Scottish Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Scotland’s space sector, HC 150
Monday 15 April 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 15 April 2024.
Members present: Pete Wishart (Chair); Alan Brown; Wendy Chamberlain; Sally-Ann Hart; Christine Jardine; Douglas Ross; Michael Shanks.
Questions 363 - 397
Witnesses
I: Joseph Dudley, Director, Space Skills Alliance; Gordon McGuinness, Director of Industry and Enterprise Networks, Skills Development Scotland; Jenni Doonan, Head of Projects, Fife College; Stuart McDowall, Head of Innovation and STEM, City of Glasgow College; and Stephen Breslin, Chief Executive, Glasgow Science Centre.
Witnesses: Joseph Dudley, Gordon McGuinness, Jenni Doonan, Stuart McDowall and Stephen Breslin.
Q363 Chair: Welcome to the Scottish Affairs Committee. Today we are looking at education and skills in the Scottish space sector and we have a stellar panel, who will now introduce themselves.
Joseph Dudley: My name is Joseph Dudley. I am a director and co-founder of Space Skills Alliance. We are a think-tank, consultancy and backbone organisation addressing the UK’s space skills shortage. We set up in 2019 and we focus on doing research about the space workforce and skills gaps. We have conducted surveys such as the space census in 2020 and again this year, and the space sector skills survey on behalf of the UK Space Agency and DSIT. We also conduct analysis of job adverts, and we are working on an EU Horizon project looking at skills across Europe, pay, diversity, all different aspects of the workforce. We also provide advice to employers, training providers, central Government, regional space clusters and so on, and provide a number of tools.
Chair: What we are looking for is just who you and the organisation you represent and then we will get into some of the details.
Gordon McGuinness: Gordon McGuinness. I am a director with Skills Development Scotland.
Stuart McDowall: Good afternoon. Stuart McDowall, Head of Innovation and STEM at City of Glasgow College.
Jenni Doonan: Hello. Jenni Doonan, Head of Projects at Fife College.
Stephen Breslin: I am Stephen Breslin, Chief Executive of Glasgow Science Centre.
Chair: Excellent. Thank you. Sorry to have rushed you, but it is to get to some of the Members of Parliament who have to leave soon. We will start with Sally-Ann Hart.
Q364 Sally-Ann Hart: I don’t represent a constituency in Scotland; my constituency is Hastings and Rye, where we have some fantastic vacuum engineering and precision engineering businesses that are supply chain for our space sector. One of the issues they raise with me down there—so this is let alone what you are trying to do up in Scotland—is the lack of skills and the lack of young people going into that sort of business. It is about the Scottish and UK Governments as well as businesses. What can the Scottish Government and the UK Government do to improve the visibility of the space sector and encourage young people to go into it? Secondly, what should businesses be doing to encourage young people to go into the space sector. Who shall I start with? Who wants to take it first?
Jenni Doonan: We were touching on this a little bit outside. The first thing is space is cool, but a lot of that is associated with astronauts and human space flight, which with the best will in the world does not necessarily feel attainable to your average person. Yet our lives are touched by space all the time, and for me, one of the key things is to communicate more clearly how space affects everyone’s life, how to highlight to people, young and old, what happens in their community or their region that is linked to space, so that it is a little bit more attainable—so that it feels like something that is aspirational but not so far away that they can’t access it.
As a sector, there is a perception that you need a PhD. You don’t. There are lots of diverse entry routes; it doesn’t have to be engineering. There are opportunities if you want to work in marketing or HR. [Interruption.] Yes, there are fantastic projects at Edinburgh University that use space data in a creative way to create art. Literally anything can be linked to the space sector, and I think it is about showing people that it impacts their daily life and that they could be part of that.
Stephen Breslin: I can speak on behalf of the Glasgow Science Centre. As the briefest of introductions, the Science Centre is a bit like the Science Museum but different in scale. Our role is to inspire young people to develop an interest in science and technology across a wide number of themes. There is a joke about science centres and science museums—if you want to bring in the crowds, do dinosaurs and space. Both of them work but, as Jenni said, the space engagement has been to bring in an astronaut, a space suit, or a bit of meteorite. People get very excited about it and young people get very excited about it, but they can’t see anything beyond that. They can’t relate it to careers that they could do.
We have done a lot of engagement with young people over the past few years specifically on space. One of the strongest things that comes through in evaluation is surprise among young people that there are career opportunities available to them locally; they don’t have to go to Houston to get a career in space. That goes right throughout our young persons support system. There is no awareness among parents and teachers, and even senior leaders in local authority education departments are unaware of what is going on. The approach that we take is very much centred on the young person and it is sustained engagement. We will bring in the astronauts and do the big exciting day, but beyond that we deliver programmes in schools across Scotland over a sustained period—we are talking four to 10 weeks—and as well as focusing on the young person, we are upskilling the teachers and creating material that the kids can take home for family learning and for their parents. We are also doing public events. It is critically important that the positive messages that we give to those young people are reinforced by teachers and parents and in the community.
Chair: I am just going to cut you off there, Sally, because I am conscious of other colleagues wanting to come in and we are going for 3.30, if that is all right.
