More Than A-Levels

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Athene Donald

Last week saw the annual media interest in A-Level results (at least in England). Commentators noticed, for instance, the substantial increase in STEM subjects, with over 100,000 students taking Maths. This figure was remarkable as it was the first time any discipline has exceeded that significant figure. Depending on their positioning, in some cases this led to a bemoaning of the fact that arts and humanities subjects are not thriving in the same way although, bucking the past few years’ trend, foreign language take up had increased. From the opposite perspective, others picked up the fact that there was a substantial increase in those taking Physics A-Level, although little improvement in the percentage of girls taking the subject.

However, the mainstream media glossed over the results for qualifications other than A-Levels, although they were not the only results announced that day. You have to look in the more specialist press to find any reference to BTECs or T-Levels. It is true that several times as many A-level exams were sat as BTECs (over 800,000 compared with slightly over 200,000 exams respectively), but nevertheless, there are a lot of students whose futures will be determined by their performance in these latter exams. As for T-Levels, despite a huge amount of money and effort having been put into what the last government hoped would be a transformation of vocational studies for the 16-19 age group, a mere 7,380 students sat these exams. Perhaps even more worryingly, over one quarter of those who started a course at this level did not complete it. In contrast to the relatively young T-Levels, BTECs have been around for a long time and are recognized by many universities as an appropriate entry path. Nevertheless, the Tory Government was in the process of ‘defunding’ these courses in favour of the unproven T-Levels; Labour has already said it will put a pause on any changes while it considers the wider landscape.

There are various issues that underlie the problems with T-Levels: the requirement of a 45-day relevant work placement is hard to accomplish if the local area can’t provide an appropriate employer; course lecturers seem to struggle with the demands of the course and universities don’t (at least yet) seem willing to recognize the qualification in the way they do BTECs. The spread of courses is also still quite limited, with only about two thirds of the planned subjects yet being rolled out. But one issue stands out, that is symptomatic of so much of our society, and that is the incredibly uneven gender split across the courses. T-Levels in construction were overwhelmingly taken by men (albeit only 318 students in total started the course): building services engineering had just 9 women enrolled this year – 3 per cent of the cohort – and onsite construction had 5 women, i.e 4 per cent of the total students. Construction (perhaps surprisingly, since it must happen everywhere) was also an area where placements seemed particularly hard to find and drop out rates were around 10%. This should be contrasted with the education and early years T-Level, where the cohort was almost entirely women: 94 per cent of the 1,533 enrolled students. This was similarly true for health where 91 per cent of the 1,044 students were women. Just as with A-Levels (as with the percentage of women taking Physics), societal expectations seem to have driven an unwholesome gender split across the courses.

There is no doubt that the area of post-16 education is somewhat incoherent, particularly if you are not following the ‘standard’ linear path that does not consist of A-Levels followed by University. It is incoherent in terms of both funding and regulation. If you want to get a sense of the complexity facing students, colleges and employers of what this landscape looks like, last month’s report, Augar Reviewed, from the EDSK think tank is a good place to start. A Government review published a year ago looks specifically at T-Levels and why they have not got off to a good start.

This all is rather serious for the economy. If we want, as a nation, to drive growth, improve productivity and be the innovative nation every Government wants of us, then we need not to waste the talent of many of our teenagers by providing an incoherent system which is likely to fail them. Skilled and semi-skilled workers are in short supply, for instance in the construction industry, and technicians who understand how to get the best out of equipment or use spreadsheets to help with logistics are vital to small companies wanting to thrive in the current market-place. Employers frequently bemoan the lack of workers like this when trying to fill posts, yet we seem unable, as a nation, to create a system which trains and values such individuals.  Schools are not provided with the wherewithal to create a careers service that helps young people make the right decisions, or indeed what decisions actually need to be taken. It is to be hoped the Skills Commission, promised by Labour in their manifesto, brings coherence and logic both to the qualifications landscape and to the funding regime which supports this, bringing employers, education providers and local government together to create a better framework for post-16 education. It is a positive step forward that a unifying structure is at least being considered to try to remove the fragmentation and ‘them and us’ landscape we currently occupy in England, where only A-Levels are deemed worthy of mainstream media attention.

