17
Examination of Witnesses
Yvonne Baker OBE and Dr Tim Bradshaw.
Q17 The Chair: I would like to welcome our witnesses to the committee’s third evidence session for its inquiry into people and skills in UK STEM. We are very pleased to have Yvonne Baker, the chief executive officer of STEM Learning, and Dr Tim Bradshaw, the chief executive of the Russell Group.
I should explain that the session is being broadcast on parliamentlive.tv. A full transcript is being taken, which will be made available to you shortly after the meeting, and you will be able to make any minor corrections or additions. If, at any point during the session, there are details that we do not have time to go into and you would like to send us further written follow-up on, we are, of course, very happy and pleased to receive that.
Without further ado, I am going to kick off with the opening question and ask each of you in turn to give us a brief outline of how your organisation is involved in STEM skills training and how it relates to the Government’s efforts.
Yvonne Baker: STEM Learning is an organisation whose main activity is subject-specific teacher professional development in the STEM subjects, particularly science and computing. We are involved in the STEM skills pipeline right from early years through to post-16, ensuring that teachers from early years to post-16 have access to that career-long CPD, subject updating, improving their pedagogy and improving their own skills.
We also run a number of enrichment and enhancement programmes in STEM, including the STEM Ambassadors programme, which is 37,000 volunteers acting as role models for young people and, increasingly, working alongside teachers and school leaders to help them update their knowledge of the context in which STEM is used in the modern workplace and the kinds of jobs that are available.
The Chair: Can you give us an idea of scale? How many CPD experiences do you organise?
Yvonne Baker: Last year, we provided 60,000 days of continuing professional development to teachers across the UK. We do that face-to-face at the National STEM Learning Centre at York. We also do it through local Science Learning Partnerships and computing hubs, but we have also done a lot over the last two and a half years remotely, either synchronous remote CPD or asynchronous CPD. We are linked with around 275,000 UK teachers through our resource library and other activities.
The Chair: So the 60,000 days are targeted at an audience of 270,000 potential participants, roughly speaking.
Yvonne Baker: There are around that number. We do not know precisely how many teachers of STEM there are in the UK, but there are around 22,500 primary and secondary schools. If you say it is an average of 20 teachers per school, by the time you take primary and secondary, you are probably talking about a workforce of about half a million.
Dr Tim Bradshaw: I am Tim Bradshaw, chief exec of the Russell Group, which represents 24 research-intensive universities in the UK. We are in all four nations, focusing on world-class research, innovation and education. Just to give you an idea of the involvement that we have in teaching in STEM, we teach approximately eight out of 10 doctors and dentists in the UK, 58% of physical scientists, 63% of mathematicians, and a third of engineers across all undergraduate, postgraduate and research levels. We are getting increasingly into degree apprenticeships, which is something that the Government are very interested in, so 16 of my members now do degree apprenticeships. The number on degree apprenticeships is building up over time, from a very small base.
This is the future, I suppose, in terms of growth. We see ourselves as part of both the supply side and the demand side for STEM skills. On the demand side, for example, we have a huge number of STEM teachers and technicians in our universities, a quarter of whom are from overseas. The rest are from the UK or were from the EU. On the supply side, we supply the market of teachers, engineers, doctors, dentists and businesspeople for the future. It is a mix in terms of what our universities are doing on both the supply and demand side.
The Chair: Can I ask a couple of follow-up questions? Then others may wish to come in. A quarter of STEM students are from overseas. That is, presumably, across undergraduate and postgraduate, is it?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: Yes.[1]
The Chair: Do you know whether those overseas students tend to stay here, or do they go home?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: Increasingly, they are able to stay here. The Government have introduced better post-study work rights for students, so many of those are able to stay here. We have a particular issue on the medical side. It is one of the few areas where the Government cap the number of students we can have from overseas, because there are not the places for them afterwards on the training side in hospitals. Many international students will look to stay here, because they have post-study work rights, but, if we cannot get them in to start off with, the number staying here long term is obviously quite low.
Viscount Hanworth: Could you be precise about what you mean by medical students? Can you categorise them? Is this biomedical studies across the board or specifically people training to be doctors?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: They are training to be doctors. There is something like a 7.5% limit on the number of international students we can have across our universities in medical school training, because they are guaranteed to have an F1 place to complete their medical studies, which costs a lot of money. The Government have restricted the number of international students we can take in, because they do not have the funds and the places available for F1.
