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Upping the Engineering Talent Pipeline

Posted on 6 July 2025 by Athene Donald

The Government’s recently published Modern Industrial Strategy has a lot to say about skills. For instance, it commits to

‘enhance skills and increase access to talent by reforming the skills and employment support system to create a strong pipeline into the IS-8’

and it specifically identifies the need for

‘an increase in technology training and boosts for engineering, digital, and defence skills’.

There are many aspects that Skills England will need to get right if these aspirations are to come to fruition, and these will need to be implemented across all the different stages of the education system.

One of the problems facing an area such as engineering is that it is not in the school curriculum and neither students nor teachers may be well informed about the breadth of opportunities the discipline offers. Careers advice in schools remains distinctly patchy, A 2022 review of careers guidance for the Sutton Trust found that of classroom teachers in state schools, only 40% were aware of the Gatsby benchmarks, the framework for careers guidance. Although the figure was significantly higher (94%) for senior school leaders, this suggests effective guidance is not making its way into the classroom. It needs to and work has to be done to make sure this happens in both primary and secondary.

A further challenge for engineering and computing is that they both have some of the largest gender imbalances in both qualifications and the workforce. Early years stereotyping is endemic in our society, and too many young girls cannot imagine that they could fit in and/or be welcome in these fields. Much more effort needs to be put in to countering these stereotypes in the classroom from the earliest years (although that’s no quick fix for the problem across wider society). Teachers need to be aware of the pitfalls casual stereotyping creates.

As Alex Knight, the winner of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2025 Rooke Award for excellence in public promotion of engineering has said

‘Children form beliefs early: about themselves, about the world, and about their place in it. By the age of seven, many have already decided what’s ‘for boys’ and what’s ‘for girls’. Engineering is still seen as a man’s world, so girls start to believe they don’t belong there….. But when a young girl meets an engineer who is a woman she can relate to, something extraordinary happens. That girl begins to imagine herself in the same role. Engineering becomes not an abstract discipline, but a human one.’

She urges female engineers to get into the classroom, arguing that, despite the low numbers of women in the field, there would nevertheless be plenty for every primary school to have one come to talk to the children. EngineeringUK is leading a partnership with a collective mission of significantly increasing the number of girls in education pathways to engineering and technology at age 18.  But changing the whole school ethos, as the IOP has demonstrated needs to be achieved, is hard work.

Not all routes into engineering careers require a degree, and the UK is an outlier in the OECD in how many adults possess Level 4 and Level 5 qualifications. The same Sutton Review of Careers guidance mentioned earlier found that post-GCSE’s nearly half (46%) of 17- and 18-year olds (year 13) say they have received a large amount of information on university routes during their education, compared to just 10% who say the same for apprenticeships.

The incentives in the current system encourage schools to prioritise university routes. Furthermore, FE Colleges find it hard to recruit staff to teach in shortage areas such as engineering, because lecturers with relevant qualifications can earn so much more outside colleges. Here the Industrial Strategy has positive news for the sector, with promised investment in colleges – for both equipment and infrastructure – and targeted retention incentive payments for early career FE teachers in STEM. It is high time – as the 2019 Augar Review said in no uncertain terms – that FE Colleges were not seen as the poor relations in the post-16 landscape, because they are crucial for so many teenagers. Skills England need to turn the promises from the Industrial Strategy paper into a coherent strategy, taking the warm words about, for instance, launching Technical Excellence Colleges, and turning it into a landscape that works.

Somewhere in this post-16 landscape a grip needs to be got on T Levels. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) may not be an obvious feeder group of commentators into this space, but their report this past week regarding T Levels has obvious implications. T Levels were – and are – intended to be a vocational course to help students into skilled employment, higher study or apprenticeships. This is clearly of relevance to the supply of engineers of all types. The qualification’s introduction has not been smooth: their numerical take-up has been far below the original intentions, finding the required 45 day work-based placement has been a challenge for some, and drop out rates have been high as well as success rates relatively low. However, the scheme is set to grow, or at least, that’s still the wish.

One of the problems the recent PAC report highlighted was the lack of awareness of the existence of T Levels, citing that in 2023 only 50% of students in years 9 to 11 were aware of T Levels. If the suite of qualification is to succeed, schools should make sure that all students know of these qualifications – one T level is equivalent to 3 A Levels – and that pressure is not put on students to go the ‘gold standard’ route of A Levels. As a nation the vocational route has always been perceived as the poor relation in our education system. That is not necessarily to the benefit of individuals or the economy. But the potential limitation of finding a timely and local placement has caused frustration and stress amongst students. An expansion of the scheme will need to iron out wrinkles.

Finally, there is the major issue of up- and re-skilling adults. With many jobs potentially under threat due to automation and the increasing use of AI, this has to be a major focus. The still-to-be-put-into-operation Lifelong Learning Entitlement (currently due to start in January 2027) may provide some solution. However, just because a loan is available does not necessarily mean an adult with dependents and commitments will feel able to drop out of work to study. In both digital and technical (including engineering) free 16 week-long bootcamps are on offer, with the money now being devolved locally. These too have their problems. One of the key attractions was intended to be a guaranteed job interview at the end, but the Government’s own evaluation has shown many participants have found this to be illusory or untargeted. For some participants, their employer facilitated attendance; many others were unemployed at the time of signing up. Whether 16 weeks is adequate to achieve desired goals will clearly depend on both the knowledge-base of the participant and the end point of the course.

Just focussing on this one sector from the industrial strategy, it is clear that at every stage of the pipeline works needs to be done to ensure an appropriate supply of talent. Whether looking at the issue from a Department for Education, a Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Department of Defence, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government or a Department for Business and Trade perspective, there is work to be done. That engineering crosses so many departments and domains can only complicate the issues. But a ‘modern’ industrial strategy needs to get this right.

