Owers Lecture 2006 - video transcript

Transcript prepared by Jamie Harries and Malcolm Moss

Introduction

Well, thanks very much for missing the football to come here. If it had been Scotland, I would have taken a ‘sickie’ as they say. But, very delighted to be here, and to follow in the great tradition of Stan Owers and the work that he has done and continues to do and the stimulation that he gives to many; not just people of my generation, but people of the younger generation too who are absolutely key in the sustainability of ideas, and I will say something about that in a minute.

Tools and Technology

So we are going to be talking, of course, again about tools and technology and I am very wedded to some of the ideas in there, and they keep coming up in all different sorts of contexts. I have been involved over the last few months in terms of an ME enquiry and if you want to see naked hatred between different groups about ME and definitions and I have never had so many vitriolic emails from certain groups in my life, not even from fellow colleagues and the Labour party during top up fees; there were a few there, but not as bad as that. I mean they are quite difficult, and running that enquiry has been very, very stimulating, and a lot of people out there are confident that at last, maybe, we will get the government to look at ME and chronic fatigue syndrome quite seriously. As more than a quarter of people suffer from this from all age groups in this country, and many GPs do not think it’s a condition yet, and when you start from that basis you know that you have a fight on your hands, but we have a very good committee of people who can investigate things. I’ve been very involved in bio-technology too which we are all told is the coming industry and so on, but that takes you into the interactions between big companies and small companies, and the occasional take over by the big company, and so on, and you can see how vultures operate in that kind of pharmaceutical industry, and I must know every pharmaceutical MD in the country and in the world, because you run across them in terms of the policies and how they are using science and so on. I remember once having Sir Richard Sikes in front of my committee with Jan Leshlie, when Glaxo Smith Kline as two separate entities were talking about merging together.

Two Cultures

I always remember saying that once we have merged together, we will have the best scientific base in the pharmaceutical industry - I’m waiting for the follow up on that, because there are a lot of questions to be asked about what happened there. Neither Jan nor Richard Sykes are around anymore, but there are new people, and we’ll find out what’s going on, and I always remember asking them: “Do you pair ever talk together now”, and they said “Yeah, we go out for a meal together”. I said “Yeh, but I bet there’s a fight about who pays for the meal”, because that was quite vicious too, so, there’s a lot of argument that goes on in this field, in terms of policy determination from what is quite simply a science base, and I want to illustrate that with some other examples later on, because science and politics don’t mix. I give talks in parts of the world, in which, its like C P Snow in a way. The new C P Snow adage is science and politics are two cultures, and in many ways I have been blessed by seeing both from the inside, and doing science, and going through the system, and running departments for students, and all the business of teaching and marking exams etc, all that terrible work, and was I glad, was I glad that I never had to mark a final exam in my life again when I got into parliament - it was substituted by many other things.

Science, Politics and the Search for Truth

But I think that there is a whole arena there of science and politics, and I’ve put a letter in the Guardian this week after Martin Reece had put something in after his Hay festival, about the difficulties that there is in getting politicians to take scientists seriously, and scientists to take politicians seriously. There’s a kind of different game that goes on now. I have kind of been wedded to both. The dirty tricks that go on in politics, and the dirtier tricks that go on in academia too! So I had a good schooling in that in terms of academic committees and giving grants and so on too but in politics its a different world. Politics is often run by lawyers who don’t care who they represent and they don’t care very much about the truth either. They will go where the dosh is, basically, whereas I find that scientists, you know, 99.9999% want to try and find out the truth but always know that you’re never quite sure that you know everything. I am pretty sure the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning, but my training tells me, well, who knows you know? Some funny things might happen, and we are prepared for that kind of illustration, of how things operate in what I call the real world out there whatever that means. Politics, it means the real world, of getting away with what you can without too much evidence getting in the way of it. I have seen it from the inside, from triple MMR jabs, there’s scars on my back on GM crops, where we tried to defend the science and explain to people that it’s not the science that’s the problem, it’s the industries that are trying to use the science for their particular interests and so on. Trying to unburble all that was quite difficult. I must say I fell out with a lot of good people in my party over it, because they just had the traditional ‘green’ thought that it must be bad, its not something we should have, and I think behind that, there’s a lot of good politicians who were quite skillful, left if you like, radical if you like, liberal if you like, it depends on what they are thinking about and having a lack of faith in science. Not trusting it completely and that’s why I say sometimes scientists don’t get it over to them what they are about.