Baroness Walmsley: I have a question for Tim. I understand that employers are looking not just for good academic qualifications but for some experience. Are your members satisfied with their ability to place students during their course to get that practical experience in industry, or is there room for improvement in that?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: There is definitely more that could be done, such as growing degree apprenticeships and working with business to find more places available across industries. We have focused quite a lot on engineering, software and things like that, where there is certainly demand from industry. We could probably do more to expand that area in the future. On the medical side, there is always an issue around GP placements, rather than in hospitals. Yes, there is more that could be done across the whole sector, not just for my universities.
Q18 Baroness Sheehan: From each of your perspectives, could you say which specific STEM skills are lacking in the UK at the moment? As an additional question, could you say which skills the UK is most likely to need in the future?
Yvonne Baker: From a schools perspective, the big issue is around physics. The DfE released figures recently showing that, in 2021-22, it recruited around 20% of its target physics teachers. We also know that many state schools in particular do not have any specialist physics teachers on their staff, which results in a limit to the number of places that they can offer for A-level physics in particular. When you start to think that A-level physics is very often required for entry to engineering degrees, but also increasingly desired by medicine and by other disciplines, that starts to cause a real bottleneck. Physics teaching, I would say, is the big issue.
The other issue we hear about from employers is that of digital skills, in the wider sense, for every young person, and data skills, because the use and manipulation of data is now in every single job, from retailing right the way through to what you would see it more as. Physics, digital skills and data skills are, I would say, the three biggest areas of concern.
Baroness Sheehan: Staying with physics, is the gap widening or lessening?
Yvonne Baker: It certainly appears to be widening at the moment. Like I say, in 2021-22, it was around 20% of target for recruitment of physics teachers. We also know that physics teachers are significantly more likely to leave, particularly in the first five years of teaching. It is not only recruiting them into the profession but retaining them. It is the paradox of STEM skills: people like that have STEM skills that lots of other employers are also looking for.
Baroness Sheehan: Before I move on to Dr Bradshaw, I ought to declare an interest. My son has just qualified as a physics teacher. He is working in a sixth-form college and is really enjoying it, but there is, for me and at the back of his mind, a concern that he is not going to be able to sustain his personal ambitions within the sector, because the support is not there for him to progress and keep up with his peers. On WhatsApp groups, everyone is doing these wonderful, weird things, and he is in the school this year, next year and the year after.
Yvonne Baker: We have data analysis to show that providing teachers of STEM subjects, who very much identify with their discipline, with the subject-specific professional development and the kind of activities that STEM Learning and others provide helps retention. I know that the scientific societies and the IOP are doing a lot of work on how we help those people retain their sense of professional identity through their subject.
We need to do more. The Government invest in this, as do business and industry, but we need to do more. We need to make sure that we have the capability to do that, to the point where we can help those young teachers achieve their ambitions, retain their professional identity and develop themselves, while, I hope, staying in the classroom. We know that the longer teachers are in the classroom, particularly up to around five years, the more effective they are for young people, particularly those living in deprived circumstances.
Dr Tim Bradshaw We talked about medicine, but veterinary is another area where we need more people in the future, particularly post Brexit, with a lot of vets from the EU going back.
Thinking more broadly about the generic level of study—postgraduate-taught STEM and postgraduate research—rather than individual disciplines, if you look at those who hold master’s degrees as their highest level of qualification, it is about 13% of the UK population and 16% or more in the EU, so we are behind the curve on that.
One of the real challenges is that the intake to postgraduate research has stayed flat over the last five years or more, and that is in STEM and non-STEM subjects. As an example for the Russell Group, our average intake over the last five years has been about 8,000 students per year into postgraduate STEM research, and about 3,000 a year into non-STEM subjects. That has been pretty much flat for five years; it has not been increasing.
If you look at the whole of the UK—Russell Group and non-Russell Group, STEM and non-STEM—in 2016, there were 22,325 entrants into postgraduate research. In 2020, there were 22,830, so about 500 extra over five years. If we are trying to become a science and innovation-led economy, the real mismatch is the numbers going into the postgraduate research side in particular, because we are going to need those researchers in the future.
Baroness Sheehan: Are the numbers that you have quoted for domestic postgrad researchers, or do they include numbers from abroad?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: The 8,000 is the UK student number for the Russell Group. The 22,000 figure would be home, international and EU, and STEM and non-STEM. Taking all research students starting a course in 2020-21, it is just 22,000 in the UK, including everybody from overseas.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I have a follow-up on Baroness Sheehan’s subsequent question. Bearing in mind that people will want to move within careers or move on from time to time, and there is a problem of wastage in the teaching profession, is there any scope for having a scheme whereby people are incentivised to come back after a certain amount of time? We are losing a lot of science teachers to industry or to the commercial sector when there might be scope for many of them to come back.
