Science Education: Policy, Professionalism and Change

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Science Education ge n a h C & ionalism

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e f o r P , y c i l Po

JF Donnelly EW Jenkins eBook covers_pj orange.indd 14

29/1/08 8:15:57 pm

SCIENCE EDUCATION

SCIENCE EDUCATION Policy, Professionalism and Change

by

J. F. Donnelly and E. W. Jenkins

© J. F. Donnelly and E. W. Jenkins 2001 First published 2001 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd A SAGE Publications Company 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32 M-Block Market Greater Kailash – I New Delhi 110 048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7619 6443 6 ISBN 0 7619 6444 4 (pbk) Library of Congress catalog record available Typeset by Anneset, Typesetters, Weston-super-Mare Printed and bound by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead

1 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vii

1

Change and Control in School Science Change in the science curriculum Control in science education Policy and its implementation Change and control in science education

2

Framing Secondary School Science The legislative background Science in the schools The changing policy framework: a common system of schooling From Schools Council to the National Curriculum

12 13 14 20 22

3

Guiding Teachers: The Nuffield Science Teaching Projects Teacher response An inadequate strategy for reform?

27 30 39

4

Power to the Teachers? The Secondary Science Curriculum Review Tensions and conflicts Review or reform? The influence of the Review

42 46 54 57

5

Monitoring Standards? The Influence of the Assessment of Performance Unit APU science The monitoring programme The influence of APU science APU and GCSE science

60 62 69 72 75

v

1 2 4 7 9

Science Education: Policy, Professionalism and Change

vi

APU and the National Curriculum APU and the Children’s Learning in Science Project Conclusion

77 78 78

6

The Uses of Examination: The Introduction of the GCSE The historical background: examinations and schools Creating and implementing GCSE science Grade-related criteria The purposes of GCSE science

80 82 84 93 94

7

The National Curriculum and Secondary School Science Towards a National Curriculum The Education Reform Act 1988 Science in the National Curriculum The Science Working Group The 1989 Statutory Order for Science Attainment Targets 1 and 17 The 1991 revision The 1995 and 1999 Statutory Orders Conclusion

97 97 100 102 103 107 109 111 114 117

8

Science Teachers’ Response to Change Disciplinary specialisms under pressure The GCSE examination The National Curriculum Other aspects of secondary science teaching in the late 1990s Conclusion

120 121 126 129 137 141

9

Conclusion The issue of standards Professional responsibility? The Nuffield projects Taking control School science teaching and professionalism Professionalism and pedagogy Professionalism and curriculum Professionalism, change and accountability in science education

144 144 148 150 155 159 163 165

Bibliography

169

Index

186

1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Throughout this book, and especially in Chapter 8, we have drawn upon a range of interview and questionnaire data. These data were collected as part of a research programme undertaken within the Centre for Studies in Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Leeds during the past decade and funded by three grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC): Policy into practice: practical assessment in GCSE science, Realizing policy in Sc1 and Change and continuity in classrooms (award numbers R000232252, R000233875 and R000236073 respectively). We are grateful to the ESRC for its financial support and to the many science teachers and others who consented to be interviewed and/or completed questionnaires in connection with the research. Chapter 4 would have been much the poorer but for the cooperation of Professor R. W. West who agreed to be interviewed in connection with his work as Director of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review. We are grateful for his assistance, including his helpful comments upon an earlier draft of the chapter. We are also grateful to Sandra Johnson and Emeritus Professor David Layton, both of whom were closely involved with the work of the Assessment of Performance Unit, for reading and commenting upon a draft of Chapter 5. We owe a particular debt to a number of colleagues and former colleagues who have worked with us at various stages of the research programme referred to above. We wish particularly to acknowledge the contributions of Dr A. S. Buchan, A. Elton, I. Jenkins, P. M. Laws, A. Mill-Ingen, Dr B. J. Swinnerton and A. G. Welford. Finally, the staff of the Brotherton Library and Nia Rees-Jones in the School of Education Library at the University of Leeds have been unfailingly helpful in dealing with our bibliographic queries.

vii

1 CHANGE AND CONTROL IN SCHOOL SCIENCE

This book is about the process of change in the school science curriculum during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Though it makes extensive use of historical data, it is not a history of science education during that period. Such a project would require a much larger volume, with all the apparatus of historical scholarship, and many of the sources needed to undertake it are not yet in the public domain. Our concern is with the process of change, or attempted change, and, more particularly, with those institutional relations, and relations of power and authority, which condition the process. The book examines the means by which attempts are made to influence science teachers’ work and sometimes to control it. Our central theme is the professional expertise and authority of science teachers. The analysis encompasses both the Nuffield Foundation science curriculum development projects, whose guides embodied a particular vision of science teachers’ work, and the Statutory Order of the National Curriculum, which embraces quite a different model. We argue that much can be learnt by a study of the shift in understandings of, and attitudes to, science teachers’ work which these initiatives frame. One of our underlying aims in this book is, therefore, to rebalance the discussion within science education between analysis of the substance of proposals for change and of underlying professional relations of authority and competence. The latter, which we believe to be a neglected area, is the focus of our attention.

1

2


CHANGE IN THE SCIENCE CURRICULUM The view that the science curriculum must change has become so common as to be an orthodoxy. In 1972 the eighth report of the International Clearing House on Science and Mathematics Curriculum Development ran to over 800 pages and listed approximately 250 science and mathematics curricular initiatives (Lockard, 1972). An Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study undertaken during the mid-1990s indicated that the pressure for change was undiminished. It also identified important similarities in emphasis across different countries (Black and Atkin, 1996). To some extent, the present impulse for change in school science education in England and Wales mirrors a wider international response to profound social and economic changes, ‘the like of which have not been seen since the last great global movement of economic and educational restructuring more than a century ago’ (Hargreaves and Goodson, 1999, p. vii). However, other, more specific, factors are also in play. In recent decades, perceptions of a diminishing enthusiasm for further study of the sciences after compulsory schooling have had an influence. While some part of the motivation is economic in origin, the evidence of an undersupply of professional scientists is more limited than might be expected, except perhaps in the somewhat circular case of science teaching in schools. Less easy to evaluate is the suggestion that science appeals less than it ought to school pupils (Millar and Osborne, 1998, p. 3). Such a claim immediately raises the question of what might be a reasonable or expected scale of postcompulsory involvement, beyond that required to satisfy industrial and other professional demands for scientific specialists. The argument for change can take a weak form, proposing innovations in teaching methods, so as to make school science more ‘fun’, more ‘exciting’ or more ‘relevant’, or improve the effectiveness with which it is taught and learnt. The last argument sometimes takes an ostensibly systematic form, in which science teaching is held to require founding on some ‘theoretical’ base, perhaps ‘constructivism’, or Piagetian theories of cognitive development. More radical is the suggestion that science education, as presently constituted, does not serve a coherent educational purpose. Such purposes as have historically dominated the practice of school science are only appropriate for those training to be professional scientists, and are perhaps questionable even for this group, or so the argument goes (Millar and Osborne, 1998; Longbottom and Butler, 1999). Other purposes for science education can be conceived, but their realization requires that its practices be significantly revised. Such purposes include, most prominently, promoting among pupils an understanding of the place of science in public and commercial polity. This in turn would require that they be introduced to the means by which scientific knowledge is established, its limitations and its social and intellectual relations with other human activities, most notably politics. Such proposals have not been without their critics (e.g., Gross and Levitt,

Change and control in school science

3

1994; Lederman, 1998). The view that a study of science promotes generalized cognitive abilities, and a scientific or rational approach to other aspects of our lives, retains many adherents (Adey, 1997; Gadd, 2000, p. 14). For some, this approach is presently underemphasized in relation to the teaching of what, in contrast, is commonly called scientific ‘content’. Finally, we can recall the continued importance of the need to ensure that the school science curriculum reflects major changes within science itself, a ‘modernizing’ agenda that was particularly prominent within the science curriculum initiatives funded by the Nuffield Foundation in the 1960s. Motivations for change are thus plentiful and they are associated with a range of suggested shifts in practice. Such shifts are often thought likely to increase the appeal of the study of science. We should perhaps note that ‘science education’, understood in some of these senses, appears as substantially different from the teaching and learning of scientific knowledge. There seems less confidence in the notion that science justifies its place in the curriculum primarily on the grounds that it introduces all pupils to the best available knowledge of the material world, and that this a worthwhile curricular aim in itself. Since science teachers are primarily expert in precisely this type of knowledge, such changes in practice have important implications for teachers’ claims to professional authority and competence, and can lead to tensions within the science education community. In this study, we focus on secondary science education in England and Wales during the last four decades, with a particular emphasis on schools funded by public money. This represents a particularly fruitful area for study, beyond its intrinsic political and historical interest, because during this period there have been many proposed shifts in emphasis for science education, encompassing most of the possibilities identified above. At times, these proposals have been in conflict, or at least not mutually supportive. We will devote little attention to such tensions, since substantive arguments about the science curriculum are not our primary concern in this book. Nor will we take a strong view on the desirability, or otherwise, of any particular change, although we will occasionally offer some brief indication of our opinion. There is, of course, a large literature on change in education, some of the most recent of which has sought to address the issues raised by the profound global economic and other changes referred to above (e.g. Stoll and Fink, 1996; Helsby, 1999). Much of the corresponding literature of the 1970s and 1980s had a somewhat different focus. Attention was directed towards imposing a degree of theoretical understanding upon the changes in the curriculum promoted by a variety of organizations, such as the Schools Council in England and Wales, or the National Science Foundation in the USA. The complex nature of curriculum change has been emphasized (Fullan, 1982) and a distinction drawn between first and second order changes, that is, between changes which ‘make what already exists more efficient and more effective’ and others which ‘seek to alter the fun-

4


damental ways in which organizations are put together’ (Cuban, 1993, p. 73). The early theories of curriculum change put forward by Bennis, Benne and Chin (1969), Schön (1971), Havelock (1973) and Skilbeck (1984) helped establish the academic field of ‘curriculum studies’, but, for the most part, the range of perspectives underpinning these early theories was too narrowly drawn. In recent times, efforts have been made to widen this perspective by examining what is meant by ‘curriculum change’ and by seeking to understand such change from biographical, technological, structural or other perspectives (Blenkin, Edwards and Kelly, 1992). In this book, we draw upon some of this literature, notably Havelock’s ideas about the dissemination and utilization of knowledge (Havelock, 1971), but we do not seek to add significantly to it. Also evident in the recent academic literature on educational change is a concern with how teachers and schools can transform themselves, with appropriate support (Sarason, 1990; Fullan, 1993). Some of the initiatives considered in this book reflect this approach. Thus the Nuffield science teaching projects, while undoubtedly incorporating a central perspective on the desirable forms of curricular change, accepted the legitimacy of teacher discretion in relation to choice of teaching methods and syllabuses, a stance also adopted by the Schools Council in its approach to curriculum reform. More recent changes, occurring directly under the authority of government, take a more prescriptive approach. This comment applies to some extent to the GCSE examination, first introduced in 1988, and more strongly to the National Curriculum, which began to come into operation shortly afterwards. Such approaches to change stand in a problematic relationship with teacher expertise and authority. They invoke the notion of control, a notion that is as complex and multifaceted as that of change.

CONTROL IN SCIENCE EDUCATION How is the practice of science teaching, in respect of both curriculum and pedagogy, to be governed? We will discuss two broad approaches, while accepting that the distinction is not a sharp one, nor these possibilities exhaustive. Teaching commonly adopts the rhetoric of professionalism, and science teaching is no exception. Professionalism represents one possible form of governance. An alternative might be political control, expressed through governmental policies and their implementation.

Professional control? There is a very large literature on the professions and professionalism (e.g., Abbott, 1988; Hoyle and John, 1995). An old but still common approach to


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understanding professionalism has been through typologies based upon the characteristics or traits of occupations. That is to say, there is taken to be an idealtypical form of profession, and the discussion of occupations aspiring to professional status is then focused around the degree to which they embody these traits, or are developing towards the possession of them (Carr-Saunders and Wilson, 1933). The traits commonly involve such characteristics as specialist knowledge, formal systems of training and licensing, and collegial control over entry. More recent analyses, such as those of Larson (1977) and Johnson (1972), have stressed power and control, viewing professionalism as a particular form of control over employee–employer or other commercial or service relations. More recently again, Abbott (1998) has presented professionalism as concerned centrally with gaining, and losing, jurisdiction over particular classes of task. In these accounts, the boundaries between ‘professions’ and other occupations have been blurred. Teaching tends to fare badly when examined against the sorts of traits identified by the professionalism literature. Certainly it has few of the characteristics of the classical professions, such as law and medicine. These admittedly might be judged extreme and unhelpful examples, historically conditioned by their association with dangerous and sensitive aspects of human life. Teachers have, collectively and individually, little power over how their practice is governed. Recent governmental interest in education has served further to reduce what power teachers have had in the past. Indeed, the government has, in some of its rhetoric at least, tended to represent some teachers as undermining good educational practice and standards. Knowledge, still one of the key sources of specialist expertise, is ambivalently present within science teaching (Macdonald, 1995). Is the particular expertise of teachers based mainly on the academic disciplines in which they are trained or does it equally derive from their expertise in the practice of teaching? If the former, any suitably educated person may become a teacher. If the latter, can such expertise be identified, transmitted and certified? If this is possible, then who should be licensed to undertake these processes of training and assess their outcomes? The practice of teaching is notoriously difficult to codify, although it is worth noting that difficulties in codifying expertise have not been seen as necessarily leading to a weakening of professional authority. Jamous and Peloille have argued that indeterminacy in relation to practice, that is to say, difficulties in specifying precisely how particular tasks can be accomplished, can enable members of professions to resist being reduced to mere technicians whose work is controlled by managerial groups, and a similar case was made by Larson (Jamous and Peloille, 1970; Larson, 1977). Despite its undoubted tendency to resist codification, teaching does not appear to have benefited in this way. The various professions offer very different answers to the question of how entry to the profession/occupation is licensed. Most involve at least a three-way

6


tension, in which the main participants are academic institutions, professional bodies and ‘employers’. The situation in teaching is rendered somewhat more complex, though not uniquely so, by the ambivalence identified earlier between disciplinary knowledge and, for want of a better term, educational expertise. In the very diverse settings of public elementary schools, public secondary schools and fee-paying independent schools, the conditions and control of entry in England and Wales have varied markedly, reflecting the lack of any clear professional control, or indeed any overall systematic control. In the public elementary schools, where government has historically controlled entry to teaching, it has commonly accepted the possibility of training in pedagogy, i.e., expertise extending beyond the area of subject knowledge. But in secondary schools, until relatively recently, the primary requirement for entry was a qualification in the relevant academic discipline. In the recent past, routes of access to teaching qualifications have often been manipulated by government, using the Teacher Training Agency as a tool, and with little or no attention to the views of teachers themselves. One might suggest that, whoever controls policy governing entry into teaching, it is most certainly not teachers. In recent years, governmental intervention and specification in relation to the substance of teachers’ work (the curriculum they will teach, the methods by which it will be taught and the means by which it will be assessed) have become increasingly peremptory. Here, a sequence of statutory bodies, most recently the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the Teacher Training Agency and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), are the tools. Teachers might be judged to be uniquely lacking in professional authority in these respects. There have, of course, been other areas of work in which government involved itself directly with training and licensing, but they have generally been in fields where public health or safety were in view. Even here, control over the substance of practice and training, although not the numbers of recruits or the level of funding, has usually been left with professional bodies or academic institutions. All of this undermines the notion of teaching as a profession in any strong sense, and conditions much with which we will be concerned in the following chapters. To summarize: the existence of professional expertise in teaching as a distinct entity has been questioned and its substance been increasingly placed under the control of government. Tensions between disciplinary and pedagogic expertise are frequently visible. The former is relatively well acknowledged, but under the professional authority of bodies such as the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry, within which teachers have comparatively low status. Control over entry and licensing is retained in the maintained sector by government. So, too, is control over the curriculum. One result of this, which we shall return to from time to time, is that, in maintained schools, attempts to redefine teachers’ work are easily given force, at least at a formal level, if access to the relevant governmental institutions can be secured.


7

Concrete experience in schools and classrooms may, of course, be very different from the prescriptions of government. This disparity can result in tensions which further weaken teachers’ professional authority, as when teachers’ ‘failure’ to ‘deliver’ government reforms is interpreted as incompetence or even ‘subversion’. In the next section we turn to this alternative mechanism of control: policy and its implementation.

POLICY AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION In the preceding section, we have sketched the difficulties with the notion that teachers have professional authority over the work they do. But innovation in science teaching may also be examined from the perspective of policy studies. Policy is, of course, even amongst politicians, a means rather than an end. In England and Wales, and no doubt many other countries, the ultimate ends so far as public policy is concerned, are only to a limited extent concerned with curricular and pedagogic change. Particularly in more recent years, they have been concerned with the twin themes of standards and accountability. In this context, accountability might be understood as ensuring that the practice of teachers continues to command public support, or even, more strongly, to reflect public judgement of what such practice should be. In the field of curricular change this may lead to difficulties, since lay people, including politicians, have almost all experienced schools, and have a historically conditioned sense of what the curriculum and teachers’ practice should consist of. Satisfaction of the demands of accountability also implies a requirement that the standards achieved by pupils are congruent with the investment of public resources. It must be recalled that policy here does not necessarily mean public policy, and we will have occasion to discuss the policies of other types of organization, notably the Nuffield Foundation and the Secondary Science Curriculum Review. For Maurice Kogan, writing in the 1970s, policies were ‘operational statements of values’, including educational, economic, social and institutional values (Kogan, 1975). Much writing by, for example, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI), and even the Department of Education and Science (DES) in the period before the mid-1980s, might be seen in this light. In more recent years, however, policy has come to have a harder edge, closer to prescription of practice. Kogan has also argued that the institutional, political and other characteristics of education in England and Wales render centralized educational policy particularly vulnerable to intermediate pressures (Kogan, 1983). Again, developments in the 1980s and 1990s might be thought to have constituted a sustained attempt to alter this situation. These two shifts are evidently linked, and condition much of what we will have to say. Classically, policy studies have recognized a distinction between creation and

8


implementation (Levitt, 1980; Lewis and Wallace, 1984), although there is often some subdivision of these categories, as, for example, in the distinctions between policy talk, policy action and policy implementation drawn by Tyack and Cuban (1995). Younis and Davidson identified three models of implementation, which they called top-bottom, bottom-top and ‘implementation as evolution’ (Younis and Davidson, 1990, p. 5). The first of these envisages policies as centrally defined, and concerned with the specification of action. It attends to the efficiency with which the ‘messages’ that policies provide are transmitted, and to the match between policy-makers’ intentions and outcomes in the field. The second approach envisages policy-makers as circumscribing initiatives, rather than specifying actions. The third sees policy origination and implementation as a dynamic interactive process. The links with Havelock’s writings cited earlier is clear enough. Implementation studies, in education and other fields, have taught us that the targets of policy change in the field of curriculum and pedagogy are rarely, if ever, passive (Sarason, 1971; Waring, 1979; Rein, 1983; Geller and Johnston, 1990; Fitz, Halpin and Power, 1994). Responses to such a recognition at the level of curriculum policy lie on a spectrum from attempting to create ‘teacher-proof’ curriculum materials to seeking to involve teachers at all stages and levels of the policy process. The latter point reflects the fact that policy implementation has received a good deal more attention than policy origination. We will have a good deal to say about how curricular policy within science education in England and Wales has been influenced, and the extent to which these influences were, in our judgement, legitimate or illegitimate. The government’s initiatives in England and Wales have taken the form of a highly detailed National Curriculum, supported by bureaucratic, expensive and time-consuming systems of assessment and inspection. The lessons of implementation studies have not been taken into account, either by the government or, in some cases, by those educational ‘experts’ to whom it turned for advice. The Conservative government was never quite able to decide its strategy. It also favoured a reliance on market discipline, making teachers more sensitive to the demands of the consumers, so-called, of their products. It remains to be seen whether the strategy which has emerged will lead to an improvement in students’ science education, beyond what is represented and measured by increasing test scores. It might well be argued that its major outcome for teachers has been to make it necessary for them ‘to spend a great deal of their time using technical skills . . . which give [them] the control and precision necessary to deliver bits of information to students and increase test scores’ (Giltin, 1987, p. 112), rather than enabling them to improve curriculum and pedagogy in some broad sense. The worrying point here is that this situation might be judged favourably, in the short term by politicians, their agents and parents. The long-term consequences for teachers and teaching may however be less favourable, as teaching increasingly competes for recruits with other fields of employment, and the need for


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effective curricular reform grows. Among the many studies of the process of policy implementation in regard to the National Curriculum, it is perhaps worth drawing attention to those of Ball and his various co-writers. They have sought to define a ‘policy sociology’, and given particular attention to the extent to which, and the means by which, policy documents facilitate or eliminate other voices. They have also examined the degree to which teachers in schools accept or resist these perspectives (Ball, 1990; Ball and Bowe, 1992; Ball, 1993 ). The general approach of these authors has been to encourage the notion of allowing multiple readings of policy documents. It hardly needs to be pointed out that this approach stands in some tension with emphases on entitlement and accountability, as these terms are now conventionally understood.