Q365 Sally-Ann Hart: Very quickly, Chair, are businesses involved in this?
Stephen Breslin: Absolutely. We have to bring in the real world context and that requires industry involvement.
Q366 Alan Brown: This question is aimed at Gordon McGuinness and Joseph Dudley. As part of this inquiry, we have heard evidence from some companies that believe that where foreign direct investment is being made, it creates not necessarily new jobs but internal displacement, and we are still left with a skills shortage. What is your view on that and how does Skills Development Scotland link all that together?
Gordon McGuinness: It is a good question and today we have heard the bad news about the Mangata development at Prestwick, which was probably exceptional because of the scale of it. The majority of inward investing companies tend to be smaller. In the short term, there can be displacement before the market stabilises again and new talent comes in. We work with Scottish Development International as part of Team Scotland. We are the key lead for the contacts, so we always encourage companies to look long term in their planning. We strike partnership working arrangements with the local colleges—we have been doing an awful lot of work with the Ayrshire College for Mangata. So we are conscious of that.
From speaking with Hina at Space Scotland, we know that there needs to be more collaboration at sector level to try to minimise the level of what has been seen as poaching in the past. We have seen incidents where wages have been offered and attracted people from other companies that are too high and unsustainable. We are always there to provide an advisory role in that type of situation.
The other key thing for us is to make as much connection as we can to partnership working with universities and colleges. We were having a discussion earlier, and I think that the colleges are often bypassed by some of these companies because the default is always to look at graduates; that need not be the case. They need to be a bit more imaginative in their workforce planning.
Q367 Alan Brown: I know it is very difficult to comment on Mangata, given today’s announcement, but do you think that they overpromised on what they could deliver?
Gordon McGuinness: I got the news at about 2 pm today so I don’t have any of the background. One of my team has been acting as part of the Team Scotland approach. I would not like to comment at this stage.
Q368 Alan Brown: Okay, thank you. I will ask Joseph Dudley my next question, which is also on foreign direct investment. Space Scotland suggested that any support given should be linked to actual confirmation of new jobs being created. Is that a realistic prospect to manage?
Joseph Dudley: It is often difficult for companies to know exactly what their skills needs will be and how many jobs they will be able to create. It depends on the details, and as we have seen today, a lot of those details do not get finalised until the last minute. At the time that companies are choosing to invest, they have a rough idea of what they might need, and that may change further down the line. We can produce some rough estimates and scenarios but we are never 100% sure. When we start attaching conditions to the investment, it can often scare companies away because they say, “We are not certain that we can do this and, therefore, we don’t want to fully commit.”
Q369 Christine Jardine: This question follows on from that. One of the things that we came across during our recent trip to California is the kind of ecosystem environment, where people understand the jobs that are available and there is a critical mass, which we need to reach. To what extent do you think the space industry is still competing with others and that we have not done enough? What can we do to create the sort of environment that persuades young people going to college or university that the environment is right there and that they don’t go off and do something else?
Stuart McDowall: Part of the challenge for Glasgow city region may be the way that the space sector is competing with other sectors, and rather large sectors for the city region. There are around 50,000 businesses, 800,000-odd roles, things like advanced manufacturing and life sciences, which are key sectors for Scotland as well. Space is not the only sector that is crying out for new talent and nor is it the only sector that is trying to promote itself. Based on both questions around youth is the current workforce and whether there are opportunities to look at transitions from existing sectors into the space sector, perhaps in the shorter term. Even as young people start to move through the education system, it will still be a number of years before they are industry ready. We have a very talented workforce across Scotland and some who have been displaced from other sectors. As much as I acknowledge the importance of youth and new talent, perhaps the existing workforce could be part of the solution to try to stimulate the workforce in the space sector.
Q370 Christine Jardine: And the awareness, mentioned already, of the fact that that you are not just looking for people with degrees in aeronautical science. It is people who can be HR specialists, who can read the data and all of that. How do we go about persuading people to move from other industries though? Is that just all about awareness?
Stuart McDowall: There are two aspects to that. First, there is the partnership action for continuing employment—PACE. For any member of the workforce who might be at risk of displacement, there are mechanisms in place to promote other routes of employment. That is a formal route, but another really strong initiative in Scotland is the STEM ambassadors programme where we have fantastic role models right across the spectrum of STEM areas. I don’t know how many of those ambassadors represent the space sector, but there are mechanisms in place, to pick up on Gordon’s point about the collaborative approach. There are levers at play through recognised programmes that perhaps the space sector could jump on the back of.
Q371 Michael Shanks: This is following on from a number of the questions about young people, but I will come back to Stuart’s point about retraining because I think that is really important. I was a teacher before I was elected and I think that careers advice in schools could definitely be improved—that is probably the understatement of the century—particularly in how we encourage young people to think of careers that don’t necessarily involve going to university as the only outcome from school. It feels a bit like that is the only output we are looking for from schools. From your point of view, Stuart and Jenni in the college sector, what more can Government do to support the college sector to be a viable alternative rather than just a bit of a backstop, which it is sometimes seen as? I know that that is not true but I think that is sometimes how it is portrayed.
