Investing in People

Posted on October 24, 2022 by Athene Donald

We have all got used to the wonders of Zoom (or Teams if you prefer) over the last couple of years. It may have made academic life as we were used to it viable during the pandemic, but it has its downsides, as I discovered this week. Firstly, much though I feel committed to reducing my carbon footprint, there are times when meeting in person makes an enormous difference. Eighteen months ago I wrote about what I felt we, as academics, lost when we could not meet. That was of course while Omicron was still rampaging and in person felt a distant dream for most. For local meetings I am totally in favour of sticking with in person unless Covid intervenes, as it did for me a couple of weeks ago (finally).

And it was due to being laid low by Covid that I did not go to London to present evidence in person to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee last week, but relied on Zoom. Sadly, this went awry. My laptop audio decided to pack up at the crucial moment and I missed the first fifteen minutes or so of the hour-long session. Hence, if you listen to the recording of the evidence, my first words are an apology. Not how I would have wanted to come across, particularly as I was left somewhat disconcerted by the hiccough and, since I was using someone else’s laptop, disorganised with regard to my notes.

This was a sessionfor their enquiry on People and Skills in UK STEM. A topic of great importance, and covering a wide swathe of issues. The session I was in was focussed on skills in the workforce; the following session more on university researchers, including issues of precarity. I don’t want to rehearse all the arguments I made there, including the importance of those who don’t follow a linear trajectory through GCSE, A Levels and hence to university, the need for FE Colleges to be well-funded, and the issues about women being discouraged from entering the STEM disciplines by societal expectations. You can listen to me on Parliament.TV and read my written submission to the enquiry if you want to know more. But I would like to highlight one point I made about the importance of employers investing in their own to upskill them.

Churchill College occupies a large site in Cambridge (45 acres I believe, the largest single site of any of the Cambridge colleges) and houses a large number of students on site. It is therefore incumbent on us to have appropriately large Estates and Maintenance teams. We also have many ‘60’s buildings, concrete and bricks in a brutalist style, with flat roofs. Flat roofs are excellent for installing solar panels on and, in our case much to our advantage, we also have copper parapets which rise slightly above the roofline. All this means, as we work around the College refurbishing the various courts, we are well-placed to install solar panels (plus plenty of a modern standard of insulation) to reduce our dependence on gas (the parapet’s advantage is it largely makes these invisible from the ground, making planning permission easier).

However, installation of solar panels does not come cheap and pay-back time tends to be well over a decade. In the College’s case, though, a decision was taken to upskill members of the maintenance team to be able to carry out the installation themselves and this is what they were able to do over the summer over an extensive area of roof. We are now able to generate 200,000kWh per annum from these installations, and are aiming for 750,000kWh of solar power on site per year by 2026. By using our own team, the pay-back time is cut right back to 4-5 years.  This is obviously great from the point of view of our carbon footprint and energy bills, but the pride our team take in this work is equally great. It demonstrates the importance in investing in employees, offering them the opportunity to upskill. You can read more about this and other in-house work to improve sustainability in our operations here.

Of course, not every employer is in a position to act in an equivalent way, but as a nation we do really badly on this front. A recent IFS report highlighted a 38% reduction in spending on adult education and apprenticeships over the last decade. There is an even greater drop (50%) in spending on classroom-based adult education.  We have a new PM about to take over, so we will have to wait to see if the phrase ‘levelling up’ re-enters the political lexicon, or whether we are now simply talking about ‘growth’, but whatever jargon is attached to this problem, if we are to drive innovation and improve our productivity, we need to make sure that we invest, not just in those heading for high-powered research jobs, but those others who make so much difference to operations at different levels in all kinds of organisations.

The trouble is that skills is a word that encompasses so much (the same might be said of levelling up), and it is a heterogeneous landscape. Robert West from the CBI, with whom I was paired in the evidence session, pointed out that apprenticeships are only one route of acquiring new skills (and very often actually these may be at a degree level or even masters anyhow) and in the Lords enquiry he wanted to stress that the solution cannot simply sit with adjusting the apprenticeship levy scheme. It is clear to me that further education colleges have a key role to play – and more particularly if they were properly resourced – to ensure that those who aren’t suited to the degree (i.e. Level 6) route have alternatives that will still equip them with vital skills.

