WEDNESDAY 11 JULY 2007

MS LINDA CONLON, MR COLIN BROWN, MR PHIL WINFIELD AND MR ALEC COLES

  Chairman: Good morning, everyone. I welcome you to this one-off session on science and discovery centres. We are very, very tight on time this morning; we have roughly 35-40 minutes to each of our three panels. I will move on without further ado to introduce our first panel for the record. Linda Conlon, the Chairman of Ecsite-uk and Director for the Centre for Life, good morning again, Linda; Colin Brown, Chief Executive of The Deep, good morning, Colin; Phil Winfield is the Director of INTECH, good morning to you; and Alec Coles is the Director of Tyne & Wear Museums. Linda, would you be the sub-chair of your panel and, if there any questions that you think should be deflected to your colleagues, then, please, do so, but we will try and direct questions to individual members.

  Dr Iddon: I have to declare two interests: I am Chairman of the Board that runs the Bolton Technical Innovation Centre Limited and I am patron of the Catalyst Science Discovery Centre although I receive no remuneration from either of those organisations.

  Linda Gilroy: I am a member of the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth and I do a lot of work with them.

  Q1  Chairman: Thank you very much, indeed. I would like to begin with you, Linda: would you tell us very, very briefly what a science and discovery centre is.

  Ms Conlon: I knew that I would get this as a first question and there is not a single definitive answer but I will try to paint you a picture. A science and discovery centre typically is a science-based institution which deals with a range of science subjects. If you think about a map of the UK, you might have been to science centres in Bristol, Newcastle, Rotherham, Manchester and Birmingham. They are large institutions which typically at their heart have a collection of interactive exhibits. By "interactive", I mean an exhibit with which you as a person or the member of your family will interact with the intention of sparking curiosity and trying to help you to understand scientific phenomena.

  Q2  Chairman: How do they differ from museums then?

  Ms Conlon: The one principal difference is that, in order to qualify as a museum, you need a collection, but that does not mean to say—and I am sure my colleague Alec Coles would agree with me—that museums are purely collections-based institutions. Science centres and museums often use similar techniques to communicate to the public and to help interpret what they do, but I think that the single clearest definition which I can offer you is that museums do have a collection that they need to look after and, with science centres, I suppose that their collection is their interactive exhibits.

  Q3  Chairman: Alec, in terms of their role in society, what sort of valuable roles do they play? What would we miss if we were not there?

  Mr Coles: Science centres specifically?

  Q4  Chairman: Yes.

  Mr Coles: We are all aware of a dearth of science expertise coming through at exactly the time when we need it most probably in terms of nature's development and what science centres are clearly doing is foregrounding science as something that is acceptable, that is interesting and is a desirable occupation, hopefully inspiring people to consider it as a career in the future. I think that they have a long-term impact not only on people's lives but also on the health of the nation.

  Q5  Chairman: Colin, if you were not there, would we miss you?

  Mr Brown: Personally, yes, you would certainly miss us. I would like to try and describe what it is like to actually be at The Deep when we have a school party in. Hull is one of the most deprived cities in the country and it has the lowest educational standards in the country. We have a lot of local schools and 14 to 15 year olds who come in as a rabble and I have seen their faces change as they have really stared in wonder at the sort of exhibits that we have and have worked our interactives and you can almost see them being in a position where they are learning. When we were building The Deep, we began by saying that our children do not have the lowest educational standards because they lack information, what they lack is inspiration and I think that the science centres give that inspiration to our youngsters to learn about science.

  Q6  Chairman: Is their primary role to turn young people on to education or is it a broader public engagement role? What is your priority?

  Mr Brown: It may be different in different science centres. Our priority is to try and change people's attitudes to science and to try and engage them in issues such as biodiversity, in our case global warming because, if we can actually change people's attitudes and educate them in those issues, we can have a genuine democratic debate about them. We have seen with things like vaccination, BSE, the whole democratic debate gets skewered towards emotion and what somebody's aunty said or whether I am born under the sign of Aquarius and what we need is for people to understand the basics of those quite complex scientific arguments in order that we can actually engage with the community.

  Q7  Chairman: Phil, that all sounds very plausible to me, so I have bought into that, but we are a committee that is interested in evidence. Where is the evidence to say that what your three colleagues have spoken about so eloquently so far is actually true and it makes a blind bit of difference? Where is the evaluation?

  Mr Winfield: I think that education is the primary function of most of my colleagues and that education can be formal or informal. Certainly from the formal education point of view, we engage, for instance, with the local authority, we understand where their educational issues are in terms of the objectives they need to meet and where there are issues we have designed our educational programme around correcting some of those areas of downfall, if you like, by the local authority. For instance, our local authority in Hampshire noticed that there was a problem in the transition between Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 where children were turned off science, if you like, and we developed programmes to bridge that gap and keep the inspiration going. We will monitor that and we continue to monitor that to see if we have that necessary improvement to that education service.

  Q8  Chairman: When you saying that you are monitoring it, what does that mean?

  Mr Winfield: We can only do that by looking at the standards achieved and because we are tightly bound with our local authority, we will work with them to understand if those standards have improved as a result of a combination of what they have done and what we have done.

  Q9  Chairman: Is there a blind bit of evidence to say that the science centres across England have actually turned people on to careers in science, for instance?

  Mr Winfield: There is no one piece of evidence.

  Q10  Chairman: Is there any evidence?

  Mr Winfield: I think there is evidence. I think that colleagues here could point to evidence. Certainly in the education field, I think that there is clear evidence and that would depend on centre to centre and different education programmes that they run to achieve that. In terms of whether you have actually inspired somebody about science, clearly that is a very, very difficult thing to measure.

  Q11  Chairman: Yes, of course it is.