Jenni Doonan: One of the big gaps now is we have great STEM outreach but for the young person who is engaged by the space sector, irrespective of whether that’s engineering or not, unless they want to go to university there is nowhere for them to go because there is no progression pathway. One of the key things is to work with colleges and say what would be the step for that young person to come into college—foundation apprenticeships, for example, where a young person attends college while they are still in school and they build a foundational understanding of a job role in a sector. It helps to get them inspired while they are still quite young in a protective school bubble, and then they can make choices to come on into college engineering courses, data science courses and so on.
The importance of a credible job opportunity at the other end must not be underestimated. We have had experiences where we have put forward what we think are great courses in really interesting things and we don’t necessarily get the uptake, but the minute we say there is an employer involved, we get the recruitment. To the earlier point about the involvement of business, I think key with the colleges is building that ecosystem. It has grown up around the universities and is obviously heavily linked to research and technology development; we need to get it to come towards the colleges to say, “We have value add here in free training and apprenticeships,” bringing a diversity of people into the sector.
There is gender diversity but also about 20% of our students cite a disability, for example, and about 40% of students have caring responsibilities. They are diverse, with different needs and a different kind of profile. Put bluntly, four years in university is not really an option for them, but they are able to access a career in the space sector. Being able to show a progression pathway, a diversity of access to education, night classes, part-time, would be a huge support to the sector and to colleges.
Joseph Dudley: If I might come in on that, one of the particular issues in the space sector is it has a very large number of people with degrees—about 85%. The number of people with vocational qualifications is much smaller, and a lot of those do a vocational qualification and then go on to do a degree. Only about a third of companies in the space sector across the UK engage with or have apprentices on board at the moment and that is particularly the larger companies. There is clearly still a lot of room to bring in more apprentices. We were talking earlier about the relative esteem of the two pathways, that apprenticeships are unfairly, I think, looked on as not as good as degrees when actually they add value and get people into the workforce earlier, which means they get those skills earlier and build up their experience.
Q372 Michael Shanks: Stuart, I know you want to come in as well. Colleges have disproportionately felt the brunt of cuts from Government for quite a long time, and universities have benefited in some ways from the Scottish Funding Council model. What more can Government do to be part of the solution in the college sector to drive this forward?
Stuart McDowall: I think probably the key word is flexibility. City of Glasgow College has diversified its revenue for a number of years to be less reliant on government funding, with our large portfolio of commercial work and international work, but even some recent projects can make sure that colleges are playing their role in supporting industry while also offering opportunities. Jenni and I are working on a UK Space Agency project creating micro-credentials for the space sector, predominantly for people who are perhaps looking to transition from one sector to another. The six regional colleges in Glasgow have recently secured £1.2 million from Innovate UK to support business innovation across key sectors. The sector relevant to space is advanced manufacturing, digital enablement.
I think it is about encouraging entrepreneurship. We talk about creating an entrepreneurial mindset in our students but endorsing entrepreneurship within the college sector to do things slightly differently, not be afraid to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Certainly for us an institution, you can’t ignore the current situation but you can show that you are resilient, adaptable and look elsewhere, whether that is at a Scottish level or UK level.
The final point I will make on that is that a lot of these funds are driven by business need, which is exactly where the colleges want to be playing. It is not delivering education for education’s sake; it is delivering an economic and social value for the key industries.
Jenni Doonan: There is quite a lot of technology funding—Innovate UK for example. Dedicated skills funding outwith core models is less available. Something to consider is that there are other models of putting out technology funding, where you say 5% or 10% of a project budget will be working with regional partners wherever the project is to develop the training needs, whether it be an online course or face-to-face course and so on.
There have been some good opportunities from the UK Space Agency recently with skills funding, but in the most recent one there were 100 companies on the webinar that announced where there was going to be six projects selected. It shows the level of competitiveness, and to be candid, if the companies in there are the University of Edinburgh or Glasgow or Cambridge or Oxford, with the best will in the world colleges might not necessarily get that allocation. There is a diverse eligibility there but I think support for colleges, that parity of esteem and that we can offer something in this space, would certainly be welcomed.
Gordon McGuinness: I worked with the National Shipbuilding Office when we were doing the UK shipbuilding skills strategy. If you look at companies north and south of the border, how the apprenticeship levy is implemented is much more generous south of the border. There is an issue there. I think it would bring more resource to colleges and to training providers if that was more equitable and sustained at a UK level. The other thing I will point to is there is some funding at a UK level of England for boot camps that enables cross-training and upskilling for people who are unemployed or are looking to career change, and employers can tap into that and train some of their own staff at a discounted rate. They are probably two funding streams that would put Scotland on a better playing field.
Q373 Sally-Ann Hart: It is good to hear there is some employability-led education to get your education pathways leading to your employment pathways, but after the Cornish launch of the rocket—well, it didn’t launch—the UK Space Agency did a Space for Everyone tour. It stopped at Hastings but also stopped in Aberdeen. Scotland is soon to achieve its end-to-end capability with the first UK orbital launch. Is there something that the UK Space Agency can do that is similar to the Space for Everyone tour to tweak people’s imagination?
