Response to Response to Petition (!)

The government’s response to the petition both misses and acknowledges the key point: that no specification can determine classroom delivery.

In the penultimate paragraph we are told that “it is a matter for individual schools to determine the content and delivery of lessons”. Yet the foregoing discussion suggests that the then new specifications would ensure delivery of ‘how science works’ and ‘relevance to everyday life’. Teachers have always had the flexibility to focus their lessons on everyday life and to incorporate those elements now termed ‘how science works’. Some teachers have always done this; others still do not today, despite the new specifications.

The target-driven nature of our education system ensures that teachers focus classroom delivery towards the assessments. It is therefore the nature of the assessment, not the specification, that drives classroom practice. Assessment varies widely between exam boards and QCA governance of this is limted to broad controls on Assessment Objectives, the definitions of which are still more broad. The resulting assessments contain neither the challenging quantitative problems suited to the most able nor the more open, discursive questions in which less able students could at least demonstrate basic scientific literacy. Though our students succeed in these assessments we as teachers are left with a sense that we have neither equipped them for further study nor given them the skills to critically consider today’s scientific issues.

What is urgently required is a move to a more tightly-defined assessment model in which are recognised the twin objectives of delivering scientific literacy for all children and science to those who will go on to power our future economic success.