On 21st July, ten years to the day, after Johnny Rich joined the EPC as Chief Executive, he will be stepping down. This week he delivered a valedictory address reflecting in the past decade’s challenges and the healthy state of the EPC he leaves behind. For those who missed it, the following is the text of his speech.
In 2016 a lot changed for many of us. That was, of course, the year of the Brexit referendum. It was also the year that David Bowie died, aged 69, and Alan Rickman too, aged 69. And Donald Trump became President – aged 69, which makes me think there must be something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
For me, the biggest change was that I joined the EPC as Executive Director, a title that became ‘Chief Executive’ at the following year’s AGM.
When I joined, it didn’t take too long to get to know most of the people involved. Partly because they were warm, welcoming and hugely enthusiastic, but also partly because, if I’m honest, there weren’t huge numbers of them.
There was a strong band of loyalists, most of them older than I was.
That said, attendance at the Annual Congress that year was not many fewer than this year. In those days, the in-person experience was a vital opportunity for that active community to come together.
It was held in Hull, organised by Steph Haywood, who I’m very pleased agreed to introduce me today. She was not only the EPC President at the time but also the Congress convenor. Either role would be more than enough for most people, but over the past ten years, Steph has always been one of the EPC’s most active and effective loyalists not only in those two roles, but more recently as Treasurer.
The Congress theme that year was creativity. As some of you will know, I was an arts graduate and very new to engineering, and I carried most of the preconceptions that we still battle today. So this theme was a revelation to me. I understood for the first time that engineering isn’t just science with tools; it sits between the creative arts and the sciences. It is as much about imagination as calculation, as much about making as machines.
The leaky pipeline
I realised that, had I understood what engineering actually was at 13 or 17, I might have become one. Who knows? I might not have been any good at it, but in 2016 I finally understood that I too was part of that leaky talent pipeline that still persists: generations of people who never even give the discipline serious consideration and they miss out on opportunities while society faces skill shortages.
That’s because, even though engineering literally surrounds every moment of our lives, good engineering is mostly invisible and engineers are unassuming. It is one of the things I have so loved about this community: varied though it is, there is a common desire to get together to solve stuff rather than to stand up and say look at me.
The state we were in
Let’s remember what higher education was like in 2016. The effect of tripled tuition fees in England had sheltered universities from the austerity that had ravaged so many other parts of the public sector, including FE. In the devolved nations too, English fees had set a ripple effect of expectation around funding the sector.
Student numbers had recently been uncapped and there was a common consensus that more international students would be A Good Thing.
There was room for almost every university to expand. Meanwhile, UK universities gobbled up a disproportionate share of Horizon Europe funding.
Ah yes, those were halcyon days!
Of course, they didn’t seem like it at the time. We worried – quite rightly – about access, students’ growing debts, facilities that couldn’t keep up with expansion, staff:student ratios, overpaid VCs, the rise of so-called challenger institutions, the new language of ‘market competition’ and ‘students as consumers’. There were also new policy initiatives like TEF and there were plans to close HEFCE and introduce an HE regulator instead.
Every decade looks back at its predecessor as more rose-tinted than today’s problems. It’s only when things get even worse tomorrow that we realise how lucky we will have been today.
Differently bad
They don’t even need to get worse. They just need to get differently bad.
Every year we have different difficulties and as engineers – and I’m completely improperly including myself here – we take problems as starting points to invent solutions. At that Congress in Hull, I heard about UCL’s innovative Integrated Masters programme. The following year, the EPC hosted a landmark conference at the IET, chaired by John Perkins, which brought together literally dozens of new approaches to Engineering education.
Among the initiatives that were creating the most buzz was the soon-to-open NMITE and the idea of Dyson creating an industry-university crossover institution – exploiting a vacuum, you might say. TEDi-London followed a couple of years two later.
In 2017 we saw the Higher Education & Research Act, which led, in 2018, to the creation of the Office for Students. HE funding had started to become a salient political issue again.
Supposedly, it had been ‘solved’ by David Willetts’ arranging that graduates would pay back most of the cost of their studies if and only if they could afford to. But now, the narrative had switched to ‘why are graduates not earning enough to pay it all back?’
Theresa May, desperate for a populist line in her Tory Conference speech changed the repayment terms in a way that helped no one and exposed the soft mud of accounting on which the entire edifice was built. An already teetering tower started to crumble in a way that has defined the financial crisis in HE today. The ruins of our broken funding system are what you get when no one has the political capital or resolve to fix things.
Send in the clowns
With the benefit of distance, it’s clear that possibly the greatest casualty of Brexit was good and stable government. The frantic juggling trick of May’s premiership gave rise to the full-blown clown act of Boris Johnson.
This handover was paralleled at OfS where the sensible, non-partisan, self-styled master of deliverology, Sir Michael Barber was replaced by James Wharton, the newly ennobled Baron Wharton of Yarm, who had run Johnson’s leadership campaign, received generous donations from his Russian tycoon pals, and who refused to surrender the whip throughout his tenure at the supposedly independent regulator OfS.
