14
Examination of Witnesses
Professor Julia Buckingham CBE and Professor Cláudia Sarrico.
Q38 The Chair: I would like to welcome our two witnesses to the committee’s sixth evidence session in its inquiry into people and skills in STEM—Professor Julia Buckingham, chair of the Institute of Cancer Research, and Professor Cláudia Sarrico of the School of Economics and Management at the University of Minho. The session is being broadcast live on Parliament TV, and a full transcript is being taken. That will be made available to the witnesses shortly after this meeting, and you will be able to make any minor corrections. Without further ado, I am going to move into the questions that we have for you over the next hour or so. I turn first to Lord Mitchell.
Q39 Lord Mitchell: Good morning. What are the major challenges facing young researchers trying to embark on an academic career at present? Have these problems got worse over time? If I could put in a supplementary now, are we underproducing or overproducing PhD students? Is there a need to do more to prepare them for careers outside of academia, which is the outcome for the majority? Let us start with Professor Buckingham.
Professor Julia Buckingham: Those are quite extensive questions. Dealing first with young researchers coming into academic careers, the biggest problem—probably everything else stems from this—is the insecurity posed by short fixed-term contracts. That is not necessarily good for research because some research is longer term, and it is certainly not good for the individual because of the insecurity it gives them.
There are increasingly major financial challenges to young researchers. In my own institute, the Institute of Cancer Research, I was talking to my chief executive last week and he was expressing great concern about the financial hardship now being experienced by young researchers—PhD students and people who have embarked on postdoctoral study. Of course, they are facing increasing rents, increasing fuel bills and everything else that the rest of us are facing.
There is a lot of pressure to perform because your next step up the ladder depends on how good your CV looks. There is tremendous pressure still on young people to perform. All that leads to stress and anxiety. Across the sector, we are seeing increasing problems with PhD students and early career researchers bringing up issues of stress and anxiety and concerns about their mental health.
Has it got worse? It is difficult to judge, really. There are a number of institutions that are trying to find creative solutions to the problem of precarity of contracts, but there is a limit to what any institution can do. Of course, universities themselves do not have endless funds. We live in a world where undergraduate fees have now been fixed for 10 years, so inflation is really biting. We already run research at a considerable loss. We are very dependent on cross-subsidies for research, particularly from international student fees and the commercial activities that universities run.
With that said, my former institution, Brunel University London, offered open-ended contracts to anybody who had been with us for two years. We could not do it for all our early career researchers. The University of Surrey, where I sit on the board, is creating a research fellowship scheme. Those will be five-year research fellowships for real stars, I hope, with a guarantee of a tenured academic post at the end of it, provided they meet the necessary performance criteria for that role.
I could quote you many other examples of what people are trying to do across the sector, but it is very difficult because of the limited resources we have. Inevitably, there is a pyramid: there are fewer people at the top and more people at the bottom, and there is a really big question about how we can support those people at the bottom.
There are bridging fund schemes. The Wellcome Trust was very creative in developing a mechanism that gave institutions some funds to help to bridge talented people when they were waiting to hear about the outcome of a grant. Those sorts of things are helpful, but they are very limited.
People are now more open to the idea of individuals taking career breaks and enabling people to manage their caring responsibilities. The atmosphere is better around that in universities. People are very supportive of young people taking time out to raise a family and coming back into research, but it is still very challenging. If you have been out of research for some time, it is not easy to get back in again and start raising those grants again. Those challenges are still very big.
Turning to PhD students, it is difficult to know whether we are training too many or too few. I would say that PhD students are an integral part of every academic department. They are the first generation of researchers. Having a vibrant research culture in an academic department is very dependent on having a good cadre of PhD students who contribute so much to that.
It is perhaps different in different disciplines. In the sciences, in the STEM subjects, we tend to work in teams and PhD students are very much part of a team of researchers. In the arts, humanities and social sciences, they tend to work much more independently. Then again, they are still part of the department and still part of creating the ethos.
You are absolutely right that not all of them are going to go on to academia, and the vast majority will go into other roles. Universities are better at supporting them, but there is still an awful lot more to do. There is a great deal to be done with employers, who I am not convinced necessarily understand the very broad range of transferable skills that people who have done a PhD have. These students are very smart people; they have very highly developed analytical critical skills, evidence-based policy type skills, et cetera. I am sure they do go on to have very successful careers, but we do not have the evidence at the moment to track where they go. I suspect that they are undervalued by potential employers. I will stop there. I could go on for a lot longer, but I think I had better stop.
