Round table meeting with Lord AdonisOrganised at the Science Council offices, 9th jan 2014

Many professional bodies were invited: Institute of Food Science and Technology, Royal Society of Chemistry, Geological society, Cardiology Science and Technology, Society of Biology, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining,  Inst of physics, Inst of Environmental Sciences, Society for General Microbiology, Royal Astronomical Society, British Psychological Society, inst of Chemical Engineers, Association for Clinical Biochemistry, Chartered inst for IT and Inst of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology.

Preamble to the meeting:  Over the next few months, Lord Adonis will be touring the country to hear the views of local businesses, colleges and universities and professional bodies taking into account the diverse challenges to innovation and growth faced by the different regions. The report will also explore whether the insufficient provision of capital at the local level has constrained the growth of innovation clusters across the country, and whether a more localised approach to financing may be beneficial. He had already had 14 previous meetings around the country.

Lord Adonis asked us to think about the following three items before attending the meeting. He had asked similar things at each of the other meetings.

·       Gearing our education and training systems to make sure they meet the needs of employers and employees and help deliver a revolution to support the jobs of the future.

·       Providing SMEs (small to medium enterprise) with improved access to finance as well as support to grow more quickly and export.

·       Delivering polices in partnership with businesses and representative bodies at an appropriate national, regional or local level to drive this radical agenda for growth forward.

Lord Adonis began the meeting by explaining why he wanted to talk to us and what his thoughts were so far and drew our attention to the Lord Heseltine review – no stone unturned. Then asked us to focus on a couple of ideas one of which was that he would like to look at introducing apprenticeships. This he said was because he kept hearing the same thing that there was a lack of technically trained personnel.

The group highlighted a number of points in answer to this: No money for this type of on the job training · need to introduce incentives (monetary) for apprenticeships · put vocational training · and BTEC diplomas in the school league tables · the consequences of not doing this is that we have a small and overqualified scientific work force and need to go overseas to employ technicians · careers advice centres should be given a lot more information about technicians jobs that need only basic A’level or BTEC diplomas · the old chestnut of lack of science teachers.

The second point was could or should universities or professional bodies lead on the regional incentives* with working with small business?

General consensus was that it would be unreasonable to load this responsibility all on the universities, again the matter of incentives was discussed · It was felt that businesses often don’t know how to approach universities, and find the interaction all a bit high level and academic. We need better go betweens, is there a role here for the professional societies? · to aid in the communication between small businesses and universities, there should be a reinstatement of the RDAs.

*I couldn’t help but mention that we had a pretty good regional thing going on with our training scheme until the DoH decided to make it national and gave accreditation to only 3 universities in England.

But we kept coming back to education: Some sound bites were

“how do we make it ok to be a technician without a university degree”. 

“Schools want to send everyone to uni, parents want to send their kids to uni”, “everyone thinks scientists are bods who get phds and do weird science, so that if you enjoy science but don’t want to go to uni there’s no alternative”.
"missing skills are the biggest impediment to growth"
"the massive job of invention not just reinvention because employers don't take o apprenticeships at all"

Please feel free to comment below on any of the points above.