Yvonne Baker: We need to look at how we make that happen effectively. There is a scheme, NowTeach, that encourages people who have had a career doing something else to then retrain for teaching. That whole question of retraining throughout a working life, which is now going to be longer than ever for most people, is really important. Teachers will go into and out of the profession a little bit, but it is not as well established as within some other professions.
Baroness Walmsley: You have talked about the supply of STEM educators. I was wondering, Yvonne, whether there is anything in your CPD that helps existing teachers encourage their students to take STEM subjects. That is the demand side, I suppose.
Yvonne Baker: Yes, that is one of the underlying points of the CPD: to try to open teachers’ and then young people’s eyes to the breadth of possibilities that are out there. A lot of what we do within the CPD is building educators’ subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and confidence, but also a lot of contextualisation. What do you do with these subjects? What careers are available to you? Where can this take you? We have to also remember that subject teachers still remain one of the biggest influences on young people’s career choices. Careers advisers have their place, of course, but it is the subject teachers who bring the subjects to life.
It is really important in primary as well that our primary teachers have confidence in what they are teaching, have confidence in science, computing and technology, and have that context, so that they can start encouraging those children at a very early age.
Viscount Hanworth: Among those whom we have been recruiting to postgraduate courses, have we seen any change over time in the relative proportions of UK and overseas students? I have a supposition that they have changed in favour of overseas students. Is that correct?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: It may have at postgraduate taught level, but not at postgraduate research level. It has been a fairly constant mix of EU, home and wider international students. Postgraduate taught level has gone up for international students a little more than for home students for the last few years, apart from the last set of data that we have, which was the first year with the pandemic. There, we saw quite an uptick in UK students going on to do a master’s, presumably because there were not the jobs available for them to get straight into after university. The international bit of the graph was growing a bit, and then that was caught up by the UK piece again last year.
Q19 Baroness Rock: We have just talked about the skills gap. I wonder whether I could ask you what measures you are seeing government currently undertaking to address this gap. Are they sufficient, given the requirements of wider government and the policy aims for science and technology, including net zero?
Yvonne Baker: The Government are investing significantly in subject-specific CPD, and have done for a long time, for STEM subjects, through the math hubs, the National Science Learning Centre, the Science Learning Partnerships and the National Centre for Computing Education. The key thing is that that investment needs to continue and be sustained. There is always scope for increase, because there is increased demand.
Overnight, when the pandemic hit, we turned everything to online from a lot of largely face-to-face CPD. In the last couple of years, the pendulum has swung back to a mix. Some people want to access this support face to face and some remotely. Very often, it is a mix of the two. We have seen that demand continue to be very buoyant, so there is a demand. Teachers want to do the best for their young people.
It is hard to be released from schools. Teacher release can be very challenging. We provide some financial support, particularly through the National Centre for Computing Education, for teacher release, enabling schools to release teachers.
There is always more that can be done, but the most important thing is a long-term commitment, which I know is difficult, to this support being available, funded by government, because that will then attract other people in to also provide ancillary support.
Baroness Rock: On hybrid, presumably it is much easier to scale it up with the demand that you are saying is coming through.
Yvonne Baker: It is. You can scale up hybrid, but one of the big things you have in STEM that you do not necessarily have in other subjects, although you do in some, is the need to provide teachers and school technicians with the opportunity to develop their own practical skills. This is particularly relevant when it comes to primary teachers a lot of the time. How do you do meaningful practicals? How do you work within a practical environment? There is lots of simulation software that you can look at, but there is still that thing about how, when you are in a classroom teaching a class of youngsters, you do that in ways that are effective as well as safe.
Baroness Rock: Dr Bradshaw, perhaps I could ask you the same question. Also, what makes for a successful skills initiative from government? What are the things that move the dial effectively?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: Can I just agree with Yvonne first in terms of the hands-on experience? That is one of the key things and it costs money. Yvonne, you said that you are a chemical engineer. One of my favourite examples is the chemical engineering degree at Imperial. You go there, and it has a set-up that is computerised and looks exactly like you are inside a chemical refinery. You can use all the latest kit and technology, and see what it is like to be a chemical engineer in the field, without blowing anything up in real life. That is fantastic, but that hands-on experience costs money. The facility there cost £10 million to build and was sponsored by business.
