growth: Business priorities for education and skills CBI May 2011
SET for growth - Business priorities for science, engineering and technology CBI August 2010
850
skills; workforce development; higher level skills. 504 These strands are all amenable to a
gender analysis and to good practice in equality.
The UKRC, as part of work on a EU project, has analysed 4 key frameworks used
internationally, to identify the drivers for change in equality and diversity outcomes in HE.
The commonalities are: leadership, progression, culture and work-life balance.
The programmes of all stakeholders and the frameworks in which they operated need to
take more systematic account of gender inequalities in STEM, general, and specific to
particular disciplines, including leadership, progression, culture and work-life balance.
Policy, strategy and practice interventions on access, take up, attainment, progression,
retention and return to STEM education or employment must explicitly address equality and
diversity, including gender.
6. STEM in society – how context contributes to the gender imbalance in STEM

A recent Public Attitudes to Science 2011 survey suggested that there are certain
demographic groups that tend to be less engaged with science so might represent priorities
for engagement. These include young people aged 16-24, women and those from less
affluent backgrounds. Their analysis also found that different groups in society require
different engagement strategies. 505
The study also found that though very few consciously believe that science is not a suitable
career for women, many people nonetheless continue to picture scientists as male. In
addition, the data suggest parents are somewhat more likely to see science as an activity for
boys rather than girls, showing the need to engage parents as well as children.
STEM related public engagement activities should have a gender focus and analysis, and
counter stereotypes.
7. Influences and choices are gendered

Research shows that attitudes to science, engineering and technology are formed relatively
early and are gendered. A number of studies and projects demonstrate that parents have a
very significant influence. Given the public attitudes to science survey results about women,
referred to above, this is of some concern with regard to STEM. Girls from lower socio-
economic groups are also a legitimate concern, on the basis of the attitudes survey alone.
The Timeline project (part of the STEM Programme recently completed) also makes
reference to physical, emotional and cultural boundaries within which choices are made and
when they are formed and how this influences attitudes to STEM subjects and careers. Their
survey of school children found that choices did not change much between year 7 and 9 but
that there was a move away from science study during Key Stage 3 particularly for girls (our
emphasis). They also confirm the fact that young people’s views of STEM subjects and
careers are highly gendered. 506
“Thus gender difference was found to be most apparent in the analysis of future likely
504 http://www.hestem.ac.uk/
505 Public Attitudes to Science 2011 Ipsos MORI, British Science Association and the Department for Business, Innovation
and Skills 2 May 2011
http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/2764/Public-attitudes-to-science-2011.aspx
506 STEM Careers Awareness Timelines Attitudes and ambitions towards science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM
at Key Stage 3) Jo Hutchinson, Peter Stagg and Kieran Bentley

851
careers, but certainly reflected subject preference differences already highlighted”.
Schools, their partners, and STEM stakeholders should make more use of the knowledge
base on good practice in equality and diversity in addressing attitudes to STEM, and subject
and career choices. Specialist organisations that can signpost include the UKRC, WISE,
WISET (Centre for Science Education, Sheffield Hallam University).
8. Quality teaching
Inspired teaching throughout the supply into HE and in HE itself is known to make a
substantial difference to enjoyment and take up of STEM. Our society and education system
needs to value quality in teaching by diverse, qualified teachers in schools, who can
effectively and confidently respond to gender based issues.
Quality teaching acknowledges that gaining young people’s interest and enjoyment of STEM
has to be complemented by practices that enable pupils to feel capable and have an “identity
which aligns with STEM”. 507 STEM subjects are stereotyped in a number of ways (as difficult,
as geeky, as masculine and so on). This discourages pupils who think they have to be extra
clever, or means they cannot imagine themselves studying or working in STEM. It
discourages girls: we know that questions of confidence and identity have well established
gendered differences, inflected by context, ethnicity and class for example.
Genuine quality in teaching and learning demands inclusive practices and gender awareness,
as well as women teachers of STEM. The 2009 guidance from DCSF, Gender Issues in
School: What Works to Improve Achievement for Boys and Girls goes some way towards
recognising this. 508 This report is for senior leaders and teachers in schools who are
seeking to improve boys’ and girls’ achievement, particularly in English and literacy. It
complements ‘Addressing Gender and Achievement: myths and realities’ a document which
dispels some of the current and unhelpful myths about gender and education.
Genuine quality in teaching and learning demands improved curricula and teaching
behaviour. The IoP have undertaken an action research project looking in detail at the ways
the physics curriculum can be made more gender sensitive. It also recommends that gender
aware teaching be incorporated into standard continuing professional development
(CPD). 509
Clearly there are major issues in improving the quality of STEM teaching. Quality must
include the development of gender awareness, and also inclusive practices within training,
CPD and enhancement and enrichment. Explicit but infomed attention to gender issues
while teaching has been found to have positive outcomes when opportunities are taken to
deconstruct and challenge stereotypes. In addition, girls also need some role models in the
classroom and amongst external speakers, ambassadors and champions, but this is not a
sufficient strategy on its own.
Teaching and learning policy and practice should

• take account of official research and analysis on gender, and on stereotypes in STEM,
• enable the implementation of commitments and duties to address gender equality
507 Centre for Science Education(SHU) & Babcock STEM Subject Choice and Careers Lessons Learnt (Parts 1 and 2)
508 https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/DCSF-00601-2009
509 Girls into Physics Action Research Institute of Physics April 2009
https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/DCSF-RR103
852
• make more systematic use of good practice which key stakeholders and programmes
highlight.
9. Enhancement and enrichment (E and E)

After-school Science and Engineering Clubs are one example of an E and E intervention
which were evaluated and reported on in 2008. The evaluation was appropriately (and
somewhat unusually) gender sensitive and it provides evidence for differential effects of clubs
on girls and boys, and of some beneficial effects for girls in terms of increasing an interest
being a scientist. However it found that more work was needed to increase their interest in
being engineers. 510 In a separate programme, the London Engineering Project with its focus
on diversity and equality, had some simple but very effective advice about the way to get a
balance of girls and boys into clubs and E and E.511
This submission has referred to the National STEM programme’s resource as worth mining
for good practice on gender. However, there is also concern that too few activities across
that programme placed a priority on diversity and equality. 512
More gender sensitive and gender inclusive enhancement and enrichment must complement
quality teaching, and good, integrated careers practice. This should help impact on girls and
boys at a younger age and in a sustained way, in relation to their career aspirations and
subject choices.
Action to ensure optimum take up of triple science by girls will also help individuals to
choose a sufficient number and range of STEM subjects at A level so that options to study
STEM in HE remain open.
10. Integrated and well developed careers advice in schools

The under representation of women in STEM affects all disciplines in varying ways. For
example, the UKRC’s 2012 report on the extremely low number of women engineers in the
UK. Recommendations suggest the engineering sector produces gender-based careers
education and information, advice and guidance (IAG) and also provides enthusiastic role
models. More radically, it is suggested that Maths and Physics remain compulsory for longer
in schools and colleges. 513
Further evidence about gender stereotyping in career aspirations and the inadequate
responses is contained in an Ofsted report published in April 2011. 514
Reports from the STEM Cohesion Action Programme 8 drew attention to many effective
ways of integrating careers awareness into teaching and learning. Inspiring good practice
takes careers advice out of the one off, one to one interview. It builds into subject teaching
an understanding of the place of STEM as a subject and a career option. This programme
investigated and tested positive approaches to work experience.
510 DFCS After-school Science and Engineering Clubs Evaluation: Final Report Ken Mannion, Centre for Science Education,
Mike Coldwell, Centre for Education and Inclusion Research, (SHU)
511 http://www.thelep.org.uk/about/thelepapproach/encouraginggirlstoparticipate
512 Centre for Science Education (SHU) & Babcock STEM Subject Choice and Careers Lessons Learnt (Parts 1 and 2)
513 An investigation into why the UK has the lowest proportion of female engineers in the EU EngineeringUK April 2011
An analysis of the European Labour Force Survey conducted by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science,
Engineering and Technology (UKRC) revealed that the UK has the lowest proportion.
514 Girls' career aspirations Ofsted 12 April 2011 http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Publications-and-
research/Browse-all-by/Documents-by-type/Thematic-reports/Girls-career-aspirations
853
The lead, Centre for Science Education (SHU) also emphasised the need to address equality
and diversity. Unless STEM becomes open to a wider audience, participation will continue to
be limited to a minority. “The full breadth of equality and diversity resources is illustrated
within our online toolkit 515 , which signposts schools to practical ways of creating change.” 516
A further Action Programme 8 report captures current good work going on to widen
access to STEM subjects and careers. 517
The Stem Cohesion Programme Final Report was an evaluation by NFER518 . They found that
the interest and engagement of young people in STEM was increasing, but by Year 3 of the
evaluation, fewer pupils were aspiring to a STEM career. They suggest this shows the need
for continued focus on the communication of STEM careers information and guidance. More
worrying was the finding that stakeholders, including schools, were more difficult to engage
in the third year.
Improved STEM careers practice, which properly addresses gender equality requires
commitment and a system wide approach, integrating equality and inclusive practices into all
levels and stages.
The knowledge base on good practice in careers and IAG work with a gender focus exists
and is growing and should be applied.
Schools, employers and learning providers have to be incentivised to engage, collaborate and
jointly plan to deliver positive outcomes for girls and boys from all backgrounds.
11. Frameworks and interventions for schools and colleges

The STEM Cohesion Programme evaluation found that key stakeholders noted “the need for
the government departments that invest in STEM to be ‘joined up’ themselves, the need to
draw in more stakeholders, the importance of embedding STEM more broadly…”519
This is supported by the National Audit Office report, Educating the Next Generation 520 :
“In taking forward the policy priorities of the new Government, the Department should
develop an overarching programme with a clear logic, based on evidence of cause and effect.
The programme should provide a framework with clear priorities, a well-defined critical
path and appropriate measures of progress.”
The NAO report found considerable regional variations, and suggested that further targeted
incentives to manage take-up are required. In particular they say,“Up to a point, take-up and
achievement in GCSE sciences is proportionally associated with the number of different
programmes in which schools participate.” 521 However they also suggest “participation in
these programmes has less influence on take-up and achievement than other factors, such as
pupil intake.”
515 http://www.stem-e-and-d-toolkit.co.uk/home/welcome-the-equality-and-diversity-toolkit
516 http://www.mathscareers.org.uk/_db/_documents/STEMreportPart2.pdf
517 Encouraging equality & diversity - Working towards equal opportunities in STEM subjects and careers Sheffield Hallam
University June 2011

518 The STEM Cohesion Programme Final Report NFER 2010
519 The STEM Cohesion Programme Final Report NFER 2010
520 www.nao.org.uk/young-scientists-2010
521 ibid. However, there may be diminishing returns when schools access larger numbers of interventions with similar
objectives.
854
The LEP was included in the analysis but NAO did not found a statistically significant change
in achievement or take up (like several other programmes). However the report explains
that this does not necessarily mean that they are ineffective or cannot support future
improvements. “The incompleteness of activity data from some of the programmes, as well
as the relatively short timeframes and difficulty of establishing causal links to take-up and
achievement, mean that more evaluation is required to conclude on longer-term
effectiveness.”
Although the NAO report makes a useful contribution, it does not present an analysis of the
data it collected by gender or ethnicity or any other protected characteristic within the
Equality Act. Integrating and understand the influence of gender (and how it intersects with
class and ethnicity 522 ) is essential and is surely indicated by findings from studies and
evaluations of children’s aspirations and choices, which prove disappointingly stereotyped. A
gender and diversity intervention and framework need not create initiative fatigue, as the
findings of the NAO prove, a greater number of interventions can actually help.
Equality and diversity analysis and approaches (as part of everyday practice and through
targeted positive action on for example specific groups of girls) should feature systematically
in work on STEM, joining up the UK’s equality law with other frameworks and pathways
which addressing the shortfall in people studying and working in STEM.
12. The HE experience

There are several ways to improve the HE experience for students and staff in STEM and
make teaching, learning and research more effective. Access can be widened through
positive outreach, affordable fees, quality teaching and good curricula, and opportunities to
upskill throughout adult life.
First, it is not clear how the new system of funding and fees in HE and in STEM will impact
on the take up and progression of women in STEM subjects, degrees and STEM related
employment. It may be necessary to institute a system of incentives and bursaries to sustain
any progress towards parity. 523
Access to well-informed, STEM specialist and well-resourced careers information advice and
guidance, backed with current STEM labour market information, should be available for adult
women seeking to enter or return to STEM, regardless of their prior qualification level or
benefit status. A strategic approach to gender equality in STEM needs to adopt a lifetime
approach which recognises that women’s career paths are often non-linear, and facilitate
access to funding and support for the transition into technical and professional pathways at
later stages for adults.
The HE STEM programme (particularly focusing on Chemistry, Engineering, Mathematics and

Physics) aims to widen participation in STEM, develop curriculum and increase the numbers
of people without Level 4 qualifications to engage in further study.
Under its several themes, the programme funds some projects addressing equality and
diversity. This includes:
522 DeWitt et al (2011). Young children's aspiration in Science: The unequivocal, the uncertain and the unthinkable.
International Journal of Science Education, available on IFirst.
Wong, B. (2011). Identifying with Science: A case study of two 13-year-old 'high achieving working class' British Asian girls.
Published online by theInternational Journal of Science Education. Available here.
523 An analysis of the SIVS related interventions by gender could be useful.
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2011/rd05_11/rd05_11.pdf
855
• the UKRC’s gender awareness training workshops which are designed to raise
awareness of cultural issues affecting the participation and progression of women in
STEM. The UKRC is also helping to develop student ambassadors to schools.
• Through the RAEng, The London Engineering Project is linked to the current
programme. It had a strong diversity and gender equality practice, supported by the
UKRC, and their archive is valuable.
• The IoP which has a number of diversity and equality initiatives and works with the
UKRC.
However, although there are a number of targeted projects (positive action for
students/pupils from under represented groups), it is not clear what kind of equality and
diversity perspective or framework functions in the programme. Other activities within the
several hundreds funded by the programme obviously aim to ‘widen representation’ and may
be ‘mainstreaming gender’ but it is not clear from their website at least that they are
formally expected to address gender, or gender and class, or gender and ethnicity
systematically. It is not clear that they will access the good practice from many gender and
STEM initiatives. Their findings may not be disaggregated by gender. If this proves to be the
case, it would be against the spirit and the letter of the Equality Act and unhelpful in terms
of identifying and embedding solutions.
Another study draws attention to concerns about equality and curriculum, teaching and
learning matters. The ECU/The Higher Education Academy report on ethnicity, gender and
attainment, argues that more “cross fertilisation (is needed) of the work between those
responsible for equality and those for teaching and learning. There is a need to combine
consideration of principles and practice of learning, teaching and equality and diversity with
key issues in areas such as attainment.” 524
This study included a case for the empowerment of university equality and diversity
committees because of their limited ability to integrate equality and diversity across the
university. It makes a number of suggestions. The ECU also refer to the Equality Act and the
Public Duty in relation to universities, which should be a driver, but seem to be ignored in
practice.
The Equality Challenge Unit and the UKRC run the Athena Swan awards programme which
seeks gender equality related outcomes for departmental and institutional culture,
professional support and promotion, and family friendly working amongst others. The long
term aim is to achieve an equal representation of women and men at all levels of STEM HE.
This award has gained considerable credibility and become an important driver for change. 525
The ECU is also running a pilot of employment-related initiatives to advance gender equality,
identifying and sharing effective practice. The longer term aim is to achieve systemic change
in gender equality for female staff working in higher education. The project is cross sector,
the not just STEM, suggesting that better practice both in gender equality and in STEM is
needed urgently across the HE Sector.
Equality and diversity, and explicitly gender equality (with its intersections with class and
524Ethnicity, gender and degree attainment: final report by ECU and the higher education academy January 2008
525In a letter to the Medical Schools Council on 29 July 2011, the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally C Davies
outlined her intention that all medical schools who wish to apply for NIHR Biomedical Research Centres and Units funding
need to have achieved an Athena SWAN Charter for women in science Silver Award.
856
ethnicity), should be a formal part of the framework of HE STEM initiatives and future policy
on HE and STEM, in line with equality legislation. HEIs can build on useful but more
piecemeal approaches.
A well articulate equalities and diversity element within the HE and HE and STEM
frameworks would help HEIs and other stakeholder institutions to achieve improved and
more systematic knowledge, skills and behaviour with respect to equality and diversity.
The core funding and performance measures for HEIs must be more robustly linked with
meaures of progress on equality and diversity.
The impact of the new fee based funding regime should be monitorred for its effect on
gender balance and other diversity and equality matters.
Key Questions
• What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure that demand for
13. The HE experience – careers advice and aspirations

The STEM HE programme includes activities addressing careers and some leads and project
owners have experience of gender equality practice and policy. But it is not clear that the
programme’s overall approach is sufficient to arrest the attrition at the critical transition
point between first degree and work, when a large number of women leave STEM (see
appendix A).
The Centre for Science Education (SHU – WISET) is creating good practice and resources
in this field. The UKRC runs Gender Equality Training workshops for FE and HE institutions
designed to raise awareness of cultural issues affecting the participation and progression of
women in STEM with HEI careers staff.
Mentoring, improved curricula and teaching practices, and work experience are all strategies
that have been applied to generate and sustain women’s interest in a STEM based career.
New thinking is emerging from the HE STEM programme. HEIs should incorporate good
practice and gender awareness into the design and delivery of their career related offer, in
mainstream services and through positive action.
14. HE - Employers and Industry

The UK Commission on Employment and Skills priorities are now:
1. Making and winning the economic argument for greater investment in skills
2. Enhancing the value and accessibility of vocational training, especially
apprenticeships
3. Galvanising industries and sectors to improve the skills and productivity of
their workforces
4. Working with employers to maximise opportunities for unemployed and
disadvantaged people
Analysis of statistics by gender show that a key attrition point for women in STEM comes
with their first job after their degree (see Appendix). Looking at the wider picture, women
in the UK are concentrated in lower paid sectors. Women do not reach senior levels in the
857
same proportions as men with the same qualifications. This wastes investment in vocational,
technical and professional skills.
The UKRC’s model of change for women includes a role and responsibility for all
stakeholders, including employers. Its products and services are specifically designed to
support employers recruit, retain, progress and return women to the STEM workforce and
the STEM industries. The UKRC is helping to provide solutions for the STEM related
business and organisations wanting change. Many now understand the imperative but fewer
know how to achieve the all important culture change. Recognition schemes like the
UKRC’s SET Fair Standard reward progress and achievements and help make transparent
specific ways employers can change policy, practice and behaviour.
Additionally, opportunities for flexible working, work experience/ internships to re-enter or

transfer to STEM employment at mid-career stage can provide routes for qualified and skilled
women to return to STEM or to engage after initial experience in other sectors.
Government supported workforce and active labour market programmes would achieve
more with gender targets, gender equality expert advice, and gender training for delivery
agents/learning providers. Monitoring for gender throughout would motivate improvements.
Employers and HEIs have to counter the trend for women to leave STEM by working
together o improve the HE experience and improving the image and reality of work in STEM
occupations or STEM industries. Women’s encounters in HE of the ‘chilly climate’ or other
forms of stereotyping, or fears about work-life balance should be addressed through culture
change in the employment and research environments. STEM employers (and occupations)
need to earn a better reputation as good places for women to work.
Joint action between universities and employers should build in a gender analysis and set
gender outcomes, drawing on a central source of expertise and innovation in gender
equality in STEM.
To attract more women into STEM careers, employers in businesses and organisations
should be encouraged to engage with recognition schemes: the UKRC’s SET Fair Standard
reward progress and achievements and help make transparent specific ways employers can
change policy, practice and behaviour.
Government supported workforce and active labour market programmes would achieve
more with gender targets, gender equality expert advice, and gender training for delivery
agents. Monitoring for gender throughout would motivate improvements.
15. Conclusion: frameworks and programmes for HE

Women are producers and consumers of science, maths, engineering and technology,
Gender and women’s participation are relevant to fundamental science, applied science,
technology, engineering and innovation. Diverse research and production teams are more
effective. Gender informed research and analysis can drive innovative technologies and
services, especially needed in the green economy, new industries and 21st Century social
challenges like ageing, energy and food.
Gender analysis has not been sufficiently embedded or mainstreamed in wider provision, in
key institutions and sectors like HE and this is likely to be part of the reason why
858
participation in STEM remains relatively but stubbornly static. In the new funding regime,
HEIs will need to work harder to attract enough student of the right quality. It is in their
interests to develop approaches and measures to take account of equality, diversity and
gender issues in teaching, research and employment.
Key stakeholders like the HE funding councils together with the various high level STEM
initiatives should integrate gender equality into their programme frameworks. These should
include specific and clear priorities on gender, a well-defined critical path and appropriate
measures of progress. 526
To create more leverage, professional bodies and learning societies accreditation processes
should integrate equality and diversity for academic and research staff, and students.
Mainstream organisations would be best enabled by a central source of expertise and

innovation in gender equality in STEM, and a well developed knowledge base, contributed by
many practitioners and researchers.
The RAEng and the Royal Society were newly established in 2011 as lead organisations on
equality and diversity and should ensure the effective integration of gender equality through
a wide range of strategic and systemic measures.
16 December 2011
Appendix A
The analysis in the UKRC’s Statistics Guide reveals that only 5.3 per cent (674 thousand
women), or about one in twenty, of all working women are employed in any SET
occupation, compared to 31.3 per cent for all working men (nearly one in three), in a total
of 5.5 million women and men in SET occupations. This means that a man is six times more
likely to work in a SET occupation than a woman. 527
The Guide shows how the number of girls and women studying STEM has improved.
However STEM graduates do not always work in SET occupations. 528 Female STEM
graduates of working age 529 in the UK (a total of 620 thousand women) are more likely to
take up employment in non-SET than in SET occupations. Only 29.8 per cent (185 thousand)
of all female STEM graduates of working age in the UK are employed in SET occupations
compared to half (782 thousand) of all male STEM graduates of working age. Nearly 100
thousand female STEM graduates are either unemployed or economically inactive.
Although girls and women are entering SET employment, education and training, sometimes
in greater numbers or proportions than in the past, there is still a pronounced trend
whereby the numbers and proportions drop at key stages or over time. Attrition begins to
be pronounced at ‘A’ level (after the national curriculum stage) and continues through post
compulsory education and training, into employment. Attracting more women scientists,
engineers and technologists into the economy is a public policy challenge. It demands public,
private and third sector solutions because the problems are complex and interdependent.
526 With reference to the NAO for elements of this recommendation.
527 SET occupations = SET and health professions and associate professions and SET skilled trades.
528 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is the term used in an educational context, while SET (science,
engineering and technology) is used in relation to occupations and industries, in the official data sources used here.
529 Term ‘working age’ includes individuals who are in employment, unemployed and economically inactive.
859
In 2008, there were 620 thousand female STEM graduates of working age in the UK, but
70.2 per cent of these were not using their SET qualifications to work in SET occupations
because they were working in non-SET occupations, inactive, or unemployed. In 2006/07,
twice the proportion of men graduating with undergraduate qualifications in STEM entered
SET professional or associate professional occupations (41.8 per cent) compared with
women (21.0 per cent). Moreover, male graduates who enter SET occupations are much
more likely to enter at higher levels than women – six months after graduation, the clear
signs of a gendered labour market and of gendered choice amongst graduates.
Women are severely under-represented in senior positions even in

subjects/occupations/sectors where they have critical mass. This is illustrated in the figures
on participation in the wider workforce above, including in academic settings. In biosciences,
a discipline with a critical mass of female students, researchers and lecturers, women still
account for oly 15.0 per cent of professors.
Despite some improvements in the take up of STEM GCSE subjects across all levels, the
impact of gender stereotyping and other factors is still demonstrated by the low proportions
of girls and women in certain subjects, occupations and industries. There has been some
negative change too. Girls accounted for 48.8 per cent of all STEM GCSE exam entries in
2009. However, in the same year girls made up only 42.2 per cent of GCE ‘A’ level entries in
STEM subjects.
Unlike GCSEs, NVQ/SVQs remain highly gender segregated by subject choice. In 2007/08,
only a small minority of all NVQ/SVQ awards were given to women in engineering and
manufacturing technologies (8.7 per cent) and construction, planning and the built
environment (below a thousand compared to about 106 thousand awards given to men).
Apprenticeship programs are also highly gender segregated. In 2006/07, women were
concentrated in the non-SET apprenticeship subjects, such as health, public services and
care,
The Guide shows some evidence of positive change, particularly in education in schools,
with take-up improvements and good performance by girls. There has also been a very small
increase in the proportion of women taking STEM degrees and small increase in the
proportion of women employed in SET occupations. Female participation in SET occupations
at 12.3 per cent has been slowly increasing by 2 percentage points in the five years between
2003 and 2008 (based on figures from the ONS).
The Guide shows that women are under-represented at every level in STEM education and
SET employment, with particularly severe gender segregation in vocational training and
skilled trades. The statistics confirm the need for more attention to culture change within
SET organisations and businesses, and more opportunities for women to enter or return to
SET training, education and employment throughout their lives. In terms of the participation
of women, this examination of the last five years reveals a mixed picture with both negative
and positive trends.
The UK has supported and invested in a range of initiatives for women in SET including the
UKRC, and the improvements indicate some good practice. The UKRC believes that these
statistics and the analysis reinforce the case for an integrated and comprehensive strategy on
women’s participation in SET: one which encompasses action in education and in relation to
research careers, as well as action by businesses and organisations to improve employment
860
rates and opportunities for women in SET across the sectors.
861
Universities UK – Written evidence
Introduction
1. Universities UK is pleased to make a submission to the House of Lords Science and

Technology Sub-Committee and aid its inquiry into higher education and science,
technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.
2. The UK economy will increasingly depend on high ‘added value’ and knowledge-
intensive industries that will rely on a workforce with graduate-level STEM skills and
qualifications obtained in higher education. For this reason there has been, in recent
years, a significant focus on raising the number of those studying STEM subjects in
universities.
3. In 2006, following a review by Sir Gareth Roberts 530 , a number of STEM subjects
were identified as being strategically important and vulnerable (SIVS). Arising from
this, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), working in
partnership with learned and professional bodies, higher education, schools and
employers, developed an approach to stimulate demand in SIVS, as well as protecting
supply in those areas deemed vulnerable whilst demand picks up. HEFCE also
supported a £20 million national STEM programme. An increased focus was given to
STEM by the Sainsbury Review, and STEM has more recently been restated as a
central policy concern of the coalition government. In addition to funded initiatives
there has been a greater focus on coordination of STEM policy, though for example
the previous BIS STEM High Level Steering Group and now the DfE and BIS Joint
Ministerial Group for STEM.
4. There is a general trend of increasing student demand for and enrolment in STEM
subjects in higher education and, whilst it is difficult to identify a direct causal link,
the strong policy focus given to STEM, through initiatives such as HEFCE SIVS
programme, is likely to have contributed to this trend. This submission covers a
number of the Committee’s questions and provides an overview of developments
throughout the different parts of the higher education STEM ‘supply chain’ and
identifies issues and concerns we believe require further attention if an ongoing and
sustainable approach to supporting STEM is to be achieved. This submission largely
draws on the significant amount of literature and knowledge on STEM has been
developed in recent years.
Overview of Universities UK’s views on STEM and higher education
5. Universities UK has been supportive of the overall policy direction in relation to

STEM subjects in higher education, particularly the approach and leadership provided
by HEFCE in this area through the SIVS programme, recognising the importance of
STEM graduates and research to the economy.
530HEFCE 2005/24 Strategically important and vulnerable subjects: Final report of the advisory group, HEFCE, June 2005,
862
6. Universities UK has contributed to the development of STEM related policy and

initiatives over a number of years and consistently made the broad points outlined
below, which will continue to inform our engagement with this agenda:
• Approaches to supporting STEM should be flexible and dynamic, ensuring that

universities remain autonomous and are able to continue to plan within their
own strategic priorities, particularly within a reformed student centred
funding environment;
• The arts, humanities and social sciences will also be vital in meeting the
needs of the economy and society and initiatives to support STEM should be
seen as one part of a wider drive to support the knowledge economy which
also includes, for example, the creative industries;
• Although the symptoms of problems with STEM can arise in higher education
(for example, as we have seen with the closure of departments due to low
demand) issues in this area need to be understood from a ‘whole system’
perspective, which includes schools and employers, and any interventions
targeted in the most effective way;
• Although the issues facing STEM provision can be both regional and national,
developments in this area need to be seen within the context of a increasingly
devolved system of higher education in the UK;
• Efforts to stimulate demand and capacity can often have long lead in times,
therefore effective monitoring is required and policy interventions should be
based on strong evidence;
• Effective coordination of initiatives and policy interventions are essential to

avoid duplication, overlap or fragmentation;
• Employers and professional bodies have a crucial role to play in working to

emphasise the career benefits of studying STEM subjects.
STEM subjects and progression into higher education
A – Level and GCSE attainment in schools
7. Choices made in terms of future study at ages 14 and 16 determine the level of more
general STEM skills in the population and also the numbers of students with the
required skills and qualifications to continue studying STEM subjects post-16.
8. In recent years it has been acknowledged that the ‘health’ of STEM subjects in
schools is beginning to improve. A National Audit Office report 531 (published in
2010) found that GCSE science entries had been stable over the preceding five years
at around 1.1 million per year. The report also found that there had been an increase
in pupils taking A-level chemistry and maths over the same period, although physics
had increased more slowly. The numbers of pupils achieving A-C in A-level biology,
chemistry, physics and maths are also reported to have increased.
531 Department for Education and National Audit Office Educating the next generation of scientists (2010)
863
9. Whilst acknowledging that these are positive results, there are still a number of
perceived barriers which prevent STEM uptake at GCSE and A-level - a predominant
one being a lack of suitable teachers in schools. In 2010, for example, it was reported
by Professor Peter Main, Director of Education and Science at the Institute of Physics
to the Children, Schools and Families Committee that, ‘500 schools exist within the
UK which offer A-levels but do not offer a course in physics A-level’. 532
10. Quality and supply issues in STEM teaching are something that the government and
Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) are currently trying to
address. In the government’s Initial Teacher Training (ITT) implementation plan
(released on the 8th November 2011) the government proposed to introduce
£20,000 bursaries for graduates wanting to go into secondary teaching who have
achieved high degree classifications in Physics, Maths and Chemistry as well as
introducing a new prestigious physics teacher training scholarship to be awarded by
the Institute of Physics. 533
11. Universities UK supports this policy as a positive step towards dealing with issues of
capacity in STEM teaching, however, care must be taken to ensure that it is clear
what such bursaries are rewarding, what behaviour they might encourage and what
future benefits and commitments are secured for graduates in terms of their teaching
careers.
12. Universities UK has recently publish a report on the role and importance of social
science research, and specifically education research, which sets out to sustain and
develop the STEM skills base in England. We have attached a copy of this report for
the Committee’s consideration.
Information and guidance for prospective STEM undergraduates
13. A significant factor that contributes to undergraduate enrolment levels in STEM is

access to good information and guidance. This is important both in relation to
making the right A-level choices required for access to higher education STEM
courses and providing ‘market signals’ to potential students on employment and
career information.
14. For its part, the sector has been working on improving information available to
prospective students and, as part of this, has committed to the production of Key
Information Sets (KIS’s) in Sept 2012. These are comparable sets of standardised
information about undergraduate courses designed to meet the information needs of
prospective students and will be published 'in context' on the web-sites of
universities and colleges.
15. Alongside such developments we believe that there continues to be an important

role for employers and professional bodies to emphasise the career benefits of
studying STEM subjects in schools. Whilst a lot is already being done in this area, we
532 UK Parliament Committee examines teaching of STEM subjects (2010)

http://news.parliament.uk/2010/02/committee-examines-teaching-of-stem-subjects/
533 Implementation Plan (2011)
http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/t/training%20our%20next%20generation%20of%20outstanding%20teachers%20
nov%202011.pdf
864
believe emphasis should be given to initiatives that promote the attractiveness of

STEM careers to secondary school students.
Undergraduate enrolment
16. When comparing trends in the number of students enrolled between STEM and non
STEM subjects there has been a similar increase, with both increasing by 13.3%
between 2003/04 and -2009/10. The situation for STEM appears to have improved in
more recent years, however, with students enrolled in STEM subjects increasing by
4.9% in comparison to 3.5% for non STEM subjects between 2008/09 and -2009/10
alone. 534
17. A 2011 report by HEFCE 535 stated that across a ‘wider definition’ of STEM an overall
increase in full time equivalent (FTE) students enrolled at HEFCE funded institutions
of 8% was observed over the period 1999/00 to 2009/10. When breaking this down
in more detail this included an increase of 97% for clinical medicine, 71% for clinical
dentistry and veterinary science which had increased by 98% over the same period.
In spite of this, numbers in computer science appeared to have continued to decline
by 25% as had those in earth, marine and environmental sciences.
18. At an international level the proportion of new entrants to higher education in STEM
subjects for the UK in 2009, at 21.3%, was below both the OECD (24.3%) and EU
averages (24.4%) and below competitor countries such as Germany (26.9%) and
Korea (31.8%) 536 .
19. The impact of changes to student funding in England for entry in 2012/13 on demand,
and consequently for demand in STEM, is unclear at this stage. Early indications from
UCAS show that as of December 2011, applications (from all domiciles) for full time
undergraduate study in 2012/13 in STEM subjects were down by 3.7% on the same
point in the previous year compared to a decrease of 8.3% for non-STEM full time
undergraduate provision over the same period 537 .
20. As noted above, whilst it is difficult to identify a direct causal link, the strong policy
focus given to STEM, through initiatives such as HEFCE SIVS programme, is likely to
have contributed to the overall long term upward trend. More detail on the impact
of the HEFCE SIVS programme can be found in the summative evaluation undertaken
by Curtis+Cartwright Consulting 538 .
21. The Curtis+Cartwright report notes that although demand has increased for SIVS
subjects, the programme may not have resulted in lasting solutions to the root
causes of vulnerability. Although HEFCE may well have a continuing role in this area,
the Department for Education and other partner organisations involved in demand
raising projects should draw on evidence from the SIVS and the National HE STEM
534 Patterns and trends in UK higher education, Universities UK (2011)

535 Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects HEFCE (2011/24) p. 42
536 OECD Education at a glance 2011
Table A4.2a Distribution of new entrants into tertiary programmes, by field of education (2009)
proportion in STEM related subects, Health and welfare, Engineering, manufacturing and construction, Science and
Agriculture
537 UCAS 2012 applicant figures – December
http://www.ucas.com/about_us/media_enquiries/media_releases/2012/2012applicantfigures
538 Evaluation of HEFCE's programme of support for Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects: A report to HEFCE by
Curtis+Cartwright Consulting HEFCE (2011) http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2011/rd05_11/rd05_11.pdf

865
programme to ensure future work in this area can continue to be most effectively
targeted and sustained.
STEM provision and higher education teaching funding
22. In December 2009 HEFCE stated that it would be inviting applications from
universities and colleges that wish to shift the balance of their teaching provision
towards vulnerable STEM and modern foreign language subjects. HEFCE is making up
to £30 million available over three years for this initiative to support the transfer of
around 3,000 undergraduate full-time equivalent students per year from non-SIVS
into SIVS subjects. 539 In its first year, the scheme provided £4m to support the
movement of 1,700 places, supplementing an allocation to SIVS within the additional
10,000 places made possible by the University Modernisation Fund. 540 The
Curtis+Cartwright report noted above suggests that these interventions have been
effective in providing more flexibility in enabling institutions to rebalance provision
strategically, and support for very high-cost science subjects has contributed to
halting the trend of science departmental closures. We would support the
Curtis+Cartwright report’s assertion that this ‘SIVS nudge’ is in keeping with a
policy of not being overly interventionist, and is an example of HEFCE using marginal
funding to introduce extra flexibility into how institutions provide SIVS places. Any
further interventions to sustain STEM provision in higher education should continue
in this vein, and should be based on a clear understanding of the problem that it is
seeking to address.
23. Higher education funding is currently undergoing significant change, and changes to
the funding of teaching in England from 2012-13 will see a review of a number of
policies which impact on the funding of STEM subjects. For example, an outcome
from the first stage of HEFCEs consultation on changes to teaching funding for 2012-
13 saw exemption from SIVS in the creation of the margin of 20,000 places to be
allocated as part of a bidding process.
24. HEFCE’s second stage teaching funding consultation, which looks at teaching funding
for 2013-14 and is expected in February 2012, will also deal with a number of issues
that could impact upon the funding of STEM provision in higher education institutions
in England. As the recent Government White Paper, ‘Students at the heart of the
system’ states, this will include reviews of policy towards SIVS with a particular focus
on maintaining future research capacity, and funding for high costs subjects at
undergraduate and postgraduate levels that cannot be sustained through income
from graduate contributions and other targeted allocations. Universities UK will be
responding to this consultation in full once it has been published, but believe that any
future approach to supporting STEM within the SIVS programme should be
underpinned by flexibility and responsiveness, working with grain of changes to
student funding and student number allocations and applied only where there is
strong evidence that the new student led system may not sustain an adequate flow of
graduates. We would support the conclusions of the 2011 SIVS report which notes
that any development of future policy related to SIVS starts from ‘the assumption
that the new student-led system for financing teaching, operating alongside HEFCE
teaching funding and the dual-support system for research, will for the most part
achieve the government's aspirations with regard to subject provision.’
539 Number of undergraduates studying science subjects continues to rise http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2010/sivs.htm

540 Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects HEFCE (2010-11) p. 8
866
Changes to student number controls from 2012/13
25. Although it is still too early in the cycle to identify significant changes to patterns of
applications to STEM subjects for entry in 2012/13 and the impact of these on
enrolments in 2012/13, there are a number of amendments to student number
controls for provision in England which could impact upon STEM provision. The
deregulation of student number control limits for those students with entry
qualifications of AAB and equivalent or above, and the creation of a margin of 20,000
places for allocation according to price and quality (in addition to other criteria)
could have an impact on the level and geographical distribution of STEM provision in
the UK.
26. The distribution of subjects above and below the AAB+ threshold shows a split in
STEM provision with physics, subjects allied to medicine, engineering, mathematics
and computer sciences, and veterinary sciences overrepresented amongst provision
above the threshold compared to technologies, biological sciences and architecture
which are underrepresented. The creation of a margin of 20,000 places from
remaining numbers (after removal of AAB+ and equivalent numbers) adds additional
pressure to underrepresented subjects with significant levels of provision below the
AAB+ threshold. As noted above HEFCE has attempted to address this by exempting
SIVS from the creation of the margin, under the requirement that this provision is
maintained in subsequent years, however, this would not apply to biological sciences
and architecture under the current definition of SIVS.
867
Ratio of subjects in AAB+ and equivalent population compared to total entrant

population as a whole, 2009/10
European Languages, Literature and related subjects
Historical and Philosophical studies
Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
Physical Sciences
Eastern, Asiatic, African, American and Australasian

Languages, Literature and related subjects
Law
Social studies
Subjects Allied to Medicine
Engineering
Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Veterinary Sciences, Agriculture and related subjects
Education
Mass Communications and Documentation
Creative Arts and Design
Technologies
Business and Administrative studies
Combined
Biological Sciences
Architecture, Building and Planning
-1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5

Ratio of total and AAB+ population
STEM group
Non-STEM
STEM
Demand for STEM graduates
27. Demand among employers for graduates skilled in STEM subjects remains strong
across a broad range of sectors. For example, a 2009 Council for Industry in Higher
Education (CIHE) report proposes that the demand for graduates with STEM skills is
likely to increase faster even than the overall increase in demand for graduates. 541
Graduate destinations
28. The destinations of leavers in higher education data (below) in 2009/10, whilst fairly
limited in what it can tell us, suggests that STEM graduates particularly in medicine
and engineering continue to be in high demand in terms of employment, although a
541 The demand for STEM graduates and post-graduates, CIHE, 2009 http://www.cihe.co.uk/category/themes/policy/stem/
868
number of candidates studying STEM subjects also appear to be in post graduate

training 3.5 years after completing their undergraduate course.
29. Data from the then DIUS in January 2009 reported that the sector with the largest
share of people employed who are qualified in STEM subjects was ‘business’ & ‘other
services’ and in ‘non-marketed services’. It stated that, ‘more than three hundred
thousand STEM post-graduates were employed in these two sectors in 2007, while
more than ¾ million STEM first degree graduates were employed in Business &
other services alone’. 542 More recent analysis by BIS (2011) investigated why some
STEM graduates do not work in occupations related to their degree. The research
gave some insight into many of the issues in the career decision-making of STEM
students and graduates. The research suggested that many STEM graduates are
attracted to other areas, often because of a lack of knowledge of what STEM work
and careers look like and also because graduates perceive other areas to be of more
interest. 543
30. Among those who had distinct careers in mind by their final year of study, it was
revealed that about half expected a career in the defined STEM ‘specialist sector’ and
just under half in the STEM ‘core jobs’ group. 544 A further 21% specified careers in
542 Wilson R The Demand for STEM Graduates: Some benchmark projections Warwick Institute for Employment Research
(January 2009) p. http://www.dius.gov.uk/consultations/~/media/publications/S/STEM_IER_Report_Web_version
543 STEM Graduates in non STEM jobs, BIS (2011) p. 9
http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/s/11-771-stem-graduates-in-non-stem-jobs.pdf
544 STEM Core jobs where a STEM degree and associated competences are directly relevant, STEM-related jobs are where
STEM competences are of relevance but applied more broadly, and Unrelated jobs where a STEM degree qualification has
little or no apparent relevance. STEM Graduates in Non-STEM Jobs relevant, STEM-related jobs where STEM competences
869
both STEM and non-STEM sectors, while 18% specified both STEM and unrelated job
functions. However, this pattern varied considerably by STEM subject with, in
particular, much higher proportions not planning to work in STEM Specialist sector
or STEM Core functions in the less vocationally focused or broader subjects, such as
Mathematics, Geography and Psychology. 545
STEM recruitment and skills
31. A recent report by the CBI (2011) suggested that 43% of employers currently have
difficulty recruiting STEM staff. A large number of those surveyed suggested that a
lack of applications was the biggest barrier to recruitment for STEM roles,
particularly amongst graduate entrants - around a third of employers (30%) reported
a lack of applications and (39%) reported a shortage of STEM graduates. Many of the
employers surveyed in the report also identified that applicants lack employability
skills (36%) and workplace experience (37%). 546
32. Significant progress has been made in this area, but employers will need to continue
to work closely with universities in the development of provision and to signal the
subjects, skills and attributes they particularly value and that will position graduates
most effectively in the labor market. The HEFCE workforce development
programme, which aims to develop higher-level learning programmes in partnership
with employers, already funds a number of projects designed to meet employers'
demand for STEM skills. The KIS, noted above, provides a mechanism for employers
to signal those courses they value to prospective students. The Government's
growth review published as part of the Autumn Statement on 29 November
recommends that Sector Skills Councils and other employer bodies should help
develop robust accreditation frameworks that tell students about the courses
employers really value that can potentially be included in the KIS.
STEM and Post-Graduates
33. Finally, we would like to draw attention to concerns about the vulnerability of STEM
PGT provision due to changes to immigration policies. Overall 27.6% of STEM
provision in 2009/10 was accounted for by non-EU students compared to 26.3% for
non-STEM subjects. At a more detailed level the main STEM subjects with above
average levels of non-EU students, and which may therefore be vulnerable to any fall
in demand from international students, were Mathematical and Computer sciences
(54.7%), Engineering (51.2%) and Technologies (30.2%). It should also be noted that
this may also be an issue for academic staffing of STEM provision, in particular
engineering, as non-EU academic staff tend to be younger and are more likely to have
progressed from being a student at a UK HEI (roughly a third of non-EU staff in many
STEM subjects were previously students in the UK).
December 2011
are of relevance but applied more broadly, and Unrelated jobs where a STEM degree qualification has little or no apparent
relevance.
545 Ibid p. 29
546 Building for growth: business priorities for education and skills, CBI (2011) p.7
870
University Alliance – Written evidence
University Alliance represents 23 major UK universities who work closely with business and
the professions to deliver world-class research and a high quality student experience. At
University Alliance, just like our universities, our approach is about putting solutions,
innovation and enterprise at the core of everything we do. We deliver evidence-based policy
and research and foster close links with Government and business in order to improve
higher education policy; to the benefit of the economy and society.
Scale of delivery
What is the definition of a STEM subject and a STEM job and is the current number of STEM
students and graduates sufficient?
A STEM subject
1. STEM graduates underpin our knowledge intensive service industries as well as
most science based organisations. Alliance universities deliver over 23% 547 of all
STEM provision in the UK and we recognise the need for graduates with strong
maths, technology, engineering and science capabilities to power the businesses
of the future in the UK. Although this submission will focus on STEM, at the
outset it is important not to neglect the essential role of design alongside
technology, engineering and science as an increasingly important element of
successful innovation. It could, therefore, be detrimental to focus too narrowly
on STEM subjects if it is at the expense of other subject areas, like design,
necessary to the development and uptake of advances in many STEM fields.
A ‘STEM job’
2. A recent report by the Science Council found that people who are dependent on
science knowledge and skills as part of their role and who will not previously
have been identified as part of the science workforce (secondary scientists) can
be found throughout the economy. Based on employment trends demonstrated
in the last five years, their projections show that if increases continue, 7.1m
people will be employed in either a primary or secondary science role by 2030.
Between 2009 and 2030, the Core Science Sectors will grow by around 300,000
workers. Of these new workers, 60% will be in Non Science Occupations, 26% in
secondary science workers and 14% in primary science occupations. Between
2009 and 2030, the Related Science Sectors will grow by over 600,000 workers.
Of these new workers, 73% will be in Non Science Occupations, 24% in
secondary science occupations and 3% in primary science occupations.548
Economic demand for more graduates
3. There is much evidence indicating that there is a need for more graduates in the
UK. In the UK’s global, knowledge-based economy, 80% of new jobs are in high-
skill areas and require graduates with a high-tech, high-skill and innovative
approach. A graduate contributes between 20 and 48 per cent greater
productivity to the labour market than employees holding lesser qualifications. In
this global, knowledge-based economy over half (56%) of the 13.5 million jobs to
547 Source: 2008-9 HESA data