CHANGE AND CONTROL IN SCIENCE EDUCATION The structuring of the preceding sections should not be interpreted to mean that policy and professional authority are understood as opposites or alternatives in the study of change and control. To put the point at its most obvious, professional bodies have policies, and may have agendas for change. Further, there may be a tension between individual and collective authority, particularly where professional bodies become unrepresentative of their members, or where there is differentiation in status and influence within a profession. This is an issue which we shall raise in relation to the professional body, albeit in one of the weaker senses of that term, of science teachers, the Association for Science Education. Despite this and other complications, it is fair to say that the tension between professional authority and expertise, on the one hand, and various forms of education policy, particularly public policy, on the other, represents the major axis of this study. The specification and acceptance of authority and expertise, in the case of science teachers, and its location within the science education community, will be identified as problematic throughout our analysis. We do not employ the science curriculum experience of the past half century or so to construct a simple or straightforward strategy for curriculum reform, or for raising the quality of science teaching in schools. Yet, like anyone professionally engaged in education, we are committed to improved standards of science education. We recognize that curriculum and assessment policies can be devised that seem to be more, rather than less, likely to improve the science education that pupils receive in schools. Nevertheless, fundamental to our understanding of how this might be done is the acknowledgement and promotion of the professionalism and professional authority of science teachers, a notion which this book argues is historically, socially and culturally contingent. Such contingency might be expected to be particularly significant among dif-

10


ferent education systems across the world. At some points in the book, and more especially in our conclusion, we will refer to a number of comparative international studies. We noted earlier that Black and Atkin have identified strong similarities in the substance of the changes which have been attempted in countries within the OECD. This, of course, is hardly surprising given the globalizing influences now in play. At a more ‘theoretical’ level within science education, there are also strong international commonalties in relation to such issues as the Science, Technology and Society (STS) ‘movement’ and the use of constructivism as a framework for pedagogy. But how these different orientations work out in practice might be expected to be influenced by national and regional intellectual and professional traditions. Examples come quickly to mind. Fensham has examined the differences of emphasis between curriculum and ‘didaktik’ even within Western developed countries (Fensham, 2000; Lijnse, 2000). Ogawa has examined the strong differences between Japan and the West (Ogawa, 1995). Islamic countries, again, have their own concerns (Loo, 1996). Many other differences can be drawn, for example between developed and developing countries (Malcolm, 1999). In short, one must be careful of over-generalization. Nevertheless, there are commonalties. After a comparative survey of policy initiatives, Carter and O’Neill presented a careful, even-handed yet generalized conclusion, suggesting that it is necessary that reformers, if they wish their reforms to succeed, understand teachers and their concerns and priorities. Teachers, for their part, must acknowledge that others have a wider but no less legitimate agenda for, and interest in, what goes on in schools (Carter and O’Neill, 1995). Despite the often profound differences between, and within, national education systems, many of the issues raised in the context of England and Wales in the following chapters have a wider, international resonance. We can briefly preview one example. The Assessment of Performance Unit (APU), unique in its genesis and function to England and Wales, is, as we will argue, not alone in contributing to curriculum change, while originally being concerned with no more than the measurement and monitoring of standards over time. It is not uncommon to find that the specification of national goals or levels of attainment, or the responses to the outcomes of international comparisons of student achievement, such as the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), generate consequences for the work which science teachers are required to undertake in classrooms and laboratories in different parts of the world. Exploring these unexpected and often undocumented influences and effects in the context of England and Wales is a major theme of this book. The chapters that follow explore, against the background just sketched, the attempts that have been made since the mid-1960s to influence or control the secondary school science curriculum and the ways in which school science has been taught and examined. Chapter 2 examines the political and institutional framework which formed the background to the policies and initiatives with


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which we shall be concerned. The curriculum projects of the 1960s and 1970s, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council, provide examples of a ‘centre-periphery’ approach to the reform of secondary school science education. These projects form the focus of Chapter 3. The Secondary Science Curriculum Review (SSCR) of the 1980s is considered in Chapter 4. The SSCR constituted a challenge both to the ‘centre-periphery’ approach to reform and to many of the assumptions and practices traditionally associated with secondary school science. It addressed, for the first time, the issue of a common science curriculum entitlement for all pupils and, as we argue in Chapter 4, can be seen as a manifestation of wider progressive forces in education. The work of the APU, discussed in Chapter 5, was never intended as a curriculum initiative. None the less, as we have already indicated, it came to influence both the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination and the National Curriculum in a number of ways, not least by the subsequent activities of some of those most closely involved in its work. The impact of the GCSE examination on science teachers’ work is considered in Chapter 6, with particular reference to the compulsory element of course work associated with the examination, and the consequent requirement that science teachers address substantial technical issues in developing their assessment practice. Chapter 7 examines the most far-reaching of the policy initiatives during the second half of the twentieth century: the National Curriculum. It focuses especially on the policy framework and motivations within which it was undertaken, and the difficulties to which it led. Chapter 8 is broadly concerned with the outcomes of the complex of processes and initiatives which have been the subject of the preceding chapters. It examines the key structural changes which have resulted, and offers a portrait of science teaching in England and Wales at the close of the twentieth century. The concluding chapter draws upon the major strands of the book and sets them in both a chronological and comparative perspective. It explores how the conflicts between the pressure for curricular and pedagogic change, the demand for accountability and the aspirations of science teachers for professional authority over their work might be reconciled. We believe strongly that it is important that these neglected issues are addressed as a matter of urgency, if, as surely must be common ground amongst all of those involved, secondary school science education is to be improved. What form that improvement might take is of course a key question: but resolving the question of where responsibility for the process is legitimately to be located is, in our view, a precondition of progress.

2 FRAMING SECONDARY SCHOOL SCIENCE

The manner in which science is taught in secondary schools in England and Wales, as in any other country, is the outcome of many different influences. Some of these influences can be conveniently labelled as historical, since they stem from the manner in which science was first schooled in the public and endowed grammar schools of the nineteenth century and the ways in which it came to be examined following the introduction of the School Certificate examinations at the end of the First World War. The most obvious historical legacies are an enduring emphasis upon the pre-professional function of school science education, a commitment to practical work in a specialized laboratory as an essential part of that education, and a resilient insulation of the science curriculum from wider shifts in the social, economic and political context of science itself. Other influences upon science teachers’ work might be regarded as more personal or contingent, e.g., the ways in which teachers themselves were taught, individual beliefs about the nature of science and/or of teaching and learning, and the structure and organization of schools and the science departments within them. The wider context is provided by legislation and a range of non-statutory guidance which, directly or indirectly, frame what science teachers do when they teach their subject in classrooms and laboratories. Not all of this legislation has education or schooling as its principal focus, e.g., the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Much, however, is concerned with the administration, finance and governance of education and, in most recent times, with the form and content of the science curriculum and diverse methods of accountability to governors, parents, students and the community at large. 12

Framing secondary school science

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THE LEGISLATIVE BACKGROUND In England and Wales, it was the Balfour Education Act of 1902 which laid down the framework whereby public education was to be provided at the local level for most of the twentieth century. Under the Act, the councils of counties and of county boroughs in England and Wales became the local education authorities, empowered to ‘take such steps’ as seemed to them desirable to ‘supply or aid the supply of education other than elementary’ and to promote the ‘general co-ordination’ of all forms of education. The system of secondary education made possible by the Act expanded by 1914 to accommodate 1,027 grant-aided secondary schools, and 187,647 pupils. Thereafter, expansion stemmed from increasing the number of pupils within the schools and the average length of time that pupils remained on roll, rather than by a marked growth in the number of secondary schools. By 1938, there were 1,398 secondary schools in England and Wales on the grant list, providing an education for 470,003 pupils, figures that need to be set alongside the 5,087,485 pupils whose education was confined to that provided by the public elementary schools. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, secondary education was differentiated from public elementary education by social class rather than by the age of the pupils who attended. A minority of pupils moved from elementary to secondary schooling by means of scholarships, or by the so-called ‘free place’ system introduced in 1907, whereby grants to secondary schools became dependent on making at least one-quarter of their places available to pupils from public elementary schools. Scholarships and ‘free places’ were awarded on a competitive basis. By 1938, 47.3 per cent of the intake to grant-aided secondary schools in England and Wales consisted of ‘free places’, although the total number of pupils aged 13 or 14 receiving a secondary education accounted for only 13.2 per cent of their age group. After the passage of the 1944 Education Act, secondary education in England and Wales became freely available to all in accordance with a pupil’s age, ability and aptitude within a tripartite system of grammar, modern and technical schools, although few of the last of these were ever established. In 1965, after the publication of Circular 10/65, local education authorities were required to draw up plans to reorganize secondary education along comprehensive lines. Although secondary reorganization was not accomplished without some fierce local political battles, sometimes involving recourse to law, by the mid-1980s, the overwhelming majority of boys and girls in England in Wales attended comprehensive schools under the control of a local education authority. By the 1990s, many budgetary and other matters had passed from local education authorities to the schools themselves, with school governors acquiring the powers needed to discharge the responsibilities placed upon them by legislation. This, in outline, is the legislative framework within which secondary education has been provided for most of the twentieth century. What, in 1902, was

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the preserve of a minority who could afford the fees became, in 1944, the freely available right of all, although on terms which, less than a generation later, were to be radically overthrown by the widespread introduction of comprehensive secondary schooling.

SCIENCE IN THE SCHOOLS What is known of the work of those who taught science in secondary schools during this period? Under the 1902 Education Act, the work of grant-aided secondary schools was governed by a series of regulations published annually after 1904 by the Board of Education. The secondary school regulations of 1904 required schools in receipt of parliamentary grant to provide an approved course of general instruction which extended over at least four years and which was based upon English language and literature, at least one language other than English, and geography, history, mathematics, science and drawing. At least seven and a half hours were to be devoted each week to the teaching of science and mathematics. The instruction in science was to be both ‘theoretical and practical’ and to occupy a minimum of three hours weekly. Although there were several changes to the regulations in subsequent years, the Board of Education dispensing in 1907, for example, with the rules whereby a definite minimum time had to be given to individual subjects or groups of subjects, science remained a compulsory component of the curriculum of grant-aided secondary schools. It should, however, be noted that, in the same year, the regulations required grant-aided secondary schools for girls to provide practical instruction in domestic subjects and allowed the substitution of an approved course in one of these subjects, ‘partially or wholly’ for the work in science normally undertaken by girls over the age of 15. By the end of the First World War, science was said to occupy a position in grant-aided secondary schools that was ‘in no way inferior to that of any other subject’, although there was concern that in many schools the time allocated for teaching science was ‘as little as four three-quarter-hour periods per week’ (Natural Science in Education, 1918, para 10). The regulations issued annually by the Board of Education, however, contained no detail about the content of the science component of the secondary school curriculum nor any suggestion about how it should be taught, save that the instruction be both ‘theoretical and practical’. By 1904, however, many of the elements of secondary school science teachers’ work were already well-established. The schooling of science in the mid-nineteenth century, initially in the public schools, and the work of the British Association for the Advancement of Science had given secondary school science education a clear rationale. A seminal report, published by the British Association in 1867 and entitled On the Best Means of Promoting Scientific Education in Schools, suggested that the case for


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teaching science rested on several grounds. It provided an excellent means of mental training and could compensate for the narrowness of a classical education. It could also develop what today might be called scientific literacy. In addition, the study of science offered intellectual pleasure and the scientific knowledge acquired was useful. However, these claims for scientific education were not weighted equally. Primacy was accorded to mental training and to scientific method, not to the acquisition of information, a distinction between ‘process’ and ‘content’ that continues to influence, where it does not frame, much of the debate about the contribution of science to general education. As for teaching methods, the last quarter of the nineteenth century had seen the development and consolidation of organized courses of laboratory work. These courses related principally to inorganic and organic chemistry and to the heat, light, sound, mechanics, magnetism and electricity which were later to form the secondary school physics curriculum. Biology, as a school subject, was rarely taught, save to a few senior pupils intending to study medicine, although botany, essentially taxonomic and morphological, remained an important subject in the education of girls. It was during this period that school laboratory design emerged as a specialized field of architectural practice, although early school laboratories were, in their essentials, indistinguishable from the undergraduate teaching laboratories upon which they were commonly modelled. Over 1,000 laboratories were provided in schools in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, although some involved adapting existing accommodation rather than new building. Indeed, what was to become the standard size and arrangement of school laboratory and preparation rooms for most of the twentieth century derived from no more fundamental consideration than what could be conjured from the basic units to be adapted, namely classrooms measuring 20 ft × 24 ft (Jenkins, 1979, 1998b). The work done in these laboratories was often supported by a new form of publication, the laboratory manual, which offered teachers and students clear guidance about what was expected. Worthington’s An Elementary Course of Practical Physics, derived from his experience of teaching at the Salt Schools in Shipley and, later, at Clifton College, where boys had worked in pairs from printed sheets which gave details of the experiments to be conducted. These experiments ranged widely to include mensuration, heat, hydrostatics and elasticity, and engaged pupils in exercises such as locating the centre of gravity of a solid, measuring the period of a simple pendulum, establishing the density of a range of solids or liquids, and determining the latent heat of freezing or boiling of water. Worthington subsequently published a more fully developed practical physics course in 1896: A First Course of Physical Laboratory Practice. According to Layton, this ‘did for physics what qualitative analysis schemes had previously done for chemistry and became the model for many subsequent courses, achieving a sixth edition by 1903’ (Layton, 1990, p. 46).

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Just how much of a model these early laboratory manuals became is evident from a survey of the exercise and laboratory books of pupils over the following half century. Notebooks completed by pupils in grammar and public schools in different parts of the country and at different times show a marked similarity in the work done and in the manner in which such work was recorded and presented. Many of the experiments in physics and chemistry conducted by grammar school pupils in the early years of the twentieth century were repeated by their successors until at least the 1950s, and, for the most part, the work was written up in a standardized format: Test, Observation, Inference, or Title, Apparatus, Method, Observation, Results and Conclusion. When, in 1948, Tyler published his highly successful A Laboratory Manual of Physics, he readily acknowledged the difficulty, if not impossibility, of producing a book on practical physics without borrowing from the ‘various standard works available’. Those standard works, like Tyler’s own volume, ‘set out the results in each case in detail in blank form, so that, if desired, the student can make direct entries of his observations’ (Tyler, 1948, p. 2). It is thus perhaps not surprising that the practical teaching of science in school laboratories was all too readily reduced to a set of routine exercises, sometimes involving little more than a lengthy elaboration of the obvious. Worthington himself had been aware of the risk that his own course might degenerate into a form of mechanical manipulation. In 1896, he commented that physics, ‘like all scientific teaching’ was to be taught ‘not with a view of training up Physicists, but with the object of evoking in the boys a genuine and generous interest in natural phenomena, and with training them to habits of patient . . . study’, adding that the ‘first aim was not to show pupils how measures of physical constants might be made but what they might mean’ (Worthington, 1896, p. 4). Regrettably, Worthington’s injunction was to be largely ignored. Others, however, attempted to redefine the role of the school science teaching laboratory by aligning it more closely with activities intended to emulate scientific research. In the case of physics, David Rintoul, Worthington’s successor at Clifton, sought to emphasize ‘the spirit of scientific curiosity’ by presenting experiments in the form of problems which the student was required to solve. In the case of chemistry, the principal advocate of the view that the teaching laboratory was a place where students could learn by conducting investigations was Henry Armstrong, although he professed to dislike the word ‘laboratory’, preferring instead to refer to a ‘workshop’. Armstrong went much further than Rintoul, campaigning vigorously from 1884 onwards for the teaching of ‘scientific method’, a term which he understood as the methodical, logical application of knowledge to establish scientific truth. Armstrong’s heuristic approach to school science education has been well documented (e.g., Brock, 1973) and need not be recounted here, but two points should be noted. First, although heuristic teaching was adopted by only a small number of science teachers, Armstrong’s emphasis upon ‘finding out’ as an objective of laboratory teaching was to endure,


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finding its later expression in the Nuffield Science Teaching Project of the 1960s (see Chapter 3) and, it might be argued, in the commitment to the various versions of Attainment Target 1 in the science component of the National Curriculum in England and Wales. Secondly, both the psychological and the philosophical underpinnings of heurism were to collapse in the early years of the century. The ‘transfer of training’ implicit in the teaching of scientific method did not withstand the scrutiny of the experimental psychologists, faculty psychology itself fell out of favour, and developments such as thermodynamics, relativity and quantum theory made it impossible to sustain the notion of scientific method as organized common sense upon which Armstrong’s heurism traded. When investigative teaching re-emerged in the 1960s and 1980s, therefore, it had to call upon different supporting rationales which allowed science to be presented as a set of ‘processes’ or skills (Wellington, 1989), the latter having the inestimable (dis)advantage of seemingly lending themselves readily to assessment. As for philosophy, philosophical ideas have been called in aid of, rather than served as determinants of, school science laboratory teaching practice. Their purpose has been to sustain the notion of the scientific community as the paradigm of institutionalized rationality. For most secondary (i.e., selective) school science teachers, however, the nature of much of their day-to-day work, whether in the classroom or laboratory, was influenced by the requirements of the external examinations for which they prepared their pupils. By 1918, these consisted principally of the School Certificate, Higher School Certificate and Matriculation examinations set by the examination boards established in conjunction with the universities. Scrutiny of the questions set by these examination boards points towards both an enduring emphasis upon the topics examined and a consistency in the kinds of questions which were asked. Chemistry papers were characterized by an emphasis upon the preparation, properties and manufacture of materials. Examinations in physics commonly required students, first, to describe how they would measure a physical constant and then to solve a related and relatively routine quantitative problem. Biology struggled to gain a secure foothold in the secondary school curriculum until after the Second World War but the examination questions set show that the emphasis here was on anatomy, morphology, taxonomy and, increasingly, plant and animal physiology. In all cases, candidates were required to recall substantial amounts of scientific knowledge, with calculations following a pattern that was all too familiar to teachers, candidates and their examiners. Throughout the inter-war years and beyond, the work of science teachers and their students was supported by a range of textbooks, some of which were highly successful publishing ventures. Holderness and Lambert’s School Certificate Chemistry, first published in 1936, went through four editions and numerous reprints and was still widely used in grammar schools in 1961. In contrast, E. J. Holmyard’s An Elementary Chemistry, first published in 1925, remained

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unchanged from 1934 to 1960 when it was still being regularly reprinted. Similar publishing successes may be recorded for other areas of school science, e.g., Sherwood Taylor’s General Science for Schools and Harrison’s Elementary General Science. Mackenzie’s Light, first published in 1936, was reprinted in 1939, 1943, 1945, 1946, 1948, 1950, 1954 and 1957. In biology, Elementary Biology for Matriculation and Allied Examinations by Phillips and Cox, published in 1930, had reached its tenth edition by 1952 and a new impression was issued in 1957. Bassey has commented that Ordinary (O) level textbooks have followed ‘one familiar and well-worn path’ which, by 1960, had become ‘a rut rather than a highway’ (Bassey, 1960, p. 14). There is little doubt that this judgement may be applied, although to a lesser extent, both to the corresponding texts in physics and biology, and to the more advanced books used by candidates preparing for Advanced (A) level examinations. Books commonly included previous examination papers and their contents closely mirrored the various examination syllabuses, although few have been quite as explicit as Holmyard in acknowledging, in the text of his A Higher School Certificate Inorganic Chemistry that the ‘allotment of space to individual topics is roughly in proportion to the frequency with which these topics appear in the examination papers’ (Holmyard, 1939, p. v). Books and examination papers can, of course, do no more than indicate what was expected of candidates preparing for the various public examinations. There is good reason to believe, however, both that the form and content of public examinations exerted a powerful influence upon science teachers’ work and acted as a significant constraint upon change. In 1928, Armstrong, a by no means sympathetic observer, referred to the ‘stranglehold’ of examinations that made it impossible to teach the spirit of rational enquiry, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) concluded that what the examination system did not encourage, ‘it tended to frustrate’ (BAAS, 1929, p. 523). A series of official reports from the Thomson Committee in 1918 (Natural Science in Education, 1918) to the Spens Committee in 1938 (Board of Education, 1938) criticized, ineffectually, the emphasis placed in public examinations in science upon the ability to recall knowledge and to reproduce it in a standard form. The criticism continued until well after the end of the Second World War, as, for example, in the ‘Gulbenkian’ Report of 1959 (University of Birmingham, 1959) and the comments of the Association for Science Education (ASE) in the 1960s (ASE, 1961). The result was that the dictation of notes, the rote learning of formal definitions and other techniques judged likely to help pupils produce the standardized answers required became commonplace in many grammar schools: ‘for many of us, the burden is fashioned by the demands made by public examinations. If these require learning by heart masses of information, this must be our own approach’ (Nuffield Foundation, 1966, p. 3). It was this examinationled approach which the Nuffield Science Teaching Project of the 1960s sought to reform.