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: Starting on the question of whether there are too many PhDs—this is related to the challenges we are facing—in the OECD we have seen that the number of doctoral researchers has been increasing a lot. In many countries, they cannot possibly stay in academia. This is one of the issues that leads to precarity, because there are so many of them and they cannot all possibly get a permanent position.
Whether there are too many or too few, it also has to do with what they are going to do next. In general, the labour market outcomes of PhDs are better than the rest of graduates, but that is for the average PhD; there is evidence that this is deteriorating quickly for younger cohorts. There is an issue here because it means that a PhD is no longer attractive to much of the best talent. We have evidence in many countries that this is the case. We still have people wanting to do PhDs, but they are not necessarily the best talent because it is not as attractive as it was before.
I agree that there are differences by field, and there are differences in terms of what type of PhD you do. As many doctorate holders will not be able to get a position in academia, what we have seen in many countries and institutions is that doctoral education is also changing: you have collaborative doctorates, industrial doctorates and doctorates preparing people for careers outside academia. This is also something that could address the issue.
In terms of the precarity of research careers, we know that the majority of doctorate holders will work outside academia. For instance, here in France, for every position that opens in academia the system produces 10 new doctorates, so nine will need to find jobs elsewhere. It is fine if they can find jobs that are compatible with their advanced skills and they get to use those skills. What we know is that many will not be doing research, so the question is whether their skills will still be valued outside academia.
There are some small surveys in some countries about how they are perceived by employers outside academia. In general, employers are happy with their technical skills but less happy with their transversal skills, mainly in terms of communication and managerial skills. This can be addressed again by changing doctoral education.
If these people are so central to the research endeavour in academia—Professor Buckingham has just supported that idea—and if we continue to produce this amount of PhDs, that probably means we need to train them for diverse career trajectories outside academia and, very importantly, to return to academia. The circulation of these people is an important idea. If they come back to academia, academia has to change the way people are assessed and the criteria that are used for recruitment. These are some ideas that I could add.
Q40 Viscount Hanworth: I am due to ask a question to which we know the answer only too well. The first part is: have academic careers in the UK become more precarious over time? If so, what are the major factors behind this increase in precariousness?
I have begun to read your excellent report, which covers the breadth of the OECD. In it you suggest, as you have just suggested now, that part of the problem is that the supply of PhD graduates has increased without a commensurate increase in the demand for them within academia. I am not sure that is the problem in the UK. I wonder why the UK is following the trend that is evident in the OECD, of which I was not previously aware; I thought this distress was a peculiarly British problem but, no, it is more general. Perhaps the causes in Britain are not quite the same as they are in other parts of the OECD. We do not seem to have an oversupply of PhD graduates, or am I wrong in that?
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: In fact, from a survey of corresponding authors of research papers, we know that the UK is not in the worst situation. Around a third of the authors of scientific papers are on fixed-term contracts. This is lower than in other countries, like Switzerland and Germany, where more than 50% of corresponding authors are on fixed-term contracts. It is still worrying because, if they are corresponding authors, they are already assuming some leadership in research. We are not just talking about PhD students or postdoctoral researchers. This level of precarity is much higher than in the general labour force.
If we continue to increase the supply and deteriorate the conditions, the danger is that an academic career will no longer be attractive to the best. In many countries—we have evidence from France and from Japan—the best graduates do a master’s, but then leave. They do not even want to consider a doctorate. Potentially, we are increasing spending on research and increasing research activity, but we are not getting the best return in terms of novelty. There is good evidence that novel research is decreasing. If you do not attract the best talent, quality decreases, but people also play it safe. They have fixed-term contracts, they are highly dependent on their PIs and on getting the next grant, so they play it safe in terms of the research they do. This is really an issue.
We know that we are not producing too many PhDs because they do fine jobs but, if there is evidence in the younger cohorts that the salary premium is already decreasing or even becoming negative, there is a question about how efficient that is. Maybe they did not need to do a PhD to get that job. Of course, relative to master’s graduates, they have lost time in the labour market because those master’s graduates have been acquiring experience outside of academia that improves their chances of progressing in the career. There is this issue about the efficiency of the system as well. This is a problem.