Scientific Literacy

Saying what you do know, what you don’t know but, gosh, what you need to do to find out about things. I think that kind of thinking has got to be inculcated in the population, not just in our young people, for young people’s sake but in a scientifically literate population because I don’t think the population is scientifically literate. I think they probably know more about Shakespeare than they do about science. They think, “Oh that’s too clever, that’s too difficult for me to be able to understand all that”. Its almost as if they are glad to say they don’t understand science. It’s a mark of courage to be able to say that, and they feel good about it, but they would never say that about Shakespeare, everybody knows about Shakespeare - they’ve done Hamlet, they’ve done the lot, oh no they haven’t, they won’t admit it, they pretend that they have this literacy, so I think there is a difficulty for us there.

Think Tanks and Advice

Yesterday morning I was at 11 Downing street, and I wanted to say something about the think tank, because I heard you mention think tank -I have just set a think tank up, called ‘Newton’s Apple’, now that wasn’t my name, it was the name of young people that I got onto the think tank steering committee, because we think, basically, that the government, politicians, don’t take science seriously -they talk about the white heat of technology, they add a bit on now and again. Throw a bit of money at it to get us back to the level we were at in probably about 1980 in terms of wealth equations and so on, but really, really, really don’t understand it. Of course, believe in it, or try to understand it. They have an advisory system and I know all the advisers. I have had some real battles with some of them, in fact I used to teach with some of them the chief scientific advisor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich I had battles with them even then about certain features about science. He was a chemist, a physical chemist, so I understand why he likes nuclear power. He comes from South Africa too of course where they like nuclear power. I’ve come from a biological background and I always knew
that biologists did not want nuclear power, for all sorts of reasons’ about radiation, whereas chemists quite liked it. I understand how the training of people pushes them in certain political directions, and yesterday at this meeting there was a think tank called the John Smith institute run by a friend of Gordon Brown’s. I think Gordon probably backs it too because Gordon says the right things about science. I doubt if he actually really, really understands it. He has to take advice for people and so on. There’s no reason why he should understand it but we need to find ways that we get our message over from the scientific technological engineering community, into that political arena.

The Regulation of Science and Technology

It was Lord George Robinson who was talking about technology. He’s a chairman of Cable & Wireless. He was talking about technology but the principal thing was about regulation of it. The subject yesterday was overlapping regulations, not just between different countries or even devolved regimes in the same country, like Britain. You can have something different in Scotland to what you have in Ireland, Wales and indeed England, but you often have it different in different kinds of activities as well. The financial regulation industry is very, very different in the way it operates from the Cable & Wireless regulations that go on. They weren't bleating about there’s too much regulation and so on. There may be, there may not be and so on but they were saying that its very confusing when you’re an international, global kind of market. Where you get your regulations from? I think that’s a problem that you guys were thinking about; that your ICT, internet, and web sites might have too, as it spins out there in terms of patents yes but also in terms of the regulations that have to be operated. I don’t just mean health and safety regulations as well, and it was very good, because the same guy with him on the platform was Matt Broughton, who is the managing director of British Airways. He was talking about the so called ‘Open Skies’ policy. He says there are no such thing as open skies. The American’s run the skies, and if you are lucky you can get in there and so on. So for all the regulations you have got, there is a deep political thing going on behind it and that power struggle and so on.

