Science is the bedrock of a modern economy. In itself, that is hardly controversial. Even Blair is on record as telling Britain's premier science institution, the Royal Society, "For Britain, science will be as important to our economic future as stability." His government says the right things. But it is doing the wrong things so consistently that it is hard to believe the mess it has created is an accident.
Pummelled by government initiatives, deprived of qualified teachers and overworked, no wonder school science departments are failing to deliver the scientifically literate – and enthusiastic – students that universities need.
In a sense, it is a good job that they don't: most universities are ill prepared for an upsurge in science students, especially in two of the core subjects, physics and chemistry.
The result – and one produced by years of neglect and interference – is that already British companies feel forced to turn abroad for science graduates. How long before they up sticks completely and go elsewhere for their research and development?
Investment abroad
On 22 January, the British-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced a major investment in research into infectious diseases...in Massachusetts, which will benefit from the $100 million dollar facility. And AstraZeneca is not the only company moving away across the Atlantic for its research.
An alternative approach is to poach scientists from abroad, just as has been happening – with disastrous results for the countries that trained them – with nurses and doctors. The deputy director of the CBI, John Cridland, told The Guardian in March last year: "We are beginning to see UK companies saying it makes economic sense to source science graduates internationally, particularly from China and India."
China, said the CBI, was producing 300,000 graduates every year in science, technology, engineering and mathematics – three times the number coming through British universities. And India had 450,000 engineering undergraduates in the current academic year alone.
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New curriculum: what teachers are saying
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"Although I understand the reasons behind the thinking the whole thing is flawed in my opinion! As a chemistry teacher I want to teach chemistry. No problem with how it fits into the world, but it seems that all the fun has been sucked out. We are told to show a video clip of fractional distillation (no – I am going to demo it!); show a video clip of titanium extraction (I wish I could find one!); tell them this, tell them that, tell them the other! Hardly any practical work at all! [My students] don't want philosophical discussions; they want to DO something..."
"As someone who has just come into teaching after doing other things I think the new GCSE is dreadful. I became a science teacher because I love chemistry and wanted to teach it. I am waiting to find some real chemistry to teach. This time last year I was doing atomic structure and rates of reaction. Now I am doing citizenship not chemistry."
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Qualifications
The position is, quite literally, desperate. In no region of England, for example, do even half of those teaching mathematics have a maths degree (the highest proportion is London, with 47 per cent, lowest the North East, with just 37 per cent). More than 10 per cent of maths teachers have no higher qualification than maths A-level, and not all of them went past O-level or GCSE. (Source: DfES Research Report RR708, 2006).
Just how desperate it is in maths is shown by this statistic: to have filled all the allocated initial teacher training places for maths would have required 40 per cent of Britain's entire output of maths graduates to have taken up a place. Of course, that didn't happen.
One-quarter of 11-18 schools have no physics specialists. In fact, the DfES admits that when it comes to the physics elements of double-award GCSE science, there are more teachers without even an A-level in physics than there are teachers with a degree in the subject.
At key stage 3 (11–14), according to the Roberts Review of 2002, "75 per cent of teachers teaching physics did not study for a physics-oriented degree". Worse, 40 per cent of them did not even have a physics A-level. At key stage 4 (14–16), 66 per cent of those teaching physics and just 51 per cent of those teaching chemistry had a related degree.
This is the result of 30 years of decline. A study for the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2004 showed that the number of chemistry teachers had actually halved since 1984.
A-level teaching crisis
While the situation is better at A-level, even there it falls far short of what it should be. Some 10 per cent of A-level science lessons (13 per cent in physics) are taken by teachers, to quote the DfES, "who either held no qualifications at post-16 level or above in the science or whose highest qualification in the science was itself A-level".
So the blind are leading the blind. No wonder science is not being taught as it should be. As far back as 2000 a study from King's College London reported that only 50 per cent of secondary science teachers had "a lot" of confidence (as opposed to "some" or "little or no") in teaching the Physical Process part of the curriculum at key stage 4. In primary, only 57 per cent of teachers felt confident about teaching science generally, with science part of the three core subjects of the National Curriculum. No one doubts that the situation has deteriorated since then.
Turnover is a massive problem. In the sciences generally, 40 per cent of all new teachers leave within five years. It's a situation that has led the Association for Science Education, with characteristic understatement, to warn that government targets for the recruitment, retraining and retention of science teachers are "unlikely to be met".
At university level, the University and College Union has recently documented the disappearance of science courses in its publication Degrees of Decline? Between 1998 and 2007, the number of single honours chemistry courses has fallen from 62 to 43; of single honours physics courses from 51 to 44; of single honours mathematics courses from 73 to 67. Only in biology has there been an increase, from 64 to 70.
