Institution news
Dear Member,
Though we make our New Year’s resolutions in January, it is the crisp autumnal days that I associate with real new beginnings. The end of summer marks exam results season, which for many school students means that, once the anxiety and excitement subside, there are life-defining decisions to be made:
“Should I stay at school or go to an FE college?”
“Might an apprenticeship work better for me than a degree?”
“Will I be more successful if continue with the subjects I’m good at or look towards a career doing something I really enjoy?”
For a minority of students, the answers are straightforward since these are the group with good grades, a passion and a clear path to a future career. But for the majority, this simply isn’t the case, and the structure of our exam system doesn’t necessarily help.
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland in particular - education is largely presented as a series of binary options, especially when making decisions about subject choice.
Some argue that the narrow focus of A-levels forces young people to adopt either arts/humanities subjects or the sciences and to opt out of career options before they’ve had a chance to opt in.
Someone who happily juggled arts and sciences until she was ready to make a final decision is IMechE member, Aoife Considine, Fleet Performance and Safety Engineer on the Heathrow Express. Aoife was interested in engineering but also tempted to follow another of her passions – ballet. Fortunately for Aoife, she was brought up in the Republic of Ireland, where the university entry Leaving Certificate examination offered her seven subjects rather than the three on offer in England. She considers herself lucky to have been able to pursue all her interests to a later stage than had she gone to school in England:
“You have wide-ranging interests, it’s hard to combine them at A-level so most people have to choose between either the sciences or arts and humanities. That means that some young people who might make good engineers opt for arts subjects and that can rule out an engineering career. If they could combine arts courses with science and maths, they might be more likely to continue with science and maths and an engineering career would still be a possibility.”
Aoife features as ‘The Dancing Engineer’ in the latest IMechE member Year of Engineering Profile ‘Meet the Mechanical Engineer'. Each profile has a downloadable PDF
The engineering community has made real progress in recent years in its commitment to release latent talent from all sorts of people to try to make engineering feel like it represents the population it serves. But the commitment hasn’t yet translated into the desired outcomes. It is still very much ‘work in progress’. Under-representation isn’t just restricted to social class, gender, sexuality or ethnic background. The Institution’s research has highlighted the existence of five distinct groups of teenagers characterised by shared attitudes and beliefs - with a greater or lesser disposition to engineering. How well do we currently reach out to them and how effective is our education system in supporting those who, on face value, do not conform to our notion of what an engineer is?
In 1956 the novelist and scientist, CP Snow, published his famous Two Cultures article in the New Statesman, criticising the British education system for ‘over-rewarding’ the humanities over the sciences, and in his view: “…depriving the nation of adequate preparation to manage the modern scientific world”.
Snow’s views have influenced our education system so that all pupils now study science to at least age 16. The future will need something more. According to Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, today’s school pupils will need a mix of technical knowhow, problem solving and communications skills to thrive. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, he suggested the disruption of the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be "on a much greater scale" than anything felt during the First Industrial Revolution of the Victorian era and that the UK simply was not prepared for it. Though hard to predict, Mr. Haldane believes that the jobs that will flourish in an age of artificial intelligence and robotics will be those that focus on the skills of human interaction, face-to-face conversation and negotiation.
The experience of Aoife Considine, the philosophical arguments of CP Snow and the crystal ball gazing of Andy Haldane suggest that while as a nation we celebrate the success of our school students and their committed teachers, could this be the right time for a public dialogue on a new approach to learning to reflect the imminent jobs revolution? A system in which all young people have the opportunity to develop a range of interests and talents.
To all pupils, students, apprentices and trainees, from five to fifty…and beyond -- wishing you a stimulating, hard-working and successful year ahead.
To read more about IMechE’s perspective on this issue, please see our report “Big Ideas: The Future of Engineering in Schools”.
Colin Brown
Interim Chief Executive