WEDNESDAY 11 JULY 2007

MS CLARE MATTERSON, MR RICHARD HALKETT AND DR PETER ANDERSON

  Q60  Dr Harris: Dr Anderson, you have already talked about your effectiveness study, the independent assessment exercise. The Government might say that its interest in doing all the things that science centres do that are valuable in terms of education is carried out through the science and learning centres. They are funding that. That is how they are doing that. Are you aware of any effectiveness evaluation that has been done of science learning centres, compared, for example, to the work you did on the effectiveness of science centres.

  Ms Matterson: We are in partnership with the Government on the science and learning centre initiative. We put £25 million into that and they put £26 million for the national and regional networks. They do carry out different roles. The science learning centres are specifically to give professional development in science for teachers and technicians, to take science back into the classroom. It is very much geared around formal education in the classroom. There is some interesting work from the University of Seattle, where somebody has mapped out, if you take your 16 waking hours a day, how much time you spend through your lifetime in formal education versus free time. Even for the most time when you are in full time school, it is only 18% of your time that is spent in formal education, so 72% of your time is spent outside of the classroom. Within that 18% there is an even smaller percentage in terms of time spent "doing science". A lot of your waking hours are spent outside the classroom, be they holidays, weekends, evenings, et cetera, and that is where the science centres and museums come in.

  Q61  Dr Harris: The Government has a plan to get more people studying STEM subjects all the way up. You will be aware of those goals. Although I do not have the transcript, Lord Sainsbury said in an earlier session last year to us that the way it was going to do that and the investment it was making to do that was through the science learning centres. When I was asking about the funding of science centres, he was saying that it was not their plan to fund science centres. Do you know of any evaluation they have done? Could you confirm your view that that is a one-club strategy—and that it is not working or is working to meet their STEM objectives in terms of young people taking it up?

  Ms Matterson: There is an evaluation ongoing of the science learning centres, but, as I say, it is measuring different things from those of the impact analysis of the science centres because they have different goals. One can say one will just back one horse, which is basically that, but my argument is that it is not sufficient to back one horse. We are absolutely committed to the science learning centre initiative. It is crucially important that teachers are effective in the classroom and part of that development of teachers in the classroom is how then they can best interact with getting the best out of taking the kids out of the school into a science centre. I would say they have different objectives. They do different things with young people. The science learning centres are very much focused on training teachers to be more effective in the classroom and the science centres are about getting kids and their families and their parents into a science environment where they can talk about it informally with their family, with their friends. I think they do different things.

  Dr Anderson: Could I extend that a little bit. The great problem for getting people into the science stream tends to be in the primary school years. There is a parallel to what has been spoken about in the United States, not so much in Canada but in the United States, where there is a crisis in elementary science teaching. Primary teachers do not know science and they do not know how to teach science with hands-on methods. In fact, the United States science centres get a lot of funding to teach teachers how to teach science. That is an equivalent. One of the science learning centres, I think, is embedded in a science centre in Britain.

  Q62  Dr Harris: Mr Halkett and Ms Matterson, in your scheme you have provided ongoing subsidies for science and discovery centres through your initiatives. The Government in its evidence says, "It has always been the Government's view that it should not provide ongoing subsidies for commercially unsuccessful science and discovery centres". Do you accept the implication that you are blundering away your money in some crazy way and they are great custodians?

  Mr Halkett: In NESTA we have made two investments—of a much smaller scale than the Wellcome Foundation. They have not been ongoing; they have been one-off early stage investments that we have made in two specific centres. I think there is a question around a change in phase and maturity of a science and discovery centre. In the early stages of an initiative like this there is potentially a benefit and a patchwork of funding that is pulled together by entrepreneurial, inspirational leaders. The question is whether, if that were to continue, that is not really sustainable for the next person who is going to be willing to do that kind of job and pull together all these different types of funding. I think there is a question around moving to a new phase. It could be a question of timing.

  Ms Matterson: Of course we do not want to invest in something which is commercially unsuccessful. Through both the Rediscover initiative with the Millennium Commission and any subsequent funding we have done, we take an awful lot of care in terms of looking at the finances of particularly science centres into which we put our money. Thus far, none of those that we have put our money into have folded or disappeared. But we do believe from a regional perspective that there is a need for people to be able, with their families, to get to a place. Not everybody can come to London to the Science Museum. If you live in Newcastle, it is a very long way to come to London.

  Q63  Dr Harris: Something struck me about their centres, because if they were commercially successful they would not need funding.