Posted in careers, education, Lifelong learning entitlement, Skills England, stereotyping, T Levels | Leave a comment

What I Read In June

Posted on 6 July 2025 by Henry Gee

Catherine Chidgey: The Book Of Guilt Britain in the 1970s, full of ’70s nostalgia, but in an altered universe in which Hitler was assassinated in 1943, and the Second World War ended in a treaty in which the UK shared some of Nazi Germany’s darker scientific secrets. Our scene is set in what at first looks like an orphanage for boys in a grand but fading country house. All the inmates have left except for a final set of pre-teen triplets, cared for by Mothers Morning, Afternoon and Night, who teach them out of the Book of Knowledge (an out-of-date Children’s Encyclopaedia); record their dreams in the Book of Dreams, their transgressions in the Book of Guilt,  and who dose them with medicines to protect them against some mystery illness. All the other residents have, they believe, been promoted to a grander house in Margate, a paradise for children. Elsewhere, Nancy is a girl  kept by her parents as a guilty secret. The dystopia slowly winds out, mostly told through the eyes of Vincent, one of the triplets. And so the shocking horror slowly unspools. Echoes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

John Higgs: Exterminate, Regenerate As someone once said in another context, one should never underestimate the power of cheap music. And it doesn’t come much more powerful, or more cheap, than Dr Who, the long-running children’s science-fiction programme that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and again from 2005 to the present day. Higgs gives a comprehensive, readable and honest account of the genesis, exodus and revelation of the show. The book is far, far better than most effusions on popular culture, and gets into the grittier details that the show’s enormous publicity machine won’t tell you, such as the bullying, misogyny, racism and sexual harassment behind the scenes; why Christopher Eccleston left the show after just one season series; and the complex relationship between the show and the BBC that affected its content, such that stories featuring the stuffy, bureaucratic Time Lords of Gallifrey (representing BBC higher-ups) tended to happen during particularly fraught periods in this pas-de-deux. He also analyses the show’s longevity, getting into such subjects as myth. Myths tend to feature archetypes such as the Trickster, and Higgs portrays the first iterations of the Doctor in this light. Myths are also not required to be consistent. Only the TARDIS and the signature tune have been constant elements from the first episode: even the Doctor is changeable. Philip Ball missed a trick as Dr Who isn’t discussed in his book The Modern Myths (reviewed here) where he makes the case that literary quality is in inverse proportion to mythic potential. Some Whovian myths are, however, exploded. Terry Nation didn’t get the idea for the Daleks from a volume of an encyclopaedia labelled DAL-LEK. And a reluctance of most of the (white, male) BBC staff to take on a show they felt was beneath their dignity, not a desire for diversity, explains why the very first episode, broadcast on 23 November 1963, was directed by a gay Asian and produced by a Jewish woman, nor that the originator of the show, if there was any single one, was Jewish. Higgs doesn’t make the leap, entirely obvious to me if perhaps nobody else, from these facts to the situation of the Doctor as a wanderer exiled from his home planet, though he could have done: in the same way that it was Jewish writers and artists who created comic-book superheroes who, like the Doctor, would sweep in, right wrongs, and stand up for the underdog. After-images, as it were, of the Golem of Old Prague, a prototype cartoon superhero in itself.  After reading this excellent book I wallowed in the entire Audible collection entitled Dr Who at the BBC, which is mostly fairly dull and repetitive, but features a few nuggets such as a radio play about Delia Derbyshire, the musician and engineer at  the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who turned Ron Grainer’s original score into the futuristic soundscape that’s now instantly familiar (you know the one, tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom woo-woo); and another radio play about a Dr Who fan convention in Belfast during the Troubles.

Stuart Turton: The Devil and the Dark Water A maritime romance and whodunit with a frisson of horror from the Age of Sail, this, so something for everyone. No swash is left unbuckled as the Saardam, a Dutch East-Indiaman, sets out from Batavia to Amsterdam under a horrible curse, that only the unlikely pair of sleuth Samuel Pipps and his monolithic-yet-sensitive sidekick Arent Hayes have any hope of unraveling. It was all far too convoluted for me, but I enjoyed the ride. Belatedly I see that Turton is another author with a story in The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) but one that didn’t stay with me quite as vividly as those of Natasha Pulley or Jess Kidd.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: Echo Taking horror from the oceans to the high mountains, this is a love story between two unlikely people. Manhattan socialite Sam Avery and Dutch beefcake Nick Gievers have been  inseparable since pecs were flexed in the gym. Sam would rather mix cocktails, but Nick’s passion ia a good deal more rugged. He is a skilled mountaineer, and the more remote and dangerous the mountain, the better. One day, Nick returns from a rarely-explored peak in the Alps, his face horribly disfigured, his companion lost, and bringing with him an ancient horror that soon spreads. Only Sam seems immune, but in coming to terms with Nick’s new life, he must confront ancient horrors of his own. I loved this book (the mountaineering sequences were especially absorbing), but it was, perhaps, somewhat overlong, and the ending rather too 2001-a-Space-Odyssey for a novel that also references Spandau Ballet.

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Atomic Human – or Atomic Man?

Posted on 28 June 2025 by Athene Donald

I’m not convinced by the idea of AI throwing everyone out of jobs or taking over the world, but I thought I should read up some thoughtful writing on the subject, so I turned to Neil Lawrence’s 2024 book (recently released in paperback), The Atomic Human. I learned a lot from it, but I was struck by the meandering tales he introduces of characters from the past, ranging from Socrates, via his grandfather to the Terminator. It wasn’t that these stories didn’t have a point. Of course they all did, but the characters wove themselves into the fabric of the text in ways that sometimes seemed to me to obscure more than they helped.

I found this mode of writing frustrating, and not necessarily illuminating. Then I read the review of the book by Adam Rutherford, which appeared in the Guardian last year, and realised how absolutely right Adam was about the unhealthy preponderance of great white men of the past (as well as the Terminator with, apparently, 16 appearances dotted around the text) in these stories. As he puts it

‘In a chapter called Enlightenment, we veer from Great Man classic tales of Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill and Stephen Hawking, down a cul-de-sac visiting William Blake and Michelangelo, then to Lewis Carroll and Bertrand Russell, and all the way to Elon Musk, via many more.’

That is a fine old collection of the great and good, but, as he goes on to say

‘I scanned the index and found that 15 women are named in this 448-page book (16 if you count the goddess Hera), as well as the mention of two groups of anonymous women (Royal Navy Wrens, and the women of Bletchley Park). Winnie-the-Pooh, a fictional bear who as far as I am aware, did not make any pronouncements on intelligence research, or the AI revolution, is mentioned 17 times.’