This is one of our challenges: the cost of teaching in schools, colleges and certainly universities. At the moment, in the way that the funding system is set up for undergraduate degrees, we in the Russell Group lose about £1,750 per home student per year on our teaching of them. Our modelling shows that that is going to be a loss of about £4,000 per student per year by 2024-25. It is not economical, in pure business terms, to teach home students. In subjects such as medicine, we lose even more money. At the moment, we are already losing over £2,400 on average per student per year for teaching, because it costs a lot to provide a very high-quality STEM education.
On the research side of things, we talk in terms of full economic costs that we get from the research councils to support research training. At the moment, it is under 50% of full economic costs that we get back on the training of PhD students or postgraduate researchers, and so the additional money then has to be found from other sources such as international students, philanthropy and business.
It is fine having a bit of skin in the game, but it feels like there is a huge pressure on universities to just do more and more with less money in that space. One of our biggest challenges is the funding. You asked whether the Government are doing enough. No. The gap is increasing on funding for both undergraduate and postgraduate in terms of wanting to give people a high-quality hands-on experience.
Q20 Viscount Hanworth: What you have said is very disturbing. My designated question is to ask what facilities are currently available for workers to retrain in STEM skills and for those who do not have such skills to acquire them. Thereafter, I would like to take my question in another direction.
Yvonne Baker: As I said before, we do not retrain teachers per se; we do in-service training for teachers. However, we do an awful lot of training in physics, for example, for non-specialist physics teachers. As I said before, a lot of science teachers will end up teaching physics even though it is not their own specialism, and so we will work with biology and chemistry teachers or people from other STEM disciplines to upskill them. We do that for computing as well; we help teachers train for different subjects. That is time-consuming and tricky for teachers, but it is a way to get more teachers of physics and of computing in front of people. It has been a successful initiative, particularly for computing.
Viscount Hanworth: We are also concerned with the question of developing the skills of people who are already in employment. Perhaps Tim Bradshaw can address that.
Dr Tim Bradshaw: I think one of the most interesting things that the Government are looking at now is the lifelong loan entitlement and what that might mean for the future. That is the piece that will genuinely allow people to come back in and to upskill, retrain and develop whatever they need for the future. That will be around modular learning. It is not going to replace undergraduate degrees, but it is exactly the sort of space that could fit workers coming back in to upskill and do new things for the future. We already do quite a bit of that in terms of CPD or postgraduate certificates. Manchester, for example, does one with clinical data science for nurses to come back in and do training in that space.
The LLE development could be very interesting for the future. One of our challenges is that the Government are at the moment saying that that should focus on levels 4, 5 and 6, and we would say that there is a big opportunity to do level 7, which would be master’s level courses, through the LLE route, because something like 30% of the working-age population already has a degree, which is only going to increase over time. If people need to come back and reskill, it will probably be at master’s level or maybe another degree.
At the moment, the Government are saying that they are not going to do that. We think that is a mistake; this is a real opportunity. That is probably the easiest way to get LLE off the ground, because it is much easier to modularise a master’s course than it is a three-year degree. They just have to work out how you mesh that with the current master’s loan that is available to students.
Viscount Hanworth: Can I give a personal testimony to lead into the next issue? In the past, I have worked with two engineers who were, respectively, apprentices of Bristol aviation and the coal board. They were sent to university by their employers, but, when their employers went out of business, they became what I might call mercenary engineers. That is to say that they were attending to crises that had arisen in various factories that had sacked their engineering workforce in pursuit of efficiency.
Have we seen a significant decline in the willingness of employers to sponsor the education of their technical workforce? Bristol aviation and the coal board were characteristic of what was happening across industry at that time, and I believe it is no longer happening.
Dr Tim Bradshaw: The statistics show that fewer people doing degrees now are supported by their employer. It is not necessarily the case if you are doing a degree apprenticeship, because there is a very tight link with the employer there, but over time there has definitely been drop-off in the number of students who are funded by their employer. They are now mostly funded by the student loan system, so self-funded, essentially.
Viscount Hanworth: In biomedical areas, employers expect to recruit some foreign students and foreign workers. It is cheaper.
Q21 Baroness Walmsley: Are there currently enough educators with STEM experience to fulfil the demand for skills training and, if not, what should the Government do to ensure that this problem is addressed? To some extent, you have already answered that, particularly in relation to physics, computer science and possibly mathematics; I do not know. I wonder whether you could, in answering, focus on what the barriers are. Is it that the rates of pay prevent people with STEM skills going into education, or are there any other issues that would encourage people with a STEM background to go and teach, particularly in economically deprived areas?