Stephen Breslin: There are hundreds of initiatives like the space on tour for every sector. I feel that we have to go further than these single interventions. If we really want to see the transformation in our young people’s focus and interests that all of these sectors require, we have to engage them over a period in a sustained manner, rather than just in one-off events that happen all over the country. We have been awarded a significant amount of money—£95,000 from the UK Space Agency—to be spent over one year to create engagement programmes for Scotland. We will build a STEM learning pathway, which is a four to 10-week module that schools and classes will sign up for. It is fully curriculum-linked and it will involve industry and academic experts to bring real world context to it. It is sustained and progressive and we are rolling it out across all of Scotland. Then an event like SaxaVord’s launch will become a highlight of that programme but there will be preparation in advance, during and after.
I really believe that if we want to get that transformation we have to engage with young people on a sustained basis over a number of weeks, over a number of years, to increase the pool of talent that is going to go into an apprenticeship, a college or a university pathway.
Joseph Dudley: You mentioned that tour in particular. I think it is an example of how in some ways not to do this kind of outreach. The reason I say that is it was taking a model of a rocket around the country, along with a number of outreach volunteers dressed as astronauts, emphasising the two parts of the space sector that everybody already knows about. While they are the most engaging for the public, what they miss is the whole rest of the sector where the skills gaps are. There is no shortage of applicants to become an astronaut; there are huge shortages of applicants for pretty much every other role in the sector. When we are doing these sorts of outreach activities, I completely agree with Stephen it needs to be sustained and also needs to be focusing on the careers where there are gaps.
Chair: One of the things that we have heard quite profoundly in our written evidence and those who have come to the Committee is the promotional skills, HR. Is that a real issue for you guys? Is that what you are finding in your own experience? Before you answer, I have to say that we are now moving into an informal session. There will no longer be any broadcast but we are still committed to listening to you guys, hearing your evidence, and it will be included in our formal report as an informal discussion.
Sitting suspended.
On resuming—
Chair: Welcome back to the Scottish Affairs Committee public session, where we are looking at education and skills in the Scottish space sector.
Q374 Douglas Ross: Mr Breslin, we have heard that there are one-off events to attract younger people into science, technology and the space sector and there is investment into longer-term programmes. Is there a role for both or should we be prioritising one over the other now?
Stephen Breslin: I think we need to move to the longer-term programmes but the one-off events can fit within the longer-term programmes which add context to those events, so you get much more impact from the single event. The point I want to make is that we have to sustain this. It takes a lot of effort to get these programmes up and running. We are now in our third year working with the energy industry to go on our programme of net zero. Through that programme we have engaged with 74,000 young people across 30 of the 32 local authority areas of Scotland. For each of those young people, there is about 16 hours of engagement time, so that is a lot of engagement, but it took us a long time to get there. We are about to do something similar with the Space Agency funding. Most of the initial effort will be getting sign-up from schools and teachers and getting them to commit to the programme. Right now we have a hard stop date of March of next year for that programme, so we don’t want to fall off a cliff.
If you want to see the kind of impact at scale that we have delivered for the energy industry, we have to have long-term thinking about what big projects we will fund and over what period, so if we are building an expectation we can deliver year on year for the young people in schools.
Q375 Douglas Ross: The other thing I wanted to follow up—I think it was when we were last in the public session but apologies if not—Mr McGuinness, you seemed to get approval from your fellow panellists when you were speaking about the apprenticeship levy perhaps not working as well as it could in Scotland and how it has been more successful south of the border.
Gordon McGuinness: There are differences. Scotland has maintained the programme of funding through apprenticeships and colleges. England created a model of the apprenticeship levy so employers of a specific size can draw down levy funding. What is awarded in England in financial value is at a higher level than it is in Scotland but apprenticeship numbers have fallen in England. There is a variety of reasons for that, not just funding. There was the pandemic and everything else. We have worked very hard, particularly in the higher-value manufacturing, to maintain investment in recruitment levels. There were about 1,600 to 1,800 new starts last year in engineering-related skills.
Q376 Douglas Ross: Are you happy with the apprenticeship levy in Scotland in its current form or do you think there could be improvements learning from elsewhere, not just taking the English model but looking at where some elements have been successful and have some change in Scotland? Or are you comfortable that it provides for what businesses need and what the apprentices need?
Gordon McGuinness: The feedback from employers who are working across the border is that the financial disparity definitely makes a difference. We have had some examples of companies taking their training south because it is more lucrative if they are delivering that in-house. Apprenticeship funding in Scotland when you take out inflation has not increased in levels for more than about 10 years. That is now just for people like colleges, private providers and charities as well. I think we could probably have a review of funding levels and need some additional increase in overall funding into the apprenticeship system.
Q377 Douglas Ross: Does that meet with the approval of others? The reason I ask is because this is something I read quite a lot and every organisation or group of the various different sectors I speak to wants to see some change but there seems to be a reluctance. A lot of people are speaking about improvements, some of them quite minor, that could be made to the apprenticeship levy in Scotland, but for whatever reason there does not seem to be a political will to do that, and I wonder why. Are we coming up against resistance where there should be none? Everyone wants it to be successful and if there are reasons why it is not being successful—that example, Mr McGuinness, of businesses taking their training down south is quite concerning—I wonder why we are not addressing these issues.
