Former Schools Minister: "The curriculum is partial against creative and applied subjects"
Baker Dearing Educational Trust
Supporting University Technical Colleges
In this edition...
Dear colleague,
Welcome to The Blueprint, the?news and insight platform from the Baker Dearing Educational Trust for leaders in industry, education, politics, and the third sector.
Each edition of The Blueprint will discuss issues affecting education and industry including the skills gap, the implications of artificial intelligence, and the state of the economy.
Before summer, the Baker Dearing Educational Trust launched an ambitious review of the UTC curriculum, titled Keeping Pace.
This was intended to measure how employers’ needs have developed since the Baker Dearing created the original UTC model around 14 years ago. Once those needs were established, the review would look at how UTCs could meet them through their curricula.
This edition of The Blueprint includes articles and interviews with top technology, business, and education leaders to discern the top demands of industry and understand how UTC can meet those needs.
"The curriculum is partial against applied subjects"
Lord Jim Knight, a Schools Minister in the last Labour government and now a leading voice on using digital technology in the delivery of public services, spoke to?The Blueprint?about how the school curriculum should keep up with technology, especially artificial intelligence...
How well do you think the education delivered by schools is meeting the need of employers?
Not very well. Obviously employers have always wanted children to leave school able to read, write, and do maths well and those remain core, as does oracy and, now, digital skills.?
I think the moves by the new government around oracy are welcome. We'll see how they get manifested in the curriculum assessment review.
I'm keen that we move on with digital skills from hiding behind the pretence computer science is the answer to digital skills, to being something that has a wider application and then once you move beyond that, I think the general thrust of the curriculum is overly abstract. It is weighed down with huge amounts of subject knowledge, and it is partial against creative and applied subjects. It is partial towards the purely academic.
When you look at the 2002 legislation, which sets out what should be in the national curriculum, that is pretty balanced. That does include the proper place for design and technology at Key Stage 4. It includes the creative subjects.?
But it is the accountability system that then skewed the delivery of the curriculum and the academy system has meant that schools have dropped important subjects like design and technology and deprioritised the creative subjects.
So we now have a curriculum that's out of balance and which only serves the purely academic route. I'm sure it's fine for employers who just want to recruit graduates from top universities. But I think it fails everybody else.
What do you think are the key skills that young people now need for work, especially in the fast-growing digital sector and in the realm of artificial intelligence?
I think it's really important now that all children, whether they're getting actually into those high tech careers or not, are really strong in basic skills around data analysis. And then if you're going into those technical worlds, you need to be really strong with data.
They then need to have good critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills, and then you need to have a good sense of how you go about analysing a problem, abstracting a problem where that's appropriate and in most cases that's important. Then being able to work out how to calculate the abstract, which is probably quite mathematical. Then they have to use critical thinking skills to reflect on the outcome of the calculation, and whether what they've come up with solves the problem. Now. that manifests itself in all sorts of applications. Be it in engineering, in maths, the sciences.
What is your view on how artificial intelligence could affect the delivery of technical education and the needs of industry over the next few years?
Artificial intelligence is as big a shift for the economy and society as the invention of the internet, and it will transform everything.?In ways that now are probably inconceivable.
We're seeing with the traditional AI, with machine learning, pattern recognition, those sorts of things, that it can transform some jobs and it can help with some technical aspects of things and produce the more boring, tedious, work and I think that will continue.
Generative AI then supercharges that and starts to create the opportunity, with a lot of risk attached, for us to have really high-powered assistance, that can help us with calculation, coding, some of the basic functions really well.
As long as we are quick enough to understand where it might be hallucinating, where it might have bias in the data, where the ethical constraints might lie, then the opportunity for us to be able to advance really quickly is profound.
For example, we saw during the rapid development of vaccines that the ability to use simulated artificially intelligent environments to rapidly work through the possibilities on vaccine development enabled us to accelerate that technology really rapidly and obviously to the world's benefit.
I think we will see more of that and we'll certainly need to make sure that we are skilled for it, we have the computing power for it, and we have the investment for it with, with the ethical safeguards that we need.
How do you think it could affect those school leavers who have started off in different sectors and probably doing those menial tasks that are going to be replaced by AI?
The danger is that if you are an employer, you might think it's better to deploy machinery rather than humans to do the basic tasks and then believe that you can find the supervisory talent to monitor those machines and to manage the system and to do the higher level thinking, without thinking through how we develop the future middle level talent to do that human function.
So we're going to have to design carefully the right incentives so that we have got entry level employment for people who can build up the experience to become the managers of the machines that we will then be deploying across the economy.