Yvonne Baker: Like I said before, there is the STEM-skilled paradox. If you have a physics or chemistry degree, you are in huge demand from lots of people. As I said before, when you manage to recruit teachers, retaining them is the big challenge. We have to look at how we retain teachers in the profession, be it the ability to do other things and then come back or as a long-term career choice.
I have some figures here. Of all teachers, around 13% leave within the first year and 31% within the first five years, but for STEM subjects it is 16% in the first year and 53% within five years. It is a really quite shocking figure. There is also other research that shows that teachers inevitably become more effective with experience; they hit peak effectiveness at around five years, so they leave at the very point that you want them in the classroom.
Baroness Walmsley: Have you monetised that at all? It costs a lot of money to train a teacher, and then, of course, there is the cost of re-recruiting that third or even half.
Yvonne Baker: Yes, absolutely. Either the National Audit Office or another agency said a few years ago that the average cost of training a teacher is around £23,000, which is at least five years old now. If you start adding that up, it is very significant. Another statistic is that physics, chemistry, computing and maths teachers are eligible for a £24,000 bursary. If 16% of 5,000 teachers a year leave within one year, that is costing us £19 million alone.
Baroness Walmsley: Do they not have to pay it back if they leave?
Yvonne Baker: No, not that I am aware of. There is a vast economic cost. From analysis we did some time ago through Education Datalab, we know that engaging with our CPD, for example, makes teachers 160% more likely to stay within the profession. If you added that up about five or seven years ago, we kept around 1,000 teachers in the professional a year, which is around £23 million a year. We are talking about big money. Yes, absolutely, there is an economic issue as well as a social issue.
There is also the issue of how you retain teachers and make them more effective, inspired and informed, so that they are more effective in going back into the classroom and encouraging more young people to pursue those STEM subjects to higher levels for longer times in their education. What we want as a country is more people with those STEM abilities, skills and knowledge, so that we are all fishing in a bigger pool. We want more of the population, so that, for example, even if the conversion rate for engineering remains at 15%, it is 15% of a bigger pool. That is my aim.
Baroness Walmsley: It is like plugging a hole in a bucket. It is a financially sensible way to go about it. What is the cost of your interventions that increase that level of retention? We can set that against the cost of training a teacher and then them going and doing something else.
Yvonne Baker: We had a social value analysis done a while back, which we know is an estimation. Social value always works on best-calculated estimations, but, for every pound the Government put into our CPD over five years, the social value returned about £18. It is a return on investment of roughly 18 times.
Baroness Walmsley: Is there anything that the Government can do apart from funding more of your work? Are teachers obliged to do any of this when they get past their first year?
Yvonne Baker: The Government have been very proactive in putting the early career framework in place, giving much more support to teachers through the first two years of their career, but there is no requirement in there for subject-specific CPD. There is currently no requirement for teachers to undertake subject-specific CPD throughout their career. They are encouraged to.
I am always a bit wary about the stick. You want the carrot approach rather than the stick, because, otherwise, it becomes a tick-box exercise. You do your CPD in the easiest way; you have ticked the box. We could do more as a country and a society to give teachers the carrot as well as the capability, the time and the resources to do the subject-specific updating.
Baroness Walmsley: I expect that it is a factor in promotion when people go for a higher job—whether they have done it.
Yvonne Baker: Yes. It is beginning to be noticed more, but we are certainly working much more closely with school leaders and multi-academy trust leaders now to ensure that it has the currency that it deserves.
Baroness Walmsley: Is there anything to add, Dr Bradshaw?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: Yes, only from the perspective of things that some of our universities are doing with schools. We are trying to increase the pool of students coming into university and wanting to do STEM subjects. Cambridge, for example, has its STEM SMART initiative, which is online mentoring and tutoring for year 12 students studying STEM subjects. It started in physics. It is now physics, biology and chemistry, open to any student from a non-fee-paying school to provide them with additional help and learning in year 12, so that they are prepared to, I hope, go on and do a STEM undergraduate course. There is that sort of intervention that we are doing with schools. That is just one of many examples.
Baroness Walmsley: That is interesting, thank you.