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The origins of this approach lie in the terms upon which science was first schooled in the public and grammar schools in the mid-nineteenth century and, more particularly, in the historic links between grammar school and higher education. The methods of science teaching at the universities is too large a topic to be considered here in detail and it will be sufficient to note Ramsay’s conclusion in 1950 that, apart from heurism, ‘the main methods of teaching science’ in grammar schools had been with the ‘aid of organised courses of laboratory work supported by practical demonstration, after the style of the laboratory courses of the University’ (Ramsay, 1950, p. 4). Ramsay reported that over 40 per cent of 168 teachers responding to a questionnaire required definitions and principles to be precisely worded and ‘learnt by heart’, and that practical work was employed more for ‘learning the content’ of the science syllabuses than for inculcating a scientific attitude towards problems. Little use was made of projects or ‘elementary research exercises’ and ‘a good deal of time’ was spent on note-taking, the writing up of practical work or answering questions on the work done. His overall judgement was that while most of the activities described by the science teachers were ‘useful, no doubt’, they were ‘not peculiar to science as an educational subject’. Little, if any, of the approach described by Ramsay can be attributed to the influence of the professional training received by the science teachers who taught in grammar schools. The training of graduates for secondary schools has not been accorded a high priority by governments during the twentieth century. Such training grew in popularity among graduates in general after the Second World War but it remained voluntary until the 1980s. The implication is that, officially at least, the teaching of science (or any other academic subject) in grammar schools was seen as essentially a matter of exposing pupils to the structure and practices of the relevant scientific disciplines, and as a task for which no initial professional training was necessary. Secondary schools other than grammar schools, were, of course, largely free from the constraints of School Certificate and, subsequently, General Certificate of Education (GCE) examinations. For the most part, those who taught within them had undergone a course of initial teacher training, although they were not graduates. In many of these schools, little or no science was taught or the work was confined to biological topics, commonly presented in the form of human biology, social biology or health education (Jenkins, 1979). Unlike grammar school pupils, who were assumed to ‘have some profession in view’, those attending secondary modern schools were presumed to have ‘no such immediate aims’ (Bonham, 1949, p. 42) and the curriculum, together with the resources made available, reflected this marked social differentiation in the two types of schooling. As far as teaching methods are concerned, many secondary modern schools initially made use of projects, sometimes to the near exclusion of other forms of teaching. However, Dent commented that ‘in all but the best schools’ which

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relied upon project or centre of interest methods ‘not very much systematic or solid learning’ was achieved (Dent, 1958) and the Ministry of Education, in its annual report for 1949, expressed concern that relatively few secondary modern schools had ‘come to grips with the problems of how to meet intellectual needs and how to stimulate fullest effort’ (Ministry of Education, 1950, p. 23). By the early 1960s, Taylor judged that secondary modern schools, having withstood an ‘onslaught of educational ideas’ which had once seemed likely to alter the subject based timetable in favour of ‘projects, centres of interest, individual assignments and subject groups’, were displaying signs of an ‘academic attitude’ towards subject matter (Taylor, 1963, p. 84). A tentative conclusion is that, by the end of the 1950s, the ‘opportunity to develop science teaching along fresh lines’ in conditions ‘free from the cramping traditions’ of examinations had been realized in a variety of ways and to different degrees in different secondary modern schools. A large minority, perhaps even a majority, of these schools were ‘attacking the problems of the “new” secondary education with imagination and energy’. Some demonstrated the academic influence to which Taylor referred and others, perhaps a declining minority, continued to reflect that ‘remarkable efflorescence of new model courses and curricula’ which characterized the work of a number of modern schools in the immediate post-war years (Dent, 1958, pp. 17, 39).

THE CHANGING POLICY FRAMEWORK: A COMMON SYSTEM OF SCHOOLING The publication of Circular 10/65 and the subsequent development of a comprehensive, rather than a selective, system of publicly funded secondary schooling required the accommodation of two different traditions within post-primary school science education within England and Wales. The first and, by far the longer-established and stronger tradition, was essentially academic, in the sense of being strongly influenced by the demands of the universities and associated with the work of the grammar schools. The second, much weaker and perhaps hardly amounting to a tradition, was pupil- rather than discipline-centred, concerned more directly with future employment, and associated with secondary modern schooling and its pre-1944 predecessors. The necessary accommodation was found, at least to a degree and in the short term, within the two systems of public external examinations developed after the government accepted the recommendations of the Beloe Report, published in 1960. 1965 saw the introduction of the Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) examination, available in one of three Modes, the third of which allowed teachers, subject to external moderating and other procedures, to devise their own syllabuses, examine their own pupils and award appropriate grades. The CSE examination coexisted with the

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Framing secondary school science Table 2.1

CSE entries in science subjects, 1985, by Mode and gender

Subject Physics Chemistry Biology General science

Boys

Mode 1 Girls

107,395 61,489 57,899 19,633

31,244 49,675 128,816 14,999

Mode 2 Boys Girls 1,955 2,037 543 1,115

625 630 1,102 815

Boys

Mode 3 Girls

5,933 7,828 6,413 27,436

1,529 690 13,775 23,148

longer-established GCE while teachers, policy-makers, parents and pupils all struggled to relate a pass in the one examination to performance in the other. From 1965 onwards, therefore, secondary school science teachers, especially those teaching in modern and comprehensive schools, were given a remarkable degree of freedom over their own work, although, interestingly, this was much greater in the case of pupils of low educational achievement than with their more able peers upon whose course of study GCE examinations remained an important influence. The number of candidates entered for CSE examinations grew steadily, although less rapidly in science than in a number of other subjects. Table 2.1 indicates the predominance of Mode 1 CSE entries (i.e. in which teachers prepared candidates for an externally prescribed syllabus and an externally marked examination). None the less, many teachers and schools took advantage of the opportunities available to them in the remaining two Modes to design a course and/or assess their pupils’ attainment. Three other features of the CSE examination are of interest in the present context. The first is the emphasis upon coursework, i.e., work undertaken by pupils, ostensibly as an integral part of the teaching and learning process, and commonly assessed by teachers. In the case of the science subjects, coursework took the form of practical work undertaken in the laboratory or, less frequently, of projects or fieldwork. The second is that the CSE examination, like its GCE counterpart, showed a marked gender differential in the pattern of entries, with girls predominating among the entries for CSE biology and boys among those entered for the corresponding examination in physics. Unlike the GCE O level examination however, the concept of passing and failing was abandoned in favour of grades recorded on certificates as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or U (ungraded). Finally, the arrangements for the CSE examination encouraged experimentation in techniques of assessment, including oral assessment in science. In a variety of ways, such as moderation, marking and the Mode 3 procedures, it also involved many more teachers in the processes of examining and syllabus design.

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FROM SCHOOLS COUNCIL TO THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM The Schools Council for the Curriculum and Examinations was established on 1 October 1964, following the recommendation of the Lockwood Committee in March of the same year that a new body be set up with responsibility in these fields. Over the 20 years of its existence the Schools Council sponsored a large number of curriculum projects, some prompted by the raising of the schoolleaving age in 1973, and, in a series of working papers and reports, addressed the problems of a dual system of examining at 16+ (GCE and CSE) and of the inadequacy of the A-level examination for the growing number of those staying on beyond the statutory school-leaving age. In the present context, it is important to examine briefly the controversy that surrounded the founding of the Schools Council and some of the principles that governed its work, principles which ultimately were to be judged wanting and lead to the announcement by the Secretary of State, Sir Keith Joseph, in the House of Commons in April 1982 of the government’s intention to disband the organization. George Tomlinson, a Labour Minister of Education, once famously claimed that ‘Minister knows nowt about curriculum’ (Richmond, 1971, p. 17). The result was that, throughout the 1950s, teachers, through their professional associations, were able to exert considerable professional influence. It was, in Lawton’s estimation, ‘the Golden Age of teacher control (or non-control) of the curriculum’ (Lawton, 1980, p. 22). By the beginning of the following decade, however, matters were set to change. In a debate on the Crowther Report in the House of Commons in March 1960, the Conservative Minister, Sir David Eccles, referred to the ‘secret garden of the curriculum’ and expressed to the House of Commons his regret that so many of our education debates have had to be devoted almost entirely to bricks and mortar and to the organisation of the system. We hardly ever discuss what is taught to the 7 million boys and girls in the maintained schools. We treat the curriculum as though it were a subject . . . about which it is ‘not done’ for us to make remarks. I should like the House to say that this reticence has been overdone. Of course, Parliament would never attempt to dictate the curriculum, but, from time to time, we could with advantage express views on what is taught in schools and in training colleges . . . I shall, therefore, try in the future to make the Ministry’s own voice heard rather more often, more positively, and, no doubt, sometimes more controversially. (Hansard, 1960, cols 51–2)

While subsequent events were to prove Eccles spectacularly wrong in his assertion that Parliament would ‘never attempt to dictate the curriculum’, he was on surer ground with his reference to controversy. Two years later, in February 1962, and perhaps partly in response to a recommendation of the Crowther Committee that the Ministry of Education should undertake more research, Eccles announced the formation of a new Curriculum Study Group within the Ministry.


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When the various educational associations and local education authorities were made aware, in a circular from the Permanent Secretary, of the existence of this group, the response was immediate and generally anxious in tone: The great fear was that this was the not very thin edge of a rather obvious wedge, and that in the end the Ministry would impose central control of the curriculum. It was taken for granted that that was anathema, because it would be destructive of . . . [freedom] of thought and action in the curriculum field . . . One headmaster wrote ‘Have we fought two world wars for this?’ (Jennings, 1985, p. 16)

To deflect the cries of ‘Prussianization’ of the English educational system and to disarm suspicion about the remit and work of the Curriculum Study Group, Morrell, the Secretary of the Group, suggested that it be taken out of the Ministry of Education and put under the control of a body representing all the major educational interests, so that neither the Ministry nor the local education authorities could control it. Morrell’s ideas led the Minister of Education, Sir Edward Boyle, to establish the Lockwood working party whose work, as noted above, led to the setting up of the Schools Council by Quintin Hogg, Boyle’s successor, less than four months after the recommendations of the working party had been submitted. The Lockwood working party gave the Schools Council, this ‘fully representative body’, a constitution, recommending that ‘the schools should have the fullest possible measure of responsibility for their own work, including responsibility for their own curricula and teaching methods, which should be evolved by their own staff to meet the needs of their own pupils, (Jennings, 1985, p. 20). In framing this recommendation, the Lockwood Report acknowledged that the existing arrangements were not working well, commented that teachers had insufficient scope for making or recommending modifications in the curriculum and examinations and noted that the underlying trend was towards an excessive standardization of their work. It was also no doubt reflecting the widely held view that ‘No freedom that teachers . . . possess is so important as that of determining the curriculum and methods of teaching’ (Lester-Smith, 1966, p. 161). Few principles could have been more clearly set out or be judged more likely to enhance teachers’ sense of responsibility for their own day-to-day work. This principle underpinned the work of the Schools Council in the field of curriculum and examinations throughout the 20 years for which it existed. The Council funded a large number of curriculum projects, of which the innovative Schools Council Integrated Science Project (SCISP) and the Schools Council Science 5–13 Project are particularly noteworthy within science education. However, despite some initial optimism, the years between 1964 and 1984 were not easy for the Schools Council. Relationships between the Council and the (then) Department of Education and Science were often difficult, matters coming to a head in the Yellow Book in 1976.

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Science Education: Policy, Professionalism and Change The Schools Council has performed moderately in commissioning development work in particular curricular areas; has had little success in tackling examination problems, despite the availability of resources which its predecessor (the Secondary Schools Examination Council) never had; and it has scarcely begun to tackle the problems of the curriculum as a whole. Despite some quality staff work the overall performance of the Schools Council has, in fact, both on curriculum and examinations, been generally mediocre. (DES, 1976, para. 50)

Not surprisingly, the Yellow Book served to reveal the ‘impression in the minds of some influential politicians now in government that the Council was both subversive and ineffectual’ (Plaskow, 1985, p. 10). A somewhat different and rather more detached perspective than that offered in the Yellow Book is provided by Price who argues that the Schools Council neither generated ‘a group of writers intent on interpreting curriculum development to the wider world nor threw up the charismatic chalkface teachers one might have expected’ (Price, 1985, p. 171). The result, according to Price, was that, during the 1970s, the Council seemed to withdraw ‘deeper and deeper into its own private language’. For Skilbeck, the failure of the Schools Council lay in not thinking through ‘the practical implications of its project development work for school curriculum change’. ‘The sheer production of a large and varied volume of interesting and highquality materials in separate subject areas, even when we add all the associated activities of workshops and conference, the designs for learning, the evaluation and research reports, does not of itself constitute a strategy for school development’ (Skilbeck, 1994, p. 84). When allied with the failure ‘to alter the shape of the public examination system in England’ and its ‘lack of political clout’, the inwardness of the Schools Council identified by Price made its eventual closure, in 1984, at least understandable, if not inevitable (Price, 1985, pp. 173–4). The new way forward was also clear, at least in outline. As Sir James Hamilton, Permanent Secretary at the DES, told the Association of Education Committees in 1976, the Secretary of State’s duties under the 1944 Act must mean I believe a much closer interest by the Department in the curriculum in its widest sense, the assessment of performance and even the relationship of teaching methods to performance. I have no detailed proposals to offer you today but I believe that the so-called secret garden of the curriculum in which HMI already walks by professional right cannot be allowed to remain so secret after all. (Mann, 1985, p. 181)

In a sense, the shift that has taken place in the last 30 years in teachers’ sense of ownership of their work with which this book is concerned, mirrors the fortunes of the Schools Council itself, the establishment of which can now be seen as only a temporary retreat from the centralism implicit in the setting up of the Curriculum Study Group within the Ministry of Education. The 1960s were


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marked by curriculum initiatives and examination reform, and brought enhanced teacher engagement with both. By the mid-1970s, the raising of the schoolleaving age, the growth of comprehensive secondary schooling and severe economic difficulties provided the wider context for scrutiny of the education system, and more particularly for the views expressed in the Yellow Book referred to above. While the Labour Secretary of State, Shirley Williams, simply wanted to end the overall teacher majority on Council committees (DES, 1977), Hamilton, appointed in 1976, was an ‘unrepentant centralist’ (TES, 1983), advising the Association for Science Education that there was an argument for government acting ‘more directly in certain limited areas of the curriculum’ (Hamilton, 1983). While it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Department of Education and Science ‘did little to nurture its own offspring’ and that ‘(m)any in the Department had not wanted the baby at all and were alarmed to see it so bonny’ (Mann, 1985, p. 179), John Tomlinson’s judgement made in 1985 captures more precisely the historical sense of the shift that undermined both the Schools Council and the curriculum and pedagogic freedom for teachers of which it was a reflection and which it so clearly espoused . . . ‘the Council was destroyed mainly because it had become an obsolete expression of the distribution of power in the education system. The obsolescence set in with great rapidity’ (Tomlinson, 1985, p. 124). The 1980s brought a major shift in power relating to educational matters to the centre and away from teachers, schools, local education authorities and others only recently regarded as partners, and as necessary partners, of central government in the educational enterprise. A new examination for all pupils at 16+, the GCSE, was introduced in 1988, after a long and difficult gestation. The new examination marked the end of the dual system of examining at 16+ which had provided different examinations for groups of pupils of different ability, confronted the rapidly growing number of comprehensive schools with formidable organizational difficulties and raised unhelpful and time-consuming issues of comparability. The new common examination at 16+ derived from national general and subject-specific criteria and it incorporated a number of the features which had become part of teachers’ work and examining routines in the preceding 20 or so years, e.g., school-based assessment and the widespread use of multiple choice tests. In the same year, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative administration fulfilled its 1987 electoral promise to establish a National Curriculum, doing so through the Education Reform Act 1988, a beguiling title which suggests progress rather than, as many came to see it, regression. This Act was to affect institutions, ideology, modes of authority, the relationship between the curriculum and assessment and, as teachers came to be charged with ‘delivering’ the government’s curriculum, the language of educational discourse. Within little more than a generation, therefore, the dominant factors shaping much of science teachers’ work, like that of their colleagues teaching other subjects, had undergone profound changes. The work of those teaching in the

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grammar schools in the 1960s was strongly coloured by the universities, through their control of GCE examinations. For those teaching in secondary modern and comprehensive schools, the CSE examination brought new freedoms in curriculum and assessment. It is no coincidence that the 1960s and early 1970s saw the setting up of teachers’ centres in large numbers, committed to helping teachers innovate, share ideas and expertise and thus improve the quality of their work. Curriculum projects, whether sponsored by the Schools Council or the Nuffield Foundation, were essentially expressions of innovative practice which teachers were free to ignore, adapt or adopt. Perhaps inevitably, a similar attitude pervaded the professional training of secondary school science teachers, training which became increasingly common in the second half of the twentieth century before being made compulsory in 1983. The emphasis was on teachers making the best judgement about how to work with their pupils, an emphasis that was given its fullest expression in the work of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review during the early 1980s. By then, disappointment that the major curriculum projects of the 1960s had not lived up to expectations was commonplace, together with a sense that the Schools Council had failed to look at the curriculum as a whole and a growing belief that standards of work in the schools were falling (see, e.g., Smith, 1985). Wrigley’s confident prediction in 1985 that ‘there is in this country little danger of central control of the curriculum by the administrators in the Department of Education and Science’ was soon to be proved wrong. As events discussed in the following chapters make clear, teachers were not, as he claimed, simply too powerful for this danger to be real (Wrigley, 1985, p. 42).

3 GUIDING TEACHERS: THE NUFFIELD SCIENCE TEACHING PROJECTS

On 4 April, 1962, the Minister of Education, Sir David Eccles, informed the House of Commons in a reply to a parliamentary question that the Nuffield Foundation has decided to make available £250,000 towards the cost of a long-term development programme to improve teaching in [science and mathematics]. The programme will be supervised by the Director of the Foundation, Dr. Farrer-Brown, in association with the Curriculum Study Group, with the help of advisory committees, but the detailed work will be carried out by practising teachers under the guidance of specially appointed Nuffield Fellows . . . (Quoted in Waring, 1979, p. 2)

This reply did more than indicate the way in which it was intended the development programme would be undertaken. It made clear that responsibility for the programme would lie with the Nuffield Foundation and, in its reference to the Curriculum Study Group, confirmed that the Ministry of Education itself would also have a role to play. Further details of what were quickly to become known as the Nuffield Foundation Science and Mathematics Teaching Projects were made available in a press release, timed to coincide with Eccles’s reply. The emphasis was to be placed on curriculum materials ‘designed for teachers by teachers’, with attention, in the first instance, focused upon physics, chemistry and biology for 11–16-year-old pupils in grammar schools and streams, and upon secondary school mathematics. Primary science and secondary school science for nonexamination classes were to be the basis of a later phase of the Foundation’s involvement in curriculum development. The outcome of the Science Teaching 27

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Project was envisaged as ‘a co-ordinated set of materials . . . to be used by individual teachers in any way they wish’. In the case of the O-level projects, these co-ordinated materials would take due account of work that had already been done in the UK, notably by the Science Masters’ Association (SMA) and the Association of Women Science Teachers (AWST), and elsewhere, a reference to the science curriculum initiatives undertaken under the auspices of the National Science Foundation in the USA. The Nuffield Science Teaching Project can be regarded as part of what was to become a worldwide movement of school science curriculum renewal, i.e., as a British manifestation of a global phenomenon (Lockard, 1972). In Britain, as in many other countries, the project sought to modernize the school science curriculum, to promote good practice and, in so doing, to give pupils some insight into what it means to think scientifically. Both in the UK and USA, for example, the underpinning curriculum emphasis was the same. For the Organizer of the Nuffield O-level chemistry project, pupils were to learn ‘what being scientific means to a scientist’ (Halliwell, 1966, p. 242). In the USA, students following ChemStudy courses were promised that they would ‘see the nature of science by engaging in scientific activity’, thereby to ‘some extent becoming scientists themselves’ (Pimentel, 1960, p. 1 and Preface). The broader curriculum rationale, to promote national scientific and technological competitiveness, was also similar, although, in the USA, the launching of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957 was seen as a particular and direct challenge to American technological expertise and to the country’s defence capability during the so-called cold war. However, some of the unique features of the Nuffield Science Teaching Project should not be overlooked. In contrast with the USA, where the National Science Foundation funded much of the science curriculum development, the Nuffield Science Teaching Project was funded by a charitable trust, the Nuffield Foundation, and not by government which, according to Waring, showed ‘little or no . . . concern about school science education . . . before the pre-election campaign of the Labour Party in 1963–4’ (Waring, 1975, p. 247). One important corollary of this difference in funding was that professional scientists played significantly different roles in science curriculum development in the two countries. In the UK, their role, although important, was largely confined to membership/chairmanship of advisory committees. In the USA, their role in the production of curriculum materials was much more direct, leaving some of the American initiatives open to the charge that they were attempts at ‘top-down’ reform of the work of the schools by those whose teaching expertise lay in higher education. There was also a significantly greater commitment in the USA to the role that a national network of research and development agencies might play in improving the work of the schools. In the UK, there was much less enthusiasm for a grand strategy of this kind, ‘even in the minds of the sponsors of largescale projects’ (Skilbeck, 1994, p. 85). In addition, the Nuffield Science Teaching

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Project necessarily reflected the prevailing assumptions about the functions of secondary schooling in the UK, then largely structured on a selective basis. Different kinds of curriculum materials were needed for two groups of pupils, sometimes differentiated by the type of school attended (grammar/secondary modern) and, on other occasions, distinguished by reference to alleged ability (e.g., the Newsom child, a reference to the chairman of a Committee that had produced a report entitled Half our Future [Central Advisory Council, 1963]). Able pupils were to be introduced to the formal structure, the grammar and syntax, of the scientific disciplines. Those judged less able were to be offered a secondary scientific education based upon a course in science, rather than through separate courses of physics, chemistry or biology, and organised on a topic, rather than a disciplinary, basis. The first of the various Nuffield science curriculum initiatives were the O-level projects in physics, chemistry and biology. These were followed by other projects in mathematics, secondary science, junior science and A-level physics, chemistry, biology and physical science. The Nuffield Junior Science Project, approved by the Trustees of the Nuffield Foundation in 1963, served to highlight how much needed to be done to establish science as a component of the primary curriculum and this task fell to the Schools Council Science 5–13 Project, funded jointly by the Schools Council, the Nuffield Foundation and the Scottish Education Department. Like the Schools Council curriculum initiatives, the various Nuffield projects placed teachers at the centre of the development process. Typically, a Project Organizer was appointed on a full-time basis to direct the work of a project team drawn, in most cases, from the schools, on a full- or part-time basis. A wider perspective was provided by a consultative or advisory committee, appointed to accommodate the views of higher education, academic science, local education authorities and others with a legitimate interest in science curriculum reform. Members of these supporting committees commonly took an active interest in the work of the project and some played a key role in facilitating discussions with examining bodies, university science departments and other organizations and associations whose support was required if the reformed science curricula were to command the necessary respect among schools, universities, students and their parents. Typically, projects undertook to reform the science curriculum by producing a range of materials which were then trialled in schools and subjected to critical review. The materials trialled, and eventually made commercially available, included not only texts such as Teachers’ Guides but also film loops and apparatus specially designed for teaching purposes. The curriculum materials generated by the initiatives of the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council led to a demand for in-service training which was met in a variety of uncoordinated ways. Teachers’ Centres were set up in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s (Schools Council, 1967). Many of these were established by local education authorities and were not subject specific. Forty-five such Centres were in

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existence by June 1966: this figure rose to nearly 300 in the following four years and to over 600 in the early 1970s. In the case of science and, to a lesser extent, of mathematics, specialist Centres were set up, usually within, or in close association with, institutions of higher education. Such Science Centres played a major role in providing inservice courses for science teachers and in making the work of the various science teaching projects more widely known within the science teaching profession. They were also an important focus for science teachers wishing to share experience and take advantage of the professional flexibility accorded to them by the introduction of the CSE examination (see Chapters 2 and 6). It was in the mid-1960s that science education as a field of study secured a foothold in higher education in England and Wales, some of those most closely involved with the Nuffield Science Teaching Project being appointed to chairs in science education. New journals, notably Education in Chemistry, Physics Education and the Journal of Biological Education were launched and the long-established School Science Review reorganized to include a curriculum development section. The professional scientific societies took a new or reinvigorated interest in the work of the schools and became actively involved in running courses and summer schools intended to familiarize science teachers with recent developments in the scientific disciplines. The global nature of the attempts to reform school science teaching also ensured that science education acquired a strong international dimension, with many of those most closely involved in initiatives in the UK acting as consultants or advisers to curriculum projects overseas. The development of new science curricula ‘by teachers for teachers’ was thus institutionalised and supported in a variety of ways in the socalled curriculum development era of the 1960s.