The Time Demands of Politics

Now I say that to you because that’s the kind of world I move in. I am not proud of it. When I go home my wife says, “I don’t want to hear any of that, I just want to talk about where we are shopping tomorrow” and so on. In-fact there was a woman worked with me for three years who was writing a book about moving from academia into politics. All this kind of stuff that goes on. The meetings, the issues and how the phone never stops, just like academics. They are always busy too, I know that, but you are not as busy as we are because everybody wants a slice of you all the time, for everything, I’ve got to stop the traffic running in Reetham High Street in Norfolk at 30 miles an hour, knocking the odd cattle over and so on. People come in moaning about that. To the next door neighbor who shouts at people through the walls, we get all that. Besides all this interesting technological regulation work to, it’s a crazy job. It kind of is like academia in a way. It’s like that poor student that comes to you who has a problem while you are talking about higher education policy and so on in some council meeting. You also have to think about the nitty-gritty of people living in that world, and that’s important but, as I say, the political world is quite exciting in the sense that you do come across people who actually know what they are talking about. I don’t mean politicians I actually mean people like Broughton who are very high octane, and very knowledgeable at things. It is quite exciting, and it takes you away from the sort of more perhaps mundane things but very, very important to the individuals. Just as important as flying British Airways is the next door neighbor who keeps banging on the next door wall all the time. Its a very, very crazy job at that level. Its very hard to remember that you have got to be a self starter and be determined to do something about science and technology.

Gordon Brown and Science

So we had that meeting yesterday and this morning Gordon’s up there, Chancellor of the Exchequer, he’s up for it, and you know, he’s waiting, September probably get the money on now -I have never been to so many dinners in my life, with groups of 10 people all plotting -it must have been like that in the Maggie Thatcher era as well. Tthey are all loving it at the minute. When’s he going? whose going to do it? and all this but no one is saying anything y’know. But I think, in this world where the chancellor gets up and says something like ‘Science and innovation are very important for the wealth economy of this country’ and so on, and people ask questions. I think ‘hang on a minute I’m going to ask him a question and I said, “Do you consider that in the innovation process, the education of the next generation in the science and technology and engineering industries is essential to keep it sustainable?” Yeah it is, yeah, yeah, yeah, he says, now I knew he thought I was just being a clever dick, and I was in a sense, but I actually do mean it, that innovation is not just making the millions. I mean it’s about seeing the whole system of innovation as being very, very important. Relating to wealth, and developing new technologies, new ideas, getting it regulated and so on. Remember, technologies move faster than regulation, much, much faster. It takes days, months, years to regulate as against developing technologies. We were talking about Cable & Wireless particularly George Robertson and I yesterday, in terms of how that’s changing. Telephones, communications, that whole strategy, the world is going to be so different, and it is true that many young people are much more into it than we are. There’s no doubt about it.

The Internet and the Generations

Many of my colleagues don’t even have websites, actually, very strange. I have a website, and I have trouble having time keeping it up to date with all the daft things that we do, because people do read it, and you know, send questions to you down the line, you know, much more than sending a letter now than they did. And the day will come, when every high street will have one; speak to your MP. Of course you’ll have the odd problem or two who comes out of the pub on a Saturday or Friday night, we’ll sort crime out too, don’t worry. An ASBO here an ASBO there it’ll all be OK. But it was very interesting, we were talking about technology coming through, and its limitations and the spectrum limitations for example and Cable & Wireless, but they are realizing that the world out there, they don’t really want to engage with this. Its all too much, trying to keep up is very hard, for brains, where many of their neurons now don’t make the connections they used to make in the early days and so on. Young people, I think, are much more comfortable with it, and we should encourage that, even though some of our colleagues are a bit, duffers. I know Tony Blair for example, some off his people have disconnected his computer because he is bloody useless at it. So they have actually taken the plug off of it. He will have his picture there now and again but don’t let him loose on it or it will crash the whole system in this country and that’s true actually. So I think that this is a world that we are moving into, and this innovation process includes that kind of world where young people get into information. I was saying earlier to some people here that you can spend hours and hours just crawling the internet. If I am looking for my wife, I know where she is, she’s on the internet, looking for cheap holidays (occasionally), or something else. It’s just a fascination with the interest and enthusiasm that it engenders - new technologies like that.

