Science is for posh kids
Terence Kealey says the disappearance of grammar schools means that science is now the preserve of public-school children There was once a stereotypical figure at our universities called the Northern chemist. He wore a college scarf, spent hours in the bar, had NHS spectacles and Biros lodged in his breast pocket. He very probably came from a grammar school, and if he lacked the grating charm of his public-school contemporaries, he made up for it with hard work, often followed by worldly success.
The Northern chemist is, alas, now all but extinct on the campus. It is one of the disasters of the modern education system that science — like classics — is now the preserve of the public-school kids. Only 7 per cent of children now receive a fee-paying education, but according to Professor Alan Smithers, the distinguished educationist from the Centre for Education Employment Research, the independent sector now supplies some 40 per cent of all pupils specialising in science and maths at A-level. Physics is now second only to classics for public-school bias at the older universities.
The reason is simple: few grammar schools survive, and there has been a sad deterioration in the ‘science’ taught at comprehensives. In the old days schools taught biology, physics and chemistry as separate O-levels, so pupils learnt them as discrete subjects with their own methods and beauties. But today most children at GCSE are instructed in a subject misleadingly called double science, which is biology, physics and chemistry taught in a melange over the time afforded to only two GCSEs. And to ensure that children never get a proper feel for the three individual subjects, they are renamed SC4 or ‘materials and their properties’. Few children with double science GCSE proceed to study hard science at A-level (only biology — innumerate, descriptive and girl’s blousey — remains popular).
The three separate subjects are still offered at GCSE but only at public and grammar schools. When I did a telephone canvas of nearby schools, I found that Stowe offered triple science at GCSE but Stantonbury Campus comprehensive school in Milton Keynes did not. Buckingham’s Royal Latin Grammar did (but there are only 164 grammar schools left in Great Britain) while Buckingham’s secondary modern school would not answer the telephone (but I understand it too offers only double science). That local pattern of triple science being restricted to the public and grammar schools is reproduced nationally.
Double science is not necessarily a disaster, and a handful of independent schools do teach it, but its inadequacies can be surmounted only by excellent teaching, where, again, the state fails its pupils. Consider physics: in a recent discussion paper, ‘How to educate a scientist’, Anthony O’Hear (director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy) and Michael Redhead (professor of the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge) reported that 79 per cent of physics teachers in independent schools were qualified in physics; in state schools the proportion with qualifications was less than a third. Incredibly, nearly a third of state-school teachers teaching physics GCSE had themselves no more than a GCSE in the subject. Two thirds of state-school teachers of physics GCSE have no relevant degree.
Faced with such dire teaching in the state schools, the numbers of pupils proceeding to A-levels is falling. In 1980, for example, 50,000 pupils took physics A-level. Today the figure is barely half that. Moreover the numbers of physicists training to be teachers fell by 70 per cent between 1993 and 2000. Today, only 3,000 undergraduates study physics at university (yet more than 15,000 study psychology) and 18 university departments have closed since 1997.
Some commentators rejoice over the collapse of British university science, like the sansculotte judge who pronounced that ‘the revolution has no need of scientists’ and condemned to death Lavoisier, greatest of chemists. Simon Jenkins of the Times recently exulted in the closure of Exeter University’s department of chemistry with: ‘Britain does not need more chemists. It appears to need more administrators, lawyers, accountants, Internet-designers, media practitioners and business graduates.’ Actually, Britain needs its administrators, lawyers, accountants, Internet-designers, media practitioners and businesspeople to have graduated first in science. The market rewards graduates well, and a recent OECD report shows that a university degree is the best single investment an individual can make, better even than a mortgage, and the most lucrative of degrees is mathematics. Science runs maths a close second. Equally, the chemistry Nobel laureate Harry Kroto has shown that science graduates stimulate more economic growth than do the others.
Few science graduates actually do science as a profession, so recent science graduates often earn little while they look around for new vocations. But science and maths graduates are valuable to all employers because scientists and mathematicians are numerate and disciplined. They can, therefore, on entering the job market, swiftly mug up media and the other vocational studies, which is why they do unusually well in their eventual professions.
It is because science graduates ultimately command such high salaries (thus pricing the better science graduates out of teaching), and because science itself is so expensive and difficult to teach well, that the state schools have given up on it. Yet people would pay top-up fees to schools if they were allowed to. Last year the state spent £17 billion on secondary school education (£4,250 per pupil, much of which gets to the schools), yet the British people spent £27 billion on their foreign holidays, to Ibiza and suchlike. Ordinary people have the money to top up their children’s education but such fees are illegal. Two thirds of parents pay surreptitiously, of course, for private supplementary tuition, but such ad hocery cannot compensate for poor school labs or poor core science teaching. So the only people whose children get a good education in science are those who can afford to go completely private.
It is perfectly true, of course, that the rich make good researchers. In the old days, when science required a private income, Britain produced the world’s greatest biologist (Charles Darwin, grandson of Erasmus, who married his Wedgwood cousin) and physicist (Cavendish, grandson of two dukes and the richest man in England).
And here is a story to lift the hearts of 7 per cent of parents. Do you remember the ten-year-old girl who saved the lives of 100 sunbathers on a Thai beach when she recognised — thanks to a geography lesson at school — that the sudden receding of the sea adumbrated a tsunami? That little girl attended a private prep school, Danes Hill in Oxshott. But why restrict learning to the few?
Terence Kealey is a clinical biochemist and vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham.
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