TEACHER RESPONSE In many ways, science teachers in the 1960s and 1970s were working within an educational free market. They were free, at least in principle, to choose from a range of syllabuses or, subject to the constraints of external moderation by an examination board, construct their own courses and examine their own pupils for public certification. They were free to adopt, ignore or select from the growing range of textual and audio-visual material and apparatus produced by science curriculum development projects which eventually covered both primary and secondary education. Educational publishers competed with each other to produce science texts and support materials which reflected the commitment of the Schools Council and Nuffield projects to ‘science by investigation’. By the end of the 1960s, however, the distinction that had emerged earlier in the decade between Nuffield and traditional school science programmes began to weaken and, by the mid-1970s, most O- and A-level GCE syllabuses had been revised in

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the light of the science curriculum initiatives supported by the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council. In addition, new examining techniques, including socalled objective testing, had been introduced and schools had been given greater responsibility for assessing the practical competence of their pupils at 18+. There were, of course, tensions and contradictions in this approach to science curriculum reform. As Humble and Simons (1978, p. 169) have observed, ‘centrally-conceived innovation is somewhat at odds with an educational system which is locally administered and where autonomy for curricular decisionmaking is said to lie with the schools’. In addition, giving science teachers the maximum freedom of choice to choose the curriculum and teaching methods they judged would best meet the needs of their pupils requires that any such choice be well informed. In reality, however, the Nuffield and Schools Council projects might be described as experiments in science curriculum reform, the results of which could not be judged either in the short term or by reference to simple criteria. It seems unlikely that those involved in developing and promoting the materials judged that practice could or should be universally or uniformly altered by any centralized initiative. For many science teachers, the various curriculum projects must have seemed quite radical in their pedagogy, as well as conceptually demanding for pupils, if not for the teachers themselves. A further difficulty was the lack of articulation of the attempts to reform school science curricula with the programmes followed by teachers undergoing courses of initial training for the profession. Even when the Science Teacher Education Project began work in the early 1970s, a laissezfaire attitude towards curriculum reform continued to prevail. Teacher trainers, like their colleagues working in the schools, were to be free to make such use as they thought fit of the materials which the Science Teaching Project eventually produced. It was thus, perhaps, not only ‘foreign visitors’ who ‘could never understand the quaint English perversity in setting up a national agency [the Schools Council], supported by the whole of the education service, which pretended that its curriculum offerings, painstakingly developed and carefully piloted by teachers, had no greater authority or credence than any textbook’ (Plaskow, 1985, p. 7). It might be argued, of course, that there was no pretence here: teachers were indeed able to accept or reject the Schools Council’s ‘offerings’. Partly for the reasons hinted at above, judging the response of the science teaching profession to the curriculum initiatives of the 1960s and early 1970s is a far from straightforward undertaking. Even more difficult in historical retrospect, because of the lack of adequate data, is the task of estimating the impact of the various projects on science teachers’ daily work, although there are evaluation studies and other, so-called diffusion studies which have sought to understand and estimate the extent to which the ideas and practices embedded in the curriculum materials produced by the different projects spread beyond the small number of schools involved at the trial stage. These studies themselves reveal a further difficulty in

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estimating the impact of the science curriculum projects of the 1960s on science teachers’ work. Given that the curriculum materials produced by the projects can be used in a variety of ways, what are the appropriate criteria to invoke in order to determine whether or not a school or a teacher has ‘adopted’ or is making at least some use of them? In March 1968, the Schools Council conducted a survey, at the suggestion of the Nuffield Science Teaching Project, in order to obtain, among much else, information about the number of schools using the Project materials, which of the science Projects the schools were using and the level of the secondary curriculum at which they were being used. The information was sought from the 163 local education authorities in England and Wales, of which 120 replied to the Schools Council’s request. All but 12 of the 120 authorities indicated that ‘some schools in their area used Nuffield materials’ and the survey suggested that ‘for the whole of England and Wales, the number of schools using Nuffield materials fully, or partially, is greater than 1,000’ (Education in Science, 1969, p. 21). Just over two-thirds of the local authorities which reported the introduction of Nuffield courses referred to their use in ten schools or fewer. In general, the Olevel physics materials were used ‘somewhat more frequently’ than the materials produced by either the chemistry or the biology projects. Noting that there were about 5,570 secondary schools in England and Wales in 1968, the Schools Council concluded that it would appear that the percentage of secondary schools using Nuffield materials is probably greater than 18%. If we make a rough assumption that probably 15% of the schools doing Nuffield science are secondary [modern] schools . . . then the percentage of grammar and comprehensive schools using the materials is greater than 43%. (Education in Science, April 1969, p. 24)

Given that the curriculum materials produced by the O-level projects were not published until 1966–67, the proportion of 43 per cent seems generous, especially when the numbers of candidates entered for the special Nuffield examinations in 1969 were estimated at 2,500 (physics), 3,300 (chemistry) and 720 (biology) (McKenzie, 1969, p. 24). According to Norman Booth, a senior figure in HM science Inspectorate, writing in 1975, ‘It was realised from the outset that there would be three groups of teachers; those who “did” Nuffield, and for them special O-level examinations were available; those who “used” Nuffield; and those who saw no use for it with their pupils’ (Booth, 1975, p. 28). Using these distinctions, Booth reported the results of a questionnaire study undertaken by ‘the science specialist members of HM Inspectorate’ with a sample of 1,723 schools ‘of all types covering the eleven-to-eighteen age range’. His conclusion was that, apart from the Nuffield Combined Science course, intended for pupils between the ages of 11 and 13, the percentage of schools ‘using’ project materials was greater, sometimes much

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greater, than the percentage of schools which fell into the category of ‘doing’ (Booth, 1975). No attempt was made, however, to ascertain the extent to which these teachers ‘used’ the innovative materials. The consequence, as Booth recognized, was that an acknowledgement of ‘use’ amounted to no more than a statement by a science teacher that he or she found the project materials useful to a greater or lesser extent. A near-contemporary but somewhat more sophisticated attempt to assess the impact of the Nuffield O- and A-level chemistry projects was carried out by Nicodemus, Jenkins and Ingle (1976). This study distinguished ‘high adopters’ of the Project materials from ‘low adopters’ on the basis of 16 characteristics of teachers or schools identified by means of a questionnaire sent to schools in the spring of 1973. It reported the degree of familiarity of chemistry teachers in each of these categories with the Project materials and the use made of them. Eightyseven per cent of high adopters and 29 per cent of low adopters were recorded as ‘using all or most’ of the O-level chemistry materials. The corresponding percentages at A-level were 55 and 26. The study also identified four factors that were statistically significant in distinguishing between the two groups who adopted A-level chemistry. These four ‘facilitating and limiting factors’ were school organization, the requirements of external examinations, contact with schools which had been involved in trialling the project materials and the provision of special ‘project examinations’. Of more immediate interest in the present context are the views of the chemistry teachers about the influence of the science curriculum projects on their work. Both high and low adopters agreed strongly with statements that the project materials had improved ‘the quality of pupils’ school experience’, had encouraged local education authorities ‘to provide improved facilities’ and had influenced ‘changes in external examinations’. There was, however, much less agreement that the chemistry projects had ‘provided packages that can be fully adopted’, influenced ‘the internal organisation of schools’, or promoted ‘dissatisfaction with what has been tested over time and shown to work’. There was particularly strong disagreement (56 and 80 per cent among high and low adopters respectively) with the assertion that the chemistry project had introduced ‘uniformity into school programmes’. When asked to rate each of 19 outcomes of science teaching, the three most important identified by the sample of chemistry teachers were ‘the development of experimental skills’, ‘an ability to handle the investigation of open-ended problems’ and ‘an understanding of, and ability to use, the scientific method’, although none of these distinguished high from low adopters. In the light of more recent economic influences upon school science education, it is particularly interesting to note that ‘facilitating competition with other countries in science and technology’ was regarded as ‘very important’ or ‘of considerable importance’ by only 2 and 3 per cent of those high adopters teaching A- and O-level Nuffield chemistry respectively. The corresponding figures among the low adopters were 10 and 14 per cent respectively.

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By combining the categories of ‘doing’ and ‘using’ project materials used in the HMI survey into a single category of ‘adoption’, Nicodemus was able to compare the data reported by Booth with data obtained from his own, somewhat smaller, national sample of schools (8 per cent). With the exception of the Nuffield O-level Projects, he found ‘considerable discrepancy between the two studies, with the HMI survey reporting much greater (× 2.5) . . . use or doing of projects’. Some of this difference he attributed to a lack of awareness of some headteachers of the curriculum materials being used in the schools for which they were responsible (Nicodemus, 1975). Tebbutt, in a subsequent study, addressed the issue of the impact of some of the curriculum development projects on science teachers’ work by reporting the numbers of candidates entered for the special examinations conducted as part of the three principal science projects at O- and A-levels (Tebbutt, 1976). Table 3.1 summarizes his findings. Although they confirm the greater uptake of the chemistry, physics and biology materials by schools in 1973 and 1974, in other respects his findings hint at discrepancies in measuring ‘adoption’ across the three projects. As Tebbutt acknowledges, the figures for formal adoption, defined in terms of entry for the special examinations, are ‘sufficiently different from the data that refer to “doing” to make it clear that the latter includes something other than preparing candidates for external examination in Nuffield O- or A-level physics, chemistry or biology’ (Tebbutt, 1976, p. 20). The numbers of candidates entered for the special Nuffield O- and A-level examinations in physics, chemistry and biology were to increase considerably beyond those presented in Table 3.1. By 1980, candidates entered for the Nuffield O-level examinations accounted for 14, 15.5 and 7 per cent of the total entries in physics, chemistry and biology respectively. The corresponding figures for A-level in the same year are 17, 21 and 8 per cent respectively. However, these are peak figures, so that ‘Nuffield entries’ never amounted to more than a significant minority of the total entry for either O- or A-level examinations in physics, chemistry or biology. In the case of other projects, directed towards candidates who, until the advent of the Certificate of Secondary Education, were rarely entered for public examinations, it is even more difficult to estimate their impact on the work of the schools. Between 1967 and 1977, total science and technology entries for CSE examinations increased from 281,490 to 1,023,932. In this latter year, as throughout the time for which the CSE examination was available, the number of candidates entered for examination in Mode 1 was much greater than the number entered for either Mode 2 or Mode 3. Table 3.2 summarizes the position in 1977. The data in Table 3.2 suggest that science teachers were cautious about using the flexibility available to them under the Mode 2 and Mode 3 examining arrangements to construct syllabuses and/or set examinations that might have been derived in some way from the wide range of curriculum materials that the various Nuffield

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Guiding teachers Table 3.1 Subject

The impact of Nuffield O- and A-level science projects Nuffield entry 1973

% of total entry* 1973

Nuffield entry 1974

% of total entry* 1974

HMI survey c. 1975

Doing

Using

Nicodemus 1975

Doing Adoption and using

O-level Biology Chemistry Physics

12,249 15,705 17,289

7.0 16.4 14.5

13,281 17,294 19,452

7.8 18.0 16.4

9.7 11.7 13.0

34.0 32.9 33.7

43.7 44.6 46.7

48 48 48

A-level Biology Chemistry Physics

1,481 4,096 2,179

5.6 12.1 5.2

2,171 5,311 3,841

8.2 15.8 9.2

10.5 19.1 13.8

21.3 26.2 14.5

31.8 45.3 28.3

13 18 13

Note: *Percentage of total subject entry. Table 3.2

CSE science entries, 1977, by Mode and gender*

Subject

Entries, boys, Mode 1

Entries, girls, Mode 1





General science Physics Chemistry Biology

19,894 81,077 40,330 45,536

10,781 11,619 19,591 94,389

963 1,718 1,036 513

775 341 629 1,251

14,954 11,298 7,372 8,767

8,725 1,967 3,762 18,024

Note: *Data for physics, chemistry and biology included candidates entered for examinations set in connection with the joint CSE/GCE 16+ feasibility study.

and Schools Council projects had made available to them. Perhaps of less importance than any attempt to reconcile data about the use of curriculum materials based upon rather different criteria and methods is the contemporary reaction of some to what they perceived to be a disappointing and inadequate response by the secondary science teaching profession to the curriculum materials produced by the different curriculum projects. As early as 1969, Whitfield suggested that ‘there are many schools and science teachers, and many thousands of children studying science today, who remain relatively uninfluenced by the work of the Nuffield and other curriculum development projects’. Writing at a time of widespread concern at the difficulty of attracting adequate numbers of science graduates for work in the schools, he asked whether the country could now ‘afford to have a fragmented policy out of the differing approaches of 8 GCE and 14 CSE examining boards in England and Wales’. His answer, following Kerr (1967), was to advise the adoption of a ‘common science

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curriculum policy’, in which the ‘professional autonomy of teachers’ might ‘rest more on the freedom of how to teach rather than what to teach’ (Whitfield, 1969, p. 33). This formulation was to find echoes in the language surrounding the National Curriculum, but it is questionable whether it was either defensible in principle or likely to be adopted indefinitely as a self-denying ordinance by those with a political interest in the science curriculum. In advocating reform of the arrangements for the conduct of public examinations in England and Wales, Whitfield was not alone: If physics education is really going to be improved, the only answer is a radical shake-up of GCE boards perhaps on the following lines; (a) the existing boards to be scrapped and replaced by one board offering two or at the most three alternative syllabuses (b) the syllabuses and examination boards to be designed by specialists . . . (Shaw, 1969, p. 60)

For McKenzie, the disappointing take-up of the various curriculum projects could be attributed to causes other than a simple lack of enthusiasm on the part of much of the science teaching profession. He identified a tendency on the part of some Nuffield enthusiasts to ‘pontificate’, the length and difficulty of the Oand A-level programmes, the cost of apparatus, the perceived difficulty of the examination papers, arising from an emphasis on testing understanding and comprehension rather than factual recall and, perhaps most significantly of all, the view that ‘all science teachers know that Nuffield should be supported – but not uncritically’ (McKenzie, 1969, p. 5). It is difficult to read the literature of the time without experiencing a sense both of the frustration that, the ‘pay-off’ from the various curriculum projects was disappointing and of the vigour of at least some science teachers in defending what they saw as their professional independence: Unlike our Continental colleagues, teachers in this country have not in the past been firmly told ‘by authority’ what to teach, how to teach it and when to teach it. The enthusiasm of individualists in our chemistry departments during the past 60 years has largely been responsible for the evolution of the subject and even for the very inception of Nuffield ideas. A rigorous regime has never been imposed . . . [and] the variation in approach by different boards of examiners has allowed a school to ‘shop around’ for the syllabus and papers most closely in line with the peculiarities of its . . . staff. It is impertinent to suggest that chemistry masters in this country are not good enough to go on developing their own approach, and that the time has come for a ‘dictatorship by academics’ in a single syllabus and a single examining board. (Bleyberg, 1969, p. 46)

The reference to a ‘dictatorship by academics’ is significant and is partly explained by the fact that Bleyberg was writing from a grammar school where, as in other grammar schools, the work, especially at 18+, was traditionally

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influenced strongly by the requirements of examining boards established in connection with the universities. In contrast, the influence of the universities on the CSE examinations taken by the majority of pupils was much attenuated. In the following two decades, this influence was to decline throughout the system of school examinations, in response to such factors as the rapid increase in the number of comprehensive secondary schools and a growing diversity in the kinds of courses which these schools provided for their pupils. The dictatorship of examinations by academics which caused Bleyberg so much concern thus failed to materialize, although the National Curriculum, introduced following the passage of the Education Reform Act 1988, was to give central government unparalleled control over the structure and content of the school curriculum. It is equally difficult to avoid a sense of ambiguity about the criteria to be used in judging the success of the large-scale attempts to effect science curriculum reform. For those who saw the projects as principally concerned with promoting an investigative/discovery approach to secondary school science teaching, success might be judged by the extent to which such an approach came to prevail in the school laboratory or classroom. Save to the extent that some of the A-level projects required students to undertake an investigative project (some of which were of a high quality), nothing is known about how widely teachers adopted an approach of this kind. For those who saw the main task of the curriculum projects as the modernizing of the content of secondary school science, success might relate to the rapidity and extent to which topics new to most school science courses came to secure an established position within the secondary curriculum. Here, the evidence is much clearer. As noted above, most examination boards, during the 1970s, developed their own syllabuses that included much of the ‘new’ content, the teaching of which had been pioneered by the Nuffield and Schools Council projects. Also, during this period, the format of public examinations had come to owe much to the techniques initially associated with the work of the various science curriculum initiatives. Although he is writing about Nuffield physics, the following account by Woolnough of the changes that took place during the 1970s applies with equal validity to the other two principal components of the secondary science curriculum: In 1970 it was possible to talk of Nuffield and non-Nuffield schools, but by the end of the seventies there had been so much infiltration of all courses with Nuffield ideas and experiments that it was difficult to tell whether a physics department was or was not working for a Nuffield exam solely by seeing what was going on in their laboratories. (Woolnough, 1988, p. 54)

As far as the projects themselves are concerned, there is no doubt that modernizing the content and reforming pedagogy were both important features of the attempts to effect change in secondary school science teaching. Some schools made substantial use of project materials, including apparatus, while continuing

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to teach science in a manner that was variously described as ‘didactic’ or ‘contrary to the spirit of Nuffield’ (Eggleston, Galton and Jones, 1976). There is also no doubt that the project materials were offered to the science teaching profession as resources, to be used in varying degrees, or not used at all, in accordance with teachers’ own professional judgement. The Nuffield Secondary Science Project advised teachers that ‘Secondary Science might be regarded as a quarry from which teachers select suitable material to build coherent courses’ (Misselbrook, 1970, p. vii). For the Nuffield Combined Science Project, which ‘quickly became the self-imposed standard diet for most science courses in comprehensive and grammar schools alike throughout [the] country’ and thus the ‘most successful of all the Nuffield courses’ (Woolnough, 1988, p. 111), the general aim was ‘to produce a source of ideas, material, and comment to allow teachers to devise their own courses’ (Nuffield Combined Science, 1970, p. xii). In Farrer-Brown’s view, it was never contemplated that the science curriculum materials produced by the various Nuffield projects should be tablets from high heaven. They were merely a starting point, and we believed that the various schemes and assemblages of materials would be changing all the time. If we could make them good – and tested – then the poor teachers could work happily with them and the good individualist could use them, adapt them and, in fact, effect in time improvements for further developments. If [the Nuffield Project] had been something designed merely for the inadequate teacher, it would have lost its impact for future improvement, because the good teachers wouldn’t have been interested. We wanted to make it tempting to both. (Farrer–Brown, 1975)

Farrer-Brown’s reference to ‘poor teachers’ serves as a reminder of the context within which the Nuffield Science Teaching Project was conceived. Science teacher supply, in terms of both quality and quantity, had risen on the political agenda throughout the 1950s as schools struggled to cope with the so-called ‘bulge’ in the post-war birth rate and the ‘trend’ for pupils to remain at school beyond the statutory leaving age. By the end of the decade, the schools were widely regarded as living on capital and the staffing position in science in many schools, including some grammar schools, was precarious (Ministry of Education, 1959, p. 245). The attempts to reform school science education initiated by the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council have attracted a number of different types of criticism. Almost from the inception of the Nuffield O-level project, the Foundation was confronted with the claim that its concern lay exclusively with pure science, to the neglect of engineering and technology (TES, 1964). It was a claim which the Foundation strenuously denied and took positive steps to counter, although with only limited success (McCulloch, Jenkins and Layton, 1985). A related claim was the implied priority accorded to science in its relationships with technology, a priority which also assumed that the application of

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scientific knowledge to serve technological ends was unproblematic and, relative to science, less intellectually demanding: it is not true that the project concentrates on pure science. In fact the guiding principle of the work is that the best way to learn science is by doing experiments and the characteristic stamp of the Nuffield courses is their preoccupation with experiment. At school this is a means of giving a child an insight into the world around him but, when he leaves school, the result should be an interest in making practical use of what he has learned. (Nuffield Foundation, 1964, quoted in McCulloch, Jenkins and Layton, 1985, p. 110)

The commitment to pure science and the fact that the early science curriculum projects were intended for the more able pupils following O- and A- level courses also left the Foundation open to the charge of initiating reform which favoured an élite and which, as some sociologists were quick to argue, failed to challenge assumptions about the structure of schooling and reflected the interests of professional science, rather than those of the pupils to be taught (see, for example, Young, 1971, 1976; Page-Jones, 1978; Haywood, 1979). By the time the Nuffield O-level project materials came to be revised in 1970, two other difficulties had emerged, both of which had been somewhat in evidence in the trials of the original materials undertaken in the early 1960s. These were the high level of conceptual demands which some topics made upon pupils and the difficulties of completing the programme of work within the time which most schools had available. By the mid-1970s, those schools were increasingly comprehensive, rather than selective, in their intake and they were seeking to meet the needs of an increased number of 15–16-year-old pupils following the raising of the school-leaving age to 16 in 1973. ‘Academic science’ and ‘intellectual rigour’ were often far from the immediate concerns of secondary school science teachers in the 1970s, many of whom had only ever hitherto taught within grammar schools. Attention shifted to the ‘least academically motivated’ pupils in the so-called LAMP Project, promoted by the Association for Science Education, and was reflected in the development of commercial texts and resources with titles such as Science at Work and Open Science.

