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Plans announced last week to make swingeing cuts to the hours of science
taught in the National Curriculum have left the Royal Society and other
science and engineering bodies angry and dismayed.

They fear that the changes – proposed by Ron Dearing, the government’s
chief adviser on the school curriculum, and already accepted in principle
by the Department for Education – could deter children from pursuing science
at GCSE and beyond. They intend to lobby the government to ensure that science
retains its present standing. The science bodies also warn that the proposals
will be unable to fulfil the stated aim of John Patten, the education secretary,
to nurture more scientists.

The proposals follow sustained criticism from teachers that the National
Curriculum is overburdened with compulsory subjects. Dearing’s recommendations
will leave English, maths and science as the compulsory core. ‘These underpin
what we do in life, and it’s very hard to come back into them later,’ he
says.

But Dearing wants a 45 per cent cut in the time schools must spend
teaching science, from nearly six hours a week to just three. He also suggests
that technology should be dropped as a core subject for two years while
the course is revised.

The Royal Society, Institute of Physics, Royal Society of Chemistry
and the Engineering Council are all opposed to these changes. ‘We are hopping
mad about this outrageous decision,’ says Brian Davis, director of education
at the IOP.

At present, for most pupils, GCSE science includes elements of physics,
chemistry, biology and earth sciences. Successful pupils who study for six
hours a week receive a double award, equivalent to two GCSEs. The institute
feels this provides ‘just about enough for the pupil to go on to A level’.

There is also a single award that takes up around three hours a week
and which leads to a single GCSE. This is Dearing’s new minimum requirement
and more students are now likely to take this course. But, says Davis, a
single award ‘doesn’t have the coherence or content for someone to have
a reasonable chance of being able to cope at A level’.

This theme is echoed by the Royal Society, which intends to bypass government
and leaflet secondary schools to stress the importance of the double award.
‘We feel that single-award science is not only an inadequate preparation
for those wishing to follow science at higher levels, but may also be inadequate
for those pupils who won’t be following science, but will be living in a
scientific society,’ says Robert Rees, education officer at the Royal Society.

The Royal Society of Chemistry is also unhappy about Dearing’s report.
‘This is a major step backwards, a retrograde step for any idea of getting
a scientifically literate population in the future,’ says Neville Reed,
the society’s education officer for schools. The RSC wants the time allocated
to science to be divided equally between physics, chemistry and biology.

At the Engineering Council, education executive John Williams fears
that having less science will mean fewer girls taking it up. ‘They are more
likely to study arts subjects given a choice,’ he says. ‘This may be going
back to the bad old days.’ Like the RSC, the council lobbied for the time
allocated to science to be maintained at 20 per cent of teaching hours,
so that the double science course could be retained.

However, the council is pleased at the decision to revise the technology
course. Dearing admits that the original course, which has been widely criticised
for being too broad in scope and poorly defined, was not well designed.
‘We rushed into it and didn’t get it right,’ he says. ‘We should allow schools
to experiment with a cut-down technology course which takes about 30 per
cent less time than it did.’

The Engineering Council would have preferred technology to be kept as
a compulsory subject but it welcomes the revision. ‘We are satisfied with
the compromise,’ says Ron Kirby, the council’s director of corporate affairs.