The Teaching Company Scheme—The First Ten Years

Abstract

The Teaching Company Scheme sets up partnerships between academic institutions and industrial companies large and small. It is financially supported by the Science and Engineering Research Council, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Economic and Social Research Council, Northern Ireland Department of Economic Development and, increasingly, by industry. It has multiple objectives designed to bring benefits in both the long-term and the short-term to industry, to academic institutions and, by providing post-graduate training and experience, to a cadre of high-quality young technical managers. The development of these partnerships started ten years or so ago, principally in the field of engineering manufacture, but in more recent years they have been developed in other fields as well. The overall structure of the Scheme is described briefly in Section 1, the components of a partnership as ‘a Teaching Company programme’, are described in Section 2. Section 3 provides a profile of the Scheme as it existed in 1985, while Section 4 reviews recent data on the impact of the Scheme on companies, academic institutions and on the young technical managers or ‘associates’. Section 5 looks at the opportunities for and limits to future growth and discusses the utility of the Teaching Company mechanism.