AN INADEQUATE STRATEGY FOR REFORM? In the present context, the criticisms levelled at the Nuffield science teaching initiative in the changed social context of science education in the 1970s are less important than the issues surrounding the initiative as a model for effecting change in science teachers’ practice. That model involved the centralized production of tested curriculum materials, the development of new techniques of assessment and an attempt to encourage teachers to use the materials by means

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of in-service courses. Despite examination entries and survey data of the kind referred to above, it is difficult to access the evidence upon which the success or otherwise of the Nuffield and Schools Council science projects might be judged. Such evidence might, most obviously, relate to improved learning outcomes, perhaps coupled with an increased uptake of science by pupils beyond the age of 16. Although there are some research studies which explored pupils’ attainment when ‘taught in the Nuffield way’ (e.g., Oliver and Roberts, 1969; Flynn and Monro, 1970) and others which reported the effect of the new curriculum materials on pupils’ attitudes and interests (e.g., Meyer, 1970; Kempa and Dubé, 1974), the Nuffield Foundation did not regard summative evaluation as part of its brief, and the attention of the Schools Council was largely confined initially to what might be called ‘uptake’. More significantly, none of the studies undertaken included ‘an analysis of what Nuffield and non-Nuffield teachers actually did in their lessons, even in the broadest terms’ (Waring, 1979, p. 216). Attempts to address this shortcoming were made by Eggleston and his colleagues in their study of teaching style, using a Science Teaching Observation Schedule (STOS). Having identified three main ‘teaching styles’, they concluded, first, that no one style was more effective than another in producing the desired outcomes across the range investigated, and, secondly, that ‘a considerable dissonance exists between the aims of curriculum developers and related classroom practice’ (Eggleston, Galton and Jones, 1976, p. 121–2). However, this concept of dissonance cannot be applied in a straightforward way to the science curriculum development projects of the 1960s and 1970s and the so-called ‘centre-periphery’ model for reform which they were sometimes said to reflect. Such a model rests on three basic assumptions: ‘First, the innovation exists, fully realized in its essentials, prior to its diffusion. Second, diffusion is the movement of an innovation from a centre to its ultimate user, and, third, directed diffusion is a centrally managed process of dissemination, training, and provision of resources and incentives’ (Blenkin, Edwards and Kelly, 1992, p. 34). The various science teaching projects encouraged science teachers to use curriculum materials in whatever way they judged in the best interests of their pupils. Implicit in this emphasis is not only an endorsement or, at least, an acceptance of what might be called science teachers’ professional judgement, but also an understanding that schools, pupils and science teachers are all different. Teachers’ Guides I and II contain the revised version of the materials which were used in the trials of the Combined Science project, and obviously they reflect the views and experience of trials teachers and children. However, teachers must bear constantly in mind that they are unlikely always to get the same reaction from their children as that quoted for a particular trial school and should not in consequence feel disappointed or let down when their children respond differently. The examples quoted for the trials schools teachers are not intended to be models . . . (Nuffield Combined Science, 1970, p. xv)

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It seems unlikely that any science teacher would need to be reminded that children, and classes of children, are different and that, to the extent that teaching involves a dialogue with pupils, each lesson is unique. From this perspective, therefore, the outcomes of centralized curriculum reform become highly problematic and the attendant notions of curriculum ‘diffusion’ and ‘adoption’ make little sense, although it is, of course, understood that some forms of change can be effected in this way. As Waring has observed, ‘there can be no claims of implementation unless it is known what teachers are doing in concrete situations’ (Waring, 1979, p. 221). It can be argued that, in acknowledging the need for individual science teachers to respond to the Nuffield and Schools Council curriculum initiatives in ways that reflected the particular combination of circumstances of individual pupils, classes and schools, the various projects were both acknowledging the centrality of secondary school science teachers to successful curriculum reform and accommodating the independence to be accorded to schools in framing their own curricula. Indeed, as far as the Nuffield Science Teaching Project is concerned, John Lewis, who played a key role in the early discussions with the Foundation that led to the setting up of the Project, was clear that, while central direction of teachers’ work (such as he had seen in the Soviet Union) might mean that there would be few, if any, bad lessons, such an approach would be unacceptable in England and Wales (Waring, 1975, p. 237). Such acknowledgement has two important consequences. The first is that science teachers can be held responsible for any failure in the attempt to reform school science education: ‘The inertia of the English system, in which so much decision making has been devolved from the centre and the individual teacher and school have had so much autonomy, lay primarily with teachers themselves’ (Woolnough, 1988, p. 234). The second is that the centre-periphery model of curriculum reform is called into question and new strategies must be devised. Addressing the ‘inertia’ identified by Woolnough points in the direction of greater external control of curriculum and pedagogy, although not necessarily of a statutory kind. In contrast, a new strategy might involve placing responsibility for reform with teachers, or groups of teachers, and encouraging them to devise curricula, teaching methods and assessment instruments that, in their judgement, best meet the needs of their pupils. Both of these perspectives upon science teachers’ ownership of their own work were to be evident in secondary school science education in England and Wales in the 1980s. The former was manifest in the National Curriculum introduced after the passage of the Education Reform Act 1988, while the latter underpinned the work of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review to which attention is now turned.

4 POWER TO THE TEACHERS? THE SECONDARY SCIENCE CURRICULUM REVIEW

In January 1978, while delivering the MacMillan Education Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Science Education, Shirley Williams, Secretary of State for Education and Science, called for ‘a balanced and effective science curriculum for all pupils in secondary schools’ (Layton, 1984, p. 125). As a result of Williams’s speech, discussions took place between the Schools Council, the Association for Science Education and the Department for Education and Science which, in turn, led to the setting up, in 1981, of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review, under the directorship of R. W. West, an active and long-standing member of the ASE (Education in Science, 1981, p. 13; West, 1982a, p. 29). The Review went through three phases; research, development and dissemination – and it lasted until 1989. In 1985, Mick Michell took over West’s position as Director of the SSCR, and Jeff Kirkham succeeded Michell for phase 3 from 1986 to 1989 (Thompson, 1985a, p. 12). The first phase of the SSCR, the research phase, lasted from the setting up of the SSCR in September 1981 until August 1983. The second phase of the review, the development phase, began in April 1983, when six project leaders were appointed to co-ordinate the local working groups, and two additional staff were appointed with responsibility for health education and evaluation respectively (Wilson, 1984, p. 12). The third phase, concerned principally with dissemination, lasted from 1986 until 1989 when the Review ended. In this final phase, the Department for Education and Science provided additional funding to support the appointment of seven Regional Project Officers, charged with pro42

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moting the aims of the review and encouraging schools to respond positively to the recently issued statement of official policy for school science (DES/WO, 1985b; Kirkham, 1986a, p. 20). During the first phase of the Review, members of the SSCR team (West, Michell and Larter) spoke at meetings with local education authorities (LEAs) to encourage the setting up of development groups, to be known as local working groups. In West’s own words: we . . . wrote to all the LEAs . . . They couldn’t just develop anything they liked. They had to write a development brief for themselves, against a set of criteria centrally established, which was the framework of the Review; they had to submit it to us for approval and if we approved it they were then an established SSCR group, they could call on the resources that we had available, some money and, of course, the advice of the regional project officers. If they didn’t get approval, we didn’t want to know about it. (West, 1994, interview)

The four criteria for approval for development work to be supported by the Review were set out in a publication, Science Education 11–16: Proposals for Action and Consultation, published by the SSCR in April 1983 and referred to by the Review’s Project Officer, Anna Larter, as the ‘yellow peril’ because of the colour of its cover. The criteria were specified in some detail, as the following example indicates: In meeting the requirement to extend educational opportunity for all, due attention will have to be given to the need to develop curriculum materials from an initial analysis of the needs and aspirations of the average student; to ensure that careful attention has been given to problems of progression and cognitive growth; that learning objectives have been carefully matched to teaching strategies and that both are matched to student abilities and expectations; and that any extension studies provided for students with particular interests, abilities or difficulties are consistent with the broad aims of the programme. (SSCR, 1983, p. 6)

Interestingly, in the light of subsequent developments, the proposal indicated that some projects may explore separate science courses with due emphasis placed on the need for greater co-ordination of work in order to meet time constraints. Other projects will focus on combined or integrated approaches, and two subject models such as physical science/biological science. It is our intention to encourage and support work on all these models so that their advantages, disadvantages, support and resource implications, and organisational consequences, can be fully evaluated and implemented. (SSCR, 1983, p. 7)

The response of the local education authorities and the teachers whom they employed was much greater than had been thought likely. According to West, ‘I did say very early on in the Review that if we got 25 LEAs behind us, we had

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enough critical mass to . . .do the job, and we ended up with about 90 odd. And that was much higher than I had anticipated’ (West, 1999, interview). By the beginning of 1984, over 80 local education authorities and education and library boards were involved, and some 220 local working groups had been established. By the summer of the same year, there were said to be 240 such groups involving about 2,500 participants (Hornsby, 1984, p. 14). The numbers involved with the work of the Review continued to increase and, in September 1985, were reported as 286 working groups and 83 local education authorities (Thompson, 1985b, p. 1). The work that took place in the Kent local education authority offers one example of the way in which the SSCR sought to realize its commitment to a ‘broad and balanced science education for all’. In the early 1980s, the secondary schools within the LEA differed widely in the science education which they offered their pupils, the provision ranging from the Schools Council Integrated Science Project to the traditional subjects of chemistry, physics and biology, taught by specialist teachers belonging to distinct departments. In 1983, the SSCR supported the secondment of two heads of science from Kent schools to act as LEA co-ordinators, charged with locating ‘good practice’ and the setting up of working groups to ‘develop and promote this work’. When the Department of Education and Science introduced the so-called ‘40 day’ management courses for heads of science departments, the SSCR co-ordinators, the appropriate members of the LEA inspectorate and teacher advisers became heavily involved in the in-service training programme. Some 80 heads of science departments from schools in the Kent LEA attended these courses which were concerned, among much else, with promoting the management of change towards a broad and balanced science education. By the latter half of the 1980s, the commitment of the review to breadth and balance in school science had wider resonances, notably in the policy statement issued by the DES in 1985. The criteria governing a new single examination at 16+, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, had been established and a timetable agreed leading to its introduction in 1988. In addition, when a National Curriculum Working Group for Science was established in 1987, its remit included a recommendation from the Secretary of State which was supportive of ‘broad and balanced science’. The SSCR also sought to take advantage of other funds to support the inservice training of science teachers, notably the Local Authority Training Grant Scheme (LEATGS), available from 1986 under the terms of Circular 6/86 (Hornsby, 1986, p. 6). These funds were not, of course, confined to science but the SSCR encouraged LEAs to direct funds towards school science, claiming that many of the teachers involved with the Review had ‘indicated they require support to initiate the Review aims’ (Kirkham, 1986, p. 2). According to Kirkham, the director of the Review in its final phase, one of the successes of the Review was the ‘establishment of networks through the


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endeavours and support of regional project officers’ (Kirkham, 1989, p. 16). Although some of these networks arose during the development phase of the Review as forums for discussion, most were established in the final, dissemination, phase and were set up to provide in-service training for teachers (INSET). The SSCR produced an INSET pack for use in schools, Departmental INSET for Better Science (Denley, 1989, p. 26), and encouraged the use of Review materials when local education authorities were making bids for INSET grants (Hornsby, 1986, p. 7). In Hampshire, an LEA that was very supportive of the SSCR and its aims, over 20 working groups were established during the development phase of the Review. In 1984 and 1985, nine of these groups ran workshops to disseminate SSCR materials and ideas. Three of those involved in running the workshops were subsequently seconded, on a part-time basis, to the SSCR during the dissemination phase. One of the aims of this phase was to promote the Better Science materials produced by the SSCR. To this end, and to create a nucleus of teachers with training skills who could work within their own schools to promote a broad and balanced science education, a team of 20 teachers was established (Munday and Evans, 1989, p. 21). Better Science consisted of a series of 12 curriculum guides, published jointly in 1987 by Heinemann and the Association for Science Education. The guides state comprehensively the views of the SSCR on the form and content of school science, incorporating the views not only of the central Review team but also of the ‘thousands of teachers’ who had been involved with the SSCR at all levels (Kirkham et al., 1987, Foreword). The guides were not guides to curriculum practice in the sense in which this term was used by the earlier Nuffield and Schools Council science projects. The emphasis was upon principles and ideas, although there were many practical examples and references to relevant work undertaken by some local groups and individual schools. For example, Guide 3 included examples of SSCR materials, developed by local working groups and directed towards placing science in a personal, social, technological or cultural context (Stewart, 1987, pp. 17–21). The SSCR also published a Directory of Resources, listing the materials produced as part of the Review and directing teachers towards other, non-SSCR, material thought likely to be helpful, such as the ASE’s Science and Technology in Society (SATIS) project. This had been set up in 1984 to ‘develop resource materials linking secondary science courses, particularly those for 13–16 year olds taking GCSE, to social and technological applications and issues’ (Stewart, 1987, p. 21). The SSCR was also involved in producing new examination courses. For example, following a meeting in October 1985, the Yorkshire, Northumberland and Cumbrian groups had developed two GCSE ‘Dual Award’ science courses which were subsequently submitted to the Northern Examining Association for approval (Wilson, 1985a, p. 5). Many other SSCR local groups developed materials that could be used in teaching ‘Dual Award’ courses of this kind (Johnson, 1986, p. 17).

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TENSIONS AND CONFLICTS The Secondary Science Curriculum Review sought to promote breadth and balance in secondary school science education, and to do so by involving science teachers as directly as possible in the process of reform. Notwithstanding the intention, expressed in 1983, to ‘encourage and support work’ on a variety of science curriculum models, the more specific objectives of the Review included replacing the ‘option of three sciences at GCSE level with a course which would lead to two GCSE passes in science’, encouraging schools to ‘redesign their science syllabuses taking into account the learners’ own needs and interests’, and increasing the amount of time spent on science by the majority of pupils up to the age of 16 (O’Connor, 1987, p. 44). The various curriculum guides addressed such matters as ‘Approaches to Teaching and Learning’, ‘Working for a Multicultural Society’ and ‘How to plan and manage the curriculum’. Collectively, the various publications of the Review reflected the view that science was no longer to be seen as ‘a body of knowledge consisting of objective, neutral facts’ but as a ‘practical activity which is influenced by the values of the society in which it is practised’. This changed perception of science, allied with the need to respond to the growing evidence that pupils ‘bring to their science classes their own ideas about how the world works’, led the Review team to argue for the ‘development of teaching styles which would engage the learner’s imagination’, and to affirm the ‘central importance’ of teacher–pupil relationships to successful science teaching. In addition, the Review wished to encourage the development in students of a ‘sense of responsibility to themselves and others and to the environment in which they live’, and to help students ‘clarify their own ideas on the scientific and technological issues’ which affect them and society so that ‘they are able to participate fully in a democratic society’ (O’Connor, 1987, p. 45). The teacher-centred approach to science curriculum renewal adopted by the SSCR might be described as a periphery-centre-periphery model. Like the socalled centre-periphery approach to science curriculum reform associated with the work of the Nuffield Foundation and Schools Council (see Chapter 3), the strategy adopted by the SSCR might also be described as a research, development and diffusion (R, D and D) model. There was, however, a fundamental difference: science teachers were themselves largely responsible for the research and development phases and were able to propose curriculum initiatives to the central Review team. Science teachers’ judgement about their professional needs and how best these could be met were accorded a much higher priority in the SSCR than in the science curriculum projects of the previous two decades. Rather than inviting teachers to adapt centrally produced curriculum materials to accommodate the particular circumstances of individual schools and classes of pupils, teachers, commonly working in local groups, were encouraged to develop their


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own curriculum materials in the light of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves working. This devolved strategy for science curriculum reform can be seen as part of a wider alternative approach to curriculum innovation that emerged during the 1970s and was characterized ‘by a commitment to promoting practitioners, both collectively and individually, as the principal agents of change. The problems of practitioners rather than the ideas of innovators were now seen as the logical starting point in promoting change’ (Blenkin, Edwards and Kelly, 1992, p. 105). Arguably, such an approach involved little more than a re-statement of the commitment of the Schools Council to giving schools the ‘fullest possible measure of responsibility’ for their own work. During the 1970s, however, ‘grass roots’ innovation ‘gained new impetus and, more significantly perhaps, acquired a more fully articulated theoretical base’ (Blenkin, Edwards and Kelly, 1992, p. 105). The reasons for this are complex. A growing recognition of the limitations of the centre-periphery approach to curriculum reform and of the importance of the teacher as the locus of change were certainly significant factors. Also significant were the economic difficulties that followed the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, which encouraged school-centred reform since this promised to be much less expensive, as well as perhaps more effective, than the high-cost, centrally directed projects associated with the Nuffield Foundation or the Schools Council. A somewhat different perspective, however, associates the greater emphasis during the 1970s on promoting practitioners as agents of change with wider ‘progressive’ ideas in education. Central to such ideas is a commitment to exploiting the experiences, interests and concerns of the learner. In the case of curriculum reform, teachers needed to be given the maximum freedom to respond to the individual needs of their pupils and to accommodate the unique characteristics of the schools within which they worked and of the communities which the schools sought to serve. From this perspective, therefore, teacher-led curriculum reform was a manifestation of those wider influences that had promoted progressive ideas within education, following the publication of the influential Plowden Report (CACE, 1967). Within this wider context, three, more particular, factors help in understanding the adoption of the devolved strategy for reform which underpinned the Secondary Science Curriculum Review. First, West, as someone who had been involved directly with some of the earlier Nuffield curriculum initiatives, was aware of the growing concern that these initiatives had had much less impact on school science teaching than had once seemed likely. The consequence, as noted in the previous chapter, was that the centre-periphery model for reform was itself called into question. Secondly, during a visit to the USA in 1971, West had been drawn to the work of Havelock on social interaction and problem solving and on innovation theory, a central tenet of which was the need to give those towards whom an innovation was directed a sense of ‘ownership’ of the