Gordon McGuinness: When the levy was introduced at first by the UK Government, there was no consultation with the devolved nations. When the actual allocations were made through Barnett and the levy that supplies the public sector, the Scottish Government took the view that there was a negative effect on the overall Scottish budget. For people like the Glasgow Health Board, for example, with a high number of staff, the apprenticeship levy was in the region of £6 million, so there was no way that they could directly recover it. That was one point.
The next point is that we are in the middle of a review of the skills system now. The Minister has indicated a desire to move to a single funding agency from the Scottish Funding Council and the parts from SDS. There has been a lot of statements around parity of esteem that within that new structure and new funding agency there will be a fairer distribution of the finance for work-based qualifications.
Q378 Douglas Ross: Mr Dudley, can I come to you? You said that you were set up in 2019. What was the impetus to set up then with this type of think-tank approach? Did you see a gap that had to be filled? Had it existed for a while? I noticed about 18 months ago you had your five solutions to the space skills gap. Can you tell us how much progress or otherwise has been made against the five key areas that you thought could improve the skills pipeline for the space sector?
Joseph Dudley: We set up in 2019 to address the gaps that we could see particularly around data. Prior to that I set up a website called SpaceCareers.uk, which is exactly what you think it is. That has a jobs board and it has profiles of people in the space sector and so on. One of the issues that we were running into was that we don’t know how many people are needed in any of these particular areas. There was a lot of talk of there being skills gaps, but no specifics of skills gaps in what areas at what seniority levels in which parts of the UK and, crucially, how are we going to do something about it. We set up, first off, to improve that understanding, the level of data, and I think we have made some significant inroads there.
It was also to start thinking about what the solutions might be and how we can help support them. We are a very small organisation. We don’t have the capacity to enact very large scale changes or to run training ourselves, but we hope that by providing data and resources, organisations like those represented here today can say, “We know how many satellite engineers we need, we know how many people with commercial skills are needed and now we can go and train those up.” We are trying to address that gap.
To the second part of your question about our five solutions, they are not intended to solve all of the problems or address everything, but we thought, “What are five things, really concrete actions?” Some of the strategy documents that have come out from the UK and Scottish Governments were mentioned earlier. We found that those were very thin on concrete actions: what can I as a company do; what can I as a training provider do? We wanted to be able to say, “Here are some very specific things you can do.” Included in that are things like creating a common language to be able to talk about these skills. We have created SpaceCRAFT, which is the space competencies framework, and that is based on looking at lots of jobs within the space sector and trying to understand the skills that are needed. We know that that is being used now in industry and by some of the universities to build courses around and to think about skills orbiting and so on. It allows a little bit more of join-up.
We have been pushed within those five solutions for more accessible training that is also more flexible. There was some conversation earlier on this panel about opportunities for continuing professional development throughout your career. There has been a big focus within the space sector on very traditional paths. The most common path into the sector is to do a degree in physics or engineering, particularly aerospace engineering, and the number of people who come in from other sectors or come from non-traditional routes is relatively low. I think there is a lot of opportunities there to bring people in but we also need training that is flexible and allows them to do that when they are not in a position that young people are in of only focusing on their training. By this point they might have a job, a family and they have to find a way to do all of that.
Q379 Wendy Chamberlain: On that point, is part of that challenge that individuals who might be interested in transferring skills from another industry into space are not aware of the skillsets available? When we were in Shetland, one of the members of staff we spoke to up there had been a refrigeration engineer originally before he went to NASA. Are we struggling with transferring skills as well?
Joseph Dudley: Definitely. If you want to become a lawyer, you Google law conversion courses and you get hundreds of results; there are many established courses. If you want to become a satellite engineer, there are no courses for that transferability. There are some currently in development. We did a piece of work for the UK Space Agency last year trying to look at skills gaps in the sector. Off the back of that it has put out a call for bids that it is funding to do with training, and it is looking within that at career changes and how to make it possible for people to come across from other industries. Some large companies that work across industries are particularly interested in that.
Q380 Wendy Chamberlain: Is that part of the challenge with companies as well in that they are not necessarily thinking about taking people without being able to tick all the boxes but realising that they can teach them in the job, where they can learn in the job? That might be the challenge with that need to have a degree at the very first instance. We have representatives here from further education and there have to be different pathways that we should be encouraging as well.
Joseph Dudley: Absolutely, and it is something we are trying to encourage employers to be open to, that there are these non-traditional pathways and by saying, “We will only accept people who have come through a physics degree,” you are really limiting your options. There needs to be that openness by employers to say, “We will look at your skills rather than your qualifications and we will be willing to train you up”. I think the hesitation there is particularly because a lot of these companies want to have somebody who can come in and immediately hit the ground running. They don’t always have the luxury of being able to spend some time training somebody up.
Q381 Wendy Chamberlain: Is that where inward investment can play a part as well, as they don’t need to because they know that they can potentially pay higher salaries that will get the person with the full skillset without having to go through the—
Joseph Dudley: Salaries are definitely a big issue. We did a study of salaries in the sector and found that when you compare to similar jobs within the tech sector where there is high demand for the same skills, the space sector is paying less and that is particularly true in Scotland.
