30/08/06 Engineering competitiveness
CaSE today called for measures to the UK a more attractive place for engineering and manufacturing companies to make the country more economically competitive. In an article in Innovation Policy Review commenting on the Bank of England's recent decision to raise interest rates, CaSE points out that even where UK does not actually construct manufactured goods, it needs to capture sectors of economic activity related to them, such as the development and design of new models. "While interest rates matter in the short term, other factors are also important," says the article. Among other things, the article concludes, the number of people studying sciences and engineering is too low to meet the needs of industry.

29/08/06 Science in school
CaSE today highlighted the need for increased recruitment and retention of well-qualified science teachers. Commenting in the Daily Telegraph, CaSE points out that nearly a quarter of schools in England and Wales have no properly-qualified physics teacher. "Today's Telegraph shows by interviewing eminent physicists that they were all inspired by good teachers who cared about the subject, so the fact that many pupils these days are denied that inspiration will have serious consequences for the future of British science," said Dr Peter Cotgreave, Director of CaSE "it's no wonder the number of youngsters choosing to study physics is falling so dramatically".

25/08/06 Public sector funding for research
CaSE today called for the Government to be clearer about what it wants to achieve with research funding before deciding on the details of how to distribute it. "The cart is being put before the horse," said Dr Peter Cotgreave, Director of CaSE, "so in a letter to the Times Higher Education Supplement, we have explained what believe needs to be sorted out before the Government charges ahead with its new plans for assessing research.

The substantive text of the letter is given below:
Discussing the relative merits of the Research Assessment Exercise and the proposed metrics system of distributing funding will not solve the problems of university research. The debate about what method to use for handing out money should not even be attempted until everyone is clear about what the money is actually for.

Historically, the block grant from the Funding Councils was supposed to pay the research element of academics’ salaries and provide baseline that in the sciences and engineering was called the ‘well found laboratory’ – an environment in which people had time to think and to try out genuinely new ideas before rushing off to a Research Council for a grant. As the Research Councils’ budgets grew much more rapidly than the Funding Councils, this became impossible, and universities had no choice but to use their block grants to plug the ever-growing funding black hole generated because Research Council grants did not meet the full costs of the projects they supported.

Now that we are moving towards the Research Councils paying full economic costs, the block grant from the Funding Councils could potential be freed up for other things. Official publications from different Government departments and agencies – the Treasury, the DTI, the various Funding Councils, the DfES – all give different definitions of what these things might be. Some mention ‘blue skies’ research and others do not, while research training is included in some but not all.

Unless we agree about what the money is for, there is little point in having a debate about the Byzantine details of different methods of handing it out.

22/08/06 Funding university science
CaSE today reiterated the importance debating the ways in which to fund the nation's ambitions for science and engineering in the universities. Commening in The Scientist magazine, CaSE said "The Research Assessment Exercise has got to go. But we need to ask what this money is really for. One of the things it should be for is investing in really new ideas, young people, and people switching fields. The question is how will we achieve that. There is widespread confusion about what the RAE money is supposed to be for, and until you say clearly what it is for, you will never be able to design a system for distributing it." This emphasised points made in CaSE's recent evidence to the Government's Next Steps document and evidence to the Royal Society's review of universities.

18/08/06 Peter Cotgreave met with David Cobb, Alistair Davies and Vince Nolan of Deloitte.

17/08/06 A level results
CaSE today welcomed the big rise in the number of students taking mathematics A-levels but warned that the continuing decline in physics students threatens the nation’s economy. “It is genuinely good to see that efforts to encourage youngsters into doing maths are working, with a rise of almost 6% taking Maths A-level and a whopping 22% increase in Further Maths” said Dr Peter Cotgreave, Director of CaSE. Commenting for BBC Online, he added: “However, we are still seeing big drops in the numbers studying physics; we’re losing physics students at the rate of around 1,000 every year, and if this trend is not urgently reversed, the UK has no chance of competing in the global economy."

read the press release

10/08/06 Science education in Northern Ireland
A report launched today by the Campaign for Science & Engineering (CaSE) points to the missing link in Northern Ireland’s development plans. School science education could be crucial to the work of the region’s government departments and their related bodies, but has not received enough attention from any of them.

read the press release

read the summary report

read the full report

10/08/06 Peter Cotgreave met with Graham Paterson of the Institution of Engineering & Technology and separately with Diana Garnham of the Science Council and John Morton of the Engineering & Technology Board.

03/08/06 Tax incentives for research
Case today called on the Chancellor to do more to ensure that tax credits for research and development are effective. In an article in Laboratory News, CaSE points out that only 41% of businesses are aware of the tax inventives they can claim to make their companies more innovative. "The Chancellor's tax credits for research, and especially for development, are a geuninely good idea," said Dr Peter Cotgreave of CaSE, "but if firms, especially small companies, are not even aware they exist, then they are not going to have the effect we all want. These new results also prove that tax credits are not the whole answer to boosting private sector development and research, which is why we are holding an Opinion Forum on the subject in September, at which both the Treasury and the Department of Trade & Industry will be taking part"

01/08/06 Commercialisation of research
CaSE today called for a full debate about how to fund university science and engineering instead of relying on commercialisation of research to plug the gap. In a letter to the Financial Times, CaSE called for commercialisation to be vigorously pursued, but points out that it will never provide adequate funds for the ever-growing demands on the universities: The text of the letter is:

Kyle Fairchild is right that universities need a more sophisticated view of commercialising their research than merely supposing a spin-out company will always be the best solution (Financial Times letters, July 31).

However, the whole debate assumes that the commercialisation of public-sector research is a way of generating funds for the universities involved. Even the best institutions (of which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is generally considered the world leader) obtain just a few per cent of their research income in this way. Commercialising academic research is good for the economy as a whole, creates jobs and wealth, and should be vigorously pursued in any industrialised country. But it is no solution to the chronic underfunding of British universities.

In the past two decades, universities have seen their total volume of students and research grow enormously. They have been encouraged to undertake new activities on a substantial scale, such as outreach to their local communities, and they have seen a big increase in bureaucratic burden. But funding per student is about 40 per cent lower than it was, and new paperwork is imposed without any new funds to pay for it.

As a nation, we need to decide how we intend to pay for the ambitions we have for our higher education system, especially in science and engineering. Options include finding more public money, putting up fees, creating bigger incentives for alumni to contribute towards endowments, or scaling back the number of students. If we do nothing, or rely on commercialisation of research to plug this funding gap, the default outcome will be falling standards.