Prof John Mitchell, the immediate past EPC President, summarises his time as President and looks forward to new projects coming to fruition in 2025 and beyond.
The EPC hosted an incredibly successful Engineering Academics Network Congress at the University of Cardiff in June 2024. Titled, Engineers of the Future, the event aimed to create a forward-looking vision of the opportunities and challenges technologies such as AI present to the sector. We were excited to follow on this conversation with our 2025 Congress in Manchester that focused on the sector’s objectives to Realise the Vision. As part of the 2024 congress, we were delighted to host a prestige lecture from Dr. Mark Drakeford MS, shortly after his stepping down as First Minister of Wales in the Welsh Assembly. As always, it has been a particular joy to award the Hammermen Student Prize in the last two years, now styled as the Hammermen David K. Harrison Student Award, in honour and memory of the council’s longstanding Secretary who died in 2022. The student submissions are exceptional and every year the students impress attendees with their expertise and enthusiasm for their subject.
It was also a great privilege as President to present the biannual EPC President’s Prize to Mary Curnock Cook CBE, who through roles at UCAS as well as more recently with the Dyson Institute of Engineering & Technology has made significant impact on higher education and engineering education. The next award will be made in 2026, when Strathclyde host us.
One of the key functions of the EPC is to lobby government and regulators on the sector’s behalf. While it is often difficult to draw a direct causation between our input and subsequent policy, we were delighted to see that despite suggestions to the contrary, ultimately foundation degrees in engineering were not subject to the government’s new HE tuition fee cap. The EPC vociferous made the point that foundation years are a critical widening participation mechanism in engineering – a subject area that has some of the best graduate outcomes and impacts in social mobility. We can only hope that our efforts regarding cuts to Level 7 Apprenticeships and the availability of places on Engineering courses have similar success.
An area of significant development for the EPC in recent years has been the development of toolkits. We now have the Sustainability Toolkit, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Engineering and Siemens. This toolkit provides accessible resources to support instruction in sustainability across a range of disciplines. This sits alongside our other toolkits, including the Enterprise Collaboration (formally the Crucible Project toolkit) and the highly successful Ethics Toolkit, which has been updated with further case-studies. Work is already underway on a Complex Systems Toolkit sponsored by Quanser, and we hope others will follow, for example in safety and security – areas were we are aware members are looking for support in their adherence to AHEP4 requirements.
Another exciting project gaining traction is in the area of Neuro-inclusion. All in for engineering is co-developing a Neuro-inclusion maturity framework to increase inclusivity in engineering programmes and within academic to better support staff and students.
Over the past two years the EPC has been working with UCL and the Royal Academy of Engineering on a State-of-the-Nation in Engineering Education Report, which is due to be published later in 2025. This exciting work tries, for the first time, to paint a comprehensive picture of the HE Engineering Education sector in the UK, from student and staff data, funding data, a survey of teaching styles and case-studies of teaching innovations.
EPC Online has matured to offer support for a wide range of the council’s activities. One exciting aspect of my presidency has been to form new groups our networks. In particular, we have launched two new networks to improve our communications with our members. The first has been the highly successful EPC Reps events. The provide an opportunity for reps to hear first-hand of developments in the sector, but also to feedback concerns and opportunities for the EPC to better support its members. The second is the Heads and Deans Networks which is hosting regular meetings to support those in senior leadership positions within Engineering Departments and Schools.
As president, I must acknowledge the wonderful (but small) team of staff that support the activities of the EPC. Their dedication to Engineering is exemplary and all go above and beyond to make the EPC the successful community that it is.
In both technology and policy, there are evolutions and revolutions at a pace rarely seem. It is an exciting but also challenging time to be an academic in engineering. However, as we know as engineers, collaboration always makes for better outcomes and it has been a pleasure to be part of the community of the EPC who are so dedicated to championing this wonderful sector. I look forward to working with you all over the final months of my Presidency and into the future.
– Prof John Mitchell, EPC President
