An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

48A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCILSoon after the EngC Chairman Sir Frank Tombs had taken office, he was told by the PrimeMinister, Margaret Thatcher, that she expected industry to put more resources intoEngineering Training and that she would have a meeting with industrialists in six monthstime for them to report on their progress. At that meeting in February 1986 the Chairman leada team of 30 leading Industrialists and academics who were able to demonstrate that Industryhad put up an extra £26 million. At the same meeting Sir Francis Tombs, on behalf of allpresent, drew attention to the need for additional resources for higher education andtechnology. The Prime Minister issued an invitation to indicate how the supply of schoolleaverswith science, technology and mathematics qualifications could be increased, whichraised the importance of the shortage of mathematics and physics teachers. The outcome wasan agreement for key figures from relevant Government departments to meet the EngC. TheSecretary of State for Education and Science invited the EngC to establish a working party toreview industrial demand and places for students in courses other than InformationTechnology – see also later in this chapter under ‘Interfacing with Industry’.This resulted in Robert Jackson, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department ofEducation and Science, on behalf of the Secretary of State (Kenneth Baker), announcing in aspeech to the CBI in 1987 the funding by Government of additional places in universities andpolytechnics for highly qualified manufacturing systems engineers. The Under-Secretary alsocommmended the EngC’s WISE campaign. The EngC, however, remained concerned aboutthe need to improve the supply of students into engineering, and hence developed a series ofproposals covering 5-19 year olds that included:• Supporting the Government’s proposals for ‘The National Curriculum 5-16’.• Promoting the double award balanced science GCSE.• Supporting the new Advanced Supplementary (AS) examinations.• Pressing for design to be an integral part of technology in the core curriculum.Throughout this period the EngC continued to press for more funds and resources to be madeavailable for engineering education to meet the highest international levels. Representationswere made to Government on its White Paper ‘Higher Education – Meeting the Challenge’.A Government inter-departmental working group published an interim report ‘InternationalComparisons of Higher Education Output in Engineering’ in the Employment Gazette forDecember 1987. This report claimed that the UK was producing the same number ofengineers at degree or sub-degree levels as France, Germany, the United States of America orJapan. However, the EngC, supported by the CBI and the Engineering Employers'Federation, stated this was just not true. The Government’s report was based upon UNESCOstudies which sadly were fundamentally inaccurate as UNESCO had allowed each country tomake its own interpretation of the raw data. This made a nonsense of using the figures forinternational comparison – a point made in the EngC press conference on this topic and byKenneth Miller on the BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme, although no Minister was availableto comment. This matter was not resolved until May 1988 when the EngC published its ownstudy ‘A Comparison of he Statistics of Engineering Education – Japan and the UnitedKingdom’, clearly supporting its position.The EngC, being committed to widening access to higher education in general, andengineering degree courses in particular, held a joint conference in 1987 with the StandingConference on University Entrance (SCUE); this examined how higher education institutionscould achieve greater flexibility, such as welcoming people with entry qualifications otherthen traditional ‘A’ levels. It was agreed that ‘AS’ levels and other mixes of ‘A’ levels and© Engineering Council UK 2004