The UK is not necessarily worse than other countries—from the statistics I gave you, it is better—but, if the situation continues to deteriorate, we may see what we see in other countries, where you can no longer attract the best talent.
Viscount Hanworth: I was questioning whether the UK was overproducing PhD graduates. The evidence is that we are filling a deficit by importing young researchers from abroad. Maybe our situation is somewhat different from the one that characterises the majority of the OECD.
Professor Buckingham, can I turn to you? The other issue that arises is the effect this precariousness—I cannot say “precarity”; I dislike that neologism—has on the quality of scientific research. Is it impacting in ways that you have identified? Is it making people cautious or less speculative in doing their research and so on?
Professor Julia Buckingham: In terms of recruiting the best into science, there is some variation between disciplines. Certainly in my experience, when I was at Brunel, which is a very engineering-centric university, we found many of our brightest graduates had no ambition to do research at all. They wanted to go into industry, where they would be professional engineers. That is what they did, and the employment rates were extremely good, but it was very hard to recruit students as PhD students. On the other hand, there are many talented people from overseas who are very keen to come to the UK to do a PhD, and who do very good research when they are here. They are extraordinarily valuable.
On whether it makes people nervous, I would not look at the PhD level in that regard. I would look at what I call early career researchers—the postdoctoral students. That is where there is a danger that people do play safe. If you have a very short-term contract—two or three years is a short time in terms of research—you are very keen to get your publications out and not to take the risks of doing what in my day was called a Friday afternoon experiment, which was very high risk but you thought it would be fun to do.
Very often, of course, the unexpected result is the real trigger to doing something different, not doing something where you got the answer you hoped you would. There is a risk around innovation and creativity, and the extent to which the current system is really encouraging our early career researchers—I am talking mainly about postdoctoral researchers—to show their talents, blossom, experiment and be what we regard a researcher as in an ideal world.
Q41 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Drawing a comparison between Britain and France, I note that in France a larger fraction of research is done in CNRS institutions and not in universities. Could you comment a bit on whether that has effects relevant to what we are discussing?
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: From the interviews that I have done, in countries such as Germany, which has a very high level of people on fixed-term contracts, one of the reasons advanced for that is that people in the professoriate are civil servants with very high levels of protection. The argument goes, “We keep people on precarious contracts because the alternative would be to give them civil service contracts. That would mean we would no longer have flexibility”. That is in a context where, increasingly, you do not have base funding; you have competitive fixed-term funding and third-party funding.
Precarity is high in the US compared to the UK, and there are high levels of protection for the professoriate via tenure. In the UK, it does not have civil servant status; it does not have tenure. There are open-ended contracts without the same high levels of protection. This probably has the effect of reducing the level of precarity, which is higher, for instance, in the US and in Germany than in the UK.
The level of precarity in France is low as well. This has to do with the fact that many are civil servants who are recruited on permanent contracts. Often, that means that people have to leave. It depends on whether you want to keep them in the academic system because, if they do not find a job in the system, they will leave. It is a trade-off between the flexibility you want given the nature of research funding, which is very much fixed-term and competitive funding. You do not have the assurance that you will have consistent levels of funding.
In fact, this is more of a problem than the volume of funding in many countries. The volume of research funding has been increasing in most OECD countries, including per capita funding, but that funding is selective and competitive. It is often concentrated in very few players, and it has become more concentrated. The level of insecurity in terms of long-term funding often plays more of a role than the level of funding per se.
Q42 Baroness Manningham-Buller: Good morning and thank you to our witnesses. Happy birthday to Professor Buckingham. I would like to start by asking you a question, Julia. A year ago the Government published a strategy on R&D people and culture, which also covers talent. In it, there were quite a lot of significant ambitions and aspirations. At this stage, is that strategy getting through? Are you and your colleagues around the universities familiar with it?
Professor Julia Buckingham: It is very nice to see you, Eliza, and thank you. Yes, the sector is very conscious of it, certainly from my experience as a former president of UUK and in my current role as chair of the strategy group that supports the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers. That is a bit of a mouthful, but that is one of my other roles.
There is a very strong feeling in the sector about the need to improve research culture. There has been a big welcoming of Dame Ottoline’s desire to improve culture across the sector. There is certainly an awareness. My understanding is that there is now a ministerial co-ordination group, with sector representation on it, looking at how the various recommendations of that strategy can be implemented.