548 The Science Council, The Current and Future Workforce (2011)
871
be filled in the UK to 2017 will require people to hold graduate level

qualifications. 549
4. In 2000, the UK was 3rd amongst top industrialised nations in terms of the
proportion of young people graduating. In 2008 we had fallen to 15th position
because our competitor countries have been investing at a faster rate than us. In
order to meet this need and remain internationally competitive the UK needs to
increase the total number of student places available at universities in the UK.
Employer demand for more graduates
5. It is vital that we move towards a system that is flexible enough to educate the
number of graduates that will be needed if we are to remain competitive. Alliance
universities are leaders in developing graduate attributes, meeting the needs of
employers and giving graduates a head start in the graduate market place. As a
result, Alliance graduates have some of the highest graduate-level employment
rates and prospects. For example, 93% of Northumbria graduates are in
graduate-level employment after 3 years and Engineering graduates from
Nottingham Trent University have joint highest graduate prospects with Imperial.
6. Employer surveys have found that STEM graduates are particularly sought-after in
the banking, finance, manufacturing, engineering, energy and construction
sectors. 550 However, the desirability of STEM-related degrees is much broader,
with employers often preferring to recruit individuals with STEM-related degrees
for their highly desirable employability skills.
7. Many STEM employers have reported a strong demand for STEM graduates and
noted shortfalls in their recruitment. Therefore, as part of the need for total
growth in student numbers, there is a need for increasing the number of STEM
students and graduates. At a time where our international competitors are
recognising the increasing need for more graduates in the workforce and are
prioritising investment in higher education to drive growth, the UK cannot afford
to stand still.
Business Links
Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from HE sufficiently high? If not, why not?
8. There has been much dialogue around the quality of STEM graduates. Last year
the CBI reported that STEM skills are vital to areas of future growth and
employment including advanced manufacturing and low carbon industries. In their
survey around 45% of employers reported having difficulty recruiting STEM-
skilled staff, with almost six in ten (59%) firms expecting difficulty in the next
three years. As a result 42% of employers called on government to take action to
raise the quality of STEM graduates. This would suggest that there are still
questions to be raised about how to increase the quality of STEM graduates.
9. Working closely with business, the professions and industry throughout the
degree program is a key feature of Alliance universities. Experience of work can
facilitate graduate employment but can also build valuable skills that support
employability and are highly valued by employers. Alliance universities are taking
innovative approaches to employer engagement contributing to the quality of
549 CBI, Mapping the route to growth (2011)

550 From CBI employer survey
872
STEM courses and graduates. The World of Work Programme at Liverpool John
Moores University is excellent example this. Every degree programme has an
element of work-related learning, so that every student has the opportunity to
engage in real world projects or go on placements and apply their skills in the
context of the world of work. Other examples include Hewlett Packard
collaborating with the University of the West of England and De Montfort
University on course design and offering placements and professional training and
the co-location of Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd with the University of
Lincoln in a new school of engineering. The collaborative nature of the
Engineering School means that graduates are ‘industry-ready’. Academics and
Siemens employees are co-located, meaning that students benefit from the real-
world, practical experience with world class gas turbines alongside the delivery of
the theoretical underpinnings provided within an academic environment. The co-
location of a real engineering business within the School also provides an
opportunity to extend students’ learning from beyond the lecture room or lab
and into a real, professional environment.
10. A HEFCE commissioned report found that “there appears to be evidence,

clearest for sandwich placements, that a benefit of structured work experience is
improved employment outcomes after graduation.” Demonstrating their
commitment to working closely with business, over 10% of students at Alliance
universities are on sandwich courses, compared with 6% sector average. The
report went on to say that “the priority for activity/interventions by the HE
sector should therefore be to support work experience placements for students
during their period of HE study so that they develop the employability skills
employers require and begin to build a body of work experience in advance of
entering the employment market proper”.
11. Through working in close partnership with business and industry, universities give
students every opportunity of graduating with the knowledge, expertise and
experience that employers are looking for and that the UK economy and society
need.
Are there industry incentives to STEM graduates to keep them in stem?
12. This partnership approach not only gives employers the opportunity to input into
the quality and skills of STEM graduates but it also affords students the
opportunity to get a taste for working in a STEM related job and to build valuable
relationships with individuals and employers within STEM occupations. The
experience of working closely with those already working within STEM
occupations, through placements, internships, co-location, research projects ,
KTPs or other forms of collaboration, is an excellent way to encourage STEM
graduates to continue in STEM related occupations.
13. Recognising the shortfall of STEM graduates reported by STEM employers, it is
also important to note that STEM graduates in “non-stem” occupations can bring
their STEM expertise and particular areas of strength into other occupations not
directly related to STEM subjects.
A diverse higher education sector
Geographical and socioeconomic STEM diversity
873
14. Alliance universities deliver nearly a quarter of all STEM provision in the UK and
are spread across the UK, from Plymouth to Northumbria and Hertfordshire to
Glamorgan. Add to this the many other institutions delivering STEM courses in
the sector and there is a great geographical spread of higher education
institutions offering STEM courses.
15. Alliance universities contribute not only to the broad geographical spread of
STEM delivery but also to the diversity of STEM graduates. Due to their scale and
the diversity of their students, 28% of students from lower socioeconomic
groups studying in the UK are studying at an Alliance university. The same is true
for 27% of students from low participation neighbourhoods.551 This part of the
sector is delivering on government priorities of widening participation in STEM.
16. The new system of student number controls for 2012/13 (core and margin) is
particularly restrictive for universities that have high numbers of STEM provision
but are not below the existing £7500 fee threshold for the redistribution of
numbers. Universities in this position will have 9% of their numbers taken away in
2012/13 with no opportunity to bid for the numbers back. However, these
parameters were never intended to be in place for more than one year and we
are making good progress with the Government in finding solutions for 2013/14
onwards to remove the unhelpful £7500 fee threshold for the reallocation of
numbers whilst limiting the cost for treasury. More information on this issue can
be provided if it would be helpful.
17. Additionally, increased participation, across all courses including STEM, has been
supported by the HEFCE widening participation allocation over recent years. We
are pleased that HEFCE has been able to protect the non-mainstream allocations
relating to widening access for 2012-13 as this funding has proved to be critical
support for widening participation and social mobility. This is significant and
essential funding for universities that should remain protected in line with
Government priorities to increase and support widening participation.
undertake?
18. There is widespread misunderstanding from PhD students about their career
opportunities thanks to the limited number of roles available in academia. There
must be a greater effort made by funding councils and universities to prepare
PhD students for a broader range of careers that reflect their contribution to
knowledge and research skills, but may sit outside of higher education.
Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to maintain the research base
19. There is always a need for PhD studentships and funding councils and universities
should constantly review that there is an appropriate and balanced offering each
year.
What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and number of PhD students? Are
551 Data from HESA: 2009-10 Participation of under-represented groups in Higher Education looking at all young, full-time,
first degree entrants
874
20. Doctoral Training Centres have been an important and transformational tool in
the experiences and lives of PhD students. They have also better enabled
universities and consortia of universities to provide a higher quality training
environment which has had benefits for the institution's own practice as well as
students.
What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of graduates to pursue a
research career?
21. The graduates who are studying and researching today will form the bedrock of
our future research base. In order to maintain the UK's excellent research
capacity in the long-term, we must ensure that we are encouraging graduates to
continue their learning and research after they have completed their
undergraduate experience. Any decline in post graduate study and research will
be felt by future generations as the important contribution to society and our
economy, that is made by research, will wither without a vibrant and diverse new
generation of researchers. Therefore, the Government, universities and others
must pay immediate attention to postgraduate funding and financing to ensure
that higher fees do not have a detrimental effect on postgraduate markets. We
must also be proactive in 'making the case' for post graduate study and research
to existing students that may not have considered the possibility.
16 December 2011
875
Bedfordshire, University of Kent and Cardiff University – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
University College London (UCL), University of Salford, University

of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of Cambridge,
University of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent
and Cardiff University – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
876
University College London (UCL), University of Nottingham and University of Oxford –
University College London (UCL), University of Nottingham and

University of Oxford – Oral evidence (QQ 246-280)
Transcript to be found under University of Oxford
877
University College London (UCL), Cranfield University and Imperial College London – Oral
University College London (UCL), Cranfield University and Imperial

College London – Oral evidence (QQ 434-468)
Transcript to be found under Cranfield University
878
University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University, University College London
(UCL), University of Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey,
University of Cambridge and University of York – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University,

University College London (UCL), University of Salford, University
of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of Cambridge
and University of York – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
879
University of Bristol – Written evidence
Introduction
They have different purposes. Doctoral provision develops higher level research skills and feeds the
global research base - research students are often described as the “engine of research”, particularly
in science-based disciplines. Stand-alone Masters provide specialisation or a change of direction
beyond first degrees, or professional qualification. Both levels feed into the UK economy.
As the benefit from doctoral study is likely to be longer-term and at a higher level, this is the area in
which government funding should be focussed: the individual has to study at doctoral level for 3-4
years and neither the individual nor the employer/wider society is likely to reap the full benefits for
10-15 years. Masters programmes tend to have an immediate impact on an individual’s career
progression and are usually supported through a more manageable financial outlay. The UK needs
to address widening participation at PG level.
At doctoral level the provision is hindered by lack of consistent funding. To employ research active
staff and equip “well founded” laboratories requires a long term view. The move to Doctoral
Training Centres (DTCs) has helped considerably in the areas receiving funding. We anticipate a
decline in applications from UK students when the first cohorts of undergraduates paying £9k/year
graduate. We have already seen a drop in Masters level applications in some disciplines following
an increase in home PGT fees to bring these more in line with the £9k undergraduate tariff. We
anticipate the decline will be more marked at doctoral level as the commitment is longer.
As a research-intensive university our aspiration is to grow doctoral provision and maintain masters
provision. In some key areas (particularly engineering and computer science) the Masters market is
dominated by overseas applications.
determined?
At a national level, sustaining the research base should be the priority. However, we can see the
argument for developing the masters level skills base to accommodate the more rapid career
evolution we see in the graduate population at large, i.e. reskilling the workforce.

This could be achieved by extending the DLHE survey.
880
Very limited.
Delivery models
In areas that receive DTC funding the affect on doctoral provision has been transformational. The
cohort effect of having a group of students and consistent funding over a long period has allowed
the areas to attract outstanding students and develop higher level skills for a cohort – this provision
would be unthinkable when facing the uncertainty around individually funded studentships. The
downside is that within the EPSRC model not all areas can receive this funding which means there
will be winners and losers. However, the effect we have seen in our 6 centres to date has been
entirely positive.
Areas such as chemistry and mathematics which are heavily dependent on doctoral provision, both
as the “research engine” and as an entry point into the profession, are likely to be depleted over the
next 5-10 years. The loss of project studentship has had a profound impact on the research base in
these areas in particular.
studentships?
The long-term consequence of concentrating funding into certain areas and universities will be fewer
academic departments in any one discipline. The interim consequence will be loss of academic staff
in those departments that do not have access to DTC funded studentship,s which will also have an
effect on research-informed teaching.
• What do you consider to be a reasonable balance of doctoral provision models to

ensure quality of provision, geographical spread and sufficient breadth of discipline
coverage?
50:50 between DTCs and individual studentships in order to nurture new areas. The EPSRC-type
DTC model works well when there is a known need for a critical mass in a research area, but we
should not cut off the more fundamental blue skies areas which often need a single researcher to
develop a new idea.

It forms the core of our new researcher skills portal at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/esu/researcher-skills
881
• How relevant is the Framework to students who will go on to employment

outside of research?
Very - it is designed to encourage development of a wide range of skills which are relevant to all
employment sectors.
Quality
Ultimately the measure is how successful the students become after graduation. Certainly
measurement of the quality of research outputs is a useful contemporaneous measure, but a more
robust approach would be to look at career trajectory 10 years out.
• What relevance does QAA have to the quality measures for post graduate
education?
The revised chapter on Research Degrees in the UK Quality Code for HE, recently circulated for
consultation, provides helpful strengthening of the framework to ensure high quality PGR education.
All engineering disciplines have industrial advisory boards that are tasked with providing feedback on
graduate skills requirements. Also, we link elements of our Masters teaching to industry (via visiting
lecturers, student placements etc) and link many of our PGT and PGR projects (where appropriate)
with an industrial partner, either for pull through beyond the project or directly through CASE top
ups and mentoring.
There should not be, but inevitably a “precious” approach to IP can inhibit collaboration. Bristol has
moved to an “open IP” model which recognises the exploitation route is through industry not the
University directly, there is no doubt this has helped industrial collaboration.
Funding
The major impact has been to replace the decline in UK students with overseas students to make
PGT courses viable. The academic outcome has been an unbalanced cohort, with a large majority
of students coming from overseas to study for a UK degree without the cultural immersion they
expect. The long-term viability of these courses needs to be considered as we are in danger of not
providing a balanced academic environment for the cohort.
882
As stated above - make up for the loss in UK numbers with overseas students.
In highly vocational CPD-type masters industrial support can be found (but only from large industries
– the SME sector cannot sustain funding, which will lead to a skills gap in this sector). For the full-
time Master model, increasingly the funding will be from the student, who wishes to specialise on
graduation from an undergraduate programme or retrain at a later stage in their career.
sufficient?
It is an important component of the funding for STEM PG provision for home students and the
decision to maintain HEFCE funding at PG level for these subjects is welcome. It is not sufficient to
prevent significant home PGT fee rises, which will have the effects described earlier.
• Are there any areas that are not currently classified as SIVS that should be
considered for such classification?
Overseas students
See response to Q7.
• Is there an over-reliance on overseas students in post graduate education? If so,
what would you consider a sustainable proportion of overseas students?
70% is about on the margin - when we have moved beyond this there has been adverse student
reaction both from home and overseas contingents. However, we would strongly advocate a major
proportion of overseas students on any masters course as diversity is part of the learning experience.
The danger is not so much the overall proportion, it is proportion from one country, which can cause
students to relate only to their own community.
• Do you consider that growth in the overseas student population nationally, at 30%
pa as has been the case until recently, is sustainable for UK HEI’s collectively?
Yes – but this requires the UK HEIs to be pro-active in recruitment and improving quality of
provision.
• Does the proportion of overseas postgraduate students have any effect on in the
supply of academic staff in UK STEM departments?
883
Typically we recruit our overseas staff from overseas. However, there is a significant impact of
overseas student recruitment. Taking South Korea as an example, 70% of academic staff have had
an educational experience in the US – which in turn recruits six times as many students choosing to
study in the US rather than the UK.
significant impact on the number of overseas students in postgraduate education and
The direct administration cost from the new regime is £200k, let alone the loss of fee income. We
are also sending messages to overseas students that we are a difficult country to deal with which
has turned some applicants away.
8 May 2012
884
Central Lancashire and University of Surrey – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
University of Cambridge, University of York, University of

Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University, University
College London (UCL), University of Salford, University of Central
Lancashire and University of Surrey – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Krebs
Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Winston
________________
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor, University of Cambridge,

Professor Brian Cantor, Vice-Chancellor, University of York, Professor Les Ebdon,
Vice-Chancellor, University of Bedfordshire, Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow, Vice-
Chancellor, University of Kent, Dr David Grant, Vice-Chancellor, Cardiff University,
Professor Malcolm Grant, Vice-Chancellor, University College London (UCL),
Professor Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor, University of Salford, Dr Malcolm McVicar,
Vice-Chancellor, University of Central Lancashire, and Professor Sir Christopher
Snowden, Vice-Chancellor, University of Surrey
Q40 The Chairman: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this major evidence
session with the Science and Technology Sub-Committee, looking at higher education and
the teaching of STEM subjects in our universities, including postgraduate study.
We are trying today to get a handle on this thorny question of whether in our universities
we are getting the right supply of students coming through to study STEM subjects. Do we
have the right blend of courses within our universities with the right content to meet the
needs of academia and industry and the health economy in particular? We are getting
conflicting views from industry to say that they are not getting enough STEM graduates and
that that they are not getting the right STEM graduates with the right set of skills. When we
try to drill into that, it is quite difficult to get any hard evidence to say that that is the case.
885
Hopefully, at the end of this inquiry, together with other work that is going on, we will be
able at least to pose some of those questions to the Government.
Our aim today is to have a conversation rather than a traditional inquiry. If you want to
interrupt each other, please feel free to do so. I am told that Vice-Chancellors are nowadays
shrinking violets, but I encourage you to be as frank and free as possible. Those are the rules
of engagement.
Perhaps we could start with you, Professor Sir Christopher Snowden. I first congratulate
you on behalf of the Committee on your honour, which was very well deserved. We
genuinely mean that. For the record, could you all introduce yourselves? If you want to
make a quick statement, then please do so, but we would like to get into the conversation.
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: Thank you very much and thank you for your good
wishes. I am Vice-Chancellor of the University of Surrey. My background is in both academia
and industry. As a brief opening comment, I make the observation that the company that I
ran was a multinational company which had several facilities in the UK. At that time, which is
now six years ago, we indeed had difficulty in recruiting STEM graduates to populate not
only the research elements of the company but the manufacturing and production elements;
in particular, we used to recruit from continental Europe to fill our needs at that time. As an
opening point I would say that there is some evidence even from then that there were and
still are issues in that respect.
Professor Martin Hall: I am Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford. My
perspective is strongly coloured by the university that I lead. The University of Salford has a
deep tradition of being engaged with industry, technology and engineering. That is something
that is important to us, but times have changed and it is something that we are really
focusing on regaining. A particular concern of ours is access and widening participation.
About 50% of our undergraduate students are drawn from Greater Manchester, with the
other 50% from the rest of the world—some 2,000 of those students are international. This
is an issue that we—in a narrower sense than some of my colleagues, because we are a
narrower-focus university—are quite deeply concerned with.
Professor Malcolm Grant: I am Malcolm Grant, President and Provost of UCL, a strong
university across all of the STEM disciplines, with a particular emphasis on medicine, which is
the biggest single intake that we have—about 330 students a year—across into engineering
and the physical and life sciences.
Dr David Grant: I am David Grant. I am an engineer and Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff
University. I have been Vice-Chancellor for 10 years and before that I spent over 30 years in
industry. In the last decade of that, I employed 30,000 graduate engineers worldwide—this
was GEC. I therefore feel that I have quite good experience from the employers’ side.
Indeed, I contributed to many surveys that no doubt have confused people about the
perception that industrialists have about the quality of graduates. I think that the quality is
actually very good.
Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: I am Julia Goodfellow. I am Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Kent. I am a scientist trained in physics, going into biology. I previously ran a
research council, the BBSRC. I am currently chair of the British Science Association, of
which Lord Winston is an eminent member, and obviously I have a keen interest in
encouraging all at school to study science. I would say that my personal area of interest is
the relatively low level of maths skills. It is hard to get people with enough maths doing
physics, maths and engineering, but when you start looking at biosciences, which is
886
increasingly mathematical these days, the level of maths skills in the university intake is
relatively low across the piece, not just at Kent.
Professor Les Ebdon: I am Les Ebdon, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire,
which is a university with about 24,500 students. About a third of them are part-time and
43% are over the age of 24 when they join us. We have seen a fivefold increase in science in
the last three years. I am also chair of the Million+ University Think Tank. I am a scientist by
background—an analytical chemist with 270 papers authored or joint authored in my name.
I have served for a number of years on the Government’s Measurement Board and I also
serve on a number of European Union committees.
Professor Brian Cantor: My name is Brian Cantor and I am Vice-Chancellor of the
University of York. I have had a career working briefly for major companies such as GE and
Rolls-Royce, but mainly I have worked in academia. My academic work has been with a
whole raft of multinational companies worldwide and, in the last 20 years, setting up science
parks and working with venture capitalists. That is where my STEM interest comes from. I
was trained as a scientist and engineer. The University of York is a balanced university, we
would like to say, across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. We also like to say
that we are balanced with our students, across home and international and across the social
spectrum. We are very proud of the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds
who come to our university. STEM is important to us. There are three big dangers, we
think. The first is that there is a threat to those from disadvantaged backgrounds as a result
of some of the current changes. Another is that we are concerned about the modified
arrangements for visas and the negative impact on recruitment of international students in
the STEM area—we think that that is important. Most important—it has not been
mentioned yet, although I agree with some of the comments that have been made—we
think that the reduction in the research council budgets is the biggest threat to STEM.
The Chairman: We will come on to some of those issues in time. You will be pleased to
know that they are all on our agenda. Finally, we come to Professor Borysiewicz.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: I am Leszek Borysiewicz. I have been the Vice-
Chancellor of the University of Cambridge for one year. Before that, I had a background in
clinical medicine and biosciences research. I progressed through Imperial College as Deputy
Rector and I was Head of the Medical Research Council. From the perspective of
Cambridge, there are a number of issues. The first of these is an anxiety about an
overemphasis on STEM without taking on board the interdisciplinarity that is important
between STEM and non-STEM subjects. One has to be very careful in just singling out STEM
subjects. We thrive ultimately on interdisciplinarity and we find that most employers are
looking for that capacity to work across those disciplinary boundaries. The biggest concern
particularly is around PhDs—not PhDs themselves, as implied by the questions that you
circulated, but PhDs in the context of career progression through academia, particularly into
the post-doctoral and permanent position domain at universities. Those are huge anxieties,
which we believe prevent recruitment in some areas.
Q41 The Chairman: Thank you very much for that. Perhaps I can start the questions
with you, Professor Goodfellow. On the issue of the quality of students who are coming
into STEM-related subjects at university, you mentioned that mathematics was perhaps a
weakness and you said that that was right across the board, not just in particular disciplines.
Do you feel generally that schools are producing good-quality material for our universities,
or where is the weakness in that supply chain?
887
Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: We know from analysis of those coming out of school
at A-levels that we produce the most fantastic students. At the top level, we have
phenomenally strong students across the board.
The Chairman: In mathematics?

Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: Even in mathematics. But I think that many students still
do not have the opportunity to study mathematics. These are old statistics but, when we
last looked, for biology degrees at university only 9% of undergraduates had A-level maths.
That is across the board and at all sorts of universities; at the research-intensive, it went up
to about 15%. That means that the majority of bioscience undergraduates may have only
GCSE maths and may not even have an A or a B grade. Certainly when I talk to our
physicists, for example, they look very carefully—as I think people do in nearly every
university—at the intake in terms of their maths skills, irrespective of their grade at A-level,
and maths is put in during the first year. Generically, lab skills are missing at schools. We all
know that schoolchildren are watching the teacher do an experiment whereas I think my
generation did experiments from the age of 11, so lab skills almost have to be taught from
scratch at university now because students are not getting them. I also agree with certain
other things that you say. The general transferable skills need to be taught anyway, whether
students are going to industry, staying in academia or whatever they are doing. That is
something that universities are teaching, on top of the normal curricula.
Q42 The Chairman: Does anyone disagree with that, or is there anything that you
would add in terms of the supply chain? What else is missing?
Professor Brian Cantor: I just want to comment that from a more local perspective we find
that we have to give maths remedial classes, often even to triple-A students. Of course, as
Julia says, quite a lot of them—even those doing STEM subjects—will not have done maths,
but even with the ones who have it quite often helps them to go through maths. I want also
to comment on the more transferable skills. We occasionally find that remedial classes in
English are useful too.
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: I think that in pretty much every university the issues
over maths skills apply. Indeed, this has been an issue now for many years within universities,
partly due to the increase in the breadth of mathematics that is studied at schools but with a
lack of depth. In some cases, for example, there is a complete absence of calculus, which is
an issue in many subjects.
I wanted to touch on lab skills, because that is a very serious issue in many parts of STEM.
Many schools no longer have either the teachers who can provide the stimulus and interest,
especially on the practical side, or indeed the facilities necessary to give students the
opportunity to do practical work. That is one of the big drivers, I think, particularly in the
younger years. If you look to students between the ages of 11 and 13, that is a very
important part—the age group where people decide what they would like to go on and
study. Science is really a practically based discipline, although you might not think so in some
schools. Without the opportunity for young people to be able to get practical experience,
they are not stimulated necessarily to study science. That has a roll-on effect in that, by the
time they come to university, some of them are not as practically skilled as they could be.
This may relate to some of the comments that you have had from colleagues in industry in
terms of their preparedness, for example, to do project work and that type of activity.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: This is one of the issues where you might think that a
university such as Cambridge would be exempt from the problem, but we are not. One of
the problems that we face is the modularity of mathematics teaching up to A-level. Having
888
the capacity to get yourself through A-level without doing maybe either mechanics or
calculus in particular is a real problem. In our fairly heavily mathematically oriented physics
courses, even at Cambridge we are having to embark on remedial teaching in mathematics
because of this chance that you can choose modules which do not tally. We think that there
is the separation of mathematics and physics, so that the two do not actually tally in those
areas. If you are going for an engineering degree, you could have avoided the mechanics
component of the mathematics curriculum leading to that. It was something that we
experienced at Imperial College as well. Even at the major universities, the suppliers are still
seeing this as a problem and our physics department is still seeing it as a problem.
Q43 The Chairman: I will come to you in a second, Professor Hall, but can I just ask
whether that is the same with privately educated students and state-educated students, or
do you notice a difference between the two?
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: At the moment, it would have to be anecdotal, but we
are not noticing as much of a difference in the independent school-educated students. The
real issue here, we think, is more to do with the structure of how mathematics is
formulated leading up to the A-level curriculum, which allows whole chunks of approaches
in mathematics to be omitted from study.
The Chairman: I am just going to get Professor Hall in, then I will come back—
Q44 Lord Winston: This is a very brief point. I just wondered whether this was true for
students who took double maths at A-level.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: It is still a potential problem. We have not yet seen it,
but we think that it is really quite core to what is actually offered at A-level education at this
point.
Professor Martin Hall: One of the strengths of our higher education system is its diversity.
Our supply chain is somewhat different; the sort of student we attract is a student who will
have sound but not top A-levels. Our task is to add value to that and realise their potential,
and we think that that is crucial in terms of the broader notion of the supply chain. We have
learnt that to achieve that it is essential that we engage with the schools sector and with the
further education sector, so that we nurture that supply chain. We have learnt that to do
that effectively we have to participate with those schools at least two to three years prior to
them becoming applicants, so that we can work with them to find out what those abilities
are, and we have to put in place a lot of support structure. My professional experience
before returning to the UK was for a long time at the University of Cape Town, where I had
responsibility for trying to rebuild from a very damaged schools sector. Our experience
overwhelmingly there was, very unfortunately, that if you do not reach young learners on
mathematical ability by the age of 12 or 14, it is very difficult to catch up.
The Chairman: At this point, I welcome Dr Malcolm McVicar, the Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Central Lancashire. We are sorry that you have been caught in the traffic
today, but you are very welcome.
Dr David Grant: I have two points. My first point is that the Institute of Physics carried out
some work last year surveying a lot of universities and 92% of academics whom they
surveyed found that mathematics was wanting. That is a very worrying statistic. My second
point is that we all have a lot of students from China. You may be aware that in China
mathematics is taught to students of all disciplines throughout their period of education.
When you look at the academic performance of Chinese students in UK universities, they
substantially outperform UK-domiciled students. That is a very worrying statistic, I am afraid.
889
The Chairman: I think that Professor Tomlinson wanted the same for our system, but we
will not go back to that.
Q45 Lord Cunningham of Felling: I should perhaps preface my question by saying that
I used to teach chemistry at Durham University. That was some time ago, as you will
appreciate, but this story is exactly the same now as it was then. There is a qualitative
shortage and a quantitative shortage of people with ability in mathematics. What messages
have the universities been giving schools in the intervening years? I will not say how many,
but it is a lot. What messages have been going back from universities to schools about these
problems? They are literally decades old.
The Chairman: We need one brief answer.
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: I think that universities have been giving very clear
messages, but the way that the examination process for secondary education was divorced
from the university system meant that a divide was created. Since that time, there has been
very little constancy in the way in which the curriculum is handled in schools and they are
quite separated. When we have tried to communicate quite firmly—and we have done this
through the examination boards as well—the interest has not necessarily been in favour of
what the universities want so much as what is perceived to be a better curriculum. I
appreciate that this is a very topical issue, but there is something to be addressed here more
fully and your point is very well taken.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: This is a circular problem. Not enough children are doing
well at mathematics at school, and not enough graduates and postgraduates are capable
enough in mathematics, as some of you have said, at university. We are not getting enough
mathematics people trained to a high enough level, numerically or quantitatively, and
therefore it goes back to the school situation. This cycle has to be broken, has it not?
Professor Brian Cantor: I remember when I was a fairly young lecturer at the University of
Sussex in the early 1980s a colleague of mine said to me, “We are creating a major problem
in physics, as we are not training enough physics teachers.” You have identified that
problem. You have hit the nail on the head—it has been hit many times—but the problem
has not been solved. It has been going on for 20, 30 and more years. Unfortunately, it gets
very embedded because of the long lead in time to train teachers, and it will take a decade
or more to turn it around. However, recently there have begun to be some improvements.
Q46 The Chairman: If it is a problem, surely the universities should also be doing
something about it, should they not?
Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: Not only is there a shortage of specialist teachers to
enthuse people at secondary schools, but the statistic that we heard earlier is that less than
1% of primary school teachers—and that number needs to be checked—have any
background in science. Teachers of primary school pupils have no background in science.
That keeps this process going. I think that it is very hard for universities, whatever we say,
to fight the examination system and the league tables at the moment.
The Chairman: Why?

Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: I think that Chris has tried to explain that schools are
perfectly reasonably going for league table position—I would do that if I were a head
teacher—and they need to get good grades. Even if they have good grades in mathematics
and other things, they are not necessarily fully rounded. Mark Walport from the Wellcome
Trust did a review about a year and a half ago, which is in the public domain. It sets out quite
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clearly the problem of the examination system and how it detracts from people doing STEM
subjects.
The Chairman: I am conscious that I am still on the first question.
Q47 Lord Lucas: In reply to that, the feeling from the other side of the fence is not that
you are excluded from exams but that you withdrew. Any attempts to try to get you to
engage with things have been rebuffed. Why do you not express preferences for one board
over another? You have Cambridge—it is your own board, near enough. Why do you not
get it to produce the sort of thing you would like to see and say that you will value it above
others? Why are not you engaging with the current curriculum review in a way that will
really produce changes? What are you going to do about Michael Gove’s announcement that
he is opening up the ICT curriculum to all comers to produce what they want in it? I have
not seen universities at the forefront of change there. It has been industry at the forefront of
change. What are you doing to help redress the very low proportion of girls doing physics
and computing? Where are you reaching back into schools to make a difference there?
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: Let me help you there, because I have AQA on my
campus. The key issue is that these are essentially commercial organisations now. Their
interest in having direct input does not exist. Your point is very reasonable, but I have talked
to external examiners—if you like, the calibrating examiners—about their roles and how
they have diminished. This comes back to one of the points that Lord Cunningham made.
One of the reasons why we have difficulty influencing them is that the very mode of
examination has changed. Exams are no longer about searching out the best students by the
way they develop an answer and give an alternative answer. Indeed, if you were to
purchase—I am willing to put money on this, and I am not a betting man—AQA exam
scripts, for example, you will find that they are looking for answers where the exact words
are underlined that they seek in an answer. How can that help to develop the broader
thinking that we would expect of tomorrow’s scientists? This is a pedagogical issue.
Lord Lucas: You could say that you would give preference to Pre-U or IB candidates or to
a particular board, but I have not heard from universities any real expression of preference,
any idea that you can drive forward—and you are the customers.
The Chairman: You are not doing it. It is in your hands.

Professor Malcolm Grant: I think that the criticism is absolutely right. I do not think that
universities have done anywhere near enough to work with the curricula, particularly to
counter the modularisation that has led to some of the consequences that my colleagues
have mentioned. Let me just mention one thing that we are doing. We decided to start a
school. We are the sole sponsors of an academy that will focus on science, mathematics and
modern languages—the strategic, vulnerable subjects that are the subject of this inquiry—
because we believe that universities should not sit back and criticise the schools system
without being willing to engage with it and to engage our staff and students in a collaborative
effort in raising aspirations and attainments for children from all backgrounds in, in this case,
the London borough of Camden.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: I have to disagree. We engage very closely with
Cambridge Assessment in relation to this issue. Two major changes have occurred, the
relative impact of which we are still assessing. One of the biggest problems with
mathematics previously concerned the judgment of what an A grade was in mathematics,
given the range of marks that were subsumed under an A grade. The introduction of A*,
which we have been piloting as a selection process, has only been in place for just over a
year. Therefore, we are still waiting to see whether that will have a selective impact in this
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area. But in terms of the modularity and engagement, there are several moves afoot
whereby, particularly for those who wish to study mathematics at Cambridge, we are
working on additional papers to ensure that they are of the standard that would be required
at that top level. However, to say that there is no engagement is an incorrect statement of
the position.
The Chairman: I am going to close that down.
Q48 Lord Krebs: Since this is the first time I have spoken in this inquiry, I should declare
an interest as Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. I want to pick up a point that Martin Hall
touched on. You in your different universities accept students to study STEM subjects from
very different starting points. At Cambridge they are all three or four A* students, I would
have thought, whereas at Salford and perhaps Central Lancashire they start from a different
point. I would like to hear briefly what the implications of that are in terms of how you
translate kids who are coming in at very different levels into suitable STEM graduates for the
employment market. Do you teach to a different end point or do you play catch-up? How
does it work? I do not understand the implications of that.
Professor Martin Hall: First of all, I think that you teach to the same end point. Your
quality at exit should be indistinguishable.
Lord Krebs: So that means there is something that you are doing that Cambridge is not
doing to turn an E, B, C student, or whatever you take, into the equivalent of a four A*
student over the same time period.
Professor Martin Hall: Then you are into the question of whether or not all degrees are
the same. I would not necessarily go down that particular route. We would test our—
Lord Krebs: But you said the same end point.

Professor Martin Hall: Yes, the same end point in terms of employability and destination of
students and obviously as regards the work of our external examiners satisfying the Quality
Assurance Agency in terms of what it is we are offering. But the key point for us would be
engagement with the schools, and I do not claim that we are doing nearly enough of this.
We work in partnership with all our major feeder schools in Greater Manchester. We try
to reach back to them two or three years before they become applicants. We are working
on sponsoring two university technical colleges. We look very closely at that supply chain. In
contrast to those universities that will select from the very best qualified students in terms
of A-levels, if we do not work in that area we will not bring out the quality in those
students. One of the most limiting factors that we find in our catchment, which is
significantly from lower socioeconomic groups, is lack of aspiration—Malcolm will probably
find the same—that is, youngsters from families saying, “University is not for us”. They do
not have the aspiration. A significant number of our students are the first in their families to
come to university. Those are very different home environments from one in which both
parents have been graduates. It is a complementary set of tasks that we have, but
engagement is critical.
Dr Malcolm McVicar: You certainly do not change the end point, because that would not
do anybody any favours. If you have students with differential qualifications coming in, you
have to give them extra help, particularly in the first year. We provide additional resources
in the first year to bring those students up to where you would want them to be. They are
perfectly competent but they need extra help, particularly in some of the mathematical
science subjects.
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Q49 Baroness Neuberger: I want to pick up something that Professor Hall said. You
said that you engage with the schools two or three years before the students come. We
have also heard Malcolm talk about the school that UCL is sponsoring. How do you engage
with those schools? Do your students go out into those schools, particularly those who are
doing the STEM subjects within the university, because I think that that is key for us?
Professor Martin Hall: We have very good information and intelligence on this. A number
of very good HEFCE reports have given us guidance on this and we tend to know what
works. Role modelling is crucial. Working with the schools is crucial because, of course, the
potential applicants cease to be statistics and become individuals. Their teachers know who
they are, so there are other indications, such as consistent position in class, which is an
indication of application and commitment. The other thing that we know works very well is
arranging visits to campus, because a lot of potential applicants who do not come from
traditional university families simply do not think that they belong on a university campus. It
makes a significant difference, as most of our access programmes show, if we actually bring
potential applicants on to the campus and engage them with what the curriculum can be and
can do.
The Chairman: I am going to move on to question 2.
Q50 Lord Broers: I want to have a little say first. This maths thing has always troubled
me a great deal. I am not dealing with the diversity question that Professor Hall is talking
about, but Cambridge students today are, in my observation, brighter, more conscientious
and more serious than Cambridge students were in 1959, when I was there. Yet all we hear
is that they do not know as much mathematics. They are clearly good students and are
clearly working hard. My question to you is: what are they learning that they should not
learn and should replace with mathematics? I think that this is a very serious question.
Should they not have the IT skills that they have had to develop or the knowledge of
biology, or something? What is it that you would tell them not to know so that they can
replace that knowledge with mathematics?
Lord Lucas: Could I ask whether we should be learning computer-based maths rather than
the history of maths, which is roughly where we are at the moment?
The Chairman: Dr Grant?

Dr David Grant: Purely on the Chinese experience, the amount of hours that students
spend on mathematics is many times greater than we see in the UK and indeed in many
other nations. The UK is not very different from many other nations in this regard. Do they
learn different things? No, they do not. They just understand the fundamentals. In response
to Lord Broers, I would not identify something that someone should not learn, but I think
that we can understand the fundamentals so that we can bridge from that. I am not sure that
we do. I think that we sometimes confuse people by the sheer scale and scope of the
curriculum. I worry that we try to cover too much rather than a core subject that we really
understand very well.
The Chairman: That is a cop-out really, is it not? If the Chinese are doing a lot more, they
must be doing something else less. What are they doing less? What would you do less?
Professor Brian Cantor: I am not going to answer that question because I do not think that
it is the key point. It is a very interesting question, but I want to make another important
point because I think that the conversation has taken a certain turn. We have focused on
examinations for a while and in my view the examination is indeed very important. The
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Salters science examinations have been developed over a decade or more at York. We have
also focused on university engagement with schools. At York we have a 40 strong schools
network with students going into schools. But I want to say that the most important feature
is the quality of teachers. You do not teach good maths or good physics or good chemistry
unless you get inspirational teachers. I think that Lord Cunningham put his finger on it. Our
best graduates are not going into teaching, so although there are some very good
mathematics teachers and some schools that do it well—and indeed in physics and so on—
that is not the generality. We will not get that in my view—I am sorry to be trenchant about
it—until society values teaching in schools more and pays teachers more. Of course, some
of our best science graduates get excited and go into teaching, but not enough do and they
will not do that if they are given offers elsewhere that are more exciting and interesting.
The Chairman: That nicely leads me in to Lord Broers’s section, which is about the needs
of the skilled workforce and the research base, of which teaching is clearly one.
Q51 Lord Broers: I will come back to this question and I will be obedient, Lord
Chairman. I apologise for my disobedience. Do you consider that STEM graduates should be
endowed with professional skills for working in industry, such as communication skills, the
ability to work in a team, commercial awareness and so on, while studying for a STEM
degree, or should industry inculcate those skills?
Professor Les Ebdon: I am very happy to reply in the positive to that. That is exactly what
my university does. We place a high premium on employability skills. I do not necessarily
think that we should look for all universities to adopt the same pattern. I think that it is
quite healthy to have diversity and some universities will want to emphasise other aspects,
particularly preparing people for a research career rather than for an industrial career. The
answer that I personally, and many other Vice-Chancellors, would give you would be yes,
but I hope that you will find that some will tell you no.
The Chairman: Professor Borysiewicz, would yours say no?

