BILL RAMMELL, MP AND SIR HOWARD NEWBY

2 NOVEMBER 2005

  Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome Bill Rammell, Minister of State for Lifelong Learning and Further and Higher Education, and Sir Howard Newby, the Chief Executive of HEFCE, and the members of the public. This is a key subject, to which we will no doubt return on many occasions during the lifetime of this Parliament. It is fair to say that although I was not on the Committee at the time, the Committee was very disappointed at the Government's response, and indeed HEFCE's response, to the Report on Strategic Science in English Universities. The purpose of this morning is to try and revisit the responses from HEFCE and the Government, and, rather than let the dust settle on the report on the shelves in the committee room, to return to it fairly briefly this morning. Can I start with you, Bill? The Government spends £6 billion in terms of higher education; the British economy is crying out for science, technology, engineering and maths graduates; and yet the Government does not believe that it should intervene in order to provide the British economy with that, despite the fact that it is spending all that money. How does that square?

  Bill Rammell: Thank you, Chair. It depends what you mean by "intervention". If you are asking us to directly intervene in independent judgments that individual institutions take about what is happening in the market, what is the best way to respond, and what individual course provision they make, I do not think that is what we should be doing, except in exceptional circumstances—and perhaps we can talk about those. However, I think we are doing an awful lot in the most important areas, which is to stimulate demand. If you look at what has happened to teaching numbers within STEM subjects over the last eight years, they have risen significantly. If you look at the quality of all teachers that are coming through, perhaps one of the most significant pieces of research that I have identified in advance of this meeting is to look at what has happened to those students entering PGCE courses in maths, science and technology. The numbers that have a degree classification of 2:1 and above, in maths in 1998-99 were 39% and by 2003-04 it had increased to 44%; science from 44% to 51%; and technology from 35% to 45%. In terms of stimulating demand—and you can look at the science centres that we are developing in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust, there is an awful lot that is taking place to make that happen. The other thing is that although there has been a lot of controversy about this subject—and that is legitimate and genuine because people will have strong views—if you look at the latest admission figures through UCAS, there have been significant increases in maths and physics, general engineering and chemistry. That does not mean that I am complacent, but it does mean that some of the measures we have been putting in place may be beginning to bear fruit.

  Q2  Chairman: We will come back to that, if we may. That is a very important issue that we should return to; we should not simply say that nothing is happening there, and I do not think that the Committee would say that. However, there was a perceived crisis with particularly a number of chemistry departments that were closing, which was sending out warning bells to the Science and Technology Committee; and the report was asking the Government to consider particularly a hub-and-spokes model, which the Committee felt very, very strongly would make sure that there was good regional provision as well as having national provision, and yet the Government just dismissed that. Why?

  Bill Rammell: I do not think we dismissed it. We looked at it. When you talk about the perception of crisis, your own Committee, Chair, actually said that it was an exaggeration.

  Q3  Chairman: Yes.

  Bill Rammell: I think that that is absolutely right, and that has actually been confirmed by everybody who has looked at that issue. In terms of the specific proposition that you put forward of the hub-and-spokes model, having looked at it—and we not only looked at it originally but I then looked at it when I took responsibility for this area in May—I think it would be far too top-down as an initiative. It would restrict innovation and creativity and the market sensitivity that we rightly value within our institutions. Looking at the details of the proposition I do not think HEFCE, and I do not think that Howard, with the best will in the world, could legislate to ensure that there was one 5-star department in every STEM subject within every region. Similarly, if you are just choosing one, who is going to make the decision, for example, in London, about which department fulfils that hub role? In the way the proposition had been put forward, I think that you would restrict and limit the cross-subsidisation which at present takes place and allows institutions, through the Research Assessment Exercise process, to be able to provide additional support for four-rated departments that are developing and improving, or indeed to protect strategic subjects. We did not dismiss it out of hand, but there are a number of practical concerns about the hub-and-spokes model that was put forward.

  Q4  Chairman: I do not think that the Committee was suggesting that there would be a single hub, and there could be more; in fact, London is a classic example. Indeed, in Yorkshire and the Humber, the white rose universities, there is a different set-up. I do not think the Committee was looking for a one-size-fits-all model. Do I take it from your response there that as far as the Government is concerned, you are happy for regions of Britain not to have—to see departments closed at universities in key subjects because you simply want to preserve the right of universities to manage the system rather than there be government intervention?

