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The single‐honours degree aims at producing specialists, yet most industrial companies need more broadly educated graduates. Donald Hutchings claims that the polytechnics could take the lead in pioneering interdisciplinary courses.

Winston Churchill once said of a political opponent, ‘Occasionally he stumbles on the truth but he picks himself up and carries on as if nothing had happened.’ By using this quotation I do not wish to imply deliberate obtuseness, but it must seem at times to those concerned with changes in education that, despite all efforts, there is an inherent resistance to innovation. We are not likely, then, to see very sweeping changes in the years immediately ahead.

This year and next a larger percentage of PhDs are going to have to get jobs in industry. But most companies do not really want the sort of physicist turned out by the universities. The easy solution is to cut back the number of PhDs, but a more effective alternative would be to train PhDs in a manner more useful to a large number of employers.

So far, the main argument about examinations in school applied science has been on motivation. Clearly, since most sixth‐formers are primarily concerned with getting a university place, it would be unrealistic to expect them to devote as much time and effort to school subjects for which there are no A‐level examinations. It is for this reason that most schools introducing applied science work want to see papers alternative to the more traditional mathematics and physics. On the other hand, some headmasters have been quick to draw a distinction between the spontaneous ‘open‐ended’ project work and the more formal studies in physics for A‐level. They fear that to introduce examinations would soon blunt this spontaneity so that the applied science work would be no more exciting than the usual A‐level studies.

Donald Hutchings writes: Modern warships need modern methods. And the Royal Navy's weapons and electrical engineering school, HMS Collingwood, has demonstrated that methods of instruction can be as sophisticated as the complex equipment now in use. One hundred and fifty teaching machines are kept fully employed in the task of training 2300 officers and weapons control systems, guns, missile launchers, missiles, and sonar. Although the work is often specialized, the apprentices are given a broad‐based technical education so that they are taught to think of an engineering system rather than of its components. At HMS Collingwood the apprentice's studies take him beyond ONC, so that he can work for higher qualifications on his own either during his service or later on if he decides to leave the Navy.

Universities offer little encouragement to schools wishing to experiment with new courses. For most headmasters this is a hard fact of life — to try out new combinations of subjects or different ways of teaching them is to take a chance. And, understandably, in most cases, the risk is too great.

How successful is the technological approach? Donald Hutchings, of Oxford University Institute of Education, writes: How far is the slowness of schools to develop technical courses, and of the universities to recognize them, the result of psychological and educational misconceptions? This was the underlying question of the conference on Towards More Creative Science held at New College, Oxford, recently.

Robert Bell, a 17‐year‐old sixthformer at The Park School, Swindon, showed me his hovercraft — or, rather, what was left of it after its first trial. “One expert said it wouldn't work,” Robert told me. “Well, it did — there was a definite lift.” He explained how he had built his machine with wood from a cupboard door, a skirt made from a tyre inner tube, and an old vacuum cleaner motor. Unfortunately, during the trial insufficient clearance for the fan had resulted in six of its vanes snapping off. But Robert was undeterred. “It's just a case of making a new fan, which I hope to do next Tuesday,” he said.

The shortage of suitable recruits to technology has come in for much discussion in the last year or two. It would be gratifying if some of this talk was beginning to have effect in the right quarters. But, in spite of the fillip given to higher technological education by Robbins, the over‐all pattern remains unchanged — the best boys still think only in terms of pure science.

It is extraordinary how little fuss there has been about Britain's new technological universities. How quickly one has become used to seeing advertisements in the press for professors and lecturers at Aston, Brunei and Loughborough, to name some of the first of the eight to get the Royal Charter, and at Chelsea, now a constituent college of the University of London, and the Welsh College of Advanced Technology, soon to become part of the University of Wales. It is a little disappointing to find that of the eight new universities, only two, Bath and Loughborough, have included the word ‘technology’ in their title, although it is not hard to see why the majority preferred a more conventional image.