Every nation anxious about its future wants to produce more science graduates. But a brow-beating report out today from the UK House of Lords Science and Technology Committee says the quality of students, not just their number, needs urgent attention. The report criticizes every aspect of the United Kingdom’s science-education system — from secondary schools up to universities — and worries that reforms to the system at the university level, including rising tuition fees and a clampdown on student immigration, will only exacerbate problems. To top it all off, there’s a blast at poor-quality statistics that make it impossible to fully understand what’s going wrong.

The headline-grabbing recommendation of the report is that every single student who stays in school to age 18 should study mathematics, because universities think that the students they get from secondary schools lack basic skills.  (Many aren’t doing maths to age 18, and those that are still need remedial maths lessons once they get to university, the report finds).

At the university level, the story doesn’t get any better.  Employers say that they’re having problems hiring sufficiently skilled graduates. “If someone has a STEM [science, technology, engineering or mathematics] degree, employers are saying they don’t know what that means anymore,” explains Phil Willis, the report’s chair.

That’s partly because many graduates who have a ‘STEM’ degree (at least, as counted by the Higher Education Statistics Authority, HESA) have studied a subject that doesn’t give them the skills employers expect. More than one-quarter of UK graduates picking up a degree in what HESA calls ‘biological sciences’ in 2010 actually studied ‘sports science’ (up from one-sixth in 2003). In the physical sciences, those getting degrees in ‘forensic and archaeological science’ accounted for just 3% in 2003, but more than 12% by 2010.

More worrying than this, HESA isn’t counting or tracking science graduates sufficiently to find out what’s going wrong between universities and employers, the report adds. “There are major problems with HESA — this is an organization that collects a mountain of data but does not process it in a way which is of real value to the communities it’s supposed to serve,” says Willis.

That same uncertainty makes it hard to judge the impact of tightened UK visa rules, and of higher tuition fees, on the number of science students studying in the country. HESA’s data on new students arriving at universities, for example, comes with an 18-month delay.

But the report is concerned about changes to immigration rules, which it says have caused “a perception that the UK does not welcome [overseas] students”. UK politicians want to reduce immigration, but if they don’t make clear that students are still welcome, the crackdown contradicts their aim to expand the higher-education sector to promote economic growth. As for higher tuition fees (which will see the cost of a science degree triple), the report says it is too early to assess their impact.

Imran Khan, director of the London-based Campaign for Science and Engineering, said: “The breadth of the Committee’s concerns show that science and engineering have not, as often assumed, had an ‘easy ride’ over the past few years.”

“If the government adopts the report’s recommendations, including some serious analysis of what skills employers need compared to what our higher education sector is actually producing, we might get a genuinely joined-up strategy for STEM education,” he said.