“Ever since I was a child, I was always interested in taking things apart and seeing how they go back together,” says 19-year-old Nick Hugill.
“The video player if it was broken, the TV. It was pens mainly. My dad would get annoyed that there wasn’t a working pen in the house.”
Hugill channelled his interests into A-levels in maths, physics and chemistry but when it came to picking a degree course, the choice was obvious to him. He moved from North Yorkshire to Warwickshire to enrol in the UK’s first “faculty on the factory floor”, a collaboration between Coventry University and manufacturer Unipart Group.
Now in the second year of a degree in manufacturing engineering, Hugill is one of 60 students at Coventry University who divide their time between lecture halls and Unipart’s nearby site, working on live projects such as redesigning Aston Martin fuel pipes or programming robots to speed up manufacturing processes.
The course’s creators believe it is unique in offering a blend of university lectures, workshop teaching and work on real manufacturing tasks. They are floating the £32m collaboration between business and academics as a possible blueprint for other centres, as employers seek to lift UK productivity growth out of the doldrums.
As one of the first cohort at the Institute of Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering (AME), Hugill is already steeped in the language of productivity gurus.
“Right from the start of the course it’s been lean manufacturing, Kanban, all the different sorts of philosophies,” says Hugill over the noise of machines in the Unipart factory.
“I have got a friend doing electrical engineering and the first time he will go into a factory setting is in his third year - if he does a placement. But I am here twice a week.”
Unipart, once the parts division of British Leyland, hopes the institute will tackle skills shortages by training up “industry-ready engineers”. It is also using the collaboration with Coventry University to develop new products and more efficient manufacturing.
First-year student Matthew Jacobs is on a project to make fuel tanks 25% lighter. He applied to the course after failing A-levels and then completing a BTec. Jacobs was looking for a course that he could relate to real world manufacturing.
“When I did A-levels, I thought it wasn’t relevant to anything. Maths was numbers on a board, whereas on this course if you learn about density in a materials lecture and then fracture toughness here at the factory, it all comes together.”
The course does not have a maths module. Instead, topics like Boolean algebra and its use in robotics are taught using the AME centre’s robots, says course director Ian Wilson.
“Some of these guys didn’t do so well in maths and science as they should have done because I think there is a fear factor. If they don’t see the relevance to what they are doing right now, they find it hard to engage,” says Wilson.
“This is a completely different course to what anyone else is doing.”
Part of the students’ time is spent in a bright, 1,000 square metre teaching workshop next to the working factory. There they can program training robots and try out their inventions on £3m worth of equipment. Manufacturing processes developed in this so-called “sandpit” can then be transferred to the factory next door.
Unipart gets “more bang for its buck” from the institute by combining training with research and development, says Carol Burke, managing director of Unipart Manufacturing Group. Breakthroughs so far include a new fuel rail for the Ford Fox engine and a lightweight exhaust system for Aston Martin. But R&D projects are as much about how Unipart makes things as what it makes, says Burke.
“A lot of that is not the sexy end of the process. It’s just being able to make half a million fuel rails, the same each time. That’s something that doesn’t ignite many people’s imaginations and yet it’s what will enable us to compete with India and China.”
Then there is the skills issue, with manufacturers reporting persistent problems in recruiting engineers.
“The reality of this building is it’s because we were really worried. We were incredibly worried. Particularly with Jaguar Land Rover on our doorstep, actually it was becoming a huge issue. They are growing and growing, so if you have a shortage to start with they just suck everybody in ... We’ve got to grow our own,” says Burke.
The project was awarded £7.9m from the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Catalyst Fund and recently got George Osborne’s backing, when the chancellor chose the institute as the venue to sign a devolution deal for the West Midlands.
John Neill, Unipart’s chairman and chief executive, says the institute builds on his company’s track record of in-house training and its consultancy work for other employers.
The manufacturer built the first corporate university in the UK in 1993, known as Unipart University, and then set up “faculties on the floor” at its sites around the world. It is evangelical about what it calls the “Unipart Way” of continuous improvement.
“Six hundred billion dollars is spent on training around the world and only 5-20% of that results in improvements,” says Neill.
“We saw how – and it happened to me – our own people went on courses and learnt really interesting stuff but went back to where they worked and it didn’t apply and so they forgot it. So we introduced ‘learn in the morning and do in the afternoon’... It goes right to the heart of human motivation.”
Neill has worked with a succession of UK governments to tackle Britain’s poor record on productivity. He feels this latest venture could be replicated.
In an age full of prophecies about robots taking humans’ jobs, the centre is also hoping to boost students’ employment prospects.
“It’s really putting them right at the edge of what’s coming and future proofing them,” says Carl Perrin, who moved from Rolls-Royce to Coventry University to run the institute.
The Bank of England recently warned that up to 15m jobs in Britain were at risk of being lost to an age of robots. Andy Haldane, the bank’s chief economist, said automation posed a risk to almost half those employed in the UK.
Perrin suggests centres like the AME could play an important role in mitigating the effects of technology on jobs.
“Someone who is in their 50s and has been operating a press for the last 30 years and is very good and been adding a lot of value to the business, if we don’t need that skill anymore, that person is not on the scrap heap, there is no reason they can’t retrain. They can be that person who knows how to programme that robot,” he says.
For now, one of the biggest challenges for the new factory degree is breaking down prejudices around manufacturing. Course director Wilson echoes employers’ reports that they struggle to fill apprenticeship places.
“We need to actually value people in manufacturing and not class it as a dirty word. We are still tarnishing it with a picture from the 1950s of being dirty and dangerous,” he says.
“When we have parents come in on open days ... they have a viewpoint of when manufacturing was dying, when people were on strike. They have a very large influence. We are almost talking more to the parents than the students. Showing them how things have changed.”
“These guys are all going to be employed when they leave this.”
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