In the researcher development concordat group, which I chair, we regard it as an absolutely integral part of our work, and it is on our agenda at every single meeting. We had a very nice conference in the summer, which we ran in partnership with the research integrity concordat, which addressed a whole load of issues pertinent to both concordats. The conversation is very, very live in the sector. I am not sure what it has delivered yet, but certainly the conversation is going on.
One recommendation that did come from the strategy group was that there should be far better alignment of the many concordats and charters we have across the sector. There are 13 at the moment, and somebody came up with another one last week. There is a group spearheaded by the Wellcome Trust, UKRI and Universities UK that is looking at how we can get more alignment between these concordats, reduce the bureaucracy and make sure they are delivering on the very important things they need to deliver on.
We have a very long way to do. EDI is an extremely important part of the agenda. I would like to think that in the last 20 years or so we have made some strides in improving things for women. We certainly are not there yet, but we know there are many other aspects of EDI that the sector needs to work hard on to make sure that there are equal opportunities for all researchers, irrespective of their socioeconomic background. There is a lot going on, but I am not sure we have actually delivered as much as I would like to deliver yet.
Baroness Manningham-Buller: Within that spectrum of things to be done, can we get back to focus on the precariousness of research careers? We gather that Dame Ottoline at UKRI is consulting on what a new deal with researchers might be. We have seen evidence on this from the Royal Society, the Russell group and others. What aspects would you recommend that UKRI and others put high on the list of things that would give researchers confidence that their careers are not as precarious as they currently are in order to retain them and help ensure they perform to the highest standards? What things would you pick out?
Professor Julia Buckingham: Very high on my list would be the nature of employment in their institution. There is a feeling from many researchers who are on fixed-term contracts that they are not eligible for their institution’s promotion rounds. It is a big block on your career, if you are not eligible to be promoted.
There is still a whole issue about the status of grant-funded early career researchers in institutions. Rather like PhD students, they do not feel part of the institution. Some of them do, but a lot of them do not. One of the things we are trying to do within the concordat—it is one of the aspirations of the concordat—is to ensure that they are properly supported in their institutions and treated as full members of staff, even if they are still on fixed-term contracts.
For example, careers advice and career development are hugely important. In the concordat we have a recommendation to all signatories that every postdoctoral researcher is given 10 days every year, aside from their research, for professional development. It may be that they want to go work in another lab or do something like that. That is fine. It may be that they have decided that research is not for them and they would like to explore something different. This is to give them the opportunity to think about and really concentrate on how their career is going to develop. A lot of them do not want to stay in academia. Universities are extraordinarily bad at supporting early career researchers in getting that difficult advice.
If somebody can find a solution to the financial problems, that would be wonderful. It would require a very different approach to grant funding, because there is no magic money tree in universities to make all early-career researchers permanent.
Baroness Manningham-Buller: What you are saying is that, notwithstanding government funding, much of this can be done within universities and is not in itself a government responsibility. Is that right?
Professor Julia Buckingham: I absolutely think so, yes. That is one of the key things I want to try to drive through with the concordat. It is incredibly important that these people are well treated and respected. For goodness’ sake, they are among the most talented people we have. We want talent and should be doing our utmost to help them develop a career that is going to be successful and rewarding for them and not necessarily what their supervisor thinks they ought to be doing.
Baroness Manningham-Buller: I would like to come back to contracts, but can I turn to Professor Sarrico? You have heard what Professor Buckingham has said about what the UK is trying to do specifically on research careers. Would you like to add anything from your experience that we have not already covered and that you think is important in encouraging people to see this as a long‑term career?
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: I would agree about the nature of employment. In many countries, people are employees, albeit on fixed-term contracts, from doctoral education onwards, which means they pay tax and contribute to their pension and welfare benefits. It is not a question of offering everybody permanent contracts, because that is impossible, as Professor Buckingham said, but improving working conditions and offering more transparent and predictable career prospects, so people know what their prospects are. It is clear that not all of them are going to stay in an academic career.
Of course, professional development is very important at the postdoctoral phase, but even at doctoral level. For instance, Norway is offering people contracts where 20% of their time is spent doing something else. Some people teach; some do consultancy outside the university; they do work-based learning outside the university. This sort of thing is very important to prepare people for other trajectories. That is transparent and it is a given from the beginning. That would make a difference as well.
