APPENDIX 11
UK Deans of Science Committee
SUPPORT FOR
RADICAL CHANGE
IN THE
SECONDARY SCIENCE
CURRICULUM ACROSS
THE UK
The UK Deans of Science Committee represents
the academic science community across the United Kingdom. It has
77 universities in membership. Whilst its core focus is on higher
education and research, it is also a keen and relatively well
informed observer of the wider science scene as it involves industry,
public bodies, schools and the general public.
Having reviewed issues concerning secondary
science education across the UK, we are convinced of the need
for a fundamental and urgent review of the whole approach and
focus which characterises the current curriculum.
School science education should contribute to
two fundamental objectives. First, it should provide a good basis
of general understanding of science for the school leaving population
as a whole. Second, it should excite interest amongst a proportion
of able young people to pursue specialist studies through to higher
education in science and engineering. Increasingly there are serious
grounds for concern on both fronts.
Broadly we agree with the analysis presented
in the report Beyond 2000: Science education for the future
(Miller & Osborne, King's College London, 1998). This criticised
the traditional curricular approach for:
— engaging inadequately with contemporary
scientific issues;
— presenting science as purely value-free,
objective and detached;
— failing in general to sustain pupil
interest in the power and significance of science;
— over-emphasising content, perceived
by learners as a catalogue of discrete ideas;
— under-emphasising the major central
principles and ideas of science;
— being assessed in a style which grotesquely
reinforces the emphasis on minutiae of content.
That Report argued for a radically revised approach
to address these criticisms. The authors, whose own professional
focus was largely on secondary education itself, argued for reform
mainly in the interests of that majority of pupils not intending
to pursue science or technology based education beyond school.
For a number of years we have been concerned
about negative trends in applications to pursue the core sciences
in higher education. Proportionately, this reduction is most marked
amongst the highest ability band of school leavers. Our colleagues
in engineering have experienced similar trends over a longer period.
Beyond that we are increasingly aware that the knowledge-based
emphasis of school courses seems to have bred surface learning
habits amongst many of our entrants and a tendency insufficiently
to discriminate between points of detail and major overarching
principles. We are acutely aware that the style of the specialist
school science curriculum has not changed for many years. We thus
have to recognise that an approach that worked satisfactorily
in the past as a preparation for higher education no longer does
so in the changed social and communications environment of today.
From a higher education science perspective,
therefore, we would happily see the general approach advocated
in the Beyond 2000 Report applied to the entire secondary
science curriculum, to embrace the needs of future specialists
also.
This short note aims simply to communicate our
general view. We would also wish to signal our ready willingness
to contribute to more detailed discussions and to any formative
development work that might take this publicly important agenda
forward.
February 2002
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