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Science Teaching

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Broers, for securing the debate. Asking a science teacher for the biggest problem facing teaching science in schools, I got the reply ““You just can’t get the staff””. There are no physicists and chemists out there clamouring for jobs to teach in schools, particularly not in our more deprived areas. Until we reverse the trend within society of undervaluing science, we will not tackle the core problems. However, there are, here and now, some solutions on the horizon. The new GCSE curriculum should help things. I will speak briefly about the Welsh baccalaureate which nobody has mentioned and which raises hope. There is also a need to save and value science in our society. In their response to the report from the Science and Technology Select Committee, the Government said that science is not more difficult. I refute that, and so would the teachers I have spoken to. I am puzzled as to how a GNVQ in dance can be equivalent to four GCSEs, a double science, history and French. I am sorry, but I am lost on that. At Cardiff University, we found that when we take in as students children with these equivalents, they really struggle. They do not have the grounding or intellectual preparation to cope with the more difficult courses. Why is learning science more difficult? You need a different set of skills. You must learn facts; as well as being able to interpret them, you must know what you are interpreting. Children are not brought up with scientific language. It is not ubiquitous, unlike the language of sports, fashion and so on. There is even discussion of social sciences in current affairs, but those wonderful TV programmes of my youth, such as ““Tomorrow’s World””, are no more. They excited scientific discovery and inquiry. Like the noble Lord, Lord Winston, I rejoiced when things went wrong. I would spend a whole term waiting for something to go wrong. My interest in physics and chemistry was stimulated by working out how to make it go wrong; that was much more fun than when it went right. I suppose that is why I enjoy pathology now because that is when things have gone wrong too. The trouble is that the drop-off in science is mirrored by a fall in the uptake of languages. I wonder whether that is also part of our inability to accept that it is sometimes necessary to learn. My mother brought me up saying, ““You learn by sitting on your bottom learning””. To a large extent, she was right. Scientists in our society are generally poorly paid. The message that children get is that it is not an exciting area to go into. We have seen university science departments, particularly chemistry, closing down, which is cutting off our supply for the future. The RAE does not value teaching and does not value outreach teaching in the same way. I wonder whether a government target should require a minimum amount of engagement outside the university with schools in order to qualify at a minimum level. It is interesting that with the new GCSEs, some schools are finding that results from one board are surprisingly high, and it will be interesting to see whether that persists when the additional science level comes through. However, schools in deprived areas may suffer a converse effect because their children are not brought up with the language of inquiry and debate. They may find that they can do better on the traditional curriculum and that they struggle with the new slightly more literacy-based curriculum. I know that some schools have chosen a more traditional curriculum because they feel that their children will do better. Targets can have unintended consequences. In Wales, the Welsh baccalaureate has been introduced. After GCSEs, it aims to stretch and challenge youngsters at school. There are six key skills. Students must do communication skills, information technology, application of number, working with others, problem solving and a modern language. They do a work placement and they produce an extended essay. They also do two other subjects to A-level, which will give them three A-levels in total. The uptake to date has been slow and has been greater in South Wales than in North Wales. However, it is a brave and imaginative experiment by the Assembly to try to improve the breadth of knowledge of children when they leave school. What about mathematics, which were mentioned by my noble friend Lord Oxburgh? At Cardiff University, we have sadly had to introduce remedial teaching in mathematics for students in many schools because they do not have data-handling skills. These are students from England as well as Wales, so it is not a reflection on education in Wales. It is just a reality that they do not have the maths skills. I was lucky. I was educated at a girls’ school, and all the evidence is that girls do better at such schools because they are somehow not inhibited in their formative early teenage years. We have to light the fire in the imagination. As the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, said, the future lies with science. If we do not understand atmospheric pollution, we will not deal with climate change or understand the health issues that face this nation.The two are integrally linked around science and mathematics.