I will admit that, despite all I have said and written about the role of women in science, I had not picked up the gender bias in the text; the woman who appeared most I think was Amelia Earhart. So conditioned am I – along with most of the population but unlike Adam – I had failed to spot that women were all but invisible. The frequent appearance of Winnie-the-Pooh I had spotted. If I were an adolescent girl. maybe I would have been more aware of the absence of role models I could identify with and thereby received an unwanted subliminal message.

Yet, looking more widely away from the book, the few women who did get opportunities to shine in the scientific and technical world from the late nineteenth century on, are beginning to be allowed to come out of the woodwork. Around the time I finished Lawrence’s book, I came across the following on Bluesky

Quantum women

This post highlights a group of women from the 1920s who are finally getting some attention for what they contributed to quantum physics. As time goes on, more and more women are being identified as having made significant if, in general, unsung contributions.

Locally, I could identify Katherine Blodgett, an American who came to Cambridge to work at the Cavendish in 1924 under Ernest Rutherford, with the support of Irving Langmuir, her boss at GE based in Schenectady in upstate New York. She was the first woman to gain a PhD from the Cavendish, so you might have expected her to appear in the 2016 voluminous history of the department written by Malcolm Longair (its former head) Maxwell’s Enduring Legacy. But no, there is no mention of her at all. Some years later (2023) the department did try to rectify this error by writing a blogpost about her, identifying her seminal role  (although its appearance is somewhat marred by the fact the hypertext relating to the photos has not been correctly formatted so the photo of her sitting in the midst of a sea of men is not online).

However, I knew about her long before that, because I had to walk past the wall of photos of generations of graduate students every day to get to the canteen or library. She stood out, along with a few other women (sometimes in very fine, if less than convenient hats) from around the turn of the century. They, presumably did not get PhDs, not least because no one did at Cambridge until 1919. But, beyond the photos, Langmuir-Blodgett films were something I lectured about, and some of my research students used them in their research (they are monolayers, or multiple monolayers, of surfactants laid down on glass or liquid surfaces). Sadly, the Cavendish cannot lay claim to their invention as this was done back at GE and not as part of Blodgett’s PhD.

I think this episode about Blodgett is symptomatic of how so much of our scientific history is narrated: great men of science, with the few women who were involved traditionally being invisible but at last increasingly being brought into focus.

For instance, the staff who did all the calculations at the Harvard Observatory with Edward Pickering were all female from 1880 onwards (a group sometimes unkindly referred to as Pickering’s Harem). This wasn’t a great act of liberalism on his part, but simply because they were cheap. According to David Grier’s book (When Computers were Human), Pickering apparently said

‘a skillful [astronomical] observer should never be obliged to spend time on what could be done equally well by an assistant at a much lower salary.’

Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt were two of these women, whose names are now much more widely known in the field, for their seminal work in classification of the stars and measurement of distance respectively. They were far more than simply cheap labour.

Pickering’s argument on cost was essentially the same one that had been made by William Herschel when he applied – successfully – to Queen Charlotte for funding for his sister Caroline to work as his assistant, more than 100 years earlier.

‘Nor could I have been prevailed upon to mention now, were it not for her evident use in the observations that are to be made…and the increase of the annual expense which, if my Sister were to decline, that office would probably amount to nearly one hundred pounds more for an assistant.’

As has been seen in the case of female composers (and as I wrote about previously on this blog), more and more significant women from the past are finally getting some attention in orchestral programmes and on Radio 3. It is high time women like Katherine Blodgett find their place in write-ups of science’s history. Whether if Neil Lawrence had tried harder to find anecdotes of women who would have fitted into his narrative he could have increased the number of references to women in his book I can’t tell. But I suspect it ought to have been possible to weave in Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to the development of frequency hopping (literally, not just a pretty face in her case) or some other notable names such as Ada Lovelace, Wendy Hall, Grace Hopper or Marissa Mayer, to name just a few who come immediately to my mind.

It would be nice to think in general authors would try harder to diversify their anecdotes, at least when considering the past half century or so. We don’t always need to quote Churchill or Newton, particularly if we are discussing a new field like AI. However, knowing Neil a little, I am quite sure if writing the book again but with the memory of Rutherford’s review, he would want to find more female examples to quote. I suspect he, just like me when I read the book, simply failed to notice the bias because culturally we are all so used to it that it is invisible. That’s what has to change to move towards an equitable society.

Posted in AI, Equality, Katherine Blodgett, Neil Lawrence, Women in science | Leave a comment

Missing the bus – a photographic story

Posted on 23 June 2025 by Frank Norman

Talking about social media

Almost a year ago I joined the u3a – a group for people with time on their hands. Members are mostly, but not exclusively, retired people. I have joined several groups in my local u3a branch, including a recently-formed social media group. There are eight of us in this group and we meet regularly to talk and learn from each other about aspects of social media, taking turns to lead on some topic or other. We’ve been led through Instagram, Bluesky (that was me), hashtags, design, analytics, and alt text (me again).

Last week we dived into photos: how to grab attention with a photo and how to tell a story in a photo. We were guided through this by an actual photographer who is the partner of one of the members. He talked us through some key elements of a good photo – strong colours (apparently red is good), lines, positioning key objects (centrally, or in thirds), triangular relations between groups of objects. He illustrated these features with some classic photos taken by acknowledged greats of the camera.

The challenge

He had also set us some advance homework. In preparation for the meeting each of us was asked to take a photo that told a story.

Usually I just take a photo because I think something looks interesting or amusing. I take pictures that please me due to their colours or shapes, or quirkiness. When I post photos on social media I will try to say something about each one, and sometimes use a series of photos to tell a story. But I haven’t often tried to take a single photo that tells a story, so I had to think a bit about this.  For the homework I needed to choose a theme or narrative for my photo and I decided that a missed bus would be my subject.

Millions of us take buses every day and many will have mixed feelings about them. They can be uncomfortable and frustrating, but as a non-driver I rely on buses very heavily so I am attached to my regular bus routes.

The story

I frequently take the bus between Crouch End and Muswell Hill, the W7. It’s quite frequent but can be unreliable, not least because there are so often roadworks along the route. It is famously a bus route that people love and hate, joining up two town centres that are not served by any tube or rail station.

