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Science Teaching

My Lords, I, too, express my gratitude to my noble friend for introducing the debate and particularly for a chance to discuss the Science and Technology Committee’s report. I think that everybody agrees that investment in teachers is the most important thing. The second most important thing is the need for really good teachers in science and mathematics, which nobody, except somebody with an axe to grind, could deny are the most difficult subjects and the most difficult to make people enthusiastic about. As was noted, in years seven, eight and nine in schools, long before GCSEs are imminent, young children are enthusiastic about science, the universe and finding out how things work, but to a large extent they lose that enthusiasm when they move to secondary school, an extremely difficult transition in any case. One criticism that I have of many schools is that they do not monitor pupils carefully at the transition stage, so many lose their fire, creativity and interest without the school noticing. That general improvement ought to be made, whatever subject we are discussing. In the case of the sciences, that lack of enthusiasm or beginning of an aversion is even more marked. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Platt, that it is far worse for girls, because they very quickly pick up the idea that science is not for them. They are made to feel foolish and get called nerds, geeks and so on, and they really do not want to be like that. So at that transition stage teachers ought to be particularly careful. There is a difficulty in how to teach at that stage. The report recommended considerable flexibility during the first years of secondary school. Flexibility is crucial if people are to be allowed to maintain the enthusiasm that they have at primary school. There are two elements. One has already been touched on: the importance of practical work in the laboratory and fieldwork. People enjoy that because it is different from the rest of their school life. It is very important that money should be spent on good laboratories,and teachers must be able to take risks if theycan, without constantly looking over their shoulder because of possible litigation under health andsafety rules. The other requirement, in my view, is that science should be treated as a historical subject. The history of science is one enormously important way to teach children to regard science not as learning simple facts but as finding out about inventions. If I may mention such a lowly book in this House, when I first read Bill Bryson’s eye-opening and horizon-widening bookA Short History of Nearly Everything, I was especially struck by his observation that when he was a child he was interested not so much in what is known as in how it came to be known—how did people ever findit out? If science is taught as a series of facts rather than a series of discoveries, it will be boring and misleading, because it will give the impression that science has, as it were, come to an end. I want science in those key years to be thought of as, rather, the history of science. In those first crucial years at secondary school, the sciences can be shown to be linked together. Physics, chemistry and biology and sciences other than the basic school three can be considered; for example, geology, palaeontology, oceanography and astronomy. All those subjects should be introduced, because they will stretch children’s imagination and make them understand that science is the greatest exercise of the human imagination there has ever been. It is that loss, as much as the difficulty of the subject in later years, which makes people begin to turn against it. Most children in schools will never become scientists or even be interested in science; they will certainly be defeated by its difficulty, which is not merely a perception, and by the mathematical background needed. Many will find it much too difficult and too much like hard work, but if, in the three years at the start of secondary school, they have had a feeling for what science actually is, what it does, what it discovers and how mysterious it is, rather than how factual it is, they will begin to treat scientists in society, even if they are not scientists themselves, as people who exercise their imaginations, probably on our behalf but possibly not. It might be the beginning of people learning to trust and admire scientists rather than suspecting them, fearing them and regarding them, as people often do now, as wholly untrustworthy. That revolution must come about somehow or another.