While degree apprenticeships and institutes of technology (IoTs) are portrayed by the government as being crucial elements of the drive to transform technical education, their impact has failed to live up to the hype.
Little more is known about IoTs than when they were first mooted back in July 2015 (see box, right). And while the concept of achieving a degree-level qualification without racking up student debt may sound attractive, fewer than 800 people started a degree apprenticeship during the whole of 2015-16.
But where the government seems to be failing to make significant inroads, one man appears to be succeeding. Sir James Dyson may be best-known as the inventor and billionaire founder of Dyson, but he is now also the creator of Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, which opened last week.
While the name of the institution, based in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, may evoke the government’s enigmatic IoT project, Dyson is keen to stress that this is very much a university. Indeed, it’s the first new institution to be created under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017.
Structure and a salary
The structure, however, appears similar to an apprenticeship. The 33 first-year students will spend one day per week in lectures and another in private study. The remaining three will be spent working in Dyson’s research, design and development team.
As Dyson employees, the students will be earning a salary throughout the four-year degree - starting at £15,500 a year and increasing annually. There is also the prospect of a permanent job on graduation.
The institute was born out of a meeting with universities minister Jo Johnson. “I had gone to complain about their not being enough engineers,” Dyson recalls. “And he said, ‘Stop complaining and set up your own.’ I immediately said yes.
“We take on in excess of 100 new graduates a year and mentor them. If we can take on graduates and mentor them, why couldn’t we take on students?”
So why did Dyson not simply establish a degree apprenticeship? “We wanted to have our own university and do it in our own particular way,” he says.
Unlike an apprenticeship standard, the Dyson programme is not set by a group of employers, explains director Duncan Piper. “We are not trying to prepare them for a specific job. It is a degree preparing them for engineering more generally. It is very much not an apprenticeship, they will get a degree.”
‘Not an easy option’
Applicants were expected to have three A levels, including maths and a science or a technology subject. For the places, the institute received around 900 applications.
“What we are doing is not an easy option,” stresses Dyson. “It is a 47-week year and they have to do their work with Dyson. It is also a four-year degree, not three. But they also get two-and-a-half times the normal teaching time they would get at another university - and they are innovators. They will be contributing to our technology.”
The degrees will be awarded by WMG University of Warwick, which will also supply lecturing staff for the first two years.
Dyson says that he is unsure about the reason for the shortage of young engineers coming through the system. “I wish I knew the answer. We have just got it wrong. We have forgotten what makes us great. I hope that we can attract more young people into engineering by what we do.”