My plan was to take a photo of a bus just leaving the bus stop on Crouch End Broadway, to encapsulate the frustration of just missing a bus. OK, it’s not a major tragedy to miss a bus but when you’re in a hurry and everything else is going wrong in the day it can be devastating.

The photo – version one

Last week I was on my way to the music library in Crouch End (where I volunteer) and I saw a W7 pulling away from the bus stop. I was short of time so I hurriedly took a photo. I was pleased because it included the Crouch End clocktower, a very recognisable local landmark. Thus the photo identified a time (from the clock) and a place. In another stroke of luck there was a yellow sign warning about the closure of one the roads on the bus route, bearing out the unruliness of the service.

A red bus leaving a bus stop

I was so pleased with this that I didn’t really look too closely at the picture. The story elements were all there and I thought I’d cracked the assignment. I was so wrong.

The judgement

At our meeting it was pointed out that my photo was a bit of a jumble – the street scene was too busy with details. As I had taken it in a hurry I’d not had time to frame it nicely or take a series from which to choose. I’d possibly nailed the story (in my head at least) but not produced a good photo. I had tried to capture an instant in time, but the chance of creating a decent photo in a single shot was rather low.

A couple of the other group members had taken some really good photos, not so much instants in time, but taking their time to choose the scene and plan the shot.

I wished that I had done justice to my subject, and to my skills. I felt I’d really missed the bus.

The photo – version two

A few days after our meeting I was back on the Broadway and decided to try again. I took a little more time choosing my vantage point. When a bus came I took a few shots, reducing the clutter in the shot and introducing some lines. I even waited for a second bus, in order to take a few more shots. I still had some traffic in the shot, but much less than before. I achieved a better positioning of the bus, the clocktower and the parade of shops curving off to the right. It’s not perfectly balanced but much better than version one.

A red bus leaving the bus stop. Clocktower and parade of shops in background.

Missing the bus in Crouch End Broadway

More people would perhaps improve it – someone running after the bus, for example. But people aren’t my strong point – I prefer buildings and scenery.

I think I’ve learnt something from the experience. It always pays to take some thinking time when setting up a shot.

Posted in Blogology, Buses, Photography | Leave a comment

Conduct Unbecoming – how can the Royal Society escape its Musk box?

Posted on 19 June 2025 by Stephen

Four months after my open letter calling on the Royal Society to take action over Elon Musk FRS’s breaches of their code of conduct had attracted thousands of signatures from the scientific community, but only a very muted response from that most learned organisation, I was beginning to think I should let the matter go. After all, Musk is no longer part of the Trump administration, his relationship with the president having exploded in spectacularly bitter fashion a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps the Royal Society was also thinking that Musk’s departure would allow them to draw a veil over all the unpleasantness stirred up by their failure to call Musk to account?

But then last week my friend Professor Andrea Stella reminded me why the issues at stake are so important. He announced that he had returned his 2014 Royal Society Faraday Prize in protest at their unwillingness to address Musk’s promotion of disinformation, his disregard for evidence, and his role in degrading the US research ecosystem. It was a bold, principled stand, inspired in part by the lecture given recently at the Royal Society by the  2024 Faraday prize winner, Professor Salim Abdool Karim.

Having now watched the lecture myself, I can see why Andrea was spurred to act.

Professor Karim is an eminent South African epidemiologist and virologist. But rather than speaking about viruses and public health, he took as his subject “Science under threat: the politics of institutionalised disinformation.” It was lucid, it was logically structured, it was evidence based, and it was a coolly devastating analysis of the tactics deployed by populists and would-be dictators (Trump, Erdoğan, Orban, Zuma…) – and their fellow-travellers – to seize power and wealth. 

The major casualties of this “state capture” are truth and the institutions that exist to uncover and protect it – our universities and the wider enterprise of science. Many of us have watched in horror as this process of capture has slowly unfolded in the US in recent months, directed by President Trump and enacted in large part by Elon Musk FRS. But not, it would seem, the Royal Society.

The title of Prof Karim’s lecture “Science Under Threat” echoes the title of a statement that the Royal Society put out in the days following media reports of my open letter. But the contrast in content could not be starker. 

Karim’s lecture brought a laser-like focus to the problem, naming Trump and Musk as major players in dismantling both US science and the American aid that deploys that science to save lives. By contrast, as the months tick silently by following the Royal Society’s promise “to look at potential further actions” in response to events in the US, its statement rings increasingly hollow. 

It said it “will use its voice and the expertise of our Fellows to resist the various challenges to science,” but offered no comment on the fact that one of their own Fellows is the embodiment of those “challenges”. In opting not to deal directly with the concerns raised by Mr Musk’s actions, the Royal Society gives the impression of dispensing with the community’s values when standing up for them might involve difficult choices. It is this neglect of its responsibilities that has diminished the Society’s reputation among many within the scientific community that it claims to represent. 

Defending the Royal Society’s stance over Musk, its President has asked the community to focus “on what unites us rather that what divides us” instead of getting embroiled in political matters. That’s an admirable sentiment, but it has to recognise that the unity of the scientific community is founded on shared values and norms. As Professor Karim has shown so eloquently, in a world awash with the politics of lies and disinformation, it is more important than ever that institutions of science to speak up for discourse that is rooted in evidence and truth. The Royal Society cannot dodge its duty by pretending that all political questions lie outside its purview.

For many of us, this episode has been a sad turn for an organisation that has built an international reputation as a bastion of science over the past 350 years. How might the Royal Society find a way to recover? 

The beginnings of an answer can be found in one of Prof Karim’s slides:

Karim-combat-disinformation

So far, in its efforts to address the Musk issue the Royal Society has stumbled over each of these five steps. Yes, it has issued a statement; and yes, it has allocated a tranche of public money to attract international scholars, including those fleeing persecution in the USA. But overall, it has grievously misjudged the moment and the scale of the threats to science and scientific freedom from a US administration in which one of its own Fellows has played a leading role.

The Royal Society needs to pick itself up, acknowledge the injury, and take specific measures to repair its standing.

First, it needs to demonstrate that it can deal effectively with the conundrum created by Mr Musk’s behaviour. The outcome of the correspondence on this issue between Musk and the incoming President, Sir Paul Nurse, should be made public – even if it has come to nothing. The Royal Society cannot continue to hide behind appeals to confidentiality when its code of conduct has been breached so openly and flagrantly. It has to be better at communicating with the community it claims to represent.

