With skills given top billing in government initiatives from the Innovation Strategy to the Levelling Up White Paper, the question put to a recent HEPI roundtable dinner was an important one: how can we persuade policymakers to be more ambitious about research and scholarship in creating a highly skilled and productive UK workforce?
It was the second roundtable hosted by HEPI with leading academic publishers Taylor and Francis, following a discussion in June 2022 on the relationship between policymaking and open-access research. It was held under Chatham House rules, by which speakers express views on the understanding that they will be unattributed.
Participants, who included academics, university strategists, business leaders, policy advisers and communications experts from across the UK, suggested that lack of ambition was not necessarily the problem; ministers have regularly expressed their aim of making the UK a “science superpower” and “innovation nation”. More of an issue was persuading them to draw on evidence rather than anecdote in working out how to do it.
In a wide-ranging and rich discussion, three key themes emerged: permeability, incentivisation and story-telling.