  Bill Rammell: No, if there is a demand for it I do not want to see any department in a STEM subject closed; but what I cannot do is guarantee the number of potential students that are coming through the system. That is why the major focus of our activity is on stimulating demand. However, a number of the benefits that would come from a hub-and-spokes model, I think in the response that HEFCE has provided to the Secretary of State, actually address those issues. We most certainly do want institutions to have early discussions with HEFCE if they feel that there is a risk that a department is closing. We want to encourage the Council—and HEFCE are absolutely with us on this—in holding regional swap-shops with groups of vice chancellors to take informed decisions about priorities, and to be able to manage change. It is not my position to commit HEFCE resources in every circumstance, but if you look at HEFCE's submission to the Secretary of State, they have identified circumstances where they have intervened with bilateral resources to enable co-operation and collaboration, of the kind that you were looking for in the hub-and-spokes model, to take place. We did not dismiss it out of hand, but the particular proposal that you put forward would be impractical and would have counter-productive outcomes. What we have done is to encourage HEFCE to work in a particular kind of way to encourage the kind of collaboration that you want.

  Q5  Chairman: This automatically leads on to HEFCE and its report. Sir Howard, you said you thought that there were some real benefits in having a hub-and-spokes model. I want to explore what those benefits are.

  Sir Howard Newby: First of all, I am a bit concerned about the Committee's perception that we have "dismissed" it, in your words, because I do not think we have. Perhaps we could just unpack what you mean by hub-and-spokes. If we mean that we want to encourage universities to collaborate together to provide sustainable provision in STEM subjects, then that is what we want to achieve. If that involves some managed collaborations between institutions, so that we are using "hub-and-spokes" as a metaphor for that, then that is very much what we would like to achieve.

  Q6  Chairman: But you will not intervene to achieve it!

  Sir Howard Newby: We would intervene. It depends what you mean by "intervention" but we would certainly encourage universities to do that, and financially support them to enable them to do that. If we mean a top-down "Gosplan" in which HEFCE assigned a hub role to certain universities and spokes to others, and we tell them they have to collaborate with each other no matter what, frankly I do not think that that is a practical proposition,. We do not have planning powers and we cannot force reluctant departments to collaborate effectively with each other. The way forward is to organise what I have called in the past a sensible division of labour between institutions, so that together they provide the breadth and depth of provision we are all looking for. If we call that a "hub-and-spokes model" so be it; but I think that around the country we will see rather different models emerging to cope with local circumstances, rather than a simple top-down hub and spokes.

  Q7  Chairman: In your report you said: "Collaboration of this type requires trust and effective relationships between the partners." Basically, you are rejecting the hub-and-spokes model because you do not believe that there is trust between the universities to get together and provide what the nation needs and what £6 billion of taxpayers' money is going into to achieve.

  Sir Howard Newby: I am rejecting a top-down dirigiste hub-and-spokes model because it will not work. I am accepting a bottom-up negotiated sustainable provisioning, with institutions collaborating together—and if we call that "hub-and-spokes", so be it.

  Q8  Chairman: I do accept, Howard, the difficulty of your role. In fact, you once said to the Education and Skills Select Committee that you would describe your role as a backseat driver. I thought that that was an interesting idea! Could you not backseat drive so that universities could work together in a hub-and-spokes type model in order to achieve what the Committee would like, and what clearly the nation needs?

  Sir Howard Newby: That is what we intend to do. We have obviously been awaiting the Secretary of State's response, which we have now had, so we can now press the "go" button on this. As the Minister has said, we do intend to call together vice chancellors and heads of institutions at a regional level to explore with them first of all their perceptions of the level of vulnerability of STEM provision, and then what we can do, together with them, usefully to, in your words, intervene—but I would say probably support and enable them working together, to ensure that it is sustainable going forward to the future.

  Q9  Chairman: Given that the Government is very keen to make sure that decisions are made in all aspects of government policy based on good research, what are you doing to continue to look at this issue and to make sure that you have the very best intelligence on which to act and to backseat drive universities into the solution which the Committee wants and which you now obviously want?