The other thing is to improve the management of institutions. I often say it is true that you have these fixed-term contracts for research and you do not know where the money is coming from, but universities could learn from other professional organisations such as law practices and consultancies. They also work on contract work. It is important that universities also have the management capabilities—financial management and human resource management—to deal with this type of work. The shift from base formula money to competitive money has been occurring for many years, so universities could develop that better.
This is the role of universities, but funding agencies, those that give the money, could attach conditions as to how it is used, if we want a change in culture, as Professor Buckingham mentioned. The change in culture would be to move away from “sink or swim”, which was fine when there were fewer people applying for the permanent positions. With so many people now, funding attached to issues of human resource management, predictability of career, transparency and professional development could be better promoted.
We also need to develop the evidence base. Often, I feel we are talking about this without having any evidence. Tracking the career of doctorate holders like we track the careers of graduates and master’s graduates is also important.
Finally, we need to give a voice to these people. Doctoral researchers and postdoctoral researchers are often the majority of the research workforce in many countries, but they often do not have a voice. As Professor Buckingham was saying, they are not in the governance of institutions; they do not feel part of the institutions. Their challenges are often not accounted for. In many systems, the professoriate is becoming residual compared to the rest of the workforce.
Q43 Lord Holmes of Richmond: Good morning to our witnesses. This committee has been concerned with how to ensure the widest group of people are attracted to participate in research at least at some stage of their careers. What should the Government do to ensure the widest group are attracted to undertake and engage in research?
Professor Julia Buckingham: Very importantly, we need more cross-fertilisation between industry or the private sector and academia. There are examples where things have improved in recent years, but having that interface is critical. Anyone who is an academic, or has been one for a very long time as I have, will know we do not speak the same language as people in business and vice versa. That is a barrier to working together. It will be very important to get more cross-fertilisation, so it becomes the norm that people perhaps spend some time in the private sector and vice versa.
There are a number of issues related to equality, diversity and inclusion, which I touched on before. The issues are probably different in different disciplines. There has been a huge amount of work done in the sector through Athena SWAN over the past 20 years or so. It has certainly had some impact, although not the impact I would like it to have had. In certain disciplines, particularly in medicine and the life sciences, we are still losing an extraordinary number of women between the ages of 30 and 35, because they frankly find it too much to try to juggle a very competitive research career and everything else with the responsibilities of bringing up a young family.
While organisations such as the Wellcome have done tremendous things, and institutions are doing a lot to try to support them, the pressure at that stage is very difficult. We have a long way to go in the sector to find ways of getting people back into the research mode again, recognising that it is okay to take time out, that it should be okay to take time out and that it is very important.
We also have an ethnicity gap. That begins at PhD level. We do not see as many people from ethnic minorities, particularly from black backgrounds, coming into research in comparison with the numbers who are in universities at the moment. Universities have made tremendous strides in the last few years to increase diversity among the undergraduate population. It is another challenge to bring it to the postgraduate level and upwards, but it is something that we are working on.
We have in the past seen examples of the research councils putting in specific funding to attract specific groups of students. My previous institution was a beneficiary of that. It was extremely good until someone decided that it was anti-equality and then we had big challenges. One has to be cautious about the way in which one goes about these things, but there was a lot of good stuff in that. It involved partnerships with industry, and I thought it was very successful. I would like to see more schemes opening the door to more diverse populations of students to encourage them to come into research. Socioeconomic background is probably one of the biggest problems. We see that from looking at our undergraduate populations coming in now. While we are doing very well on ethnicity, we are doing much less well on socioeconomic background. Of course, the white working-class male is now the minority group least likely to enter higher education.
We have to think really hard about that pipeline. It is very easy to make a comparison at the top and say, “It is dreadful. We only have X% of Y instead of Z%”, but, if you do not have the pipeline right in the first place, the top is never going to be right. We have a massive amount of work to do on getting that pipeline right.
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: I do not have much to add to Professor Buckingham’s answer. She covered a lot of the things I would have covered, but I would like to highlight the issue of socioeconomic background. This came across very strongly in the OECD work. This is linked to precarity because there is this idea that only those from high socioeconomic backgrounds can afford a long period of precarity without knowing whether they will have a job afterwards. The issue of social class is important.