In England, a 2018 Government report showed that only 4 per cent of 25-year-olds hold a Level 4 or Level 5 qualification as their highest level. Much higher numbers either don’t get beyond Level 3 or go on to achieve a Level 6 qualification, with figures for around 30% for both.  In contrast, in Germany, Level 4 and 5 makes up 20 per cent of all higher education enrolments. These people with intermediate skills are often crucial for technical roles – in universities or in factories or SMEs driving innovative processes – and there is a shortage of such people. This was highlighted in the 2021 Royal Society report on the research and technical workforce in the UK, as also in earlier work for the Gatsby Foundation by Paul Lewis.

I will look forward to seeing the final report from the Lords Committee, and also how investment in education and skills plays out under the new PM.  Meanwhile Churchill College will continue to invest in its workforce, employing apprentices (as we always have) and helping to upskill others in ways that work for them.

 

 

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Why We Still Need Ada Lovelace Day

Posted on October 11, 2022 by Athene Donald

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in science and inspire future generations. It is often said that ‘you cannot be what you cannot see’, and if young children only ever see images of men as scientists, how are they to realise that girls too can participate? This was a point I made to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee when I gave evidence to their enquiry on diversity in STEM earlier this year.

I stressed there that the absence of named women scientists in the national curriculum is a gaping hole, one that will not make it easy for a girl to imagine that she belongs. It is a point that I may well use again when I present evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee enquiry on People and Skills in UK Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics next week, although I await further details about the precise line of questioning they intend to follow.

Needing to know that people like you are able to pursue the dreams you have is clearly important to encourage individuals to stick with their aspirations. In a very different context, I was very struck at the weekend to hear Fleur East (singer-songwriter-presenter), a celebrity contestant on Strictly, commenting on seeing a trailer of the next version of the cartoon the Little Mermaid, starring a character of colour. She said something along the lines of how much it would have mattered to her as a child to have seen such a character. Ok, she wasn’t dreaming of becoming a mermaid, but clearly a starring role in anything might have seemed unachievable if all she saw were white exemplars. (Many cartoons have of course started to redress this balance).

Ada Lovelace Day is a day to stress all the women who have made a difference in the scientific sphere, in whatever guise. They may be teachers or communicators rather than Nobel Prize winners, but their contribution to the overall scientific enterprise needs to be celebrated. Highlighting their actions and lives is one way of reminding school children that, whatever they look like, whatever their background, there is a place for them in science if they want it. Increasingly, if you are a parent you can find books that tell real life or fictional stories about women making their way in STEM: for instance biographies of Marie Curie suitable for a range of ages; Katherine Johnson’s autobiography aimed at early teens (Reaching for the Moon); or books about the fictional Rosie Revere, a girl with passion for inventing things. Lots of good reading matter, if you happen to come from a family with funds and inclination to bring such women to your attention. If you come from a less advantaged or informed background, the National Curriculum should be able to inspire you, so that it is depressing that the gap is not formally plugged to allow children from whatever family circumstances to be still aware of this reality.

Ada Lovelace is perhaps an unlikely icon for all of this, being the daughter of Lord Byron, whose life was tragically short, but she was a remarkable woman who made the most of her unusual upbringing and education (her mother was so frightened that she might follow in her father’s footsteps that she focussed her education on mathematics and not poetry). She was friends with Mary Somerville, but it was her association with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine, that has led to her memory being celebrated. In 1843 she translated and extensively annotated an article written by the Italian mathematician and engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea, “Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage”, in which she set out the rudiments of a computational algorithm for the first time.

Ada Lovelace Day was initiated in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson but now seems under threat, in large part due to a lack of sponsorship. However, to think that we have reached a point where the problem about women in science is ‘fixed’ would be naïve in the extreme. One only has to think about the comments Katherine Barbalsingh made to the same Commons Select Committee I referred to above, to realise how far from the truth that is. There is still much work to be done to ensure that anyone, regardless of skin colour or chromosome distribution, is able to pursue a career in STEM if that is what they want to do. I do hope that Ada Lovelace Day will be able to continue.

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The Future of Skills and Education?

Posted on October 2, 2022 by Athene Donald

It is only six weeks since I last wrote about skills on this blog. Not, you might think, a very long time for change to happen. And yet much has. A new monarch (probably the least important for the theme of this post), a new PM, a new Chancellor, and a new direction of travel which, currently, is far from finding favour in the markets. It is also the Conference season; we wait to see quite what turmoil the Conservative Conference unleashes, following Labour’s rather successful one. (We will never know what the LibDems would have done, due to their need to cancel.)

