When I talk to student groups, as I still do quite often, I talk as much as what else one can do with a science/Physics degree beyond the obvious, as about the research I used to do (quite a long time ago now). I like to encourage them to think about careers beyond the academic lab and roles for which their science education will provide an excellent base. Obviously, teaching is one where the need for more graduates entering the profession is crucial, particularly in Physics where the shortfall is massive: in 2023 only 17% of the target for trainee teachers in the subject was achieved, ‘up’ (if one can call it that) from 16% the year before. But I also like to highlight the policy arena, both politics itself and the civil service.
Angela McLean, as GCSA, has stressed the desirability of having more scientists in the civil service, with a specific science and engineering fast stream, which is steadily growing. There were 113 participants in this scheme in 2023, compared with 18 in 2015. The more generalist fast stream entry now has a (Cabinet Office) target of 50% of their new entrants being scientists, a figure that was achieved, and even exceeded, in 2023. However, having achieved that, it is important that their scientific expertise, their numeracy and analytical thinking skills, are put to good use. Reading an account of how the Civil Service is deployed in Ian Dunt’s 2023 book (How Westminster Works….and Why it Doesn’t), may make one question whether that is, in practice, the case.
Dunt discusses the history of the civil service from its reform in the 1850’s, following the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. At that time, civil servants were expected to be generalists, coming typically from Oxbridge with an arts degree, but expected to be able to tackle anything. My grandfather – who read Classics in Cambridge before the first world war – would occasionally talk about the Indian Civil Service exams he sat after his degree. My memory is imperfect of the things he said to me during my teenage years, but these exams involved something like fourteen separate papers covering different topics over three days. I assume the questions were similar to those old types of name the principal rivers in Mesopotamia or list the kings of England in the thirteenth century, but I never pressed him on that. Not necessarily, however, knowledge particularly useful even to an Edwardian civil service – or India come to that. I don’t know if he ever intended to go to India (I often think of the questions I wish I’d asked him, but wasn’t interested in at the time, plus I had zero appreciation of the consequences of colonialism back then), but he ended up as a clerk in the House of Commons instead, where he formed a dim view of both Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The war put an end to that position, as he headed off to France.
But enough of the personal detour, although recalling his account of the exams he sat may have mislead me about the more modern civil service. Dunt points out that many people over the last 50+ years have raged against the lack of specialist knowledge the civil service system utlises (and it is the structure he is railing against, not the individuals serving). He quotes an essay from 1959 by Thomas Balogh entitled The Apotheosis of a Dilettante and the 1968 inquiry led by Lord Fulton, who highlighted the issues around generalism and churn. Then, as now, people get moved on as the obvious way to gain promotion, so that knowledge gained in one sphere becomes irrelevant a couple of years (or less) later. For, according to Fulton, scientists and engineers – and yes, even in 1968 there were such people employed –
‘get neither the full responsibilities and corresponding authority, nor the opportunities they ought to have.’
I suspect Dunt doesn’t believe much has changed since then, and he rails against the widespread use of consultants instead of constructively using what experts they do have. He states:
‘On a very basic level, government departments have no idea what skills, knowledge or experience their staff have, because no one bothered to track it. Many departments do not collect basic workforce data…’
There are government departments where science sits squarely and centrally in its policy-making and their teams include many scientists. But, as I discovered some years back when I became chair of the Science Advisory Council for the Department of Culture Media and Sports in 2015, that particular department had precious few scientists on its staff, about one as I recall. (It didn’t even at that point have a CSA, only a deputy who was an economist.) That position changed subsequently when it assumed responsibility for digital, between 2017 and 2023 until DSIT took on that responsibility.
Talking of DSIT reminds me of a visit I made to its predecessor, BEIS, soon after the creation of UKRI. The primary focus of that visit was to stress the importance of UKRI making progress on interdisciplinary funding, for instance through the newly announced Strategic Priorities Fund, and I was talking to some of the staff assigned to UKRI from BEIS as it got going. I may have thought I was going to talk to those who knew what was going on, but ended up realising I was instead giving some new and junior staff a tutorial about how grant-funding committees worked. I was disappointed that the direction of knowledge transfer was from me to them, not vice versa, but I hope they found it useful. What I do recall was the insertion of various Latin epigrams into the conversation by one of the civil servants, and I left feeling that he, like my grandfather, had a Classics degree from Oxbridge, but that it didn’t mean he had a good grasp of how UKRI could or should operate. I had to hope I had inspired him to do more homework.
Now I work with another Department (the Department for Education) as chair of their newly formed Science Advisory Council. They have now, and for the first time I believe, a CSA (Russell Viner, a paediatrician) and a small science team, actually populated by scientists, one which probably could usefully be larger. I am excited to be working with them, and excited by the signs of genuine cross-departmental working under the new government’s missions. I am also encouraged by the willingness of those in Whitehall and elsewhere to talk to me about their work and potentially mine. I hope Dunt is wrong in his pessimistic analysis of the way Westminster works, or doesn’t; and that the vital place of STEM within Whitehall is fully recognized in our increasingly technologically-led society. We live in a world in which innovation and growth are crucially important for our economy and consequent societal wellbeing but which can only be delivered with a well-functioning education and skills system. All of which requires an appropriate spread of scientists and engineers across government departments.