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: We kind of embed it, but it is relatively light touch in
our area at the undergraduate level. Where that assumes major importance is as we
progress beyond, to Masters and to PhD levels. Perhaps I can be a little disobedient and go
back to Lord Broers’s original question. The issue that comes to us is really a sense that it is
the depth within which certain elements of mathematics are treated in the curriculum and
the modularity of the approach towards the teaching of mathematics that attract the
greatest criticism from those in engineering and physics. It is not necessarily the content or
stopping doing some things, but it is where the emphasis is placed on the outcome and the
separation between the sciences that occurs in relationship to the taught nature of the A-
level curriculum.
Lord Broers: But then you are saying that it is the emphasis within the teaching of
mathematics. Of course, Professor Cantor has also said that it is the quality of the teaching.
They may be spending the time, but they are not learning at the rate they would be if the
teaching—
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: It is where the modularity comes in, as you try to break
a discipline into individual chunks. You basically do a chunk and you pass the exam at the
end of the chunk. Mathematics as a discipline requires that throughput right across the
board and you see the integration of the various aspects of the discipline as it is taught at A-
level. We think that that element is missing.
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The Chairman: I think that we have picked up this issue of mathematics.
Lord Broers: I would like to get back to this disciplinary issue, though. Perhaps we should
hear from Dr Grant.
Dr David Grant: In 2010, the Royal Academy of Engineering carried out a very substantial
piece of work and produced a report called “Engineering Graduates for Industry”. That
piece of work, which many of you may be familiar with, looked at many employers. It
identified in depth some of the needs. Many of the needs to improve employability were
associated with giving students as undergraduates some further experience. Whether that
experience was in industry or in a project in the university, engaging with people from the
business world in universities, certainly what we found is that universities that engage with
businesses in the course of the undergraduate experience produce students who are more
employable and valuable at an earlier stage than those that do not. The challenge that we
have, of course, is the cost of doing that, but there is no doubt that the evidence base is
clear. We should try to get students to have that kind of experience while they are
undergraduates. Moreover, students who have had either internship or experience do
better academically as well. Not only are they more employable but they perform better in
their final examinations.
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: I want to build on that. More than half the students at
Surrey volunteer to go on a placement year. The net result is that we have the highest
employability in the UK. The comment that Lord Broers brings back that employers are
unhappy is something that I do not experience at Surrey. Part of that is attributable to the
fact that our students have spent a year doing a placement and therefore have acquired the
skills that companies expect. Having been an employer, I am not as negative as the feedback
that we get here.
I would like to look at another context: a lot of employers are the same age as me. I went to
university at a time when far fewer people went to university, so that at the time they would
presumably be among the brightest. Now we have a much more diverse student base and
their skill base is much more diverse, but there is an expectation among employers that
everybody is going to be the same. That is exactly the point raised here by my colleagues.
We are producing a more diverse range of graduates who have different skill sets, which are
not always entirely appreciated. I know that because my own company’s human resource
department realised that some students are well suited for research activities and some are
much more suited for marketing. That is not always universally appreciated. Until this year, I
chaired for five years the UUK Employability, Business and Industry Policy Network. It was a
very interesting role to have, meeting up with employers and talking to them about their
expectations and experiences. I have to say that it is an issue of expectation management,
among what some of the employers expect and are willing to bring to this, along with
matching up with what the universities are offering in the way of graduates. It is quite a
complex picture and I do not think that it is quite as problematic as it might appear in that
respect.
Lord Broers: I go back to what Professor Hall said. I think that we can overemphasise a
certain aspect of all this, with communication skills and the rest of it. In my experience,
having gone straight from a PhD into industry, the things that I really valued were the
fundamental subjects that I learnt when my brain was younger and I could learn them and
found it quite easy. I happened to work with a good company—IBM—which was good at
management, and I learnt those social skills after I had had a bit of experience. I am very glad
that I did not spend a lot of time at university learning to be charming and working in a
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team. I found that easier to learn later on. It was the fundamental stuff that you want to
learn at university when your brain is young.
The Chairman: Some might question that, but we will move on.
Q52 Lord Cunningham of Felling: My question has been introduced by Professor

Snowden already. What should universities and industry be doing together to try to improve
the matching of supply and demand of STEM graduates? Is there a particular model that
should be followed? Is there a process, or does everyone do their own thing? How does it
work?
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: Perhaps I can follow up on that and then pass it on. I
think that universities do this. As an example, one thing that we do is to have an advisory
group from industry to meet with my colleagues to talk about what our students are
studying and what qualities and skills they need, not entirely in a vocational sense. I support
Lord Broers’s comments that grasping fundamentals is very important for employers.
Nevertheless, all subject areas, particularly in science and technology, evolve and move on. It
is very important to have some sharing and understanding of what are the more valuable
aspects. They are also helpful in letting us have an understanding of what they think are
demand areas. To be honest, they never raise communication as one of them, so I would
support Lord Broers’s comments on that.
Professor Martin Hall: I think that Professor Snowden’s model is the ideal one that we
would also aspire to. Certainly, we would not want to start teaching teamwork or
communication skills as a subject. That would be a waste of curriculum space. I think that
our students would certainly not want to participate. We find that students will gain those
skills through some form of work experience. There is a problem if we cannot provide the
work experience because there is an absorption problem. It used to be possible with far
fewer students to run traditional sandwich courses or placements. You simply cannot do it
now. Particularly in an environment where you work very closely with small and medium
enterprises, you cannot impose a whole bunch of students on them, as they are busy trying
to survive. But we find that we can approximate to the conditions of employment
experience through student volunteering programmes, which students are very keen to take
part in. That builds the team skills and working skills in the context of the curriculum.
The Chairman: Professor Borysiewicz, you said in your opening remarks that these things
are important.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: They are important, but the issue for me is that I come
from a profession where communication skills and teamworking are taught from day one. It
is inherent in the medical curriculum that you are taught to communicate.
The Chairman: That could be the basis of a separate inquiry.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: You are welcome to have one. They were introduced in
south Wales in the 1970s, so it is possible that they were already ahead of the game. The
issue here is that there are two dangers. One is the one-size-fits-all situation. The generic
skills that are required differ from sector to sector, and particularly if you look for
employment in small and medium-sized enterprises, some of the demands on the generic
skills are much tighter and more specific. So engagement, as happens in many university
courses, is very important. We hear that that is the case in Surrey and elsewhere where this
has been introduced. But ultimately we have to remember that graduates are autonomous.
They are going to make career choices for themselves. Some of them will leave the sciences
and go into administration, go into jobs in the City or, as is the case for many from
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Cambridge, go abroad for a period, although many do return thereafter. The issue of the
ability to control manpower—after all, the industry that I work with has been trying
manpower management in the health service for the past 20 years, but I cannot say with any
great success in every model that has been tried—means that we should not run away with
the idea that you can do this in a simplistic way and somehow get away from the issue of the
autonomy of the individual. We also have to remember that Europe is introducing mobility
of labour as the fourth right in the European Union. As part of that organisation, we would
get into great difficulties if we put any constraints against such a basic right for graduates. It
is very difficult. We need to aspire to get some semblance of control, but it is not going to
be easy and we have to avoid a one-size-fits-all solution.
The Chairman: A brief comment, please, from Professor Cantor.

Professor Brian Cantor: I shall make three brief points. First, the average graduate is doing
something different five years after they graduate from what they expected they were going
to be doing. We know that because we are in touch with our graduates, and that is a
consistent finding. It is the case for the vast majority. Secondly, we engage with industry.
Like most universities, we have industrial advisers and so on. SMEs are a big problem. They
are far too busy being SMEs to have time for engaging with universities, despite the fact that
they need what we produce. There is no good forum for discussion. My third point goes to
the point made by a number of people. It is a long timescale solution. If you think of this as a
market, and it is a market when you are employing graduates, the timescales for changing
things go back to the schools and then through the universities. By the time you get to the
workforce point, the work needs may well have moved on. It is very difficult. These are just
three important points. I do not know what the answers are, but they need to be borne in
mind.
The Chairman: I am going to move to a less thorny subject, which Lord Winston will
introduce.
Q53 Lord Winston: Does every university teaching STEM subjects teach them effectively
by using STEM research? Can you do good STEM teaching without being a research
university? We would be interested in your comments about what is helpful in teaching the
STEM subjects most effectively.
Dr Malcolm McVicar: Let me jump in here. You might get different responses from
different Vice-Chancellors. My own view is that if a university does not engage in research, it
is not recognised as a university. When you are trying to attract good academic staff, even
though a university like mine does not have research across the piece, there are areas of
good research. If you do not have a research culture, you will not attract good academic
staff, particularly young staff. If you do not attract them, you are very much offering a
second-rate service. Of course, no one would deny that there has to be a concentration of
very expensive capital projects. But as in other subjects, lots of research can go on into
STEM subjects that does not need high capital concentration, and the international network
through IT for good researchers to link up is irrespective of location. It is absolutely crucial
that we do not erode the research base of those universities that have research activity,
wherever they happen to be.
Professor Les Ebdon: I second that. I cannot envisage a university that does not do
research-informed teaching, and particularly in the case of the STEM subjects it is impossible
to think that scientists and engineers do not actively want to be engaged in research. What
might differ is the flavour of the research. It is more likely to be applied research in some
universities than others, where perhaps it would be more fundamental research. Finally, it is
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true to say that it is easier to get funding for fundamental research than it is for applied
research. Perhaps that is an issue that could be the subject of another inquiry.
Dr David Grant: We know from measures that the student experience is certainly
enhanced when students are taught by people who are at the leading edge of their subject.
Even though they cannot be at the leading edge of everything, at least they will have a
number of areas in which they excel so that they can bring their enthusiasm for the subject
to their students. I think that that is absolutely vital. Just relying on textbooks or other
material is inadequate these days. You need to enthuse students constantly through their
education. The enthusiasm of someone who is carrying out research really rubs off. It
enables them to talk, perhaps not about everything, but on many subjects, and it creates an
effervescence. We get wonderful student feedback. They have been offered a memorable
experience at university of learning from a professor who is working on a particular subject.
Their interest and enthusiasm really effervesce.
The Chairman: We have rehearsed this before, Professor Grant.

Professor Malcolm Grant: Yes, in another setting we have, Lord Chairman. I shall build on
what David has said, but would add that the historical model by which students learn
through lectures and tutorials no longer works and is no longer common across any of
these institutions. Our students are as engaged in research as are those teaching them. They
are working on small group projects and they undertake project-based learning. In a four-
year Master of Science programme, we would anticipate that 50% of the final year will be
spent on a research project. So the research that we inculcate in our students comes by
virtue of the fact that we are a research-rich institution. It is one of the skills that fit students
well for the marketplace. It is not just the fact of having experienced a research
environment; it is the process of intellectual inquiry, solving problems and dealing with the
fundamental questions that come from research that fits them more readily for future
employment.
Q54 Lord Winston: All these answers sound very grand, but forgive me if I turn the
question on its head. I do not mean to be cheeky, but I have seen postgraduate courses
taught by outstanding researchers, but being taught very badly simply because the teachers
are outstanding researchers. Students have even complained about the quality of the
teaching that they are getting. Does anyone want to comment on that?
Professor Martin Hall: I was just going to say that Lord Winston’s question is a little
thornier than it might initially have seemed because another question lies within it. The first
point in answer is that research-led teaching is indeed important, but the question within
that is that, in a university, how many students encounter a leading researcher in their
learning experience? When I taught briefly at the University of Stanford a number of years
ago, the departmental administrator apologised to me because an undergraduate student
had managed to register on one of my courses. Undergraduates, all 5,000 of them at
Stanford, are rigorously kept away from that aspect of teaching. I am very interested in
knowing within my university what percentage of my professors actually teaches first-year
classes.
The Chairman: What is the answer?

Professor Martin Hall: The answer is obviously a good one or I would not have introduced
it. 92% of all our professors teach undergraduate students across the range of the three
years of their courses, and a good many of our professors engage directly with students in
their first year at our university. On Lord Winston’s second point, there is certainly a place
within the approach and the team for teaching, particularly in the STEM subjects, where you
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will have a gifted career teacher within the university who can work in partnership with
researchers. We have been doing quite a lot of work in that area in physics. I find that some
of the people who are good at working with younger students are not necessarily totally
sold on a research career. The balance, certainly in a university such as mine—again I make
the point that our strength lies in a diverse sector, so what I am saying applies to my
university—is trying to get teaching teams that combine the excitement of a research-led
environment with at the same time having the translational skills for students who need that
help and assistance.
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: Could I just build on this? One of the key issues is
that I have come across staff who are excellent researchers but who are actually brilliant
teachers as well. I have also come across staff in my history who have not been great
researchers and who have also not been great teachers. Fortunately, I do not think that
there are many of those left in universities today. One of the massive drivers for that has
been the National Student Survey, where students get the opportunity to make their points
very clearly. That is a serious issue today in all universities.
To come back to STEM in particular, as it is the focus of this hearing, to be able to do final-
year projects, which as we have heard is an extremely important part of any one of these
areas, including mathematics, and to have both the stimulating types of project put forward
by researchers and in some cases to have the facilities to pursue them, you really need to
have a research base to support that. It is very difficult to provide the level of inquiry that
can come from this. You might well ask, “Well, do all these students need to have that level
of skill when they leave university?” My argument would be that they do, because while they
may not go on to do something in a STEM subject, they have learnt to tackle a challenge,
often quite a major challenge. They will have learnt to develop it and write it up, which
refers back to some of the skill elements that develop out of this. As Malcolm said in
opening, it is a very important part of STEM that can only really be satisfactorily supported
by a university with a research base.
Q55 Lord Winston: So do you need to re-evaluate what the research councils are
doing?
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: There is a broader issue in that respect. One of the
key issues that we will eventually get to here is how this feeds over into the postgraduate
community, because they are also part of the rich environment that undergraduate students
experience. We may have a problem going forward if something is not done to support that
more strongly.
Dr David Grant: Perhaps I can comment briefly on our teaching staff. We, along with most
if not all universities, now have formal tuition available for staff. It is an expectation that staff
will take what are often postgraduate qualifications in teaching. One thing that I have
discovered works extremely effectively is to have each cohort of fairly early-career lecturers
mix the disciplines widely—in other words, to have STEM teachers working alongside
humanities and other disciplines. Because we are talking about different students and
different curricula, some of that rubs off. We have found that these cohorts of early-career
lecturers stick together for a long period of time sharing their experiences. What you have
learnt teaching medicine may well have interesting value in teaching history and vice versa.
As I say, we are not alone in doing this, but much more concentration goes into helping
early-career lecturers.
The other thing that I was surprised to observe when I moved into academe was the extent
to which we get feedback from students. As you probably know, it is huge, and we take
action on it. The National Student Survey, which has been referred to, shows that we really
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do make a difference. We now take this very seriously. In recent times, probably the last
decade or two, teaching quality and student experience have gone to the top of the agenda.
The Chairman: I want to move fairly swiftly through the rest of my agenda because there
are a couple of major issues that I want to deal with. I shall ask Baroness Perry to inquire
about soft STEM subjects.
Q56 Baroness Perry of Southwark: When we started the inquiry, we were all quite
surprised to discover that, among many of the definitions of STEM, subjects like psychology,
forensic science, sports science, subjects allied to medicine and so on are included. The
statistics show that these are the areas in which the numbers are growing rapidly and they
account for much of the overall increase in the number of STEM students. The question is
this. Does the curriculum in these subjects mean that they are interchangeable with the
more traditional disciplines of physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biology in terms of
the general employability of graduates in the economy?
Professor Brian Cantor: I have two comments. First, the list of subjects that you read out
was interesting, but you did not include computer science and IT in any of the areas. I want
to make a big plea for them. We were told that you might be interested in some definitions
of STEM because there are different definitions. Computer science and IT are left out
sometimes, but it is absolutely critical that they are not. My second point is that I personally
believe that certain parts of psychology should not be left out because a lot of psychology
now, arguably almost all of it but certainly a lot, is extremely scientific. It is almost a meta-
subject to neuroscience. You did not include psychology at the scientific end of the
spectrum, along with computer science and IT in the STEM subjects, but I think that it is
important that we have a reasonably broad range in order to capture the wide range of
science that is being studied.
I want to make a final point because it follows on from something that was said in response
to an earlier question. The nature of the subjects that most scientists and technologists will
be dealing with when they leave university these days is, I think, rather different from what it
was 20 years ago and possibly even 10 years ago. They will be dealing with scientific and
technological innovations or developments where the social implications and the history and
culture related to those developments are much more intertwined. I have forgotten who
said it, but there is a need to have those STEM subjects taught in that context. While we are
on the discipline issue, I want to see all the STEM students coming through to have a good
knowledge of and the potential ability to appreciate the social implications, which includes
the cultural, in the form of the humanities, as well as the social sciences. In terms of the
definition of what a STEM subject is, I would argue for a reasonably broad one. The scientific
method now underpins an enormous amount of the activity that we do, and certainly more
than was traditionally the case.
The Chairman: Is that the general view?

Professor Les Ebdon: You do not like us agreeing.
The Chairman: I do not, really, no.

Professor Les Ebdon: These subjects play a very important role in popularising science and
encouraging more young people into studying science, as the figures and statistics bear out.
There was a time when we struggled in trying to encourage students to come and study
subjects which had lost their popularity, and we discovered that by refreshing those and
putting them in a different applied context we were able to get people to study subjects that
sometimes they thought were too difficult for them. This was one of the key issues that we
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faced in encouraging people into STEM subjects. So I would put in a strong plea that we
recognise the key role that they play. I always find it extraordinary when people say, “Oh,
those courses in forensic science. They are not all going to get jobs as forensic scientists.”
No, they do not. They take up jobs as other kinds of scientist. But I never hear people say,
“Oh, those historians. They will never get jobs as historians.” They all seem to end up with
jobs at the BBC.
The Chairman: We will leave it at that.

Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: I was just going to agree with everybody. If you take
forensic science and underline the science as being a way to reintroduce analytical
chemistry, we see that a lot of our graduates are getting jobs as chemists.
The Chairman: But you would put a question mark on forensic science without
chemistry?
Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: Well, I think that some forensic subjects may be more
descriptive. If there is a large element of science and you have the right units with chemistry
within them, you will get people doing chemistry when they would never have applied to
university to do chemistry.
The Chairman: Okay, with my apologies to Professor Borysiewicz, I am going to leave it

there. I want to move on to something that you might disagree on, and that is postgraduate
provision. Do your best, Lord Winston.
Q57 Lord Winston: Industry warns that UK business will be damaged unless more UK-
domiciled students undertake postgraduate research and that in the future firms will take
their research and development work abroad if our home-grown talents are not nurtured.
One thing that concerns some of us is that, with students being more and more local to a
university and staying in one place, we might make our research base rather impoverished.
That is because one of the key ways of getting graduate students to acquire more
experience is by going to a different unit to continue work on a post-doc and other studies.
Can you comment on that aspect of training? Also, what more can be done generally to
ensure that UK-domiciled students take up postgraduate studies in STEM?
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: The biggest single issue is funding. As you said in
introducing this, the change in the way the research councils have now chosen to fund
postgraduates, and even more acutely for Masters students, has led to a situation where we
face a significant shortfall in UK students going on to postgraduate study both at
postgraduate taught and postgraduate research levels. I know that various initiatives are
afoot in this area, but while the demand is there, the funding is not. I really would like to
draw the Committee’s attention to that.
The Chairman: Is the demand there from UK-domiciled students?
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: Yes, but the funding is not available for them. It is
particularly acute now because, of course, as we introduce the new fee-based models,
students are leaving university with substantial debts. I think that they will be put off both
the Masters and the PhD route even if they were able to pay for some of it themselves.
Historically it was certainly the case at my university that students were quite willing to pay
for a one-year Masters programme and often willing to pay for some of the PhD
programmes, but I am very concerned that that will not be the case going forward. Another
reason for concern is that this is a major competitive issue nationally. Masters programmes
are now globally regarded as a natural progression from an undergraduate degree as a step
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towards what is, if you like, a new professional level. That is a serious issue. Furthermore,
returning to where I opened, there is an absolute need for PhDs in the technology-based
industries here in the UK where we still see a shortage of UK students because they are not
being funded to go on to that level.
Professor Les Ebdon: The only thing that surprised me about the question was the “could
be” in it. We think the evidence shows that UK industry is and has for some time been
facing a shortfall. In the pharmaceutical industry we saw manufacturing move offshore some
years ago, but at the time I was assured by people in the industry that R&D would never
depart these shores because of the supply of scientists to work in the laboratories. Now, of
course, it is commonplace to see the R&D activities of major pharma companies move
offshore. There are two drivers for that. One is that you can get a Masters student or
graduate in China or India who will work for a year for what you would have to pay a
student from this country for one month. There are significant differences in salary levels,
and I accept that. However, it is also the shortage of people that we are supplying for those
particular industries. There is a desperate need to find more funding in order to train more
of our own students, particularly to PhD level in these key industries for the UK.
Professor Brian Cantor: Let me return to my start point, seeing as Chris did. I shall
mention the biggest danger—research council funding of studentships. Project studentships
are not being funded and they are not funding PhDs, and that is a massive blow to the ability
to bring PhD students through. There are also the reductions in PhD student funding
generally.
The Chairman: Where are you suggesting that the research councils should spend less?
Professor Brian Cantor: I believe that they should make spending on studentships a top
priority.
The Chairman: What should they spend less on?

Professor Brian Cantor: Well, I think that there should be more spending through the
research councils. They have seen a significant drop in funding, with the single exception of
the MRC. Because of the way in which research council funding works, there will be an
enormous problem for a two-year period because of the structure of the way the funding
flows through. The drop is very severe.
Q58 The Chairman: I shall bring in Professor Borysiewicz. Let us concentrate on this
one area because it is a really important one, which will also be brought up in other
discussions.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: I think that three elements are very important. Funding
is undoubtedly a major issue when you get to the postgraduate stage, as is the fact that
recruitment for postgraduates is, in most institutions in Great Britain, a fearsomely
internationally competitive arena. You are not just recruiting from a UK benchmark and
many undergraduates from Britain will seek their PhD studentships elsewhere in order to
broaden their experience in what is actually a global culture.
Secondly, there is an economy that moves from postgraduate to post-doc relatively
seamlessly. It has been seen time and time again in research council funding and it is actually
tied to long-term positions available in academia, plus the availability of those positions in
industry. I believe that there should be greater partnership and engagement with industry to
ensure that that pathway—that outlet—into industry is a very real one.
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Obviously I was involved in some of the debates leading up to the last Comprehensive
Spending Review. There is a substantial problem. If the total sum of money for research
councils is limited, how far do you train a cohort of individuals who then become relatively
unemployable in the research dimension because there is no funding to enable them to
progress along that pathway of post-doctoral development, which a large fraction would
move on to, if industry is not actively engaged in seeking the solution in that area? It is easy
to blame the research councils and I share the view that the removal by the EPSRC of
individual studentships attached to grants impacts adversely in specific areas, but the total
numbers are actually dependent on the total investment that the Government are prepared
to put into this area so as to ensure that you can keep the pipeline flowing. There is no
simple answer in just putting more into PhDs because it must take priority over everything
else. It is not enough just to train a whole lot of PhD students who at the end of the day
become very frustrated because no funding is available for them to continue their interests
beyond that area. Moreover, industry shows no sign of picking up the slack if we look at
total investment by industry in the R&D sector. There is a substantial problem that has to be
addressed, and it has to be addressed in partnership between the research councils and
industry working together to ensure that this pipeline can flow through.
The Chairman: Robert, did you want to come back on that before I bring in Baroness
Perry?
Lord Winston: No, I think that we should move on.
Lord Cunningham of Felling: Can I ask one brief follow-up question? Is what you have
just said generally applicable or does it apply particularly to the STEM subjects?
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: It is particularly applicable to the STEM subjects when
you look at the volume of investment that the research councils have in STEM over non-
STEM subjects. There is a problem in non-STEM subjects, but I think that it is more closely
related to funding and debt as a fundamental problem over the long term.
Q59 The Chairman: You have raised a fundamental issue in asking how industry plays its
part. Some of the evidence that we have received shows that industry is not interested in
PhDs. They want to train people at those higher levels themselves. What is going wrong
within the university system if we are not producing the people that industry actually then
wants to invest in in terms of PhDs? Where is the joint working in this?
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: The difficulty that you face here is the variability
between the various industries. If we take the pharma sector, which I know best of all, what
we are seeing is a complete turnaround in the nature of pharma investigation, which is now
throwing much more back into the university system, particularly in target discovery and
early-phase work in relation to drug discovery. It varies from sector to sector. Some sectors
would prefer to take a relatively undifferentiated individual and train them much more at the
industrial end.
We also have to think about the individual. Are they well served by a system that might
actually become very narrow to serve a specific industry without the more generic
qualification of a doctorate that many would prefer? What I hope would be really important
is the recognition of the falling amount of investment in R&D coming from the private sector
in contrast to the government sector, which has in fact maintained its original levels of
increased investment as they were proposed. However, we need to get the two to come
together and work out how this pipeline is going to provide for the needs of industry
alongside the needs of academia in the future.
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The Chairman: What would be enormously useful for the Committee would be if any
Vice-Chancellor has not only an analysis of this problem with some hard facts but also
suggestions for how we can take this forward in a positive way in our report. Simply blaming
industry does not get us anywhere unless we can find some solutions.
Q60 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I want to take us back to the balance between
international students and home and EC students, and to ask a blunt question. Given that
the resources that you have for postgraduate students in STEM subjects are finite, is it really
the case that international students are taking the places that ought to be given to our
students? Is there now an imbalance? Has it reached the point where it is more attractive to
take international students because they bring money with them in a way that British and EC
students now do not?
Dr Malcolm McVicar: Without the international students we would not have the money to
invest in our programmes. It is not a crowding-out thesis; this is absolutely crucial. Without
the international students, we would not have the money to build the capacity that takes the
UK students. You could not sustain this on UK students alone.
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: In my view there are no students who are being
displaced; indeed, quite the opposite. If I could get some more funding for UK students, in
some areas I could have richer groups. By that I do not mean financially, but richer in terms
of the mixture of students at work. It is true that there are an awful lot of international
students, just as there are in the United States, if we want to look at a system that has
matured into that mode either badly or positively. This has more to do with the fundamental
availability of funding for students.
I would like briefly to comment on the fact that many companies in different areas—I bow
to Professor Borysiewicz’s experience in the pharma area—particularly in the areas of
engineering and the physical sciences, are very keen to work with universities in a research
environment because they want to attract PhD students. They take the initiative and
approach the universities because they would like to be able to have access to these
students and ultimately recruit them.
My last comment is that not every student who goes on to do research has their heart set
on a career in industry. We have to bear in mind that some of the brightest minds do not
always see their natural career in a commercial environment. They would like simply to
pursue their research. We have to recognise that some people will want to do that, and that
has always been the case.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: What a good job.

Professor Brian Cantor: Our position in relation to STEM PhDs is one of inadequate
supply, not inadequate demand for them. If we have more PhDs, they will find great jobs in
academia and in industry. The narrowness in the pipeline is simply due to the funding at PhD
level.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: National-domiciled students and international students
often compete for quite separate pots of resource, and it is therefore about the size of the
resource that is actually available. For us it is all about competition for the very best
students whom we seek to train. We will look globally for them. We are not going to be
constrained just to the UK, and I think that we have to put that fallacy to bed. The students
who come from international backgrounds, if we can provide the enterprise, will often
create the best post-doctoral group and the people who are able to move into industry.
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I agree with Chris that, particularly in engineering and most of the physical sciences, the
industries are very keen to support PhD programmes. Where they often want separate
training is if there is a career switch—for instance, when a physicist moves into sales within
a major multinational corporation. They prefer that sort of training to be undertaken in-
company. I believe that industry is very keen to work alongside others in order to train
more PhDs because that is good for the individuals concerned and provides them with a
longer-term sense of security. That is also why it is so important that they have an
underpinning qualification that they can utilise globally. Please do not worry too much about
the international students in terms of the quality that they provide. We must remember that
they are an input into the UK and we should be treating them as a positive, not as a
negative.
Q61 The Chairman: Should we still be worrying about the visa situation and how
students get into the UK, or has that all gone away?
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: I think that we all worry about that day in and day out.
The best way to describe it is that we are muddling through.
Professor Brian Cantor: The UK has a big export market through recruiting international
students generally—I am moving away from just PhDs, though they are absolutely critical
and they sit alongside our students, as Professor Borysiewicz has just said. In its totality this
is a great export market. The visa issue has almost managed to dent it extremely badly, but
that has to some extent been modified to make it work a little better. However, it has yet
to be seen how the removal of the post-study work visa will feed through. When it was
brought in, it was a major encouragement that allowed us to attract some of the best
students around the world. I stress that this is a global market. The most important thing
that Professor Borysiewicz said is that there is a global market for graduates, and even more
so for post-docs.
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: We have to be very careful here. It is not the overt
impact that everyone is going to look at. All of us are going out to recruit in countries like
India, China and elsewhere. What matters is the perception that these students are not
valued because of the restrictions that are being put in place. This is a very subjective issue.
In India in particular, where we have had major prime ministerial and other missions to try
to make the Indian community feel that it would want to recreate the special relationship
with us, what have we done? We have said, “Actually, you are not very special. You have to
queue up and get your visa in a different way.” That is a fundamental problem. Again, it is a
subjective one, and that is what I meant when I said that we are kind of muddling through.
This is not where I would like to be.
Professor Malcolm Grant: I have two points. First, undergraduate international
recruitment in the past saw us having two separate entry points, because the number of UK
and EU students had been capped under the student number control. That will now go with
the new AAB entry requirement and I can see a way in which international and domestic
students will mesh in the admissions process, although it will be a rather more complex
mesh than it has been in the past. Secondly, for both undergraduates and postgraduates,
international students are the lifeblood of institutions and they are absolutely critical. They
are particularly so at the postgraduate level in Masters programmes, especially in certain
specialised disciplines that we could not otherwise maintain. There is a risk, which everyone
is aware of, that a class may become too dominated by international students who have
come here to have the experience of being taught in a British university. But as long as one
can manage that risk, it is possible to continue highly specialised programmes that otherwise
would not find a place in our institutions.
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Baroness Perry of Southwark: That is very reassuring and I am delighted to hear your
answers.
Professor Brian Cantor: Can I make one last comment on this point? I believe fiercely that
having international students and home students at the same time, not only in my institution
but also in others, enriches the educational experience. Again, I believe that fiercely. It is not
just a question of markets and supply and demand, although those are very important as
well; I have talked about that. But actually the education experience for our home students
is better if there are international students, and the education experience for international
students is better if there are home students. The key lies in having the mix.
The Chairman: Lord Broers, would you introduce the last topic for today’s session? The
witnesses may well have to write to us on this, but perhaps we can take a quick canter
through it.
Q62 Lord Broers: I think that the answers will be different from the different
institutions. The question is this: how have you reacted to the impending higher education
reforms in terms of the courses that you are offering or the business model that you are
following? The supplementaries are: have you made any changes to the provision of STEM
subjects and do you think you are likely to make changes in the future? Is the funding you
will obtain for STEM students in the future sufficient to cover your costs and. if not, how are
you going to fund your STEM courses? Overall, what are the main threats to your institution
arising from these reforms?
The Chairman: We want to try to get a feel for this, because clearly we do not have any
hard evidence as yet.
Dr Malcolm McVicar: The real problem comes in capital funding. We have set fees at
£9,000, of which a part has to be discounted in terms of scholarships and bursaries, but it is
sufficient to run the university on a day-to-day basis. When it comes to investment in new
buildings and expensive equipment, that is not fundable from the £9,000 fees. With the
cessation of HEFCE funding for capital projects, I think that there is a major problem ahead.
For example, we have just opened a £14 million chemistry building and we are about to
announce plans for a £15 million engineering building for which we have saved up the
money. However, I do not know where the money will come from in the future. It cannot
come from the fees paid by the students.
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: It has had some impact on Surrey because we have a
large amount of STEM-based activity. We had already reached the point where our average
entrant grades are AAB. Nevertheless, what it has driven us to do is essentially to firm that
up and we have raised our entrance standards in some subjects. Moreover, the demand for
STEM subjects at Surrey has increased. The question that I have going forward is this. Do I
focus more investment in STEM for the reason put by Lord Broers, which is that STEM is an
expensive area to support? We could do that, but at the moment there is both the
uncertainty introduced as a result of the changes and the question of how this will be funded
going forward, because the HEFCE element is a significant factor in making this a viable
prospect. Again, international students have a significant part to play in making sure that the
STEM subject areas remain financially viable.
Professor Martin Hall: Along with around 20 other institutions, we are in the classic
squeezed middle, so we are feeling a great deal of pain. We have a relatively small number of
AAB students, whom we are likely to lose to other institutions which have no limitation on
their capacity. We have to maintain our fees at above £7,500 because of the loss of capital
funding and because we have quite heavy STEM requirements, but at least 350 places that
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we could fill several times over are to be removed from us in order to contribute to the
margin, and that is a real threat. We will manage the first round of core or margin in
September this year because we can remove those places from courses that we can migrate
to our further education partners, and that will actually increase the quality of what we do
overall—it will make for a clean institution. But we have not had the funding letter yet. We
might have received it this afternoon, but the last time I looked, we had not had it. If we
have more rounds of core or margin at 9%, we will have to start taking out STEM subjects
because we will have those places taken away from us. That means that we will not be able
to offer opportunities to students who have a good solid suite of A-levels at, say, ABB or
BBB, as much as we would like to do so. Again, we could fill the places many times over. We
have four or five applicants for every one of those places at the moment. I regard that as a
tragedy.
Professor Malcolm Grant: For us, STEM subjects are an important entry point for students
from non-traditional backgrounds. First, our proportion of state school entrants is higher
across the STEM areas than it is elsewhere, so we are concerned to try to maintain that.
Secondly, we will use the AAB dispensation as an opportunity to provide some marginal
growth in areas where there is a huge demand for places and where we are turning away
students with outstanding A-levels. However, we do not regard that as a solid platform on
which to build major growth across the institution. We are in what I think is a difficult and
uncertain time. Thirdly, you asked about the changes that we have made in response to the
new regime. I think that we have made quite a few. One is frankly a very worthwhile
investment in teaching and attention to the student experience, and another is a wholly new
undergraduate programme called a BASc. It will be an interdisciplinary liberal arts
programme which requires students to excel both in science and in the arts and humanities
in order to delay the unenviable choice between those disciplines until a later age as
opposed to compelling students to make it at the age of 16. Across all these institutions I
think you will see responses to a significant change in market conditions that are attuned to
the individual circumstances of each institution, but taking advantage of opportunities that
previously were not so readily available to us. In other words, we could not have done the
new programme without the AAB dispensation and the ability to bring new students into
the institution.
Dr David Grant: If I may, I will answer this from two viewpoints. The first concerns some
work carried out by the Royal Academy of Engineering, to which I will refer, and the second
viewpoint is from that of a devolved Administration where we have different funding
arrangements and perhaps different challenges. I shall speak first about the work that has
been carried out by the Royal Academy of Engineering. It is clear from the review that it
carried out last year that a number of STEM subjects are already losing money. Work
carried out into the discipline of engineering at six universities showed that in all six of them
it was running at a loss. In other words, today Vice-Chancellors are subsidising STEM
teaching. I believe that work with chemistry and with the IOP has demonstrated this across
a far greater field than that of engineering. So we are already in a position of some difficulty.
As we discussed earlier, what we are trying to do is increase the amount of resource that
we spend in order to give students more experience in project working, working with
businesses and so on. It is a very worrying situation and the Royal Academy of Engineering,
in submitting evidence to the Committee, has set out some of these fears.
I can also give evidence of this from the point of view of Cardiff University. As you may be
aware, we have not had SIVS funding for STEM subjects in Wales. SIVS funding has existed in
England since 2005. It has been something in the order of £1,500 per head, and in some
subjects even more than that, paid as an extra subsidy in order to attract the best students
to STEM. We have not had that. That leaves us in a very difficult position in Wales. In fact, I
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am already cross-subsidising to a huge extent physics and chemistry, although not
engineering to the same extent. That is going to be a continuing problem and I fear that in
the future these cross-subsidies are going to be the only solution. I know that the Welsh
Government are looking towards the high-cost subjects receiving extra funding, just as is
happening through HEFCE in England, but without that extra funding I am afraid that we will
not be able to sustain these subjects, and that creates a great fear for the future of STEM.
Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: STEM at Kent involves around 25% of our student
numbers; we are best known for the social sciences and the arts and humanities. However,
science is strong and we have seen a year-on-year increase in demand. This year we have
seen increased demand across all our science subjects, especially physics and mathematics.
This is a strong area and we put a lot of work into outreach, partly through SEPnet, which
Bill has been heavily involved in here in the south-east, but we also do a lot in Kent. We are
seeing massive demand and one would like to consider expanding the area. However, as my
colleagues have said, there are the actual costs of teaching science subjects and investing for
the future. In order to take on another group, we would have to build a new lab. That
represents a major investment, and where will we get the money from? I still do not know
how much extra money I will be getting per high-cost science student next September. I am
doing the planning for next September now, but HEFCE has not told us what the money will
be when we are less than nine months away.
Q63 The Chairman: Will you be cross-subsidising as well or is it too early to say?
Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: We cross-subsidise now. My view is that it is not right
and that it cannot go on for ever, but we do it. Under the regime, when students are paying
their £9,000 in fees, arts students are going to ask, “Why am I subsidising science subjects?”
Some of them will be subsidising bursaries under the system, and equally students will ask,
“Why am I cross-subsidising?” I think that there are arguments for cross-disciplinarity in
running a university, and the majority of the staff are on board with cross-subsidy. That is
because staff across the disciplines want to see a university that offers a range of subjects
and they recognise the high cost of many science subjects. However, there is a high risk
under the new system. I also think, and my colleagues can perhaps confirm this, that the
number of applications for science subjects across the country is down. That is not true for
us, but I understand that it is down across the country.
Professor Les Ebdon: If I can pick up from there, at the University of Bedfordshire we have
seen a strong swing towards science. This year’s applications are continuing a swing that
started with the introduction of fees. Our interpretation is that as students see that they are
paying more towards their degree, they are looking more closely at its value and assessing
that the STEM subjects will bring them a higher graduate premium. That may be ascribing a
level of sophistication that they do not have, but it does seem to be held up by the facts.
Given that, I would love to be able to create more places in the STEM subjects at the
university for those additional students, as we have done in recent years, but that is going to
be very difficult to do because of the core or margin that has been introduced. In fact, we
will have 10% fewer places this year and it will therefore be very difficult to expand any
subject area. That certainly concerns me, as does the impact of AAB, particularly if it is
continued on to ABB and so on. The Committee will have seen strong evidence to show
that in certain areas of STEM, particularly engineering, the average A-level grades of
applicants is lower than those in other subject areas. Of course, the net effect of taking the
cap off for one group of students and keeping it on for another will tend to distort the
provision, and it will distort it away from STEM.
908
The other threat that I am really concerned about relates to the provision of the widening
participation premium. That may sound a bit remote from the discussion that we are now
having, but if we go back to our earlier discussion about what some colleagues have called
remedial maths—I would rather call it “equalising studies in mathematics”—we see that
there is a need to provide it for a range of students who come from educationally
disadvantaged situations. Again, the Committee will have seen evidence of the advantage that
students from independent schools enjoy compared with those from state schools in terms
of entry to STEM subjects. We have heard evidence this afternoon about the additional
input that has to be made for students from certain backgrounds in terms of mathematics
and laboratory work. It costs money and the widening participation premium recognises
that. If it is abolished, how are we going to fund those equalising studies in the future?
Q64 The Chairman: Professor Cantor, with the largest building site in North Yorkshire,
what are your views?
Professor Brian Cantor: Several questions were put to us, one of which was how have we
reacted to this. We have gone through every course that we offer and looked very hard at
what we are delivering. That is what you would do in any business if you were experiencing
tougher market conditions or more competitive arrangements. You must look hard at what
you are doing to try to make sure that it is better. There is always room for improvement,
so we have done a detailed study, and I would be amazed if any university had not been
doing that. I heard someone say on the radio—I will not say who it was—“Of course we
teach perfectly, so we do not need to do it,” but I do not accept that. We have been looking
at all our existing courses, trying to improve some of them with various modifications and
taking some others out.
New courses were referred to. We are also looking, as Malcolm mentioned, at new
courses. Slightly broader courses are something that I have been in favour of throughout my
career. Having read natural sciences at Cambridge, I guess that I would be in favour of
rather broad-based courses. We are looking at things like broad-based science, which is the
sort of thing that Malcolm talked about. Whether we do it or not remains to be seen, but
we think that there may be outstanding students who will want to come through if they see
different offerings. That is what we are doing in terms of reforming our courses.
You also asked about the threats to the institution from the reforms. I mentioned those at
the beginning, so I will not go over them in detail, but I want to talk about something that
others have raised from perhaps a slightly different perspective. We are a socially inclusive
university. We are very proud of that and we are proud when people comment externally
and independently about the sort of university we are. We have high numbers of state
school entry and so on. As others have said, we are very concerned that the reforms,
particularly the AAB issue, will work differentially against disadvantaged students. As Les has
just said, that could be amplified in the STEM subjects, so we are concerned about that. It
remains to be seen what will happen. I have to say that currently we are seeing a slight
increase in applications across the board, but I stress that it is across the board and, as far as
we can tell, it is evenly distributed socially. There is no issue of humanities versus sciences
or independent schools versus state schools. But it is the application stage and we are in the
middle of a complicated process so we must wait to see the outcome. However, we are
worried about that.
The last point that I want to make is about the cross-subsidy. We cross-subsidise and the
recurrent issue is clearly there. The new arrangements effectively discriminate poorly against
the expensive sciences on recurrent grounds, and that is amplified by the capital costs, as
has been said, and the research council grants that support research, which are very high in
909
the sciences. Because these are both also under threat, that particularly impacts on the
sciences. So, as others have said, the cross-subsidy at the recurrent, the capital and the
research overhead levels is under considerable threat. We pride ourselves on supporting all
our subjects, which we have always done, and the leaders of the disciplines like to support
each other precisely for the reasons that Julia set out. But for how long that can continue
and how extreme it can get, I do not know. At the moment I do not see any problems
arising next week or the following week, but it is a worrying position. So those are our big
threats: social inclusivity, the capital and the drop-off in research council funding.
Q65 Lord Broers: I want to follow up on something that Professor Cantor has just said,
and with which Professor Borysiewicz opened. To a certain extent it is a new subject. You
have talked about breadth. In a few Australian universities, joint degrees are extremely
popular: engineering and law, engineering and management, and various other combinations.
Are you seeing the same thing? I cannot resist asking this question of such a distinguished
group of Vice-Chancellors. Are you considering these joint degrees or are you already doing
them?
Professor Brian Cantor: We have a tradition at York of offering a lot of joint degrees, but
it is very hard to deliver them at the quality and level required. It is very difficult to do for a
variety of reasons: timetabling, culture, bringing teachers together and so on. It has to be
very integrated. Since we were founded, we have traditionally offered a lot of these courses,
but actually we have probably been reducing them over the years for the reasons that I have
set out, which turn on whether we deliver them effectively. We are now trying to look at
more integrated ways of delivering that kind of degree, but it is not just, say, engineering
plus law.
Q66 Lord Winston: Some institutions have gone into partnership with others to do this.
For example, Imperial College has partnerships with the Royal College of Art and the Royal
College of Music. Is that kind of thing being considered?
Professor Brian Cantor: Imperial College does not do art or music, whereas we do.
Lord Winston: We have music with physics and we are thinking about doing more in that
area. We are also looking at electronics.
Professor Brian Cantor: The problems of delivering joint courses are bad enough within
one institution, so to do it across two institutions would be even more difficult.
Professor Malcolm Grant: It is very common. Most of us have a wide range of subjects
where there is a dominant subject that is studied with something else. What we do not
follow is the Australasian model of two separate degrees that are taken together and
merged, and I assume that there is a fee issue around it. But I suspect that you can easily
graduate in engineering with management, for example, from any of our institutions.
Dr David Grant: I agree entirely with that. Looking ahead, I think that we will see a
reduction in the number of joint courses, which frankly will be driven by economic
circumstance.
Professor Sir Christopher Snowden: Interestingly, the demand from students has not
increased, and if anything I would support the comments made earlier that there has been a
steady drift away from joint degrees. Let me say that they are perceived to be slightly more
challenging. Also—much to my surprise in some of the subject areas offered—they just do
not seem to be a draw for students, who seem to focus on single subject areas. I would
guess that all universities are responding in a similar fashion.
910
Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: I think that the worry for students under the new
system will be anything that takes longer. We have heard that it is harder to get everything
we need into three years. Some courses are of course four years long—the MPhys and
MChem and so on. The other issue is the year abroad. It is more popular in the arts and
humanities and in social science, where I think it is very valuable. But students are worried
about spending any extra time at university, given the extra cost that that involves under the
new system. However, I think that it is very valuable for UK-domiciled students to spend a
year working or studying abroad. It is good for their future employment prospects and I
worry that it is under threat.
Q67 The Chairman: Going back to HEFCE and the SIVS, do you think that the
arrangements and the ways in which they are being manipulated will not be effective, or is it
still too early to say?
Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow: You have to be clear what the SIVS are. There is
protection under the RAE in 2008, which protected the volume of investment in science.
Presumably that is still with us until the REF 2013-14. There is protection of student
numbers, with a slight protection at the moment for science subjects under the core/margin.
But what we do not know is what extra money we are getting for what were band A and
band B subjects. We all know the gossip and so on, but we have not had letters telling us
what we have got. I do not know whether there is another aspect of SIVS that you want to
deal with.
Professor Les Ebdon: In terms of analysing the effect of the SIVS initiative as we have
known it, it is extremely difficult to divorce it from switches in student demand. We have
seen a swing towards science as shown in the A-level figures. Have we seen a swing towards
science in universities because of the SIVS initiative or because of student demand? I would
suggest that student demand is the stronger driver. I think that there was always a basic fault
in the concept of SIVS, which was that science and engineering departments were closing
because of the small unit of resource in teaching. That was not very helpful, but looking back
at the incidence of closure of departments, I think that the major driver was the failure to
secure sufficient funding through the Research Assessment Exercise. That was the major
driver of the economy of science and engineering departments and it is therefore wrong to
say that SIVS saved departments. What saved some departments, of course, was the ring-
fencing of science and engineering after the last RAE.
The Chairman: I am sorry, but I am going to finish on that note. I thank you all very much
for the time that you have given us today. This session has been really useful to us. I want
also to make a point of thanking the Committee for staying on beyond the allotted time,
especially as I know that many Members have to go to other events. Again, I thank everyone
very much indeed.
911
University of Cambridge – Supplementary written evidence
In the limited time available, it has not been possible to obtain a collective response to these
questions from across the Cambridge academic community. We hope, nevertheless, that
the response will be helpful.
Introduction
determined?
Stand-alone Masters (purposes)

