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Science Teaching

My Lords, there can be no doubt of the importance of today’s subject if Britain is to retain its economic success in today’s competitive world. There are few areas of industry and commerce in which a sound and innovative knowledge of science, technology and maths is not essential. That means attracting young people into careers in those fields who have a good understanding of those subjects enabling them to keep up with worldwide progress and pursue new ideas themselves with success. That is now not happening enough, as is clearly shown in the tables in chapter 2 of our report. It is vitally urgent and needs action. There are several reasons for this decline: a shortage of inspiring teachers, although there are many good ones, and careers advisers; and the view that scientific subjects are difficult, which leads to easier choices of A-level and degree subjects by young people and their schools. Maths, physics and chemistry do demand bright answers and our report shows clearly that they are difficult subjects. Therefore, the Government need to do all that they can to recruit inspiring teachers and careers advisers into these subjects. Science commands good salaries elsewhere, so good science teachers need good salaries if they are to be attracted into schools—and golden hellos are a good idea. People who have worked in industry and decide to change careers need positive action, too, and I am glad that their numbers are increasing. Their working experience could do much to make the subjects more interesting for young people and persuade them to make scientific career choices. I have declared my interest as an engineer and as patron of the WISE campaign—Women into Science, Engineering and Construction. Marie-Noelle Barton, the director, gave valuable advice as a witness. Females form 52 per cent of the population at schools and as adults. Therefore, we need to do far more to attract them into these fields—otherwise they can be regarded as male subjects, which they are not. WISE and the Women’s Engineering Society have provided a database for the ambassador scheme so that successful young women can come into schools and describe in an exciting way the rewarding nature of their careers. All the problems in need of solution, as I shall describe, make girls less likely than boys to choose scientific and engineering careers, so urgency must be added to the solution if we are to make them attractive and see an improvement in these fields. I implore the Government—action, not just words. Often careers advisers, who are mostly humanities based, can put young people off scientific careers. Their lack of knowledge and experience leads to their regarding work in these fields as boring. Anyone who has worked as a scientist or engineer knows that that is not true. Problems in pharmacy, aviation, the health service—or the production of mobile phones—are interesting to solve and give those involved exciting possibilities of success in their working teams. Connexions needs to encourage the least able, but not enough is being done in the careers service to attract technicians, chartered scientists and engineers to choose further and higher education leading to rewarding scientific careers. Again, urgent action is needed. The schools are over-dominated by targets. They have recently been described as results factories.Dr Pike of the Royal Society of Chemistry said, ““Scrap targets””, which I have a feeling might be a good idea. League tables can lead to young people being actively discouraged from these subjects. Science teachers need to be freer to teach their subjects in their own way. They also need to be able to take up continuing professional development in the knowledge that the money is available for CPD, if necessary ring-fenced, and to recruit supply teachers so that their classes are not neglected when they take their courses and they keep up to date. Those scientific supply teachers may later become full-time, which would be good news. We were worried about the opportunity for practical work, which young people enjoy. It is absolutely necessary that better labs should be available. Their design and improvement must be carried out with the advice of the experts in local authorities, the Association for Science Education and the scientific institutions, which will need capital investment as soon as possible. That is an urgent matter, too, as some labs are very unsatisfactory indeed. Those labs need well-trained technicians to support science teachers if they are to teach practical work in an interesting way. Experiments need to be well prepared and the ASE’s proposed career structure for technicians with good salary scales will make that an attractive career option. There are encouraging things in the Government’s response: the ambassador scheme, student associates, the international baccalaureate expansion, science regional centres and project Faraday—but none of this will come cheap.