Second, the Royal Society must ensure it is not caught out again by one of its Fellows pivoting from science to more questionable activities, political or otherwise. It now has to update its code of conduct to deal with cases where Fellows engage in behaviours that are divorced from evidence and truth-telling, while still allowing for political pluralism and robust, good-faith debate.

Finally, it should deliver on its promise of action and outline as soon as possible it plans to advocate for science amid the rising tide of misinformation. In this endeavour it might usefully ally with the social science expertise to be found at the British Academy.

A scientific community that has been greatly unsettled by the Royal Society’s fumbling of recent events will surely be encouraged by news that it is striving to learn the lessons. And so might Professors Sella and Karim.

Posted in science | Leave a comment

I asked, ChatGPT answered

Posted on 6 June 2025 by Henry Gee

I asked Chat GPT: Please recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare.

It came up … er … ‘Trumps’

A Scene from The Tempest of Tech and Throne
Act III, Scene II
A courtyard in the realm of public opinion. Enter DONALDUS, the exiled King, and ELONIUS, a merchant alchemist and master of flying chariots.

DONALDUS
What rogue is this that mounts the stars in steel,
Yet scorns the hand that lifted him aloft?
I made thee, knave! When Fortune’s tide ran low,
‘Twas I who lent the gale to fill thy sails.

ELONIUS
Thou err’st, great Trump, for I did chart my stars
Long ere thy golden tower cast its shade.
Thy boast is but the echo of thy pride,
Not coin from which I forged my wondrous works.

DONALDUS
Aye, silver-tonguèd serpent! In days gone past,
Didst thou not whisper praises in my hall?
“Most noble Donaldus,” thou didst proclaim,
“The sun itself doth envy thy bright reign.”

ELONIUS
In truth, I flattered where I feared thy wrath,
As courtiers do when kings grow tempest-toss’d.
Yet now the realm hath eyes to see thy guise—
A jester crowned, whose crown sits much askew.

DONALDUS
Thou art but a knave in merchant’s garb,
A peddler of toys and tongues of flame.
Thy wagons fly, yet still thou canst not flee
The ire of kings nor truth of loyalty.

ELONIUS
Better to craft new worlds than serve a fool.
Thy realm is tweets, thine armies bots and boasts.
Wouldst wage a war of words? Then have at thee—
But know, my ships reach stars thine eyes can’t see.

DONALDUS
Ingratitude! A sin most foul and deep!
Go then, false Elonius—fly far and fast!
Yet mark me well: no throne awaits in space,
Nor shall the people crown a lord of code.

ELONIUS (aside)
The stars are silent, yet more just than kings.
This play of power ends—I’ll write new scenes.

Exeunt, their feud echoing through the digital wind.

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What I Read In May

Posted on 5 June 2025 by Henry Gee

Once again I apologise for being late. I make no excuse for this, partly because there are too many reasons to mention. Oh all right, here’s one —  my desire to participate in the online world is waning. The same empty vessels  with the same prejudices still resonate  as loudly as they ever did. I am very tempted to leave them to it and do something more useful instead. Partly for this reason I haven’t added the usual pictures and links, and I am wondering whether I shall continue much more in this vein. Time will tell.

Paul Cooper: Fall of Civilisations I was prompted to read this as there was a glimmer of a joint book event with the author given that my latest book is similarly fin d’espèce. The event never happened, but I got the book all the same. It’s a very readable account of the decline and fall of different civilisations through the ages, and seems to be a spin-off of a podcast called Fall of Civilisations. The book definitely has that episodic feel. Each one of the fourteen chapters is a case history of the rise, decline and fall of a civilisation, from Sumer to Easter Island. It was refreshing to find details of civilisations far from the usual beaten track, such as the Khmer; the southern Indian civilisation of Vijayanagar; and the Songhai of the African Sahel. It is engagingly written, but – perhaps because of its derivation from a podcast – doesn’t quite have the coherence of, say, Collapse by Jared Diamond. So, what causes civilisations to fall? Well, it’s a number of things. Climate change (whether natural or human-caused); the exhaustion of land required to support a large population; but, mostly, the endless capacity for human societies to bash themselves in the face with their own stupidity, cupidity and vainglory.

Mark Rowlands: The Happiness of Dogs In which a professional philosopher and avocational Dog Person takes issue with the Socratic ideal that only the examined life is worth living. In the course of his exploration (and I use the word course advisedly, because one acquires in reading this book a great deal of knowledge about the current thinking on matters such as morality, motivation, sentience and so on) Rowlands shows that dogs, lacking the human ability to reflect upon themselves and their place in the world, have a more fulfilled life. It is the unexamined life, contra Socrates, that is worth living. Humans sometimes achieve a nirvanic state in which they can fleetingly ‘lose themselves’ , if, for example, they are playing sport; indulging in some hobby or activity that they love; or during sex. To quote from the Guide to Jewish Buddhist Wisdom – there is no self. But if there is no self, whose arthritis is this?  Dogs, though, find themselves in this state as a matter of course, and can do things routinely that many humans struggle to achieve even for a moment, such as full, honest love and commitment. So pupperino, so prelapsarian, and who, really, is the better off?

Jonny Sweet: The Kellerby Code is what might have happened had P. G. Wodehouse tried to write Brideshead Revisited but ended up with Vile Bodies. It concerns Edward, our mashup of Jeeves, Charles Ryder and Tony Last, who would do anything for his ungrateful friends Robert and Stanza. Collect their dry-cleaning. Get them tables at a restaurant. Be There for them at any time of day or night. And all because he has a burning and unrequited love for Stanza, whose ancestral pile of Kellerby stands in for Brideshead. Without wishing to spoil anything from this brittle, pin-sharp satirical froth, Edward – unlike Tony – laughs Last.

Tom Michell: Penguin Lessons The true story of a young Englishman who finds himself teaching at an English-style boy’s public school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1970s. On vacation across the estuary of the River Plate in Punta dal Este, Uruguay, he becomes the unlikely saviour of a penguin, the only one left alive after a colony has been fouled by an oil slick. Smuggling the penguin into Argentina where it becomes a kind of school mascot, the penguin – named Juan Salvado – provides inspiration for one and all, mostly by being a good listener. The book is charming and reminiscent of such tales as Tarka the Otter. I have heard that it is to be adapted into a magic-lantern presentation starring Steve Coogan as Juan Salvado.

