Education: Science and Mathematics

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, on promoting this important and timely short debate. It is timely because there has been published during the past couple of weeks the report of the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, about which several people, including him, have spoken. It is an important report, which, as he rightly said, shows that we face many opportunities as well as many challenges. Last year, the Select Committee on Science and Technology, on which I sat, published a report on the teaching of science in schools. It made a number of recommendations to which we were encouraged by the Government’s positive response. There was perhaps a number of issues, however, on which we would have liked a slightly more positive response—I shall mention one or two of them today. We were given very short notice of this debate—we knew on Tuesday that it was going to take place. On Tuesday, I attended two seminars which were relevant to it. The first was a breakfast seminar run by the pharmaceutical industry on the teaching of science and mathematics. Among those present was Professor John Holman from the National Science Learning Centre at York. The pharmaceutical industry had arranged the seminar because it is extremely worried about the difficulty of recruiting scientists of the quality that they need, both at the research level from universities and at technician level. It said that it could fill its vacancies without difficulty because it was recruiting from other countries, particularly from eastern Europe, India and China. That is representative of what is happening to British science: we have now to look elsewhere. Professor Holman began by talking to us about a survey that he had done of first-year chemistry students at York, whom he also teaches. He had asked them: ““Since we are trying to encourage more of you, why have you decided to come and study chemistry?””. Sixty per cent of them said that they were studying chemistry because they were inspired by their teachers at school. Thirty per cent said that they were motivated by career prospects. That illustrates well the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Rees, about the quality of our teachers. How can we attract really high-quality people into the teaching profession? The report of the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, points out that if we were to succeed in fulfilling the targets for the recruitment of specialists to the profession, we would need to take one in five physics graduates and one in five chemistry graduates. If one considers the number of people who gain degrees in those subjects and the competing careers on offer to them, it would be optimistic of us to think that we could do that. The noble Lord’s report points out also that if we take from a broader base of science training—for example, those trained in biology or psychology—and offer specialist conversion courses, we need take only 3 per cent of those graduates instead of 20 per cent. One area we need to look at, therefore, is how far we can recruit more widely, but offer specialist training, because pupils need the specialist teacher as distinct from the broad, generalised teacher. They respond to the specialist teacher; those are the ones who really stimulate them. Also mentioned in the noble Lord’s report is Teach First, which is a splendid initiative which has brought some extremely good graduates into teaching. The report indicates that we need also to think about the continuing professional development of teachers, which was emphasised, too, by Professor Holman. There is a huge drop-out rate: 50 per cent of physics teachers drop out in the first five years. So we are not only not recruiting vast numbers of teachers but we are losing them much too fast. One thing that Professor Holman talked about was the need to provide mentoring and help in those early years of teaching, which is where CPD—continuous professional development—can help quite a lot. There is also a need to update teachers. The difficulty faced by many teachers is, first, that their head teacher is often not keen to see them go. The difficulty of doing CPD, particularly in term time, is in finding cover; it is extremely difficult to find cover for science teachers in secondary schools, so there is a need to have a sympathetic head teacher who is prepared to try to find cover for them. Secondly, there is the very real problem of funding some of those courses, as those at York cost the schools money and many schools are reluctant to pay the cost. For the first few years the Wellcome Foundation subsided the costs—but it is important that we look at who pays the costs for those courses and that there should be some subsidisation. In addition, it is not unreasonable to expect teachers to use perhaps part of their holidays to go on such courses, but it is important that they gain qualifications from them that perhaps can go towards a masters degree, or something like that. There is a need for modular qualifications that they can build upon. The second point—on how students are influenced by careers—emphasises another point that has been mentioned by many people in this debate, which is the importance of advice to young people about the real prospects for careers in science and how exciting some of them can be. As your Lordships know, we in many senses lament the number of science graduates who are taken up by the City, because the City badly needs those who can produce obscure models based on differential equations, in which those based in science and particularly in engineering are well versed. It is good that at long last there are people in the City who understand science and technology but, equally, they are losses to the other aspects of the economy. It is vital that careers advisers know what the opportunities are and make them known and that we get to the young people not at 16, when they have made their GCSE choices, but at 13 and 14 when they are making their crucial choices. Universities need to think very carefully in this regard. The main employers of our science graduates are the universities, through PhDs and post-docs. In spite of improvements, the form of contract for post-doc researchers means, very often, that they have short-term positions and have to move from one post to another. That is extremely disturbing for those who have done a lengthy period of training—as are the rates of pay. Although there have been improvements, universities still need to look at how attractive that makes a career in science. The second seminar that I went to was one about science and society, at which one of the speakers was Frances Cairncross. She talked about mathematics in particular and lamented—on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay—that of those who enter Oxford and Cambridge these days, 48 per cent come from the top 200 schools. There is a danger that our state school pupils are not getting the same support as our independent school pupils. The noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, referred to the success of the Further Mathematics Network, which has been great; mathematics is the language of science, and it is vital that we do not see a further deterioration in the subject. It is coming up but only very slowly. In the mid-1990s, 56,000 a year took basic mathematics at A-level; that has dropped to about 49,000—but I remind noble Lords that in 1989 some 70,000 young people took mathematics at A-level. There has been a very significant drop over those years.