Ultralab is Avant Garde

Now Ultralab, of course, is one of these organizations which has kind of developed a philosophy which I think is very avant-garde and very ‘up there’, and new. You are ahead of your time, actually, you’re not steeped in a lot of the old traditions that go on in higher education. I know that to some extent you have to be dragged along with the numbers of students. The 50%, now that was a really daft policy Tony Blair and co. came up with. I don’t know how you can estimate the number of people who are going to be advantaged by higher education. It is very difficult to put a figure on it. All you can say honestly is do your best, give us the money and we will come up with some new innovative ideas and try and get some people to do it. But no, I remember the debate on top up fees. It had to be 50% and they are all going to be working class kids and so on, and they won’t have to pay until afterwards. The catch was changing the rules every time they knew I was going to win it. Within 20 minutes to go I was 20 votes ahead, and the whips got at them, and clearly made them sit on their hands or whatever, and its at that point I suddenly realized how it works. Now for me it was absolutely the wrong policy. It wasn’t going to be £3000 at the start, the top up fee, it was going to be 10,000 actually. That’s what Richard Sykes and Cambridge and Oxford and so on wanted because they were the elite, and they brought it down to 5, and then down to 3, and so on. So there was a lot of argument about it and there will be a pitched battle about it in a few years time again when the assessment process comes out to decide wether or not they are going to be able to put it up. I liked the Ower’s philosophy if I may be as bold as to call it that. Then I looked at your mission statement and I am very keen on mission statements. There’s one in the West Ham dressing room at Upton Park. Its brilliant. It hasn’t done them much good, but its OK, and you know Nelson Mandela didn’t actually need a mission statement either, nor did Martin Luther King, but there you go. We have got one, and you have to have it and I like this idea of the benefits of new technology developing and empowering creative; all that kind of delightful environments that we set up, we know that its there.

Science as a Career

My experience of young people and we did a select committee enquiry years ago, in 1998, when we went round schools and talked to young people. Young women who were really fascinated about science and we said to them “are you going to go into science?” “Don’t be daft, you know we can get £50,000 in the city. We’re not going to sit there on three post docs, and there may be a job at the end of it”. And you know, its exactly the same, because in my think tank, I have got four young people there who are doing PhD’s, and that’s what they say. They are fascinated by the work they are doing with AIDS and to do with neuro-sciences, chemistry, what ever it is. They want to actually go on with it but the system does not allow that to happen, because they’re not daft, they are not going to go into a profession where the career structure doesn’t really extend beyond another three years. You have to be very lucky to get something that pays for the mortgage or whatever it is and that’s disgraceful. In a country which says that science technology and engineering are central to wealth economy and so on. That’s why I am kind of cynical about it when politicians say that, that it doesn’t jibe with the actual job itself and the young people who go into it. I mean, my daughter is a civil servant and she works as an adviser to a high flying minister. I won’t mention who or she will kill me but she said “God dad, some of those kids I was at school with (and she’s only 27), God they were such boring little scientists”, you know. My wife says the same thing –“Ian, don’t bring any of your scientific friends home for a party, they’ll be talking about bloody pH and fatty acid cycles and all that. We’ll be in the front room talking about books, and the Booker prize. Why does the Booker prize get the publicity it gets, when the science books, which are more read, you know, some of the stories that come out, Stevie Smith or whatever, gets very little? We have a one day in the sun, you know. I don’t mean the Sun newspaper. I mean this sun, which gives you vitamin D and all that. You have one day when they actually mention that there is an Aventis prize and so on, books that are read by more people than the arts world. There’s something that inbalances there and I think that we have to try and see ways of actually correcting it.