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intended change(s) (Havelock, 1971, 1973). West drew upon Havelock’s ideas in developing his strategy for the Review (West, 1999, interview), although he was careful not to make too much of this theoretical perspective in his dealings with the leading members of the Association for Science Education (Jenkins, 1998a, p. 445). For West, the best way to bring about change was to ‘do it from within’. Reflecting, in an interview in 1994, on the early days of the SSCR, he commented that ‘If you don’t involve teachers themselves in the process of change, why should they change? . . . Unless people are involved in the very process itself and unless they see they have got part ownership of it, then they won’t do it’ (West, 1994, interview). Thirdly, aware of the financial constraints upon the Review, West recognized at an early stage the need to involve local education authorities and other organizations and agencies in its work in order to secure the additional resources that such involvement would make available (West, 1999, interview). The partnership entailed by these joint funding arrangements was the principal reason why West insisted on the initiative being referred to as a ‘Review’ rather than as a curriculum development project. The Review was to be a partnership between teachers, local education authorities, central government, industry and any other organization with a legitimate interest in promoting and helping to fund its work. During the lifetime of the SSCR, funds were secured from local education authorities, the Schools Council (up to March 1984), the School Curriculum Development Committee (from April 1984), the Association for Science Education, the Health Education Council and the Northern Ireland Council for Educational Development (West, 1982b, p. 30; Michell, 1987, p. 1). To these can be added the support of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the Department of Trade and Industry, and industrial companies such as ICI, GEC, British Gas and British Petroleum. The assistance from these sources took a variety of forms. In addition to direct funding, some local education authorities, for example, helped with photocopying costs, provided venues for meetings, or met the travel expenses of teachers. Others allowed teachers in their employ to be partially or wholly seconded to the Review and devoted some of their INSET funds to promoting its activities. The Health Education Council funded the appointment of a Research and Development Officer for Health and Science Education (Michell, 1987, p. 2). The SSCR also maintained links with a number of organizations through its Steering Committee, the membership of which included representatives drawn from the examination boards, the Standing Conference on University Entrance and the Association for Science Education. The chairman of the Steering Committee of the SSCR was Jeff Thompson who was later to chair the National Curriculum Science Working Group. An obvious objection to the strategy adopted by the Review to bring about science curriculum change is that it might spawn a range of initiatives which,


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whatever their appeal and usefulness to a local group, would have little or no wider impact on school science education. West’s retrospective judgement is that this strategy was ‘an appropriate educational experiment of its time and . . . an incredibly brave one’ (West, 1999, interview). Brave or not, there is no doubt that there was some apprehension among the SSCR team about how successful the strategy adopted by the Review was likely to be: Initially there were strong reservations about how this approach to curriculum development could ever contribute to major changes in practice at the national level. Looking at the models of curriculum development adopted by previous science education projects, these reservations were understandable. For many teachers, curriculum development resulted in a familiar package of materials produced by a fairly small number of ‘experts’, whereas the projected results of the Review were not so clear cut. Teachers were being offered the opportunity to become active participants in a national initiative rather than the passive recipients of products; a new idea which took time to assimilate. (Ditchfield et al., 1985, p. 629)

However, as has already been implied, the SSCR was far more than an opportunity for secondary school science teachers to ‘become active participants in a national initiative’. It presented a number of challenges to their practice and, in so doing, generated tensions and conflict which were sometimes exacerbated by differences among the agencies involved in funding its work. No single issue generated as much debate among science teachers as the commitment of the Review to realizing an entitlement to a broad and balanced science education for all by replacing the option of three sciences at GCSE level with a course that led to a ‘Double Award’. Breadth and balance were interpreted in terms of a balance between topics drawn from biology, physics and chemistry and other, hitherto largely neglected, areas of science such as astronomy, health education and even technology. The notion of balance also embraced that between ‘cognitive and process skills’ and content, although little progress seems to have been made in resolving the issues involved in striking a balance of this kind. The view that all pupils were entitled to a broad and balanced science education throughout compulsory schooling did not originate with the Secondary Science Curriculum Review. A policy statement issued in 1981 by the Association for Science Education asserted that ‘All pupils should have the opportunity to benefit from a full and effective programme of science education throughout their period of compulsory schooling’ (ASE, 1981, p. 3). However, on the issue of Double Award science, the Association was careful to assure its members that it had ‘not attempted to provide a single prescription for science education’ and that it ‘remained fully committed to the maintenance of appropriate academic standards in the basic disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics’ (ASE, 1981, pp. 15, 51). The position adopted by the ASE in this ‘most worthy, conciliatory

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[and] unexceptionable statement’ (Woolnough, 1988, p. 149) was much weaker than had been presented in an earlier and highly contentious draft of the policy statement in the preparation of which West had played a key role (Jenkins, 1998a, pp. 441–59). The government’s position on breadth, balance and entitlement in school science education also became clearer during the early 1980s. In 1981, the DES commented that ‘the increasing importance of science and its applications in the modern world, and the rapid development of technology, reinforce the case for science as an essential component of education for all pupils of 11 to 16’ (DES/WO, 1981, p. 15). A year later, the educational case for science was extended to include primary schooling: ‘Science should have a place in the education of all pupils of compulsory school age, whether or not they go on to follow a career in science or technology’ (DES/WO, 1982, p. 1). In 1983, the ‘scientific’ was identified as one of eight areas of curriculum entitlement (DES/WO, 1983) and, two years later, the government published its formal statement of science education policy, asserting that: Science should have a place in the education of all pupils of compulsory school age, whether or not they are likely to go on to follow a career in science or technology . . . all pupils should continue to study a broad science programme, well suited to their abilities and aptitudes, throughout the first five years of secondary education. (DES/WO, 1985b, p. 1)

Realizing an entitlement to a broad and balanced secondary science education did not, of course, necessarily entail abandoning the teaching of the three traditional science courses in favour of some kind of modular, combined or integrated programme. The claim of the three sciences on curriculum time, however, was considerable and, for most schools, this became unacceptable once they were required to ‘deliver’ all the subjects of the National Curriculum. Also, the relevant Statutory Order specified science, not physics, chemistry and biology, and, in the decade after 1988, entries for Double Award science at GCSE rose rapidly from about 30,000 to almost 500,000, while entries in the individual science declined to under 50,000 in each case. Personally, West was strongly committed to a more integrated approach to school science and this is clearly reflected in the position adopted by the Review. In an interview in 1999, he offered a number of reasons to justify his stance on this issue. His experience had convinced him that the priorities of the grammar schools were dictating an inappropriate science education for the increasing majority of pupils attending non-selective, comprehensive schools. That same experience had also brought home to him the difficulties that arose when attempts were made to accommodate in the same school both specialized subject teaching and the teaching of a broader, integrated science course. He was also convinced that pupils made decisions about which, if any, science subjects to study in response to such factors as peer pressure or culturally established and


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gender-stereotyped assumptions, rather than on any more explicit and rational basis. Finally, West was also anxious to promote science as an integral part of wider culture and believed that this was more likely to be achieved through the kinds of courses that the Review sought to develop (West, 1999, interview). By no means all science teachers, however, shared West’s vision for school science education. According to Alan Boyle, a Regional Project Officer of the SSCR, many teachers resented the introduction of balanced science because of its possible effect on their specialist status (Boyle, 1988/89, p. 35). In 1986, Roger Blin-Stoyle, Chairman of the School Curriculum Development Committee and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Sussex, claimed that there were ‘not a few’ science teachers against change, fearing that their subject specialist status was threatened. Some parents also had reservations, and some employers continued to believe that single science had more status than balanced science (Blin-Stoyle, 1986, p. 21). A related concern was the suitability of balanced science as a preparation for A-level work in science, for careers in engineering and for work in industry, a concern which was acknowledged in Better Science: Making It Happen, published for the review in 1987 (O’Connor, 1987). It continued to be expressed over a decade later (QCA, 1998). This concern and the threatened demise of separate science teaching up to 16+ were a source of some difficulty for the Association for Science Education, an organization which, even in 1980, still bore clear evidence of strong public and grammar school influence on its affairs. At the Annual Meeting of the Association in 1984 there were even rumours of science teachers coming to blows and parents complaining that Secondary Science Curriculum Review was getting rid of ‘proper science’ (Low, 1985, p. 39). Not surprisingly, therefore, relationships between the Association for Science Education and the Review were not always harmonious. West had played a seminal role in the struggle that took place within the Association between 1976 and 1981 as it laboured to establish its policy for school science. He had encountered opposition of various kinds as he sought to use the Association ‘to go for the jugular and attempt to alter the basic framework of science education in the UK’ (West, 1994, interview). Having contributed £10,000 to the first phase of a Review that was addressing issues of fundamental concern to its members, the Association, for its part, was anxious to keep in close touch with any initiatives that the Review might undertake. In addition, given the role that West had earlier played in framing its policy statement, the Association was no less anxious to monitor any outcomes that might influence government policy. At a national level, formal contact between the Association and the Review was maintained via the four representatives of the former on the Steering Committee of the SSCR. In November 1982, the Council of the ASE considered a ‘Discussion Paper on the role of the ASE in the SSCR’ in which West suggested ways in which the Association might continue to support the Review. In particular, he suggested

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that the ASE might become ‘a seventh region’, the remaining six being the Southern, Midland, Anglia, North-East, Northern Ireland and North-West groups associated with the Review. The following February, the Council decided that the Association would make a ‘positive contribution’ to the work of the Review during its second, and major, development phase, although this was not to take the form of further direct financial support. Instead, each region of the ASE was invited to appoint a member to assume specific responsibility for liaising at the local level with the appropriate Regional Project Leader of the Review, and to link, through a member of the secretariat based at the Association’s headquarters, with the central team of the Review. C. M. Wilson, the Deputy General Secretary of the ASE given responsibility for liaison at national level with the SSCR, explained the effect of the Council’s decision to ASE members in the following terms: The Review’s basic strategy brings together a number of locally based and supported working groups funded by LEAs, and co-ordinated on a regional basis. The Association has a regional and sectional network too, and may thus provide complementary working groups, co-ordinated within the region by the ASE link person within that region and nationally from headquarters. (Wilson, 1983, p. 16)

As though this were not enough to confuse science teachers, especially those who were not members of the ASE, Wilson went on to add that to an extent the Association must assert its independence from, as well as its sympathy with, the work of the Review and indicate those aspects of curriculum work it considers to be important and worthy of support. Thus I hope that some ASE regions or sections will put forward proposals for work in the field of curriculum development which they would like to tackle. (Ibid.)

It is difficult not to read into Wilson’s statement an attempt on the part of the ASE both to assert its independence of the Review and an enduring concern to influence its work. Certainly, by early 1983, it must have been clear to the leading members of the ASE that unless the Association became much more involved with the work of the Review at grass roots level, there was a risk that it (the Association) would be marginalized in the development of policy for school science education (Low, 1985, p. 40). From West’s point of view, the action of the ASE council was indicative of a less than satisfactory partnership between the Review and the science teachers’ organization. His judgement, made with hindsight, is that the ASE was ‘highly ambivalent’ towards the Review and that the Association did not really become committed to it until Wilson became involved in the way indicated above (West, 1999, interview). Relationships between West as Director of the SSCR and the Department of Education and Science were somewhat more supportive. The latter was sensitive


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to a growing sense among politicians of the need for greater control over the curriculum (see Chapter 2) and aware of the need voiced by, among others, Shirley Williams as Secretary of State, to provide a secondary school science education that catered for ‘average’ and ‘the less able’ as well as for the most academically successful pupils. As a result, the DES made clear to the Schools Council that funds could be made available to review the secondary school science curriculum with particular reference to these groups of pupils. However, when this was raised at a meeting of the Schools Council Science Committee, it was decided to set up a small working party to consider what action the Council might take. The eventual outcome was a recommendation from the Committee to broaden the remit of any study of secondary science and a subsequent Schools Council proposal to undertake what became known as the Secondary Science Curriculum Review. The Schools Council originally wanted sole control of the Review but the working party had already committed itself to a wider, more open and diffused approach to science curriculum reform (Schools Council, 1979b). It was this approach which prevailed, with the Schools Council collaborating with the DES and ASE as major partners. Such an outcome involved a number of delicate negotiations. The Schools Council was anxious to protect its independence of the DES and to discharge its responsibility for matters to do with the school curriculum. The DES, for its part, was the source of funding for the Schools Council and had its own agenda for curriculum reform driven by both the wider political issues raised by, for example, Prime Minister Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech in 1976 which launched the so-called ‘Great Debate’ in education, and the consensus that was emerging around the notion of curriculum entitlement. In addition, in general terms, rather than at the level of individuals, relationships between the DES and the Schools Council sometimes left much to be desired and, as noted in Chapter 2, the latter eventually came to be seen as an ‘obsolete expression of the distribution of power’ within education and was abolished. The Association for Science Education, engaged in formulating its own policy for the future of school science and no doubt aware that it had been somewhat marginalised in the earlier Nuffield science curriculum initiatives, was also understandably keen to be closely involved with any initiative undertaken by the DES and/or the Schools Council. By the early 1980s, it was clear that the commitment of the Review to a broad and balanced science education for all was one that commanded support within the DES, and it is significant that, when the Schools Council was abolished, the Review (along with the Schools Council Industry Project) continued to attract further financial support from the DES. From this perspective, the Review can be regarded as helping science teachers come to terms with what, in 1985, was to become official government policy. Supporting the aims of the Review, however, was not the same as endorsing

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its strategy for reform or welcoming what seemed likely to be some of its outcomes. Sir James Hamilton, the Permanent Secretary at the DES, was sceptical of the need to involve large numbers of teachers associated with regional groups and wanted the Review to generate prescriptions of curriculum practice that teachers could follow (West, 1999, interview). West’s recollection is that ‘I was constantly being pressured on product, product, product and I was responding process, process, process. It was process which was central and we had to get it right’ (West, 1999, interview). Pressure of a different kind also began to bear upon West and the Review during the development and dissemination phases of its work. The first was industrial action by members of the teaching profession: ‘For a significant slice of its life so far it [the Review] has been the unhappy victim of a dispute between school teachers and their employers over salaries and working conditions. Under such circumstances it has been understandable that many teachers have wished to suspend their Review activities’ (Michell, 1987, p. 3). These pressures upon the Review had a direct impact on its work. It became necessary for the central team to undertake a great more writing than had originally been anticipated, so that they were able to spend much less time travelling around the country supporting local groups of science teachers, using the skills for which they had been appointed. Henceforth, more time was to be devoted to writing, the focus of which was evident from the statement of official policy in 1985 with its many references to the Secondary Science Curriculum Review. To put the matter somewhat differently, the DES wanted the Review to produce curriculum materials that would help science teachers implement the policy set out in Science 5–16: A Statement of Policy: ‘The Secretaries of State look to the Secondary Science Curriculum Review, drawing as it does upon the energies of some 3000 practising science teachers, to demonstrate ways in which, within the resources available, the principles defined in this paper can be put into effect’ (DES/WO, 1985b, p. 19).

REVIEW OR REFORM? Notwithstanding its title, the SSCR set out to reform secondary school science teaching and to do so by stimulating and supporting ‘the development work that is required to enable schools to make appropriate curricular provision’ for the science education of all pupils between the ages of 11 and 16 (SSCR, 1983, p. 1). By what means, and to what extent, may the success of the Review be estimated and what are the implications of that success for the control and direction of science teachers’ work? It is clear that by no means all those concerned with secondary science education were supportive of the Review. In broad terms, those individuals and orga-


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nizations who were not in sympathy with its work simply kept away from it. Attempts to involve the independent schools in the work of the Review were unsuccessful, partly because of the firm commitment of such schools to teaching the three traditional school sciences.1 In West’s judgement, they were ‘highly antipathetic towards the Review’ (West, 1999, interview). Teacher training institutions, which, for the most part, trained specialist teachers of physics, chemistry and biology, also showed little interest in the work of the Review, maintaining, according to one commentator, a ‘detached neutralism and mannered scepticism’ (Low, 1985, p. 39). The position adopted by the independent schools and by the teacher training institutions needs to be placed in the context of the wider support from the range of organizations and agencies referred to above. It also should be contrasted with the influential support of the Royal Society, support which was obtained, it seems, largely as a result of the persuasiveness of Sir Harry Pitt, Vice-Chancellor of Reading University and chairman of the Society’s Education Committee (West, 1999, interview). Wilson, writing in 1984, however, claimed that, although many teachers were involved with the work of the SSCR, there were many others who knew nothing about the Review (Wilson, 1984, p. 12). Towards the end of the life of the Review, a survey was carried out in the North-West to assess teachers’ awareness of the proposals for a broad and balanced science education. A questionnaire of 31 questions was sent to 17 LEAs. Replies were received from 54 (85 per cent) schools and 310 (64 per cent) teachers. When heads of science departments were asked if they were aware of plans regarding balanced science, in only just over half of the LEAs were heads ‘fully aware’ of their LEAs intentions. In one LEA, some schools were ‘aware’ and in two others there was no knowledge of the intended changes at all. In terms of pupils already experiencing balanced science in their fourth and fifth years, 18 per cent and 10 per cent of schools respectively claimed that more than 60 per cent of their pupils were being taught combined science of some sort. Furthermore, nearly 90 per cent of the sample believed that balanced science would mean teachers teaching science which lay outside their specialism. As a result, many expressed concern about being able to answer pupils’ questions and accorded priority to in-service training in the area of ‘updating in content on other science areas’. The teachers also expressed anxiety about the effect of balanced science on more able children and, in particular, on their ability to cope with A-level work in the sciences. It was feared that ‘balanced science’ would not be intellectually demanding enough for these able pupils and that they might be additionally disadvantaged when compared with their peers in independent schools where, it was anticipated, the three sciences would continue to be taught separately (Reid and Ryles, 1988/89, pp. 28–9). Even those directly involved with the Review sometimes had a limited knowledge of the wider picture of which they formed a part. An SSCR Co-ordinator in County Durham complained that, despite having been a member of two local

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working groups, he knew very little about the SSCR as a whole. He believed this was a consequence of the periphery to centre element of the strategy for reform espoused by the Review. Copying and distributing material from the centre became more difficult and less reliable as the periphery was approached. He also commented that he and his colleagues were so busy ‘working on products’ that they were unable ‘to spend time reading about the system we were part of’ (Randall, 1986, p. 10). The National Curriculum was introduced almost at the end of the SSCR and, on the face of it, represented a very different approach to the governance of school science. Nevertheless, the Review also sought to influence the future of school science education by responding to the interim report of the National Curriculum Science Working Group, chaired by Jeff Thompson, a former chairman of the Steering Committee of the Review. Although the Review team found much to welcome in the interim report, especially the notion of entitling all pupils to a broad and balanced science education, there were many points of disagreement. The team was critical of the subject-based approach to constructing a school curriculum and expressed concern about the ‘strong emphasis put on assessment and testing across a wide age range’ (SSCR, 1987, p. 13). The Review also took issue with the proposal in the interim report that some pupils in the fourth and fifth years of secondary schooling might spend about 12.5 per cent (not 20 per cent as, for example, suggested by the DES in 1982) of curriculum time on science, and study for a single, rather than a double, award. We found it hard to imagine how the 14–16 part could be nearly cut in half and the whole programme still remain worthwhile! . . . The creation of a two-tier national curriculum would be a sad move and would be seen in the future as a lost opportunity in enabling the minimum entitlement SSCR has been working towards . . . (Denley, 1988/89, p. 17)

A particular concern about the introduction of single award science was that this might come to be seen as the route to be followed by girls, thus undoing much of what had been achieved in terms of equality of access to science education: The provision of a single balanced science option, through the national curriculum proposals, is very disappointing. Suddenly (and it is sudden for many) girls were to be given full access, and therefore full choice at 16, only to have this recede through this fall away from the initial position (12.5 per cent option, rather than 20 per cent for all). (Chapman, 1989, p. 9)

The reality, however, was that the political climate within which the Review was operating during its later stages was fundamentally different from that which had prevailed when it was established. The Review, with its commitment to science teachers assuming responsibility for their own professional development,


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was, like the Schools Council, simply overtaken by events on the wider political stage. Under the 1988 legislation, curriculum authority came to be centralized in the hands of the relevant Secretaries of State in England and Wales to an extent that would have been unimaginable even a few years earlier. Edwin James, writing about the Review in 1989 and seeking to draw attention to what its work might mean for the Association for Science Education, could not have been more out of touch with the political temper of the times. If one feature above all deserves comment, then it is this, that through involvement with the Review, science teachers have established ownership of their own professionalism. If one lasting memorial is sought it should be in enshrining, not the content, but the process of curricular change. So much local activity has been facilitated, with so many involved. It is for the Association now to ensure that this mode of working can be sustained. (James, 1989, p. 13)

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REVIEW It is difficult to form a judgement on the impact of so unusual an initiative as the SSCR, the more so since it was so rapidly and comprehensively overtaken by the National Curriculum. That impact may be more evident in helping to generate a climate of opinion and in establishing networks among science teachers than at the level of curriculum materials. It has already been noted that the notion of an entitlement to a broad and balanced science education for all did not originate with the Secondary Science Curriculum Review. It is also the case that the term ‘broad and balanced’ science was capable of a variety of interpretations. None the less, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the SSCR did much to alert many members of the science teaching profession to the shifts that were taking place in thinking about the school science curriculum. It brought such thinking to the attention of many science teachers, notably through its bulletin and newsletters and through the pages of Education in Science. It also helped fuel and inform a debate that was already under way within government and, somewhat belatedly, within the Association for Science Education. It achieved much the same in relation to several other issues of concern to science teachers in comprehensive schools but which hitherto had had little attention, e.g. multicultural education and science for young people with special educational needs, and it is significant that a number of the Better Science publications produced by the Review dealt specifically with these issues. By helping to fund the Children’s Learning in Science Project, and in other ways,2 the Review also promoted a ‘constructivist’ perspective upon learning and the implications which this was seen as having for the ways in which science should be taught: ‘It is essential for pupils to have opportunities to relate that which they observe, read or discuss in science lessons to their own prior knowledge’ (Stewart, 1987, p. 5).