The Chair: I wondered, Yvonne, whether I could ask a follow-up question about barriers to going into teaching. From the people I know who are in teaching, including one of my daughters, who is a STEM teacher, part of the problem is the huge amount of bureaucratic stuff that they have to deal with. If you love teaching, you end up spending a lot of your time doing stuff that is not teaching. Is there anything that could be done in that direction to free up those precious people who go into STEM teaching to do the teaching?
Yvonne Baker: Yes. Speaking more from a personal perspective now, because I am a school governor and have been for many years, there has been a huge growth over the last few years in bureaucracy or necessary administration, whatever you wish to call it. To be fair, efforts are being made. For example, the new inspection framework from Ofsted says it is much more about looking at the broad and balanced curriculum. While some of it will, of course, be data-driven, Ofsted is trying to encourage schools to row back on the amount of data that they present, et cetera.
Through STEM learning, we try to support teachers in working out how to work smarter, not harder; for example, in how you prepare lessons, the kind of lessons that you do or the kind of experience that you can draw on. It is all about helping teachers and school leaders know what support and resources are available to them, so that they can draw on things that are already there, on other teachers’ and schools’ examples, and all that will help with workload and, I hope, help keep more teachers in the profession.
Q22 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Moving on to another aspect of this, I was very struck by the example at Imperial that Dr Bradshaw gave us. Are STEM graduates currently being sufficiently well prepared for highly skilled careers? I imagine the answer is that it is very partial. If they are not, are there any reforms that could be made to degree courses that would equip students better to undertake jobs in STEM?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: Yes, they are very well equipped, certainly when they leave our universities. We try our hardest to give them a really high-quality experience, in particular giving them some of the research skills that they might need in the future in their careers. There is almost always, in a STEM subject, a third-year project, which would be a research project. Quite typically, the researchers on those third-year projects will be in labs with postgraduates and others, using the same facilities and equipment that they are using, so we try to give them the high-quality hands-on experience that they need.
Increasingly, we are seeing a number of our courses doing the core STEM subject plus something such as entrepreneurship. At Bristol, for example, you can do a BSc course in technology and innovation, with entrepreneurship mixed in, so that you have the skills to go and set up a business or to at least understand how IP, financing and things like that might work, if you were to go into a small business or high-tech start-up. Manchester is doing the same. It has a BSc in biomedical science and entrepreneurship with its business school. Oxford has a scientific entrepreneurship postgraduate research initiative to try to get staff and researchers there to pick up commercial skills, so that they can commercialise the research that they are involved in.
There is a growing trend for that sort of thing. Quite often, it is a BSc undergraduate with a master’s either tacked on at the end or merged within it, which gives you the additional skills on top of the core science.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Is that in conjunction or co-operation with industry or with companies? Are you or the universities getting the feedback that this is working and that they are much more satisfied with the graduates they are getting?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: Yes, and those graduates are the ones going off and getting high-value jobs very quickly. There is good feedback from business on that. There is the degree apprenticeship side as well, which I mentioned earlier, where businesses and universities are working very closely together. I was visiting Warwick University a few days ago, which has a fantastic degree apprenticeship programme with the automotive manufacturers in the region, in particular Jaguar Land Rover.
One of the things we hear, though, even from really good companies such as those investing in apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships is that they cannot draw down all their apprenticeship levy money. They pay the apprenticeship levy but cannot reclaim all of it. They would like to, and they would like to be able to put more money per student into the apprenticeships that they train at some of the high-quality providers around the country.
There is a system challenge there, in terms of the funding being available but not actually able to be used in the training on the ground in the universities. I do not have an exact figure for it, but I understand that there was quite a bit of underspend in the apprenticeship levy. Something like £200 million or £300 million has gone back to Treasury, unspent. That money should be reinvested back into high-quality STEM education.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I am sure that the Select Committee on apprenticeships will be looking at that. I wonder whether I could ask a slightly broader question. Is there a leaky pipeline for students who study science in schools but do not end up in STEM-adjacent careers? If that is the case, where are the leaks and what could be done to address them?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: I do not mind if there is a leaky pipeline, so long as that pipeline keeps on going. There is huge value in having an understanding of STEM and of research skills in a wide range of disciplines and careers in society. You do not want everybody doing a postgraduate research degree coming through and ending up in academia. We want people to leak out into business.
We want people to leak out and become parliamentarians or go into the media, with an understanding of science and technology. That is vital for the future of the economy. If we are trying to go for net zero, you need to understand how those technologies work, even if you are not involved in producing and developing them, for example. The leakiness is a good thing, so long as there is sufficient coming through that pipeline and staying in those core disciplines in academia, in business and elsewhere, but having that wider understanding of STEM in society is a good thing.
