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PROPOSED DEVELOPMENTS IN TECHNICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL EDUCATION IN TECHNICAL COLLEGES

1. There is no need to argue the case for expanding technical education. Even if we could satisfy British industry, there would be an insatiable demand from overseas. Including the plans for Imperial College, the university developments announced for the present quinquennium seem likely to lead to an increase of roughly 25 per cent. in the present annual number of about 1,850 first degrees in technology at universities in England, Wales and Scotland. The universities are already beginning to think about further developments for 1957-62, but they cannot rapidly increase their output of graduates.

THE TECHNICAL COLLEGES AND THE EDUCATION OF TECHNOLOGISTS

2. The technical colleges are a complementary means of training technologists, catering for those students who prefer to mix earning and learning, and whose ambitions are not fully stirred until they have some experience of making a living. I suspect that this mixture of practice and theory is peculiarly suited to our people, and that many boys, and also their parents and employers, prefer this start in life to a university. At present the technical colleges turn out about 1,500 students every year who get external university degrees in science or technology, and some 9,000 who obtain qualifications not vastly different, mostly Higher National Certificates. Some of these students come on straight from full-time schooling at 18, but most of them leave school at 15 or 16 and fill the gap until 18 by part-time studies, having a definite job and an employer who backs their further education.

3. Our policy at the technological level is to attract more students who have stayed at school till 18 and to get more young men released from industry for full-time study. They will take either a continuous course of three or four years or, more frequently, the "sandwich courses" of alternate periods of study and employment which are being developed in consultation with the electrical, mining, building, railway and other industries. The new award-making Council, under the Chairmanship of Lord Hives, will approve these courses for diplomas in advanced technology having a status equal to a university degree.

4. As the main (though not exclusive) instruments for these courses we envisage the development of some 25 existing colleges in the major industrial centres as regional colleges concentrating on advanced work. These will be served by satellite local colleges, most of which will concentrate on the less advanced students and thus relieve the regional colleges of the low-level work with which many of them are still encumbered. To achieve this pattern we shall have to persuade the local authorities, who manage almost all the technical colleges, to accept regional planning and "free trade" in students across their boundaries.

5. The programme described later is designed to increase the annual output from advanced courses at technical colleges from about 10,000 to about 15,000. We shall do better than this if we succeed in increasing the proportion of students who complete the courses on which they embark. I am considering how best to reduce the wastage, which is now serious.

TECHNICAL COLLEGE COURSES FOR LESS ADVANCED STUDENTS

6. These are needed for training the skilled technicians and craftsmen required to support the technologists and for widening the stream from which the more able and ambitious can go on to advanced courses.

7. There should be no shortage of applicants. The growing number of pupils stopping on at secondary schools after 15 is already swelling the number of suitably qualified boys anxious to obtain further education, and over the next ten years the bulge in the birthrate will very substantially increase the numbers leaving school. This year out of some 250,000 boys who left maintained schools 70,000 went on to further education. The programme I propose will raise this figure to 120,000 out of the 300,000 who are expected to leave in 1965. (Not many girls become technicians; separate figures for these are, therefore, not given in this memorandum.)

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