Q382 Douglas Ross: I think you said in your introductory remarks that you are also looking at skills across Europe at the moment. How does Scotland compare with other parts of Europe?
Joseph Dudley: It is quite early days on that European project so I don’t have a lot of detail there, but we are seeing quite similar issues across the European space sector. We are trying to apply the same kind of approaches. I mentioned about the competencies framework and so on. We are looking at how does that work on an EU level, but the UK space sector is very closely integrated with the European space sector. There is a lot of crossover of people’s career paths where they will spend some time in Europe. I think Jenni mentioned earlier that she did some of her career in Darmstadt. We are very closely integrated with the European Space Agency and so on. There are very similar problems and opportunities for join-up there.
Q383 Douglas Ross: If I can come to Mr McDowall and Ms Doonan, you had a joint submission in your evidence. At point 7, page 5 I think it was, you said, “The Government needs to invest in skills. The sector simply cannot grow without the development of the talent pipeline that enables it.” What is your message? We will do a report to the UK Government but it also goes to the Scottish Government? What would your ask be to the two Governments to deal with the point you have put in here about the Government investment in skills?
Jenni Doonan: There is a couple of things. The space industrial plan highlights the importance of accessible and visible pathways into the sector. Colleges are uniquely placed to offer that with the diversity model. The second thing is that there is a specific ambition around the increased adoption of UK space services by Government. For me, the Government in their procurement and engagement with the sector should be, as part of that package, requiring the people responding to a procurement notice to work with education partners to ensure that education is bedded in with new technology programmes, new service programmes. That has the added benefit of some of things we have been saying recently about explaining to the public why it is important, showing the diversity of space data applications and so on. To me it is to see it in an integrated way with the broader ambition of the sector to grow and to partner with colleges to do that.
Stuart McDowall: To go back to the point that was made about the recognition of what colleges can deliver, I think colleges have a track record of being able to deliver workforce development at scale in various models, not just to apprenticeship frameworks. The diversity point is really well made. We often talk about how do we make sectors more accessible and inclusive. For us, our SIMD percentage is about 6% higher than the sector average. We have a large proportion of students who are care-experienced and we often need to try to find a way to be the signpost into sectors that are looking for diversity.
Q384 Douglas Ross: On that point before you move on, you are doing a good job of that in attracting candidates and students in. Is the industry equipped to support them when they leave college or are you investing a lot in them and the industry is not ready to pick up that mantle?
Stuart McDowall: I guess that is the responsibility of the colleges. Colleges have a much more supportive environment for students, a lot of personalised support, mental health and wellbeing support. It is a very supportive environment, whereas in university, having been through both, you are very much an independent learner and you drive your own learning. I think the job of the colleges is to make sure that students are ready. At City of Glasgow College we have a new concept around city attributes and that is that every student who leaves the institution will have particular attributes like resilience and adaptability; no matter whether they are going into the maritime sector, construction, creative industries or the space sector, they are ready for work. I think that responsibility sits on the shoulders of colleges.
If you don’t mind, I have just one final point on what is required. It is also a matter of access to infrastructure. We are very fortunate; at our Riverside campus we have some of the best maritime simulators in the UK and an expansive engineering workshop, but Jenni and I have spoken about access to things like clean rooms and other spaces to allow experimentation, as a way to try to combat that failure where you are creating safe spaces to experiment. That is probably not a huge amount. Certainly there are not many facilities around space but we hope to have them one day.
Jenni Doonan: That ties into a couple of things. Part of the work we are doing at the freeport is with Fife Council, Edinburgh University and the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland. Our ambition is to have an innovation centre there to provide shared facilities that could apply to the space sector with maybe additional investment. That then comes back to some of the points about the entrepreneurial mindset, the opportunity to fail. It gives a place for groups of people interested in this sector and the adjacent sectors to come together and share ideas. That is heavily what has driven the Silicon Valley context before. A shared environment in the central belt would be good.
Q385 Douglas Ross: My final question is back to Ms Doonan. You were speaking about the proportion of female students you have. We heard evidence earlier in our inquiry that the attrition rate of female students, even during the courses, is quite high; the drop-off is quite significant and then even further, with female students not taking up careers for a variety of reasons. What more can be done to support more female students coming into the science space sector and getting those qualifications and then keeping them to the end of their training and ultimately into a career in those sectors?
Jenni Doonan: I think there is a couple of things. Evidence says that the biggest driver in STEM generally for women and men is role modelling and we have touched on that—having more women out talking about space and about their careers. I think we do that quite well, but the reality is when there are not so many in the industry, finding them to go out and chat is an issue.
The second thing is about retraining and the opportunity to get back into the sector. Irrespective of your role, whether you are an engineer or in one of the more business support functions, it is a heavily tech-driven sector and you need to maintain your understanding of the sector. If you choose to take a career break for whatever reason, you might find that your knowledge does not keep pace. There is a great organisation in Scotland called Equate that has programmes to help women who are in technology roles to get back into the workplace after they have had a break. That gets them back upskilled in the technology space again. Something like that that helps keep information and knowledge current so they can feel confident back in the workplace would be really helpful.