Mouthy Al-Rashid: Between Two Rivers I have long been fascinated with the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, ever since I did a school project on Sumer almost half a century ago, reading the works of Samuel Noah Kramer and Georges Roux and becoming entranced with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Al-Rashid became entranced on her very first exposure to cuneiform writing, and offers a guide to the rises and falls of Mesopotamian civilisations through a unique lens. One of the many discoveries was a collection, all in the same stratigraphic level at Ur and in a palace that might have been the residence of a princess, of a series of Mesopotamian artefacts of widely divergent dates and uses. This, says Al-Rashid, could have been the earliest known museum. Al-Rashid uses these objects to tell the story of ancient Mesopotamia. I find my schoolboy interest rekindled.

James Rhodes: Instrumental The author is a renowned concert pianist who is unusual in that he came to the instrument late in life, and indeed for a period of ten years didn’t touch a keyboard at all. In this searing and very sweary memoir, the author recounts how his mind and body were scarred by sustained physical and sexual abuse from a gym teacher over a period of five years between the ages of five and ten. This led to a very uncertain life in which his deep psychological trauma remained — and still remains — unhealed. It also led to back problems caused by the spinal damage resulting from the repeated violent penetration of the anus of a five-year-old by an adult male penis. This is occasionally a very difficult read (or listen) and leaves one recoiling with rage at those adults who violate the young and the defenceless, and how society repeatedly fails to do much about it. Oh, and there’s some lovely music.

Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks Another month, another highly imaginative novel from Natasha Pulley. This one is set in the same fictional universe as The Watchmaker of Filigree Street but apart from a couple of scenes with the main protagonist of that book, the setting is very different. The scene is the early nineteenth century, and an British expedition is sent to Darkest Peru to steal cuttings of the cinchona tree for transport to Ceylon, so the quinine can be used to treat malaria ravaging the Indian subcontinent. The expedition makes its way over the high Andes into a region of dreamlike fantasy, where people with various disabilities and disfigurements live in New Bethlehem (hence Bedlam), a colony set on three tall islands (hence Stacks), set in a wide river, where magic is real and statues appear to move. The style is very much the Boy’s Own Adventure of tales such as King Solomon’s Mines (though with more modern sensibilities) with nods to Heart of Darkness and — dare I say it — the chilling Weeping Angels from Dr Who. Each one of Pulley’s novels has its own flavour, even if some are set in the same fictional setting. Whereas The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was crisp and telegraphic, The Bedlam Stacks is richly weird. The Half-Life of Valery K takes place in the Soviet Union of the 1960s — and The Mars House is set on, well, Mars. There are, however, things in common. The characterisation is sensitive; there is quite often a bromance between the two male leads; and all the novels feature at least one mention of an octopus.

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Skills, What Skills?

Posted on 30 May 2025 by Athene Donald

The answer to many of today’s problems seems to lie in the magic word ‘skills’, but this word can be used to mean so many different things, depending on audience and context, that in itself it is far from sufficient to cure anything. Yet, it is absolutely right to focus on the general area as one that needs attention, it’s just that it needs so much attention it might be better if we could find a new, more discerning vocabulary.

To some, skills means a technical skill: say that of a plumber or an electrician, whereas to others it might mean ‘soft skills’, such as teamwork and communication. The skills level could refer to someone with a PhD or someone who left school with few formal qualifications at all. It could mean foundational skills such as numeracy or literacy, or advanced skills such as operating a clean room or flow cytometry equipment. And who the provider of such skills should be will obviously depend on which skills we’re talking about. Certainly, all of schools, FE Colleges and universities need to be included in the list of providers, as well as employers.

If the work of Skills England is to progress, as they finally move out of their shadow form into solid reality, they have to know what challenges they need to face up to. Their new Board, announced this week, has their work cut out for them. Their remit is potentially vast, charged with: bringing coherence to the current incoherent state of play; working out where the ‘skills gaps’ are (which begs the question of which sorts of skills); shaping technical education to respond to the current needs, including how the new Growth and Skills Levy (the new name for the Apprenticeship Levy) can be spent; and provide advice on how this will feed into a clear plan appropriate for a growth economy. No small order then.

Under the old Apprenticeship Levy there had been a steady drift towards higher level qualifications at the expense of fresh school leavers, and already it is clear this will no longer be permissible: formally, level 7 (i.e. Masters Level) apprenticeships will only be available to those aged 21 and under, in essence stopping this route. Such a change was advocated earlier in the year by Alison Wolf in her policy primer Saving Apprenticeships, a publication containing, as she put it to me in a private conversation, ‘far more than you ever wanted to know about apprentices’. It is indeed a comprehensive discussion of the state of play at the time of writing (it was published at the start of this year).  She wanted a clear distinction between these higher level apprentices, which she saw as essentially employers accessing CPD on the cheap for their employees, and apprenticeships enabling youngsters to get their foot on the job ladder or adults seeking to gain new, sub-degree, qualifications and skills.

Adult education has long been a poor child of the education system. Gone are the days of easy access to multiple evening classes provided locally to allow those who had struggled at school to have a second chance at gaining qualifications. Money is too tight in the sector for much to be available. Furthermore, particularly at FE Colleges, there is often a shortage of teachers. But if (and so far it is an ‘if’, as it’s not really happened substantially yet as people try to work out how to make best use of it) AI is going to remove many jobs, there will be a pressing need for adults to retrain for where the jobs still are. In many more technical areas, FE teachers are in short supply because the pay is so dismal compared with what they could earn elsewhere (as is true for Physics teachers in schools). Indeed, FE lecturers are paid badly by any standards, typically about £10,000 less than an experienced school teacher.

With the plans for revitalising the construction industry workforce recently announced, adult learners will potentially benefit from £14 million of adult skills funding for construction to be devolved to local mayors. This initiative is expected to support up to 5,000 additional adult learners, and new level 2 courses relevant to the sector will be set up. So specific goals for the revised Growth and Apprenticeship levy are beginning to emerge.