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In Transition

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Athene Donald

Readers may think I’ve given up on my blog, but the reality is more prosaic: as my ten-year stint as Master of Churchill College comes to an end (at the end of September), I have been moving out of the rather wonderful and spacious Lodge provided by the College for the Master and back to our newly refurbished and significantly smaller house of more than 40 years. Despite the house being extended during the refurbishment, there still seems not to be enough space for the life-time’s accumulated detritus of a couple of academics. Maybe others have long since thrown away, not only the lecture notes for the first course they ever gave, but also their own undergraduate notes, but not me. I am always amazed by the neatness – not to mention legibility – of the notes I took at pace during my own student days, but I have definitely subscribed to the view you never know when they will come in useful. Just occasionally (for instance, when setting exam questions) they have – although that is not a task I will have to face up to in the future.

I have spent an inordinate amount of what one might term ‘creative’ time, time that could have been spent writing this blog for instance, trying to work out where furniture might fit in rooms that aren’t quite the same size as they used to be due to large amounts of additional insulation being introduced (we’ve come off gas and are now running an air-source heat pump, which really requires extensive wall insulation to be effective). Further complications arise from the fact that, during our ten-year absence more furniture has been acquired. This dates from when I emptied my late mother’s house and brought back some ancient, familiar, solid-if-battered items which fitted neatly into the Lodge. Sadly, they fit less neatly into our house, and that only after endless drawing and redrawing of room layouts. I have to offer most sincere thanks to the hard-working team who managed to get my grandmother’s lovely old desk (probably more correctly termed a bureau) up two flights of twisting stairs to my new office location in a loft conversion. It was no mean feat, but they accomplished it with great good humour, if also a lot of sweat.

During this move into the next, and completely uncharted part of my life that amounts to full retirement, I have spent many, many hours going through my belongings and throwing out what I can. Clearly this wasn’t enough to get the volume down to the point needed, and the process will need to continue, although perhaps a little more slowly now the move is actually accomplished. I do feel as if my headspace has been full of moving logistics for months. Various items have still to find a home, and several rooms contain an extraordinary number of boxed-up books for which we still lack bookshelf space. These may definitely be first world problems, but problems they certainly are.

I have learned over the past month or two that my strength is no longer that of a young person, nor is my stamina. But that doesn’t mean I want to sink permanently into an armchair by the fire. I will definitely be wanting to use, at least in some part-time capacity, the different skills I believe I have acquired during my career. So, I am on the look-out for challenging opportunities in areas where I hope I have gained expertise, both as a professional scientist and as a leader of an institution. Mentally I have been trying to work out what I enjoy and what I can do but with less enthusiasm. Everyone who has been through a similar process has warned me not to take on roles just for the sake of it, but to be sure anything I do take on genuinely aligns with my interests and strengths.

In the meantime, the net effect of this transition has meant that the creative time and mental bandwidth that I used to put towards writing this blog regularly have not been available to me recently. Time will tell whether, now that phase is mercifully over, I revert to writing as frequently as I used to. It was always a task I found satisfying and, in some ways, liberating, as I moved away from the formal prose of paper-writing to something a bit more personal and free-form; where I could choose my topic and approach, building on whatever matters of interest (and sometimes dismay) crossed my path.

Those of you who read this frequently in the past (and I note I am approaching the 14th anniversary of starting this blog next week) will know that one topic I often used to write about was the issue of women in science. Having written a book on the subject published last year, it would be nice to think that everything that needs to be said about this I have said. Sadly, that is clearly not so, and the issues have not gone away (see this year’s A Level results, for instance, which show how the proportion of students taking A Level Physics who are girls remains stubbornly low). More may yet need saying here, although I doubt I will be writing another book on the subject. Nevertheless, I think in the back of my mind is the feeling that, on the assumption I keep writing, I will broaden the topics I write about. Watch this space to see how this pans out….

 

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Role Models for Girls?

