lecture 2007 video clips

Jeff Roche

"It's so different to every other subject. Maths, physics; you just sit in a classroom and it's notes on the board, it's textbooks. You get some theory, some practical stuff in the workshop and it's the whole hands-on thing. It's not sitting there you get to do things; cut stuff and make stuff. Quite simply that appeals to me, I don't know if it's just that I'm a boy who likes doing things, I don't know. Mrs Brown and Mr Carroll, they are probably the reason I'm doing engineering now because DT has been a cracking subject for me throughout school."

"Lego Technic came along when I entered junior school at about seven or eight. It's big boys' Lego; you get gears, you get motors, you get pneumatic rams and things and you can actually make things that work. I think it's the best toy ever, and I'm really disappointed that I don't have a better excuse to sit around and play with it these days"

"I think years ago the tech department used to run a trip to Ford's; I don't know where it could have been Dagenham or something. They just got to look round the factory and you would see a production line; no idea what one of them looks like. You'd see cells; yep, we were told about them, never saw one. So all these machines were words we'd seen written on a piece of paper, we never got to see them in real life."

Raj Rajagopal

"Another view is the UK can do the clever stuff. Let's do the design and research and let the dumb guys do the manufacturing: It doesn't work like that. Where manufacturing goes, design follows pretty fast."

"It's interesting on factories, visiting factories: never having the chance to visit a factory. That's industry's fault. Industry doesn't do enough to make sure that they go to the school that are locally around them and get the the kids to come in and see the factories. You should be proud of your factory, want to show everyone your factory whoever it is. That's a great chance for young people to see factories, we should do more of that."

"Really it's up to us senior people in manufacturing and industry to make a difference. It's scary that there are still companies where management sit in the offices and aren't engineers and it's unfortunate that there's a division between the engineers, the mangers and the salespeople. One hopes more and more companies will take those divisions away, that they do get integrated and they do understand the way business works, and that they make industry and engineering attractive for young people; they pay them well, show them what's possible, give them the overseas travel, the interesting bits, the creativity, the opportunity to make money because if you don't, Goldman Sachs will have them, that's for sure."

"To be an engineer is something that people to aspire to in [India and China], it isn't something you're going to get stuck with because you aren't good enough to be a historian; you actually want to be an engineer, and there's huge numbers going into engineering."