Chair: That is a perfect spot to bring in Ms Chamberlain who is going to ask some questions about diversity in the workforce space sector.
Wendy Chamberlain: I think I am going to ask something else first though, if that is okay.
Chair: You are? Okay, well, there you go.
Q386 Wendy Chamberlain: Douglas covered it so well. I am very conscious that I probably missed a whole load of things while I was in the Chamber for Home Office questions and then the statement. I apologise for that. I want to ask Mr Breslin about the Science Centre, having visited it with my family, having once upon a time taken part in some science quiz of an evening there. How do we get away from the mindset of “that is not for you”? How do you see your role in the Science Centre as not just about educating children but educating families and other stakeholders as well?
Stephen Breslin: It is critically important and I have seen it with my own eyes with families coming up to the Science Centre. As you will know, you can either turn left into the cinema or turn right into the science mall. To paraphrase a chap with his wife and young daughter, “We are not going into that science stuff because that is not for us.” That is the first time I had ever seen it with my own eyes; for some people it is not for them.
We have worked very hard over the past few years just to get groups and families in who are scared of the Science Centre. Some of it is that the parents are scared that they will feel stupid when they come in or be made to look stupid because they don’t understand it. The first step is getting over that boundary. We do a lot of events that have got nothing to do with science. It is just about getting people into the building and if you can get them over the threshold, you can start to work with them and develop their confidence before anything else to the point where they start asking questions and they start developing a curiosity for themselves and maybe their children.
It is critically important because we are talking to young people, giving positive messages about all of these different opportunities, and if they go home to their family and are told, “Forget that, that is not for people like us,” we are wasting our time. I have said this already in the session but our focus is very much on the young person; we create materials to make sure that the messages that we are giving to the young person are taken home and discussed in a family context. We try to facilitate that. We also work very closely with teachers to raise awareness there, but also critically important is the community, so that the community base has awareness of what is going on. You would not believe how many people are surprised when I say to them—you will know the local area—“There are rockets being built in Cumbernauld.” Not many people know that. You have to make it normal for them and not alien and try to understand why they are scared or feel it is not for them.
Q387 Wendy Chamberlain: Also that space is not just about rockets. I think the data aspect is very little understood and the direct to home, which we are moving away from, when you say to people what space has done up until recent times is direct to home and what that means for you in going home and switching on your television is part of that too. I think you do a great job but I am conscious with all those different factors and influences on young people, we need to challenge them all.
Can I ask about recruiting from overseas? This is probably to Mr Dudley and Mr McGuinness. How international is Scotland’s space workforce and is that changing? I suppose that there are positives and negatives in all of that?
Joseph Dudley: We don’t have a lot of detail on Scotland’s space sector specifically. The best data we have comes from the space census that we ran in 2020 and we are running another one right now, when we will probably be able to get some detailed data. In the 2020 survey for the whole of the UK, we found that about 18% of the space workforce were foreign nationals, and most of those were Europeans. One of the things that has come up in skill surveys and discussions has been the impact of Brexit. As I mentioned earlier, there is quite a lot of integration between the UK and European space sectors and so that has been a difficulty. About a third of companies try to hire from outside of the UK and that is more common for the larger ones, not least because of the hurdles that they need to overcome. We have heard quite different things. Some companies say, “The visa process is extremely complicated, we are struggling with it, we don’t have the time and the expertise to deal with it”. Other companies say it was quite straightforward. I am not quite sure why there is that wide range of experiences but certainly quite a lot of companies are engaging with it because they are finding that there are not enough people locally.
Q388 Wendy Chamberlain: When they come, do they come on a temporary basis or for longer than that to make Scotland their home?
Joseph Dudley: I don’t know. I don’t have the data on that but I know that DSIT is doing some investigation into those kinds of visas at the moment.
Gordon McGuinness: It is something that we are going to do further work on with Space Scotland, with the sector body. The Scottish Government at the end of March started the new Migration Service so they should start to get more data from that service. It is an initial service now but it will expand in August with a service looking to support individuals and then one that is more focused on companies. For smaller companies and with reference to the size of the company base here, being a sponsor for a visa for the first time can be quite daunting, so the new service is designed to be further support.
Q389 Wendy Chamberlain: Is that part of a recognition that you are not just in competition internationally but also with the UK as well?
Gordon McGuinness: It is, I think, companies being encouraged to minimise, or avoid poaching too much within the UK market. It is called a labour market for a reason and people will move if the money is right. That is where you can see increased churn in skillsets around demand.
Q390 Wendy Chamberlain: On money, have any concerns been raised about the varying income tax bands in Scotland?
Gordon McGuinness: It has not featured in the conversations we have had. It is more one to address to the space cluster.
Q391 Wendy Chamberlain: Do you think that there will always be skillsets in which Scottish-based companies will look overseas or do you think there will be an opportunity for those core skills to be developed as the sector develops from an education perspective?
Gordon McGuinness: As part of our work with the Migration Advisory Service where we were given concessions in the past, there was an undertaking always given that if concessions were given for specific skillsets then the home nation had to put a plan in place to start to try to address those so it was not going to be sustained over a longer period.