Posted on June 16, 2024 by Athene Donald

Recently I received an email from a young girl (aged 8 and a half, as she signed herself off, with overtones of Adrian Mole) complaining about the lack of representation of women in STEM. As she says ‘If you want to be in science you need to see yourself represented.’ – a view heard often, but it is interesting that a pre-teen has already worked this out and sees it as a problem. It is always a pleasure to receive a note of thanks for the work I do and have done around the whole question of women in STEM, and particularly so when it becomes apparent it is reaching readers of essentially all ages.

For someone of that age, there are increasing numbers of books describing women from the past who made significant contributions in science aimed at young children. Very often these are about Marie Curie and, as I discuss at some length in my book, I am not sure she is the best role model since her life was so extreme. Is it likely to be attractive to a young girl to hear of someone who was consigned to a cold outhouse for her research, simply because she was a woman? The trouble is, most women from the past who ‘made’ it had so many challenges to overcome that I wonder if any of them make good role models. There are those who weren’t able to get to university till they were relatively mature because their fathers forbade it; those who never got past being an assistant or unpaid because, well that’s just how it was for women in their day. Even for Nobel Prize winners like Barbara McClintock, who did her main research for love not (any) money.

These really aren’t the images I’d like an eight-year-old to take away about how science is done. Rosalind Franklin – another woman whose life story can readily be found in children’s books – had a rubbish time with her colleagues and died tragically young. Also a bit of a downer of a life story. For Jocelyn Bell Burnell, people seemed to think her engagement was worth more of a celebration than her discovery of pulsars. That discovery was anyhow not rewarded with a Nobel Prize for her personally: it went to her supervisor Anthony Hewish and his colleague Martin Ryle. When Dorothy Hodgkin did win the Nobel Prize (still the only British woman to do so), in 1964, the Daily Mail celebrated this triumph with the headline “Oxford housewife wins Nobel“. Again, not a very positive message to give a young girl.

It is not irrelevant that, as late as 2018, laser scientist and Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland remarked that she wanted the story to be about her science not her sex. Surely in the 21st century we have reached a point where it ought to be possible for the science to come first, rather than ‘oh look, here’s a woman who is quite successful’. Yet we still do not seem to have got there. Young girls may not be inspired by the typical emphasis on gender, not success, for women in the world of science.

As we look to a possible change of Government, it would be nice to think that we might see some better (female) role models appearing in the national curriculum, coupled with a national curriculum that actually needs to be followed by all state schools; currently academies can opt out. The former was a recommendation that Greg Clark’s Commons enquiry into Diversity in STEM made, but to no effect (at least as yet). It would be interesting to draw up a list of potential role models to include. Using Nobel Prize winners might be one option, a clear label of ‘success’ that would distinguish the Donna Strickland’s of this world in a way an eight (or indeed eighteen) year old could understand.

On the other hand, the fundamental flaw in the way these awards are made, so that team science is not rewarded, just that illustrious but generally illusory lone genius, does not reflect the primary way of doing science in the 21st century. Recognizing that collaboration is an important part of progress in science, that it’s OK to enjoy interactions and often that’s not only the best but the only way of making progress, is a fact that the Nobel’s continue to ignore by their way of doing things. Given that the Peace Prize is often given to groups (think of the IPCC in 2077), it’s not immediately obvious that the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will actually forbid awarding one of the science prizes to a group, although that is the argument typically advanced. I believe that the ongoing failure to recognize the importance of collaboration in science by the Nobel committee is detrimental to science itself. We know in our universities, promotion is often likewise based simply on an individual’s contribution rather than the part they play in collaborative science, and this too is a major problem. Although everyone is happy to believe that excellence in science should be rewarded, why should team science not be ‘excellent’ (of course it is!) and hence get the accolades?

To return to the eight-year-old girl I mentioned at the start, as she grows up what will attract or deter her from following her current dreams? Our schools should think much harder about this, as should the committees that make decisions about promotions and prizes for later years. Only when this happens will she be able to see ‘people like her’ represented across the board, encouraging her that she does belong in whichever field she chooses.