Yvonne Baker: I completely agree. I would prefer to talk about needing a bigger pool rather than plugging all the gaps in the pipeline, because I want, as you said, our parliamentarians to have an understanding and appreciation of STEM. I want everybody to have that. People now going into retailing need to understand the role of data and AI. I often say that there is no job in the world now that is not a STEM job. Whichever way you look at it, it really does not matter what it is; it has some element of STEM in it.
It is more about having a broad and balanced curriculum for every young person, so that they have those choices. It also goes back to supporting teachers, all the way through from early years to post-16, in having that broad vision of what STEM is and how STEM skills are used now, so that they can encourage young people to go on to university and do specialist STEM degrees, but maybe also understand what the role of STEM is in the world more generally.
As I have mentioned before, we have the STEM ambassador community, with 37,000 volunteers from the widest possible range of STEM-related jobs that you can imagine. I have been involved with that for over 20 years, and it has been fascinating to meet that range of people. They all help bring what you do with STEM in the modern world to life, which is vital.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: That reinforces all the points you have been making, both about CPD and about giving teachers adequate support in order to encourage them to remain and to enhance their skills.
Q23 Lord Wei: Is there anything that the current Government can learn either from international competitors or from successful policies of previous Governments to address the STEM skills gap? I am particularly interested in any outliers or things we might not have been aware of.
Yvonne Baker: Certainly in subject-specific teacher professional development, the UK has been pretty much up there internationally since the Wellcome Trust and the Government invested in the National Science Learning Centre back in the early 2000s. We certainly still get quite a lot of international inquiries. We get a lot of international visitors coming to the centre at York particularly, but it does not mean that we can rest on our laurels. We have to take lessons from a number of countries that also invest in subject-specific CPD, which have made investments in things like the National Science Learning Centre, and to keep up with them.
We are always looking at what our international partners are doing. We work quite closely with a number of international communities, but there are always things we can learn. We have also been able to share our good practice, both around CPD and around the STEM Ambassadors programme, with quite a few countries.
Dr Tim Bradshaw: Let me talk about the research side of things again. What can we learn from overseas? Science and research is an international, collaborative, hands-on exercise. It is a good thing that we get international staff into our universities to teach and do research, as well as into business. We ought to be making sure that we are competitive internationally in terms of our attractiveness, and there are various components to that.
One component is the Government’s recent announcement of their commitment to investing £20 billion per year in R&D, which is fantastic. That shows real ambition. It shows that the Government wants the UK to be a science, research and innovation-led economy to underpin growth. That is fantastic. I hope that the current Government continues with that commitment, which will help attract really good talent to the UK.
The second component is visas. We ought to make sure that our visa system is really attractive, if we want to make the best of the talent that is available to us around the world, but I do not think that we do enough in that space. The points-based system is good. It gives extra points for having a PhD, which is really good and much improved, but we have a very high-cost visa system. I talk to my opposite numbers in other organisations around the world, and their systems are much better than ours. They are trying very hard to attract really high-quality talent and make it easy and friendly for people to come to study and research in their nations. We do not.
If you are coming to the UK on a five-year skilled worker visa, and you are bringing a partner and two children with you, it is going to cost you something like £15,880 up front to get that visa, of which £10,940 is the immigration health surcharge. This does not make it very attractive for people to come to the UK if they have to pay that out, rather than just taking out the normal medical insurance that you might do if you went abroad.
We asked the Department of Health and Social Care to justify that figure through an FoI at the end of 2019: “How do you justify £10,000?” It said that it was going to publish that evidence imminently, and it still has not done so, so you might like to ask it how this is being benchmarked internationally.
The third thing in terms of overall attractiveness for international staff at the moment is what we do with Horizon Europe. Will we be associated to Horizon Europe? That is still a little bit in limbo. There may have been a chink of light these last few weeks, with a bit of thawing in relations between the UK and France, and the UK and Ireland, and I hope that the Government pursue that. Being part of the largest international collaborative programme for research in the world is a real attractor for talent and, if we are outside that, the UK will lose out significantly in being able to attract very good people who come into universities and then maybe go off into industry as well.