• Up skilling of the workforce
• Quick and responsive provision especially in new and/or interdisciplinary areas
• Conversion courses for graduates wishing to move into other areas
• Intensive training for research degrees
Doctoral Provision (purposes)

• Underpinning and supporting research activity in HEIs
• Key contributions to the output of labs
• Training of the next generation of researchers
• Development of a highly skilled workforce for industry
Balance
Government should, in broad terms:
a) Let market forces shape stand-alone PGT provision
b) Provide a stable planning platform for PGR provision
Policy Barriers
• Lack of funding, including demise of ORS awards
• UKBA requirements
• The implications of changes in undergraduate funding (increased student debt) for
postgraduate provision
• Difficulties of fitting UK Masters into the Bologna framework
Balance of Provision
Stand-alone Masters provision is market led. Cambridge is content with this model and
would not want to see national intervention lead to regulation of numbers or fees.
Balance of Funding
Funding for research students is based, in part, on volume and quality of research output.
There are separate funding streams and this is appropriate.
912

Collection of additional data at a national level would not serve a useful purpose and would
be logistically time-consuming or even impossible where graduated students have left the
UK. Demand is monitored through application rates, and employability and destination data
for STEM subjects is keep under review at department level through links with employers.
Delivery Models
studentships?
The current model is appropriate provided there is sufficient consultation with the sector
on areas in which funding should be concentrated.
However, there need to be mechanisms for funding projects in new areas, which fall outside
the DTC areas.
If PhD studentships are not available to an institution this will have a detrimental effect on its
research possibly leading to teaching only HEIs.

research?
Much researcher development is implicit in the development of PhD students. Cambridge

would resist any attempts to make the framework compulsory or to include it in the
assessment for degrees.
Transferable skills are most relevant when developed in the course of research.
913
Quality
Output is one measure, but others include completion rates, publications and the student
experience (via feedback such as PRES and PTES).
The QAA CoP has played an important role in development of Cambridge’s own CoP. The
QAA CoP is relevant and sufficient. There is no need for a wider pan-European framework.
Representatives from industry, and the professional bodies, play an important role in
curriculum design and development of Masters courses, but not in setting academic
standards. Involvement is via close links with industry at departmental level. Cambridge does
not see its role as training individuals for particular employers, but has a broader
perspective. Independence is essential for academic quality.
Funding
Lack of funding has led to a more market driven approach and increased fees. Further
reduction in studentship funding will lead to a fall in demand in some areas and closure of
courses.
As funding for home student declines, Cambridge has seen a shift in the student intake.
The majority of students on masters courses are self-funded through loans, and an extension
of the Student Loan system to masters courses would be welcome..
sufficient?
914
SIV funding has not has a noticeable impact but there remains value in a certain amount of
ring-fencing of SIV subjects.
Overseas Students
Courses which rely too heavily on an overseas intake are vulnerable to factors including
foreign currency fluctuations, political change and immigration restrictions.
Where the student intake is dominated by a student from a single country, the student
experience for all on the course is diminished. It may have implications for quality of
provision. There are increased demands on pastoral support.
Growth in the overseas students population nationally at 30% p.a. is not sustainable - we
have not witnessed anywhere that level of increase in Cambridge.
We have not seen any effects on the supply of academic staff.
It is too early to say what impact the changes in the immigration system will have: regulation
keeps changing (e.g. recent introduction of restrictions on bring dependents, time limits).
Cambridge has concerns at student perceptions of the UK, and has provided increased
support for international students, including visa advice. We do not support the view that
students should be considered to be part of immigration numbers.
8 May 2012
915
University of Cambridge Careers Service – Written evidence
INTRODUCTION
1 The University of Cambridge’s Careers Service welcomes this opportunity to

contribute to Lord Willis’ Science and Technology sub-committee. Our department,
an integral part of the University, provides careers guidance, education, information
and advice to all Cambridge students and junior research staff, and also to our
alumni, for life. Over 37,000 users are currently registered on our website and we
are actively engaged with 87% of all final year first-degree students. Our work brings
us into contact with over 5,000 organisations a year, of which approximately 800 will
visit Cambridge to attend our careers fairs, host recruitment presentations and
deliver assorted skills sessions. These employers range from the large to very small,
both local and international and many are eager to recruit STEM students graduating
from Cambridge. We therefore enjoy a strong position straddling students, academia
and employers. As such, we have focussed our attention on the second point being
explored by the committee: ‘Are employers providing the right incentives to attract the
best STEM graduates?’.
2 Our contribution is under two sections: our thoughts regarding some of the main
issues surrounding employer behaviour in attracting and recruiting Cambridge’s
STEM students and a summary of some recommendations the committee might like
to consider. Our comments are based on our extensive dealings with many of the
UK’s major employers and nearly ninety percent of Cambridge students so, although
some of our views are not directly supported by hard factual evidence, they are still,
we believe, reliable.
Key issues surrounding whether employers are providing the right incentives to
attract the best STEM graduates
3 Although science, engineering, mathematics and technology are often grouped under
the umbrella term ‘STEM’, this semantic convenience should not mask the differences
between individual disciplines and the sub-divisions within each not simply in terms of
what is taught and how the curriculum is delivered, but also in terms of the
expectations of academics, their engagement with their particular constituencies and
routes to professional accreditation not ignoring the expectations of students and the
many different paths graduates may take on leaving. Additionally, it has to be
remembered that students are being educated in the most rigorous of academic
environments rather than being vocationally trained.
4 The picture, therefore, is complex and whilst prospects for one particular specialist
may be strong (electrical engineering say), those for scientists who want to use their
degree (ecology perhaps) are likely to be markedly different and quite possibly, less
buoyant. One size, therefore, certainly does not fit all and STEM graduates leaving
Cambridge are fortunate in being faced by a wide choice of careers including the
option to continue into further study (often to doctoral level) here in Cambridge or
the UK or abroad (the USA for example).
5 Differences exist between departments in terms of their attitude to engagement with

industry. In the Engineering Department for example, students are expected to
916
undertake a summer placement on completion of their first year of study the

engineering sector and are helped so to do by an industrial work experience
coordinator.
6 At some universities students can undertake one year placements (or ‘integrated
sandwich courses’) which are embedded within the curriculum. This route is not
routinely available within Cambridge. Whether engagement with labour markets
occurs via a sandwich or summer placement, there is little doubt that early exposure
to commercial and industrial life has important implications for formation of the
individual student particularly in terms of the individual’s ‘work readiness’ and ‘career
decidedness’.
7 STEM subjects are not strictly vocational. A student may choose to read a specific
degree for many reasons (enthusiasm and interest being essential at Cambridge). The
UK enjoys a relatively flexible labour market in which graduates need not pursue
their degree into employment. Indeed many employers welcome graduates from ‘any
discipline’. As data collected on the destinations of graduates six months after they
leave Cambridge demonstrates the blend of quantitative and qualitative skills acquired
in some STEM subject areas makes graduates from those degrees attractive to a wide
range of employers
8 Compensation and benefits issues can be important to some students. Of course,

money isn’t everything, but as demonstrated in Table 1, some sectors pay more than
others. Although the data is drawn from a 2007 analysis, we believe the picture
broadly reflects current relativities although factors such as bonus payments which
are not included, will further distort the picture. See Table 2
9 Many employers blindly seek a 2.1 in pursuit of ‘the best’ students. Members of
Cambridge University Careers Service Employers Group (a collective of 120 active
recruiters spanning a variety of employment sectors) will know how strongly we
argue for a broader interpretation of ‘best’ and that relying on a simple index (which
is not a universal standard) leads to high calibre students being discriminated against
simply because they do not posses that all important 2.1 (or better). Some
preliminary work undertaken by the Service for its Employer Group suggests that
those with weaker degrees may well secure employment in organisations where their
degrees will be used directly whereas those with higher grades may be recruited for
their broader skills in organisation where the financial returns on their academic
investment may be greater.
10 Recruiting and retaining high calibre women (and there are important gender issues
relating to STEM subjects) and men for an organisation is a hugely important process
and doing it well is, one would have thought, an organisational imperative. However, in
some cases the mechanisms adopted are slow and tedious with not inconsiderable
time-lapses between the various phases. This can be off-putting in the extreme
especially when students are aware of the relatively quick, nimble and personal
approaches used by some (often smaller) employers.
11 Career choice is influenced by many factors. Social and other influences in terms of
graduate career choice (including perceived reputation of employer) cannot be
ignored and neither can location. London attracts many a graduate but for obvious
reasons, many industrial organisations are not there.
917
12 Many employers work with Cambridge year by year. Both within Cambridge and
nationally (the AGR for example) we engagement widely, but the absence of
consistency year by year can reduce the impact certain employers of STEM students
can make. ‘Here today but gone tomorrow’, often caused by the endless churn in
recruiters, is hardly the most effective way to build a presence. Organisations which
only want/need STEM subject graduates don’t have the luxury of being able to take
any degree discipline. Yet many organisations that recruit STEM graduates for their
broader skills (in the City for example) put considerable effort into building and
sustaining relationships. In fairness, many of the organisations that fit into the latter
category have big budgets too – but building and maintaining an effective presence is
not simply a matter that is solved with cash.
RECOMMENDATIONS
13 Policy makers and employers alike need to continually remind themselves that
students are autonomous and, as evidenced by nationally gathered destination data,
may not choose to use their degrees in a vocational career. In a market economy,
employers of STEM graduates must work hard to actively attract and retain the
attention and interest of high calibre candidates.
14 It is difficult to keep up with the continually changing world of work. Knowledge and
skills may quickly date, so when the question ‘are employers providing the right
incentives to attract the best STEM graduates’ is posed it is reasonable to speculate
about what is meant by that word ‘best’ and the means by which the (so called) best
are to be judged? Of course many organisations have detailed and elaborate
competency frameworks but even where these exist, the organisation should reflect
on the appropriateness of their processes, the filters used to reduce numbers such as
2.2/2.1 boundary and the barriers and disincentives that may, albeit unintentionally,
be present.
15 Like it or not, money talks, and as shown in table 2 some fields pay more and appear
more attractive than others. Many students seek, what they would regard as a
reasonable return on their investment.
16 Recent changes have been introduced to the work permit system. The impact of
ending the two year post study work visa scheme (PSW) for STEM graduates should
be monitored carefully.
17 Firms should be encouraged to offer paid, supervised, demanding and therefore

meaningful summer internships across the STEM subjects (not just engineering and
not simply for pre-finalists – in other words first and second year students [assuming
four year MSci/MEng programmes]).
18 Similarly firms should be encouraged to provide more post-qualification internships

(graduate internships).
19 Not all students know what they want to do before entering university and it is not
uncommon to find students expressing a wish to retrain. We have graduate
medicine courses for those who, at a later stage in their lives, decide to refocus their
918
energies – so why not graduate science and graduate engineering programmes

(sufficient to achieve recognition by the key professional bodies)?
20 What additional steps might professional bodies take to foster an enthusiasm for
careers in their particular field among student communities (a captive group so to
speak) in universities throughout the UK?
21 Academic research careers are not infrequently characterised by years of unstable

short-term contracts during which time the individual has to move location and
possibly leave behind friends/relationships. STEM graduates following this path face
relatively low salaries with no guarantee of a lectureship. This is a critical matter for
individuals, institutions and for the nation as a whole and is vital that policy makers
address.
TABLE 1
Salary differences by sector for BA/MEng tripos 2007
Sector SIC Range Average (k£)
(Standard (k£) Figures for
Industrial 2006 in
Classification) brackets
Construction (including 4510 - 4520 18.0 – 24.2 (23.0)
civil/structural etc) and Other 7420 - 7423 31.5
Engineering Design Consultancy
Software Consultancy & Supply 7220 18.0 – 24.0
27.0
Manufacturing: 1500 – 1520 22.0 – 24.5 (23.6)
Food, beverages, machinery & 2400 – 3530 28.0
equipment
Accountancy 7412 27.0 – 28.8 (24.6)
30.0
Banking 6511 25.0 – 31.3 (35.3)
36.0
Oil & Gas 1110,1120,232 31.0 – 32.6 (30.0)
Extraction, manufacture and services 0 35.0
Management Consultancy 7414 24.0 – 35.1 (31.2)
45.0
919
TABLE 2
Salary data for Cambridge Engineers (first degree, permanent employment 2010)
COURSE Range (£k)* 2010 Average (£K)*
UK based. Excludes Figures for 2009/8/7/6 respectively
voluntary/temporary in brackets. Excludes
employment. Figures for voluntary/temporary employment.
2009 in brackets
Engineering tripos 18.0 – 43.0 (16.0 - 40.0) 26.6 (26.7, 26.8 ,26.2, 24.4, 24.1)
Manufacturing 26.0 – 45.0 (17.3 – 38.0) 30.1 (29.5, 28.6, 31.2, 31.6, 30.6)
engineering tripos
Chemical 23.0 – 41.0 (24.0 –38.0) 33.7 (32.2, 31.1, 30.6, 26.7, 26.8)
Engineering tripos
14 December 2011
920
University of Central Lancashire – Written evidence
General questions
1.1 There is a potential for the widely accepted definition of Science, Technology,
Engineering and Maths subjects to create artificial boundaries that are not necessarily
helpful. The University of Central Lancashire takes an interdisciplinary approach to
STEM, and includes some subjects which would not be included under a traditional
definition of STEM. For example subjects like Pharmacy are not classified as STEM
subjects in the traditional sense yet the focus and skillset required are similar.
1.2 Our experience is that employers and graduates tend not to think of subjects as ‘STEM’,
but focus more on the degree subject itself. Students are anchored in their subject
rather than in STEM, and consider career/occupational directions in relation to their
degree subject, rather than in relation to a ‘STEM’ job.
influence supply?
2.1 The engineering industry in particular has raised issues around the supply of engineering
students, and there is evidence to suggest that many engineering students do not go on
to work in the industry, but move instead into careers in sectors such as finance. A true
and accurate understanding of the demand for STEM graduates requires a detailed skills
analysis to be undertaken. Such a requirement has been particularly necessary in the
nuclear industry, an industry that UCLan works closely with.
2.2 Nuclear is an industry sector which perhaps demonstrates one of the greatest shifts in
skill requirements from process operation through decommissioning to new build within
a couple of decades, hence adaptability of STEM staff is critically important. It is clear
that the industry had difficulty in adopting common thinking and terminology in respect
of nuclear skills. While evidence of skill and competence levels is demonstrated
throughout the sector via Suitably Qualified and Experienced Person (SQEP) records,
the industry primarily operates skill forecasting at the occupation level (‘we require a
nuclear safety engineer’) as opposed to the qualification or competence of individuals.
There are therefore more competences and qualifications in the labour pool than are
currently being utilised, but these are not consistently tracked. The industry therefore
has some difficulty determining what skills are currently available to it and how flexible
and adaptable the workforce is.
2.3 There are some initiatives to increase the use of labour pooling across the sector and
sector-wide retraining schemes, but self-evidently the success of these is uncertain. As
such, the required supply of newly qualified engineers and scientists which the industry
hopes that colleges and universities will furnish is particularly uncertain. Each new
graduate requires a programme of experience-building and therefore the demand for
these programmes is also uncertain.
2.4 The second issue is the projection of future demand, which is also fraught with
uncertainty. Many processes are subject to considerable technological change and
921
therefore the ‘half-life’ of competence can be short and unpredictable. We have

concluded that the industry should make greater use of scenario-based planning tools
than is currently the case. The industry is not sufficiently agile to advise universities and
colleges what skill set will be required for the future. The effect of this is that universities
are educating for today’s challenges, not tomorrow’s.
2.5 Other significant changes impact on these issues. The nuclear site license companies are
increasing their use of contractors rather than relying on in-house staffing levels.
Contractors are prepared to pay market prices for skills to meet short-term skill
requirements but they show no inclination to engage with sector workforce planning or
education. This creates great difficulties for the universities as the contractor industry
becomes a high risk, high reward environment for employability.
16-18 supply
3.1 More work could be done at primary and secondary level to help students make the
transition to studying STEM degrees. The nature of much classroom based teaching
means that students need to learn new skills when they enter Higher Education
Institutions. Some students need time to adjust to a different learning environment,
particularly more independent learning.
3.2 Problem-solving and mathematical skills are also areas that sometimes need to be
developed when students enter University and many students lack extensive experience
of writing essays, meaning they need support to develop their essay writing skills.
3.3 Access to laboratory facilities and experience of using this equipment has significant
impact on the skills students possess. In our experience, those schools that have made
an investment in good labs and provision of science subjects, such as Cockermouth
School in Cumbria, have a high uptake of science A levels and are successful in preparing
students effectively to take on degree level studies. Our experience is that the league
table approach drives schools to focus on achieving pass grades, rather than considering
the skills base, wider learning needs and pushing pupils to achieve higher grades.
4.1 It is our experience that there has been an increase in the uptake of physics and maths
but we do not have evidence to support the reasons behind this.
5.1 Limited evidence currently exists on the possible impact that this change will have, but
there is a potential for it to change the approach of some schools that are focussed on
helping students to achieve pass grades, driven by league table pressures, rather than
considering students' wider learning needs and pushing more able students.
Graduate supply
922
6.1 According to data from the Higher Education Funding Council for England there has
been an 8% increase in the number of STEM graduates over the past ten years. 552
However, it is less clear what the actual demand for STEM graduates is. Anecdotally,
companies make the case that they need a greater supply of STEM graduates but this has
not been accompanied by an in-depth analysis of what specific skills are needed.
6.2 Currently there is a sufficient supply of overseas STEM graduates but there are concerns
that this will be restricted under the new student visa regime which prevents overseas
graduates from obtaining work experience as part of their learning. This will influence
the provision of high quality STEM graduates available to industry.
7.1 STEM graduates are equipped with a range of transferable skills, as they tend to be
numerate and analytical, which are skills that are valued by industry. Various studies,
including one undertaken by the Department for Universities, Innovation and Skills in
2009, demonstrate that employers like the skills that STEM graduates are equipped
with. 553
7.2 Universities play an important role in shaping the skillset of graduates. Working with
industry, students and academics, UCLan undertakes work to define the key attributes
needed by a graduate and ensure that students are aware of the skills that they will need
upon entering the workplace, and specifically for the industry that they wish to enter.
7.3 The challenge is that different industries that seek to recruit STEM graduates will be
focussed on their own specific needs. UCLan works with 70 key principle employers and
our experience is that there is a broad range of demands on STEM skills, making it
challenging to define a specific set of skills that all employers want.
institutions?
8.1 UCLan has concerns that the higher education reforms will lead many Higher Education
Institutions (HEIs), and particularly new market entrants, to focus on courses that are
the most popular and profitable at the expense of STEM subjects.
8.2 As there are significant capital costs attached to delivering science subjects, they are less
attractive to new entrants who are likely to cherry pick popular courses that are less
expensive to provide. Provision is likely to fall to existing public universities, who will
face huge costs to maintain these courses, and thus face a disadvantage. This has the
potential to threaten the stability of the sector and the provision of a number of courses.
552 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_24/11_24.pdf - page 24

553 http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/migratedD/publications/D/Demand_for_STEM_Skills
923
If there is not student demand for STEM courses, it will be extremely difficult for the
majority of universities to continue provision of these subjects.
8.3 Furthermore, the government’s plans to drive down tuition fees through the
introduction of a core and margin model for the allocation of student places will put
pressure on universities to set different fees for different courses in an attempt to bring
the average fee levels below £7,500, which is needed to access margin places. This
combined with the huge reduction in the teaching grant means universities will no
longer be able to cross subsidise the costs of STEM subjects, creating serious questions
over their long term future.
9.1 If the Research Excellence Framework is driving a focus on pure research, there is less
incentive for new cross disciplinary STEM degrees. UCLan uses an interdisciplinary
approach for the provision of its degrees, for example pharmacy and forensic science
degrees are grouped with STEM subjects in terms of skills sets developed. We may be
better placed than some research-intensive institutions that are focused more on pure
research because of our interdisciplinary approach.
10.1 The definition of a University is its ability to provide high quality teaching, undertake
high quality research and drive knowledge transfer.
10.2 UCLan is committed to the three key pillars that underpin a successful university.
Our teaching helps to equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to enter
and succeed in the work place. We take a practical approach to academic research by
investing in areas that have real world impact and we successfully collaborate with both
the private and public sector to develop and shape innovative solutions that improve
communities.
10.3 We believe that teaching and research are indivisible, as research-informed teaching
is invaluable to both students and staff development. The connectivity and
interdependence of teaching and research is even more important in STEM than other
subjects.
10.4 It is important for undergraduates and post-graduates to both be taught within one
institution because it highlights opportunities for academic progression, encourages
aspiration and the flow of students needed by industry.

11.1 There is currently a good spread of HEIs offering STEM courses but it is difficult to
predict what the impact of changes to higher education will be and particularly whether
there will be the same breadth of institutions involved in STEM provision.
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12.1 UCLan has directly targeted students from the lower socio-economic groups
through the Aimhigher initiative and has specifically developed a project entitled
‘Creative Science’ that delivers hands-on STEM to primary age pupils and a number of
STEM-themed summer schools. UCLan also leads a successful Science Partnership which
links three secondary schools and two FE colleges in Preston with the aim of increasing
progression in STEM subjects by demonstrating inclusivity and the applied nature of
many courses. Activities include enrichment workshops, curriculum support, HE/FE
taster days, support for teacher CPD, and provision of access to STEM facilities. Data
from the last three years shows a significant increase in the number of students
progressing to STEM subjects at FE. There are similar partnerships developing around
our campuses in East Lancashire and West Cumbria. Almost all of our STEM outreach
events are free of charge.
12.2 There is still an overarching stereotype that scientists and engineers are men. There
needs to be increased research into the reasons that girls are negatively influenced in
their perception of STEM subjects. Preliminary data collected at science summer schools
at UCLan suggested that girls are more pragmatic when it comes to subject choice, and
have an end goal in mind, whereas boys focus more on the immediate ‘wow’ factor. It
may be that the current STEM enrichment, which can aim to excite & enthuse, is biased
towards the male preference and that long term engagement with girls, focussing on
progression, careers and salary would be more successful.
12.3 Although STEM outreach and enrichment activities are often offered free of charge,
they can still be inaccessible to schools and families due to travel costs, which can be
prohibitive. Almost all STEM initiatives, STEM centres, STEM museums and projects are
based in major cities, which can severely limit participation of schools from deprived
areas. Travel bursaries are limited and funders are not supportive of projects in which a
large portion of the budget is allocated to paying for travel to enable schools to attend.
There needs to be a culture change in the way such projects are structured and a little
more ‘risk’ taken when allocating funding to ensure that money does not repeatedly go
into the same area. For example, making financial support available to develop new
science centres and educational hubs that cater for deprived areas that are not within
reach of current projects.
12.4 We also believe that the continued focus on A level grades when recruiting
graduates into industry disadvantages those who have non-traditional routes into higher
education and skilled employment. We work with employers to help them understand
and recognise that they should select from the graduate pool without referencing A level
grades. We help students to realise their potential regardless of their background and
employers should recognise this work.
13.1 UCLan shapes doctoral programmes which embed employability and personal
development skills through work placements and other support. All of our skills training
925
is compatible with the Researcher Development Framework (RDF) which is now the
European yardstick for researcher training.
13.2 However, our example of best practice does not necessarily reflect how PhD
training is conducted across the sector. There is a broader issue about the ways in
which HEIs can best prepare PhD students for employment. UCLan would welcome a
more strategic focus across the sector on the contribution PhD students in STEM
subjects can make to the economy in a wide variety of industries, and a better
acknowledgement of the work done in modern universities in this area.

14.1 There is a strong case for supporting a higher number of PhD students to maintain
the research base in STEM subjects. Vitae recently produced a report highlighting the
added value that PhD students bring to employers, but there is also a particular
economic need to make sure that STEM subjects are protected.
14.2 The main issue is funding – there are high quality students out there and we have the
capacity to supervise a larger number of STEM doctoral students. UCLan has many
world class researchers and we have recently invested in state-of-the-art laboratories,
but ultimately the home market is shaped by the funding opportunities available to our
graduates to continue into research. We offer our own first class students bursaries into
research degrees but we are not in a position to support more STEM PhDs.
14.3 Many of our STEM research students are funded directly or indirectly by industry or
external organisations. However, there is insufficient uptake of doctoral students by
SMEs. The Innovation Voucher scheme has shown a latent demand for doctoral level
skills in local SMEs but it is still unlikely that doctoral students will gain employment in
SMEs when they graduate.
15.1 There are benefits to DTCs but they are very expensive both in terms of cost to the
tax payer and the cost of time to the research student. They also effectively restrict
opportunities for STEM students to a small number of universities.
15.2 UCLan does not receive funding for a DTC but we have seen healthy increases in
research student numbers in STEM subjects regardless. UCLan endeavours to deliver a
quality research experience by ensuring good quality students on entry and a well-
managed research project and skill training environment in which the students can
develop.
15.3 We have excellent facilities and research expertise and we are utilising them to
support STEM through research council bids and other funding opportunities. However,
it would be better in the long term for DTCs to make full use of the capacity and
expertise available in the sector.
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16.1 The main advantage of Masters degrees is that they give students an opportunity to
gain key skills over a limited term research project and this strengthens conversion into
successful doctoral programmes. However, this would not justify a reduction in
emphasis on PhD funding to support Masters. Masters have an important role, but they
will not in themselves address the skills gap in STEM subjects, nor will they enhance the
research base as effectively as PhDs. There is a case for supporting more Masters to
improve the overall quality of and transition into doctoral programmes, but PhDs should
remain the main focus of government strategy in STEM subjects.
16.2 If state funding is used to fund Masters degrees then they should be in applied
science subject areas which have strong application to industrial environments. This has
the advantage of providing a skilled work force for those industries and potentially
stimulating innovative research with those industries that will lead to new enterprise.
17.1 There is an expectation through the sector that higher undergraduate fees will have
an impact on postgraduate research degrees from 2015 onwards but the truth is that
this assumption has yet to be put to the test.
17.2 On the one hand students who have paid higher fees for their undergraduate degree
may be more reluctant to pursue research degrees which they cannot get student loans
for. However, the deferred nature of the student loan system may mitigate this. As a
sector we need to be clear about the career benefits of research degrees and make sure
there are flexible routes into research. This includes a role for government to bring
forward innovative ways to help students into postgraduate study.
Industry
graduates?
18.1 Supply should be matching demand, not the other way round, and there is a drive
towards closer collaboration between industry and universities to ensure that this is the
case. Progress is being made at both a local and national level. At UCLan, we work
closely with the nuclear industry to understand skills needs and the example of our PhD
student jointly sponsored by the NDA is an example of best practice.
of best practice?
19.1 There are always lessons that can be learned from other countries but in terms of
research output relative to investment, the UK is one of the leading countries in the
OECD. However, quality and breadth of provision does depend on investment in STEM
subjects, which is under threat. Figures from the Organisation for Economic
927
Cooperation and Development’s most recent Education at a Glance study showed that
the UK spent 1.2 per cent of its gross domestic product on higher education in 2008,
below the OECD average of 1.5 per cent.
16 December 2011
928
University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of Cambridge, University
of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University, University
College London (UCL) and University of Salford – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of

Cambridge, University of York, University of Bedfordshire,
University of Kent, Cardiff University, University College London
(UCL) and University of Salford – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
929
University of Greenwich – Written evidence
Introduction
determined?
Master’s and PhD programmes are essential to providing a highly educated and
technologically competent work force, which will equip the UK to be a leading technology
based economy. Maters programmes are likely to be less attractive in the future as a result
of the introduction of the £9k undergraduate fees and the associated debt accumulation.
Currently there is no mechanism for students to be state funded to undertake a taught
Masters qualification. Government could extend the student loan provision to cover the fee
for Masters programmes in STEM subjects. PhDs at Greenwich are typically funded by: (i)
the individual - this may reduce as a result of growing undergraduate debt; (ii) QR
Institutional funding; and (iii) Industry.
The ratio of taught M.Sc. students to PhD is greater than 5x at Greenwich; however, many
of these M.Sc. students are from overseas. As a result of financial constraints, particularly in
relation to the funding available to home students, the balance between Masters level and
doctoral provision is therefore determined by market forces. This situation is likely to
continue if not be exacerbated by the Research Council’s decision to concentrate funding
into selected Universities. We see this as a retrograde step in relation to the provision of
higher-level skills and the total Masters level and PhD provision available nationally.
Greenwich has a significant contribution to make to postgraduate education. We are able

to service and develop the talents of a different geographical, ethnic and subject mix than
some of the more selective universities. We are also experienced in providing support for
students from disadvantaged backgrounds and traditionally low participation
neighbourhoods.

Yes, we as an Institution do collect employability and destination data for M.Sc. taught
programmes and M.Sc. by research as a part of our DLHE survey. To the best of our
knowledge, there is no consistent means of collecting employer demand or graduate
destinations for PhD students. We would find this helpful in terms of recruiting PhD
students, many of whom contribute significantly to the research effort of the University. It
930
should be noted that academic units with large numbers of PhD students do estimate
graduate destination but we feel that this would be better if undertaken consistently across
the country. At the University of Greenwich more than 90% of students graduating with
PhDs in Science gain PhD level jobs within six months of graduating.
Delivery models
studentships?
The current concentration of funding through DTCs ignores a substantial portion (greater
than 50%) of the national capability to train doctoral students to a level recognised as
internationally excellent. In addition it should be noted that research students make a
substantial contribution to the research capacity of any institution. RAE 2008 shows that
substantial amounts of 3* and 4* research was produced by institutions which are not
currently associated with DTCs. The introduction of DTCs has not seen a net increase in
the number of research students studying across the country, not has it given rise to
substantial increases in the number of research students studying in elite institutions. It is
therefore clear that this policy is one which reduces research capability at international
levels of excellence across the country. Furthermore, there is likely to be a substantial
opportunity cost as institutions, which previously were able to attract quality PhD students
to work with top class groups, are now unable to attract the same numbers. For our
University this policy has seen a reduction in PhD numbers of about 10. We would prefer
to see the worst excesses of the current model mitigated by a move to a hub and spoke
network model with consortia of research intensive and regional universities collaborating in
DTCs.
The University has an excellent research infrastructure – for example the equipment estate
in the School of Science alone represents an investment in excess of £5m and together with
internationally recognised staff this represents an important resource, which we aim to use
fully for the benefit of the country. Restrictions on PhD student recruitment militate against
efficient use of this facility.
PhD students are a crucial part of the research capability of any University. We believe
strongly in the research-teaching nexus and in the value of research informed teaching to
producing well-equipped, employable graduates who are best able to serve economic
development. A University without PhD students would be one where the vibrancy of the
research community was substantially damaged and the effectiveness of the research
informed teaching agenda greatly decreased. In saying this we note that in our University
95% of PhD students are involved in teaching and this demonstrates the importance of the
direct links between teaching and research.
931
We encourage a model whereby at least 50% of the funding available for doctoral training is
available to any institution on a competitive basis rather being pre-filtered through doctoral
centres.

research?
We embrace key elements of the Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework

(http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers) e.g. the Personal Development Portfolio for all PhD
students. The driver is to build up the range of skills a PhD student has which equips them
to be ready for a doctoral standard job. PhD students who contribute to teaching all
undertake formal teacher training before engaging with students. Numerous sessions are
held with PhD Students around the design of experiments, writing scientific papers and
effectively presenting the results of their work at conferences and to other third parties. We
have designed our doctoral training programme for students following the Vitae principles
and we also incorporate them into our HR policies.
Quality
We do not agree that research output should be the sole measure of research supervision
quality. Quality assurance of PhD students at Greenwich is rigorously applied through the
University’s Research Degree Committee. The work of the committee is strongly informed
by QAA guidelines and fully incorporates a key role for external assessors (examiners). We
do not see a need for an extended role for QAA in doctoral examinations.
Each School in the University has an Advisory Board with majority representation from
business/industry. We use these boards to advise on quality and standards for all our
programmes including post-graduate degrees. Industry representatives are involved in the
supervision of selected students.
The University of Greenwich strongly welcomes interaction with industry. As an example

over a 6-year period from 2003 to 2009 Pfizer (the Pharmaceutical Company) operated a
932
very successful post-doctoral/PhD collaboration with the University of Greenwich. The

scheme had 25 post-docs and PhDs, a number of whom became employees of Pfizer and
other Pharmaceutical companies. The scheme was worth approx. £2.5m to the University.
Current major Science & Engineering sponsors include Novartis, BP, British Sugar and BAE
systems.
Funding
Future funding for taught postgraduate education is one of the most active discussion topics
in the sector at the present time. The changes to student funding will mean that most of
those who graduate in 2015 and beyond will be carrying forward significant debts and
graduate repayment liabilities. Everyone agrees that this will have a major impact on
demand for taught postgraduate education in this country. A postgraduate education
provides high level skills for UK plc, enables members of the workforce to retrain, and is an
essential entry point for a number of professions (e.g. teaching, pharmacy, and health care).
Many would argue also that postgraduate education provides important cultural and social
benefits both for the individual and society in general.
This is an important issue for us at Greenwich because we have a community of almost

6,000 postgraduate students and we focus on developing the higher level skills needed by
employers. Students come from around the country and around the world to study at
Greenwich. It is one of the most popular universities in the UK for international students,
and recruits strongly among aspiring professionals from India, Nigeria, Bangladesh and
Thailand. Many of our courses are developed in close cooperation with companies such as
BP, Kent Police Service and the pharmaceuticals giants Astra-Zenica, Glaxo Smith Kline and
Novartis. Some external collaborators directly fund postgraduate education, others provide
lectures, student placements and curriculum review.
Presently, funding for taught postgraduate courses is diminishing and costs are rising. Banks
are reducing career development loans, individuals’ discretionary spending is falling and
research council funding is also on the decline. Universities have been steadily raising fee
levels, in part to cover the true costs of delivery, but also to obtain parity with
undergraduate fee levels (this is an especial issue because at 160 credits postgraduate
courses and bigger than undergraduate courses that are typically 120 credits). The recently
announced Hefce proposal to part-fund PGT education is some welcome good news554 .
The likely outcome of all of this is an increase in four year Integrated Masters degrees (for
example at Greenwich we have MEng, and MPharm four year degrees). It may also herald a
switch from more academic to more vocational programmes (for example from Masters
degrees in English and Media, to those in Nursing and Teaching). Additionally, we might
expect a greater emphasis on part-time rather than full-time models study as students look
554 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=418922
933
to support themselves by working. There may well be greater interest in distance learning,
and a larger proportion of international students, who have been paying higher, economic
fees for quite some time.
An important question is: how will PGT education be funded in the future? If you believe
the arguments about the importance of high skills in a race to the top (to use David
Sainsbury’s phrase) and that the public interest will best be served by having a well-trained
workforce, the most obvious solution is to extend the existing student loan model to
postgraduates, as proposed by Leunig (2011) 555 . This would provide compatibility with the
current undergraduate scheme (and will add little additional complexity), and would allow
Hefce to deal with issues of strategically important and vulnerable subjects, as well as high
cost subjects, regional priorities, etc.
Not surprisingly, the government is concerned about the costs of such an extension and a
number of alternatives have been proposed including private bank loans, university funding
(possibly using income from bond schemes) and some hybrid variations. All the alternatives
are problematic in some way. It is unlikely that private bank and bond schemes will provide
universal access based on ability, or that they will support social mobility. The additional
complexity they will place on the system will also add unwanted burdens on universities and
students alike.
So, it is time for the government to step up, to accept the importance of postgraduate
education to the economy, science and society, and to extend the existing graduate
repayment scheme to postgraduates on favourable terms.
sufficient?
Overseas students
Some of the Masters level programmes at Greenwich have 90% or greater overseas student
participation. There are many advantages to overseas students coming to Greenwich: they
555Leunig, T Oct 2011 Mastering postgraduate funding. Centreforum http://centreforum.org/assets/pubs/mastering-
postgraduate-funding.pdf
934
enrich the culture of the institution; allows us to develop links with overseas organisations;
and they provide much needed supplementary income. The UK is an attractive place to
study for many overseas students. The threat is not from any reduction in the perceived
quality of the post-graduate offering in UK institutions, rather the challenging UKBA
requirements.
Our experience is that overseas markets are notoriously volatile so without a substantial
increase in the resource available for home students to undertake masters’ level study the
higher degree level programmes in our University are at substantial risk. With 20% of
Masters level students at the University of Greenwich going on to PhD studies (note that
these are the higher achieving students within the cohorts) there is a substantial knock-on
risk to our research programmes.
A 30% per annum growth in overseas students with a concomitant shift in the funding
source from domestic to international represents a substantial risk to funding for UK HEIs.
We are not aware of staff supply issues being linked to the supply of overseas post-graduate
students.
Many of our PG courses would not be viable with less that 50% international students.
Recent changes introduced by the UKBA have had a negative impact on the UK retaining its
attraction as a major international high quality provider of higher education. There is a
perception amongst overseas students that the UK is less welcoming than other major
commonwealth countries e.g. Canada and Australia who are pro-actively encouraging
overseas students to study in those countries. Some countries are offering overseas
students a work visa following successful completion of their Masters level programme of
study e.g. Canada.
8 May 2012
935
University of Kent, Cardiff University, University College London (UCL), University of
Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of Cambridge,
University of York and University of Bedfordshire – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
University of Kent, Cardiff University, University College London