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Not Knowing Where You Are Going

Posted on May 19, 2024 by Athene Donald

One of the initiatives I started when I became Master of Churchill College was a series of public conversations with eminent women, many – but by no means all – academics. To start with I was quite nervous: would I run out of questions? Would my interviewee just answer in monosyllables (none of them ever did)? Would I put my foot in it accidentally by asking a question that felt too intrusive? Would I just fall over all my words and mumble? You can imagine the sorts of things that troubled me, but by and large none of them came to pass and I have enjoyed the interactions enormously. You can find the series of interviews on the Churchill website here. It may not have fulfilled my original objective of reaching out to students – sadly few of them ever found the time to come – but it has certainly been immensely satisfying for me!

Sharon PeacockMy last conversation, rather a bittersweet one given it was the last one now I am stepping down, was with my successor at the College, Sharon Peacock (pictured). Whereas many of the women I’ve talked to have had what one might call ‘typical’ careers, in that they went to university straight after school and then followed a fairly logical path, this cannot be said of Sharon. Here was a woman (the recording will be up on the Churchill website soon) who left school at 16 with no qualifications. Although, like her, both Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Sally Davies of my previous interviewees had failed that largely historic hurdle, the 11-plus, Sharon did not have the family know-how and backing to find ways round the setback so straightforwardedly as they did. Sharon went to a school that had low expectations and did not offer a route to the exam successes she would have needed to go on to A Levels and university in a straight path.

As a result, Sharon had to study both O-Levels (GCSE’s predecessor) and A-Levels in her evenings, while working in full time employment, starting with work in a dental surgery, and only finally got to university much later in her 20’s. It is interesting to note that my very first interviewee, Carol Robinson, had also not gone straight to university from school, but worked as a technician at a company that encouraged her to take qualifications and progress so in due course she could study for a PhD at Cambridge. Carol went on to become the first female professor in Chemistry at Cambridge and then at Oxford, where she still is, and will be receiving an Honorary Degree from Cambridge this summer. Sharon, meanwhile, has had a successful career in infectious diseases, before coming into the public limelight as the leader of the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium, something that was fantastically important as the world tried to combat the disease.

The point I want to make is that not all careers go in straight lines, including the highly successful ones. Luck – good or bad – plays a part in progression. Cultural capital arising from one’s family background is incredibly helpful to have, but neither Sharon nor Carol had the background to start off with it. This week, two activities I’m involved in will be confronting the issues of what happens if you didn’t have the best start in life.

Firstly, I am off to a school in the Fens, as part of the Speakers in Schools Programme, to talk to some Y12 students. I have been asked to give a ‘motivational and aspirational’ talk to a group who perhaps are coming from backgrounds thin on cultural capital, with little awareness of what a university education can and cannot do for them, but who have already made their post-16 exam choices.  These may be A-Levels or BTECs and they certainly won’t necessarily be in the sciences, so a fairly generic talk is required. I will certainly be ending up with a potted history of Sharon, to demonstrate that ‘not all those who wander are lost’ as Tolkien put it in a different context, a subject I have written about before, but as applied to postdocs.

Secondly, as part of the Royal Society’s Science 2040 project looking at what an ideal system for science should look like in 2040, I am leading a working group exploring ‘Future Careers’. We cannot and should not assume things ought to go on in the same way as now. What needs to change? We also importantly need to consider the overall needs of the entire science ecosystem and not just for those who may be the FRS’s of tomorrow. In this vein, I wrote recently about Ottoline Leyser’s comments regarding just how many different people contribute to an overall outcome to make a fully functioning science and innovation system. Our organisations – whether universities or not – need to recognize this in their incentives and progression systems. I suspect industry, for instance, is already much better at rewarding team work than our universities currently are.

At the end of the day, our education system and our society need to realise that A-Levels may not be the gold standard that everyone needs to work their way through if they are going to contribute to a fully functioning science system, although I doubt that T-Levels are the answer either. (In the Fens, for instance, how are schools going to find sufficient local businesses to provide 45 days useful and relevant work experience?) Equally, students setting out on their educational and career journeys need to understand that a beginning that does not fit the norm does not mean all doors are closed to them for ever more. It takes determination – as Sharon clearly demonstrated – luck and supporters within the family and far beyond, but nevertheless a great deal can be accomplished even with a shaky start.