Lord Wei: Can I just pick up on one point? I was in the US recently, speaking to a colleague there about the STEM pipeline that they have, and there seemed to be more—and I do not have the latest stats—going into STEM careers or taking STEM subjects for longer than we do in the UK. We talked about how the education system there, with the GPA system, does not stigmatise you too early if you do not perform in a STEM GCSE or exam, which then forces you slightly to have to choose a STEM or non-STEM career. Do you see something about the structure of our education system contributing to this versus other countries, whether it is India, China or America, where they seem to churn out lots of STEM students and workers?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: We should not specialise too early. It is very useful for people to have a broad education, but we have the system that we have and, particularly when you go to university, there is at least an opportunity to do other things around the side of whatever course you are doing. I hope students can pick up other opportunities and take additional courses and modules while doing their main degree.
It is difficult. There is only so much time in the timetable to teach subjects to the depth and breadth that is needed, so there is always going to be a balance to be struck. The key is to make sure that the opportunities are there for the bright students to take a variety of things and not to specialise too soon.
Yvonne Baker: We have a system that asks young people to make what can end up being quite high-stakes choices quite early, but—I keep coming back to this—we have bottlenecks in the system. For example, we have remained at around 36,000 to 38,000 young people taking physics A-level each year for the last five years. Nobody is quite saying it, but it is probably due more to the teaching capacity being a bottleneck. Anecdotally, we know that there are lots of young people who would like to take physics A-level, but schools either do not have the capacity or put entry requirements on to moving into physics A-level, because it is seen as a harder A-level and as more high risk to the student as well as to the school. So there are bottlenecks in the system.
With a different hat on, I sat for a number of years on the Institution of Engineering and Technology education and skills panel, and some really good work was done on new approaches to higher education from some engineering departments and looking more broadly—not just requiring the maths tick or the physics tick. I am a great believer that we need to look at that, because sometimes young people make choices that they would, in hindsight, like to change. We need to be more flexible towards those young people.
The Chair: Could I just go back a step in Lord Wei’s question? On a factual point, is the STEM skills gap similar, let us say, in other large European countries, such as France, Germany or Italy? Do they talk about it in the way that we do?
Yvonne Baker: Anecdotally, yes. There has certainly been real concern about that. There has not been a major study done on it for a number of years. Many years ago, there was something called ROSE—the Relevance of Science Education project—from the University of Oslo. That was very interesting about young people’s attitudes to science and technology across about 160 countries. One of the most striking points was that it showed quite a negative correlation between the human development index of a country and young people’s positive attitudes towards science and science education. The higher up on the index the country was, maybe the less young people saw the importance of science education in their futures.
The Chair: How old is that study?
Yvonne Baker: It is quite an old one now. I think it started in the early 2000s, but it carried on until about 2010 or 2012. It is quite an interesting read.
Viscount Hanworth: If the proportion of degree apprenticeships in STEM were to increase at the expense of traditional STEM degrees, would you see any danger in specific skills displacing generic skills—in other words, that graduates would have skills that would not endure if their employment prospects changed?
Dr Tim Bradshaw: No, I do not think so. The proportion doing degree apprenticeships at the moment is very small. You could double or treble it and you would not have that problem, particularly since those people are then working with industry. Once they have invested in that degree apprenticeship, they will want to continue developing in the future, I would have thought, so I do not think that there is a problem in that space.
Baroness Walmsley: Could you tell us more or write to us about the STEM Ambassadors? The reason I ask the question is that I currently know a sixth former who is doing maths, physics and chemistry and who really has no idea what sort of job that might lead to and, indeed, which university course to choose, because he does not know enough about the range of exciting jobs that you can get if you take this line or that line within STEM. I can imagine that the STEM Ambassadors might be really helpful to students in that way.
Yvonne Baker: Yes, absolutely. We will write to you with some links for some resources, but that is exactly it. It is about trying to open the eyes of teachers and young people to the breadth and depth of roles that use STEM skills, but also that exist in STEM-related companies. We know that, for young people growing up in more disadvantaged backgrounds, they lack exactly those networks and links that they get informally. The STEM Ambassadors programme can help all young people, but particularly those young people, to build a picture. It is answering the perennial question that we probably all asked at school once: “So why are we doing this, Miss?”
The Chair: On that happy note, I thank both our witnesses for a very interesting session. You have been very helpful to us with the oral evidence that you have given us. Yvonne, you have agreed to send in some further information about STEM Ambassadors. If there is anything else that either of you feel you would like to write in about to add to the evidence, please do not hesitate to do so.
As I mentioned at the beginning, you will be sent a transcript of today’s session and you will have an opportunity to make any minor corrections that you wish to make at that point. With that, I would like to close this part of the meeting.
