Science in schools

Science in schools ....crisis or new beginning?

Andrew Hunt DIRECTOR NUFFIELD CURRICULUM CENTRE
This is not a new problem. It dates back to changes in the organisation of secondary schools in the 1960s. The growth in the number of comprehensive schools created a need for science courses of value and significance to young people of a wide range of academic aptitudes and interests.

At that time educational diversity flourished supported by the freedoms offered by Mode 3 CSE courses. Important lessons were learnt about ways to make the study of science purposeful for most students but there was strong dissatisfaction with the choices that young people had to make and the outcome that many girls dropped physical sciences while many boys ceased to learn biology. This created the demand for ‘broad balanced science’ courses covering biology, chemistry and physics in the time normally allocated to two subjects in the curriculum. This became the norm from the mid- 1980s when GCSE was introduced.

The National Curriculum (1989) consolidated the place of double-award science in the curriculum and today around 80% of students follow a course of this kind. Unfortunately the National Curriculum imposed an educational ‘monoculture’ based on the tradition that science courses should emphasise the ideas and principles needed to progress to more advanced study in the sciences. This both stifled innovation and perpetuated the error of designing each stage of education to suit those going on to the next stage with those who are not good enough to go on being regarded as expendable.

go on being regarded as expendable. How then are we to design a science curriculum for 14-16 year olds that is in line with the principle that each stage of education should be designed for the main body of those who take it and that the following stage should start from where the previous stage ended? This broad question leads to two more specific questions:

Why do we want to teach science to all students up to the age of 16?

What kind of science courses do we therefore need to offer?

The science education community took the opportunity to respond to these questions in the mid 1990s. At that point the government imposed a five-year moratorium on further curriculum change after Sir Ron Dearing had streamlined the unmanageable programmes of study in the National Curriculum. This allowed time for a seminar series and further research that led to the influential Beyond 2000 report. This report highlighted the fact that the science curriculum has two important jobs to do: it has to help all students to develop ‘scientific literacy’ while providing the first steps in training for professional science for some. The current curriculum fails with respect to both jobs. It neither suits the needs of the majority nor does it provide intellectual challenge for those with the ambition to be scientists or to work as practitioners of science.

Clarity about this central tension between the two purposes of science education has led to the new programme of study for Key Stage 4 Science that underpins the Science GCSEs being introduced from this September. The new approach has been pioneered by the Twenty First Century Science project which exists as a partnership between the Nuffield Curriculum Centre and the University of York Science Education group. In partnership with an awarding body and publisher, the project has had a pilot of a new model for the science curriculum

The model has been piloted for three years in over 80 schools to test the proposition that the two main purposes of science education are better tackled separately while implementing the recommendation of the Beyond 2000 report that the compulsory science curriculum should aim to develop scientific literacy