A House of Lords report – which heavily quoted the EPC’s own submission – later slammed the OfS during that time as “unfit”, “inconsistent” and a “smokescreen for the political priorities of ministers”.
We found ourselves in a new era, where higher education was a battlefront in the culture war. Eton and Oxbridge-educated politicians complained about the elitism and disconnectedness of academia. They deployed the public speaking skills that they’d learned while practising their free speech at the Oxford Union to talk about how woke universities were denying students free speech. And no doubt it was thanks to their degrees in PPE that they understood that higher education had become insufficiently vocational.
This was the sort of arrant nonsense that obsessed the policy landscape and drowned out the real issues, most notably that, as that Lords report noted, there was a looming financial crisis that OfS, and governments across the UK were ignoring.
Counting what’s measured, not measuring what counts
The culture war allowed politicians – on all sides – to question the ‘value’ of courses, with value measured not even in utilitarian terms, but merely in the narrowest of commercial terms, based on outputs with no consideration of input.
That means that a student from a disadvantaged background in Sunderland who studies engineering and chooses to stay in their community, contributing to regeneration and earning perhaps twice the regional median salary is valued less than a student from a posh school who goes to a posh university and on to a posh city job earning five times more. Where is the value that has created for society?
These are the metrics that allow some politicians and commentators to say that too many people go to university, when what they mean is too many other people’s kids.
Higher education policy today determines that universities have to follow student demand or face financial ruin, but then they’re condemned for failing to add enough value if there are skills shortages in the areas like engineering that not enough students choose. Students like me, back in the day.
The state we’re in
Tuition fees may not be frozen any more, but they’re still refrigerated. The Strategic Priorities Grant, which the EPC told the Treasury should rise by hundreds of millions to meet the shortfall in engineering funding, was instead cut last week by £55 million.
Meanwhile, even though international students contribute a net of over £40 billion to the UK, the government has pursued a visa regime that’s like an ‘out to lunch’ sign on the shop door and it is planning to tax whatever’s left of the cross-subsidy provided by international students.
These are dire times indeed.
Strength through adversity
But, as I already said, engineers turn problems into opportunities. Just as the EPC supported a wave of innovation in the last decade, we’re bringing together our community to do the same in this one.
One example is the Emerging Stronger initiative that Professors Gary Woods and Bev Gibbs led as we came of the pandemic. They gathered the best responses to crisis from across the sector and put together a guide to what might help us to work better in more normal times.
They’re repeating that exercise now. Emerging Stronger 2.0 is looking at the ways that we can collaborate more, use AI to our advantage and to our students’, and treat today’s problems as the launchpad to challenge practices and assumptions that have passed their ‘best before’ dates. By the way, if you haven’t already, do sign up for the Emerging Stronger webinar this Thursday.
No one is saying, “Stop doing that, do this instead”, but instead we are encouraging our community to share what works in order to innovate and learn how to adopt a diversity of approaches.
Learning through collaboration
This is also the thinking behind one of the strands of activity I’ve been most proud of during my time at the EPC: the creation of toolkits.
There were toolkits before I joined, but they were generally a few pages of text, produced by those public-spirited loyalists. When I joined, there were already projects nearing completion for toolkits on placements and degree apprenticeships.
One of the conclusions of the apprenticeship work was that there were more questions than answers. With tireless support from volunteers, especially the leadership of Prof Mike Sutcliffe, this led to a major campaign aimed at government and IfATE, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. This campaign led to policy changes in the DfE and ongoing arrangements for closer working between engineering employers, PEIs and education providers.
Our first really big toolkit project arose out of the Congress we had planned to hold in Sheffield. We had an amazing line-up of speakers, but a certain coronavirus had other ideas.
We moved the Congress online but that didn’t altogether solve our problems. Our big opening keynote was supposed to be from Sir Bob Kerslake, now sadly no longer with us. He was already suffering health issues and he called me from the hospital at around 8.15am, a little over an hour before we were due to go live. I am very grateful to my many friends in the HE sector that, after putting the call out to my contacts, Greg Walker, then Director of MillionPlus, stepped up to save the day.
But back to the toolkit. The Congress theme was how we could better foster the relationship between business and academia. The online discussions, coupled with the Sheffield connection, gave rise to the Crucible Project, an initiative to gather what turned out to be dozens of case studies of projects where colleagues across the sector could learn what to try – and not to waste time on – in their own institutions.
Tools for the future
It was a lot of work and my thanks go to the many people involved, especially Prof Andy Alderson who led the work in the effective, unassuming way of engineers. The toolkit, which is now called the Enterprise Collaboration Toolkit, is an excellent resource and, without it, the past few years of EPC history would not be the same.
We wanted to help our members more, but we didn’t have the financial resources and with the pandemic and looming financial crisis, ramping up subscription fees was not an option.
However, I realised we were not alone in our goals to support our members. We had allies such as the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Engineering Council, Engineers Without Borders and many others.
