WEDNESDAY 11 JULY 2007

MS CLARE MATTERSON, MR RICHARD HALKETT AND DR PETER ANDERSON

  Chairman: We welcome our second panel for this morning: Clare Matterson, the Director of Medicine, Society and History at The Wellcome Trust, welcome to you, Clare; Richard Halkett, the Executive Director of Policy & Research Unit at NESTA, welcome to you, Richard; and Dr Peter Anderson, Museum Consultant, welcome to you, Peter. I am going to ask Dr Turner to begin this session.

  Q42  Dr Turner: I would like to ask Clare and Richard to expand a little on the role of both your organisations in supporting science centres.

  Ms Matterson: The Wellcome Trust has a strong commitment to public engagement with science and gives a significant amount every year to that, and what we aim to do is actually look to see what are the most effective ways by which we think we can help the public to engage with science, science development, science innovation and debate and discuss issues that science raises. The extent to which our future relationship involves science centres is the extent to which we believe science centres are successful in helping us achieve that aim.

  Mr Halkett: NESTA's role has been in funding at the very early stage to a much smaller degree than the Wellcome Trust in two science related centres, specifically Bolton being one of them and Centre of the Cell being the other. Our role is to get involved at that very early stage; we see NESTA's role as an endowment in reaching across science technology and the arts to use that position to fund experimental high-risk projects to help them get over those initial hurdles. We try to spot high potential projects and fund them very early on and we are pleased so far.

  Q43  Dr Turner: You represent organisations which have quite different primary remits. Yours is a cross-cutting cultural remit essentially and the Wellcome Trust puts most of its force behind medical research, which is wonderful and which we applaud. The question is, are you both in your different ways expressing altruism in the work that you do with science centres or are you specifically focusing on achieving through science centres in the case of Wellcome greater public understanding and involvement particularly with medical science and promoting scientific careers to young people, and to what extent do you think your aims are being achieved whatever they are and perhaps you could be highly specific about your aims.

  Ms Matterson: Our aims are twofold around young people and science. We do specifically want to encourage more people to go into science careers, but we also believe that if the UK is to be a place where the Wellcome Trust wants to continue to invest, it has to be a society within which other people want to come, young people coming through want to be scientists and the technologies and developments that science produces are actually embraced and taken up by the society and, with the scientific issues that are raised, there is a society which is actually able to have some informed debate and make democratic decisions around that science. It is actually therefore a very broad agenda and we try to look at the activities that we fund in relation to which ones support whether it is greater scientific literacy or whether it is pulling people up through into the science arena. Our experience of science centres and the external impact assessment that we carried out from our initial investment into some of the millennium centres has shown that the science centres—and this is five science centres that we looked at in great depth, an external evaluation—have been successful particularly at the primary level, particularly when there has been a good link in with the curriculum and there have been good links with the schools ahead of time and the assessors went back and spoke to children who had been to science centres three months after they had made their visit to actually find out whether they had learned anything and whether they had retained it and, when those things were in place, the children could remember what they had done and could explain what the learning was. So, I think that there was some very direct evidence that, when all those things are in place, there is some real learning going on. When those things are not in place, I think that it is just a fun day out. Sometimes a fun day out is fine but we are not really there for fun days out. We want to encourage those links to be made. I think that where a lot more work needs to be done—and therefore the question is, do the science centres have a role here, and I think that they do but I think that there is more work to be done with the centres that we looked at—is around secondary education. Whether that is because with young people it is harder to get out of school during school time, whether it is that the science centres are not quite catering as well as they could, I think there is an awful lot of work to be done to understand that but, from our evaluation of the five centres, it has not been so successful at secondary level.

  Q44  Dr Turner: Richard, obviously you have a slightly different approach. Can you tell us what your experience has been?

  Mr Halkett: NESTA's broad mission is to transform the UK's capacity for innovation and we see a good pipeline of people with STEM skills as being important to that but also, reaching beyond that, being inspired by science and being people who are creative in science. Creativity seems to be confined to other areas of the curriculum at the moment and one thing that we see with science and discovery centres is that they are able to teach the more creative aspects of science as well through hands-on ways. That is the reason we are interested in this part of our overall portfolio which includes investment at early stage companies and the other activities of NESTA. In terms of their success, we have been very pleased with the ones we have been involved with. We are seeing in Bolton TIC, for instance, that there is high participation amongst both primary and secondary schools and indeed there is not enough capacity to meet that among students. I certainly think that more could be done more broadly when I have been looking at this, and the work of the Wellcome Trust in the impact analysis has been very good but I think that more needs to be done there. We are dealing with very long-term aims and therefore it is going to be important to establish proxy indicators along the way to see if we are on the right path before you can see much later impacts in terms of STEM careers and greater achievement further down the track, but that should not be an excuse for not doing it.

  Q45  Dr Turner: To what extent do you try to exercise control over the way that both your institutions fund science centres or how they use your money?