Science and Technology Education

What I like about the Ower’s philosophy is this. I am sure Stan’s going to be really embarrassed at this point but it comes from a bottom up concept of people doing things with their hands, wanting to get their hands dirty. The practicalities of doing things and those young women I talked about. You know what the biggest complaint was? “Gosh, we wanted to do experiments in the class; we couldn’t, you know, we are to watch the teacher doing them”. There was the old Kits Generator still in the corner that was caked. Don’t know if Dumfries Academy has still got them. They’re the ones we used to use (referring to ex students Dr Ian Gibson and Richard Millwood), they had not developed the labs to their full, and when they do develop a lab and we have fought hard to get people to put money in. We have put some millions into labs, but we are a long way short of the facilities. We still have those brown top desks with ‘Cherie loves Tony’ written on them and all that stuff scrawled on them. You know, the new kinds of lab are absolutely magnificent when you get them. The private schools in this country, for example, have beautiful ones. The one at Westminster I saw; they have little bits at the end where they can cool off and talk about the issues. Write the experiments up and so on and they do their own experiments. They have technical staff who are there to help who are as efficient and as knowledgeable as the teacher who is running the class themselves. Now in any other schools where you have technicians who are left in the back room, they are drinking coffee, unsafely of course, like we always did, and you know, they are getting paid absolute peanuts for doing an essential service to provide the apparatus, and keep it in good condition, to provide the experimental material, and to talk to the young people. Some of the young people would rather talk to the technical staff than actually to the teacher, in certain circumstances. Why not encourage it? And I think training technicians is something we have lost in this country. They are extremely valuable. When I first went to university it was the technicians that you talked to about ‘what should this do?’, and that has been disappearing gradually. They have slipped away and you know you ended up having to wash your own glassware. There’s no harm in that of course but at the end of the day we used to have people who were an essential service and they have taken that job away from many people.

Failure and Inspiration

When we think about education too, lets go back just a little to one of the ministers who you’ve highlighted, and that’s Estelle Morris herself, and some of the stuff she said about this once size fits all philosophy which it obviously, quite clearly, doesn’t. It’s essential that we train people she said, but this idea that certain types of training are options for failure, they are branded as failure, is what’s wrong in this society of ours. I tell you, I love America, parts of it, I love when they say ‘fail - have a go and fail’, and if you haven’t failed, you’re not going to go on and fail again. Fail three times in a row and anyone who has ever done experiments knows they never bloody work anyway the first time. You forget to do something or you try and kid yourself and have to do it right and so on. There’s a culture and a philosophy that we have to install in people in this country and maybe I think it starts at school, that you know, that if something doesn’t work, alright forget it. We will move on to the next part of the curriculum and so on. It would be more important, I say to you, to go back, and repeat the thing all over again, and see if it works next time, or do something different. The best experiments I ever did were on a Friday afternoon after we had two pints in the pub. You go back and it was never a mistake of course because you were always sober but you did something, and something happened and you went back and you thought, cor, that was quite something’. Then you went back and that didn’t work but sometimes you just did something out of order. That was the excitement and the enthusiasm that made me a scientist. I got it at Dumfries Academy from teachers there. Some people thought I only did science because I fancied some of the women in the class at the time but it was never like that, although I did. It was because the teacher was inspirational, and that’s what makes the difference. People say to me when I meet the students I used to teach and there must have been hundreds of them, We have them down to parliament and we have an alumni day and they say “you are a great teacher”. 99% of your lecture was crap but there was that one bit that was inspirational and you said something that made me think about it, go away and grab a book and talk to people about it and so on. That’s what teaching is all about, realizing you are not going to be perfect every minute. Some of the lectures were absolutely duff of course. You hadn’t prepared them properly and so on. I once gave a lecture in the states, in Seattle, and I suddenly realized half way through it that I didn’t understand it myself and I had the guts because I was 24 at the time, to say “I am cancelling this class, I will be back tomorrow, I’ve got a bit more reading to do”. I always felt “God, that’s, shameful to do that” but when i look back now I am so glad I did. I wish I’d done it more often, sometimes, instead of trying to bluff your way through trying to explain something. We have got to inculcate that value of really, if you are going to be a good teacher, you have got to be able to say sometimes “I don’t understand it” and so on. I think that’s very, very important, because if you want young people to be honest and truthful in their experiments, and not put false points on graphs and that kind of thing, then it’s very important.