All the signs from the Government seem to be worrying when it comes to investment in Jo Public, infrastructure and innovation. There is still no science minister and, interesting though it is that the ONS has significantly uplifted its analysis of investment in R+D (to put more weight on that done by SMEs), so that it is now much closer to HMRC’s calculations, this change in their estimate does not resolve the productivity puzzle. Productivity (output per hour) has been near to flat since the 2008 financial crash, leaving the economy in a very fragile state made worse by the consequences of Brexit and the pandemic.

Economic growth and increased productivity require (amongst other things) skilled workers, with the right skills in the right place. It requires both that school and university leavers have acquired relevant skills and that they know what career trajectories are open to them. It also requires that adults, who trained decades ago, are able to reskill or upskill to be able to take on the jobs that are available to them now, which may be very different from those accessible to them when they left school or college. In order for all these strands to be working, there needs to be investment in appropriate courses and facilities.

Briefly, it looked as if the Lifelong Learning Entitlement might offer hope to make it easier for people to drop in and out of education according to their needs and the requirements of their local job market. However, although this has been much talked about, the Treasury never signed off on it and, with all the present noises about ‘cuts’, it seems quite possible they never will. Yet the need for workers to be able to update their skills has never been more urgent.

Under the last Labour government, a variety of schemes were introduced with the intent of reducing inequality, starting from birth. Sure Start aimed at ensuring that children from disadvantaged families did not immediately fall behind their middle class peers before they’d even started school. The Education Maintenance Allowance, was a payment to poorer students to incentivise them to stay at school post GCSE. Both these schemes still operate in parts of the UK, but not in England, despite evidence being gathered to show that both were cost-effective, although in the long term rather than the short.

The UK is now in a situation where teacher training has been upended by changes in the accreditation process, and there is a 40% shortfall in recruitment of trainee teachers starting this autumn. The situation is much worse for secondary school teachers than for primary. Given that teacher retention of trained teachers is also a massive problem, there will be many schools with significant shortages of teachers in the years ahead. This has long been a problem with Physics, but it would seem it is going to become prevalent across all disciplines. Anecdote tells of language teachers being asked to teach maths, because there are few pupils wanting to study languages coupled with a dearth of maths teachers. A lack of teachers can only mean large class sizes and restriction of subject choice, neither boding well for generations of students and their future careers. Teachers having to teach outside their comfort zone and qualifications are less likely to inspire the young.

For those students who do not acquire good qualifications at Level 2 (GCSE), their future career options are limited. More opportunities for them to improve their qualifications in later years need to be on offer, and this requires investment in the colleges which will provide such courses as well as financial support for the individual, so that they can afford to take up the opportunities that are available to them. The LLE would have provided such support, but it was due to be a loan, and I always wondered how many individuals, perhaps already with families to support, would have felt able to take on the financial liability. A grant would be much more attractive (as well as expensive). But perhaps we will never find out if the LLE could have worked, if the Treasury sits on its approval.

Instead, what we’ve already learned from this government is that the extremely wealthy will get tax cuts, and the cuts the rest of the population are likely to feel seem set to be on welfare and infrastructure. As yet there has been no talk of investment into the crumbling infrastructure of hospitals, schools, FE Colleges and transport; or investment in the people who are needed to run these. The words uttered by numerous politicians that they aspire for the UK to be a global science superpower will be empty rhetoric without the investment to make this possible. Association with the EU over science seems a dream that will never come to fruition, and so-called Plan B, ill-defined though it may have been, looks a potential target for more of these cuts we are hearing about. Science will not thrive under these circumstances. We will lose scientists, engineers and technicians, we will lose innovation opportunities and productivity will not receive the fillip it needs. We are damaging our future as well as our present, by not investing in education and skills at an appropriate level. These are tough times.

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Impostors at a Conference

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Athene Donald

September has always been a busy time for conferences, and I have attended a fair few in my time. However, the one I attended this week was the first scientific one I recall having impostor syndrome publicly mentioned several times, both explicitly and implicitly. This was the conference to mark (belatedly) my retirement, and it was all of joyous, moving and weird from my perspective. No doubt there are other perspectives! You can read the report from the editor of Physics World, Matin Durrani, my former student and active participant in the meeting, to get a different view.

The conference covered many topics, because my research and scientific activities have, and a wide variety of different themes were teased out. It was organised, necessarily twice because the pandemic prevented the first manifestation coming to pass, by my long term friends and collaborators Richard Jones and Ruth Cameron. Ruth was my student; Richard technically was not, but as he put it I ‘offered a helping hand to waifs and orphans’ when his supervisor left the country. Listening to others describe my career, gave a very peculiar feeling. Who is this person whose life seems so logical and tidy, for instance, according to the narrative Richard constructed to open the meeting? I suppose the meeting fulfilled the wish Robert Burns expressed in his poem To a Louse

‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!’.