  Mr Winfield: Because there are so many influences and variables in a child's development.

  Q12  Chairman: Linda, is there any evidence?

  Ms Conlon: Yes. I think that it is very, very difficult indeed to claim that someone has won a Nobel Prize because they went to a science centre when they were 12. That would be grossly simplistic. I think that those of us who have managed to work with schools over a sustained period of time find it easier to evaluate than simply to look at a single visit in isolation. Certainly there are a number of science centres that have worked for a term, for example, with socially disadvantaged schools and have been able to measure at the outset attitudes to science, take-up of science, interest in science, understanding of science and, over a term, have been able to see an appreciative difference and an increase of interest in science. What is good for the school is that then you can leave a model behind which the school can use and sustain those results over a period of time. My colleagues would like to add to that.

  Mr Coles: Obviously you will aware that the museum sector has been doing a lot of evaluation in terms of impact: social impact, educational impact, cultural impact. I want to point to something in particular which is a project with which we were involved with the Natural History Museum, the Museum of Zoology and the Manchester Museum which is funded through something called Strategic Commissioning which was DCMS and DfES funded and it was called Real World Science, which was a series of life science base particularly looking at not only life science of chemistry but very much related to the Key Stage 3, 4 and 5 curricula. As a result of those sessions, the testimony—and I appreciate that it is testimony and Linda's point is right, that we have not tracked those kids through to what they did but what they said they were interested in—revealed that 20-25% across all the programmes and something like 40% in the Natural History Museum actually said that, as a result of that engagement, they were more interested in science and more likely to pursue a career in science.

  Mr Brown: Slightly more anecdotally perhaps but, since we opened in Hull, the number of undergraduates studying marine biology has tripled and our education sessions have now reached capacity, we are full up, and we monitor the teachers' reactions and they tell us that there is a definite change in their children's attitude.

  Q13  Dr Turner: Linda, the body which you chair, Ecsite-uk, is conducting a review on behalf of the Government demonstrating the impact of science centres and the added value that they deliver. Is there not a risk—you obviously are not a disinterested body and it would be a matter of great surprise if you did not conclude that they had an enormous impact and delivered a lot of added value—of people saying, "Well, they would say that, would they not?" Do you not think that it might have been helpful to your case—you want more status with the Government and you want all the funding and support that you can get—if that message had been delivered, as presumably it would in any event, by some independent reviewer?

  Ms Conlon: Yes, you are absolutely right, we would say that, would we not, but we have to start somewhere. Science centres have been around for some time but I think that the advent of the millennium science centres which were large physically impressive buildings certainly did put the spotlight on science centres in a way that had not happened before then. Science centres themselves have been collecting data. We need robust data in order to fulfil our business plans and run ourselves as efficiently and as effectively as we need to. Science centres are collecting data but I do not think that we are collecting it consistently at present. We have been very busy trying to establish our businesses, trying to improve things, trying to introduce new exhibits, trying to get on with the minutia of running the science centre and there has not been a huge amount of money available to us to actually carry out research in a systematic, robust and consistent way. We are now addressing that. We have received money, you are absolutely right, and we have carried out the first stage in our research which admittedly is quantitative. We do need to look at more qualitative measures, we do need to be more consistent and we will be commissioning the second stage of study and it will be an independent study because I think, as in Scotland for example, the Scottish Executive made available money to four science centres there but it was based upon independent assessment by independent economic consultants and that money is only released on a quarter-by-quarter basis against stipulated criteria which all science centres adhere to. We are getting there but we are not there yet.

  Q14  Dr Turner: But an independent review would strengthen your case.

  Ms Conlon: It would indeed, absolutely.

  Q15  Dr Harris: Mr Brown, would you say that the management in your science centre from the Chief Executive downwards is heavy handed and hierarchical?

  Mr Brown: No.

  Q16  Dr Harris: But in your evidence, you said that you thought that this was quite common in science centres.

  Mr Brown: I did not use the words "heavy handed".

  Q17  Dr Harris: I am sorry, top heavy and inward looking. Is that your science centre or is that other people's?

  Mr Brown: I used the words "some science centres" and I believe that that is true and I believe that the evidence supports that.

  Q18  Dr Harris: How do you know?

  Mr Brown: To give you some examples, The Deep's marketing salaries are £65,000. We have 400,000 people pass through a year. A similar attraction gets about 280,000 and spends three times as much as we do. We have one operations manager who deals with not only operational things but also health and safety and personnel. There are other science centres that employ a personnel director, a personnel manager and a health and safety coordinator. There may be reasons for that. It may be that they have specific problems or specific issues that they need that structure for. My main point was that nobody knows that and, without any peer group review, there is no way of shining a light on to that.

  Q19  Dr Harris: Do any of you recognise yourselves in what has just been said?

  Ms Conlon: I do not recognise myself.

  Mr Brown: It was not you, Linda.

  Ms Conlon: Thank you! Science centres are very different. Colin runs an aquarium which has its own special requirements and needs. Science centres deal with a multiplicity of science topics and employ typically large education teams and large teams of science explainers and it costs money. You cannot do it on a shoestring. I think that it would be foolish to read too much into looking at one operation without really drilling down into the detail and looking and seeing what you get for your money. It might be that it is necessary to spend several hundred thousand pounds on staffing because we pride ourselves on engagement with qualified science explainers. That is one of our USP. It costs money.

  Mr Coles: I want to agree with that and say that I do not recognise myself, I hope, and I do not recognise others. The fact is that quality engagement comes at a price and we really should not just be talking about a numbers game, we should be talking about the experience and the way that actually changes the outlook of the person who engages and that costs money and certainly my experience in the science centres I know is that there is an awful lot invested at that contact level which is where the difference gets made.