SKILLS & TRAINING MAY 2019
A LEARNING REVOLUTION
A new start-up university, due to open in Hereford, is set to drastically change the
way engineering and manufacturing skills are taught. MM visited to fi nd out more
THE BOSS
Professor Elena Rodriguez-Falcon
president & CEO
In a modest council building on
a quiet back street of Hereford
city centre, an educational
revolution is taking place.
The New Model in
Engineering & Technology
(NMiTE – pronounced
enmight)
might
is an initiative backed
by government, educators and
industry, to transform engineering
education in Britain. NMiTE aims
to secure university status and
become Britain’s fi rst wholly new,
purpose-built university in four
decades. With a focus on hands-on
learning, led by industry, could it
be the solution to the skills crisis
that has plagued manufacturing
and engineering for too long?
To fi nd the answer to that
question, meet the brains behind
the initiative…
Professor Rodriguez-Falcon has been with NMiTE for 15 months,
having previously worked at the University of She eld for 20
years. She explains how the project came about...
NMiTE was born out of the needs of the county, the economy and
the industry. About ten years ago, the then local MP and a group of
local residents began exploring what was needed for this region.
There are only two counties in the UK that don’t have a university,
and Herefordshire is one of them. The group saw the benefi ts of
bringing a university to the city, especially stopping the exodus of
young people from Hereford.
Once they realised the level of the skills shortage in engineering
and manufacturing, the focus quickly turned to establishing a
university with a specifi c focus on industry. Employers are very
vocal about the fact they receive engineering graduates and then
they have to spend two years retraining them. That led the team to
wonder: if employers are after work-ready engineers, what do we
have to do to produce one?
They looked at all teaching methods around the world and
put together a menu of things that could produce a work-ready
engineer. What you tend to fi nd is that a typical curriculum is based
on lectures and exams with the occasional input from business.
The obvious way of doing it would be to fl ip it around – to allow the
students to become engineers-in-training by working with industry
from day one. It’s the same approach the medical profession took
some years ago: instead of graduating a doctor who had never
seen a patient, they started working with patients regularly.
This is the fi rst new university in 40 years, so comes with its own
challenges. If you think about what a university entails, especially
when starting with a blank piece of paper, the challenges are
enormous. It starts with ensuring that you put all the right building
blocks in place before you start teaching – before you can have an
academic programme, you have to have academic sta . Before you
can have academic sta , you need human resources provisions.
It’s all new. We’re a start-up university, e ectively. Normally, with
established organisations, you do things sequentially; with NMiTE
we’ve done things in parallel. You can’t a ord to waste time by
doing things in a set order.
We are currently developing the ‘product’ – the academic
programme, infrastructure and student experience. We plan to
launch with a full group of about 200 students in September
2020. We will do a test with 50, as soon as possible. Because our
programme is linear, it doesn’t matter when we start.
The aim is to get a full Royal Charter and become an o cial
university. It’s a long journey, though. It requires us to graduate
a full cohort, so we’re at least three or four years away from that.
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