  Sir Howard Newby: We have been working very hard with the learned societies already in this field. We have already granted just over £1 million to the Royal Society of Chemistry, to extend their scheme to working with employers, schools and higher education institutions to promote more demand for chemistry subjects. We have given £2.8 million to the Royal Academy of Engineering to do a similar scheme. We have given money to the various mathematics learned societies—and there are more than one of them—to promote mathematics in schools, following the Smith report; and we are just concluding discussions with the Institute of Physics, which will lead to a similar scheme being launched for physics. These are all interventions on the demand side, working schools, universities and employers to get them working together to bring students through. I remind the Committee that when we are talking about STEM subjects, we are really talking about physics; chemistry; most, but not all, branches of engineering; and mathematics. There are many other science subjects that are in a healthy state, and most notable is the biological sciences, medicine, most of IT and computing and electrical engineering, for example.

  Q10  Mr Flello: This question is to both of you. Sir Howard, recently you said to the Education and Skills Select Committee that there had been "a very precipitous decline in student demand for undergraduate places in STEM subjects"—the issue that we started to talk about this morning. Bill, the Government's response stated that the overall number of young people studying for STEM degrees has been rising steadily. Why is HEFCE's interpretation a negative one, and the Government's interpretation that it is good news?

  Sir Howard Newby: It is true that the overall numbers in all science subjects has gone up. I can supply a note on the detail but it is around 80,000 over the last decade. The precipitous declines to which I was referring were the ones I have just mentioned in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and most branches of engineering—although this year, as has already been said, this appears to be stabilising. We will wait to see whether or not that is a blip or a trend. Whilst the overall position with regard to the numbers of students studying science and technology subjects has gone up, there has been a big expansion in medical students, for example, and in biological sciences, there are real problems, which do concern us in the Funding Council for those subjects I mentioned.

  Bill Rammell: To add to that, the latest figures that I outlined earlier are encouraging, but clearly you cannot take one year's figures in isolation, and we need to see whether the measures that have been put in place continue to provide an improvement, on a sustainable basis. If you look over the longer period and look at science subjects across the board, and look back to 1997 compared to today, subjects allied to medicine have increased by 54%; computer sciences have increased by 78%. Both of those are very connected with what has been happening in the market. We have been expanding capacity within the National Health Service, which has led to a substantially increased number of students undertaking medical studies; computer studies is in large part related to what has been happening in the IT industry. You cannot buck those kinds of trends. Overall, it means that we have 120,000 more students studying science-related subjects today, compared to eight years ago; but there have been changes between the kinds of study programmes that students are undertaking. That does not mean that I am complacent. The Department and HEFCE are putting an enormous amount of effort into stimulating demand in those subject areas that continue to have an enduring benefit for society as a whole. I do think that you need to look at the wider picture.

  Q11  Mr Flello: In terms of that stimulation of interest in those subjects, is that being done with a view to what is current demand or very much to what is likely to be the demand in 10, 20 or 30 years' time?

  Bill Rammell: We are looking both at present demand trends and looking to the future as well. If you look forward, say, to 2012, employers are estimating that 50% of the jobs will require graduate level qualifications, and a significant number of those will need to be science-related. One of the things we do need to do within this process is better get across to young people the benefits of studying a science subject. When you look at the figures, the graduate premium in earnings for someone taking a physics, chemistry or engineering degree, is about 30% compared to only 23% for someone who does not take those subjects. If we are being very frank about where we are at the moment, that is one element of this where I do not think we are doing enough to get that message across. That is one of the things that I am going to be looking to take forward.

  Q12  Mr Newmark: Sir Howard, are you finding that while people may be taking the sciences, even when they are doing biological sciences or chemistry, that what I would view as the definition of what used to be the core curriculum in those subjects is becoming a wider definition of what biological sciences are, for example?

  Sir Howard Newby: There has been a notable trend towards more inter-disciplinary work in all the sciences, and certainly in research the most exciting advances in today's science span disciplinary boundaries, and are not lodged completely within physics, chemistry or biology. Indeed, I think I got myself into a certain amount of trouble on a previous occasion when I said that those disciplines reflected 19th century boundaries of knowledge, which they do. We have to move with the times. Many universities have reorganised their science provision, both in research and in teaching, to reflect these new and very exciting inter-disciplinary areas. Increasingly, students are exposed to the boundaries between chemistry and biology or physics and biology, or engineering and chemistry. That is a good thing. My personal view, which is perhaps a slightly old-fashioned one, is that I believe students need to be grounded in a discipline before they can then be multi-disciplinary. I certainly do not foresee the future of science as being completely multi-disciplinary without some basic grounding in the key core disciplines you describe.