What do you think can be done by educators, the government and employers to bridge the gap between what skills and knowledge being taught in schools and what industry needs.
I think within schools, we need to do some urgent work to develop strategies around using AI for teaching. That in turn means building the competence of teachers around AI and seeing it as something that might be their friend and not their enemy.
We then need to ensure that we have some of the computing power that is needed in order to properly deploy this within schools and that we have young people starting to be trained to think around about how to deploy it, how to adapt it.
We have got some great open source models now. For example, Meta’s Llama model is open source.?There are others, similarly, who are publishing AI models that people can play with, can tinker with, and start to do interesting things with.
Then, instead of schools worrying that children will be cheating by using AI models, schools should be thinking about the future that they're going to have, where people going to be collaborating with those machines, and embedding within the way we teach and learn the collaboration of those machines, to reflect the world of work that students are going to be moving into.
About University Technical Colleges and the Baker Dearing Educational Trust
University Technical Colleges deliver a science, technology, and creative curriculum at a secondary school level. There are now 44 UTCs across England, delivering a curriculum designed by and benefitting local employers to around 21,000 young people between the ages of 11 and 19.?
Former education secretary Lord Baker and former Post Office chairman Lord Dearing both spearheaded the development of the UTC programme and created the Baker Dearing Educational Trust to support the UTC network.
Baker Dearing is now focusing on widening access to technical education nationally, with UTCs and partners and through the UTC Sleeve initiative?
If you are interested in discussing working with the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, please contact us through our website.
"Employers are looking for what practical experience students have got"
Yvonne Mason OBE DL, Chief Executive of SafeSTS and a founder of UTC Norfolk, where she now chairs the Industry Liaison Group, has spoken to The Blueprint?about the changing needs of business and how UTCs are keeping up with them...
What is it your business does?
We work in ship to ship transfer. So we transfer either at sea or within the port environments, cargoes that are either being exported or imported.
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The export may well be because there is insufficient country infrastructure, so we kick start the process. So with the early stages of development in a country like Senegal, for example, we're helping to set up their supply chain to receive energy into the country.
At the moment it's oil, but it's moving into more green opportunities. So we're also part of supply chains looking at LNG, ammonia, hydrogen, ethylene, all the new green fuels. That will require new processes, new operating processes, it requires new equipment to suit the materials being transferred.?
What have been the major changes to business needs over the last five years in your view?
War makes a big change to us, geopolitics makes a big change to us.
Climate change is having a huge impact on us. In areas where we used to be able to operate with impunity all year round, we're now finding seasonal issues. We're finding very quick changes in weather patterns that are giving rise to short, sharp, snap and nasty weather events. So we're having to amend our processes and procedures, we're having to bring in engineered safety equipment to cope with the eventuality of a breakout [of fuel].?
COVID also hit us very badly. It had a huge impact on the business because we're global, we need to move. We can't move if we’re pinned down by COVID.
We try and have teams in place around the around the world in time zones. So part of our challenge is managing time zones, culture, language, everything, as part of our day job.?It's a big challenge to find people to do that, and there's no formal training for what we do.
The master mariners that do the operations between the ships are formally trained, but we have to train them again to do what we do, because they never actually berth two moving ships together.
How do you think the education system, the skills system can better prepare people for those problems?
We find the students that we take on from UTC Norfolk [UTCN] come to us partly prepared because they're used to working with industry. They do projects on a regular basis. They have interaction with employers on a regular basis.
We talk to those companies, which are in different sectors, and they are all finding the same issues.
Materials are changing, which affects anything we teach our students in, for example, aviation where the composites in different steel grades have to cope with these very aggressive green fuels. Biofuels eat the old equipment.
Materials and process engineering are two big things we find on our radar constantly.
It would be helpful for students to have an understanding of the global supply chain and the local supply chain and how it impacts on them. There's no training for that which we can find.
Fundamentally, the practical hands on opportunity that UTCs offer is fantastic and that's what the companies are looking for when they're employing. What actual practical experience have you got, is the student used to handling tools, are they used to having different materials? Do they understand how a CAD system works? Can they design something? Can they work in 3D? Do they have any experience of robotics?
If we can start, at least, to get an inkling of that in the curriculum, that makes a big difference to the work of the young people we take on.
What do you think of the efforts of UTCs to keep up with the needs of industry?
I think we're one of the biggest deliverers of T Levels in the country and that's working well because of our industry partnerships that we can get the placements.