The Importance of Projects

I also remember too at university when people came to do projects - I remember the fight against conventional academics in Norwich, when I first went there coming from the States, bald, brassy, arrogant and so on, coming from Harvard and Yale and all that stuff, they say this is how we should do it, and they would say, no, no, no, you’ve got to do practical classes. We said, well, forget practical classes, why not allow these young people to do projects and you know, when they did projects, they came alive. They absolutely came alive. They went, to the ‘John Innes’ and would work in a lab there. Never get a paper out of it necessarily unless they stayed on for the summer and so on, but they really started to learn what it was all about. It wasn’t this raw teaching and learning with you drawing graphs. They actually did it. We won the argument that they all must do a project and some of them didn’t want to get their hands dirty. Fine, they wanted to do a literature project, second class, absolutely second class wanting to do a literature project. I remember one young woman who did the genetics of women for me. This was in the heady days of women's rights and all this kind of stuff and she was looking at it to see if there were biological differences and all that stuff. That’s what she was interested in. She researched everything that had ever been written in 17 different languages and so on. I met her and she said it really, really stimulated her and she’s in social work, caring now or something like that but being able to develop something gave her not just confidence but the ability to be able to go out and know how to get knowledge and so on, and find it. She didn’t actually have to work at the bench in her subject. She couldn’t have done that anyway but it was so important she was looking for the literature. They can write just as good essays as the person who puts six graphs and so on. It was a real fight and when it came to classification they would never get a first for a literature project, as we used to call it, because the other academics when it was all being screened and monitored, and so on would argue against it. Well that’s easy, you just get the book and so on, these other people have been in the lab and I said yeah but they have been in the lab rigging the bloody data. You know they don’t know any different. They just want to get marks and getting away from that marking system, the best thing that could happen in universities, if for once, we keep arguing in higher education, we did away with this rubbish first class, second class, two-ones, two-twos, and so on. I have marked thousands of scripts in my time, I have never really, honestly, and I can say this now, knowing the difference between 68% and 70%. I have known a first class answer when I’ve seen it, in fact, I had one lad, we used to give them a some project thing, “how do you explain this data?”. He got it 100% right and it had just come out in a journal called proceedings of natural sciences and I said “you sod, you must have read that this week” and he hadn’t actually. He’d worked it out,and now he is a professor over in Belfast, so it was right. I was doubting it as a teacher that anybody could be that bright, brighter than you even, how dare they, you know. It’s the same with all the PHD students I had. They used to come out with some wonderful, wonderful ideas, but they became my idea. This afternoon I just had a meeting with all these eminent professors from Cambridge and all over the place, and I think that they are trustees and so on and when I said something like that they all laughed because they knew exactly that that is how it is in laboratories. The young people themselves who are doing the work often have a brilliant idea. It’s our job to encourage it. Make them possessive about it. Make them feel like they can create ideas. Your job is to say how can you improve that, and that’s what good teaching is, and that’s where it comes from the bottom up. The people that are going through it can come up with the ideas, and we don’t often encourage that.

The Research Assessment Exercise

The research assessment exercise, I have hated it from the very first day, it came in and I am somebody who drove a department from a grade 3 to a grade 5, and did I make enemies. I tell you this, that the department is still in the top 10 of in the nation because it got that 5. I never believed in it but that was the system you had to play it to do your job. Its like having to take a pension and all that with companies you don’t want to and so on when you are in certain jobs and my question this week was Is there going to be a research assessment exercise in 2008? I have a sneaky suspicion that there is not going to be one, so all these universities who are spending time recruiting people, taking money and putting it into this department so that this department keeps its 5 star or whatever grade its going to be. All that could just be negated and the sooner the government says no, the better. I tell you what. I think academia would welcome it. You know yourself whose doing good work. You mix, people go up they go down and so on. Very few people are duffers. There are some and they need a good pushing now and again but in general they are all pretty good. I think the students know that as well. I could always ask the students who were the rubbish lecturers. They knew, they knew the ones who fired them up and so on and I think that we have to encourage that kind of thing to encourage the people not to play this game of being frightened even the lecturers to get involved in this exciting and enthusiastic process that takes place in higher education.