(UCL), University of Salford, University of Central Lancashire,
University of Surrey, University of Cambridge, University of York
and University of Bedfordshire – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
936
University of Kent – Supplementary written evidence
These are excellent and informed questions about a complex subject which recognise that,
over time, a disjointed provision with apparently conflicting objectives and incentives has
been produced. At the University of Kent, we have focused on finding the routes through
this somewhat disorganised regulatory and funding environment that allow us to maintain
and develop appropriate programmes. Our aims are: to provide postgraduate training to
people seeking new skills that enhance those gained at undergraduate level and to provide
research training to sustain the flow of future researchers. We regard a vibrant
postgraduate community as central to our research activities and to the development of the
skills the UK requires in the current global knowledge economy. We have received awards
from UK Research Councils and, together with other European universities, run innovative
courses through the EU funded Erasmus Mundus Programmes. Such training is of essential
benefit to the UK.
1. What is the purpose of stand-alone Masters courses and doctoral provision in HEIs? In each case,
what is the role of government in supporting these?
Across industrialized countries there has been significant user demand for stand-alone
Master’s courses because these provide people with advantages in competitive, high skill
employment markets. Except in the STEM subjects the UK government, through HEFCE, has
effectively withdrawn from funding these vocational and professional masters. People must
therefore fund themselves, or less often, their employers do so.
This largely private funding will become more difficult for individuals once people begin to
graduate with the post-Browne debt burdens. All universities therefore expect a significant
proportion of the home demand for these courses to shift to part-time, distance and
blended learning modes. Many universities, including our own, are therefore investing in the
substantial costs of developing high quality, at least partly, web-based programmes.
Because of the absence of funding for most vocational and professional Master’s, home
demand has effectively been combined with provision of Master’s courses that appeal to
significant numbers of overseas students. This means that Master’s provision in the UK is
not, in the main, driven by the needs of the national economy and in some areas we may be
training relatively few UK domiciled students.
Master’s courses focused on research training have evolved most commonly in the
humanities and social sciences and are often required prior to entry to a PhD programme. In
the sciences, longer doctoral programmes are the primary method of providing appropriate
research training. Current changes in policy have moved the funding of these one year
stand-alone Research Master’s to PhD funding (of average length 3.5 years) through
Doctoral Training Centres. This has increased the likelihood of students privately funding
their first year prior to starting their research council funded PhD training.
What then should be the role of government in supporting masters and doctoral provision?
We see it as unlikely in the present public expenditure environment that state funding for
vocational and professional Master’s will grow. Funding in this area must therefore
937
necessarily be limited to the small number of areas where there is clear market failure.
There is also a requirement for public funding to generate a skills base that the country
clearly needs. The current HEFCE subsidy provides only for STEM and SIV (strategically
important and vulnerable) subjects and we support the continuation of this.
In the case of the doctoral programmes needed to produce the next generations of highly
skilled researchers, we tentatively suggest a number of possible changes to deal with the
current confusion of objectives. One year research training Master’s are unnecessary if
research training is a key part of a doctoral programme of appropriate length. For students
who find they are unable to complete a full doctoral programme there should be
appropriate lower exit qualifications. This would mean moving to a US model of doctoral
programmes where the early years contain a higher proportion of training, and even
coursework, and the thesis forms a smaller and later part of the programme.
We recognise that the state funding of doctoral programmes is clearly moving to a

mechanism that works through awards made to DTCs for periods of five years or so. We
comment on this trend in our answer to Question 3 below.
3. What is your assessment of the EPSRC's decisions to concentrate on funding Doctoral Training
Centres and to remove funding from project studentships?
We see no reason to focus only on the EPSRC. This model of funding is being pursued by all
the Research Councils.
The DTC block grant model has evolved, not because it focuses public money on the best
students in the best institutions, but because it saves the Research Councils the considerable
administrative costs that the previous quota and competitive models of allocating
studentships to individual students involved. In the face of necessary cuts to their
administrative costs, the Research Councils have had no option but to move to the block
grant DTC model. However, it does now allow more autonomy for the University or
groups of Universities.
DTCs were initially presented as a way of getting institutions to group together to share and
enhance their strengths. We fully support this networking of expertise and would query the
funding of single institution DTCs. With this model the Research Council loses oversight of
the balance of studentships between disciplines. Once block grants are allocated, the DTCs
decide the balance allocation to subjects within their limited pools. Over time this may lead
to the underfunding of research studentships in some disciplines.
Together with the introduction of DTCs we have seen a reduction in the number of PhD
studentships. We find it worrying that the UK is effectively reducing the funding for home
students to study at this level.
We regret the withdrawal of project studentships. In fact, we would like to see this mode of
funding remain and extended to other Research Councils. Again, we could look to funding
models within the USA in which students are funded by a variety of mechanism including
grants and, of course, through teaching and research assistant posts.
938
We also support the continuation of the HEFCE Research Degree Programme providing
funding to the Research Excellence Framework, as this funding is linked to high quality
research, as currently assessed in the Research Assessment Exercise
5. Is the quality of research output the best proxy of quality research supervision and training for
What relevance does QAA have to the quality measures for post graduate education?
This question is better answered by starting with the supplementary. The publication and
application of the section of the QAA Code of Practice governing research programmes
(QAA CoP Section 1, 2004) has had a profound positive effect on the quality and
consistency of supervision and support for research students in UK universities.
The code set out plain guidance on the things that should be done to ensure proper support
for students in all key areas: the research environment, selection, admission and induction of
students, supervision (particularly its frequency, the training of supervisors, the creation of
supervisory teams, what happens when supervisors leave), regular progress and review
arrangements, the assessment and development of research and other skills, getting
feedback from students, setting out clearly what they were required to do, could expect
from the institution, and how they could complain in the event of difficulties. That these
simple and obvious aspects of support were properly attended to was checked by the
various forms of quality audit and review conducted by the QAA.
There is little doubt that before the intervention of the QAA, the quality of support and
supervision for students had varied enormously within and between institutions, depending
largely on the conscientiousness of the supervisor. Before the QAA set out and audited
their standards there was very little reason for, or likelihood of, a correlation between the
research ranking of an institution and the quality of supervision and training. An excellent
research environment is clearly a necessary support for good supervision, but it is not
sufficient.
Allocating public money for research students to institutions on the basis of their research
rankings (in retrospective research assessment exercises) is a short cut which may be
justifiable, to a degree, on the basis of efficiency. Ideally money should be allocated to
students in terms of their quality and potential, and then they should be allowed to choose
which institutions to attend, but this is a very expensive method. If money is to be allocated
to institutions, then standard setting and audit of the sort carried out by the QAA becomes
an essential guarantor that they will use that money to provide high quality research training.
The development of the DTC method of funding, which creates long periods when Research
Councils will have relatively little oversight over how the money is being spent, makes the
role of the QAA even more important.
9. We have heard that in certain Masters courses over 70% of the students are from overseas.
What are the dangers of such a large proportion of overseas students and how can we mitigate
against them?
Is there and over-reliance on overseas students in post graduate education? If so, what would you
consider a sustainable proportion of overseas students?
939
As pointed out earlier, the limited UK funding available to support stand-alone Master’s
programmes does mean that they are unlikely to be viable where there are not a mix of
home and international students. If we wish to train more UK domiciled students at
Master’s level then we need to find appropriate funding mechanisms.
There are obvious risks. International students will not find the English experience which
many of them are looking for and may query one of the benefits of studying overseas and
the UK will not provide the appropriate training opportunities for its population which
would allow them to compete in the world.
8 May 2012
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University of Manchester – Written evidence
1.0 General questions
• What is the definition of a STEM subject and a STEM job?
1.1: The broadest/literal definition is a subject or job in the area of Science, Technology,
Engineering and/or Mathematics. It normally does not include the medical sciences (and we
are not considering these in the responses below). We would expect STEM to cover a wide
range of subjects including, but not limited to, Aerospace Engineering, Biological & Life
Science, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Computer Science &
Informatics, Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Environmental Science, Geology (and certain
aspects of Geography), Materials Science, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Nuclear
Engineering, Physics and Textiles Technology. We can therefore see that the STEM subjects
underpin much of the worldwide manufacturing activity. Within the UK, supply of suitable
STEM graduates to industry is a significant issue for both large companies and SME’s (Small
and Medium Enterprises).
1.2: We also recognize that STEM graduates are attractive to industries well beyond the
obvious engineering and science technology industries, for example the financial industry has
been a long-term significant recruiter of graduates from STEM subjects. Therefore there is
not, nor should there be, a complete match between the number of STEM based graduates
and STEM job vacancies. Accordingly, the definition of a ‘STEM job’ is unclear but perhaps
can be best defined as any job requiring the core skills and knowledge engendered through
the education presented within a STEM subject.
• Do we understand demand for STEM graduates and how this could be used
1.3: We need to place this question in an international context. For UK based industries
this can be summarized as a need for a greater number of highly qualified/highly performing
STEM graduates especially in some disciplines, e.g. Nuclear and Electrical Engineering. There
are also particular challenges supplying suitable graduates to the SME sector which is widely
recognized as an area of growing importance to the UK, and which is being considered by
many HE (Higher Education) and professional institutions. At present, whilst there has been
a greater level of graduate unemployment, some of the STEM sectors do have a good
opportunity to promote themselves and their continuing opportunities to influence supply.
1.4: We also recognize that internationally the high growth nations (led by the BRIC
countries) have a high demand for STEM subject graduates, in particular in many branches of
engineering, driven by growth in their industrial sector. The UK HE sector is seen, together
with the USA, as a premier destination for those wishing to study in these subjects. This has
been providing an inflow of international students into the UK which is essential to the
economic survival of many UK engineering departments, as well as providing an
internationally diverse cohort of students.
2.0 16-18 supply
• Are schools and colleges supplying the right numbers of STEM students and
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2.1: In some subjects there are a reasonable number of students coming forward (e.g. to
study Biological Sciences, Mathematics or Physics) but we need more UK students studying
other STEM subjects. We do have some concerns with the curriculum changes in some of
the qualifications (notably BTEC) and the level of/ability with Mathematics and English of
some students (certainly compared to a number of years ago). This means we need to
spend more time on some of the ‘basics’ in the first year of study which in general is
pressurizing the overall curriculum.
2.2: STEM subject students already spend a large percentage of their studies in timetabled
learning and we have concerns over the ability to maintain the high technical standard of the
degree qualifications whilst broadening the curriculum in response to at least some
industrial input and providing additional resource to teach basic Mathematics and English
skills, which can be variable in the students entering university.
• What have been the effects of earlier Government initiatives on the uptake
of STEM subject in higher education?
2.3: As just commented, we are seeing good numbers of STEM students coming forward in
some subjects but these tend to be in the traditional single subjects (e.g. Biology or Physics)
as opposed subjects which cover and require a combination of subjects (e.g. Engineering or
Materials Science). Much is already being done by individual institutions and organizations to
help inform school pupils of STEM subjects, but we would like to see more done to inform
school teachers as well as pupils at pre GCSE level of the full range of STEM subjects
available to them beyond school/college (for example what is Materials Science or Nuclear
Engineering and what job opportunities are there, etc).
• What effect, if any, will the English Baccalaureate have on the study of STEM
2.4: The inclusion of a science as one of the qualifying subjects is strongly supported. An
increased emphasis on high attainment in English and Mathematics should aid the study of
STEM subjects. How successful this will be in practice, of course, remains to be seen.
3.0 Graduate supply
3.1: From our perspective the current number of STEM students does not meet the
forward aspirations of the current UK strategy for growth. The growth of the high
technology, high value added sector demands STEM skills as indeed does modern
manufacturing processes. As an example, the recent House of Lords Select Committee’s
Report on Nuclear Research and Development Capabilities took evidence that there is a
massive under supply of graduates in this area with a consequent impact on the UK
industry’s ability to deliver. There are other examples, for example in wind engineering,
where some research and development activity has been invested in the far east (Singapore)
rather than in EU/UK at least in part as a consequence of lack of supply of engineering
graduates.
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3.2: We would believe it to be from our perspective. We do work hard to engage with
employers at a programme level (e.g. Visiting Lecturers and Professors from industry,
Industrial Advisory Boards, guest lectures and case studies) to try to ensure the content is
appropriate. Our attractiveness to international students is at least some indication that we
are seen as providing a high quality, relevant, education. However the curriculum is not
static; we continually review the provision to balance the needs of a changing commercial
environment with the provision of the necessary core knowledge and skills enhancement in
our student body. The close engagement of the professional institutions with the HE sector
leading to accreditation is a vital part of this process and provides a baseline assurance of
quality.
3.3: Again, we would believe this is the case with our graduates going into research,
industry and more broadly supporting the economy. In terms of research (and industry to a
large extent), it is probably fair to comment that the adoption of 4 year Integrated Masters
degrees has helped with this, as students have an extra year to gain further broadening
knowledge as well as applying this within a significant research/industrial project. Some
industries specifically target Integrated Masters graduates rather than Bachelor degree
holders.
institutions?
3.4: We hope they will not have a negative effect but we are concerned with the low level
of Government funding that appears to be available to support high cost subjects (e.g.
Engineering). It is likely that the cost side will reduce the total number of places available to
students in these subjects over time if nothing is done about this. In order to maintain
financial viability of at least some STEM subjects, particularly in engineering many HE
institutions rely on international students and there are concerns over the long term viability
of this and the risk from the UK government’s immigration policy, which is having an adverse
affect on attracting overseas students to the UK.
3.5: We also note that students will be graduating with higher levels of debt. This may mean
that they are particularly tempted by higher salary levels. Very good STEM graduates are
already strongly recruited into the Finance and Business sectors, often influenced by the
larger salaries/financial rewards available and this is likely to be further accentuated.
• What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to develop
3.6: We do not feel that this has a negative effect. However, as addressed below, we
consider it essential that research informs teaching particularly in fast moving technology
fields. We note that the amount of resource which needs to be devoted to the research
assessment to make it meaningful inevitably impacts other activities in HE, including the
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teaching agenda. We believe we can successfully balance the demands of the research and
teaching agendas but this does present challenges which should not be minimized.
• What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it necessary for

all universities to teach undergraduates and post graduates and conduct
3.7: We believe it is essential that universities connect their teaching and research to
deliver high quality graduates. Arguably teaching led universities do not necessarily need to
have conducted the research themselves, although it is certainly the case that inspiring
students to succeed is best achieved via passionate research leaders who are shaping the
subjects going forward. It is this vision that is so important in engendering innovative
thinking.

3.8: Generally speaking – yes. One or two parts of the UK might feel less well supplied than
others but there is normally a HE Institution (HEI) offering STEM courses somewhere
nearby (and most graduates are mobile anyway). There are some specialist subjects (e.g.
Materials – notably Textiles) where there are only a small number of HEIs covering these
subjects but arguably some of this links to supply and demand anyway.
background?
3.9: We do realize that there is a significant gender imbalance in many STEM subjects. For
our own part we run a Women into Science, Engineering & Technology (WiSET) scheme at
Manchester (see http://www.wiset.eps.manchester.ac.uk/index.html). We do find that there
is a drop off in engagement at each stage (e.g. GCSE to A level, A level to degree and degree
to employment) and the real focus needs to be at school level. For many subjects (notably in
Engineering and Technology) there is a good representation of most ethnic minorities
(usually the exception is Black Afro Caribbean) although we are finding that there is a
difference in degree attainment levels which is being further investigated. We have not, to
date, conducted research on socio-economic background.
4.0 Post-graduate supply
4.1: This has improved significantly in recent years notably through the support from the
Roberts Funding (now stopped) and the development of Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs).
Historically most of the training was around continuing in research but this has now been
broadened across a range of transferable and entrepreneurial skills. There is still a slight
imbalance but this is more from the student’s own perspective of expecting to be continuing
in a research career (i.e. more expect to do so than actually do) so do not take up some of
the training opportunities.
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4.2: It might be useful to note that, from an international perspective, at least one fast
developing country is on record as saying they wish their top students to undergo PhD
degrees in STEM subjects as, in their view, this engenders the correct level of skills for
entrepreneurial and innovative thinking.

4.3: We are concerned that the number of UK PhD students in some STEM areas (mainly
applied science and engineering) is already much lower than ideal and could drop in the
near future mostly due to funding availability. This will reduce the competitiveness of the
UK compared to other countries. Whilst across STEM subjects there is probably a
reasonable balance between UK and non UK PhD students, there are some subjects
(notably Engineering) where there is already a considerably greater number of non UK PhD
students being trained and, with current post study visa legislation, most of these will not
remain in the UK for work.
• What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on quality and number of
4.4: In the short term, the number of PhD students has increased slightly for us but we are
expecting this to decrease with the removal of the Research Council project studentships
due to Government funding, which we consider as a negative step. The quality of the
student intake to date has been good and we are expecting the graduates to be of a
commensurate high quality.
4.5: We assume that the term “Masters degrees” is only counting post-graduate study here
(note: we also teach 4 year Integrated Masters degrees (e.g. MEng) as a first degree and
there is some state funding for these). Most Masters degrees are used to improve the skills
and knowledge of the student often for their own benefit (employment) so it seems fair
that there is less state funding than for PhDs but if we are to provide upskilling of our
graduate population some state support for UK Masters degree students (e.g. reasonable
loan facilities) is essential. We are already not internationally competitive in providing
support in this area.

4.6: Students will be graduating with higher levels of debt. This is likely to put off some very
good students (especially from particular socio-economic backgrounds) from continuing to
post-graduate (notably PhD) study. As previously commented, this may also mean that
graduates are particularly tempted by higher salary levels, leading to a dilatation of high
achieving graduates working in STEM subjects.
5.0 Industry
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them?
5.1: It will be important to continue to have close working relationships between

universities and industry (e.g. to offer a year in industry as part of the degree). More could
probably be done to offer income earning opportunities alongside studies (notably in
vacation times) but STEM employers may need to consider their financial packages against
those of others if they are to attract the best.
5.2: There are models, for example in the electrical power industry, where industrial
consortia working together have provided relatively modest financial incentives to students
to study in this area. This has been successful in addressing skills shortages and could
possibly be adopted by other sectors.
5.3: Many STEM graduates will wish to achieve professional standing and industry can also
look to specifically support graduates with this (note: many already do).
5.4: Hopefully the engagement/dialogue between the two is good. From our perspective, as
previously mentioned, we have Industrial Advisory Boards to help to guide the curriculum.
We also invite many employers onto our campus to give presentations, showcase
themselves in exhibitions and interview students. With some of the larger companies we
have high level steering groups to ensure that communication is taking place at various levels
between the two organizations.
5.5: The role of professional institutions is also important here as they act in many STEM
subjects as accrediting bodies.
6.0 International comparisons
• What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in STEM
6.1: STEM subjects do seem to be more popular in many countries compared to the UK.
This is notably in rapidly developing countries such as China and in general across the Far
and Middle East. To what extent they offer a model that we can follow is debatable as many
of the students complete their studies at international institutions, for which the top UK
universities are recognised as leaders. What is interesting is the way these subjects are
considered important in these countries by students, parents, industry and Governments in
a way which is traditionally lacking in the UK. As an example, a recent student from Pakistan
when asked why he chose to study engineering stated in his country engineering and
medicine were considered the top two professions - in front of, say, law or finance.
16 December 2011
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University of Manchester, University of Southampton and

Government, Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 281-312)
Evidence Session No.10. Heard in Public. Questions 281 - 312

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Krebs
Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Patel
Lord Rees of Ludlow
Lord Winston
________________
Ian Bradley, Head of Academic Services, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences,
University of Manchester; Jo Doyle, Director of the International Office, University of
Southampton; Neil Hughes, National Lead for Temporary Migration, Home Office; and
Glyn Williams, Head of Migration Policy, Home Office.
Q281 The Chairman: First, I apologise to our second group of witnesses. As this is just
before Prorogation and the end of the Session, there are a lot of Bills going through the
House and I think that we are going to have another vote soon, but I apologise for the delay
in bringing you in. Perhaps I could ask each of our witnesses to say, first, who they are. If
you want to make a brief statement, then please do so. We will start with Mr Bradley.
Ian Bradley: Thank you. I am Ian Bradley and I am from the University of Manchester. My
role there is head of academic services in the faculty of engineering and physical sciences,
which effectively covers all the academic administration around student recruitment and
dealing with undergraduate, postgraduate taught and postgraduate research students. I have
worked at both UMIST and the University of Manchester in science and engineering subjects
for just under 20 years.
Jo Doyle: My name is Jo Doyle. I am director of the international office at the University of
Southampton. I have held that role for the past 10 years but have been in the employment of
the university for 24 years.
Neil Hughes: I am Neil Hughes. I am director of temporary migration at the UK Border
Agency. Temporary migration covers all the routes to work, to train and to study in the UK,
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and I am responsible for operational day-to-day decision making on cases from applicants
and from sponsors in universities.
Glyn Williams: I am Glyn Williams. I am head of migration policy in the Home Office. We
were responsible for advising the Minister on the reforms to the student visa routes, among
other things that we have been doing over the past 12 months or so.
Q282 The Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed. I wonder whether we could start
with you, Mr Bradley. At Manchester, have you seen a drop in applications for some subjects
from certain countries, at undergraduate or postgraduate level, as a result of the change to
the visa system?
Ian Bradley: The clear answer to that question is yes. It is still early days in terms of seeing
how everything filters through, because some of the changes came in only part-way through
last year’s cycle. I would say that India, in particular, is a country where we have seen a quite
significant shift. As I look across postgraduate taught in what we would describe as STEM
subjects, we have seen probably a 37% reduction in Indian students coming to the University
of Manchester. This ranges from subject to subject, but typically it is around 30% up to 35%
across disciplines such as chemical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering,
mechanical, aerospace and civil engineering, and particularly at postgraduate computing
science level, where we have seen a 48% drop. So India is a country where we have already
seen a drop and we are still seeing some of that drop filtering through in current
applications.
We are also expecting that there may be a shift in areas such as pharmacy and optometry,
where a lot of the undergraduate students, as part of their progression to employment,
need to take a training year, which is normally after graduation. There are issues with the
post-study work route and the changes that are happening there. If you take a big company
like Boots, for example, which, as we are probably all aware, employs many pharmacists, its
standard training contract for year 1 post graduation is around the £19,000 mark. Then the
graduates progress above the standard £20,000 limit.
Q283 The Chairman: Could you just drill down into those numbers for us? Is the post-
study work route the real problem here?
Ian Bradley: It is difficult to say specifically but our belief, certainly for the India market, is
very strongly that it is the post-study work visa route.
Jo Doyle: Perhaps I could just give you a little bit of context. Over the past number of years,
the university has seen a growth in overall applications. So, for example, in the past three
years, we have seen a 32%, 36% and 23% growth in applications at this time of the year.
When the changes to the post-study work regulations were announced this time last year,
we were running at a 23% increase in applications. By the end of the recruitment cycle, that
had reduced to 11%, and I think that that is probably a direct result of the post-study work
change. This year, our applications are up only 3%, so that is quite a big shift.
In the three years that I have been talking about, the biggest growth has been in
postgraduate applications, with 47%, 44% and 32% respectively. Again, it was running at 32%
at the time of the post-study work announcement last year, and it then reduced to 13% by
the end of the year. This year, our growth in postgraduate taught applications at this stage is
only 4%. So I am looking at the same period over four years.
In terms of specific markets, like Mr Bradley, we have seen a significant decrease from India
and, specifically in STEM subjects, a reduction so far this year of 23% from India. We have
also seen a 33% overall drop from Pakistan and a 65% drop in electronics and computer
science, which is a premier department in the UK. There has been a similar decrease—that
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is, 65%—in maths. Although the numbers have been smaller, there has been a significant
decrease from Sri Lanka, which is down 27%, but the figure is down 60% for electronics and
computer science. Interestingly, Nigeria is down 19%, with engineering down 24% and
natural sciences down 32%.
Q284 The Chairman: Again, what specific element of the changes to the rules do you
put that down to?
Jo Doyle: Given that the English language is not a major issue in those areas, the main issue
has to be post-study work. My view is that, in the decision-making process that students and
their parents and advisers go through when thinking about which country they are going to
study in, they take a lot of issues into account. The possibility of having work experience and
of having paid placements so that they can pay off the debts that they and their parents have
incurred in sending them here is an issue. At the end of they day, they may not take up that
option. They may decide to go home immediately, but it is an important factor in their
decision-making process.
Q285 Lord Krebs: Very briefly, perhaps I may ask the witnesses from UKBA and the
Home Office about this. In addition to the evidence that we have heard from Jo Doyle and
Ian Bradley, we have a letter here from the vice-chancellor of the University of Aston,
particularly focusing on engineering. Part of our inquiry is to understand whether enough
STEM graduates are being produced to meet the needs of industry. Julia King, the VC of
Aston makes the very compelling argument that, as a result of the changes in the post-study
possibility of staying on to work, there will be a real shortfall in the supply of engineers to
meet the needs of the UK economy. I wondered whether this is recognised as a
consequence of the changes in the visa requirements.
Q286 Neil Hughes: Our position is that, from the changes we have made, we do not see
that they necessarily need to lead to any of the reduction in numbers that has been
described. The tier 1 post-study work visa has been removed—it will be removed at the end
of this month—but it has not been removed and not replaced. We have replaced it with the
ability of people who would have previously qualified for tier 1 post-study work, if they get a
job with a UK employer and work at graduate level, to go straight into tier 2 in the same
way as they previously were able to do under the tier 1 post-study work route. The reason
that we have made the changes is that tier 1 post-study work, as an entire route, did not
work. Of the approximately 50,000 people a year who went into tier 1 post-study work and
applied for an extension two years later or moved to a different category, around a third
were working at graduate level, putting their post-graduate qualification to really good use—
that was great. About another third were working at medium skill level—not at graduate
level—and the remaining third were working in either low-skilled jobs or not working at all.
What we were effectively doing is taking 50,000 graduates, and then putting about two-
thirds of them into the UK labour market, where there is already a surfeit of UK graduates,
and just adding them to the mix. That is not achieving the goals we set out to achieve, so
what we have done is change that to be targeted. If you have a good degree—and,
presumably, the people we are talking about will have a degree in a subject that employers
want—you can get a job with an employer and go and get a job with that employer. That is
targeted, sensible and does not create barriers for UK graduates who are trying to find
work.
Q287 Lord Krebs: If the decreases we have heard about are not due to the new rules,
what is your hypothesis for these dramatic figures?
Glyn Williams: We do not know. That remains to be seen—
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Q288 Lord Krebs: So it is just coincidence that it happens to occur at the same time as
the changes in immigration restrictions
Glyn Williams: There may be a direct causal link, but there are other factors at play such as
exchange rates, fees that are being charged, the recession in India and perceptions.
Lord Winston: The perception is that we are a no-go area for foreign students.
Neil Hughes: That has happened in India, but it has not happened in China, Australia or all
the other markets. The sub-continent has seen decreases—we know that from our own
figures. Why has that penetrated only in the sub-continent? China has more than stood up,
so I do not think you can say that there is anything we have done systemically.
Q289 The Chairman: Is not this £20,000 earnings figure a barrier? That is not a
perception, is it? It is really quite difficult to guarantee at least £20,000 a year in order to
repay the debts. In reality, is not the Indian sub-continent far more sophisticated in terms of
the issue of debt? The Chinese market is very different. I am interested in how you came to
these conclusions.
Glyn Williams: I do not think that we have come to any conclusions as yet. The post-study
work route closes on 6 April. We announced that a year ago and we will have to see what
happens. I would not say that we have come to any firm conclusions. On the £20,000, it is
important to bear in mind that the post-study work route did not guarantee anyone a job; it
allowed graduates to stay on in the UK to look for a job but they were not guaranteed to
get a job at any level—and we know, as Neil Hughes said, that a lot of them were working in
supermarkets and petrol stations and all the rest of it. You would have thought, if we are
talking about STEM graduates who have valuable skills, that they would have been able to
access the UK labour market, although we of course know that British graduates are
struggling to access the British labour market as well. At this time, it is tough for everyone.
Neil Hughes: Just to be clear, we did not choose £20,000. We did not pluck the figure of
£20,000 out of the air. It came to us from the Migration Advisory Committee—an
independent group of labour market experts. It was on its advice that we set the threshold.
The Chairman: We are not blaming you for anything. We do not blame anyone. We are
just trying to find—
Lord Winston: I have to say that, at my own laboratory, it has been quite difficult to
employ people after they have had a graduate experience to do jobs that were not easily
done by a British graduate, even though they had those particular skills. It has been a real
battle to try to get them a work permit. This has exacerbated the situation quite
considerably.
The Chairman: The last word is with you, Mr Bradley.
Ian Bradley: Something was said about perceptions, which I thought would be helpful to
come back on. We have a survey of our international students—the International Student
Tracking Survey—which tracks Manchester and a number of other universities. Within that
survey there is a question about awareness of post-study work routes. Of the 2010
graduates, 62% commented that before they came to study that was something of which
they were very aware of. However, of those 2010 graduates, only 13% were actually
recorded as being in employment in the UK post study. So there is a real perception issue
there, whereby students are thinking that it is something that may be an opportunity for
them. I take the point from my colleagues that there are graduates who have used the post-
study work route for a variety of different things, but I think that the £20,000 requirement is
a potential barrier for some. I quoted Boots earlier, and I think that we would all consider
working as a pharmacist at Boots as being a good graduate-level job, but in year 1 after
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graduation £20,000 is not what Boots pay. In year 2 or 3, it pays £30,000 or £35,000. It is
about that barrier.
The Chairman: We will move on.
Q290 Lord Patel: I think that much of this ground has been covered, but I should like
again to ask, particularly the witnesses from the Home Office, whether they have seen a
drop in visa applications to institutes of higher education in recent years, in both
undergraduates and postgraduates—and particularly in what subjects. Perhaps you might
also say what countries they are from.
Glyn Williams: In terms of the overall numbers for all the kinds of student visas for
universities, private schools and private colleges, there were 176,000 in 2005, 207,000 in
2008, 274,000 in 2009—that was the record, after tier 4 of the points-based system was
introduced—and 254,000 in 2010 and 236,000 in 2011. So it remains the case that 2011 is
the third-highest year on record and was higher than when the system was pre-points based
in 2008, when the figure was 207,000. We cannot disaggregate those figures by university or
course.
Q291 Lord Patel: Can you disaggregate by undergraduate and postgraduate subjects?
Glyn Williams: We know that in 2009, the 155 universities in the system accounted for
about half the student visas—133,000. More than half of those were doing postgraduate
studies of some description. I do not know how many of those were doing STEM subjects.
Q292 Lord Krebs: Just on a factual point. When you do those inter-year comparisons,
do you normalise them in any way? The total flow of students from around the world in
international exchange must increase over time as developing countries become more
affluent and people go overseas. So you cannot quote just raw numbers; you have to
normalise them. Do you do that?
Glyn Williams: I am quoting from the official statistics.
Lord Krebs: But are they normalised?
Glyn Williams: I do not know. I shall have to check that.
Lord Krebs: Can you check and get back to us?
Q293 The Chairman: Can I just leave this issue and bring in Baroness Neuberger?
Neither of you—I am pointing particularly at the two university representatives—mentioned
the issue of the complexity of the applications for visas. We had some interesting evidence
from LGC, which basically said that it had offered a candidate a particular role who then had
to go out of the country in order to be able to apply, so there was not only a time delay but
a cost as well, which made coming back quite prohibitive. Again, is this perception or
reality?
Jo Doyle: There are a number of issues. There was a UCISA survey of students who had
achieved a visa and arrived in the UK about their experience, and the stand-out response for
me was that they found the guidance confusing and unhelpful. Many students are relying on
agents in country, for example, to help them get through the visa process. I have an example
of a Venezuelan student—sorry, an Iraqi student—and his wife, both of whom were
sponsored in the university doing a one-year English for academic studies programme. They
are on a student visitor visa and they have a two year-old daughter, but they can bring a
dependent into the country for only six months so they have to go back after that time and
951
apply for another visa in order to keep their two year-old daughter with them. So there are
complexities in the system.
We have also found that there is inconsistency in the guidance that is given in different hubs
around the world. There are issues about potential students having to travel from their
home country to another one in the region to get the visa. That costs them time and
money, and increases the impression of complexity and cost. As I think Lord Winston said,
it also gives an unwelcoming impression. Obviously the visa system is there to ensure that
only genuine people come to the UK and do not overstay or abuse the rights that they are
given, but we make it very complex. The points-based system was based on the premise of
making things simpler, and indeed there is no doubt that it is simpler—there is probably less
idiosyncrasy in the system than there used to be in the past with individuals making
decisions—but there is still complexity and a lack of clarity. Because of the frequent changes
that have occurred, not everyone has kept up to speed around the world.
We have had additional complexity when the rules have changed during a major recruitment
cycle. This time last year, when the English-language requirements changed so that students
coming in had to have a B2 level 5.5 IELTS in each of the four elements of the English
language, we at Southampton had to retrospectively review about 8,500 offers that were out
there to see whether we had made offers that were compatible with that new requirement.
Q294 The Chairman: I really think that we would like a response from you, Mr
Williams. Are we deliberately making it so difficult? Is that part of policy?
Glyn Williams: No, we would not accept that the process is difficult.
Q295 The Chairman: Do you accept the criticism that you just heard from
Southampton?
Glyn Williams: The fact remains that we are issuing 230,000 to 250,000 student visas a year
in tier 4. That is quite a lot of students in a very short time over the summer who manage to
get their hands on a visa, which suggests that a lot of people have managed to navigate their
way through the system successfully, if I am being slightly polemical about it. Compare us
with the Americans, for example, who insist that all students are personally interviewed; we
do not do that. We do very few interviews. With regard to the hub-and-spoke
arrangements, I do not know whether a particular case was in mind but generally the
student does not have to move country—it is the passport that moves country and the visa
decision is taken at the hub, while the student stays in the spoke and applies at the visa
application centre. The fact is that the UK Border Agency is dealing with a very significant
amount of applications—more than 1,000 a day and more than that in the summer—and in
our opinion it turns those around very quickly. I suspect that our system will bear
comparison with those of the Americans, the Australians and the Canadians.
Q296 Lord Broers: You have just answered part of my question, but I will ask it of the
universities too: do you have evidence of our competitors doing much better than we are in
this area? Where are we losing all these students to? Are there examples of best practice
overseas that we could learn from regarding visas and other things?
Ian Bradley: It is probably too early to say at the moment, simply because it is difficult to
get numerical information from other countries at this point. India will be an interesting one
to compare. According to statistics that I saw, last year there were 57,000 Indians on visas in
the UK, which equalled the number in the US, Australia and Canada put together, so India is
very much the situation of choice. Australia in particular will be the one to look at, as I
believe that it has moved away from its points-based system. It was not exactly the same
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system—there were other quirks and issues within it—but I suspect that we will see
substantial growth in the Australian system over the next couple of years.
Jo Doyle: The UK has lost market share, primarily to the US, which has relaxed its
requirements since 9/11. Australia has seen a decrease in the number of its international
student visas over recent years due to a number of issues—partly its visa requirements and
partly issues of safety, particularly from the Indian sub-continent. The Knight report is
looking to reverse that, but I do not think that Australia ever wants to get back to that
massification of international students; it wants an increase but not a massive increase.
Other countries are coming up on the inside—Canada, New Zealand and our European
partners—more of which are offering high-level programmes in STEM subject areas, in
English.
The Chairman: Lord Lucas, do you want to come in?
Lord Lucas: No.
Q297 Baroness Neuberger: We have been hearing quite a lot about the contrast
between the actual facts and the perception. I think there is a fairly clear perception that the
UK is not as welcoming to students as it once was. I was particularly going to ask the people
here from the Home Office about what the Government are thinking about doing in
responding to calls to improve the perception of the UK as a country to come and study in.
Neil Hughes: If you look back three or four years ago when people thought we were
welcoming, allegedly, we were not just welcoming genuine students; we found a lot of
people using the student route to come to the UK for other purposes and the student route
was abused. That was not just by students. I am talking about some institutions in the UK
that were, frankly, ripping students off. I think that the changes we have made have made it
much harder for people to abuse the student route and for institutions here to use the
student route to bring in people for other purposes. If taking that action, which I think was
the right thing to have done, has created a perception of being unwelcoming, then that is
unfortunate. I do not think anything that has been issued from our department will have
created that, but clearly it may have been portrayed that way. We have consistently said that
we welcome the brightest and the best. We want to support our world-class universities.
Our message has been consistent, that if you are genuine students doing high-quality and
high-value courses, we welcome you.
Q298 Baroness Neuberger: Can I interrupt you? I can see that that is what you feel you
are saying, but that is clearly not the perception that a lot of people are getting out there.
Given that that is the case and that UKCISA has recommended that, given the recent
negative publicity, the Border Agency needs to work with the Foreign Office and the British
Council to develop a different way of looking at all of this, how would you suggest that the
Government might respond?
Glyn Williams: I know that David Willetts, the Minister in BIS, is leading a task force,
consisting of the British Council, Universities UK, BIS, UKTI and so on, which is working to
maximise opportunities for higher education, and the Home Office is part of that task force.
The Home Office considers its particular remit to be clear about the actual rules that apply
in the student visa system. The UK Border Agency has its website, and the posts overseas
work locally with agents, host Governments and so on at the various education fairs to try
to get over the message of the requirements that students are asked to fulfil. That is the
main thing that the Home Office does. As Neil Hughes said, Damian Green has made a point
of saying that he wants to protect the universities and attract the brightest and best. That is
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reflected in the policy that we put in place, which in many ways favours higher education
institutions over others.
Q299 Lord Lucas: I understand that, but I think that the perception and the reality is that
you are not working together with the universities to produce a unified appeal to the
students that we want to attract. If you look at the US equivalent of the Border Agency’s
site, the first sentence there is: “The United States welcomes foreign citizens who come to
the United States to study”. If you go to the Border Agency site, you are into a convoluted,
badly laid out exploration of detailed visa rules, every page of which says, “Go away, go
away, go away”. The idea that somebody has sat down with the universities to produce
something that meets your and the universities’ requirements together is just not apparent.
Neil Hughes: I chair a meeting called the joint education task force that is made up of
Universities UK, English / UK and all the education bodies. We work with them on the
details of how the guidance is laid out and how the IT system works. We have really tried to
work closely with the sector wherever we can. The message is not getting out there. We do
not control the Indian media and, when we make an announcement, if people in Delhi or the
London correspondent of an Indian newspaper writes a story, we do not control that. We
control our press releases, and I think that if you look back through our press releases they
are fairly positive and welcoming, valuing universities and students. It is portrayed differently
by journalists, and I am sure that we have all suffered from that at times. That is something
that we are not in control of.
On the website, I take your point that we could probably make that a friendlier, more
welcoming place to be. At the same time, we have to explain the rules as they apply to the
hundreds of different scenarios with which we have to deal.
Q300 Lord Winston: There are so many questions, but let us come back to what we
have discussed already. What, in your opinion, do you consider a sustainable number of
overseas international students within the higher education sector, or within an institution,
given the growing number of international students globally?
Jo Doyle: At the moment, Southampton has a target of 30% of its student body being from
outside the UK. That includes students from Europe. It is important in that to get some
element of diversity, so that UK students and international students who come to
Southampton have an international experience.
Q301 Lord Winston: Are you worried that having a large number of students from
outside the EC changes the culture of the university? Is that a problem? I am from Imperial
College, where we have groups of students talking Mandarin in corners, which is fine, but
there is a question of whether that affects the ethos of the university.
Jo Doyle: I think that it does affect the ethos of the university, and I think that it affects it
positively. It makes it a more international place. We are educating students to become
global graduates, to be able to work in an international environment. I would very much like
to see groups of home students sitting in corners speaking Mandarin. That would be a great
step forward. We would very much like our home students to have a more international
experience, not just within the university—having a diverse group of students whose
experience they can gain from—but also to go out of the UK as students elsewhere.
Students who have come halfway across the world are very brave people, and I have great
respect for them coming. Some of them are doing very difficult degrees in perhaps their
third, fourth or fifth language. I give them a great deal of respect and they add hugely to the
richness of the academic environment, not only for our students but for our staff. We also
have to think forward to the regeneration of the academic staff in our universities. Are we
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going to be able to recruit them just from within the UK? No. In Southampton, 40% of our
staff were born outside the UK. As colleagues in the Home Office have said, we need to
think about getting the brightest and the best here and retaining them for the economy.
Ian Bradley: We are probably not dissimilar to Southampton. When I look at STEM within
my areas of engineering and physical sciences, it is probably slightly over 30%. It varies very
much from subject to subject. Looking at chemistry, physics and astronomy, for example,
there is less significant international take-up than in, say, engineering. It also depends very
much on level: undergraduate, postgraduate taught and postgraduate research.
First, at undergraduate level, particularly at Manchester, we are quite large—a similar size in
many cases to Imperial. There is not a capacity issue, as such, in many subjects. We are not
turning away UK students at the expense of other students. We have large laboratories and
that allows us to cater for all our students. An important point that perhaps ties into your
previous session is on the postgraduate taught market. I know that colleagues earlier were
not able to commit, but we are seeing a significant drop in postgraduate taught applications
from UK students at the moment because of the funding changes coming through HEFCE. If
we did not have international students in many of our subjects, we would not be teaching
the masters course that we are. That is an important point to remember, picking up on the
previous session with the importance of masters and postgraduate training to UK business.
That is where we have quite a bit of capacity in many subjects, particularly as our UK—and,
to some extent, European—students drop away from the traditional numbers we have had.
Q302 Lord Winston: You have effectively answered my next question, which is about the
viability of universities without these students. Would you like to comment on that very
quickly?
Jo Doyle: Currently, our income from international students is about 9% of our turnover.
That is a very important 9%, with the uncertainty of the new fees regime coming in this
October and the impact that that may have on the postgraduate taught cohort from the UK
and Europe.
Ian Bradley: Sector wide, the average is probably around 15% of international income to
universities.
Q303 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Clearly, the taught postgraduate courses depend most on
the overseas students. Do you have any concerns about the quality of those courses? We
need to compete, as you say, with the US and with Australia for those. Are you happy that
the value for money that they are getting will be good, despite the higher fees?
Ian Bradley: In terms of international students, the fees are not changing significantly from
what they already are, which is admittedly quite high. The exchange rate was commented on
earlier. The exchange rate for most markets is quite positive, so the UK is seen as value for
money. We also have effectively a 51-week MSc programme, which is a three-semester
route in the UK compared to a four-semester route in Europe and the US. Often,
international students see concentrated one-year study as good. Quality-wise, we are still
seeing, and have probably seen for the past 10 years, the UK being the quality place in the
marketplace. When you go to the Middle East and the Far East, the UK is seen very much as
a high-quality route.
Q304 The Chairman: Can I just ask our two colleagues from the Home Office a
question? There seems to be a conflict of policy. There is a policy to try to reduce numbers,
yet the universities are required to increase numbers to balance the books. To put it
crudely, that is one of the things that you were saying. Do you speak to BIS? Neil Hughes is
smiling. What sort of conversations do you have in terms of finalising your policy?
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Glyn Williams: There are regular discussions at all levels, including ministerial level. The
Government have not set a limit, or cap, on student visa numbers. That is an important
point: there is no cap on student visa numbers. We have made certain policy changes, most
of which many would describe as basically common sense, bringing us more into line with
what other countries are doing. We think that those policy changes will have some
depressive impact on student visa numbers, but largely not in the university sector, let alone
the STEM sector—not least because, as I mentioned earlier, we put the universities in a
slightly privileged position compared with the rest.
Q305 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Of course, we would like that some of the best of these
people getting masters or PhD degrees who want to stay in the UK were able to stay in the
UK. Is it a concern that that is quite a big hurdle for some of them?
Neil Hughes: With the kind of graduate that we are talking about here, if they get a job
with an employer, they can work in the UK. They cannot stay in the UK and go and work in
the proverbial burger restaurant or somewhere like that. They need to be using the
qualification that they have just obtained. If they can do that, and an employer wants to
employ them, they can stay.
Q306 Lord Lucas: Mr Williams, do you as the Home Office see part of your role as being
to support British education, or is that BIS business? Do you just regard yourselves as the
guardians of the borders and recruitment is for BIS, or do you as the Home Office feel that
you have a role in promoting and supporting British education? Within that, I remain puzzled
as to why students are classed as migrants. When I went up to Oxford I was not a migrant
to Oxford, but when I came to work in London I was a migrant to London. There seems to
be a fundamental difference between being a migrant and going somewhere to study.
Glyn Williams: I think that we are part of the overall Government effort to this extent: we
want to create a student visa system which is clear and understandable and which, in itself,
does not place obstacles in the way of genuine students. That is the role that we, as a matter
of policy and operations, are trying to fulfil. On proactively going out and recruiting students,
we do not see that as part of our role but, if a student decides that they want to study at a
British university, we want them not to regard the visa process as a hurdle in its own right,
assuming that they are genuine students and all the rest of it.
In terms of the migration classification question, the Office for National Statistics keeps the
migrant stats. It uses the UN-approved definition of a migrant, which is basically that
anybody coming to or leaving the UK for more than 12 months is classed as a migrant, as
opposed to someone coming in as a visitor. The idea is that you need to draw the line
somewhere between purely ephemeral visitors and people who are staying for a longer
period. That is drawn at the 12-month point—the thinking being that those people will be
living in rented accommodation, consuming public services and public transport and so on,
so they are basically part of the resident population. They may intend to leave the UK after
three, four or five years, but while they are here they are part of the resident population to
all intents and purposes. That is why they are counted.
Q307 Lord Lucas: So it is not your decision at all. If the ONS changed its mind, you
would change your mind instantly, too?
Glyn Williams: Ministers have talked in terms of reducing net migration and they are using
the ONS figures to measure how they are doing against that aspiration.
Q308 Lord Broers: That leads into my question to a certain extent. There are reportedly
significant weaknesses in the data available to monitor students coming into and going out of
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the country. How do you plan to improve this so that, in future, the department has robust
benchmark data on which to develop and monitor the impacts of immigration policy?
Neil Hughes: For students coming in, we have all the data that we need to know who is
entering the UK. Everything is recorded. We have no bother at all knowing who has entered
the UK. As has been a matter of record, embarkation controls were reduced and removed
in 1996 and 1998, so we have not been able to count everybody out. Our e-Borders
programme now has 100% coverage of people leaving the UK if they are going outside the
EU or the EEA. Within two or three years, we will have data on 100% of people leaving the
UK. So the issue of not knowing who is leaving is gradually being addressed. The way that
we tackle it at the moment is that we place the responsibility on the sponsors—on the
universities, the English language schools et cetera—to tell us when people have arrived or
failed to arrive and to tell us when people have left their course early or failed to enrol and
so on. At least then we can begin the process of tracking and, if necessary, removing the
people who should not be here.
Q309 Lord Broers: You were talking earlier about the thirds—one-third is doing very
well, in good jobs, et cetera. You have been tracking those numbers for some time, I
imagine. Is the situation deteriorating?
Neil Hughes: Basically, that was the situation last year and it continues to be the situation
with the applications that we are seeing today. The route will close on 5 April next year.
That tracking is not about tracking people who leave but about tracking people coming to us
at the end of their period of permission to be here and saying, “I now want to do this; here
is what I have been doing for the past two years”. So when they made their next application
we were able to analyse what they had been doing previously.
Q310 Lord Krebs: On what other countries are doing, I quote from a British Council
report on the impact of visa changes on student mobility and the outlook for the UK, which
said that recent immigration changes “have managed to single out the UK as the country
with the toughest immigration regime… compared to its competitors”. It commented that
the USA, Australia and Canada are able to draw genuine and career-driven students away
from the UK. Is the British Council wrong?
Glyn Williams: Yes.
Lord Krebs: Can you explain why?
Glyn Williams: Not briefly, no. There are various factual errors in that report.
Lord Krebs: Can you write in and explain what is wrong with the British Council report?
Glyn Williams: We will. Those assertions are quite difficult to justify. When you try to
compare different visa systems around the world, it is as much an art as a science and there
are lots of different factors in play. I am particularly sceptical about assertions that the
American system has been more generous and user-friendly than the British one. It may be
that, in the past year or so, they have put in an extra effort but, certainly after 9/11—and
bearing in mind who committed 9/11; they were students—the Americans instituted what
was probably the tightest regime in the world. The Australian Knight report was mentioned
earlier. The Australians had increases in their student numbers which led to what they
considered to be a completely unsustainable position. Indian students were being attacked
and tragically murdered in Australia. There were lots of issues about the sustainability of the
visa system leading to that report. Whether you consider that the Australians’ system has
now been tightened up or relaxed is an interesting point when you look at what they are
actually doing.
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Lord Krebs: If it is an art, it would be interesting to look at your artwork versus the British
Council’s, so perhaps you could send something.
The Chairman: It would be useful to have a note on that if possible.
Q311 Lord Lucas: Mr Hughes, you said that you had all the information that you wanted
on incoming students, but earlier Mr Williams said that you could not disaggregate the data
as to from which sector students were coming, let alone which institution. Those two
remarks do not seem to tie together.
Neil Hughes: We know how many students are arriving and which students have arrived.
What we cannot do very easily, without a lot of effort, is answer the question “How many
are coming here to do physics courses?”. The way that our systems are designed means that
we cannot just pick out all the physics students very easily. We know who has arrived and
we know in what numbers they are arriving. Having to disaggregate that into publically
funded institutions versus private and those doing STEM courses as opposed to others—
disaggregation into various categories—is hard. We have the information; extracting and
disaggregating it is difficult.
The Chairman: But you do link together the entrance and exit data now.
Neil Hughes: When Southampton says, “This person left us last month”, we can now find
out whether they have exited the UK and gone outside the EU. Unfortunately, if they chose
to go home and thought, “I’ll have a day out in Paris and get a flight from Orly on the way
home”, we cannot find that out.
Ian Bradley: There could still be some mileage for universities and the Home Office
working closer together on data, particularly in terms of visa refusals. We, as the sponsors,
are effectively proposing people to receive visas. We then need to report later on who has
and who has not come. There is a chunk of data where sharing between us would help both
of our causes.
Q312 Baroness Neuberger: Very quickly, going back to the perception question, if it
was clear that the universities were talking to the Home Office and the Border Agency
about where those visas are refused, and some of the narrative was clear, would that
improve the perception somewhat?
Jo Doyle: I think that it would be very helpful. At the moment, as a highly trusted sponsor,
we are required to be judged by the number of students who leave and the number of
refusals we get. We know our refusal rate, but we do not know where they have come
from, so we are then not able to work with the markets that we are bringing students from
to ensure that we increase our uptake.
Ian Bradley: It is fair to say that, in many cases, we may have picked up examples that are
quite complex. There are also examples where a refusal has come through but, with the
university working with UKBA colleagues in China or other countries, we are able to
resolve that to ensure that the right information is brought forward. There are some
complexities. It is clear that there are significant numbers of students coming through. It is a
question of whether we can optimise that for everyone’s benefit.
The Chairman: On that positive note, I think that we will end this session. As a
Committee, all that we want to see is that we attract the very brightest from across the
world to come to the UK and that thereafter we can use their talents as much as we
possibly can for the benefit of the UK. That is quite a simple plea from the Chairman of this
Committee. On that note, we end with huge optimism. Thank you all very much indeed for
your time this afternoon.
958
University of Manchester – Supplementary written evidence
University of Manchester – Supplementary written evidence
At the end of the Science & Technology Sub-committee meeting that Ian Bradley attended
on 20 March, Lord Lucas asked how universities and the UKBA could work closer together
from a data sharing perspective. Mr Bradley sought some input from colleagues within The
University and it is felt it would be very helpful if the Sponsor Management System (which is
the system used) showed and transferred into our own systems:
• details (where relevant) of a student’s previous Tier 4 history. This will help us
better understand whether we are required to vouch for academic progression and
would enable us to assess them ‘against the 5 year rule’;
• more detail on the outcome of visa applications, rather than the current status of
‘USED’ – i.e., was it successful, when was it issued, and for how long?;
• the date on which someone has entered the country (leaving the country would also
be helpful, though I think their own systems do not always provide for this for them);
• information if the CAS has been cancelled by the UKBA or where the immigration
permission of the student has been curtailed.
16 April 2012
959
University of Nottingham, University of Oxford and University College London (UCL) –
University of Nottingham, University of Oxford and University