At an away day, the Board had decided to put more focus on engineering ethics, so I spoke to Rhys Morgan at the Royal Academy who has been an incredible friend to the EPC. Together we hatched a plan to use their funds to create an Ethics Toolkit. We brought together brilliant people such as Professors Sarah Hitt and Raffaella Ocone who led the work.
The resulting toolkit was and remains a game changer for the sector. It receives tens of thousands of visits from all over the world every year.
That was such a success that we launched another project with the Royal Academy with additional backing from Siemens to create the Sustainability Toolkit.
In partnership with Quanser we have produced the Complex Systems Toolkit – which currently has an open call for contributions, by the way, particularly on intelligent robotics.
There was the Inclusive Employability Toolkit produced with Anne Nortcliffe at Wrexham and others, and the Digital Technical Standards Toolkit with DSIT.
None of these would have been possible without the brilliance of Crystal Nwagboso and Wendy Attwell on the EPC team.
We are currently working on the Inclusive Engineering Toolkit with the Royal Academy, a multi-year project, chaired by the brilliant Professor Sarah Sharples. We’ve also just confirmed a grant from the Lloyds Register Foundation to build a Safety Toolkit in several phases over the next 3 and a half years.
Supporting our members, supporting the EPC, supporting our friends
These projects are first and foremost a way of supporting our members and adding value to their membership. We wouldn’t do them if they didn’t, but they are also part of our business model. We never aim to make a profit, but by attracting funding for these projects we can help to support larger overheads and that allows the EPC to do more across the Board.
EPC Online
It has allowed us to invest in the website which looks very different to 2016. That’s where the toolkits are hosted, but it’s also where the centre of gravity sits for our wide community – rather than in small rooms that can only house those whose timetables, seniority and institution’s funds allow them to attend in person.
The website also hosts the extraordinary Data Explorer, for which Stella deserves almost all the credit, with a portion reserved for our web developers. Getting them to deliver our ambitions has often been a burden – which Crystal has shouldered more than I – but on the Data Explorer with Stella, they aced it.
A stronger voice
External funding has also allowed us to be more impactful in our representation work. Even when a government policy changes to coincide with what we’re asking for, it’s rare that we know that it was we who made the difference.
That has happened sometimes though. For example, last year, I was at a roundtable with a senior civil servant from the DfE who came up to me afterwards and said that she was very grateful for our work on the cost and importance of engineering foundation years, because it had helped her department argue successfully with the Treasury for an exemption for engineering when fees for foundation years in other disciplines were axed by a third.
The EPC has reached a point where governments across the four nations, OfS, UKRI, the Engineering Council, the Royal Academy and so many others now look to us for expertise. We aren’t just moaning in the wind, even if we don’t always manage to change its direction.
For that, I must again pay tribute to Stella for being the force behind so many of our policy consultations and papers, but also to all the members of our various committees, their chairs and vice chairs, the EPC Board, and to the wider membership who so often contribute their time, their expertise and their lived experience.
More and different
The band of EPC loyalists is now stronger than ever. And not so few in numbers.
Unlike 2016, most of them are now younger than me. That’s partly because I’m ten years older, but it’s also because I think because the EPC is now more welcoming, more inclusive, and more diverse.
On that note, at this year’s Congress, Sir Jim McDonald gave an excellent keynote during which he raised a point about the lack of diversity in engineering. I imagine this was an issue he’d raised in many rooms of engineers before because he was clearly going to reference the make-up of the room by way of illustration. But that wasn’t what was in front of him and he ended up saying, “Well, not in this room, perhaps.”
He was right. I totted up the gender balance among the 33 congress speakers – men did outnumber women… by one. Similarly, the delegates were 45% female and 55% male. In a sector where men outnumber women by six to one, that’s impressive, and given that our public lecture by Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was about women in STEM, I was very proud that the EPC was ahead of the curve.
The future
Further ahead than us, however, were the young finalists in the Hammermen David K Harrison Award, named to honour our late honorary secretary, one of those first people to welcome me in 2016.
Of the five finalists, four were young female engineers, who had taken a look at the world and thought about problems like breast cancer and climate change and decided that fixing them was their job.
They epitomise how the student body of engineering is changing and must change. It’s still a discipline for those who love Lego and maths and taking things apart to see how they work, but it’s also for people who dream, who want lives to be better, who want the planet to be better.
Thank you
Before I finish, I must say some thank yous. There are far too many to list individually and I hope if I haven’t mentioned you by name already, you know that it’s not because I wasn’t grateful for your support and friendship. I must however recognise the wonderful EPC Presidents – Georgina, John, Colin, Mike, Sarah and Steph – and all the directors it has been both a privilege and a pleasure to work with. And, I have mentioned most of the EPC team already, but not yet Rhian, who unassumingly gets on with making the whole machine work and making me look good.
Everything we have achieved over the past ten years, we have done by working together. Everything we have failed to do are just the successes we’re yet to have.
Thank you. I shall miss you all very much.