The number of single-honours courses is significant. As the Royal Society says, only these courses, taught over three or four years, provide the depth necessary for students to contribute fully as researchers. The multidisciplinary teams that are driving knowledge forward are overwhelmingly made up of single-honours graduates.
Even including joint physics courses, the number of UK universities offering degrees in physics has fallen since 1994 from 79 to 51, according to the Institute of Physics. Recent closures to hit the headlines include physics at Reading. Regionally, there is only one institution providing a single-honours physics course in the North East of England, and one as well in Northern Ireland.
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An increasingly rare sight: hands-on work in a laboratory...
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Struggling to fill places
With so few emerging from the schools with physics A-level, those physics courses remaining are struggling to fill their places. Astonishingly, four universities (East Anglia, London South Bank, Leicester and Surrey) announced in October that they would accept students for physics courses without physics or maths A-levels!
Meanwhile, figures from the Royal Society show that the number taking A-level chemistry fell from 45,000 in 1991 to fewer than 39,000 in 2005.
The consequence has been dramatic. Faced with falling numbers and rising costs, universities have reached for the axe. The Royal Society of Chemistry has documented the closure over the past 10 years of no fewer than 30 university chemistry departments, leaving only 40 remaining. What it calls a "recent rash of department closures" has seen departments shut at King's College London, Queen Mary College London, Swansea and Exeter. The society put the blame fairly and squarely on government funding policies.
Two years ago, Sussex said it would close its chemistry department, whose former staff include two of Britain's Nobel laureates in chemistry. In the face of furious opposition, Sussex first postponed the decision, and then said it would merge the department with biochemistry – a partial but important victory. One of the laureates, Sir Harry Kroto, had said he would hand back his honorary degree from the university if the university went ahead with closure.
For once, Britain could take a lesson from the United States. "There is no... US university that would dream of damaging its chemistry department," says Ronald Breslow, former president of the American Chemical Society. "It is as fundamental to the core of the universities as are the history and literature departments."
Already, engineering and physics are in decline. Between 1994 and 2004, during a period of university expansion, the number of engineering graduates leaving university fell by 11 per cent, and of physics graduates by 10 per cent.
Curriculum decline
Now, almost unbelievably, the government has stepped in to make matters even worse. A new assessment regium for 7–11s will drop science as a compulsory test. Given the pressure that schools are under to "perform", what is not tested loses status – and curriculum time. And the government is introducing a new curriculum at GCSE, "Twenty-First Century Science". The course was introduced nationally at the start of this academic year, in September, and is being taken by a third of secondary students.
True, something had to be done about the science curriculum, a monstrous set of dull lessons and mountains of facts introduced in 1989 with the idea of creating scientific literacy. With almost all GCSE students spending 20 per cent of their time on it, the immediate result was a phenomenal boost in the numbers gaining a science GCSE, especially among girls.
The trouble was, it is so dull that there is hardly any time for the laboratory – which is where the fun is. So only a tiny fraction of the dragooned GCSE students carried on to A-level.
It's the ultimate opiate: a dull curriculum, taught too often by teachers without expertise in the subject they are teaching. But the supposed solution is not going to help. The shortage of qualified teachers remains. And instead of getting students to do science themselves in the lab and make their own bangs and stinks – too expensive, too tied down by health and safety – they will have discussions on "topical issues". It won't work.
One look at the language explaining its rationale tells you all you need to know, littered as it is with the government's meaningless buzz words: "Our view is that we need a curriculum model for science that offers flexibility and genuine choice to cope with the diversity of students' interests and aspirations." The course is designed "to develop the scientific literacy of future citizens".
Out go traditional physics, chemistry and biology. In come discussions about topical issues – GM crops, or the triple vaccine MMR, for example.
The course has been savaged by some of Britain's leading scientists. Professor Steve Jones, a noted geneticist and campaigner against creationism, said, "Such topics are entertaining but are best deferred until the pubs open. Even over a pint, they make little sense without enough knowledge to support informed discussion."
Sir Richard Sykes, head of Imperial College and former boss of the pharmaceutical company GSK, fumed: "A science curriculum based on encouraging pupils to debate science in the news is taking a back-to-front approach. Science should inform the news agenda, not the other way around."
Sykes added, "...before the future citizen can contribute to the decision-making process, they need to have a good grounding in the fundamentals of science and technology, rather than the soundbite science that state school curriculums are increasingly moving towards."
This course is not really aimed at offering anything to students. It is aimed at living with a situation where there are not enough scientifically trained teachers to teach science properly. The result will be an educational apartheid where the private and selective schools will shun this curriculum, leaving the rest with waffle instead of understanding.
Up to now the debate about the school science curriculum – and the supply of scientists – has been confined mainly to the scientific societies and to high-tech companies. It must spread out, into the teaching unions and professional associations, and wider, too, to the industrial unions, and out to the whole working class. The future of industry, and therefore of Britain, depends on it.