Engineering, Engineering, Engineering
11 Jun 2014
Education, Education, Education. Tony Blair’s famous 1997 speech on the importance of education could also be the answer to the question “What is most likely to provide the long term solution to the UK’s engineering skills shortage?”
Professor John Perkins’ review into engineering skills estimates that to avoid a skills shortage, the UK will need over 100,000 new engineers, scientists and technologists every year until 2020.
The response of many engineering institutions to last November’s Perkins Review was that the key to achieving this was by targeting secondary school children, pushing them towards STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects in their GCSE and A-level choices.
The government clearly recognises this and has backed a number of industry campaigns designed at making engineering a more attractive career choice for young people, such as Tomorrow’s Engineers and Your Life.
So why on earth has it decided to scrap engineering GSCEs and A-Levels?
The Government must recognise that the GCSE and A Level in engineering will be at the heart of supporting a pipeline of future engineers
IET head of policy Paul Davies
Exam watchdog Ofqual has proposed scrapping the courses as part of the government’s wider reform of GSCEs and A-levels, which aims to make the syllabus for core subjects such as the sciences and maths more robust.
However, there are a huge number of subjects that fall outside this “core” category – including engineering – that rather than take the effort to also improve and reform them, Ofqual is seeking merely to scrap by 2017.
Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) head of policy Paul Davies hit the nail on the head with his comments on the proposals.
“If the engineering GCSE and A Level are to be dropped, how will young people know about engineering and then go on and study the subject?” asked Davies.
“The Government must recognise that qualifications such as the GCSE and A Level in engineering will be at the heart of achieving improvements to the economy and supporting a pipeline of future apprentices, technicians and engineers.”
You can have all the fancy brochures for campaigns such as Your Life that you like, but those sort of campaigns will never have the same impact as a captive audience in a classroom, studying engineering over a period of years.
With the government’s reform of the sciences and maths also likely to eschew applied science for a more theoretical focus, the battle to make young people aware of the real-world application of the subjects they study at school (and the potential careers that come with those applications) suddenly looks to have become much harder.
The mixed messages coming from government on the issue of engineering skills - recognising the shortage as an impediment to economic growth but axing perhaps the most accessible path to engineering for many schoolchildren - to me smacks of an education secretary who wields far too much power within the cabinet.
Michael Gove seems all too easily to have been able to allow his ideological view of education to run roughshod over all other policies and to dismiss the efforts of his colleagues at the department for Business, Innovation & Skills in raising engineering’s profile among young people.