  Ms Matterson: I think that the early investments were around the business plans that have been described previously and I think that a lot of people have learnt from that that money was put in and then I think funders stood back and I am not sure that that is necessarily the best way forward. With the later investments, we have been more rigorous in terms of the contracts that we have set up in terms of the data that we want back and a very recent investment was where we really believed there was a real need in the UK for a good touring exhibition around genomics and genetics because there has not been one in the UK, bizarrely; given the huge investment that the UK has made in that subject; there has not been a very high quality touring exhibition that has gone around. We worked very closely and we suggested the idea, gave a development grant to the science centres and they responded extremely positively and we gave them some development grant, they came back, put in a proposal which was very rigorously peer reviewed and went through two rounds of committee where we very intensively interrogated the science centres and, in November, that touring exhibition will open and Bristol has been coordinating it on behalf of all the science centres. That is a different type of collaboration where we have had much more involvement and it has been very positive from our perspective and we still obviously do not know what the outcomes of the exhibition will be because it has not opened yet. I think that answer is that, increasingly, as the funders have learned about the centres and the centres have learned about themselves, the way in which we work together has changed, I think for the better, with more collaboration and I think more expectations on data and evaluation and output.

  Mr Halkett: I think that you do not have to choose. I think in terms of control data of the activities, that is not a position that NESTA would ever really take particularly at the very early stage that we work with these centres, but I think that certainly the process that Clare outlined which needed well designed evaluation data collecting and monitoring need not restrict the day-to-day running of centres and what it does do is build a much, much stronger case for the future. So, in terms of hands on, no, we do not do that, we stay in close touch, we are very interested parties, but what we do is establish evaluation milestones and I think that that is the way to do it. You have to trust, particularly at the early stage, the talented individuals/inspirational individuals who drive a lot of these centres because of their funding backgrounds largely who are very important and you do not want to constrain that too much.

  Q46  Dr Turner: Do either of you offer business support?

  Mr Halkett: We certainly help people if they make proposals to us to improve those proposals but, as I said, not in a very in-depth way.

  Q47  Dr Iddon: We have seen that funding can come from the Government and it can come from trusts but it can also of course come from industry and commerce and they are the people who are very critical of the lack of skills at the moment but they do not appear to be exactly running forward and helping the science centres. I would like Dr Anderson to comment on that view.

  Dr Anderson: I agree entirely that industry does have a vested interest in supporting science centres and supporting the interest generation in science and technology which they can achieve. At the moment, there is not a tradition of that in Britain or in Europe in general. There is much more of a tradition of that in the United States and somewhat in Canada too.

  Q48  Dr Iddon: What is the difference? How do the United States do it and Europe cannot?

  Dr Anderson: Industrial concerns in the United States especially support science centres, they support programmes and they have philanthropic aspects to their operation anyway; it is more of a tradition there than here. It used to be a tradition in Britain in Victorian times.

  Q49  Dr Iddon: Do you think that we can get that tradition going? Have you any ideas about how we can get industry and commerce engaged?

  Dr Anderson: I am told that there is a resurgence of it now. At the time when everyone dreamed of a welfare state and industry and individuals were taxed very heavily, it tended to go away, but I think it is building back again now. There was a programme on television yesterday about that and I think that it is happening.

  Q50  Dr Iddon: Clare or Richard, do you have any comments to make on the involvement of industry and commerce?

  Mr Halkett: I would certainly make the comment that one of the principles which is good but which is also a problem is that quite a lot of the investment required by centres in terms of core funding is not very sexy; it is not a piece of machinery; it is not a large building. It is quite possible to get capital investment for those kinds of projects but, in terms of the long running and developing a strong core programme of activities, something that is important for the longevity of the centres, then that is normally less attractive in the short term. Reflecting on my time in the States, of course philanthropy is more of a culture there and there are tax breaks for it in a way that there are not necessarily here which does encourage that although corporate social responsibility is encouraging a greater culture.

  Ms Matterson: I think that our observations are the same. There is some industry sponsorship in science centres but I think that it is tough to get hold of it and it often has strings attached and, if you look into the formal education world, there is a huge amount of money going into education through different companies producing their own resources that go into schools etc which actually often just end up in the bin and are not used, so actually I think that a lot of industry money is wasted in supporting education and science for young people more broadly.

  Q51  Dr Iddon: It could be argued that these science centres are regional assets rather than national assets. The question that I pose to all of you now, should it be local government or regional government or national government that is supporting these centres and can I also bring in the concept of the Regional Development Agencies because they receive a considerable amount of money to support science in their regions?

  Ms Matterson: In my sense, it should probably be a mixture of both, that there is a very strong and very clear national agenda around science, there is the science ten year strategy and there is a whole load of elements particularly around the public engagement side that need to be put into place to ensure that that is effective long term and science centres could play a part in that, I think a bigger part in terms of funding than they have thus far, but I think you are absolutely right as well that they are also regional assets and, within the context of the region in terms of how that region sees its science and wanting to develop its science, there is an opportunity there. So, I think there are different roles for both and I think that each needs to make its own decision as to how then it wants to support.

