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Science Teaching

My Lords, we have heard many good points. I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Broers for this debate. The topic could not be more important. Curiously, although I have never been a working scientist, or even a non-working scientist, I have an interest to declare in that I chair the Nuffield Foundation, which has had a long interest in science education and is responsible for the 21st-century science GCSE, in collaboration with the Salters’ Institute and the Wellcome Trust. Indeed, QCA set the current goalposts but did not develop the curriculum, pilot it or ensure that teachers were engaged. The foundation also has a long interest in questions of assessment, and particularly in the enormous amount of evidence that what counts for children is formative assessment, by which they learn to understand something about how they are doing, rather than summative assessment, which may give the right sort of information for a target-obsessed approach to education. Finally, we are concerned most of all with young people’s engagement in science, particularly by placing young people in sixth forms in laboratories for summer work experience with bursaries. Under each of its headings, the debate has shown us much. Under the heading ““curriculum””, the most remarkable thing is the degree of agreement among colleagues with long experience of science and science education that we now need a broad education throughout the school years. The time was when those of us in the humanities or social sciences would groan a little because so many scientists seemed to think that A-levels were an educational gold standard, although of course they required even the brightest to narrow their focus to three or four subjects, which, for physical scientists, were sometimes all too closely related. Now we know that scientists need languages as well as English. We also know all too bitterly that social scientists and many in the humanities need mathematics. Indeed, we have real difficulties of capacity and quality of capacity in those areas in this country. If we reflect on these issues we return to the point stressed by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. Once again, he made a passionate speech, and I believe that he was right in every respect. Tomlinson has disappeared. That may be a pity, but it has happened. That was a way of thinking about how we might broaden the curriculum for the older age group at school. However, the issues of curricula structure have not gone away with Tomlinson. We still need to think about what we are doing that is leading us straight into recurrent problems. In particular, we incentivise schools and pupils by stressing the number of passes or, as it is quaintly put, the number of good passes at GCSE, where good means A to C grades. That approach would make sense if we knew that a pass was a unit of account, so that four passes was more than three passes and so on. But as has been said repeatedly, nobody thinks that. We know that this is not a question of a proper unit of account, yet we incentivise schools, pupils and their parents to maximise the number of passes or, very often, the number of As. The cost is immense. Our examination systemdoes not provide good evidence for employers or universities, which are highly competitive in their recruitment, of what pupils can actually do or of the level of achievement of one pupil compared to another. It is not a fit-for-purpose educational system. We need to go broad; we need to be more ambitious about content. Finally, we need to think much more deeply about engagement and enrichment for people who are still at school. We heard many comments about the way in which science can be made boring or can be made exciting. That is true for virtually every subject, of course; there are legions of ways of making them boring, exciting though they are. One of the ways in which we could make science more exciting is to think much more deeply about formative assessment and about putting summative assessment back in its place. Sometimes we need to rank people, but often we do not. Where we do not need to, we should not. I hope that the Minister will comment on that point when he replies.