  Ms Matterson: I think they struggle from day to day.

  Q64  Dr Harris: I want you to comment on the Government's view that it is not the Government's role, and by implication anyone else's, to subsidise commercially unsuccessful science and discovery centres. The corollary of that is that it should only fund the ones that do not need funding.

  Mr Halkett: It seems like a very odd sentence to me. I do not know what other government initiatives we would want to apply that test to.

  Q65  Dr Harris: Indeed. The Army and the Police perhaps!

  Mr Halkett: Public goods would fall away.

  Dr Anderson: It is hard to understand why one regards the science centre anyway as a commercial venture. It is fundamentally an educational venture. One or two of them lean very heavily on the more attraction side. By and large they are educational institutions, not commercial ventures. From our impact assessment, that is what the public believe them to be as well.

  Mr Halkett: If they are uneconomic, that is different from them not being commercially viable. You can have economic impacts that are different. Of course they have said commercially unviable, but if they meant uneconomic that would be different. That might be sensible.

  Q66  Dr Harris: My final question is to all of you. If the Government were to invest in science and discovery centres, knowing what you do about the aims of government policy, do you think that would be a value for money investment? That is from your experience, the two of you at least, as investors in this field and the third of you as someone who knows a lot about the way these things work.

  Ms Matterson: If it is a little bit of money into everybody, no. That would be the wrong way to go. One needs to think very carefully, strategically, what you would want to get, and then, through some element of competition, where there is some sort of long-term funding as well linked into that, and through rigorous evaluation and monitoring, and invest and target that way. A little bit trickled into everybody I think would be a waste of money.

  Q67  Dr Harris: Would the funder get value for money if they did it in the right way?

  Mr Halkett: If they did it the right way, absolutely. I think the crucial thing to do is to look at the benefits, the logic behind science and discovery centres. The principle is that they can do things by sharing resources and pooling them that individual schools cannot do themselves. Therefore, I think the critical thing to include in the evaluation is in terms of access and in terms of reaching out to all areas of the community to make sure that is not just to a privileged few. I know that the science and discovery centres strive to make that the case but I think that would be critical to the economic argument that could be made.

  Dr Anderson: Personally, I believe very strongly that such an investment has well paid off, but I do think that in the long term it is much better to have a variety of sources from which science centres can, in a rather entrepreneurial way, find funding for their programmes rather than having one big lump of money coming from one source. One source changes, public policies change, things change. It is like an ecosystem: it is more stable if it is more complex. In the end, it is a more stable situation when there are many different sources to which science centres can turn and they should all be audited sources.

  Q68  Chairman: The one thing we are struggling with in this inquiry is how do we evaluate the success of the centres? Clearly, in terms of objective evaluation, I think we heard from Ecsite that they would prefer to have an independent evaluation. I thought that was a very powerful statement that was made there. Clearly, it is the criteria on which you judge the success that is the important element. I just wonder, in your view, who should set those criteria. Should it be the centre itself? Should it be the funding bodies? Should it be the Government? Who should it be?

  Mr Halkett: I think you begin with the end, where you want to get to—and that could be extremely long term—and you move in a logical sequence back to where you are now. There will undoubtedly be local priorities for individual centres, but the overarching goal before them is to encourage engagement in science, technology, engineering and maths in the long term. If you set that, you can then work backwards and establish proxy indicators: involvement at A-level, involvement at GCSE, linkages with local communities, and then you have to package in or access some ideas of quality. There are good benchmarks, that would not be incredibly complex, that could be set to establish this if a formalised programme were set up.

  Ms Matterson: I think one would need a range of level of objectives that one is trying to achieve. In many respects, it would be useful, if there are key funders coming in, for there to be conversation amongst those key funders. With the national Science Learning Centre initiative, we have agreed and joint objectives with government so that we are not all trying to collect different data, but I think it would be very beneficial if there were some single, agreed data requirement collected across the sector as a whole. I think the impact of that analysis is that the problem was that data is not available at the moment. One needs a mixture of quantitative and qualitative to look at reach, impact and value and then try to set criteria against those three headings.

  Q69  Chairman: Perhaps I could I ask Peter: that should be a recommendation of this Committee, should it?

  Dr Anderson: Yes, I agree. They are very good observations made.

  Chairman: You would support them. On that positive note, where we all agree, could I thank Clare Matterson, Richard Halkett and Dr Peter Anderson for your time with us this morning. Thank you very much indeed.