Thanks to the very many of you who took time out to respond to the question posed to us by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) through our colleagues at EngineeringUK. To recap…

EngineeringUK through its annual report EngineeringUK 2103: The State of Engineering, identified that in order to meet the future UK demand for engineers with Level 4+ skills, the UK needs to roughly double its output of students with Level 4+ qualifications via universities and colleges of further education. A clear question arising is: if the number of students applying for engineering at university did double, would universities actually have the capacity to recruit them? And if not, how long would it take for departments to build the capacity to be able to accommodate a doubling of numbers? This of course, is a very complex question, but our members rose to the challenge and a summary of the results has been jointly published in this summary report from the Engineering Professors’ Council and EngineeringUK. It will be used to inform conversations with BIS and as part of the Tomorrow’s Engineers programme.