 

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Stupid Chemists (perhaps)

Posted on May 5, 2024 by Athene Donald

I’ve recently returned from my annual visit to the High Polymer Research Group Conference, held at the picturesquely named village of Pott Shrigley at the Western edge of the Peak District. This is a conference about which I have written before, following its evolution from the scarey place full of established and unwelcoming male chemists I encountered as a young researcher back in the mid-1980’s, to a much more diverse and inclusive group of people working across the polymer domain. If you want to know about the science discussed under the theme of Polymers in the Age of Data, I refer you to Richard Jones’ excellent summary on his own blog. My take on the conference will be more focussed on the human aspects.

Over the years I’ve been going, my own years have clearly advanced. Now, I have reached the heady heights of chairing the committee that oversees this annual event. One consequence of this is that I am expected to produce an after-dinner speech on the final evening. For any international readers, this idea may be somewhat alien, but it is a standard activity at more formal dinners in the UK. I have, in my capacity as Master of a Cambridge college, had plenty of experience of exhorting students in the college to better things, and reminiscing about the College’s activities (and why donations are so important to support our students) at alumni dinners. Neither of those sorts of speeches would fit the bill very well at this conference, as I discussed in my speech last year. (I may say my predecessor as chair was Andy Cooper. He gave an excellent talk this year about his robot-based synthetic chemistry lab, on which more later, but as chair for three years he managed to get away with only giving one after-dinner speech, due to two years of cancellation because of the pandemic.)

The challenge is, at least in part, because this is not a speech that can be written in advance, as it needs to take into account what the different presentations covered. So, the afternoon before the conference dinner may need to be set aside for dreaming up amusing anecdotes to include. The strategy I have taken, both last year and this, is to make notes, at the time, of the particular bon mots I want to include and then weave them together. It works for me, but probably wouldn’t for everyone. This year, speakers seemed to cover much about the skills needed, and the skills that perhaps robots lack. As Andy put it in his own talk, his ‘robots are the world’s stupidest chemists. We need humans in the loop.’ However, it is also the case, as Tanja Junckers said, that ‘robots are much more consistent than graduate students.’ Hence, using them (the robots that is) for repetitive grunt work absolutely makes sense, with the added advantage that they can work 24/7 without complaint.

Given that the whole theme of the conference was what can and can’t be automated, what data we do or don’t have, and how we’re going to tackle the gaps in knowhow and robust data, it isn’t surprising that much was said about how the average researcher fits into this evolving landscape. Michael Meier, who was obviously pushing the limits both of the chemistry and of his students, remarked that he had ‘some students very frustrated with the Chemistry he was requiring of them’ and that often there were various routes to some end point, but ‘all of them were crap’. However, whatever his students might have felt, he himself remained excited about his research, including one project that he called his James Bond project; you can imagine the sort of flavour that had.

One of the major problems in this area is that there are data on only a subset of all the possibilities – be it in molecular structure, or a particular property over a specific if narrow range of parameters. How do you construct a database under these circumstances? Jacqui Cole has been working hard at scraping the literature to build a huge dataset, but up till now she has concentrated on small molecules, often inorganic. To move into the polymer world is hard, as she admitted, saying not only that ‘polymers are messy and difficult’ but that overall ‘polymer science is really hard.’ I suspect those words will have resonated with everyone in the room, even if not applying all of the time. Polymer science is, of course, endlessly fascinating as well, or we wouldn’t all be doing it.

But careers do not go in a straight line – something I frequently tell the Churchill students (particularly at the Freshers’ and Graduates’ Dinners) as well as writing about here over many years – and that sentiment turned up too in the presentations, when Adam Gormley said flatly ‘I didn’t design my career to get here.’ Who does ‘design’ a career, even if synthetic chemists may try to design a macromolecule? Our final speaker, Filip du Prez, was perhaps being flippant, or cynical, when he praised those students who ‘boost their supervisors career’ – he was after all the only thing standing between the delegates and the conference dinner, so perhaps a little lightheartedness was in order.

It was an incredibly stimulating conference. I have picked out the comments I have, because I noted how many people addressed some quasi-social aspects of the area. I’m not sure that this is so common in conference presentations, but perhaps this field particularly lends itself to rueful remarks about human/machine-learning/robot/data interactions in ways that other parts of the discipline do not. I’ll be watching out next year to see if the theme continues.

 

 

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