Research is full of dead ends, which if introduced would no doubt have spoilt the narrative. So Richard did not mention the thesis of a student whose every experiment came up with a null result, for instance, and glossed over the episode of the tilting cartridge I mentioned in my last blogpost, as well as other hiccoughs on the route to what I know appears to be a highly successful career.

My memories of the meeting, even only 48 hours later, are already rather a blur; there was too much emotion tied up in listening to all the talks for great clarity of recollection. I think it was Matin who described what he felt was the pecking order in the Cavendish when he arrived, with theoretical particle physicists at the top and the sort of work my group was doing in the messy world of soft matter (polymers, biopolymers, cement, food, starch granules, paint….all got a mention during the meeting) somewhere near the bottom. And also, how he felt that he was an impostor, even if he didn’t know the phrase at the time.

The idea of a pecking order is interesting: there are many versions of it in science of course, but there is absolutely no doubt that a complex system was, back in the 1990s when Matin joined me, all but beyond the collective department’s pale. I have not forgotten the comments from the (by then retired) Cavendish Professor, Sir Brian Pippard, that ‘things have come to a sad pass when people at the Cavendish study starch’. Matin wasn’t studying starch itself, but aqueous mixtures of biopolymers, relevant to many foodstuffs, during what Richard had termed ‘The Cheesy Wotsit years’ in his talk. (Yes, I worked on the vanilla version of Cheesy Wotsits, aka known as extruded starch foams, i.e. the wotsit sans flavourings and colour.) That was, and is, the kind of comment that can sap morale, and make one wonder what one is doing in a department, but I guess I’m fairly obstinate and I wasn’t going to let that derail me, whatever the angst the remark caused.

Matin was talking in a panel discussion on the difficulties of interdisciplinary working. Having my REF Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel colleague, anthropologist Veronica Strang, on the panel introduced a fascinating social science perspective on the challenges (in itself highlighting the importance of interdisciplinarity). She pointed out how the ‘other’ can invoke hostility, and I guess being interdisciplinary will always be ‘other’ to those who stick to the straight and narrow. Our current structures – departments and funding panels for instance – tend to favour monodisciplinary approaches, in part because of the teaching demands a department must handle. The panel itself was all the richer for its disciplinary diversity (the third speaker was Mark Leake, current chair of the IOP’s Biological Physics group of which I was the founding chair).

I got to say a few words after the dinner, and I returned to the impostor syndrome theme, this time explicitly. Regular readers of this blog will know that it is a topic I feel needs a good airing (e.g here) and it is a feeling that I am not ashamed to admit to. However, I still get the feeling that students and early career researchers imagine it is something one overcomes and then life is easier. I suspect most people suffer from it, whether or not they’ve got a label for their feelings, and I suspect for few of us does it dissipate, even if success attends us. Certainly, on the second day, there were several more senior scientists admitting to it, male and female. It can only be healthy for it to be acknowledged. It is good if it sneaks into a regular science session, rather than one simply aimed at confidence building or solely for women. We all bring our whole selves to our scientific endeavour, and impostor syndrome may well be part of that self.

However, it wasn’t a conference about impostor syndrome! I was touched by the way some of my former students recalled advice I had given them all those years ago. Advice such as ‘don’t be afraid to say no’, and ‘negotiate a better starting package’, were what erstwhile postdoc Aline Miller recalled (as well as ‘don’t wear jeans or they may think you’re a student’) when she went to take up a lectureship. The photo here that I took during Joe Keddie’s talk, about watching paint dry, indicates what he remembers of my advice, possibly updated overnight to bring in the imposter syndrome theme. (Joe was actually not working directly with me, but with Richard, but we wrote several papers together literally about watching paint dry. Much more interesting than you might imagine.) I would stand by all these pieces of advice and it moves me to think people took my messages to heart and still remember them so many years later.

Joe Keddie's conclusions AMD conference

I guess I really am retired now, now the conference is over (although I am of course still Master of Churchill College for another two years). It was a wonderful conference, delightful to see my former students and postdocs thriving, delightful to be able to meet in person. Thank you to all of them. I hope they continue to thrive as I melt into the background.

