Daniel Zeichner – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Daniel Zeichner on 2016-09-12.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to increase the number of people in the UK with high-level specialist skills in data science.

Joseph Johnson

The Government recognises the need to increase the number of people with high-level skills in data science for the benefit of the UK, and is taking a range of measures to boost the supply of people with these skills.

The Alan Turing Institute is a £67 million joint venture between the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and five leading UK Universities (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick). It is the UK’s national institute for data science, and training the next generation of researchers is a key part of its mission.

Other institutes supported by the Research Councils include the Hartree Centre (a centre of excellence in High Performance Computing), the Farr Institute of Health Informatics Research, and the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, which are all helping researchers to develop their skills to make better use of data.

The Research Councils are taking other steps to increase the supply of researchers with data skills, for example all Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council-funded doctoral students are required to be trained in informatics, data analysis and computational methods as a core part of their training. They support numerous Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) involved in data analysis, including the University of Edinburgh’s Data Science CDT, and the Big Data and Cloud Computing CDT at the University of Newcastle. And the £19.5 million Q-Step programme is designed to promote a step-change in quantitative social science training in the UK.