We have discovered that, for the professoriate and the career proper, there are very strict procedures for open and transparent recruitment and progression, but not for those on fixed-term contracts. Often, this is very discretionary on the part of PIs, which opens the door to EDI issues. If you do not widely advertise or if you recruit directly from your team and from your students, you will probably reinforce issues of discrimination and there will be fewer opportunities for disadvantaged groups. When appropriate and when possible, it is important to have anonymised evaluation against clearly defined selection criteria for both recruitment and the possibility of progression to the academic career proper. I would emphasise these two issues.
Q44 Lord Winston: Julia, happy birthday to you. My first question is one that we discussed before when you were at Imperial College. Are STEM graduates sufficiently well prepared for highly skilled careers outside academia?
Professor Julia Buckingham: My short answer to that would be no. We are still not doing enough to give people the skills and understanding of what is involved in a career outside academia and what the opportunities are. If you look at careers departments across universities, they are very focused on undergraduates and have a relatively small investment in postgraduates. That is a mistake.
It is moving; things in the sector are changing. There are some very good examples of good practice. In particular, I would pull out Liverpool as a university that is doing some extraordinarily good work in supporting its PhD students and early career researchers to understand the opportunities there are outside the sector and to support them in developing the range of skills they need.
There is a long way we could go, if we had the flexibility to do it, to encourage people to do internships so they can really go and experience what it is like somewhere else. Sometimes that can be a really good thing, and sometimes it can put you off. I can remember I did one internship, and it put me off something for life. That was actually very helpful; it was a very positive thing to happen. Even a negative experience you can turn into a good experience, if you actually learn something from it. There is just a huge amount more that we need to do.
It will be very interesting. With the researcher concordat, we are developing a reporting mechanism whereby institutions that are signatories to the concordat will have to report annually on their action plans. From that, my ambition is that we will get a good picture across the sector of what is going on to enable individuals to find out about those other careers and develop the skills that they need to develop.
Lord Winston: Cláudia, I am going to miss the question about employment because we have covered that quite well. I have a third question, which is about interdisciplinary careers, where students are not doing just one part of a science—not the things that digitate with academia, industry, government and so on. Could you tell us what the situation is in Europe, in particular? Do you have any views on initiatives in this area?
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: Many countries are doing interesting things, such as industrial PhDs, where people get a contract to do a PhD in collaboration with industry. That happens in France and Norway. There is a similar thing for the public sector, which is mentioned less often. That also happens in France, Norway and other countries.
Professor Buckingham was talking about internships. Canada promotes work-based learning for PhDs and early-career researchers. These internships are not just in industry but in the public sector, for instance for policy officials. In the Netherlands many doctorate holders work in private not-for-profits in the social sector—so think tanks, study centres, associations and so on.
The key again is to provide a diverse experience during doctoral and postdoctoral training, so that people experience different possibilities and gain skills that allow them to make the transition, so that the transition is not traumatic. Often the transition is quite traumatic.
Q45 Baroness Walmsley: Is there anything that the current Government, or any future Government, can learn either from international competitors or from successful policies pursued by previous Governments to improve conditions for postgraduate and early career researchers?
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: As I said before, it is very important to offer good working conditions, even if they are on fixed terms, as well as transparency and predictability about what is going to happen so people know what their career prospects are. During their doctoral and postdoctoral training, they also need to receive support in terms of professional development and opportunities for career guidance and work-based learning in other contexts, apart from academia, to prepare them for the transition.
We have to normalise the idea that people will have different trajectories, so that it is not seen as a failure not to stay in academia. In a way, they will give their contribution to science and to academic research while they are there, but at the same time they are being prepared to go to other sectors and eventually to return. In fact, there is evidence that it is easier to return. Sectoral mobility is easier from outside academia into academia, once people gain other skills, than the other way around. The first transition is more difficult. It is very important to prepare people for that type of mobility. As I said before, it is also important to include them in the university and to give them a voice, so they are part of the university and have a say in their experience there. They are a big share of the workforce already.
Baroness Walmsley: Is that movement in and out of academia more normal in any other country that we can learn from?
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: The Germanic countries have had a long tradition of people moving to industry. Although they have very high levels of precarity—higher than in the UK—that is not perceived as a big issue because people know they can move to industry. That predictability, transparency and normalcy help. Switzerland, Austria and Germany have been doing that more and for longer.
Baroness Walmsley: Is there anywhere where people can more easily come back to academia from industry?
