FST JOURNAL

Following the presentations, the speakers at the event formed a panel and took questions from the audience. Some of the key points raised are shown below.

The first question from the audience concerned the skills gap. How do we encourage more young people into STEM and importantly, help to maintain interest through secondary school and beyond. A panellist said that we could do better by ‘training the trainers’- talking to and engaging teachers and educators to help them to understand the application side of STEM and pass this onto young people. Another panellist said that there is something in the ‘prestige’ of the STEM sector that is attractive. Visibility of industry is important. Can young people image themselves in these jobs? The gender pay gap does not help, and we are losing a huge pool of talent because of this. Visibility of women in the sector here in the UK is key to encourage more young women to come into the sector. There are lots of jobs that will ‘pay the mortgage’ in the space sector, but we need to do more to communicate this to families. The other aspect of the skills gap is lack of experience. There is not enough people who have ‘touched hardware’ or have engineering experience to employ. We need to create programmes that build experience, not just classrooms for theory.

Another question to the panel was how wider public bodies could support academia and government to connect lots of the good work going on in a seemingly fragmented ecosystem, with the wider public. One panellist said that we need to change our communications mentality around science. He said that we live in a peer-reviewed world, but that we should place more value on going out into the world and communicating the science to everyday people, not just other scientists. Another panellist challenged this point saying that she felt that the UK had a strong science communication culture but connecting the UK’s space-science ecosystem to start-ups and capital, needed developing.

With regards to getting more young people into STEM, the FST Chair, Lord Willetts chimed in to say that the early specialisation in the UK’s education system was a ‘big problem’. He said that we are expecting young people of 14 and 15-year-old to make decisions on their professional life and we need to change our culture around this. In the US system, the biggest single group of applicants for university courses are ‘not yet decided’. They spend their first year of university trying out a range of different subjects and choosing a major after that. That then changes the culture of explanation. The academics will pitch their subjects to their students, bringing STEM subjects to light and engaging students with their expertise.

Katie Perry’s mission to space came up briefly and panellists said that it has caused a lot of controversy but that it has got people talking about space which is positive.

A question around connecting sustainability issues on earth with space missions was answered by the panellist representing the European Space Agency (ESA) as Director of Science there. She said that ESA have a very strong Earth Observation Programme which is world leading for Europe, they are also looking at sustainability of the space environment. She said that space is becoming crowded and that Spectrum and Low Earth orbit is contested. ESA have a voluntary ‘zero debris charter’ which companies and countries can sign up to. It is a value proposition that can’t be ‘policed’ but they hope that by behaving in the right way, they will mobilise public support to make sure that everybody also behaves well in space. Concern was voiced around recent announcements of cuts to NASA programmes dealing with climate science and climate monitoring. There was support for David Attenborough’s comment on one of his recent documentaries about earth which said that to bring everybody together in thinking about our planet in a sustainable way, we must first view it from space.