What is the state of England's science education in 2022?
As much as we don’t like to say the “C” word anymore, we can not deny that the big “C” has has a long-standing impact on education, especially within science.
All children and students have had their education impacted and now, schools are trying to play catch-up. Exam boards will still test students on everything that was normally in the national curriculum so schools are under strict time pressure to make sure all of their students catch-up.
Many subjects can set a topic to be covered or learnt in a homework task but this is harder for science. Did you know a large proportion of the questions in a science GCSE exam are based on their “required practicals”?
We, at STEM@Home, surveyed 135 qualified, secondary-school science teachers here in England and the survey data was rather concerning.
Experiments should be run more than once. Maybe a student missed it due to illness or maybe students want to re-do their experiments so they can get better results. 51.1% of those science teachers said they NEVER re-run science experiments with 32.6% only re-running science experiments ONCE per term. That’s only THREE times per year!
This is where the idea for STEM@Home came from. As an experienced science teacher, I really wanted to be able to run as many experiments as possible but we were so restricted by variables such as “did we enough time to set up, perform and pack up the equipment?”, “are the technicians in?” or “am I being pressured to cover some other topics?”. Many students and their parents wanted to be able to run their science experiments at home but they were unable to because who has all the equipment and facilities they need at home? This is what STEM@Home aimed to fix! We want to change the narrative on where, when and how students do their science experiments.
Don’t blame teachers for not re-doing science practicals! As discussed earlier, teachers are being forced to play catch-up with curriculum content and 72.6% of those teachers surveyed said the biggest hurdle to running science experiments was TIME. You may think “Schools could run more science experiments like the good old days but that “health and safety” agenda stops them!”. Surprisingly, this is NOT the case. Only 2.2% of those surveyed blamed it on health and safety reasons.
Some of you may be saying “Teachers are lazy! They don’t spend anytime on science experiments!”. This is further from the truth. 51.1% said they spend TWO hours per experiment and 41.5% said they spent FOUR hours per experiment. Remember, a normal science teacher has around SIX science classes and each class has to do around 15 experiments per year! That means that science teachers in England spend between 180 to 360 hours on organising and running science experiments per year! Do you think 360 hours every year on science experiments is “lazy”?
Don’t blame teachers or schools. We are trying our best to help your children learn and appreciate science but sadly, we don’t have enough time anymore! In the next article, we will discuss the ramifications of these time constraints and why science experiments are vital in getting a good exam grade.
It is clear that something must be done to improve science education in the UK. Teacher can not redo science experiments and many students are not getting the opportunity to do experiments at all. This is where STEM@Home comes in, as it changes the narrative on where, when and how students do their science experiments. We need your help to start campaigning now for education reform so that our students can have access to a world-class science education. With your help, we can make sure that every student has the opportunity to learn about and experience science first-hand. Thank you for reading!