Professor Cláudia Sarrico: This is what I was saying: it is easier to come back to academia in many countries than it is to first move from academia to other sectors. That is because people can get double affiliations. Of course, this is very dependent on your field of study. This is more in fields of study that are market facing, such as business, economics and engineering, because the skills people have acquired outside are valued in academia, for not just research but teaching.
Many countries now have the possibility of double affiliations. Having those double affiliations—people with two hats across industry, the public sector or academia—makes it easier to provide doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers with those opportunities.
Baroness Walmsley: Professor Buckingham, what is your view about this? Is there anything that the current Government or future Governments can learn from international competitors? Is this something that has been done well before over here?
Professor Julia Buckingham: There is always an enormous amount we can learn from international competitors, and it is very important to keep an open mind and have a good look at what is going on in other countries. One of the great things we get through our international partnerships and collaborations is a better understanding of what is happening elsewhere in the world, along with the many other advantages.
Just returning to the good things that have happened in the UK, we have seen the development of doctoral training centres, which are very focused on working with specific sets of industries. Those PhD training schemes offer a fantastic breadth of opportunity to students in thinking about how their careers might develop in either academia or industry.
We have seen examples of postgraduate centres being set up in workplaces. For example, at my former institution, Brunel, we led a consortium of universities partnering with the Welding Institute, which is focused on structural integrity, which is extremely important in many aspects of our lives. That is now a thriving work-based centre for master’s and PhD training. Those graduates very definitely go into industry, often so quickly that they do not want to write up their PhDs. That is another issue, but at least that is a positive move in terms of feeding industry with talent. There is a lot to learn from that, but the flip-side is that the students who are not part of these groups feel left out from the party. There is a lot of pressure on universities to do something to support that. Innovate UK, which is a partnership between universities and industry, does a lot to help people understand what the opportunities are in industry.
Many institutions have tried to make it easier for individuals to come back into academia after a career in another sector by not being quite so rigorous about what a CV should look like. An academic CV is very specific, with lots of grants and lots of publications in good journals et cetera. If you have been in industry, you are not getting grants and very often you do not publish your work either, so your CV can look “a bit thin”, as I have heard it called, even if you have done some remarkable work. Many universities are now looking much more holistically at the contributions of individuals and are creating pathways directly to professor for people who have had very strong backgrounds in industry. They are a fantastic addition to universities. Not only do they help to change the research culture and make us more focused on innovation and what is going on in business; they are also wonderful teachers and often very keen to engage with the younger generation and contribute to teaching. I am very positive about that.
Baroness Walmsley: Do the employers that engage in these PhD centres that you refer to use them as an opportunity to cherry-pick some of the potentially good employees for the future?
Professor Julia Buckingham: I would be very surprised if they did not.
Q46 Viscount Hanworth: In British universities, postgraduate research students are increasingly being used in support of teaching, for which they are paid very poorly, but of course they need the money. Professor Buckingham, do you believe this is subverting the research they might otherwise be doing?
Professor Julia Buckingham: No, in a short word, I do not, but it depends on how much you are asking them to do. Many universities have quite clear restrictions on the amount of teaching a PhD student is allowed to do. It is a tremendous learning opportunity for students. It develops their communication skills, and there is nothing like having to teach something to find out what you do not know about the subject. It is a tremendous opportunity for them. It helps them to feel part of the department and part of the ethos that is going on, and it does not detract from the research at all, because PhD students are a pretty dedicated bunch. They have learned to multitask and get on with it.
Viscount Hanworth: You do not detect a degree of exploitation.
Professor Julia Buckingham: They could be paid better. That is absolutely important. It needs to be clear what the contracts are and what you are asking them to do. In my experience, they are limited to supporting teaching. I would be very worried if they were running courses or doing something like that, because it would not be fair to them or to the students. It is about making sure that what they are being asked to do is appropriate. If it is demonstrating in practical classes or supporting team-based learning, that is a great experience for them, so long as it is not too much.
The Chair: That brings us to the close of this session. I would like to thank both our witnesses for their very helpful evidence to us and the detailed responses you have given to our questions.
If there are any points that we have not asked about or that you wanted to expand on, please do not hesitate to write in. We can still use that as additional evidence in concluding our inquiry. As I said at the beginning, you will be sent a transcript of the session, and you will be able to make editorial corrections to that, if you so wish. Meanwhile, thank you once again for joining us. Have a pleasant rest of your day.