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Beyond the level of influence upon ideas and, to a lesser extent, practice, the Secondary Science Curriculum Review raises important questions about the politics of science curriculum reform and the locus of authority over science teachers’ work, issues which are at the heart of this book. As was indicated in Chapter 2, for rather more than the first half of the twentieth century, the content of the science curriculum of selective secondary schools was the responsibility of the universities which, acting through examination boards, set the Certificate and Matriculation examinations for which pupils were entered. The setting up of the Schools Council, the introduction of the Certificate of Secondary Education and the growth of comprehensive schools following Circular 10/65 appeared to be creating a different professional environment. In addition, local education authorities appointed advisory staff and further supported the work of the teachers they employed by establishing teachers’ centres and funding teachers’ secondment to curriculum development projects or for advanced study. It is not coincidental that LEA advisers contributed substantially to the SSCR. From a variety of perspectives, therefore, teachers were regarded as central to the process of change and reform, and science teachers, charged with the reproduction of knowledge in a subject that was commonly regarded as continually advancing, were at the forefront of developments. It was within this climate that the Secondary Science Curriculum Review sought to effect change: The Review is in an influential position but has no executive powers. Its advice will be better respected as long as it appears to speak on behalf of a significant proportion of science teachers. We need to reflect therefore your views and advice about goals and strategies so that we speak effectively for the Review. (Kirkham, 1986, p. 2)

Yet even by the time it was formally established, in 1981, there was ample evidence that the climate was changing and that teachers were henceforth not to be involved to any significant extent in establishing ‘goals and strategies’. As well as the overwhelming impact of the National Curriculum, local education authority advisory services were to be much reduced and their attention redirected towards monitoring and improving the delivery of a statutory curriculum. The setting up of the SSCR might thus be viewed, with hindsight, as an anachronistic attempt to ensure that science teachers retained a substantial degree of control over their own work, an attempt that was consistent with an increasingly politically obsolete commitment of the Schools Council, after 1979, to school- and curriculum-based projects, rather than to initiatives that reflected the traditional disciplines and subjects (Schools Council, 1979a). Within a few years, most of the assumptions, attitudes and mechanisms upon which the work of the Review depended no longer existed. West is surely right in his judgement that the Secondary Science Curriculum Review was ‘the last time [teachers] really ever had any sort of influence at all on what they taught’ (West, 1999, interview).


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NOTES 1 The historic basis of this commitment is easily overestimated. Until after the Second World War, science was sometimes little more than tolerated in some independent schools. In contrast, the contribution of the independent sector of schooling to the science curriculum development projects of the 1960s was substantial and of seminal importance. 2 The Children’s Learning in Science Project (CLISP) had a representative on the SSCR central team (Larter, 1985, p. 2). The SSCR held a conference in collaboration with CLISP and the Assessment of Performance Unit in July 1984 to discuss and investigate children’s learning and performance in science (Bell, Watts and Ellington, 1984, p. 3).

5 MONITORING STANDARDS? THE INFLUENCE OF THE ASSESSMENT OF PERFORMANCE UNIT

The Assessment of Performance Unit and its work represented a policy initiative with, supposedly, no intended relationship to curriculum policy. It was, of course, not remote from the concerns of government. Assessment was to form an increasingly significant aspect of public policy towards education during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet it was not through the guidance which it provided for the processes of assessment that the work of the APU primarily influenced science education. Its impact was more subtle, and more contingent, and was indeed primarily directed at the science curriculum. It figures here precisely because that influence was so pervasive. The Assessment of Performance Unit had a peculiarly obscure genesis. It was announced, as a Unit within the Department of Education and Science, in the 1974 White Paper on Educational Disadvantage and the Educational Needs of Immigrants (DES, 1974). The Unit’s ostensible early focus was on identifying educational disadvantage and associated underachievement. This metamorphosed, equally obscurely, into a concern with defining and monitoring standards of achievement. The Assessment of Performance Unit generated a good deal of interest at the policy level during its first five to six years. It benefited from the attention of a full-length academic study by Gipps and Goldstein and there were several other accounts of its work (Lawton, 1980; Holt, 1981; Pring, 1981; Gipps and Goldstein, 1983; Skilbeck, 1984). But interest in it subsequently diminished, as it was assimilated into the mainstream of the ‘educational establishment’ and eventually overwhelmed by the Education Reform Act. There has 60

Monitoring standards?

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been no serious study of its later existence and of the work it funded, beyond the severely factual and valedictory account commissioned by the School Examination and Assessment Council and published in 1991 (Foxman, Hutchinson and Bloomfield, 1991). The research and monitoring projects associated with the project came to an end in 1990. Until the mid-1970s, governmental interest in assessment was mainly confined to maintaining a distant controlling interest in the public examination system. In consequence, when the Assessment of Performance Unit was established, it appeared to some academics and teacher unions as the thin end of a potentially large wedge. And so, to some degree, it proved. The APU was, if remotely, the precursor of a national programme of assessment. With hindsight, the Unit, or at least the controversy which surrounded it during its early years, can appear quaint. The quaintness derives from the then sensitivity of the issue, and the significance attributed to the views of teachers, their unions and even academic educationists. Judgements on the Unit varied. In a hostile, but now very dated, account, Holt took it as the very epitome of what he judged to be a wholly negative evaluative trend in education (Holt, 1981). Yet Pring could write, in the same year, that ‘the Unit is not concerned with standards’ (Pring, 1981, p. 156). In 1984, its then administrative Head, Jean Dawson, commented: ‘The APU’s main purpose is monitoring children’s performance, to provide objective information about national standards of children’s performance, so that those concerned . . . may have a reliable and dispassionate measure of the performance of the education system . . . We are not a covert agency for curriculum development’ (Dawson, 1984, pp. 125–6). A decade later, the first and only public evaluation of the science project within the Unit highlighted the shift from ‘the initial APU emphasis on defining standards of achievement and measuring trends over time’ towards a wider emphasis on curriculum and pedagogy (Eggleston, 1991, p. ix). It might be claimed that the inability, or unwillingness, of the APU monitoring teams to provide either stable standards (in one of the several senses of that term) against which performance could be measured or, the corollary, an account of changes in performance over time, helped convince politicians and some others that a more robust approach was necessary. Had APU been more effective in this aspect of its work, would the assessment apparatus of the National Curriculum have come into being? The answer is probably ‘yes’, given that the mechanism of accountability upon which the National Curriculum was based was taken to run through parents’ individual ‘market’ choices in respect of schools, rather than aggregated national standards. Nevertheless, the tone of the questioning of the Unit’s staff by the Parliamentary Committee on Education, Science and Arts in 1984 indicated that politicians were somewhat sceptical of its achievements. The former Prime Minister, James Callaghan, asked bluntly: ‘Have standards gone up?’, and received, inevitably, a somewhat uninformative answer from Jean Dawson (House of Commons, 1984–85, pp. 330–1). Much of the Committee’s

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talk was of norms and standards, while the representative of the Unit preferred to talk about researching children’s learning. Further, some of the projects, and science is prominent in this respect, developed their own agendas. When Caroline Gipps described the APU in 1987 as having moved from ‘Trojan Horse to Angel of Light’, and suggested that some aspects of this transformation had been led by the science team, it was from the point of view of what would come to be called the educational establishment that the judgement was made. The APU had not, Gipps wrote, ‘force(d) accountability on schools and therefore teachers’ (Gipps, 1987, p. 13), as if accountability were a threat. It had, instead, developed an ‘important role in curricular change’. Like some other quotations in this book, the statement is out of step with the policy trajectory of its times. It might be claimed that the APU helped make politicians and civil servants wary of giving the educationists they employed too long a leash while leaving them in possession of significant amounts of cash. The APU is perhaps a significant element in the recent political history of education in England and Wales more by its silences on the issues on which it was supposed to cast light, than by its interventions. Whether APU did indeed prompt the much more robust policies of the late 1980s and 1990s must be judged questionable. Though the language of national standards was certainly used, the Unit itself, and the monitoring and research teams which it sponsored, were affiliated to an increasingly dated corporatism. It owed nothing at all to the world of competition, parental choice and market-making which underpinned the National Curriculum and its associated testing programme. However, the APU was, we will claim, a central influence in the recent history of the science curriculum, and thus upon the work of science teachers.

APU SCIENCE The APU science projects were based at Chelsea College (later part of King’s College), London, and the University of Leeds. The two projects appeared substantially independent from the Unit proper. For those teachers who knew of them, the projects, and their staff at Leeds and London, were APU science. Indeed, the teams frequently used their own acronym: APS (Assessment of Performance in Science). The work which the projects undertook came to be seen less as a threat to the independence of schools and teachers than as a mechanism for ‘progressive’ curricular reform. In this guise the projects significantly influenced science education during the 1980s and the substance of the National Curriculum. This influence was exerted both directly, through the assessment instruments they created, and indirectly, through the activities of those who were associated with them as team members. The most prominent of these were Professors David Layton, Paul Black, Rosalind Driver and Wynne Harlen. Even


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as APU subsided into obscurity in the late 1980s, during the creation of the GCSE, and, more so, the National Curriculum, the science projects, their assessment framework, and some of the staff whom they recruited and subsequently released into the world of science education, sustained and indeed increased its influence. It was through the assessment framework developed within the science projects, rather than through its empirical findings, that APU science exerted its main influence. In 1975, the first Head of the Unit, Brian Kay HMI, published a much cited article in Trends in Education, in which he outlined the general approach of the Unit to monitoring (Kay, 1975). The article placed a strong emphasis on cutting across the traditional subject boundaries, and identified six ‘lines of development’, one of which was ‘the scientific’. These ‘lines of development’ had much in common with the eight ‘areas of experience’ published, in strict alphabetical order, by HMI in 1977 in the document Curriculum 11–16, and which perhaps traced their genealogy back to Paul Hirst’s writings (DES/HMI, 1977a, p. 6). But the manner in which Kay formulated the ‘scientific’ was significant. He emphasized ‘observation, the selection, evaluation and use of evidence, testing of hypotheses, the use of experiment’ (Kay, 1975, p. 15). Science was not to be understood as particularly orientated to any substantive understanding of the world and, with the possible exception of the last of Kay’s characteristics, was barely distinguishable from a range of other disciplines, most notably history. This orientation resembled what was to come to be known as ‘process science’, and was to be reflected in a range of other DES and HMI publications during the 1970s and 1980s. In Curriculum 11–16, the major emphasis was on ‘observation’, ‘looking for patterns’ and the experimental testing of pupil-generated explanations of phenomena (DES/HMI, 1977a, p. 27). In the Conclusion the following statement is made: ‘If a subject is to qualify as a science it must be presented as an observational and experimental study incorporating the skill of prediction’ (DES/HMI, 1977a, p. 29). ‘Skill’ is the key term here. There is almost no appeal to a knowledge base. Nearly a decade later, in The Curriculum from 5 to 16, HMI explored the ‘areas of experience’ (now, with the inclusion of the ‘technological’, increased to nine) in more detail. Science received seven paragraphs, of which six focused on ‘developing skills and competencies associated with science as a process of enquiry’ (DES/HMI, 1985, pp. 29–32). Science 5–16: A Statement of Policy, issued by the DES in 1985 (DES/WO, 1985b), made the following claim: the ‘essential characteristic of education in science is that it introduces pupils to the methods of science’. The phrase was, in the words of two hostile commentators in Education in Science, ‘strongly redolent of APU’ (Chapman and Jenkins, 1985). The relationship between the views of APU and HMI during this period is a matter of conjecture. But there is at the very least a striking parallelism between the HMI approach and the orientation which emerged in the development of the

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APU science assessment framework. Kay’s formulation also reflects the fact that APU displayed, at least in its early years, a resistance to subjects in their operational sense in schools, that is, as institutionalized through timetables, teacher specialisms, pupil groupings and the like. However, the eventual influence of this orientation within APU was limited, and each of the assessment programmes which was developed came to have a recognizable subject orientation (Gipps and Goldstein, 1983, pp. 16–17). The two science teams were established in 1977. That at the University of Leeds had responsibility for the age 15 surveys and the statistical analysis, while that at Chelsea College, University of London, worked at ages 11 and 13. They were led respectively by Professors David Layton and Paul Black, perhaps the two most prominent science educators of their generation in the UK. The science assessment programme was accountable to the Working Group, later renamed ‘Steering Group’, on Science. (There were other groups which operated in an advisory capacity in relation to the wider role of the Unit. These were meant to be broadly representative of the education community.) The APU Science Working Group was intended to be representative of the range of interests in science education. It was chaired by the Professional Head of the Unit, a Staff Inspector within HMI. The science project was unique (until the establishment of that for design and technology) in that it was based in an academic institution, rather than at the National Foundation for Educational Research. Gipps and Goldstein (1983) argued that this location had a significant effect on the conduct of the work and the relationship between the teams and the Unit itself. The science teams were more prone to question the Unit’s approaches and, perhaps, to go their own way. Another unique and significant characteristic was provided by the decision to monitor at three ages: 11, 13 and 15. This decision reflected less the absence of any common curriculum in science than the fact that science as a subject did not exist in the late secondary years in many schools except for the least able pupils, something which the first APU surveys were to demonstrate. Age 13 was judged to be the last point at which most pupils could be judged likely to have studied all three sciences in some form. In October 1977, the Unit published a consultative paper entitled Assessment of Scientific Development. The authorship of this document is uncertain, since, as we have noted, the first monitoring teams had not started work until mid1977. Several thousand copies were distributed, and generated about 60 responses. The teams also made presentations to the 1978 Annual Meeting of the Association for Science Education at Liverpool (APU, 1978, app. 4). The consultative paper claimed that an approach which focused on school subjects would be unhelpful, and therefore that: ‘Science is . . . regarded as a term which describes particular ways of tackling problems rather than as a label to cover particular school subjects.’ It went on to advise, confusingly, that ‘the monitor-


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ing of science lays emphasis on the particular processes and skills which should be the distinctive outcomes of science education and should pay attention to a wide range of subject areas in which these processes and skills should be developed’ (APU, 1977, p. 2). In fact, the work of the teams owed little to any significant cross-curricular notion of science, while, as will be seen, resisting traditional notions of the distinctive science disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology. The approach being developed at this time showed some evidence of an influence from wider philosophical, psychological and sociological writing on the nature of science. Thus, in its analysis of ‘Observation’, the document stressed the selectivity of the observer, and the possibility of multiple interpretations of data (APU, 1977, p. 5). It also began the process of distinguishing a range of elements within the overall idea of ‘Observation’, and of hierarchies of ‘development’ or ‘behaviour’ (APU, 1977, p. 6). Important characteristics of APU science were already well-developed even at this very early stage. They included the emphasis on forms of criterion referencing. The paper also drew attention to the difficult issue of defining a content ‘on and through which’ the processes ‘operate’ (APU, 1977, p. 4). (These and other metaphors, such as the ‘interaction’ of processes with content, were a commonplace of APU language, though their meaning was not always clear.) In part, this may have been to do with political sensitivity. The aim of the Unit was not, it was said, ‘to set up a national syllabus, but rather to establish ways of monitoring the variety of science curricula which exist’ (APU, 1977, p. 9). But the question of matching the assessment instrument to the curriculum to which pupils had been exposed, which impinges directly on the validity of the instrument, could not be conjured away quite so easily. A range of approaches was sketched. Finally, the consultative paper drew attention to the need to base the assessment on a range of mechanisms, including written tests and audio-visual methods, and to site the assessment process in ordinary teaching rather than formal testing. It laid particular stress on the assessment of pupils working in practical situations. The APU methods in these areas were seen as significant outside the UK, and team members acted as consultants to, for example, the US National Assessment of Educational Progress. While it was in this area that APU science became particularly well known, the emphasis on what might be called naturalistic assessment was, somewhat perversely, to resonate within science teaching and assessment during the 1980s and 1990s. The perversity stemmed from the fact that APU science rarely undertook its practical assessment programme in anything resembling everyday classroom circumstances. Often it was conducted on a one-to-one basis. The consultative paper generated a number of responses, which will be discussed below. The Association for Science Education published a summary of its response. It was frosty in tone. The ASE’s Education (Research) Committee

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suggested, in terms which now appear bizarre, that ‘the idea of monitoring performance seemed to show an implied lack of humanity – pupils are people and must be considered as such’. The Committee questioned whether the data collected would identify the causes of underachievement. It anticipated resistance to ‘the APU developing a core of content which could be used as a basis for core science’. It was critical of the lack of involvement of teachers, and posed a number of questions: To whom are the results given? Who interprets the results? How is the interpretation to be used? What end products will help teachers and schools? When will the Working and Monitoring Group actively involve more science teachers in schools? (ASE, 1978, pp. 18–19)

In sum, the ASE articulated some of the concerns which were being expressed more generally about the work of the Unit. As if making a direct response to the last question quoted above, the January 1979 issue of Education in Science contained a report of the liaison work being undertaken with groups of teachers in the localities where the two teams were based. The key emphasis which came to characterize APU science was its orientation to ‘process’. It is difficult to know whether this emphasis developed as a result of the difficulty of assessing children with a range of backgrounds in scientific content, whether it was a direct reflection of the HMI emphasis at that time on process, transmitted through the influence of the senior HMIs who were appointed as the Unit’s Professional Heads, or whether it was merely a manifestation of a more general construal of science education in these terms during the late 1970s and 1980s. At a conference in 1979 a team member gave the following justifications for the emphasis on ‘process’: ‘the cross curricular emphasis which the Unit had originally adopted’; ‘the declared intention of the APU not to influence what was taught’; and ‘the persuasions of the members of the Steering Group and the monitoring teams’ (Fairbrother, 1980, p. 26). In September 1978, the Unit updated the previous consultative paper with a Science Progress Report 1977–8 (APU, 1978). In this document, the language was unequivocally that of ‘science processes’. A ‘process list’ of six ‘science activity categories’ was presented. This list remained broadly unchanged throughout the remaining lifetime of the science project. The Report claimed that the list ‘defines the main aspects of school science teaching’ (APU, 1978, p. 3). This was a bold claim, and the word ‘defines’ appears emphatic when compared with the other formulations which might have been used: for example, ‘reflects’, ‘identifies’ or even ‘expresses’. Two members of the Leeds team, writing in 1979, placed their emphasis differently. The science activity categories, as they were known within the teams, were derived ‘from a standpoint of educational significance, rather than some other model, such as philosophy of science or cognitive psy-


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chology’, so that ‘a great weight is attached to face validity, rather than . . . construct validity’ (Driver and Worsley, 1979). The ‘process list’ in the 1978 document consisted of the following categories: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Using symbolic representations. Using apparatus and measuring instruments. Observation tasks. Interpretation and application. Design of investigations. Performing investigations.

These categories were in turn further subdivided. The assessment framework had also taken on a three-dimensional form. The three dimensions were identified as ‘process categories’, ‘concept areas’ and ‘contexts’. The last of these, the notion of context, was to be of some significance in wider discussion. ‘The context of a question is the setting in which ideas and processes are used . . . Context can significantly affect performance’ (APU, 1978, p. 5). The science teams had chosen to define three contexts: science teaching, teaching in other subjects and everyday or out-of-school activities. This type of formulation would enter the language of practical assessment, if not necessarily in the way developed in the APU document. The guidance associated with practical assessment for the GCSE offers many examples of its use, especially the INSET document produced by the Schools Examination Council and the Open University (SEC/OU, 1986, p. 53). (See Chapter 6 in this volume.) It was in the 1978 document that the project began to report individual questions. It included an account of a pupil investigation undertaken using apparatus and assessed by observing the pupils undertaking the task. The report also described the creation of a list of concept areas which pupils might reasonably have been expected to have met by the age of 13. It is a measure of the somewhat bizarre strategies to which the teams were driven by the exigencies of the science curriculum at the time that this list was to form the basis of monitoring at ages 13 and 15. The Progress Report (app. 4) included an account of the responses which had been received to Assessment of Scientific Development. Some of the primary issues were explored here. There was concern over the possibility of a ‘national syllabus in science’: ‘There is a real danger that a content list drawn up by the APU, or even associated with national monitoring may be used and treated as a national syllabus’ (APU, 1978, p. 20). The legitimacy of the implied hostility to a ‘national syllabus’ was not discussed, but was rather assumed to be self-evident. Yet the report also indicated that several groups had responded along the lines of one which claimed that ‘the nettle of a national basic syllabus should be grasped’. While this type of discussion might give some support to the view that the APU opened the way to the National Curriculum, the linkage is at best tenuous.