Plans such as these are all very well, but every apprenticeship – at whatever level – needs an employer to take them on and to cover much of the cost, including salary. At present, there are far more people wishing to start an apprenticeship than openings available. The construction industry works largely with small firms covering, perhaps, just one or two specialities (electrical, plumbing and so on). These typically act as sub-contractors as part of a larger job and may well struggle to cope with trainin someone just starting out, not to mention being put off by the complexity of the current course landscape (anyhow limited by local availability and transport), funding mechanisms and overall bureaucracy. So, there are many challenges in ensuring a steady supply of SMEs willing and able to take a school-leaver (or, indeed, an adult) on an apprenticeship which will need to be ironed out if the ‘skills’ arena is to progress as the economy needs.

Thus, although the advent of Skills England, and the direction of travel implied by both the Growth and Opportunity Missions, suggest an ecosystem that is changing, the nature of that change and the effectiveness of new initiatives, structures and any new funding to handle the ‘skills’ agenda remains to be seen. Explicit disaggregation of what ‘skills’ are, so that in any context it is clear everyone is talking about the same thing, will be required if appropriate interventions can be successfully introduced as part of any new strategy.

Posted in Alison Wolf, apprenticeships, careers, education, FE Colleges, Growth and Skills Levy | Comments Off on Skills, What Skills?

Choosing Your Image

Posted on 12 May 2025 by Athene Donald

We all know people who seem quintessentially comfortable in their own skins, who effortlessly fit in to whatever group they want to belong to and reign supreme in their world (at least socially). But, note my use of the word ‘seem’. It is worth pondering whether that is their own lived reality.

I’m prompted to this train of thought by hearing a Radio 3 presenter discuss Edward Elgar as someone who ‘often felt an outsider’. His reputation now implies that he represents the height of Edwardian ‘pomp and circumstance’, the imperial zeitgeist. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing, he would seem to have been right inside the system of the day. Yet, as a self-taught musician, that was apparently not his own sense of self. He felt an outsider, because he hadn’t been trained in the formal schools of music like his peers.

I can think of many colleagues who occasionally have let their masks slip to let their insecure inner self creep out. The amazingly successful professor, with prizes a-plenty to their name, who clearly was damaged by being a nerd at their posh public school where the ‘in set’ were the Rugby players. Knowing that, I could see how he always felt that he was on the outside, however much others felt that’s where they were while he was a key central player in the research environment.  It didn’t make him an easy person for others to interact with. Or the Fellow of that grandest of Cambridge Colleges, Trinity, who admitted he never felt he truly belonged because he had been educated elsewhere, whereas many on the fellowship were Trinity through and through. The College may have changed (after all, its current Master Sally Davies was not Cambridge educated at all), but that feeling of being an outsider will probably go with him to the grave.

Or there was the senior colleague to whom I was once unburdening myself of the feeling of not fitting in as a female physicist, who startled me by saying when things went wrong for him, or when people were rude, he tried not to believe it was because he was a Jew. Despite having known him and worked closely with him for many years, I’d never known (or indeed thought about) his religious affiliation. For most of us, at least for some if not all of the time, there will be some fear, niggling or much bigger, that everyone else fits in but you have some stain on your pedigree that somehow means you are only on the outside looking in, different from everyone else.

Reading Simon Fanshawe’s book, The Power of Difference, has introduced the word ‘covering’ into my lexicon. I knew the concept because, now I know it is a name, I know how I have used it at different times. It’s not dissimilar to ‘code-switching’, to move between different manners of speaking (something Michelle Obama discusses as a black woman navigating a predominantly white world in her book The Light We Carry); or to the ‘masking’ behaviour of autistic girls Gina Rippon discusses in her recent book The Lost Girls of Autism. Whatever you call it, you’re probably familiar with behaviour along these lines – at least unless you’re incredibly sure of yourself. The feeling you need to act a role in order to fit in with whatever group you’re currently amongst.

The time I remember doing this best, or perhaps I mean worst as I look back at how I behaved with some horror, was at an annual conference in my field. Being one of a paltry number of women, I wanted – fairly consciously – to be ‘one of the boys’. One who was welcome down the pub and seen as a good laugh. So I adopted a persona which was not my own; somewhat raucous and laughing at the double entendres of my associates, downing pints. At some point I decided I had had enough. Perhaps I felt secure enough in my affiliation to the in-crowd to feel I could drop that un-me persona, but I’m sure there will be a generation of men who believed that was the true me.

Was it worth doing? Maybe. It certainly seemed so at the time, yet in retrospect it just feels distasteful. There is a price to pay for acting outside one’s true self. It is important to work out what really matters and what is less important. In order to progress, in science or wherever, it may require you to put on a false sense of confidence as you give a conference presentation or take on some new committee role. That is probably worth doing since no one wants to listen to the lecturer mumbling away inaudibly (however exciting the results), or dropping the committee papers on the floor – less likely in this paperless age admittedly – due to nerves. But pretending to be someone you are not in other ways – as I did when I assumed a cheeky, extrovert and raucous character – is hardly necessary and may backfire. These are difficult balancing acts to get right. Yet each of us, every day, is faced with decisions big or small about how to portray oneself and align it with who we really are.

Posted in covering, fitting in, Science Culture, self-confidence, Simon Fanshawe | Comments Off on Choosing Your Image

Creating a library system using Airtable

Posted on 12 May 2025 by Frank Norman

I volunteer at the CYM Library, a music library based in north London, mostly helping with day-to-day jobs. Recently I undertook a project to improve the way that CYM Library records requests and loans and I talked about this project at the IAML UK & Ireland Annual Study Weekend in April.

Background

CYM Library is a collection of vocal scores and orchestral parts that can be borrowed, for a fee, by choirs and orchestras across the UK. We lend both directly to them and via other libraries through the inter-library loan (ILL) system. CYM Library is an independent, self-funding charity. In addition to a part-time music librarian (Ceri Mann) there are several volunteers. I’ve been volunteering there for two and a half years and have a good understanding of how it all works.

Until last October we kept track of music reservations and loans via a combination of Word and Excel files, stored on Google drive, plus paper loan records. We had lists of music on loan and a list of requests that needed action – invoicing, packing, posting. Separate lists recorded invoices and payment details.