There is an issue with keeping equipment up to date. For example, if you take Haas, a major provider of CNC machine tools, they are changing their software every six to eight weeks. So while they're very kind to give us a machine to have in our workshops, it's out of date very quickly, so we have to start looking at desktop solutions or augmented and virtual reality in order to train.
In shipping, we work with augmented and virtual reality to do everything from incident and accident investigation to planning a brand new ship. We even use it to give the crew the experience of working on that ship before they even set on the deck.
The old classroom learning, hard book learning, I'm sorry, it's really not how we teach. I'm hearing from things like Metaverse Learning, there is a 25 per cent increase in the speed of learning by using mixed reality.
Offshore wind companies train the turbine technicians using mixed reality because if an employee works at height, they need to understand how it feels. If you pay to train somebody to work at height and then it transpires they have a fear of heights, you’ve got a problem.
This is where you can practise it in virtual reality and know whether it's for you or not. And you can make mistakes. You can make mistakes with no harm to anybody and learn from it, without massive and costly implications to industry. That's why I think there's a big opportunity.
If you look at anything in construction, they're completely rethinking how they build, what they build with, which means there are a million and one opportunities for young people to get involved in something really quite exciting.
We had the Future of Work conference a couple of weeks ago. Fantastic, absolutely fabulous to hear what those guys are doing. British Sugar’s young engineers have been given the task of remodelling packaging to turn the whole business into a sustainable one; that's a heck of a piece of work. And that's being done by relatively young engineers.
We know young people are keen on sustainable jobs and industry absolutely needs people.
"The UTC approach is about education to meet employers' needs, not for the sake of education"
Principal of UTC Portsmouth James Doherty outlines what they are doing to match what they are teaching students with the needs of industry...
The uniqueness of the UTC offer
I feel privileged to have worked at UTC Portsmouth since before it opened. What attracted me to what was then a muddy field and a set of architect’s blueprints, was clearly the 'UTC approach' – education that meets the needs of employers rather than education for the sake of education. Upon starting at the college, a new question became apparent: How can we best achieve that?
Employer Advisory Group
As a school, we are here to progress young people into employers and universities. As such, one of our primary mechanisms for liaising with employers has been our Employer Advisory Group (EAG). This group, which meets once a term, is led by Alex Blandford, who leads on UTC Portsmouth’s co-curriculum, and is made up of as many employer partner representatives as possible.
The EAG sits differently to our Board of Trustees, and has a more casual membership with representatives from large employers, such as the Royal Navy, Airbus, and Lockheed Martin, as well as more locally-based employers, including Knights Brown, Portsmouth Aviation, and Rolls Royce Motor Cars. In these meetings, we can update employer partners directly on what the college is doing, but also seek their thoughts on future developments and initiatives that we are proposing.
A key example for us of the EAG in action has been the deployment of T Levels. UTC Portsmouth took the idea of T Levels to the EAG and we were intrigued to learn just how positive employers were about the new qualification once we had explained it.
The EAG helped shape the course structure of our first T Level, in engineering maintenance, including what they felt was a useful format for the employer experience element of the course. With the backing of the EAG, we were able to fill all employer placement requirements and have since adopted the same format for our digital T Level and will likely do so for our planned health science T Level. This is in stark contrast to local FE colleges which launched T Levels without consultation, to quite a poor employer reception.?
Informing the curriculum and co-curriculum
Our EAG also allows the employer partners to tell us what skills challenges they see in the medium to long term. This includes AI, automation and robotics, as well as a current shortage of skilled programmers. The challenge for the school, then, is to consider how it will play a role in bridging that gap.
This can often be a challenge as many of the areas of need are simply not on any curriculum – they are too cutting edge.
Nevertheless, whilst we can endeavour to insert some of these developments into our curriculum, including by deploying AI algorithms into computing and automation into our engineering courses, our training programmes are the most flexible tool we have for delivering on these needs.
In our experience, we tend to see that employers are keen to support the development of these skill areas, as they will stand to benefit from it. An example of this is our Royal Navy DNA Enrichment. Over the course of a half term, students work with the Royal Navy’s software house with the support of experts to prepare for a whole day 'hackathon'. Students will present the results of this hack to Royal Navy, civil service, and software contractors.
Flexible employer arrangements
A final key piece for ensuring that we keep at the leading edge of developments is the commitment to flexible employer partner interactions such as UTC Portsmouth’s “Project Pipeline”. This initiative, now in its fifth year involves a dozen employer partners, such as QinetiQ, BAE Systems and the NHS, running real-life projects with students. We encourage employers to send across alumni as a further way of strengthening links.?
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