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Dodgy Encounters with a Fragile Piece of Equipment

Posted on August 31, 2022 by Athene Donald

Doing a PhD is hard work, stressful and uncertain. Even with the most understanding of supervisors, the clearest goals and routes to get there, there will be hiccoughs and worse en route to getting the letters after your name. And, of course, for many, things will be tougher than ideal circumstances might imply, with lack of clarity over the objectives, equipment that does not work and peers who rub you up the wrong way (or worse).

My PhD is a long, long time ago. In speeches, for instance to the College’s graduate students, I point out that mistakes and disasters during the course of research are only to be expected and certainly need not be terminal. Just because things go wrong is no indicator the student is inevitably not cut out for research.  The particular mistake I made that I recall most vividly was repeatedly breaking a delicate piece of equipment (the tilting cartridge for a Siemens 102 transmission electron microscope, aka a TEM, if you’re really interested). It could be – and was – fixed by the skilled workshop technician who, strangely, was the father of the technician in my own group 20 years later. Perfecting such technical skills was obviously something that ran in the family, along with a great desire to help the novice researcher find their feet.

Talking about breaking this piece of kit, time after time, is something that feels worth spelling out to help those setting out on their careers that failure doesn’t mean they should walk away from their PhD. I’m not afraid to admit I was completely ham-fisted, something I had always suspected. It was not by accident that my final undergraduate year was dedicated to theoretical  and not experimental physics; I thought I knew my limitations, but then decided a theoretical PhD was even more beyond me than tangling with equipment.

This all comes back to me because I have been sorting through the letters I wrote to my mother during those turbulent months in the second term of my PhD, spelling out just how difficult I was finding things (retrieved from her house after her death). They contain a level of detail I had forgotten. I knew I had left Cambridge for a couple of weeks, retiring to my mother’s house and feeling most uncertain whether I should continue with research. I came to the decision ‘I was not a quitter’, quite explicitly, and made my way back to Cambridge to try again. But, what I had forgotten was it wasn’t all plain sailing from then on. I appear to have found it really hard even to set foot in the department: the first day I popped in for just a few minutes, that being all I could face. I obviously – and this is what I’d forgotten – had to screw my courage up to breaking point to get going again. It seems I slowly built up the confidence to spend a whole day in the department, and ultimately to start doing experiments again.

Whether or when, during the course of my PhD, I ever used that particular tilting stage again I cannot be sure. I do recollect that much of my work was done on a different make of TEM, and the central point of the project was to use a brand-new microscope, a scanning transmission electron microscope (or STEM), which arrived early on in my time, being only the second such instrument in the UK. I also know that the results that formed the meat of the thesis (from the STEM experiments) were almost certainly incorrectly interpreted, and that the part of my research that has stood the test of time (still cited just a couple of months ago) was a completely accidental finding. Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

The tilting cartridge for the Siemens instrument reappeared in my life in a much more positive way during my postdoc years in the States, although again being ham-fisted was relevant. By the time I had started my second postdoc, and moved from an unsatisfactory attempt studying metals to (amorphous) polymers, I was confident enough to tackle the Siemens again, with the same sort of delicate cartridge. However…I didn’t break it, but I managed to fail to zero the angle of tilt, thereby observing the craze (a precursor to a crack in a material like polystyrene) not at normal incidence. The tip of the craze was therefore splayed out in a way that hadn’t been observed before. Eureka – it supported a theory about what the craze tip would look like, as my wonderful supervisor Ed Kramer instantly spotted. Once I’d satisfactorily proved I could reproduce the results, obtain stereoscopic pairs of images (i.e. two images with a small and controlled angle of tilt between them that allowed a 3D reconstruction under an appropriate viewer), a paper was rapidly penned. This was within about 6-8 weeks of starting working with Ed. My life was transformed. Another piece of accidental mayhem, it couldn’t even be called serendipity on my part though perhaps it was on Ed’s, but this time with a happy ending.

The rest of my career, as they say, is history. It could so easily have ended after my first encounter with that fragile tilting cartridge; I might have gone off and become a teacher or worked in industry, who knows. In which case, there would be no blog, no strings of papers or letters after my name. So much is chance, and one should never forget it. I was lucky. Far too many people get discouraged, lost or break things (like me) and move away, perhaps completely away from science. Research is full of luck and serendipity. I have always tried to tell my students that. Shortly I will have the pleasure of meeting up with many of them, and collaborators more generally, at a conference to mark my retirement, albeit two years late due to the pandemic. I’m very much looking forward to seeing once more many of the people who have made so much difference to my professional life.

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