Ingenuity and Creativity

I wanted to say something too about Martin Reece’s article, recently because he talked about all the new technologies that are coming on board, and he hit all the right buttons. Climate change, we are going to have carbon capture and all this kind of stuff but you see none of that will happen unless scientists and politicians get it together, because I know that the politicians talk a good talk about climate change, but there’s very, very little going to go into that. In fact I gave a talk to a group of people from Ontario universities and in part I’ve written about this, it was about this two cultures thing and they agreed that its right across the world. This process going on where politicians talk the talk and the scientists get on with it and then just pass it on. Martin Reece was talking about the atomic bomb and how scientists should feel guilty about it. Well I feel funny about that actually, because they are living in a world where it’s kudos and the department and so on has got to be up there and if they can get research money to do this, then fine. I often say to vice chancellors when I speak to him. You know, if you want to make money today work on stem cells. Now I don’t know if stem cells are going to cure Alzheimers, Parkinson's disease, whatever but I know in the political game at the minute, that’s where the money is going. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think that’s the way it should be handled. That certain political momenta decides what research should be done. I want people to do the crazy things, to have the idea, to try something on and so on and to be encouraged to do that. I think all too often we have these targets, and these standards we have to reach and so on for this curriculum and that curriculum which inhibit this ingenuity and creativity that people have. If we don’t have that, then I think we are going to suffer in the next ten, twenty years with a generation of young people, who are pretty 'dumbley-dumbley-dumb', who just do the safe things and don’t do the excitement and take that on.

New Schools and Old Universities

I wanted to say something too about a recent debate we had about education. Gosh, that was an interesting one, very interesting that the government wins it with conservative support. Now, I have no doubt that privatization and private schools are very much part of some peoples idea of what it’s really all about. In fact I see today there’s been a report out by Sir Peter Lample which shows you that most journalists and a large percentage of politicians have been to private schools and have been to Oxford or Cambridge. Now I have got a chip on the shoulder, you probably still have it too. We got it in Scotland I guess, not that we couldn’t have gone to Oxford or Cambridge in terms of the results but we would never ever have thought of doing it. I could never have stood up in Dumfries if I had gone to Oxford and Cambridge. If you came back and said I have got a double blue they would have said well what’s a double blue. Whatever it is you get at Oxford and Cambridge. I used to play football for St. Mirren so I know they hate that. You’re always tempted to go down to England and play but the number of people in higher positions in this country and it happens in academia too, and I saw it absolutely through the debate on top up fees. The percentage and the debate on education. The people who were kind of wanting the trust schools, kind of private, run by religious sect or whatever it is, doesn’t matter. They were separate. They could go their own way. Set up their own governors. Set up their own head teacher and so on, and they would have a little parental group here who would decide on things, thank you very much. Come to the Christmas party but they wouldn’t have control over it and this is the way that Andrew Adonis and others in the government are trying to take it. We fought and fought and fought against it, and I tell you, deep, deep down, I think most people agree with us. Well OK, we have got private schools, but increasing them, in this kind of subtle way, is not going to give us the education process that we want. It’s OK if people want to spend money on them, fine but I think, you know and I worked with Fiona Miller on this and we argued all the time about the comprehensive system and the successes that come through that system. Of course they go up and down and they are monitored and some are bad and they come out of failure, those that have been in. But in general, I think the have done us very good in terms of producing an educated bunch of people in this country and so on. I think, you know, that if we are really honest about it and I don’t want to preach old style socialism or anything like that, it’s just that these organizations have a certain momentum of their own and how they work together. Gosh, don’t you know it in higher education. I knew it absolutely on the top up fees. I had a bunch of vice chancellors on my side; you guess what universities they were at. Brighton, Bournemouth, you know, not real universities are they? So said the Russell group. You know, we are the real universities and so on and that stratification is still there in our education system and that is the political battle that some of us got into politics to try and put right. How you can do it, of course, is to either have a massive revolution in parliament, which is very unlikely in my opinion, or more likely to happen is that young people are going to press through the system and know that from the schooling they have got. They have been able to do it without the private facilities that the private schools have got and so on and it does, does happen. Many, many people I know who are doing well too, not the majority in some professions, have got there the hard way because they are bright and they have kept at it, and have been encouraged by their parents and so on, and by the teachers that have taught them, and I think that kind of education, that was my education.