This all worked, but there was much duplication of information between the different lists, creating additional work and with a danger that they might get out-of-step. We had no list of all our customers, and generating any statistics was an onerous task.

Project aims

As we considered how to streamline our records, we agreed that any new system should:

  • Save time and be less work
  • Be easy to implement and use
  • It had to be able to interface with shelves/packing/returns. That is, we needed to be able to generate a printed record sheet for each loan.
  • It needed to be available anywhere, so we could work on some tasks away from the library if necessary.
  • It needed to be inexpensive. We would struggle to find funding for a big system.

I explored Google Drive and Microsoft Office but was unsuccessful in my attempts with these. Possibly that’s down to a deficit in my technical skills, but I also had a sense (from previous experience) that whatever I did with Google or MS Office was going to end up being very clunky.

As I searched for software tools that were both powerful yet easy-to-use, one popped up that I recognised from my previous workplace – Airtable. I thought it was worth a closer look so I started playing with it on a one week free trial and immediately liked it.

Airtable

Airtable describes itself as a ’No-code’ database. This means a platform that allows users to create and manage databases without writing code. It looks like a spreadsheet, and has a drag-and-drop interface. It is cloud-based and very flexible. Airtable was founded in 2012 and is now widely used so there is a large community of users and good online support. It has many integrations with other software packages.

Pricing is based on the number of users, starting at a single user, and there is a charity and non-profit discount. This makes it very affordable for small organisations like CYM Library.

I read a useful eBook – Learning Airtable and registered for an online course which gave me a good grounding in the basics.

New system

My priority was to create a system that would allow us to enter details of a request just once, and then to amend the record as changes occurred to the status of the request. I also wanted to launch the system in a reasonable timeframe, so I deliberately limited the scope of the initial system to managing requests, loans and returns.

We switched to the new system on 1 October 2024, though I had been recording data in the new system from 1 May 2024.

The two key tables in our database are Customers and Requests, with a few others used occasionally.

The customer table currently has 230 records, and is still growing. It records names of borrowing organisations and the contact person, plus any contact details. We also record the type of borrower (orchestra, choir, public library, school etc).

The request table has more than 70 fields. That’s a lot of data to scroll through on a screen and would be unwieldy to work with but Airtable allows you to create different ‘views’ of your data.

When you create a view you can filter the records by one or more fields, eg to show only requests that have been confirmed and need an invoice to be paid. You can also hide fields that are not of interest at a particular point as well as sorting the records in a view. Thus you end up with a view that shows key fields from the requests that need some action to be taken. Updating a record in one view updates the underlying database, so any changes are reflected in all other views too.

We have created about a dozen different views to match the various processes through the lifecycle of a request.

The first stage is to enter the details of a new request – composer, title, edition, number copies, dates needed (from and to), customer, quotes for charges (price or number of BL forms). There is a view that makes this straightforward, and also a form that can be used for the same purpose.

When a customer confirms they wish to proceed with the request, we then change the request status from Provisional to Confirmed and we print out a loan sheet from Airtable. It was important that we could generate a piece of paper for each loan, so that key details would be available when we’re at the shelf picking copies, at the packing desk, or at the returns desk.

Airtable’s Page Designer tool lets you create a printable version of a record and is very flexible. You can choose any fields, and position them in boxes wherever you want on a page. Then you can format the text in the box, add more text and images.

The Request Tracking view shows confirmed requests and what stage they’re at – invoiced, whether paid, packed, etc. as well as whether the music is to be posted or collected. Some loans are booked well in advance, so this helps to keep track of what needs to be done when. Different colours in fields provide helpful visual clues.

The list of current choral loans and reservations, shows alphabetically by composer/title what choral sets are out on loan or provisionally reserved, and when they are due back.

Some of the fields are formula fields, derived from a number of other fields. Sometimes I’ve used these to make the lists easier to read, other times there is some calculation or logic involved – eg calculating prices. The formulae look a bit scary, but I quickly learnt how they work. It’s a great feature of Airtable.

Results

We made the changeover with no noticeable affect on the service and broadly speaking we’re happy with the result. It is easier for us to record a new request now. It is easier to follow a request through different stages and change its status. The information is all brought together in one place and we don’t need to keep opening different files, using different programs. Claims to the BL for ILL payments are easier – we’ve just done our second batch of these.

We will be generating annual statistics soon, and I expect it to be easier than in the past (fingers crossed). As time goes on I think we will gain new insights from analysing data about our loan activities.

Printing out packing sheets (equivalent to the old loan sheets) has worked well, though we have needed to tweak the format and layout a few times.

The database is accessible anywhere – from the library or when working from home. It is also available via the Airtable phone app if necessary.

We have only needed one userid so the software cost is manageable. It was a bit of a hassle to get validated by Airtable as a charity, but worth it.

We have already found some additional benefits of having an up to date customer list. It allowed us to identify new customers and add their email addresses to an email group that we send updates to. We’ve also been able to start centrally recording the postal tracking details for parcels of music that we send out.

Challenges

Switching to the new system was a bigger challenge than anticipated – it took several weeks to get used to how it works. It’s a cliche, but more time for training in advance would have helped.

We’ve had to devise some workarounds to cater for non-standard requests — time extensions, additional copies, discounts. The basic data structure though has proved to be solid.

Reports are not as easy as I’d expected, though data can be exported to Excel for more analysis. The Page Design feature is cumbersome.

Though the community of Airtable users is large, not many of them are libraries, so the support forums tend to deal with more business-focused applications. It would be good to find other libraries who are using Airtable.

Future developments

We have some new volunteers and I plan to give them Airtable training. I hope they may have ideas for improvements that we can incorporate into Airtable.

I would like to automate some operations, such as calculating prices and parcel weights, and generating invoices. I’d also like to create a webform on the CYM Library website, for requestors to enter new requests. This could feed straight into our Airtable database. A next step would be to integrate the catalogue into the webform.

A bigger challenge would be to expose part of our Airtable database via the CYM Library website, making it into a ‘live catalogue’ that shows the availability of copies.

Conclusion

It is possible to use a general database tool (no-code) for record keeping in a music library.
No-code databases are much easier to get started on than traditional database products.

Posted in Libraries and librarians, Library automation, Metadata, Music libraries | Comments Off on Creating a library system using Airtable