Q392 Wendy Chamberlain: Is that working?
Gordon McGuinness: Probably not as well as it should do but it changes with the markets as well. Technology goes through cycles, so what would have been skill shortages five years ago in areas like toolmakers and others have become much more redundant because of digital capabilities now.
Q393 Wendy Chamberlain: What I think you are saying is there will always be a need to recruit from overseas but it won’t necessarily be for the same skillsets. There just will always be a need for that.
Gordon McGuinness: Yes.
Joseph Dudley: There are some very specific skills where perhaps the number of experts across Europe is in the tens and so it is not viable to say, “Let’s run a course in Scotland” or even in the whole of the UK because there is just not enough people and it is not commercially viable. In those situations you have some experts who hop around the place wherever they are needed.
Q394 Wendy Chamberlain: Is there anything the colleges want to add on that?
Stuart McDowall: We spoke about diversity. In its own right, you will be attracting talent from overseas to create that diversity in the workforce but equally for our own students to take their ambitions abroad. That movement goes both ways. The most important thing is to make sure that colleges are providing as many opportunities for high-quality jobs as possible. It comes back to a point that Stephen made about grabbing the attention and the excitement of young people but making sure that there is a pathway there.
That pathway may take you to North America or Asia, but when you look at the stats on graduates coming out of Glasgow city region, they are in the tens of thousands. Back to the point Joseph made about quantifying the number of jobs, there needs to be a bit of work done in saying, “Where are the graduates going?” Are we experiencing such a gap that we simply don’t have the human resource to fill the jobs, or is it the graduates that are coming out are not being signposted to where the economy needs them most, so you then revert to perhaps bringing talent from abroad?
Q395 Wendy Chamberlain: From overseas, where maybe you didn’t need to in the first instance, or at least you could provide the grounding locally. You mentioned a bit of support for the smaller companies when they have to recruit from abroad, but is there anything from the Government that the Committee should be signposting that you want to do to better support companies to recruit from abroad where there is a need to do that? It sounds like providing that support to SMEs is there. Is there anything else that you expect we should be doing, Mr Dudley?
Joseph Dudley: Some of the small companies struggle with the paperwork. Recently there have been changes in the income bands related to some of the visas and we think that has an impact on perhaps 5% of the sector, which is not inconsiderable when we consider the skill shortages and so on. One of the most important things is long-term certainty. Bringing someone in on a visa, or indeed hiring at all, is quite a big investment by a company, particularly a small company.
Q396 Wendy Chamberlain: Particularly if they are going to bring a spouse, a family, for example.
Joseph Dudley: Yes. They need to be able to say the job is confirmed for a certain amount of time and that ties into the length of contracts that are given. I know that some companies in the sector have complained a bit about short-term government contracts and everything being on a one-year timescale, which makes it very hard to plan and say, “We are going to need this skill in the long term so let’s invest in training or hiring and so on.”
Q397 Chair: I think this session has worked out quite well and I am very sorry for all the interruptions and thank you for your forbearance. What has not come across in the session is we have a successful space sector and even in the States it is acknowledged that there is something particular going in Scotland that is very positive. I think it is as well to state that and put that out there when we are having this session. Are you hopeful for the sector, given all the difficulties and challenges and all the issues that we have heard in the conversations here today, that we can emerge as one of the key sectors for space within Europe and, not just in Europe, in the world? I want to hear what you think about that as we go forward. Are you hopeful or do you think that it will be beyond our ability and our scale to be up there?
Jenni Doonan: I worked in the space industry for 15 years before I moved into education and to do that I had to leave not just Scotland, but the whole of the UK—as I said, I went to Germany. I came back to the south of England. I was desperate to get back to Scotland and I could not get there because the sector was not there where my career was at the time. Eventually I got back up about eight years ago because it was great to see that Clyde Space, as the first space company at the time, had grown to the place where it was a bigger company and needed people at different levels. I think it is massively inspirational to see what we have achieved in the last eight years in the number of companies, the end-to-end capability, the data and then all the adjacent sectors that are using space data in other areas. To be sitting here particularly for colleges and saying you can come from any background, go to any school and we will make sure there is a pathway for you so you can work in space is fantastic and we will achieve it 100%.
Stuart McDowall: I think the opportunities are really exciting and the sector is at an interesting juncture. Perhaps the question for the inquiry is how does it scale and how does it scale to a level that tries to realise some of these successes and opportunities? The companies that Jenni and I worked with on the UK Space Agency cluster project are full of enthusiasm, very innovative, very forward thinking, ambitious in their own right as well and willing to collaborate. I think they realise that they can’t do everything on their own and to be a sustainable sector it needs all parts of the system to come together, whether that is skills, Governments or the companies themselves. There are exciting times ahead.
Chair: It is always good to end on a positive note on the Scottish Affairs Committee, as you can sense. Thank you all for coming today and helping us with this inquiry and again I am sorry for the inconvenience about the progress of business through the House today. I think it has been a very useful session. There is a couple of things you might get back to us about and if you can do that with the clerks we would be grateful. We are more than happy to accept anything else that you feel that you can usefully contribute to this inquiry, but for this afternoon, thank you for coming along.