Strategic Advisor for Quantitative Methods

1 The best programme of CI and RDI projects
The first task of the Strategic Advisor, together with the rest of the commissioning panel, and working closely with Mike Wallace, will be to help select the best and most coherent suite of projects from the applications made. The Strategic Advisor should work with successful applicants to revise and review successful applications so that they cohere as effectively as possible into a national programme.

2 Employability
Student demand, in the broadest sense of interest in QM, is a vital complement to course supply, so that maximizing student awareness of the market potential of QM skills, particularly in the current economic environment, is a strategically important. The challenge is to turn the anecdotal 'It was SPSS that got me the job' into a recognition by undergraduates that QM skills are not about the boring processing of irrelevant numbers, but about highly transferrable problem solving, analysis and report writing skills.

3 Locating UG QM within the overall educational life course
Improving undergraduate QM teaching will be made easier to the extent that school students arrive at university courses suitably prepared, and will in turn raise capacity and skill levels at postgraduate and post doctoral levels. The SA should press the case for the importance of the application of mathematics, as opposed to teaching to the test, in the school curriculum. Second, support any moves towards more general post-GCSE maths education. Third, to build links between schools and universities: researchers working with school projects, e.g. on the census, can act as important role models. Fourth, the strategic advisor can make university departments more aware of their ability to influence student subject choice in school through their entrance requirements.

The next link to consider is that between undergraduate and postgraduate training. The Strategic Advisor should talk to all DTC directors to encourage them to see 'outreach' work geared to securing a good supply of applications from QM qualified undergraduates as a core part of their DTC's remit.

4 A lobbying body for QM
The strategic advisor, with a mandate from the ESRC, should seek to build a coalition that is prepared to press the case for developing the quantitative skills of non-STEM subject undergraduates, for policies, at all stages of the educational life course, that promote this, and for the corresponding resources.

5 Certification/Recognition development
The strategic advisor will need to take forward the debate about accreditation versus recognition posed in my 2009 report in the light of several relevant developments, such as the launch of Getstats, the establishment of DTCs, the forthcoming Nuffield Foundation/ESRC funded centres on undergraduate QM teaching and secondary analysis and the impact of changes to tuition fees. My sense is that the way forward may well lie in the creation of a national level qualification, together with the teaching and assessment infrastructure needed to sustain that, but that once established, the normal route to the award of this qualification would be through work assessed by individual HEIs as part of an undergraduate degree curriculum.
6 Taking undergraduate QM further
The SA should encourage the development of attention to longitudinal and administrative data in undergraduate QM teaching.

This project involves little original research so that impact in its usual sense is not relevant. However the purpose of the project is precisely to achieve as large an impact as possible on the standard and breadth of QM training in UK university social science, including the development of interest, awareness, knowledge and skills amongst school pupils who might go on to study social science at university, post-doc researchers and teachers, and HE social science staff without the relevant knowledge or skill.