  Q52  Dr Iddon: How do we strike that balance? Who strikes the balance?

  Ms Matterson: I think that is for you to decide, not me!

  Q53  Dr Iddon: Very wise! Dr Anderson?

  Dr Anderson: I think it is notable that most cities in the UK support their museums very fully. When the science centres and millennium projects started up, I think that the cities were largely assured that the science centres would not be a financial burden, that they were going to be self-supporting, so I do not think that cities in general have tackled that point. I would just say parenthetically that, in the United States where everyone thinks that the rich people pour money into the science centres, they do not, museums and science centres fight very hard for their money and most of them get some tax-based money from their city or the state and a lot of them get the funds for specific programmes from many federal government offices like the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health, the Department of Education etc. So, there is a broad spectrum of sources that they work at very hard.

  Q54  Dr Iddon: Do you find the people who are working, as you have described, very hard at that spend too much money fundraising rather than running the centres?

  Ms Matterson: Could I put an image in your head of a three-legged stool. A science centre, I think, is a bit like three-legged stool. It has three things it needs to worry about in order to be effective. It needs to worry about its revenue and its finance and it will do some things that are there to be completely commercial in order to keep its finances on an even keel. It needs to ensure that it has a strong intellectual base, so it will sometimes need to do things which are very strong in content, very strong intellectually, which may not be very, very commercial but it needs to have those in order to maintain credibility in terms of the main science centre. It also needs to be well linked into its community, both in terms of the regional context that we have talked about but also in terms of being a neutral place where the community can come and feel comfortable, and if there is a threat to that science centre the science centre will want its community to come out in support of it. Each of those three prongs has to be even in order for that stool to be steady. The problem that the science centres have had is that they have had to rely hugely on trying to get revenue in, sometimes doing things at the expense, say, of the intellectual base, in order just to keep going. If we are going to have a very strong culture of science centres in this country, we need to make sure that each of them has those three legs and can manage on those three legs and be supported as they move forward. That gives a role for the different components and different aspects.

  Q55  Dr Iddon: Nobody has mentioned conferencing. Richard?

  Mr Halkett: I have very little to add to the comments. I would just reinforce Clare's point about the centres not just being an asset to their regions but the regions being an asset to their centres and the way they can tie in, particularly, to industrial heritage. For instance, if you are looking at advanced manufacturing in the West Midlands that would seem to be a particularly useful context for a science and discovery centre to tap into.

  Q56  Chairman: I am intrigued by your idea of a three-legged stool. The trouble is that somebody has to build that three-legged stool and make sure the legs are all even in order for it to sit carefully on the ground. You have said that should be the job not for this Committee but for Parliament, yet, in our discussions with the centres earlier, their local autonomy they regard perhaps not as paramount but as an incredibly important ingredient for the success of their centres. I do not see from you, yet, where you would see this coordinating function to make sure the three legs are even.

  Ms Matterson: I think each science centre itself has to make sure the three legs are even, otherwise it will topple over.

  Q57  Chairman: Would they drive it?

  Ms Matterson: They need to drive it or it will topple over. It is very clear that when you start seeing a centre which is being driven too far, perhaps, in the revenue context and it really loses its intellectual credibility, it does topple over to some extent, and the community is not there to support it. I think there have been cases of that.

  Q58  Chairman: Clare, we mentioned earlier the Scottish model, which is an interesting model where in fact the Scottish Executive have come in and said, "We will put some ground rules together to try and enable centres not to deal with their individuality but to have some common purpose across them." Do you see that as a model that is worthy of serious consideration?

  Ms Matterson: I think it is a model worthy of serious consideration. From my perspective, I would want to think, at a national level, what are the things we want out of these centres and what are the things we want in terms of supporting science and innovation across the UK. You can let them drive the commercial element—so, putting shows on around Bob the Builder, or whatever it might be—to get different groups in. The genomic show that we have just funded we knew would never be a commercial show. But we believe it is important for the UK that there is a show like that and that there is an opportunity for people to go and see it but it will never pull the numbers in like the science of Lord of the Rings or whatever. It is trying to identify which bits we should let the science centres be entrepreneurial about and do for themselves, to keep that leg solid, and for which bit they need support. Because, frankly, often science is not seen as the sexy thing to do, but it is an important thing to do and if it is there and if it is a show that is put on well people will go to see it.

  Q59  Chairman: Richard, you did not respond to Brian Iddon's particular question about the RDAs. I would have thought you would have something to say on that because of the innovation role which NESTA have.

  Mr Halkett: I am side-stepping, in the way that Clare did, any idea of percentages or anything like that, but I think that RDAs do have a particular role. In terms of supporting the local system, we do quite a lot of research into the role of cities and the role of regions and the role of leadership structures there that foster innovation, and it seems particularly important that something like this will be linked into that quite clearly. In the past, Bolton TIC has quite a lot of capital funding from the North West Development Agency, so certain ideas have already been involved in the past but, again, on the capital side of projects rather than in the core funding area. In terms of the other areas, that is to be decided, of course.