Transcript to be found under University of Oxford
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University of Oxford – Written evidence
General questions
A STEM subject is one in the biological, biomedical, physical, or mathematical sciences,

including the engineering sciences, computer sciences, and technology.
A STEM job is one in which the employee is engaged primarily because of his/her skills in
one or more STEM subjects and in which s/he is required to use those skills. The primary
product of the employer may be directly in a STEM area (e.g. a pharmaceutical or bioscience
or engineering company, energy, conservation, electronics, computing) or its research or
educational focus (a University or school), or it may rely on employees with STEM skills to
meet needs in a wide range of other areas, such as defence, finance, actuarial risk, or public
policy in STEM areas.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of an undergraduate education in the STEM subjects is

the ability to think analytically, including about abstract problems, and to use evidence to
support propositions. The associated skills a STEM graduate has – including numeracy,
literacy, ability to use information technology, programming skills, group working,
presentational skills, time organisation, and research skills – are all valuable to any employer.
Many non-STEM companies recognise this, and STEM graduates are therefore eminently
employable.
influence supply?
Demand is not something primarily for the University to comment on. Supply is closely
linked to the issue of funding. Nevertheless, it is clear that if the UK wants home-grown
talent in particular areas, for example those with the skills to run the next generation of
nuclear power stations, it will have to invest in training physicists and engineers with those
skills. However, national statistics point to the reduction both in the number of Home
students undertaking advanced level work in STEM subjects and in the number of available
studentships. The HEFCE advisory group's 2010-11 report records in detail the percentage
change in Home PGR numbers between 2002-3 and 2009-10: Physics and Astronomy + 10%;
Chemistry/Materials Science - 9%; Mathematical Sciences - 7%; Engineering and technology -
1%. The resulting total is -2% while the comparable figure for EU students is +13% and for
International Students +23% 556 .
16-18 supply
From Oxford’s perspective, the answer is that numbers of applications to the STEM subjects
have risen in recent years and therefore the University continues to be able to admit
556 Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects: the HEFCE advisory group’s 2010-11 report
961
students with the ability and the potential to profit from the type of intensive education we
offer. The relevant figures are that there has been an increase in applications to Oxford for
STEM subjects of 47% between 2006 and 2010. The school system has now been stable for a
number of years, and so the University knows what to expect of the skills base of those with
A-levels in the STEM subjects, and how provision has to be tailored to take account of the
areas of greater or lesser strength. It remains important that a broad enough range of
schools encourage students to take single science GCSE's and to consider science and maths
A-levels. This answer might change were there to be a wholesale change in A-level or post-
16 provision.
It is difficult to demonstrate cause and effect. However, as indicated above, we have seen a
substantial increase in the numbers of applications for STEM subjects in recent years, largely
but not totally from the UK.
We think the effect is likely to be positive, in encouraging the continuation of the study of
mathematics and at least one science, although clearly the level of attainment will be critical
in demonstrating capacity to meet the University's expectations for the study of the Sciences
in Oxford.
Graduate supply
Yes, if the totality of the supply is to be counted, that is of students and graduates from the
UK, EU, and overseas. However, the visa requirements for overseas students represent a
risk to the supply of undergraduate and postgraduate students to UK Higher Education, and
the immigration restrictions represent a risk to the supply of overseas STEM graduates
(whether educated in the UK or elsewhere) to fill vacancies requiring STEM qualifications or
skills in the UK.

From Oxford's perspective, as both a supplier and employer of STEM graduates, it is. We
are confident with our research-led learning and teaching that the Oxford STEM graduate,
with a BA or an Integrated Master's degree, is an excellent product, and highly employable.
The overall answer to this question needs to come from industry.
962
Yes, given the advances in skills training over the last six or seven years to improve the
employability of STEM (and other) graduates, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
The possible exception to this might be foreign language proficiency for which provision has
possibly not kept pace with need.
institutions?
It is not clear exactly what 'education reforms' this question refers to. The single largest
change at present is the introduction of the new arrangements for undergraduate fees. This
will have an effect on the funding of undergraduate science, because the premium provided
for the more expensive science subjects by HEFCE has been reduced. This represents a
danger both to the quality of teaching, for example, to meet the higher teaching costs
associated with practical learning and teaching (appropriate teaching laboratories and
equipment), and to the quantity of graduates in science, because if science courses cease to
be financially viable, they may cease to be taught, and the reduction in science courses that
took place in the 1990s might be repeated. The risk to quality is also compounded by the
reduction in capital funding which increases the problems for universities in refurbishing
teaching laboratories and maintaining and equipping them to the standards necessary for
modern scientific education. This is an area of major concern to the University.
It is also the case that a student on a four-year Integrated Master's degree – the standard
model in many sciences – will be faced with four years’ worth of fees debt. There may be a
risk that students will opt for shorter, three-year, courses, and so the overall quality of the
science graduate will be reduced. There is no sign of this at Oxford to date, and it is too
early to see the picture nationally, but this possibility should be closely monitored.
Where the standard model for other science subjects such as Biomedical Sciences is three
years, there are very few opportunities to pursue a funded MSc programme to develop the
skill level. This is currently a gap which is widening. As the HEFCE premium is reduced
without a corresponding provision of student loans for higher fees, there is a danger that
master's provision will become unviable.
We welcome the recent statements related to strategically important and vulnerable

subjects in the HEFCE advisory group's report 2010-11 which indicate recognition of the
limitations of a student-led funding system alone. Two paragraphs are particularly important
for us:
1. For these reasons, the government will maintain some public funding for teaching, ‘to
fund additional costs and public policy priorities that cannot be met by a student-led funding
system alone’. 557 The White Paper identifies a number of priorities for the use of teaching
funding, which include meeting ‘the additional costs of higher-cost subjects at undergraduate
and postgraduate levels such as medicine, science and engineering, that cannot be recovered
through income from graduate contributions’ and support for ‘those subjects which are
strategically important and vulnerable and require support to avoid undesirable reductions in
the scale of provision’. 558
557 White Paper, paragraph 1.25

558 Ibid, paragraph 1.26
963
2. With regard to subjects, the government is concerned to address costs beyond the
level that may be addressed through fees, given the restrictions on the level of fees that can
be charged. It is then, as it indicates in both its grant letter to HEFCE and in the White
Paper, concerned to identify and support subjects that may be strategically important and
vulnerable. This provides HEFCE with two key challenges: firstly, to establish an approach to
support high cost subjects that mitigates the impact of costs on the demand for and supply
of the highest cost provision; secondly, to identify those subjects where there is evidence
that the student-led system – operating alongside the dual support system for research, and
activities such as business engagement and international student recruitment – may not
sustain the flow of graduates, supply of programmes and expertise, and level of research
activity necessary to secure the national interest.
We would first want the subcommittee to consider the premise behind this question. The
University's view is that students are best educated initially in a disciplinary context, with
interdisciplinary activity being largely undertaken at graduate degree level and related to
research activity. It is often the case, based on US experience that joint majors (e.g.
biomedical engineering) lead to an inadequate preparation for undertaking research across
boundaries. On the question as posed, there is some limited concern that evaluating science
subjects for the REF in subject-based units of assessment might encourage concentration on
the core aspects of disciplines rather on cross-disciplinary themes. Secondly, the focus that
is required of academics to meet the REF criteria might over time detract from their ability
to develop new STEM degrees.
The Russell Group has commented on the relationship between teaching and research in its
submission to the Innovation, Universities, Skills and Science Select Committee Inquiry into
Students and Universities as follows:
"Research-led learning
The combination of teaching and research excellence in Russell Group universities

creates an ideal learning environment. Now more than ever, employers want graduates who
are entrepreneurial, good at problem-solving, able to handle uncertainty and who can work
both independently and within a team. Russell Group universities create the optimum
environment for students to develop these crucial skills by providing:
• opportunities to engage in research processes and undertake independent projects;
• access to leading thinkers, world-class experts in their fields as well as cutting-edge
researchers;
• high-quality libraries and facilities and a curriculum informed by world-class research;
• highly motivated and talented peer group to interact with.
Russell Group universities offer world-class teaching in an environment that instils

independence of thought and learning. It is a model that ensures we continue to produce
capable, self-motivated graduates of the highest standard.
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We would like to emphasise that any consideration of the balance between teaching and
research should recognise the importance of research-led learning to the student
learning experience.
Rather than considering “the balance between teaching and research” as if these are
separate entities or processes, the Russell Group believes that it is more accurate to
consider how teaching and research interact within the broader context of a research-led
learning environment. As institutions which are able to demonstrate excellence in both
research and teaching..., Russell Group universities provide an environment in which
students learn through research, adding value to the student experience. We welcome
reports by HEFCE14 and the Research Forum15 which have pointed to the benefits or
added value of learning in a research-intensive environment."
We endorse this statement.
With regard to the question whether it is necessary for all universities to teach
undergraduates and post graduates and conduct research, it depends what is wanted of the
STEM graduate. If what is wanted are research-ready leaders of the future, of the sort that
the Russell Group has described, then it is essential that the graduate is trained in research
active departments. If what is wanted are generally scientifically literate graduates, with
STEM skills but not trained to drive forward research, then a teaching-only model may
suffice. The two models of delivery may coexist, but the product, in the form of the
graduate, will not be the same.

It is perhaps not for any one institution to answer this question on its own. However, what
an institution offering STEM subjects can offer a local area are (1) a place for educating
students from that area who wish to learn locally, and (2) knowledge exchange with local
industry. Most universities offering STEM subjects are located in the main population
centres, and the main population centres are distributed throughout the UK.
The single most important thing is to provide sound advice on subject choice and
encouragement to continue with the sciences to all pupils before they decide on their GCSEs.
We engage in a wide range of activities to encourage under-represented and target groups

to apply to study science at university – in general, and at Oxford in particular. Some of
those are set out in our OFFA agreement. We actively participate in the Athena Swan and
Project Juno programmes, we offer Christmas Lectures in the sciences primarily to (former)
Aim Higher schools, we offer a Women in Science residential course for Year 12 girls, we
offer the UNIQ summer schools to encourage application to Oxford from under-
represented groups, we provide open days, we participate in scientific outreach work, we
encourage visits to our museums and botanic garden, and we are considering a bridging
scheme for those accepted to help with the transition to studying science at Oxford.
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However, as set out in the Russell Group’s publication Informed Choices, if the a pupil has not
chosen to take mathematics and other sciences at GCSE level, s/he will not be able to take, and so
offer, the right A-levels to study science at university.
Universities and the Scientific Societies can help with this, but they cannot solve this
problem alone.
The current training is sufficiently sensitive. Employers of STEM PhD students will want, first
and foremost, a student trained in research in their subject area. The RCUK Joint Skills
Statement, now the Vitae Researcher Development Statement/Researcher Development
Framework, backed initially by the RCUK 'Roberts' Skills Funding, has widened the skills
base of PhD students, and developed their employability. The loss of the Roberts funding,
and the reliance on income from fees and from (declining) overheads on research grants
may jeopardise the progress made in providing for development of these wider skills. Other
initiatives, such as the requirement for students funded from the BBSRC DTP to go on
internships during a four year period of funding, will develop employability skills further. But
a balance has to be struck between the time spent on research, and the time spent
specifically on skills training, especially in the context of a continued emphasis on timely
submission and completion rates.

From the Oxford perspective, the UK was supporting the right number of PhD studentships,
but going forward, with the reduction in funding of the Research Councils for research
studentships in STEM subject areas, it will cease to do so.
The demand for doctoral places outstrips supply, and the competition means that the quality
of those accepted for research studentships is extremely high. The quality of the research
training provided means that the quality of the graduate with a doctorate is also high. The
Oxford DPhil in the STEM subjects is almost always of publishable quality, and many of the
graduates will have published before completing their doctorate. The EPSRC PhD Prize
scheme, which provides funds for a limited number of students to work at the University for
a short period after they have submitted, is valuable in increasing the publication rate. The
quality of the doctoral training is evidenced by the demand for our postgraduates, for
research posts or for STEM–related posts in industry or the professions.
The cohort-based approach to training pioneered by the Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs)
has been very influential. It has encouraged greater concentration on the skills training in the
first year of the doctorate beyond the DTCs themselves; in the Mathematical, Physical and
Life Sciences at Oxford, we have launched a Graduate Academic Programme which provides
the opportunity for postgraduates in any department to undertake skills training provided by
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other departments across the division. Within departments, there is also more of a focus
than hitherto on group-based training in the first year. The four-year funding for DTC
studentships, and the facilities afforded by the Research Councils grants, are also
advantageous, and are capable of producing the more rounded researcher.
If there is a down side, it is that most of the DTCs to date have been in specific subject
areas. This means that funds and students can be clustered in narrower subject areas,
increasing the supply of trained researchers in those areas, but potentially to the neglect of
other areas that might not have been prioritised by a particular research council or other
funding body at a particular point in time.
An alternative model might be to use cohort based training and four-year funding, but to
apply it to wider subject areas. The opportunities available to graduate students within the
sizeable Oxford departments are already considerable and complement the particular
opportunities provided by Doctoral Training Centres.
The standard model in many of the STEM subjects is the Integrated Master's, the four-year
degree comprising undergraduate and taught master's level training, and culminating in an
award such as the MChem or MPhys. This is the route by which most undergraduate STEM
students in Oxford will achieve a Master's level qualification, and through which they will
enter doctoral work if they so choose. This is one reason why the number of stand-alone,
one-year, taught Master's degrees in the STEM subjects at Oxford is relatively low.
Another reason is that there is no state funding for taught Master's degrees in the STEM
subjects. This is potentially a significant access issue, for it means that UK graduates who
have not had the opportunity, for whatever reason, to take an Integrated Master's degree,
can only fund their Master's level study through industrial sponsorship, if that is available,
self-funding, for those who can afford it, or through commercial loans. This also potentially
restricts training that is of direct benefit to industry, as some Master's degrees tend to be
focussed on industrial and technological imperatives. This is a particular problem in the
biomedical sciences where integrated Master's degrees are not the norm.
For the STEM subjects in Oxford, however, the priority remains the funding of doctoral
studentships and routes to the DPhil, not free-standing Master's degrees.
It is too early to say whether the £9,000 fee will impact on the willingness of graduates to
pursue a research career. In the STEM subjects most would have run up a debt of four years
worth of fees and maintenance by the time they would embark on a doctorate. If they have
become debt-averse by then, it may well dissuade them from entering a further period of
low financial reward, depending on how important it is to them to start repaying the loan
straight after graduating. Such aversion may be greater among those from some under-
represented groups. This is speculation at this stage, but is a worry and we attach
considerable importance to the government's commitment (in responding to the Smith
Review) that it would continue 'to monitor progression to postgraduate study as our
reforms to undergraduate funding and finance take effect'.
967
Industry

them?
Paid internships in the summer would be a major attraction; they have to be paid, as many
students will be working in the vacations to reduce their debts; it is also extremely
important from the point of view of access, otherwise only the well-off will be able to take
up what is on offer.
A larger number of CASE awards from industry would be beneficial to encourage research
students to engage with industry as part of their studies.
A major incentive would be the willingness of industry to pay at least in part for their
recruit's education by meeting some proportion of the graduate's debt.
graduates?
It is important for research active departments to engage constructively with local and
national industry, to ascertain what industry requires from universities, and how they might
provide that. Consideration should be given to providing full support for students if the
supply is inadequate. Top-up CASE awards are clearly welcome - but the need may well be
for industrial awards carrying full stipend and tuition fees.
subjects in other countries
The low level of research spend by GDP in the UK puts us at a competitive disadvantage
compared with Europe and the USA. We are currently ranked 6th in the G7 and 8th in the
G10 group of industrialised countries by this measure.
The new fee regime in the UK is one of the highest in the industrial world (and especially in
relation to European competitors); its long-term effects on STEM (and other) subjects have
yet to be seen.
The esteem in which STEM graduates are held in the UK is lower than in some competitors,
such as Germany and France.
9 December 2011
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University of Oxford, University College London (UCL) and

University of Nottingham – Oral evidence (QQ 246-280)

Members present

Lord Broers
Lord Krebs
Lord Lucas
Baroness Neuberger
Lord Patel
Lord Rees of Ludlow
Lord Winston
________________
Dr Phil Clare, Associate Director, Research Services and Head of Knowledge Exchange,
University of Oxford; Professor Stephen Caddick, Vice-Provost (Engineering), University
College London; and Professor Chris Rudd, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Pro-
Vice Chancellor for Knowledge Transfer, University
Q313 The Chairman: Good afternoon. I welcome our panel and members of the public
to this session. In particular, I welcome Claudia Havranek who is doing biosciences at
Oxford University—we are delighted to see you here—and we are delighted to see
everybody else as well. This is a historic day for the Science and Technology Select
Committee because we are being webcast in a unique experiment, so please be very careful
because there are very detailed profiles of everybody as they speak this afternoon. It is also
being podcast, so the whole world is listening as you give your evidence. There is no
pressure on you at all but you are very, very welcome. This is a really important evidence
session for us to really try to get to the bottom of the Wilson report but also to look at
whether we are giving our STEM graduates the right employability skills in order to go out
and be able to meet the needs of a huge database in terms of workforce.
Could you please, for the record, say who you are? If you want to give a very short
introductory statement, then please do so, but otherwise we shall get straight into the
questions.
Professor Rudd: It is a pleasure to be here. My name is Chris Rudd and I am a professor of
mechanical engineering at the University of Nottingham and the pro-vice chancellor who
takes responsibility for business knowledge transfer and commercialisation. It was a privilege
969
to be involved in the report, which was interesting and challenging in many ways. The one
area that I would pick on to draw your attention to is the role of universities in international
trade and investment. Of all the areas that the report tries to cover, that is the one which
has the potential to be transformational rather than incremental in the way that we
contribute to driving the UK economy, and I would be very happy to expand on that.
The Chairman: I am sure that we will pick that up, and if we do not, then please come
back to us on that.
Dr Clare: I am Phil Clare. I am associate director of research services and head of
knowledge exchange at the University of Oxford, and I am past chair of PraxisUnico, the
national knowledge transfer association. I am very pleased to be associated with the report,
which celebrates a lot of the good progress that universities and industry have made
together, as well as suggesting further improvements.
Professor Caddick: I am Stephen Caddick. I am a professor of chemistry and have an active
research lab and teach students, but my day job is as vice-provost for enterprise, so I am
responsible for collaboration with business, promoting technology transfer and
commercialisation and stimulating and promoting entrepreneurship.
Q314 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We began this inquiry because
there were concerns that in fact the supply of STEM graduates into the workforce, and what
was being offered to them in terms of undergraduate courses, did not meet employer
expectations. Does the Wilson review bear that out?
Professor Rudd: On this point the Wilson review echoes that. This is the cry of successive
generations of STEM graduates as they rise through the system to become managers and
reflect on the shortcomings of the next generation. One point that is worth bringing out is
the issue that, by and large, we prepare STEM graduates to be hired by large corporates and,
while many graduates from Russell Group universities will find gainful employment with large
blue-chip organisations, there simply is not that level of demand available in the marketplace.
We need to look at the second and third tiers, who could be better prepared for
employment within smaller companies and SMEs and for growing the economy from the
ground up by opening their own enterprises.
Q315 The Chairman: Is there a mismatch then, Dr Clare?

Dr Clare: I would agree with that. One question is: what is it that employers expect? Do
they expect to be passive recipients of oven-ready graduates just for them, or do they feel
they are competing in a marketplace? I spoke to our careers service people, who observed
that graduates prefer to go to employers with structured training programmes. I think that
employers who feel that universities are going to do all the preparation and that they are
going to get everything that they want in every graduate should perhaps think about
developing their own training programmes. It is a partnership, not a supplier relationship.
Q316 The Chairman: One issue from employers that came to us in one of our evidence
sessions is that the teaching of STEM courses in universities faces towards the academic and
research needs of the university staff rather than out towards employers. Was that
something you picked up in the review?
Dr Clare: Was that concern about the technical content of the course rather than
graduates’ business and associated skills?
Q317 The Chairman: Yes, the teaching is geared towards future academic careers as
opposed to future industrial careers. Is that a fair comment?
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Dr Clare: I do not teach myself, so I am not personally able to comment on that, but I am
not sure that I agree with the notion that academic training renders students incapable of
employment in companies. The skills that you acquire doing a PhD or a DPhil are the sorts
of skills that you need whether you work in large engineering companies, in Parliament or in
newspapers. We need STEM graduates everywhere, so a narrow range of skills tailored for a
narrow range of companies is not what we need.
Q318 The Chairman: Professor Caddick, do you support that? Were there any areas
that you picked up that were missing in terms of skills sets?
Professor Caddick: There is an issue about how universities play a role in preparing
students for work. There is another question over the academic curriculum. Although the
academic curriculum will often provide opportunities for training—and we need to ensure
that we maximise the potential for that—it should not be at the expense of the academic
content of the course. I will come back to issue about the bias in a moment, but there is
another issue that we have to address, which is to enhance the skills training to help
students. That may well be extra-curricular or it may be a combination of extra-curricular
activities and curricular-based training. We should remember that the Wilson report was
not simply about STEM and, necessarily, it looked at things from the supply end rather than
from the demand side. The data on demand are patchy. We know anecdotally that, if I go
and talk to pharmaceutical companies, one group will say that it needs students who can do
this, and another group will say not to teach something because employers will teach that
when the students arrive. If the proposition is that universities are failing, then it is very
important to get robust data and evidence to support that proposition. We owe it to the 1
million unemployed people aged 16 to 24 to take this matter very seriously.
Q319 Lord Broers: Before asking my question, I want to declare an interest. I have been
acting as chairman of the Higher Education Commission but I am seeking to step down from
that position. My question is for Professor Rudd. You said that the large companies cannot
provide enough jobs for all the graduates of the Russell Group universities. We heard from
Rolls-Royce, Microsoft and others and were told that, in fact, it is more a matter of
discipline. Rolls-Royce told us that it was seeking nuclear engineers and could not find them,
and Microsoft pointed out that there was a decline in computer scientists. Overall they said
that they were finding it difficult to find high-quality graduates in conventional electrical
engineering. Would you like to comment on that?
Professor Rudd: I think that there is truth in that for these subjects. I was talking about the
great mass of output of Russell Group graduates. If one lined up the corporates on one side
of the table and the graduates on the other, one might find a mismatch. I agree that in
subjects such as nuclear there is a shortage of capacity where the UK has divested itself,
perhaps because the undergraduate market has moved away and neither the Government
nor the universities have put incentives or interventions in place in order to protect those
subjects. Agricultural sciences is a good example of where the market moved strongly away
and now there are only three or four players left who are delivering these curricula at a high
level.
Q320 Lord Broers: Could you suggest how the Government might act to accomplish
those things?
Professor Rudd: I think that the Government have acted successfully in several areas
recently. Chemical engineering, for example, was very much an at-risk discipline after the
corporate sector moved a lot of its activity offshore and the UK market fell away, but that is
971
an area which we have protected successfully. Now we have a thriving environmental sector
and mineral processing sector, where the UK is still arguably the world leader.
Q321 Lord Broers: How do the Government do this? By encouraging the research
councils to spend more in these areas?
Professor Rudd: By encouraging the research councils and also by maintaining the historic
price of an undergraduate place over and above a general engineering programme.
Q322 The Chairman: Coming back to you, Professor Caddick, and picking up on the
points that Lord Broers made, I think that there is a tendency to expect either the
Government or the universities to do something. Where do we make a call on employers to
do something? Are they playing a sufficient role in influencing the agenda so that in fact they
do not have these concerns?
Professor Caddick: I think that is very fair. There needs to be a partnership here. What we
are talking about is industry wanting to have a sustainable pipeline of people coming through.
Just like any supply chain, you have to be fairly active in ensuring that you have got that in
place. Some companies are extremely active. For example, on a programme that I teach on
medicinal chemistry, we have people from the pharmaceutical industry actually helping us
with certain course units, who come in, do some teaching and give the students real case
studies in medicinal chemistry. One of the biggest areas that we might try to tackle is the
issue of work experience because in the end we need students, as they progress and
mature, to understand what the workplace looks like and we also need employers to
understand—if I may put it this way—what the material might be like when they see it
emerge. That might provide an excellent opportunity for a bit more collaboration and co-
operation.
The Chairman: We may come back to that a bit later.
Q323 Lord Krebs: I would like to move on from quantity of students applying to quality.
We are interested in whether the quality of STEM graduates in particular is consistent and
appropriate. What are your views on how quality might be measured and whether the
issues of employability and suitability for work in the business environment should be part of
the measurement of quality of STEM graduates? Perhaps Professor Caddick would like to
kick off.
Professor Caddick: As I said previously, it is incredibly important that we get the package of
measures right for students so that they are best placed to get work. We need to look at
the totality of the student experience. We have to look at the educational component and
the extra-curricular activity. We already take a lot of measures in universities to look in
great depth at the quality of courses. I myself have externally examined many undergraduate
courses, and external examiners take it very seriously. Many colleagues here will know that
a huge amount of work goes into ensuring that the quality is as high as possible. That is not
just in the student experience of whether the lecturer is engaging, but in the robustness of
the teaching and the benchmarking across national and international standards. That is not
to say that I am in any way complacent about quality but we should recognise that there is
an awful lot of work going on to ensure very high quality. That underpins the quality of the
research base, which in STEM we see the UK is extremely good at.
Q324 Lord Krebs: Do you think that quality is consistent across all UK universities?
Professor Caddick: That is a very hard question to answer. I have experience of only a
modest number. As a simple soul, I could not possibly offer an opinion on that.
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Lord Krebs: Is that an evasive way of saying, “No”?
Professor Caddick: It is an evasive way of saying that I do not want to answer.
The Chairman: No one wants to answer that question.
Lord Krebs: It is funny that we have not found anyone prepared to answer it.
Lord Winston: But it is an important question, is it not?
Professor Caddick: Okay, let me expand on that. There are very significant differences.
They are inevitable. They are not just about the quality of teaching. They are about the
quality of the infrastructure that might be available to do that teaching. They might be the
personal circumstances of the students. I think that the outcomes will inevitably differ. The
reason that people will be reluctant to answer is that in some ways it is a loaded question. It
might then lead to some attribution of blame that one outcome is better or worse than
another. There are opportunities to spread good practice even more widely than we do
now. That is one of the elements of external examining that is very positive. That might be
as far as I would be willing to go.
The Chairman: Dr Clare, can you help Lord Krebs?
Dr Clare: I think that implicit in the question of quality is the notion of fitness for purpose.
The earlier question divorced the academic quality from the suitability for employment. I
could say that the quality is very high across the whole higher education system because we
are producing different graduates from different universities to do different things.
Graduates from Oxford are of very high quality and employers from all sectors compete to
employ them; other universities in the sector produce graduates who are more suitable to
going to work in different industries because they have a particular vocational focus. We
have a diverse system there. So, yes.
Q325 Lord Krebs: Sorry, “Yes”, the quality is constant across the whole system?
Dr Clare: Yes, the quality is very high across the whole system if you mean fitness for
purpose and that graduates from different universities are fit for different things.
Q326 Lord Krebs: So the fact that you at Oxford—or “we” at Oxford because I declare
an interest as a member of Oxford University—select from the very top sliver of
qualification at entrance does not mean that we produce a higher quality product at the end?
Dr Clare: If you are looking at absolute terms, I think that we do. The notion of quality that
was introduced at the beginning of the discussion was quality vis-à-vis employability of
students. Of course I would say that Oxford produces the finest graduates in the country. If
I do not say so and that is put on the web, my employers would probably shoot me—and I
believe it.
Q327 The Chairman: Is that the only reason that you are saying it?
Dr Clare: No, I believe that it is true.
The Chairman: We are actually getting off the fence. Please carry on, Professor Rudd.
Professor Rudd: I will not be squeamish in the least about this. Of course there is a
hierarchy and variability in the system. We should talk about the value added because
different universities have different infrastructures and levels of resource. We would hope
that they would all add value to individual students.
Q328 Lord Krebs: And how is value added measured?
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Professor Rudd: Value added is measured in terms of the outcomes versus the level of the
intake. You and I both have access to many of the league tables published in our newspapers.
The Guardian makes much of value added in its outcomes. That is a simple measure of how
far the student has travelled on their journey, taking into account all the things we have
talked about.
Q329 Lord Krebs: So should there be some sort of kitemark or accreditation that says
that all 150 of this set of universities have met a certain quality? They then get a kitemark on
their degree that says that it has met a universal standard. Would that be helpful?
Professor Rudd: I think that there is a de facto kitemark because they are a product of the
British HE system.
Q330 Lord Krebs: There is a slight sort of slipperiness here because I have heard from
Dr Clare that he is prepared to say that, in his view, different universities offer an outcome
of a different quality, partly reflecting the fact that they take an input of different quality and
that they have infrastructure of a different quality. Yet, you are now saying that a kitemark
would be unnecessary because everybody meets an equivalent standard.
Professor Rudd: I think that we have a national kitemark, but we also have sub-kitemarks
within that with the various mission groups. People understand in the marketplace what a
Russell group university confers with its degree, just as people understand what to be from,
say, Napier would confirm.
The Chairman: This is terribly woolly, if you do not mind my saying so. I hope that we will
get something. Lord Rees and Baroness Perry want to come in.
Q331 Lord Rees of Ludlow: With value added you need the input and the output. I
would like to press a bit harder on how one calibrates the relative quality of the output
from different universities. Do you think the external examiner system is rigorous or
adequate enough? Do you think we need some new way in which employers can be sent a
signal about the quality of the output?
Professor Rudd: I am an engineer, and with engineering it is pretty straightforward. Most of
the degree programmes would be accredited by one of the professional institutions, sitting
under the umbrella of the Engineering Council. Its ways of measuring quality, value added
and output threshold have varied over the years but currently sit at the level of the output
threshold. It would not argue that a degree from the University of Oxford and the
University of Napier have the same level but if it gave its badge to them both, then that
would agree that they met a minimum standard that would enable an engineer to go out and
become a practising engineering manager with a certain level of responsibility.
Q332 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Returning to the last question that Lord Krebs
put to you about quality, is it not the case that you are using quality in two different ways?
To use an analogy from the car industry, you can have a very high-quality Ford Fiesta and a
very high-quality Rolls-Royce, but they are very different products. People pay a very
different price for the two, and the products are not expected to perform in the same way.
Nevertheless, the quality that they produce, from what they try to do, would be equivalent.
Are you with me? In other words, the quality control people who look at the Ford Fiesta
would have exactly the same standards of wanting to build the best, according to the
product that was their output. Is it not rather the same in the engineering faculties of British
universities? Some universities produce a very different product. You would not necessarily
want every engineering graduate to be like an Oxford engineering graduate. They are the
people, one hopes, who will end up not running banks but running large engineering
974
companies and being creative in the engineering field in a way that you would perhaps not
expect of the graduates of some of the other, newer universities. Nevertheless, the
economy of the country also needs the standard engineer who can do a very good job but
will not be one of the high-flyers. Am I wrong?
Professor Rudd: I think that is a perfectly reasonable assertion. If you take the example of
Rolls-Royce, it needs many high-technology managers who can direct and lead its R&D
programmes. It needs people who can manage its production operations and people with a
certain level of practical skills who can operate within its own laboratories. Therein, one has
the spectrum of output from the UK’s engineering programmes across all of its universities.
The Chairman: We will all have to come back because we have a Division in the House. I
will suspend the Committee for 10 minutes. You can relax for that.
The Chairman: We will resume. We are making a lot of progress on many of these
questions. We come to question 3 and the issue of work experience.
Q333 Baroness Perry of Southwark: My question is about what the Wilson review
said. As you know, there was a very strong recommendation that all undergraduates should
have the opportunity for work experience. It was considered a very important component.
What are the barriers to that happening? Assuming you agree that it is a good thing, why is
work experience not more widely available to undergraduates?
Dr Clare: One of the barriers that springs to mind, and relates to the previous question, is
visa regulations. We agree that work experience is valuable for students but, quite simply,
overseas students are often unable to take up the opportunity because the visa rules do not
allow them to do so.
Lord Winston: Forgive me, but the acoustics in this room are terrible. It is quite difficult
to hear in these Committee Rooms. Would you mind being a bit louder?
Dr Clare: I will try to project. One of the barriers for students who are not British and here
on a student visa is that they may not be able to work. We would like to give them work
experience but the immigration regulations simply do not allow it.
Q334 Baroness Perry of Southwark: Is that true even if they are not paid?
Dr Clare: I am not an expert, but I understand that it can be. It depends on the length of
experience and the particular circumstances. I do not know whether anybody knows more
about that.
The Chairman: Are there any other views on that?
Professor Caddick: I have another point related to placements and work experience
generally. I believe that this should be absolutely transformational in universities. Every
student, every postgraduate and every post-doctoral worker should have the opportunity
for work experience. If we do not give it to them, we fail to address a number of issues,
most importantly our responsibility to help young people find employment and get
experience of employment. Collectively, the Government, universities and employers should
have an overarching approach to placements, be they internships, short placements,
sandwich placements, postgraduate placements or post-doctoral placements.
Q335 Baroness Perry of Southwark: What can the Government do? You referred to
universities, employers and the Government? What is the Government’s role?
975
Professor Caddick: I think there are some recommendations about allowing the relaxation
of fees for students who take up a year’s employment. Some methods are needed to help
small and medium-sized enterprises—I do not like putting small and medium-sized
enterprises together, as they can have incredibly different agendas—and we need to expose
those companies to the opportunities to employ people at various points in the educational
process relatively early. We need to recognise that there is a real cost to a small business,
and try to find some way of offsetting that cost. I do not know whether that should be done
through taxation—it is for others to determine the best mechanism—but we absolutely
have to get this right together.
Professor Rudd: There is a lot of good work going on in this space, including many talent-
builder programmes, which put some limited resources into the kind of programmes that
you mention. However, the disappearance of the post-study work visa is a big issue, which
will hit recruitment as well as student experience. Looking forward to 2013, we have a little
more resource coming into the system. By working with the Government and with business,
universities can do some of the things that Professor Caddick was talking about. Broadening
access to internships is fundamentally good for students, business and the sector’s
interaction with business.
Q336 The Chairman: I will bring in Lord Rees in a second, but can you just say how we
will pay for it? How does the Wilson report suggest that we should pay for the internships
and support?
Dr Clare: It does not. One would expect employers, if they are benefiting from internships,
to pay for them. CASE students often get paid by the company for which they work.
Q337 Baroness Perry of Southwark: I think one of the suggestions that the Wilson
report makes is that universities could pay for this activity through their offer funds. I do not
know how much the definition of what offer money can be used for would include, but it is
certainly money that is in the discretion of the universities.
Professor Rudd: I believe that Wilson suggests that that could be used for a subset of
students but not for the totality. It would be argued that it would be unreasonable to spread
that resource across students from non-widening-participation backgrounds.
Q338 Lord Rees of Ludlow: How many students are getting the intensive experience of
sandwich courses now?
Professor Rudd: I cannot give specific numbers. The main value that we can add is by
building around the existing programmes. Sandwich courses have a place and always will
where there is a more structured and formal interaction with big business. However, the
difficult-to-reach sector that comprises small companies and start-ups, which were referred
to in an earlier question, needs to be developed and perhaps fed with shorter and sharper
internship experiences. That would be difficult to configure in a formal sandwich course.
Dr Clare: One element of work experience that we have not touched on is students
starting their own businesses. Student entrepreneurship is incredibly important and
becoming more prominent. There are huge support structures in universities, helping
students start their own businesses. If we are thinking about the health of UK industry, we
need to concern ourselves not only with the businesses that are already here but with the
start-ups that will come from our universities. To me, the students themselves seem some
of the best bets to drive these things forward. The student entrepreneurship society at
Oxford is the biggest society after the Oxford Union. Lectures on how to start your own
business are standing room only in the biggest lecture hall in the business school every
976
week. Work experience is not just about doing things to students and inviting them to learn
from businesses; there is a lot that we can learn from them.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: Might it be best just to drop out?
Dr Clare: Perhaps not.
Q339 Lord Lucas: Professor Caddick, you said earlier that we should not move in the
direction of accommodating the interests of business if that threatened academic content.
However, now you want businesses to put money and time into your students. Surely there
should be a quid pro quo here. If you want businesses to do things for you, you ought to do
things for them.
Professor Caddick: I understand the logic of that. I was trying to say that there is a lot of
opportunity to ensure that the curriculum maximises the training opportunities that will help
enhance employability. However, there is in some ways a bigger opportunity to carry out
extra-curricular or additional activities that enhance the student experience. If we ask
students to do more of X, we are necessarily asking them to do less of something else. The
concern would be that, if you replace certain parts of the academic curriculum with
employability skills, you will lose some of the important academic quality. I am in no way
saying that business should not be very close; it should be extremely close to our curriculum
development. However, there has to be a shared vision of what a higher-quality academic
curriculum looks like and that needs to be stable. There are other elements, which can be
extra-curricular, where we can have a much greater degree of variation in activity. These
two things enhance student experience. They make the students more employable but they
also maintain and safeguard the quality of academic standards. You can do both those things.
Q340 Lord Lucas: It is not really about academic standards, is it? You are talking about
academic content.
Professor Caddick: Yes, academic content.
Q341 Lord Lucas: This is a very English thing. American universities would never say the
same, would they? They are about educating people, rather than educating scientists.
Professor Caddick: I think we are all about educating people.
The Chairman: I am conscious that we are fast running out of time in this session, so I ask
the panel and our witnesses to be fairly brief. If the panel can specifically direct a question,
that would be useful.
Q342 Lord Broers: I am continuing on the same theme, but I think it is an important
theme. Much doctoral training is focused with respect to an academic research
perspective—let me be specific—for high-quality publications in high-impact journals so that
you survive the research assessment exercise or whatever it is called today, whereas that is
not necessarily what industry wants at all. Is the overall approach to doctoral training
appropriate to prepare students for the varied employment opportunities that they may
follow? In many of the sciences, that might be the most appropriate thing, but for many of
the applied sciences, it would not be. The question is: are you flexible in this, and are you
making sure that the applied scientists and engineers are working on research projects that
are the projects that industry would like them to be working on?
Professor Rudd: The great majority of research that is going on is work that someone
somewhere has paid for. The sponsor of that research will have an expectation about
whether the requirements are couched in terms of the scientific outputs or whether they
are delivering a piece of intellectual property or a result that can be used by an engineering
977
company in one of its products. That is the fundamental influence on the direction of the
work.
The assumption that universities are training people to replicate the faculty is an outmoded
one. In my domain, I have supervised perhaps 50 PhD students in my career and probably
eight or nine of them have ended up in academic roles; the rest have gone to industry and
ended up as engineering managers, directors or innovation leaders in all kinds of commercial
and technical roles.
Dr Clare: I would agree. The transferable skills that PhD and DPhil students get are useful
no matter what career they go into. We need to not restrict our concern to whether
engineers can go to do engineering; we need engineers in all walks of life. We need to help
students to understand their own skill sets. I would agree with that, but I do not think we
need to change the DPhil.
Professor Caddick: I think that the research councils need to be congratulated on the work
that they have done with doctoral training, because there are a number of very good
initiatives now where doctoral programmes are heavily influenced by industry. There are
engineering doctoral programmes where people spend 75% of their time working on an
industry-led or heavily industry-informed project. The Medical Research Council, similarly, is
naturally moving towards that side. So a lot of good things are going on. There is more to be
done, but there has been significant movement.
Q343 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: I think that we have covered a lot of the answers
to my question, which is about the mismatch between research papers in universities and
what industry is requiring. Specifically we have heard from industry about the lack of
mathematical skills, which seems rather surprising as, on the whole, industry is objecting to
the lack of practical experience and human management skills. So there is a curious
mismatch in what they are asking you to provide. I wondered how widespread opportunities
to do start-ups were, which I would have thought were rather limited in many universities. I
am asking about mathematical skills and opportunities to show enterprise.
Professor Caddick: I can say something about enterprise. We have an event on campus at
UCL every day of the academic year to promote and support enterprise. Last year, we did
education or training events for enterprise skills, setting up businesses et cetera for 2,000
students. We are absolutely committed to supporting students who want to set up their
own businesses. There is a bias towards undergraduate students, in fact. I think there is a lot
of interesting work that should be done to promote more entrepreneurialism at the
postgraduate level.
The Chairman: Are there any other comments?
Dr Clare: I would only support that with an anecdote, but we do not have time.
Q344 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I want to ask about the specific effects of the recent funding
upheavals on demand for postgraduate qualifications and on concentration and issues like
that in the higher education sector.
Professor Rudd: In the first place, we have not seen a great upheaval at postgraduate level.
We are only now seeing the first signs of marketisation at undergraduate level, where
demand is shifting away from certain subjects largely in the direction of the STEM subjects.
Within the postgraduate space, I see only an increase in demand for postgraduate places,
partly because of the downturn in industry and commerce but perhaps also because of an
increase in demand from overseas institutions for places within the UK. We have not yet
seen any diminution of demand for PhD places—quite the reverse.
978
Dr Clare: I think that there are difficulties in terms of finding funding for PhD places. Good
students turn down places at Oxford because we cannot supply the funding and Harvard
can. So there is a broader issue about access to funds. I am no expert on whether masters
degrees will be affected by the funding reforms, but those are an incredibly important way of
people developing new skills throughout their career. Careers move and change, and
masters degrees are hugely important—I speak as somebody halfway through my second
one—as it is necessary to learn new skills as you go along.
Q345 Lord Winston: I think that the Wilson report suggests that we should reduce the
fees for masters students. Do you have any comments on that?
Dr Clare: I do not, I am afraid.
Professor Caddick: No.
Professor Rudd: I think that it is unreasonable to expect that higher levels of debt and
higher fees would do anything other than lead to some decay in the demand for masters
places. If there were a partnership with business in developing masters programmes where
there was a greater availability of sponsored places and perhaps some tax incentives for
business to do that, that would be a very helpful move.
The Chairman: Perhaps, Lord Winston, you could finish the session.
Q346 Lord Winston: My question comes back to the Wilson report. It is pointed out
that there is a lack of data to make policy about industrial intelligence on the supply and
demand for STEM graduates. I wondered if you would be kind enough briefly to tell us how
you think that we might get those data, because they are clearly missing. One of the
problems with this inquiry is that we are short of data in a number of areas.
Professor Caddick: I agree entirely, which is why some of the questions are very difficult to
answer. If we could get some more robust data—longitudinal studies about demand—that
would be incredibly useful.
Q347 Lord Winston: How could we tackle that?