The Importance of Manual Skills

Dumfries Academy was kind of grammar school in a way I was at an academy when I was younger. You know academies are sneered at down here in England. My brother went to the local high school where he learnt woodwork. He learnt those kind of skills and so on and I kind of admire him because I tried once to make a fish slice and it wobbled. I couldn’t get it right you know and they just learnt these kind of skills and so on. They were demeaned because they went to the high school but yet the skills they had were very, very important to the society that we live in. And I tell you this, if you look at it now, the number of people we are going to need with high education degrees. Not a big percentage actually, we are still going to need other people who are not going to be the bankers. All that stuff who are actually going to do the vocational things that are very important for our society. We are actually going to need that.I think the kind of work you guys are doing is so important in inspiring that in people and actually telling them that this is valuable in our society. It’s the valuation of activities that really astonishes me. I look at some people who are ministers and I think ‘cor, gee’, you know, they have no experience at all but you know they can handle it in terms of being articulate and so on but they haven’t got that skill to manage and handle things like people who come from a different background have got and so on. So many of the people I see in politics come from that higher education grouping. Oxford, Cambridge and so on, the majority, you know, still.

School Selection and Cooperation

And education whether it be 11+, 11+! There we were, many of us came in to destroy the 11+. It comes up in that debate. I couldn’t believe it, you know. Colleagues of mine were allowing it still to happen. Kent is full of it. People are selected on the basis of a really, really stupid exam. I won’t go into details although I investigated it and spoke on it. We say get rid of the whole damned thing and lets get rid of that kind of stupid selection process that goes on in our schools which taints people for their whole lives because they failed some stupid exam. I think that’s absolutely wrong. My experience of life is that people go up and down and they come on and so on. Learning is something for life. The nice thing I like in Parliament is that I am always learning. I can go to a meeting at 11 Downing Street and listen to these whizz people who run airlines and so on. OK, you don’t have to like them, you don’t have to sleep with them but at the end of the day you have to listen to them because they have got the experience and the knowledge. I think it’s the same in science too. That many young people do need that kind of support and help but they need the encouragement. My wife always says to me, “your value to your students was that you had always been through it in America, you knew the system and how it worked, and it was your job to encourage them to see through it”. You know, all this magic stuff that went on, let them see that its hard work, that it’s a grind. That it doesn’t always work. They’ve got to learn new technologies. They’ve got to understand each other. They’ve got to work with each other. They mustn't mess up each others experiments which some of them always did just to get ahead of the game, but theres no need for that. Co-operation was so important and I think we’re much the same. Me and some of you lot in trying to inspire young people to do that. I don’t care if they win a Nobel prize. What I do care about is that their skills, their knowledge, their interest, their enthusiasm, their creativity is supported and helped, and its not pushed aside because they failed an exam when they were 11. It’s not pushed aside because they were in the wrong university at the wrong time and so on, or was it the university. There’s still talk about that and I must say some of my colleagues want to go back to the Poly you know, forget it. You know, we have moved on from that. Just make sure they’ve all got money to do research. I mean, I know lots of places that haven’t got money to do the research, it’s disgraceful. There’s bright people who can do it anywhere and we need to treat them all the same and research assessment exercises are biased to give the rich even more and so on. So that is socialist, that is absolutely wrong and I shall fight against that as long as I am in parliament.

Inquiry-based Learning

So anyhow, I’ll finish with this, that there was a book out a few years ago by Bill Bryson which was absolutely inspirational for me. Here was somebody who knew damn all about science, who suddenly started asking about what is a tectonic plate. Even John Prescott’s heard of it. He doesn’t understand it but its OK. He’s asking the questions and Bryson’s book is full of things like that where he actually, later in life even, investigated things to try and understand natural phenomena wherever they are. Our young people are inspired by programmes on the media, the Attenborough stuff and all that. They ask questions. They’ve got enthusiasm and you know they get repelled often within the system at school. They say “Oh you don’t want to ask that kind of question”. I always remember when stem cells, we were fighting in parliament to allow us to do the research. I went to a school in Norwich and all these kids were saying “what about stem cells? “Oh, we’ve heard about it, yeh”. What is it? “It’s all these funny cells” Where do you learn about that?” They learnt it in the religious class and not the science class and that said it for me and that's why at my think tank I can’t wait for our religious debate with the creationists in America. When Stevie Jones and I go over there to the press club we are going to give them hell. Thank you very much.

Questions

Dr Stan Owers August 2006