English universities should be moved away from a Department for Education that treats them “like poorly performing secondary schools” and into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology if the Westminster government wants to boost its science superpower agenda, according to former minister Lord Willetts.
The Tory peer makes the call in a paper for the Policy Exchange thinktank, in which he urges government and policymakers to move on from “Thatcherite rhetoric” against industrial strategy and have confidence in the state’s role in supporting innovation and key technologies.
The paper revisits a previous report by Lord Willetts 10 years ago as universities minister, Eight Great Technologies, tracing fluctuating Conservative government attitudes to industrial strategy since then amid political upheaval.
In the new report, Lord Willetts calls the division of responsibility for universities in Whitehall – teaching under the DfE and research under the new DSIT – “very dysfunctional as it means nobody has an overall view of the funding and performance of our universities, a key national asset receiving significant public funding”.