Professor Caddick: There was a recommendation that CIHE should play some role. Having
a forum with some sustained support to try to capture the tricky issues about trends and
meta-analysis of trends across sectors would be incredibly valuable. It is almost as valuable
for students thinking about degrees. We are talking about students choosing a university,
segmenting the data, seeing where the best place to do chemistry in the UK is and what the
employment prospects are for those people. Actually, “Employment for what?” is a key
question. A repository that can give us some data on demand is not a short-term
undertaking; it is a very long-term undertaking.
The Chairman: I sense that the rest of the panel would agree with that. I am really sorry
to have to end the session there and apologise to the panel for the fact that we had to go to
vote.
Lord Winston: Perhaps, Lord Chairman, if there are other points about how we might
collect data, they could write to us.
The Chairman: One of the great weaknesses is the lack of a system for producing the sort
of data that we need to be able to answer some of these fundamental questions. Following
up the comment of Lord Winston, if you want to supply us with anything, please feel free to
do so. On that note, I thank you all very much indeed for coming to join us this afternoon.
979
University of Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, University of
Cambridge, University of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff
University and University College London (UCL) – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
University of Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of

Surrey, University of Cambridge, University of York, University of
Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University and University
980
University of Salford – Supplementary written evidence
Introduction
determined?
The purpose of stand-alone Masters and doctoral provision in HEIs for STEM is to provide a
well educated UK workforce who can add wealth, including industrial value,to the country.
For Masters: with advanced knowledge and research methods, the ability and opportunity to
discover new applications.
For Doctoral studies : the ability and opportunity for discovery of new knowledge and new
applications
The Government’s role is to promote the importance of these qualifications through

cohesive supporting polices.
The Government’s current main focus is to decrease it deficit, however, investment in

education is a long term strategic issue. Gaining short term financial balance will damage the
future knowledge position of the country. The Government hopes that the financial shortfall
will be compensated by students and industry which may benefit from these students and
research. However Research and recruitment is a global business. Companies can get their
research done and find employees from outside the UK. The Government needs to review
its business case in the funding of PG provisions in STEM subjects, especially if there is a
desire to increase its exports outside of the service industry.
The way and rationale to determine the balance of Masters and doctoral provision nationally
is not clear or explicit. It seems that the current approach is to achieve financial balance
instead of anticipating future knowledge requirements. The starting point should be a
national strategic plan for research and development.

No response
981
Delivery models
studentships?
No response

research?
We welcome the Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework. Our University supports the
generic concepts of Personal Development Plans in all our education provision. The
concepts are well implemented and embedded at undergraduate level. The implementation
of such concepts at postgraduate level is embedded but not completed explicitly and
officially.
The Framework is also relevant to students who will go on to employment outside of

research. For STEM subjects, most of the taught Masters courses are accredited by their
relevant professional bodies. Their requirements are very similar to the Vitae’s Framework.
Quality
Quality of research output can be an important, but not necessarily definitive, proxy of
quality research supervision. Arguably, PhD completion rates are a more important
measure, given that working towards and gaining the PhD qualification is the prime purpose
of study. Overall , the HEFCE statistics show that those Universities with high research
quality rankings tend also to have high PhD completion rates , so that quality of research
outputs and high completion rates should be seen as the two best measures of the quality of
training for PGR students.
982
No response
Funding
The demand for full and part-time Masters programmes from UK and other EU nationals is
likely to decline if the fee levels for these courses rises to compensate for the reduction in
state funding via HEFCE and other sources. At present the fee levels for these awards vary
considerably and it is not clear which cover the costs of provision, which generate a surplus
for institutions and which record a deficit and are therefore implicitly subsidised by activity
in other areas within English HEIs.
At Salford we have priced our PG provision at a level to cover costs taking account of the
lower level of finding for Band B and C Masters programmes. Demand for these awards for
entry in 2012/13 has declined by approximately 12% as currently recorded in application
numbers.
Students themselves in most cases will fund stand alone Masters Courses , with employers
funding a small but significant minority
sufficient?
This funding is poorly understood within institutions and not known about by applicants.
There should be scholarships for priority subjects within the SIV category. We do not
believe there areas currently not classified as SIVS that should be considered.
Overseas students
983
Most of our Masters courses depend on overseas students. Without them, most of these
courses will be closed on economic grounds. Many schemes and communication routes have
been introduced to encourage home students to take up Masters programmes. However, it
is apparent that many students believe there are not incentives to study a Master’s
programme in the UK.
The growth in numbers of overseas students will decrease in the long term. In the short
term, the number of overseas undergraduate students will decrease as their countries
mature, producing more graduates. However, the decrease can be compensated for by the
increase in postgraduate studies. In the past we had many undergraduate students from
particular countries, which now have enough UK qualified graduates in their education
systems to support their undergraduate provisions.
In STEM subject areas, more and more of our academic staff are previously overseas
postgraduate students. Without them, the quality of our academic staff portfolio would
suffer.
There is evidence that changes in the immigration system had a significant impact in the
number of overseas students recruited for STEM subjects at postgraduate taught level at the
University of Salford for 2011 entry. This was the first intake after significant changes took
place around the removal of rights of students to work in the UK for 2 years after the
completion of their studies, as well as changes which increased the minimum levels of English
component scores required by UKBA for issuing of a study visa. Both of these factors have
been important in the area of STEM recruitment with being able to gain some international
work experience seen as a key factor for many STEM students from key markets. The latter
issue is important as the changes to minimum levels meant the University had to reject
students it may have previously accepted as they did not have the scores required under the
new visa rules.
Overall, if we compare the situation April 2012 to April 2011, we see a 23.7% reduction in
applications to PGT STEM subjects. The drop in applications corresponds across a wide
range of the University’s markets for STEM subjects including those in Africa (Angola,
Cameroon; Kenya; Libya); the Middle East (Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE) Asia
Pacific (China, Thailand) and South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka)
This continues to be an issue for applications for September 2012 although the impact is
most heavily focused on some key international markets for the UK which includes most
notably India, where the University has seen a decline of 61.8% in applications for PGT
applications in the corresponding STEM subject areas. There has been a reduction of 44.6%
of registering students from India. We have also seen significant declines in applications and
registrations from students originating from Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
984
Operations on the ground for recruitment from key markets like India remain challenging,
especially given changes to immigration rules in Australia and Canada who, along with the
USA, are seeking to attract talented STEM students both a students and through post study
work opportunities.
8 May 2012
985
University of Southampton – Written evidence
1. The University of Southampton welcomes the opportunity to comment on the issue

of STEM subjects, particularly in the light of the changes to Higher Education policy
currently being implemented. The Committee has a vast agenda as a starting point
and we recommend that it focus on a small number of issues where it can have a
significant formative impact on government policy. In particular we would urge the
Committee to focus on the match between the supply of graduates and
postgraduates in STEM subjects to the likely future demand for STEM graduates
based on the government’s vision of the development of UK economy.
2. In this submission we highlight four issues that affect the supply of STEM graduates,
and on which recommendations made by the Committee could have a positive effect.
• Identifying ways that Government could direct the remaining HEFCE Teaching
Funding and other discretionary funding to support the future development of
STEM subject teaching in Universities
• Incentivising employers to engage in education and offering employment
experience
• Fixing the visa system to retain international talent that is educated in UK
universities
• Identifying mechanisms to promote widening participation and increase diversity
Identifying ways that Government could direct the remaining HEFCE Teaching Funding and
other discretionary funding to support the future development of STEM subject teaching in
universities
3. The mainstay of the supply of STEM graduates to UK industry comes from UK/EU
students studying STEM subjects in UK universities. It is therefore crucially important
that the changes proposed by the Government in the Higher Education White Paper
do not adversely affect the supply of STEM graduates to the UK economy. We are
concerned that current proposals may have this effect. Given the high cost of
investment in infrastructure, it is highly unlikely that new higher education providers
(as envisioned in the Higher Education White Paper) will teach STEM subjects – they
are much more likely to focus on less expensive to teach classroom-based subjects.
We are also concerned that a failure to protect incentives for existing universities
may also force them to rationalise STEM subject provision.
4. The Government has recognised the importance of STEM subjects by removing most
of them from the core and margin student number controls proposed in the HE
White Paper for 2012-13. This is welcomed as a short –term measure, though it is
not clear why some STEM subjects, such as biological sciences, are not part of the
list of Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects (SIVS) which are removed from
the core and margin student number controls. A long-term and sustainable approach
to STEM funding needs to be identified.
5. In relation to funding, HEFCE have made it clear that no additional teaching funding
resource is available. We are concerned that this will lead to a real terms reduction
in funding per student, reducing the incentives for universities to maintain STEM
986
subject provision, and leading over time to a reduction in the volume and range of
STEM provision .
6. We recommend that the Committee investigate how the Government will maintain
the funding to meet the higher costs for STEM subjects in real terms, and not reduce
funding if STEM student numbers increase.
7. As a part of this examination of a long-term and sustainable approach to STEM

funding we recommend that the Committee also examine ways in which residual
HEFCE discretionary funding could be applied to support the teaching of STEM
subjects in universities. For example, the Indicative Allocations of Teaching Capital
Investment Fund 2 for 2012/13 future teaching capital funding from 2012/13 and
beyond could be applied to support STEM subjects only.
8. Similarly, widening participation (WP) funding support could be weighted to favour

recruitment initiatives in STEM and the support costs for WP students in STEM
activities.
9. Finally, we believe there to be an anomaly in STEM classification in the context of a

knowledge economy increasing shaped by the World Wide Web. In many
Universities, Computing Science is very close in cost and academic content to STEM
subjects. We recommend that an assessment is made of Computer Science provision
at different Universities and using rigorous measures, in recognition that some
Computer Science provision should be rebanded as Band B and treated consistently
with STEM subjects. Such an approach has been used in the past by HEFCE in
determining funding rates for Media Studies.
Incentivising employers and universities to work together on curriculum issues, and to identify
employment experience for STEM graduates
10. The supply of STEM graduates is not just a question of overall numbers, but also a
question of quality and “employment readiness”. To ensure that STEM graduates
have the skills needed by industry, employers and universities need to work
together. Whilst there are many good examples of this , there remain some barriers
to closer co-operation..
11. On the development of curriculum for STEM subjects, universities need to be

encouraged to work with industry partners, so that the skills industry needs and the
ways of delivering them are clearly identified and brought into courses. One barrier
to this which the Committee could look into is the role of Academies and Learned
Societies, and in particular their accreditation of university courses. Universities want
to respond to business needs, but they also want their courses to be accredited by
the appropriate academy or learned society. The requirements which these bodies
set can be very prescriptive and slow to change, and it becomes difficult to introduce
new elements to courses as demanded by business without dropping some elements
which the Academies insist are retained. The Committee could usefully explore this
issue, and the role that business could play in influencing academies and learned
societies about the content of university courses, and the process and “value add” of
accreditation. We would encourage where possible a rationalisation of accreditation
strongly shaped by various industrial sectors.
987
12. Several employers of STEM graduates provide opportunities for STEM students or
recent graduates to work in STEM-related work environments. This can be highly
relevant and beneficial work experience for the student, and a significant factor to
bring them into STEM-related employment. It is also beneficial for the employer to
identify new talent. The Committee could examine the issue of scaling-up
employment opportunities in the context of the responsibilities placed upon the
Local Enterprise Partnerships established by Government and the work of the
Wilson Review. Is there more the Government can do to make it easier for
companies and universities to set up paid placements for students?
Fixing the visa system to retain international talent that is educated in UK universities
13. The supply of STEM graduates comes not just from the UK and EU countries. UK
universities are educating students from all over the world in STEM subjects. To
develop and maintain strong STEM-related industries we need to ensure that the
best talent from across the world is available to UK and UK-based global companies.
Some of those people will come after graduation overseas, but a key supply route is
from students who have been educated in UK universities. The visa system we have
in place now allows some of the most talented people in the world to develop their
skills here, and just when they could be of most benefit to our economy, we send
them home. This is particularly true in some STEM subjects.
14. Almost half of post graduate researchers in Engineering in UK universities, for

example, come from outside the EU, and the abolition of the post study work
provision means that from April, they will have to return to their home countries
unless they already have a position lined up paying over £20k per year.
15. The UK visa system is in sharp contrast to our competitors, who are working hard
to attract and then retain top talent. Over time, we will lose not only the
opportunity to employ them, but they won’t come here to study either – and the
market for international students is in itself worth billions to the UK economy.
16. The Committee could look at the visa system. Should different rules apply to STEM
subjects (or Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects, SIVS, which includes
most STEM subjects)? What changes are needed to ensure we balance the need to
control migration whilst building a strong economy based on a highly-skilled
workforce?
17. This is not just a concern for those who are currently studying in the UK, but also
for potential applicants who may view the UK as a less welcoming environment for
post study employment and look to other countries for their doctorial studies
Identifying mechanisms to promote widening participation and increase diversity in STEM

subjects
18. University participation from students from poorer backgrounds has increased
significantly in the last 15 years. However, whilst the number of entrants from that
group into non-STEM subjects has risen significantly, the number entering STEM
subjects has fallen.
988
19. However, it is not a uniform picture, and there have been some successes. Some
STEM subjects (particularly medicine and biosciences) have seen a huge rise in female
students over the past generation.
20. There is a danger in the major reforms in Higher Education which the Government
has proposed that research-intensive universities are discouraged from widening
participation, as often the best students from poorer backgrounds will not have AAB
grades at A-Level, due not to ability but to more limited opportunities at home and
school. The decision taken by the Government and HEFCE to exempt Strategically
Important and Vulnerable Subjects, (which includes most STEM subjects) from
student number controls is therefore extremely positive, although whether such
students are put off university altogether from higher fee levels is still to be seen.
Universities must also clarify their expectations of A level subjects studied
appropriate for different degree courses.
21. The Committee could look at the issues surrounding widening participation and
increasing diversity in STEM subjects. We have recommended above that HEFCE and
BIS consider weighting widening participation funds towards STEM recruitment
activities and to enable appropriate support for STEM students from non-traditional
students when they enter Universities.
22. We hope that these observations constitute a positive contribution to the work of
the Select Committee, and would be delighted to contribute further if this would be
helpful.
16 December 2011
989
University of Southampton, Government, Home Office and University of Manchester – Oral
University of Southampton, Government, Home Office and

University of Manchester – Oral evidence (QQ 281-312)
Transcript to be found under University of Manchester
990
Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University, University College London (UCL),
University of Salford and University of Central Lancashire – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
University of Surrey, University of Cambridge, University of York,

University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University,
University College London (UCL), University of Salford and
University of Central Lancashire – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
991
University of Surrey – Supplementary written evidence
Introduction
Masters Courses: To develop individuals to a higher level of skills. UK nationals see

Masters as a way of enhancing their qualifications, skills and prospects. The vast
majority are international students return to their home country after completing
the degree. Most see this as a way of enhancing their career prospects and
professional development. Surrey has nearly 1000 in its Business School alone. A
very small percentage go on to higher degrees – the percentage is higher for UK/EU
students. There is essentially no government support for these students. Support is
either from the private individual/family or form companies. This is why there are
relatively few Home/EU students.
Doctoral: To develop individuals to higher skills in research. This is much broader

than the Masters’ courses and provides development in terms of research, planning,
communication, life-long learning and broader personal development. Surrey’s PhDs
are very much in demand. A small number go on to academic posts – most go into
industry/commerce. The Government provides funding for some Home/Eu students
through research councils (DTCs mainly) . Some students are self-funding or funded
by companies and some benefit from scholarships. The number of international
students is far greater than the number of home students.
Funding for studentships. Visa restrictions/perceived restrictions for excellent
international candidates who often choose the USA over UK because of this
issue.
There does not appear to be any methodology to determine balance, because
the Government plays very little role in funding Masters students. At Surrey
the two groups are addressed independently, although they all belong to
Graduate Schools. The Masters courses have a significant taught-course
element (usually with large project/dissertation) covering a year (usually) in a
highly structured fashion. Doctoral provision follows the research activities and
some of this is funded by UK studentships (a minority) and the nature of the
doctoral programme is matched to the research area and discipline in question
– some follow a DEng industrial scheme.
determined?
This is the question that research councils wrestle with constantly. Both
elements are vital – research students play a central role in successful research
groups. It is a loss to the UK if Home/EU students cannot be funded – there
are good numbers of excellent international students happy to study at Surrey.
We would welcome many more UK students if funding is available. It is
992
important to fund students but the current reduction in cash to most research
councils has meant that they have had to take a pragmatic line of reducing
student funding.

There is data available, but it is more limited and more complex to collect and
maintain (the number are also much smaller than for UG). The majority of PGs are
internationals students who return overseas and in many cases UK students graduate
and move overseas for a period – so tracking is a challenge. This are is not well
funded by government and would need resourcing if a greater amount of data was
required.
We have some data available – mostly as part of our Alumni data base. It meets
our needs and is a valuable asset.
Delivery models
3. What is your assessment of the EPSRC’s decisions to concentrate funding on
Doctoral Training Centres and to remove funding from project studentships?
A difficult decision based on (i) a decision to concentrate research funding and (ii)
insufficient funds to meet the needs of all research groups and universities. This
focusses activity in any one discipline in one or two universities (in DTCs) -all the
rest receive no funding for students – so in many excellent research groups there are
now very few UK students. This is a very unsatisfactory situation.
Loss of UK/Home student research opportunities in most research groups in
any one discipline – shifts towards international research students.
studentships?
Focus on international students industrial sponsorship. Staff shift interest to EU
funding and other sources for funding. IP can often then lie outside the UK.
• What do you consider to be a reasonable balance of doctoral provision models to

ensure quality of provision, geographical spread and sufficient breadth of discipline
coverage?
Maintain DTCs but add funding to research councils to allow staff to bid for
studentships with research grants. This would be a relatively modest increase

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The researcher development team at Surrey have developed a web based tool called
Action Planner which maps on to the Vitae Researcher Development Framework
(RDF). This allows every PGR to have a training programme which is tailored to
their needs. Training is offered through courses but Action Planner also identifies
other ways in which each PGR can be developed, e.g. by attending seminars,
international conferences, or by attending summer schools, participating in public
engagement activities, involvement in PGR conference etc. Courses are offered at a
number of levels, again to ensure that they meet the needs of each PGR. Discipline
specific training is being developed in the Faculties. All PGR are expected to use
Action Planner which is introduced during the first of the 3 compulsory PGR training
activities "welcome to your PhD" (the others are the 'Confirmation' and 'PhD Viva').
The plan is to use Action Planner at the beginning of each year of the PhD, to define
the training and development activities that need to be undertaken during that year.
The RDF defines a sensible core of activities; Surrey’s training is much broader than
this. All PGRs have the opportunity to assess their skills, identify gaps and then
choose from a wide range of training to make good any deficiencies.
research?
At Surrey the training is tailored to each PGR it enables those who are looking
for a non-academic career to choose courses which fit with this outcome.
Moreover, PGRs are strongly encouraged to take a course (in year 1 of their
PhD, with further courses in subsequent years if required) in conjunction with
the careers service which helps them to think about their future career and
look at options outside academic research. The Vitae RDF does look at skills
outside research but at Surrey I think we have taken this one stage further.
This is aided by the strong ethos of working with industry, our excellent EngD
programmes, and the professional placements for UG etc
However, the question possibly misinterprets the purpose of the Framework

which was never just about academic careers. At Surrey, the careers
component of the training is delivered throughout the PhD. From day 1
researchers are encouraged to consider career choice and take responsibility
for CV development throughout the 3 years. Even (especially) for those wisher
to consider an academic career, they are given the reality check of the ratio of
PhD graduates/academic positions, and encouraged to this of a ‘Plan B’.
Quality
5. Is quality of research output the best proxy of quality research supervision and
training for post graduate students? What other criteria should be used?
Quality of research outputs is not a sole proxy for quality of research supervision –
it is only a part of the picture. Other criteria already include: successful completion
of a high quality thesis within time frames, communication/presentation, and peer
review of outputs, awareness for career development, impact of research including
involvement of key stakeholders and public engagement. Further metrics include the
time to PGR confirmation and completion of 6 monthly and annual progress reviews
and involvement of the PGR in PGR training activities. PRES, the PG survey, also
provides further metrics on the research experience of PGRs. Employability of PGRs
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and career destinations are other metrics. Ensuring PGR supervisors have the
necessary training and are aware of the University regulations is also important.
Module completion within training, composition of training.
QAA are already beginning to look at the possibility of auditing PG provision in
same ways as UG currently carried out. To date this has been focused on how
we train PGR for UG teaching and demonstrating duties. It will be interesting
to see how they may approach PGR training as some of this is funded by the
Research Councils, hence considered public money and need to show value for
money – but this is only part of the picture. How we take into account
examiners comments may also be examined by QAA. We look at every
examiner’s form, compile a list and take action where necessary and record
actions in Annual Programme Review. This is a different situation to
undergraduate quality and QAA’s role needs to reflect the nature and diversity
of PGR and associated training.
We are already actively working with Industry on EngD and Case Awards and the
EngD has industrial partners on its management board. Our CDT (with Strathclyde,
Huddersfield and QUB) has a mini project in year 1 with industry and a 6 month
industrial placement in year 3 of this 4 year PhD. Like the EngD its management
board has input from industry.
The interactions with end-users are many and various. e.g. Surrey’s Research and
Enterprise Industrial Advisory Group (16 external members along with senior
academics); Faculty Advisory Boards; the two EngDs have Boards Chaired by Senior
Industrialists and with a majority of External Members; Centre/Dept Advisory Boards
input to PGT provision etc
No inhibitions. Even in a recession there are many industrial/end-user
colleagues who will give their time when asked.
Funding
7. There has been a continual erosion of public funding for stand-alone Masters and it
has now disappeared in many areas. What impact will this lack of funding have on the
PGT Masters: for most courses the FT UK numbers have fallen significantly because
of the lack of any funding; many PGT course are now dominated by overseas
students. Clearly for those courses that stay in the traditional long-thin module
format are likely to dwindle if decent sized (c20+), consistent overseas cohorts
cannot be attracted.
Universities are responding by closing some Masters courses and moving others to
distance learning, modular training that can be picked up and consumed around
employment. The UK is losing the opportunity for higher level skill development
relative to other countries as the number of UK students decline. Universities are
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offering scholarships – but this is from a shrinking funding pot. The appetite for
further learning will grow but not at the cost of a year’s salary and consuming living
costs. There may be some potential from the RDF for PGRs, to provide enhanced
training for MScs/CPD in addition to the technical competencies.
By default, from fees from overseas students.
There will be some employer funded students but rarely sufficient to sustain an
MSc unless in niche areas (Radiation Physics as an example).
sufficient?
Little impact as there is very limited funding at the PG course level. Very welcome
support that has helped some subjects at UG level, but insufficient to compensate for
the low numbers and UK students and absence of core funding.
• Are there any areas that are not currently classified as SIVS that should be considered
for such classification?
Most subjects suffer from lack of resource at Master’s level – this is not the
same provision as UG in genuine Master’s course – so specific SIV funding
would facilitate Masters provision.
Overseas students
There are no dangers in educating overseas students from a pedagogic point of view
(quite the reverse, international perspectives significantly enhance the learning for all
concerned including the academics). There are funding dangers e.g. over-reliance on
a particular national group dominating intake where changes in behaviour create a
risk. The biggest issue is to the UK higher level skills base- which suffers whilst other
nations benefit. If the international students didn’t come to the UK, they would
choose the USA as the next natural destination. Master’s courses are an asset to the
UK and its economy.
No there is not an over-reliance. The status in the USA illustrates what will
happened downstream if there is not a greater funding form UK students. The
situation is entirely sustainable, as long as UKBA do not limit the numbers
further(which would damage universities and the UK economy).
• Do you consider that growth in the overseas student population nationally at 30% pa,
as has been the case until recently, is sustainable for UK HEI’s collectively?
996
As for all scenarios based on perpetual growth (especially with such a high
figure), they are unrealistic in the long term. Universities are happy to have this
level of demand and can adapt and grow provision further.
• Does the proportion of overseas postgraduate students have any effect on in the
supply of academic staff in UK STEM departments?
This will have an impact on the supply of UK nationals, but depending on
UKBA in the future it does not necessarily adversely affect staffing. There are
excellent international staff and those with UK PhDs who would be able to fill
these posts, subject to visa regulations. In terms of international
competitiveness there is a strong view that universities of international calibre
should be well represented with international staff members and indeed this is
one of the metrics in international league tables.
The issue of fewer UK nationals holding PhDs and Masters will be an issue for
some UK roles (e.g. defence and government) in the future, which require this
level of skills.
The issues with respect to PG students is well documented now and there is no
doubt that some excellent candidates have chosen to study in the USA rather than
the UK because of current visa practice. This has knock-on effects because these
students will be influential in the future in terms of which countries they will build
relationship when they enter business and government and positions of
responsibility.
02 May 2012
997
University of Warwick – Written evidence
Post graduate provision questions
Introduction
1. What is the purpose of stand-alone Masters courses and doctoral provision in HEIs? In
A highly educated workforce can support and drive forward research and
development. Postgraduate skills are vital to the health and wellbeing of the economy:
not only through the more in-depth knowledge that is gained, but also through
enhanced critical thinking skills, lively intellectual curiosity, and entrepreneurial
creativity.
Masters: in general there are two types of stand-alone Masters in STEM subjects. The
first is the more traditional masters which effectively constitutes research training for
those who intend to pursue a doctoral programme. In STEM subjects, many of those
who go on to do a doctoral programme have pursued the 1 + 3 route (one year
masters linked to three year doctoral training), or have undertaken an integrated 4
year degree in which the final year is taken at masters level.
The second type is Masters courses that provide industry/employment training, or

Continuing Professional Development (CPD). Examples from Warwick include, among
many others, the MSc programme in Statistics, which provides training for a career as
a professional statistician, or our School of Engineering’s MSc in Tunnelling and
Underground Space, which prepares students for a career in the engineering industry.
These kinds of Masters are not suitable as preparation for a research career, but are
highly regarded within professional circles for the specific skills that graduates obtain
by doing them.
The purpose of doctoral provision is two-fold. First, doctoral provision provides the
research skills and training required to build capacity for the next generation of
scientific researchers who will work in academic roles. Second, although this is a less
traditional but increasingly popular route, doctoral provision equips graduates with
skills that are sought after by business and industry. Doctoral Training Centres set out
to combine the traditional research training associated with PhD, as well as equip their
graduates with a broad range of inter and cross-disciplinary skills that will prepare
them for a career outside of industry.
Where government has a role to play is in bridging the gap between a reasonable fee
that universities can charge and the actual full economic cost of the course, and in
providing adequate bursary funding for PG students. Universities have long been in the
position of subsidising government funded students, particularly for PGT courses,
because research councils only pay tuition fees set at the agreed home/EU fee for
research postgraduates, currently £3900. This compares with fees at Warwick of over
£5000 for home/EU students, and between £10,900 and £13,950 for overseas
students.
As government funding for PGT students is eroded, university subsidies

correspondingly increase. For research preparation Masters degrees (those intended
998
to provide the necessary research training and preparation for doctoral study), an
unfunded PGT year can often mean the difference between a gifted researcher
carrying on to doctoral study, and that person choosing to conclude his or her
education, to the detriment of the research and development needs of business,
industry, and the furtherance of university research itself.

employability and destination data. At postgraduate level there is a dearth of data on
Information on employment destinations is collected from undergraduates and

postgraduates in exactly the same way, through the Destinations of Leavers from
Higher Education survey (DLHE), which collects data six months after graduation.
Given the numbers of UG/PG students graduating each year, it is to be expected that
less data are available on postgraduate leavers compared with undergraduate leavers.
There is, perhaps, a lack of free, publicly available information focusing on the
employment destinations of postgraduates, compared with undergraduates. This is
true across all subjects and not restricted to STEM. The Higher Education Statistics
Agency publishes free DLHE statistics, including the Employment Performance
Indicator 559 , which gives comparative data on the performance of HE institutions in
terms of graduate employment. The Employment PI is based on UG graduates only.
The Unistats website 560 , delivered by UCAS, does provide detailed information on the
employment prospects of both UG and PG graduates, but given the undergraduate
focus of the website (which also includes UCAS points and National Student Survey
scores), it would be interesting to understand how widely used Unistats is amongst
applicants to postgraduate courses.
Vitae has published useful research on the destinations of doctoral graduates through
its ‘What do researchers do?’ series 561 , providing, for example, analyses by subject, and
by occupation. Given Vitae’s remit 562 , the series focuses on doctoral graduates and
does not, for example, cover taught Masters graduates. The most recent DLHE data
included in the series is derived from the 2003-2007 DLHE surveys and the 2008
Longitudinal DLHE survey, which collected data on doctoral students who graduated
in 2004/05.
We suggest that further research is carried out to establish (a) what publicly available
information on postgraduate employment destinations would be most useful for
potential applicants to postgraduate courses, current postgraduate students, HE
institutions and other stakeholders, and through what medium; and (b) what data
could feasibly be made available, noting the smaller population of PG graduates
compared with UG graduates.
Delivery models
559 http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2071&Itemid=141
560 http://unistats.direct.gov.uk/
561 http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/513201/What-do-researchers-do.html
562 ‘Vitae is the UK organisation championing the personal, professional and career development of doctoral researchers
and research staff in higher education institutions and research institutes’; see: http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-
practice/1397/About-Vitae.html
999

In our view, both forms of doctoral training play an important role. The University of
Warwick finds that doctoral training through the Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) is
a successful and useful form of preparation for a career in academia and industry.
DTCs provide a cross-disciplinary environment, in which students undertake
integrated research skills training typically through a one year Masters and three year
PhD programme. We run a PG Certificate in Transferable Skills in Science, which
focuses on important skills such as communication, team work and project
management, and this is largely compulsory for our Science and Engineering students.
Although evidence is limited, anecdotally we can suggest that DTCs constitute a
supportive and collaborative framework for doctoral training in which students
interact with a community of researchers that facilitates the successful completion of
doctorates within the given time frame.
Having said that, having just one mechanism for doctoral training is a mistake, and the
withdrawal of project studentships is an unfortunate loss to the UK science and
engineering research community. The University of Warwick would argue that not
only were project studentships excellent training in science for doctoral researchers,
they also provided significant capacity for supporting the very best (peer reviewed)
scientific research projects in the UK.

The University of Warwick has a rich and diverse programme of researcher

development opportunities. We have hosted the Vitae Midlands Hub since 2004. As an
institution we have actively supported the aims and objectives of Vitae and value
greatly the network that has developed across the Midlands as a result.
Supporting the professional development of our research students is a core and

integral part of the doctoral student experience at Warwick and a number of
programmes exist at departmental and faculty level to effectively meet this aim. These
programmes are supported centrally by the Graduate School and the Department for
Student Careers & Skills.
As part of an experiential induction process, all doctoral students are actively

encouraged to complete a training needs analysis of their research and professional
skills. This training needs analysis is underpinned directly by Vitae’s Researcher
Development Framework (RDF). The Professional Researcher Development (PRD)
Online Tool (Warwick’s name for its training needs analysis) allows students to reflect
on their confidence, knowledge and skills across all 64 descriptors articulated in the
RDF. The online tool, then allows students to prioritise, action plan, record and reflect
on their development and naturally support the cyclical nature of learning in this
respect. The PRD will form the gateway for the soon to be launched, Warwick
Portfolio (Autumn 2012). The Warwick Portfolio will allow the University of Warwick
to present an institutional perspective on the RDF to engage all students and
supervisors in this aspect of research activity; will link seamlessly with key
1000
administrative processes, which include the annual review process; and support
evolving faculty and departmental programmes.
Over the next 6 months the University will be launching its “Post Graduate
Researcher Enterprise Programme – Create Your Own Impact in Academia and
Beyond”. The Vitae Enterprise Lens on the RDF has been a key support in the design
of this provision alongside institutional drivers that have defined its focus.
Quality
The University of Warwick would argue that it is vitally important for research
studentships to be embedded within a high quality research environment. RAE or REF
outcomes are a good, but not perfect, measure of that quality. These scores relate to
the quality of academic staff research, and the associated research income supports
the continuation of funded research within a university. In STEM subjects, this often
corresponds to the development and growth of research projects on which PGR
students can work, joining a team of highly motivated and like-minded researchers.
However, quality research supervision also grows from the personal dedication and
experience of the supervisors, who agree to share their expertise with students and
nurture those students’ growth. While this is enhanced by the income associated with
RAE/REF high scores, income alone will not substitute for high quality personal
supervision.
In order to ensure all students receive supervision of the highest quality, the
University’s Learning and Development Centre, in conjunction with the Graduate
School, runs mandatory doctoral supervision training for new probationary academic
staff. Probationers can supervise ahead of its completion only in conjunction with an
established member of staff, and many departments do not allow this until a staff
member is in the latter stages of the probationary period (which is 5 years). Some
departments offer some form of refresher doctoral supervision training.
Other measures are also important: for example, the nature and type of training
provided within a postgraduate experience. The University of Warwick provides
comprehensive training and information for all postgraduate students related to
careers both within and outside academia. All PG students are supported through
dedicated webpages, access to 1:1 advice from specialist Careers Consultants. In
particular for PGR students, the University runs career development workshops and
events specifically tailored for their needs. Each department and DTC within the
Science Faculty has a link Senior Careers Consultant who works with academic
departments, offers weekly guidance appointments, and coordinates tailored provision
and co-delivery of career development workshops with academic colleagues. These
careers consultants also liaise directly with professional bodies, such as Royal Society
of Chemistry, Society of Biology, Institute of Physics, trade associations and graduate
employers to understand new opportunities and challenges in the STEM labour market
and gain insights into the skills required in emerging areas.
1001
The University of Warwick is well known for its close links with industry. This
reputation is best articulated through the use of examples from WMG (Warwick
Manufacturing Group).
WMG work very closely with industry to build educational programmes that will then
meet their training and development needs. Occasionally WMG will respond to
general calls for tender for a training/education intervention advertised by industry, but
in general we will respond to specific invitations to tender, which come about as a
result of past business with the company or senior staff within the company having
attended/graduated from a WMG programme or research collaboration.
In these circumstances WMG will meet with representatives of the company

concerned and work to understand their needs from which WMG will produce a
proposed specification for the programme. The mechanism adopted is the “working
party” consisting of academic and company subject experts who will develop syllabi,
material and assessment mechanisms which meet both the needs of the company and
the University’s academic standards.
Some examples of developments along these lines are (more detailed information
available in the file):
• MSc in Automotive Technology – this programme commenced in 2010 and was
developed for and with JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) as a result of WMG’s long-standing
relationship with JLR.
• Network Rail “Stepping Stones” programme – consists of three levels of
provision: the PgA in Strategic Leadership, PgA in Business Leadership and a CPD
certificate in Frontline Leaders.
• Goodrich leadership development programme – the company had an in-house
leadership development programme that they approached WMG to develop and
accredit. WMG has worked with the company to provide more academic rigour in
their programme and has developed and delivered several modules which – to date –
have been for a non-qualification programme.
• Supply Professionalism Programme (SPP) – leads to the Postgraduate Certificate
in Process Business Management; graduate can carry credit forward into the part-
time Masters programmes offered by WMG. Participants travel to Warwick 8 times
over 2 years from all over the world (including UK, Scandinavia, USA, China, Africa)
to undertake modules; a company based project completes the programme.
Funding
In the current consultation on Student Number Control and Teaching Funding, the
HEFCE is proposing to make some limited funding available for postgraduate taught
courses, where the cost to providers is over £7500 (‘high-cost subjects’). According to
the consultation this has been prompted by the lack of loan facilities for postgraduate
students. It is proposed that HEFCE will provide the same rate of grant for
1002
undergraduate provision, plus a supplement for all subjects in price groups A to C.

