How to kill a love of science

This country’s engineering shortage is nothing new; but the Government both ploughing money into the problem and shaping educational policy to tackle it is.

Last week in his Autumn Statement chancellor George Osborne announced extra funding of £50 million per academic year for the teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects at our universities, covering about 30,000 students, plus £40 million for 20,000 apprenticeships in 2013/14.

His announcement followed the Perkins Review in November, which claimed that to remain economically competitive and to avoid a skills shortage, the UK will need over 100,000 new engineers, scientists and technologists every year until 2020.

These initiatives are treating the symptoms rather than the cause of the lack of young people choosing to study STEM subjects

This was followed by the news last week that among under-19s apprenticeships had begun to drop.

The government’s solution has not only been to throw a relatively small amount of money behind the problem, but also to reshape education policy in primary schools to ensure children begin secondary school life with the necessary numeracy skills to excel at STEM subjects (this policy will no doubt be pursued even more aggressively in the wake of the OECD’s PISA education league tables, which ranked UK 15-year olds as 20th in the world for science and 26th for maths).

However, for me, all of these initiatives are treating the symptoms rather than the cause of the lack of young people choosing to study STEM subjects at A-Level and beyond.

Do we really think that the reason so few teenagers are choosing to study these subjects is due to a lack of basic numeracy skills? There are many, many bright students who will score A and A* across all the subjects they study at GCSE, yet only a small proportion will choose to study STEM subjects after age 16.

It seems clear to me that these able students have lost their love for science, and to solve the skills shortage we need to ask the difficult questions of why this is the case?

Firstly, to be clear, I believe that all children are born with an innate love of science. Why? Because all children love to learn about the world around them. From a very young age they love to learn how the world works; they ask questions about why leaves fall from the trees, why it gets dark at night, why their bath water goes down the plughole. They experiment with dropping objects from great heights, digging up soil and covering things in water.

This government is doing a very good job of killing the love of science in generations of young people to come

So where do we go wrong? I’ll give you a good example: two primary schools I know of recently ran a lesson on why certain objects float and others sink. In one school, they used a tank of water and dropped items in, then discussed the results. In another school the teacher simply displayed the items on a white board projected from a computer.

Now which lesson do you think the children would have a) learned more from and b) grown in their love of understanding how the world works?

My problem with the current policy pursued by education secretary Michael Gove is that it places far more emphasis on the “traditional” idea of sitting at a desk and “learning” from a very young age rather than the more active learning likely to inspire budding scientists and engineers; this problem continues into secondary education where (at state schools at least) there is far too much learning from text books and far too little experimenting to engender a love of science: I am living proof – despite having written about engineering the entirety of my career and being fascinated by it, I was totally turned off science subjects at age 16 due to very little active learning or real-world application of scientific theories.

By placing more emphasis on desk learning and less on active learning, this government is in fact doing a very good job of killing the love of science in generations of young people to come.

We should also consider whether the huge level of testing our children now face is beneficial to STEM subjects: children are now growing up in an education system where the most important thing is not to gain an understanding of the world but to pass tests – is it any wonder that in a system where high test scores are the priority, most 16 year-olds when deciding which A-Levels to pick steer away from the STEM subjects in favour of the arts and humanities subjects that are perceived as easier to pass?