  Q13  Mr Flello: I have a vision of applied alchemy or something! Picking up on your comments, Bill, you are saying that even if the percentage of total students taking STEM subjects is declining, and less demand in relative terms, that does not matter as long as the overall number of students is increased.

  Bill Rammell: No, I am saying two separate things. One, it is a good that overall you have about 120,000 more students taking science-related subjects today, compared to eight years ago, but also we do need to be working to stimulate and increase the numbers of students taking STEM subjects. That is why we are investing as much effort, time and resources as we are on stimulating demand. One of the things we are doing in that regard is that myself and David Sainsbury from the DTI are conducting a fairly root-and-branch review of what we are doing in terms of our STEM initiatives. We are directly, from memory, spending about 80 million across the country on a whole plethora of schemes, something like 70 different schemes. We need to be looking at where the intersections are so that the impact is greater on the ground, and that teachers and young people are absolutely clear on where the support is coming from.

  Q14  Mr Flello: Do you see the problem fundamentally as one of demand, or one of supply?

  Bill Rammell: Principally I regard it as a problem of demand. That is the real issue, and that is what we are very much focusing on. What I mean by that is that if you have not got the supply of students coming through, ultimately you are not going to be able to legislate for universities and to say "you keep the department open even though there are not students to fill the places". The major thrust of what we are looking at is on the demand side. However, that does not mean we are neglecting the supply side. Coming back to your comments, Chairman, we can get into a bit of an artificial ideological debate about hub-and-spokes versus collaboration. We are clearly saying: do we want collaboration and co-operation between different departments on a regional and indeed cross-regional basis? Yes, we do. Are we going, in a very fixed way, to legislate for that through hub-and-spokes? No, we are not. We want HEFCE to be working with vice chancellors to share information at the earlier stages so that we can try to maintain provision.

  Q15  Dr Harris: Minister, is it your policy ambition that the proportion of students studying in higher education who are studying STEM subjects should increase; or are you happy, as you have indicated you are, as far as you have gone, that the numbers are increasing without any reference to the proportion that are studying STEM subjects increasing? Would you clarify whether it is your policy to see an increase in the percentage?

  Bill Rammell: I would like both the numbers and the percentage to increase. If you look at what has happened to STEM subjects over recent years, there has been a downturn and we want to reverse that. There are the initial indications this year that that may be beginning to happen.

  Q16  Dr Harris: So it is your aim to increase the proportion studying STEM subjects; you recognise that that is not happening at the moment, but you are optimistic that the one-year figures you have just referred to may change.

  Bill Rammell: I am not naively optimistic, no.

  Q17  Dr Harris: You have said you are not complacent twice, and you can add a third time, but the message has been understood. You are right, if I may say, not to be complacent, because you will be aware of what the science community thinks about taking snapshot figures and pronouncing a trend on one year. Would you agree that you should be judged by trend, since you have had eight years, rather than picking a start point and an end point almost at random—probably not at random, sadly—or picking the last year?

  Bill Rammell: It is not at random; it is where we are. They are the latest figures, so I think there is some validity and justification in looking at those figures. Of course you have to look at these issues over the longer term, and if you look at what happened particularly in stimulating demand over the last eight years, I think it has been very substantial. I know your Committee has looked at this issue and acknowledged the increased teaching numbers and increased quality that is coming forward, and a whole range of STEM activities. Yes, we should be judged over the longer term; but you cannot be judged in isolation to what else is happening within society and is happening within the sector.

  Q18  Dr Harris: I do not have the figures, but I am trying to confirm whether you are happy to be judged on the regression, on the trend, because you have just given the data points and made the best guess of which way it is going. You accept that that is the most appropriate way, particularly in the science area, to judge performance.

  Bill Rammell: Over the longer term, yes I do. In terms of the proportions—and this is not exclusively related to STEM but across the wider science subjects—the proportions of students studying science-related subjects has increased from 38 to 41% over the last eight years. While that is not exclusively within STEM subjects, I think it is a cause for modest encouragement.

  Q19  Dr Harris: You said in your answer to the Chairman in question 1 that you would not want to see any STEM department close; so you are saying it is not desirable that such departments may close; they may close, but it is not a desirable outcome.

  Bill Rammell: I think it is the problem of taking quotes out of context. My recollection of what I said is that I do not want to see a STEM department close if there is the demand for that department. Certainly, if the demand is there, all other things being equal I do want those departments to continue, and that is why it is important that HEFCE at an early stage has discussions with departments that are fearful they may have to close.