The University of Warwick would welcome this.
However, it should be emphasised that the real concern is the lack of maintenance
awards for these kinds of courses. In the light of changes to the undergraduate fee
regime, there is a significant risk that UK students will be deterred from pursuing
postgraduate study due to the amount of debt they will have incurred on graduation.
This is potentially a serious issue not just in terms of the higher level of skills that
postgraduate students bring to the wider economy, but also a concern for doctoral
research, which to an extent depends on the initial research training provided in
masters courses.
Quite clearly, debt-averse students will find that the need to pay PG fees upfront, and
the lack of any loan or underwriting provision, risks persuading them that PG study is
a luxury (see in particular a recent Times Higher Education article referencing research
supporting this point: ‘Study highlights fees deterrent for postgraduates’, 26/3/12,
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=419434
&c=1 [accessed 2/4/12]). The added value to employability of gaining a PG degree,
especially at Masters level, is a motivating factor for students, but the very students for
whom UG admission has represented a financial burden will be further affected at PG
level. The country thus risks systematically under-skilling its most vulnerable sectors
of society just at the point where a real difference could be made to such students’
prospects.
Government and business need to do a better job of supporting student needs;

business and industry need to work together with universities to understand and
exploit the added value of PG degrees.
The wider availability of bursary or maintenance awards for postgraduate study,

combined with increased support to higher education institutions to provide these
courses would go some way to ensuring that the best students are not deterred from
entering into postgraduate study.
sufficient?
HEFCE does not provide SIVS funding at the postgraduate level, just undergraduate
level. However, UG SIVS funding provides important protection for some science
courses, without which it would not be possible to run such courses. Were such
funding to be withdrawn, this could have a negative impact on the supply of students
to PG courses in these areas.
Warwick suggests that the government could play a role in providing specific funding
for PG courses in SIVS subjects.
Overseas students
1003
Approximately 59% of the University of Warwick’s postgraduate taught population is

classed as ‘overseas’, i.e. non home/EU. Some departments attract a higher
proportion of overseas enrolments than others. The overseas student populations of
the taught master’s programmes in the following departments are all at or above 70%:
Centre for Applied Linguistics, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, Warwick
Business School, and Warwick Manufacturing Group. Law and Warwick Medical
School are near to the 70% mark.
As a globally-connected university, Warwick hosts students from 140 countries on its

campus, and sees the cosmopolitan student body as an opportunity to ensure that all
students have an international experience.
We do not associate a higher overseas student population with any particular dangers,
but would instead say that such demographics present particular potential challenges
or difficulties that the University proactively deals with in a number of ways. These
difficulties are related to the potential for a downturn in University income should the
overseas student market collapse, and students’ expectations that they will have a
diverse and cosmopolitan student experience, rather than one that is dominated by
any one particular nationality. However, the University is developing a number of
initiatives, working closely with the Student Union, to facilitate the full integration of
students from different national backgrounds, and to encourage UK students to benefit
from the inter-cultural learning opportunities resulting from having such a
cosmopolitan community on campus. The University is confident that the institution
deals with these challenges very well.
Changes in the immigration system did not impact negatively on Warwick. The
University increased its enrolment of overseas PGT students by 14% in 2011
compared to the previous year. This included a small increase in the number of Indian
students. Applications, offers and acceptances for 2012 entry have all increased again
from the 2011 totals.
However, University staff visiting overseas have encountered the perception that it has
become much more difficult to obtain a visa to study in the UK, and this may have
affected the decision of some international students to choose to go elsewhere.
9 May 2012
1004
University of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent, Cardiff University,
University of Surrey and University of Cambridge – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
University of York, University of Bedfordshire, University of Kent,

Cardiff University, University College London (UCL), University of
Salford, University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey and
University of Cambridge – Oral evidence (QQ 40-67)
1005
University of York – Supplementary written Evidence
Q1 What is the purpose of stand-alone Masters courses and doctoral provision in HEIs? In each
case, what is the role of Government in supporting these?
Stand alone Masters fall into three main categories – professional courses needed for
entry to the profession, vocational courses which improve job prospects, and research
training in preparation for a PhD. Doctoral provision is to produce the next
generation of university research staff and also to produce higher level intellectual
development and skills for the high end of the commercial/industrial sector.
Demand for Masters is broadly determined by market forces, i.e. the perceived value
to the student relative to the fee and living expenses. For PhDs demand is mainly
determined by the willingness of government and others to provide funding, principally
through the Research Councils, with additional support from charities.
Much research is performed by Masters and Doctoral research students in groups

funded by major research grants, so implying a separation of funding between research
students and research projects is not strictly valid. The increasing tendency of the
Research Councils is to pick and choose the areas where they allocate studentships,
rather than the previous method of relying on universities to direct this important
resource. There are dangers in this. It is important to universities themselves and the
country as a whole to have a good balance between fundamental and applied research.
The Research Councils are very close to government, and often feel the need to meet
short term political interests. It is becoming increasingly difficult to fund the longer
term, speculative research from which much of tomorrow's useful applications come.
Q2 In undergraduate provision there is an attempt to collect data on demand, employability and

destination data. At postgraduate level there is a dearth of data on these issues? What should
be done to remedy this situation?
To my knowledge few universities collect this information in any comprehensive way.

From time to time the Research Councils undertake surveys of cohorts of the
students they fund and that information is available.
Q3 What is your assessment of the EPSRC’s decisions to concentrate funding on Doctoral

EPSRC is relying heavily on Doctoral Training Centres, which is risky for the long term
health of the science base as noted above. We cannot rely in a fully assured way on
the Research Council’s ability to pick the right areas to support, and we need to
maintain freedom to select research projects within the universities.
Loss of project students is a major problem as it decouples research effort from the
most highly rated research activities.
It is hard to imagine that the term “university” can reasonably be applied to an

institution that does not carry out high level research, and in turn it is hard to see how
high level research can take place without the input of research students.
1006
Q5 Is quality of research output the best proxy of quality research supervision and training for
Definitely not. It is all too easy for the quality of the training to be compromised by
the pressure on research groups both to publish and to win grants.
Q6 What mechanisms do you have for involving industry in setting the standards and outputs for
post graduate STEM provision?
Some Masters training involves input from industrial/commercial organisations. CASE

and EngD provision involves heavy engagement with companies. These are excellent
programmes for applied research fields.
However, there are limits to the value of involving industry directly. There is often a
tension between the timescales on which industry is willing and able to commit to
joint projects (typically months rather than years) compared with the need for longer
term stability of funding in the university to safeguard the prospects of a student on a
3/4 year PhD programme. Industry involvement would also be undesirable in areas of
blue skies research.
Q7 There has been a continual erosion of public funding for stand-alone Masters and it has now
disappeared in many areas. What impact will this lack of funding have on the provision of
stand-alone Masters courses?
The decision by most students to undertake a Masters course is now based on an

assessment of the potential for career development. Most Masters students have to
think hard about how the course might enhance long term job prospects and earning
capability. Masters fees are widely expected to rise close to the £9k level of
undergraduate fees. If this is what happens, then there are likely to be serious
reductions in numbers of Masters students.
Q8 What impact does HEFCE’s SIVS funding have on post graduate provision? Is it sufficient?
There is an increasing range of SIVS, so that the original purpose and value of
supporting a few special cases has been diminished. Adding to the list of SIVS will
further reduce the impact and value even further.
Q9 We have heard that in certain Masters courses over 70% of the students are from overseas.
What are the dangers of such a large proportion of overseas students and how can we
mitigate against them?
This is a commercial decision by universities, driven by a need to develop alternative

income streams to replace decreasing government funding. In some institutions and
for some courses it would otherwise be hard to compete on the international level.
There are of course indirect benefits to the universities (good students may stay on
and contribute to the research base) and to the country (students returning to their
home country and rising to influential positions may retain the association and contact
with the UK, resulting in business coming to the country).
We support the value of bringing into the UK outstanding students who (a) invigorate
the intellectual quality of our courses; (b) may continue to play a role in the UK and its
1007
science and economic development; and (c) will be great ambassadors for the UK in
their home countries.
Q10 We have heard in evidence that changes in the immigration system are having a significant
impact on the number of overseas students in post graduate education and stand-alone
Masters in particular. What is your experience of this issue?
Changes in the immigration system have been disastrous from the point of view of (a)
applications, (b) administrative overhead, and (c) the reputation of the UK as a liberal
democracy.
11 May 2012
1008
Vectura – Written evidence
Graduate supply
Q. Is the current number of STEM students and graduates (from the UK,
EU and overseas) sufficient to meet the needs of industry, the research
base, and other sectors not directly connected with STEM?
A. We have been able to source graduates and have not noticed insufficient supply
of STEM graduates for many roles. There is a shortage of graduates with
experience or exposure to laboratory based immunology and regenerative
medicine and to principles of Good Clinical Practice / Good Manufacturing
Practice. Although any company recruiting a graduate would expect to offer
training in day to day operations, it would be a benefit for graduates to have
some reasonable expectations of what the practical application of their science
qualification may entail.
Q. Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education

sufficiently high, and if not ,why not?
A. When recruiting staff we look to see if there is an organisation ‘fit’ i.e. will they
work well within the culture. We expect to train and develop employee’s job
specific skills. From Universities we look for a solid grounding in the subjects i.e.
Chemistry and the ‘correct’ approach to scientific investigations.
Q. Do STEM graduates have the right skills for their next career move, be
it research, industry or more broadly within the economy?
A. Generally they have the skills required, if there is one area where we find
‘remedial’ skills development is needed is in English and in particular sentence,
and paragraph construction when writing results.
Q. What effect will higher education reforms have on the quality of

teaching, the quality of degrees and the supply of STEM courses in
higher education institutions?
A. I suspect, because of funding, that top Universities will attract more overseas
students and fewer UK students. Overseas students may or may not wish to
remain in the UK after graduation and there may be a shortage of high quality
STEM graduates available for employment in the UK in coming years.
Q. What effect does “research assessment” have upon the ability to

develop new and cross-disciplinary STEM degrees?
No comment.
Q. What is the relationship between teaching and research? Is it

necessary for all universities to teach undergraduates and post
graduates and conduct research? What other delivery model should be
considered?
A. All STEM graduates should be able to deliver projects, which may include
research projects. All STEM postgraduates should be able to devise and run
projects to address particular matters and this will usually be research focussed.
We feel it is unlikely that universities not actively involved in research will have
1009
enough ‘hands on’ experience of the latest tools and techniques to prepare
undergraduates sufficiently for the workplace.
Q. Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education

A. We have always been able to source interns and post graduate students and have
not found geographical restrictions. Restrictions are more likely to come from
applicants not wishing to consider alternative locations however this tends to
relate to applicants with post graduate work experience.
At the moment it is fair to say there are more STEM students and graduates than
places. I don’t see this as something which can be easily remedied as it is
intrinsically linked to how well a business and the economy is performing and
when the opportunities become available.
The problem with graduates and placement students is that they all become
available at the same time each year so competition will always be high and
opportunities in smaller organisations may not coincide with their availability.
Q. What is being done and what ought to be done to increase the

diversity of STEM graduates in terms of gender, ethnic origin and
socio-economic background?
A. I am not able to fully comment on this as it is more linked to intake at
universities. Our recruitment as we always offer places based on merit.
Q. Is the current training of PhD students sensitive to the range of

careers they subsequently undertake?
A. In our experience commercial requirements are rarely closely aligned with PhD
subject matter. As noted previously we hire for attitude and the ‘correct’
approach to scientific investigations. We expect to provide new employees with
specific job skills.
Q. Are we currently supporting the right number of PhD studentships to

A. I would suggest that they are of sufficient quality. However, a large number of
STEM PhD graduates do not pursue research careers for a variety of reasons.
Anecdotal evidence from small number of interviews / discussions suggests that
graduates perceive the financial sector to offer faster career progression and
higher rewards.
Q. What impact have Doctoral Training Centres had on the quality and
A. We have not experienced issues in the recruitment of suitable qualified PhD
students. The recent contraction of large pharmaceutical companies’ research
efforts in the UK has also provided a pool of qualified scientists willing to ‘take a
step back’, which may impact job prospects for new PhD students in the short
term.
1010
Q. Should state funding be used to promote Masters degrees and is the

balance right between the number of Masters degree students and
PhD students?
A. We do provide employees with the opportunities undertake further studies and
enable them to study for Masters Courses. We expect the course to be relevant
and appropriate to their current role or future enable them to be ready for
career opportunities in the organisation.
Q. What impact will higher education reforms have on the willingness of

No comment.
Industry
Q. What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to

attract them?
A. Industry offers industrial placement opportunities to students (i.e. sandwich
courses). Companies have a up to a year to develop a student, give them work &
practical skills while assessing if they would like them as a full time employee. The
student industrial application of the course theory, work experience and it
enables them to make an assessment on the type of organisation in which they
would like to work. We have found that students are often employed by the
original placement company. Work experience of less than a year is not effective;
it normally takes 6 – 9 months for student to become competent.
Q. What steps are industry and universities taking together to ensure

that demand for STEM graduates matches supply in terms of numbers,
skills and quality of graduates?
A. Since each company will have different requirements it is not particularly practical
to try and match supply and demand in this way: it is our view that universities
must maintain a supply of ‘traditional’ degree subjects (e.g. chemistry, biology)
and resist the trend towards so-called ‘vocational’ courses which rarely, in our
experience, meet the needs of industry.
Q. What lessons can be learnt from the provision of higher education in

A. Undergraduates and post-graduates from the Université Lille demonstrate a
proactive approach to application, adaptability, willingness to move and language
that does them credit. We see requests for placements and internships that will
certainly help people find employment after graduation.
27 February 2012
1011
Vectura, LGC Limited and Expedition Engineering – Oral evidence (QQ 146-166)
Vectura, LGC Limited and Expedition Engineering – Oral evidence

(QQ 146-166)
Transcript to be found under LGC Limited
1012
Vectura – Supplementary written evidence
1. Throughout this inquiry we have heard conflicting views on whether there is a shortage of
STEM graduates and post graduates in the UK. Do you recruit fresh graduates or
postgraduates? If not, why not?
We recruit graduates and post graduates. Graduates are normally recruited direct
from University, and we normally recruit interns as they have had more rounded
experience.
2. Have you experienced or are you experiencing difficulties recruiting STEM graduates or post
graduates in terms of numbers? Are you able to attract enough candidates in order to carry
out appropriate selection processes? How easy or difficult it is to compete with larger
employers that may be able to offer better salaries and/or training and superior working
conditions to STEM graduates?
We recruit about 3 ‘fresh’ graduates who are looking for a different working
environment from the large pharma organisations. Our culture is more flexible and
engaging employees have a more rounded experience. The career path offered is
different, providing employees with the opportunity to develop a range of research
competencies rather than a narrow specialism and we have found this foster
innovation
3. Do STEM graduates meet your expectations in terms of knowledge, technical skills and
social competence? What are they lacking, if anything? Has this changed over time?
The general scientific technical experience is good, and we expect to provide specific
technical expertise which is bespoke to our organisation.
We do not attract staff from Oxford / Cambridge and I would question if these seek
careers outside of the pharma industry.
4. Is it reasonable to expect universities to equip STEM graduates with certain employability

skills, such as team working, self-management, understanding of the business context etc, or
should this learning take place while in employment?
We recruit for attitude and train for skills. So we provide the presentation, team
work learning events and have structured management development programmes.
Graduates we recruit will normally have been interns in the business and
consequently we will have provided these skills while on work placement. However
there is scope for improvement in English and in particular grammar.
5. Do you or could you take students during their course on placements of short or long
duration?
It takes approx. 6 – 8 months for a new graduate to become competent, we only

offer 1 year placements in order to maximise their experience.
1013
6. Do you feel that you have any mechanisms to influence the education of graduates or
postgraduates in universities to better suit your needs? Are some universities better
equipped than others to provide the sorts of skilled graduates you look for?
We have built relationships with a number of universities Cardiff, Bristol and Bath
where Vectura originated. We have tried to establish working relationships with a
number of other establishments with less success.
Courses that provide students with industrial placements (Bath) do produce more
rounded individuals – team work, commercially astute, time management and have a
higher work ethic.
As an organisation we expect to provide the more specialised training required

together with management development courses.
Universities would benefit from taking more interest in undergraduates placed on

work experience courses, both to cement the relationship but also to gain a better
understanding of industry.
7. What role can the Government play in ensuring a better match between supply and
demand of STEM graduates and post graduates?
There is no easy answer.

In smaller organisations the number of graduates required each year fluctuates and is
partially dependent upon staff turnover which given the economic climate, is very
low, moreover the times we have vacancies does not coincide with the end of the
academic year.
Another factor impacting pharmaceutical recruitment are the large organisations

downsizing, in the short term there is a plethora of talented, experienced candidates,
in the longer term students may be discouraged from considering studying subjects
relevant to careers in the industry.
1 March 2012
1014
Vitae – Written evidence
Background
Vitae is the UK organisation championing the personal, professional and career development
of doctoral researchers and research staff in higher education institutions and research
institutes. We are funded by Research Councils UK, and managed by CRAC 563 .
Doctoral researchers and research staff are highly skilled individuals, critical players in both
the supply of talented employees for innovation and wealth creating businesses, and
achieving effective knowledge exchange between universities and businesses.
With a vision for the UK to be world-leading in researcher development, Vitae plays a key
role in the UK drive for high-level skills and innovation in a globally competitive research
environment.
Our response focuses on the following question and related issues:
undertake?
1. The UK is committed to the development of world-class researchers, both doctoral

researchers and research staff. Evidence shows that researchers’ careers span a
range of employment sectors, and the relationship between businesses and
universities in maximising the benefits of researchers’ knowledge and expertise to
the economy is complex and variable across sectors.
2. Doctoral researchers and research staff acquire unique expertise, attributes and
capabilities through engaging in research (see para 4). Following the investment by
RCUK of substantial funds through the ‘Roberts money’ (over £120m between 2003-
11) to build higher education capacity to develop researchers, the training and career
development aspect of doctoral programmes has transformed substantially,
specifically in terms of improving their employability 564 . In a recent study, training and
development resources for postgraduate researchers were found to be publicly
available on 93% of HEIs websites that were reviewed 565 This initiative included funds
from EPSRC for enterprise training for their funded researchers.
3. Vitae, CBI and Research Councils UK held a strategy forum in June 2011 to enable
university, industry and research leaders to consider together the future of UK
research and the implications for the professional and career development of
postgraduate researchers and research staff. The Forum agreed that further
opportunities for continuing constructive dialogue between universities, employers
563 CRAC: the Career Development Organisation www.crac.org.uk

564 Vitae Database of Practice contains examples of institutional provision of career development opportunities
www.vitae.ac.uk/dop. Also see independent review of implementation of Roberts recommendations by
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/researchcareers/RobertReport2011.pdf, and recent (2011) analysis of institutional
strategies for embedding career development and transferable skills training in UK institutions
http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/2011analysisHaynes%20Roberts.pdf
565 http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/Vitae-The-visibility-of-researcher-development-in-UK-higher-education-
institutions-strategies-2011.pdf
1015
and key stakeholders relating to the supply of highly skilled people would be valuable,
and identified the following key areas:
• The importance of increasing the absorptive capacity of business for research,

researchers and innovation by means of two-way people transfer
• Finding ways for HEIs to engage effectively with SMEs
• Increasing awareness of value and importance of cross-sector experience for
knowledge exchange and innovation through placements and work experience
• Improving understanding and knowledge of researcher career paths, capabilities
and contribution across all sectors
• Ensuring future supply of highly-skilled workforce and sustainability of the UK
research base
• Maintaining and improving the international standing and attractiveness of the UK
for researchers, research-led companies and international businesses
4. The Vitae ‘What do researchers do?’566 series of publications and web resources
provide comprehensive information on the employability and career pathways of
doctoral graduates, and on relevant labour market information 567 . All our
publications and labour market information provide breakdowns by disciplinary
groups, including biological sciences, biomedical sciences, physical sciences and
engineering. These resources provide employers, doctoral researchers and
institutional careers advisors with access to information on employment
opportunities
5. The 2010 Vitae publication ‘What do researchers do? Doctoral graduate destinations
and impact three years on’ explores doctoral graduates experiences of their research
degree programmes, how valuable a doctorate was for their current job, their job
search processes, motivations, and satisfaction with their employment.
The report findings indicate that STEM doctoral graduates, 62% of whom were
working outside of higher education, can impact in the workplace by:
• enhancing the research capacity, knowledge and skills of businesses and
organisations by undertaking research, applying their research skills and
disciplinary knowledge
• enhancing business revenue and creative capacity by being able to be innovative
• enhancing the efficiency, performance and sustainability of organisations by
working both autonomously and in teams
• changing organisational culture and practices by working with and managing other
staff.
6. A significant new approach to training all doctoral researchers for their future
careers is the Vitae Researcher Development Framework which describes the
knowledge, behaviours and attributes of successful researchers. The Researcher
Development Framework was developed by, and in consultation with, higher
education and employers and is becoming widely adopted in UK higher education to
underpin researcher development. It is endorsed by over 30 stakeholders including
the Research Councils, UK funding bodies, Universities UK and the unions 568 . The
566 www.vitae.ac.uk/wdrd
567 www.vitae.ac.uk/lmi
568 www.vitae.ac.uk/rdf
1016
Researcher Development Framework underpins the strategy to realise researchers'

potential for all sectors of the economy and society. In this way employability in
different sectors, companies or job types can be understood by both employer and
researcher. For example, Vitae is currently working with the Engineering Council to
map the Researcher Development Framework against their requirements for
achieving chartered status (CEng).
7. Vitae is also working with the HE sector and relevant organisations to create ‘lenses’
on the Researcher Development Framework, which focus on the key knowledge,
behaviours and attributes of researchers and how these can be acquired through, or
used in, other environments. These include an employability lens, a leadership lens,
and an enterprise lens developed with the Research Councils.
8. Partly due to the Roberts funding given to HEIs (dedicated to improving transferable
skills and employability) and the work and resources provided by Vitae, careers
provision for doctoral researchers has transformed dramatically in recent years.
Many university careers services now provide dedicated staff to support
postgraduate researchers. Vitae provides a dedicated careers portal
www.vitae.ac.uk/careers for researchers, materials for induction, and a suite of
researcher booklets www.vitae.ac.uk/researcherbooklets, which provide practical
advice on a range of topics including engaging with the public, leadership and
enhancing creativity.
9. However, we know from various surveys that formal careers advice is generally only
taken up by a minority of researchers and is often only considered relatively late in
the process. A recent survey 569 of over 4,500 doctoral researchers in higher
education found that over 50% of respondents use their family and friends to help
clarify their career goals, and 42% use their supervisor. One of the challenges is that
doctoral respondents who aspire to a career in research reported gaining more
careers help than those who considered careers beyond research. The contribution
of doctoral graduates to the wider economy is well documented in the ‘What do
researchers do?’ series; we need to consider how best to equip their supervisors,
mentors and peers with information relating to the full range of career and job
opportunities available to doctoral graduates.
10. ‘What do researchers want to do?’ confirms that over half of doctoral researchers
aspire to careers in higher education, and a very high proportion to occupations
related to their research field. In addition, a number of observations emerge:
• Work experience appears to be more widespread at undergraduate level than
amongst postgraduate researchers
• At undergraduate level, work experience was more commonly undertaken by
those studying STEM subjects than others; the position at doctoral level appears
to be reversed, with fewer STEM researchers undertaking placements than in
other subjects
• Of those STEM researchers who did have work experience during their doctoral
studies, a fifth were offered jobs and two fifths decided it was the type of work
they wanted to do
• Respondents reported choosing to undertake research principally for intellectual
interest rather than (essentially) career-related reasons. A significant proportion
569 ‘What do researchers want to do?’, in press, due for launch early 2012
1017
reported that they wished that they had had more advice in relation to their
decision-making at this point
11. The role of researchers in contributing to economic and social benefit is unique:
whether researchers remain in academia, or make a transition to other employment,
their capabilities to be innovative and make impact are substantial. The opportunity is
to find ways to strengthen and build links between employers and researchers, and
to provide solid evidence of the benefits through data analysis and case studies. It is
important to understand the career trajectories of doctoral graduates as a unique
cohort of talent for industry and academia. Whilst there is good provision of careers
information in HEIs, the uptake by researchers of careers advice and guidance could
be higher.
16 December 2011
1018
Vitae, Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and Higher Education Academy – Oral evidence
(QQ 167-215)
Vitae, Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and Higher Education

Academy – Oral evidence (QQ 167-215)
Transcript to be found under Quality Assurance Agency (QAA)
1019
Wellcome Trust – Written evidence
Key Points
1. In addition to providing a pipeline of graduates for careers in research and technology-
driven industries, STEM study provides graduates with important transferrable skills.
The fact that many STEM graduates find employment outside traditional STEM fields
should be seen as positive.
2. It is difficult to predict what impact the Government’s higher education reforms will have
on students’ ability and willingness to study STEM, and enter STEM careers. The fact
that some institutions intend to charge higher fees for STEM degrees is of serious
concern, as is the potential impact on the quantity and quality of people transitioning to
postgraduate study. It is essential that there is national oversight of the offer of STEM
courses.
3. Improvements in the quality and availability of careers advice, and better communication
from employers around the value of STEM qualifications and the wide variety of
opportunities they present, will also improve the supply of high quality individuals into
the STEM workforce. Actions are required at all the stages of the education pipeline
covered by this inquiry.
4. The UK STEM workforce is highly dependent on international, as well as home grown,

talent. Government restrictions on skilled immigration from outside the EEA present a
significant threat to the sustainability of the UK’s STEM workforce.
Introduction
5. We welcome the opportunity to respond to this inquiry. A healthy pipeline of
individuals with skills and qualifications in STEM is important both to maintain the
competitiveness of the UK research base and of the critical economic sectors that
depend on STEM skills, including the life sciences. While considerable progress has been
made in a number of the areas highlighted by this inquiry, the rapidly changing landscape
means it is important to continue to monitor emerging trends. It is important that
actions to improve the STEM pipeline are consistent and well integrated across schools,
higher education and industry, to avoid any risk of silos developing.
6. The Terms of Reference for this inquiry acknowledges that STEM graduates have
important transferrable skills – for example numeracy, quantitative and analytical skills –
which are valued by industries outside the traditional definition of ‘STEM’ sectors.
However, this important point is contradicted by a following statement that the
significant proportion of STEM graduates working in “jobs that do not require a STEM
degree” is grounds for concern. The Committee should certainly be concerned if there
is evidence of talent shortages in particular industries or areas of research, or if STEM
graduates are finding it difficult to secure skilled employment. However, the fact that
STEM graduates are finding employment in a wide range of areas should generally be
seen as positive, both for the individuals involved and for the diverse sectors that will
benefit from their skills.
7. The Committee asks about the definition of a ‘STEM subject’ and a ‘STEM job’. It would
be difficult to develop an exhaustive list of every subject or job that falls under the STEM
umbrella, and there will inevitably be grey areas. For example, medicine is not usually
considered a STEM subject, even though the field is founded on the biosciences, and
1020
many medically-qualified individuals end up working in research. A recent study by the

Science Council has highlighted the wide variety of science roles across the economy,
providing a useful insight into the importance that these roles play in society 570 .
8. The breadth of STEM means that significant variation is likely to exist between industries
and fields of study in relation to the questions and concerns identified in the inquiry. The
difficulties that the civil engineering sector experiences in attracting skilled staff may be
quite different to the challenges experienced by the pharmaceutical industry. We know
that gender diversity is less of an issue in the biological compared to the physical
sciences. While it is valuable to identify areas of commonality, there is a risk of over-
generalising problems. In making its recommendations, the Committee should consider
whether STEM-wide solutions are needed, or more targeted actions in specific STEM
industries, research fields or areas of study.
9. While the inquiry focuses on the supply of STEM graduates from the higher education
system, it is important to acknowledge issues related to retention of talent, particularly
for certain groups of individuals and especially at higher levels. For example, the number
of male and female applicants for Wellcome Trust PhD programmes is roughly equal, but
the proportion of female applicants is dramatically lower for Investigator Awards and
senior fellowships 571 .
10. The UK STEM workforce is highly dependent on international, as well as home grown,
talent. Government restrictions on immigration from outside the European Economic
Area (EEA) are detrimental to the UK’s ability to attract top international researchers
and academics, and therefore present a significant threat to the quality and sustainability
of the STEM workforce. This will be exacerbated if the Government’s higher education
reforms decrease the number of UK residents choosing to enrol in a STEM qualification,
undertake postgraduate study, or pursue a research career. Immigration issues are
discussed further in paragraph 20.
11. There is a paucity of quality data when it comes to understanding the supply and demand
for STEM graduates. It will be important to improve this evidence base, particularly
given the Government’s expectation that employers will increasingly hire local workers
rather than relying on immigrants from outside the EEA. Data sets are not well
integrated across government – for example it would be valuable to compare data held
by the UK Border Agency, such as the information used to compile the Shortage
Occupation List, with data held by the Higher Education Statistics Agency on trends in
STEM study.
16-18 supply
12. In 2010 and 2011, entries to all three core science A levels at last achieved an annual
percentage increase greater than the overall increase in A level entries. Rising entries in
physical sciences (especially physics) and mathematics (especially further mathematics)
followed a dramatic decline in the 1990s and the start of the following decade. This
570 The Science Council (2011) The current and future UK science workforce
571 PhD studentships: 49% (male): 51% (female); Early Career Fellowships: 52% (male): 48% (female). Investigator Awards in
2010/11: 140 male (81%) and 33 female (19%) researchers applied. However, the award rates after interview for these
applications were 49% (male): 51% (female).
1021
trend of increasing entries will need to be sustained over the next 5-10 years to have the
desired impact on the number of STEM qualified individuals572 .
13. This improvement in the quantity of 16-18 STEM students followed many years of wide-
ranging and often long-term Government and stakeholder initiatives. Attention now also
needs to be paid to improving the quality of STEM trained individuals. There are two
areas that need significant attention: enhancing practical skills and mathematical
knowledge. Indeed, mathematical skills should be better developed for all 16-18
students, not just those studying STEM. These gains could be achieved by requiring the
examination boards to properly assess practical knowledge and demand the relevant
mathematical skills for science qualifications. The current structure of the examination
system has raised concerns that competing examination boards are driving standards
down rather than developing the necessary level of challenge 573 .
14. While the Committee has chosen to focus on secondary education, there is considerable
evidence that the seeds of future career choices are sown earlier than this. Young
people’s interest in science is often sparked in primary schools, but few schools have
even one teacher with a STEM background and many primary school teachers lack
confidence in teaching science. Furthermore, a recent survey by the Wellcome Trust 574
found that many primary school teachers reported a decline in the status of science over
the past two years, coinciding with the removal of external science tests at age 11. The
Royal Society has called for a skilled science specialist in every primary school, Based on
the success of the Department for Education’s programme for mathematics specialists,
the Trust intends to pilot a scheme to up-skill primary science leaders, to complement
the Government's plans to recruit and train primary science specialist teachers.
15. The Trust is supportive of current Government initiatives to support STEM in schools,
specifically:
• Science Learning Centres / Project ENTHUSE – the Department for

Education, industry and the Wellcome Trust have joined forces in Project
ENTHUSE, making it possible for teachers from all over the country to upgrade
their subject knowledge and teaching skills at the National Science Learning
Centre (NSLC). The National Audit Office (2010) describes evidence of
improved teaching and higher take-up of science and mathematics as a result of
the NSLC’s training courses 575 . In the 2011 Autumn Statement we were
delighted to see the Government announce a further £10 million investment in
Project ENTHUSE from 2013-14, which will be matched by the Wellcome Trust.
We look forward to working with Government on the review of the network of
Science Learning Centres, funding for which is coming to an end in 2013.
572 Royal Society (2011). Preparing for the transfer from school and college science and mathematics education to UK STEM higher
education http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/education/policy/state-of-nation/2011_02_15-SR4-
Fullreport.pdf
573 Wellcome Trust response to the House of Commons Education Select Committee inquiry: How should examinations for
15-19 year olds in England be run? (2011).

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/%40policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtvm053
825.pdf
574 Primary science survey carried out in collaboration with the National Science Learning Centre in July 2011, with 467
respondents. Detailed results are available on the Wellcome Trust website.

575 National Audit Office (November 2010). Educating the Next Generation of Scientists
http://www.nao.org.uk//idoc.ashx?docId=95a6046d-8162-438c-b074-c9975db8a90e&version=-1
1022
• STEM Ambassadors 576 – This programme brings volunteers from STEM

backgrounds into schools to inspire young people about STEM subjects. STEM
Ambassadors contribute through formal lessons or extra-curricular activities,
with the aim to increase the motivation and enthusiasm for STEM. Importantly
they also help young people to better understand the variety of career
opportunities that STEM can offer, and increase schools’ and teachers’ links with
local companies.
16. The Government must ensure a science education, at the appropriate level, is available
to all. This will have benefits in terms of improving scientific literacy across the
population, as well as boosting the STEM pipeline. At secondary level, ensuring that all
students have access to triple science should be a priority. It is possible that the English
Baccalaureate (EBacc) will increase the number of students studying two science GCSEs,
as it requires to A*-C passes in science. It seems unlikely that the EBacc will drive
uptake of triple science, and it is possible that the new timetabling pressures that it
introduces will move students away from triple science.
17. Improving the quality of careers advice is vital, as subject choices at 14 and 16 can send
young people down the wrong path, for example if they miss the qualifications they need
for STEM careers. For example, young people often do not appreciate the importance
of further studies in mathematics. The National Audit Office 577 listed careers
information and guidance as one of five critical success factors in improving take-up and
achievement in science. The Government already produces labour market information in
the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). If this could be augmented and made
directly available to people planning their careers, especially young people and their
parents, it would give them direct access to authentic information to inform decisions
about future courses of study.
18. To continue to attract sufficient quality and quantity of students into STEM study,
stronger incentives will be needed, especially as some students tend to see STEM
subjects as a difficult option 578 . Higher education institutions need to get better at
communicating the value of STEM qualifications. A recent report by the Russell Group
provides a useful model 579 .
19. Employers must also communicate the value of STEM qualifications better, with emphasis
on the wide range of career options available, and opportunities for salary progression
(rather than just starting salaries) 580 . We welcome the ‘kite-marking’ initiative in the
Government’s Autumn Statement. Employers can also play a more proactive role in
attracting students into STEM subjects by providing bursaries and work and internship
opportunities.
Graduate supply
20. As part of our charitable mission, the Wellcome Trust supports “the brightest minds in
biomedical research and the medical humanities” – in other words, we fund only the
best. From our perspective as a funder of PhD programmes and other postgraduate
576 http://www.stemnet.org.uk/content/stem-ambassadors
577 Educating the Next Generation of Scientists National Audit Office (November 2010)
578 Durham University (2008) Relative difficulty of examinations in different subjects
http://www.cemcentre.org/attachments/SCORE2008report.pdf
579 The Russell Group (2011). Informed choices http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/media/informed-choices/InformedChoices-
latest.pdf
580 The Royal Academy of Engineering (2011).The labour market value of STEM qualifications and occupations.
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/releases/pdf/The_Labour_Market_Value_of_STEM_Qualifications_and_Occupations.pdf
1023
training schemes, we do not have any specific concerns about the quality of students
coming through from undergraduate level.
21. The introduction of accreditation should help improve the quality of STEM graduates,
promote best practice in STEM teaching and harmonise course content across
institutions. The Society of Biology has introduced an accreditation process for
undergraduate bioscience degrees, and we welcome the announcement in the
Government’s recent Strategy for Life Sciences that this will be expanded.
22. The Committee’s questions refer to the supply of graduates “from the UK, EU and
internationally”. It is worth noting that a significant proportion of the UK’s current
research and academic workforce originate from outside the EEA. Even if there were
ample STEM graduates to supply the UK workforce, international scientists should still
be welcomed for the diversity of skills, knowledge and connections that they bring,
enhancing research and innovation. Science is a global affair and flourishes through
international collaborations. Non-EEA nationals make up 10.6 per cent of all UK
academic staff; although in some science and engineering disciplines the proportion is as
high as 26 per cent 581 . The Wellcome Trust is concerned that the Government’s
immigration reforms are likely to have a negative impact on the UK’s ability to continue
attracting high quality international staff. In particular:
• The Government’s decision to close the Tier 1 Post-Study Work route could
make it much more difficult for talented international graduates of UK
universities to enter the UK workforce following their graduation. While the
Government is allowing international graduates to transfer into the main Tier 2
work category, in practice not all graduates will meet the requirements –
specifically the need for a job offer paying more than £20,000.
• The closure of the Tier 1 (General) category and the additional restrictions on
Tier 2 have made it much more difficult for graduate-level talent to enter the UK.
Tier 1 (General) specifically prioritised those who were young and qualified to
degree-level or higher. Under Tier 2 no points are awarded for youth or
qualifications 582 , and employers can only hire a foreigner if they can demonstrate
that there is no UK or EEA worker who could do the job;
• The proposal to restrict Tier 5 to 12 months rather than 24 months will threaten
the viability of a number of important STEM training schemes, including the
Newton Fellowships operated by the Royal Society, and the sponsored
researchers programme led by Research Councils UK.
23. At this stage it is difficult to say with any certainty what impact the higher education
reforms will have on STEM provision at the undergraduate level. This will need to be
carefully monitored. However, it is of serious concern that some institutions have set
higher fees for STEM courses than courses in other areas, even though STEM courses
will continue to receive public tuition subsidies. This could reduce numbers of STEM
undergraduates and systematically deter certain groups of students from studying STEM,
notably the debt averse. As part of its funding arrangements for teaching in STEM
subjects, the Government should seek a commitment from institutions that students
581Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2009/10

582While priority is given in Tier 2 to ‘PhD level’ occupations, the extra points are granted irrespective of whether the
individual in question actually has a PhD.
1024
choosing to study STEM subjects will not face higher fees than other students at the
same institution.
24. The higher education reforms may also have an impact on the diversity and geographical
spread of STEM graduates. It is predicted that more students will decide to stay at home
when studying in order to save money – if their local HEIs do not offer the full range of
STEM subjects, their options will be limited.
25. The Wellcome Trust was an early pioneer of the four year approach to PhD
programmes, which has since been adopted by other research funders, for example
through the EPSRC/ESRC Doctoral Training Centres. We currently support 30
Programmes based in centres of excellence throughout the UK, and an additional seven
clinical PhD programmes.
26. In developing our four-year PhD programme the Trust elected to prioritise quality over
quantity – ensuring that the individuals we fund have access to the very best training
environments, even if that means funding fewer people and a limited number of
institutions. This targeted approach is consistent with our mission as a charitable funder,
but at the national level there may be value in greater diversity.
27. While there is a perception that PhD training has not historically been sensitive to the
range of careers that PhD graduates will ultimately undertake, we consider that this
situation is improving. Like most other developed nations, the UK has seen a significant
increase in the number of PhD graduates over recent decades – as the number of
permanent academic positions has not increased at the same rate, there is increasing
recognition and acceptance that not all PhD graduates will end up in research and
academic roles. PhD programmes, including those funded by the Wellcome Trust, are
increasingly incorporating training in transferable skills such as communication and
leadership, in addition to technical training.
28. We would argue that the expansion in PhD-qualified individuals is positive for the UK
even if many of these individuals do not end up working directly in research. It is
important for postgraduate students to have access to high quality careers advice to
counter any perception that a non-academic career path is less worthy. For those who
wish to remain in academia, appropriate support and advice at each career stage is also
important. This is especially pertinent for women in science given the decline in numbers
of women as the seniority of positions increases.
29. In 2009, the Trust launched ‘Career Tracker’, a longitudinal prospective study to track
Trust award holders' careers over time, with a focus on recipients of PhD and early
career fellowships. The early results show that the majority of the participants in the
study have remained in academic research, although the proportion of women remaining
in academia was lower (66 per cent compared to 80 per cent of males). Although most
PhD holders who had left academic research were still working in science-related areas
– such as the pharmaceutical/biotech industry medicine, science administration or
science communications – others had started careers in new fields, such as TV
production, social work and investment. The reasons given for leaving academia
included: a “willingness to contribute to improve global health but not at the bench”;
“uninspiring career prospects”; and a “dislike of politics that seem to be associated with
an academic career”. When asked to suggest some barriers to the pursuit of a career in
science, the Career Tracker participants mentioned difficulty in obtaining funding and a
1025
lack of job security. We would be happy to share more detailed results with the
Committee if this would of interest.
30. As a research funder we are concerned about the potential impact of the higher
education reforms on students’ decisions about whether to pursue postgraduate study,
and ultimately a research career. In the current economic climate the extent of this
impact may not become fully apparent, as the difficult graduate job market is likely to
strengthen incentives to pursue further study. However, as the economy recovers and
graduate opportunities increase, students who are concerned about their level of debt
may think twice about enrolling in a higher qualification, particularly if this is likely to
mean additional debt. It was announced in the higher education white paper that the
government intended to monitor this area closely, but we welcome HEFCE’s willingness
to adopt a more proactive approach, including exploring options for providing financial
support to postgraduates.
31. Masters degrees are increasingly seen as entry-level qualifications for STEM graduates
wishing to work within the sector or progress to PhDs. Indeed, the majority of
chemistry and engineering courses are now four-year integrated Masters programmes.
To avoid a break in the STEM pipeline, state funding should support Masters level
courses where these are an entry-level qualification or are essential for progression to a
PhD. Financial incentives are needed given that increasing levels of debt may deter
students from further study – this will not only reduce numbers but may risk course
closures.
Industry
32. There are numerous ways industry can encourage students to pursue STEM disciplines.
For example:
• Providing financial support to individual students through bursaries and

scholarships;
• Working with HEIs to ensure that industry priorities and activities are
represented within STEM courses, for example by supplying guest lecturers.
• Participating in STEM Ambassadors and other schemes that increase awareness

of the value and diversity of STEM careers
• Offering work experience and enrichment to students throughout education
33. Better information about wage progression may encourage more potential students to
consider a STEM career, as graduate salaries are not always representative of long-term
earning potential. With regard to encouraging young people to consider research
careers, it is also important to highlight the non-monetary advantages, such as
independence, ability to work flexibly, prestige, opportunities to travel or work abroad,
intellectual stimulation, and the potential to help solve important problems.
16 December 2011
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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SUB-COMMITTEE 1

Higher Education in STEM subjects (Science,Technology,

1994 Group – Written evidence

2 CBI and EDI, Building for Growth, p.34,

6 CBI and EDI, Building for Growth, http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1051530/cbi__edi_education___skills_survey_2011.pdf

12 1994 Group response to the Higher Education White Paper

4.4. Due to the importance of sustaining postgraduate provision we encourage consideration

Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) – Written evidence

1. The Academy of Medical Sciences welcomes the opportunity to contribute to this

2. The Academy’s response focuses on postgraduate biomedical training and research,

6. Sustaining a world class biomedical workforce

should be taken into account when planning to expand the contribution of

the innovation race. http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/library/industry/Documents/skills-biomedical-research.pdf

is being hampered by a shortage of PhD studentships within the UK as some funders

20 More information available at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/1382/1382.pdf

24 Further information is available from: http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk/p47prid96.html

Sustaining a world class biomedical workforce

27 Further information is available from: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/

26.Government has advocated that excellence in teaching should be recognised and

27.The UK has historically enjoyed a vibrant pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector

Professor Edward Acton, University of East Anglia – Written

House of Lords Immigration Evidence Panel

UUK's preliminary data indicates serious impact at postgraduate taught level

4 What is considered to be a sustainable level of international students within the

In 2010-11 non-EU full-time the numbers stood at 258,000, approximately 10% of

HEFCE 2009-14 forecasts point to annual growth in England of about 10,000

HESA data on university-sponsored students is already capable of providing

Meanwhile, the meticulous records available on each individual university-

Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) – Written

Responses to questions posed by the Committee

• What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?

When considering undergraduate teaching of STEM subjects, we believe it is important to

35 The current and future UK science workforce, Science Council, 2011.

Koenig, Cambridge University, June 2011 http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/reports/biomaths_landscape.pdf

• Is the quality of STEM graduates emerging from higher education sufficiently

43 Skills needs for biomedical research, ABPI 2008.

Koenig, Cambridge University, June 2011 http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/reports/biomaths_landscape.pdf

A substantial increase in the number of placements offered is unlikely to occur in large

49 Building for Growth, Education and skills survey 2011, CBI

Teaching informed by research is an essential component of a high quality undergraduate

Collaboration between research-intensive universities and between universities and industry

• Does the UK have a sufficient geographical spread of higher education

medicine, molecular and translational toxicology, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and

where postgraduate teaching is essential. Universities running courses valued by industry

If individuals with appropriate postgraduate qualifications are not available in sufficient

• What incentives should industry offer to STEM graduates in order to attract

We welcome the Wilson Review of industry-academic collaboration and eagerly anticipate

Aston University – Written evidence

2. In undergraduate provision there is an attempt to collect data on demand, employability and

Have coordinated approach to collection and storage of data

Will limit doctoral training in particular areas, this is a significant concern.

• What do you consider to be a reasonable balance of doctoral provision models to ensure

Researcher Development Framework

Case awards, KTPs, use of the associated supervisors from industry.

Mitigation is currently taking place by considerable investment in scholarships for

British Academy – Written evidence

50 On mobility and high achievers, see this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15696714

British Computer Society (the Chartered Institute for IT), in

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

Council of Professors and Heads of Computing

UK Computing Research Committee

What is the definition of a STEM subject, and a STEM job?

6. Data from one representative UK University shows that 6 months from