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Other concerns expressed at that time included the question of the utility of APU findings for ‘underachievement’ in the absence of information on what were called background variables. This issue was eventually to disappear from the explicit agenda that the Unit was to address. Of greater significance for the themes of this book is the attention devoted by the report to the question of what was called ‘the relationship between content and process’ (APU, 1978, p. 21). As if responding to the claim that the process list ‘defined’ the outcomes of science teaching, many replies suggested that it was instead ‘significantly out of line with current teaching practice’ (APU, 1978, p. 22). Perhaps the most resonant and prophetic response, for a later reader, is that quoted from an examining board: ‘the APU exercise will be successful only if its emphasis is shifted to make it part of a planned scheme of curriculum development which would coordinate the influence of public examinations and the APU assessment to achieve a new approach towards science teaching’ (APU, 1978, p. 22). This statement may have seemed somewhat far-fetched within APU at the time. It provides a striking contrast with the more frequently expressed concerns over so-called curricular backwash (i.e. the idea that APU testing might influence the curriculum). Yet it is not an entirely inaccurate description of central aspects of the subsequent development of both the GCSE and the National Curriculum. The report concluded by noting that the responses, overall, displayed ‘a general tone of goodwill towards the work’. With the publication of this report, and one or two other accounts of its work in academic journals by team members, the early development of the APU science monitoring programme had established the most significant issues with which it would be concerned for the next ten years (Driver and Worsley, 1979). Despite the sensitive political position of the Unit as a whole, the science teams and science Steering Group came quickly to position themselves as a force for curricular change within science education. This occurred especially as a result of the ‘process’ orientation of the assessment framework and the novelty of some of the assessment methods used. The project was articulating some key contemporary emphases within science education, and most obviously that of HMI, into a developed system, in the absence of any other such development (although others would come to be available, such as the Graded Assessment in Science Project (GASP) and the Oxford Certificate of Educational Achievement (OCEA)). The assessment framework, developed in its essentials early in the science project, lay at the foundation of this process. However, the ultimate influence of the framework depended upon the development within both the GCSE and the National Curriculum of an emphasis on the assessment of pupils’ laboratory work. The key question, in assessing the impact of APU science, concerns the extent to which the APU science assessment framework influenced these developments. By contrast, the controversy of the early political arguments (about monitoring individual pupils, teachers and schools, collecting background data, and the potential curricular backwash) began to fade into the background, and


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were already of limited political interest by the time the Gipps and Goldstein study was published in 1983.

THE MONITORING PROGRAMME In the period leading up to the first national survey, further details of the assessment methodology were worked out. The Unit had from the first announced its intention to use a light sampling strategy, and not to obtain performance data about individual schools or children. Sets of questions were distributed randomly across a random sample of schools, from which a random sample of pupils had been drawn. Stratification of the sample was employed to ensure representativeness. The overall approach is known as ‘multiple matrix sampling’, and the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) was employed so that samples could be drawn and contact maintained with schools anonymously. This sensitivity to identifying individual schools or pupils is one of the aspects of APU which now contributes to the historical sense of quaintness about its work. A key shift in the science monitoring programme occurred in 1979, when the teams received a supplementary grant to support a programme of practical assessment. This aspect of the teams’ work was by some way the major source of its subsequent influence. The methods used for the creation of the test instrument and packages were the source of some internal controversy within the Unit. The mathematics and language teams examined the possibility of using what was known as a Rasch model, based on rank ordering the items in level of difficulty, while the science teams opted in most elements of the assessment framework to use ‘generalizability theory’. This latter approach involved creating a set of test items which represented a universe of such items, and then sampling from them. The influence of item sampling on the reliability of the performance estimates was determined principally by the size of the item sample, the variation in item difficulties and pupil–item interaction. This issue was of major significance in relation to monitoring performance over time: the random variation in questions drawn from year to year was reflected in random variations in scores on the categories (Johnson, 1989, ch. 10). This in turn meant that large variations from year to year in the underlying ‘true’ scores would have been needed to detect change over time. The underlying situation was that there were wide variations in mean scores on questions testing ostensibly similar ‘processes’. While the problem might have been addressed by using a fixed set of questions, the resulting difficulties, both for the validity of the test and the potential for ‘teaching to the test’, were considerable. Of course none of these points applies uniquely to APU science or its methodology, or indeed to science ‘processes’. Indeed it could be argued that by undertaking systematic research in this area the teams drew atten-

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tion to the issue, though little note seems to have been taken of this in subsequent assessment practice. However, it might be argued that the issues apply with particular force in the context of ‘processes’, with their emphasis on generality and transferability. Not all of the assessment framework employed this type of sampling: in fact, the majority of the practical testing was conducted on a quite different basis. The assessment of pupils’ measurement skills employed a relatively small fixed test. Tests of pupils’ performance on investigations utilised individual tasks, of which only a small number, barely reaching double figures at each age, was developed during the life of the science monitoring programme. These tasks (e.g., comparing the absorbency of different types of paper towel) largely eschewed any requirement to deploy substantive scientific knowledge. They were to this degree very routine. Nevertheless, even such attenuated tasks stimulated pupils to generate a wide range of responses and these were analysed in ways which recognized this. Most importantly, the variation in response from question to question was at least as wide as that to be found on written questions, though no estimate of variability could be made because the number of questions deployed was so small. It is significant, and ironic, that this, the most influential element of the APU assessment framework and monitoring programme for summative assessment within the public examination system, was more or less entirely devoid of statistical analysis, reliability estimation, and so on (Johnson, 1989, pp. 22–3). The science monitoring programme began with the first national surveys undertaken in 1980. This survey had two main elements: a questionnaire to schools and a battery of assessment instruments. The surveys were repeated annually for five years. The first full reports appeared in 1981 and 1982. Each report was a large and detailed document: 15 such reports were produced, including three ‘review reports’, which appeared in 1988. In addition, the teams began to produce a range of smaller publications and leaflets, targeted on teachers. The early APU reports were notable for the relative lack of interpretation which they contained. Indeed, the heads of the Unit, in the first report published, based on the age-11 survey, made this very explicit. The authors invite discussion on the interpretation of the results revealed by the survey, but do not draw conclusions from those results. It is for those for whom the reports are intended – educationalists, parents, and those concerned with the provision of resources centrally and locally – to consider how far the standards of performance reflected in the report are acceptable. (APU, 1981, p. ix)

This formula was repeated in each of the first three reports. The pattern of the reports was set: some chapters were based around the school questionnaires, others gave descriptions of performance in the categories of activity identified within the assessment framework and sometimes accounts of individual ques-


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tions. In these first reports, broad correlational accounts were given of the relationship between performance and a range of variables, such as geographical region, school size, gender, curriculum choice, etc. It was in these early efforts in this direction that two somewhat notorious findings were presented: that in some areas of the assessment framework, at age 11, pupil/teacher ratio was either independent of, or in some cases, even positively correlated, with pupil performance (APU, 1981, p. 166); and that, at age 13, the size of teaching groups was positively correlated with pupil performance (APU, 1982, p. 190). These findings, which are relatively easy to explain as reflecting the impact of other variables, showed the dangers of of crude relationship-seeking. The teams were well aware of the danger and sought hard to gather extra background information to avoid simplistic generalization. By this time, the science teams’ assessment framework was stable, and attention increasingly began to focus on the detail of pupils’ achievement in the categories of activity which had been defined. The teams settled into a pattern of developing test instruments, deploying them, analysing the data, writing reports, and providing information to teachers and others about the assessment framework and their findings. The academic commentators such as Gipps and Goldstein, and Holt, who stressed the wider issues associated with the Unit had already begun to sound somewhat dated. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the science teams were the changes in the personnel involved in its work. These changes were one of the most important mechanisms through which APU science exerted an influence on developments in school science education, even while the APU itself began to lose its public prominence. At Leeds, David Layton resigned as Director in 1982 to be replaced briefly by Professor Dennis Child. Rosalind Driver left her post as Deputy Director in 1982 to assume the leadership of a major, though barely recognizable, offspring of the APU: the Children’s Learning in Science Project. This project, as the major UK vehicle for ‘constructivism’, would outshine its parent in academic influence. In 1984, Richard Gott left Leeds for a lectureship and eventually a chair at the University of Durham. Gott, through involvement with the National Curriculum Council, was to be influential in the creation of Attainment Target 1 in the National Curriculum, and its subsequent revision. Throughout the Unit’s life, Professor Paul Black retained the Directorship of the Chelsea, later King’s, College team within the science project. He extended his involvement with assessment issues by chairing the National Curriculum Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT), which influenced key aspects of the national framework for assessment during the 1990s. Although the influence of the different aspects of the model proposed by this group were of variable longevity, the idea of a criterion-referenced system of age-independent levels has survived until the time of writing. Wynne Harlen left Chelsea College for a chair at Liverpool University in 1984, and subsequently directed the Scottish Council for Educational Research. Harlen and Driver were to serve on the Working Group which wrote

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the early drafts of the National Curriculum for science, focusing respectively on the primary and secondary phases. The role of the APU science framework in all of this may have varied, but it indicates that the impact of APU science, understood as a network of influence, was undoubtedly large, if heterogeneous.

THE INFLUENCE OF APU SCIENCE During the early 1980s, the APU (and APU science within it) existed as a fairly high-profile activity, gradually transforming in the wider perception from a threat to a worthy but somewhat amorphous body, whose staff were often consulted when matters connected with the science curriculum and its assessment were under consideration. The first reports, issued in 1981 and 1982, were reviewed circumspectly by the Association for Science Education, as if not quite knowing what to make of them. The age 11 survey was ‘in a sense a pilot study’. It led to questions such as ‘What are acceptable standards?’, ‘What is an 11 year old really capable of . . . ?’, rather than providing the answers to them (Education in Science, 1982, June, pp. 18–19). It has been said that the early reports were lacking in commentary to the extent of being almost unreadable. This is true only up to a point. The first age 11 report, while duly cautious in its presentation of the immediate empirical findings, was at times more assertive than might have been expected in its commentary about their significance: ‘teachers may not be providing for scientific experience and the reason is to be found in their intention rather than in the organisational structure or resources of the school’. The report went on: It is sad to note that the science processes undervalued by teachers were among those given prominence in the broad aims of Science 5/13 and in the Nuffield Junior Science Project. It is not then surprising that the essential nature of primary science as a process of enquiry has not been carried forward to any degree in the work of the pupils. (APU, 1981, p. 178)

The terms of this paragraph took the earlier quoted comment of the progress report at face value: the APU science framework was indeed treated as defining (rather than, say, reflecting) primary school science. It may however be observed that Wynne Harlen, principal author of the APU report, was also very active in Science 5/13, so that the comment was not quite as independent as it might appear. The situation was complicated by the relative paucity of primary science teaching, but the message about what primary science ought to be was clear enough. And that normative judgement was implied as being embedded in the assessment framework, which was in turn offered as the semi-official evaluative mechanism for school science (Jenkins and Swinnerton, 1998).


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Some evidence of the situation which had been reached by the mid-1980s is to be found in the independent appraisal of the APU science programme undertaken by Professor Jim Eggleston in 1985–86. Eggleston’s report was not published until 1991, when it had lost such policy relevance as it might have had. But it began by identifying the shift which had occurred in the project’s orientation: ‘the initial APU emphasis on defining standards of achievement and measuring trends over time has shifted to providing information potentially useful for designing more effective teaching methods: the initial target audience of policy makers has to some extent given way to an audience of teachers’ (Eggleston, 1991, p. 4). Eggleston’s comments might be thought modest. The quotations which he offered about the Unit from its staff showed a less inhibited stance. Thus Paul Black told him that the assessment framework was ‘some distance from the centre of gravity of the field’. It offered ‘a progressive view of science teaching’ (Eggleston, 1991, p. 19). Eggleston commented that this had implications for the validity of the framework: ‘Is the assessment framework . . . designed to secure backwash effects on the science curriculum and the behaviour of teachers in the direction consistent with the beliefs of its progenitors and their consultants?’ (Eggleston, 1991, p. 20). Some further indication of this shift in view, and that it went to the centre of the Unit, can be found in the evidence given by Arthur Clegg and Jean Dawson (respectively Professional and Administrative Heads of the Unit at the time) to the Parliamentary Committee on Education in 1984, which was referred to earlier. Both focused their attention on what the Unit’s work could offer in relation to an understanding of children’s learning and the professional development of teachers. Asked whether there was a ‘par’ below which children might be said to be falling, or whether they were able to say that standards had gone up, the pair were able to give only non-committal answers. The Unit, it was tacitly admitted, had shifted from its central task of monitoring achievement and underachievement (House of Commons, 1984–85, pp. 329–31). By the early 1980s, evidence from various sources suggests that APU science team members were by no means content merely to react to the existing science curriculum and use the assessment framework as a somewhat imprecise instrument to measure outcomes relating to it. They were moving towards using it as a standard against which the curriculum might be evaluated. It is perhaps likely that, in the longer term, a programme such as APU science, based in academic institutions, would not readily, or at least necessarily, be restricted to some kind of metrical, reactive role. Having become established in its own right, it would begin to reverse the relationship. In our concluding chapter, we will identify examples of this process within other educational systems. Before examining the process in more detail, it is appropriate to make some further comment on the Unit’s science publications, and other forms of dissemination. The main reports continued to be worthy but somewhat impenetrable

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documents. Their influence among teachers, or indeed anyone else, must be judged limited, even though it was claimed that the emphasis on interpreting results increased after the early reports (Foxman, Hutchinson and Bloomfield, 1991, p. 158). The Unit also published brief summaries of the findings. The account by Foxman and his colleagues claims that it was after the impossibility of saying anything very concrete about trends over time became clear (because of the measurement errors associated with the assessment process) that the Unit, and the science team in particular, began to produce short reports for teachers (Foxman, Hutchinson and Bloomfield, 1991, p. 159). The available data suggest that these short reports made reasonable penetration into schools, as measured by teachers’ awareness of them (Foxman, Hutchinson and Bloomfield, 1991, p. 172). Their impact on practice is, of course, quite another matter. Finally, the Unit proper, under the vigorous leadership of HMI Arthur Clegg, who himself had a scientific background, undertook a programme of dissemination during the mid-1980s. It involved the distribution of boxes of materials (both texts and apparatus) to local education authorities and higher education institutions involved in teacher training, and the organization of conferences for teacher trainers, LEA science advisers, and others. But it was not merely, or perhaps even primarily, through such mechanisms that APU science influenced practice. The history of APU science, in its relation to policy, can be broadly divided into three periods. During the first period – until the early 1980s – it was perceived as a slightly sinister arm of the DES, and was subject to a range of criticisms. During the mid-1980s, it had attained a certain respectability within academic and educational circles. So far as APU science was concerned, this respectability was connected with its well-established orientation to ‘science processes’, which identified it firmly with ‘progressive’ curricular change. By this time it had gone, according to Caroline Gipps, ‘unnoticed and unremarked from assessment into curriculum development . . . a venerable philosopher bringing light into the curriculum’ (Gipps, 1987, p. 17). This is, at best, only half true: the influence which APU science was able to muster, and it was considerable, was predicated on its specifically assessment orientation. But, by the second half of the 1980s, assessment requirements had come to have a quite different significance within the policy agenda of education. During this period, APU was particularly influential in relation to GCSE science. Finally, in the years of its institutional decline, which broadly corresponded with the establishment of the National Curriculum and its associated assessment mechanisms, aspects of the Unit’s work came to influence the Statutory Order for science. Both of these policy initiatives are treated separately in other chapters of this book, and the commentary in this chapter mainly serves to complement the analyses given there.


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APU AND GCSE SCIENCE In 1984, the Secretary of State announced that the GCE and CSE would be reformed around the new GCSE examination. The new examination would be framed within criteria to be authorized by the Secretary of State for Education and Science. It would be an overstatement to suggest, from the currently available evidence, that the Unit or the researchers it employed set out to influence public examinations. However, the APU assessment framework provided a resource which was likely to influence any major innovation in science education at the time. The centralized nature of the introduction of the GCSE combined with the role of APU as, in effect, the assessment arm of the DES research programme, meant that it had a particularly significant means of influencing the development of the examination. (The Unit’s Administrative Head told the parliamentary committee referred to earlier that, during the early 1980s, APU accounted for over 40 per cent of the Department’s research budget.) The GCSE had two dimensions which articulated well with APU work. Much the most significant of these was its emphasis on ‘process’ and, more particularly, on practical assessment. The second, more marginal, influence was exerted in the area of criterion referencing, and this shared the fate of that initiative within the GCSE. When the government’s intention to create the GCSE was announced in June 1984, the notion of a greater measure of criterion referencing was part of the proposal, carrying forward an earlier commitment in this area expressed by Sir Keith Joseph to the North of England Education Conference in January of that year (see Chapter 6). That is to say, the gradings associated with the examination were ultimately intended to be interpretable in relation to pupils’ capabilities. From an early stage, APU science had adopted elements of a criterion referenced approach to its work, but this approach had focused on the relatively unproblematic domain of individual questions rather than in relation to categories within the assessment framework itself. Further, because of the technicalities of the multiple matrix sampling method used, interpretable performance in relation to individual pupils was not an issue the APU teams could address. The science reports made little play of criterion referencing. Nevertheless, when the Secondary Examinations Council (SEC) set up working parties to develop grade-related criteria, APU teams members took on a consultative role. The APU science also figured prominently in the general guidance given to the working parties (SEC, 1984b, para. 21). The reports of the various working parties for science began with a quotation of an interpretation of science offered by the APU: ‘An experimental problem-solving activity involving a set of skills, both intellectual and practical, which are deployed in using and developing a body of concepts and knowledge’ (SEC, 1985, p. 1). This point illustrates the manner in which APU was influential at that time. It was here, rather than through technical involvement or the provision of performance data, that its influence ran. The science project’s own statistician would suggest that

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the APU had been able to contribute little to the process of developing grade related criteria, mainly because of the complexity of pupil response (Johnson, 1989, p. 103). The attempt to develop grade-related criteria had already stalled when it was overtaken by the introduction of the National Curriculum and its assessment arrangements, within which criterion referencing was treated altogether more robustly. The key element in the early development of the GCSE was the establishment of the National Criteria for the examination. The criteria displayed the characteristic concern within England and Wales for laboratory work, beginning with the following aim: ‘To provide through well-defined studies of experimental and practical science a worthwhile educational experience for all pupils’ (DES/WO, 1985a: 2.1). As we shall see in Chapter 6, the explication of the assessment objectives appeared to draw heavily on the APU science assessment framework, although their actual provenance is not easily established. The APU influence is visible also in the guidance for teachers produced by the SEC. The APU reports and tasks figure prominently, and the demands of coursework assessment (which was identified with experimental and related ‘process’ activity) dominated. Though CSE examinations sometimes involved a practical component, and other sources, such as the Graded Assessment of Science Project and the Oxford Certificate of Educational Achievement, existed, all of these post-dated APU, and often themselves showed signs of its influence. Thus the latter referred to the development of: ‘process-based activities common to the full range of science courses used in secondary schools’ (OCEA, 1985). The APU assessment framework offered to those responsible for the creation of the GCSE a working model, as it were, of what practical assessment might look like, in the context of the then-fashionable ‘process approach’ to the curriculum. Indeed, it offered more than one model. The fact that the setting of APU activity was very different from that to be found in everyday classroom assessment was rarely acknowledged. The Unit also provided some specific examples of assessment tasks, which were frequently recycled within the examination system. It contributed some key concepts to the process, notably the notion of so-called ‘context’ effects. This formulation was identified earlier: it allowed variation in performance on a hypothetical ‘skill’ to be accounted for by the influence of ‘context’, thus saving the hypothesis of generic scientific ‘processes’ in the face of empirical difficulties. In fact, such was the complexity of pupil performance that, in the absence of the notion of ‘context’, APU findings undermined the notion that ‘process skills’ had any empirical status, or could be assessed in a criterion referenced manner. Finally, APU team members were often involved, if somewhat randomly, in activities concerned with the in-service education of teachers (INSET) which preceded the first GCSE examinations in 1988. It is very difficult in all of this to establish the significance and direction of influences. But the characteristic marks of the APU assessment framework are


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repeatedly visible in syllabuses, training documents and so on (Donnelly et al., 1993). It is an open question as to how the laboratory element of GCSE science might have developed in the absence of APU science, although Gipps has questioned whether, without its influence, examinations in GCSE science would have incorporated any component of practical assessment (Gipps, 1987, p. 17).

APU AND THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM The GCSE was barely under way before the National Curriculum was announced, in 1987. Assessment was one of the key dimensions of the new policy. Again, it was perhaps inevitable that the APU would have some involvement, providing advice and data on pupil performance. Despite the fact that the Unit was now well past its peak of activity, having undertaken what would prove to be its last national survey in 1985, and that its evaluative function would be usurped by the new system, its influence on the National Curriculum was substantial. Beyond the fact that two former team members, Rosalind Driver and Wynne Harlen, were members of the Working Group which made the first recommendations for the science component of the National Curriculum, this influence was exerted through two main routes. The Director of the King’s College science team, Professor Paul Black, was appointed Chair of the National Curriculum Task Group on Assessment and Testing, which was set up to make recommendations about the national assessment system. It can scarcely be doubted that his position as one of the longestserving and most prominent team directors within the APU played a significant part in his appointment. The other main source of influence came about, reportedly, also through Black’s involvement, this time with the National Curriculum Council. APU team members were involved in the later, much less public, working groups which devised the assessment structure within Attainment Target 1 (AT1, Exploration of Science), that element of the science curriculum which focused particularly on the place of the laboratory in science teaching. We have traced in some detail elsewhere the process by which this Attainment Target came into existence, and the difficulties and transformations associated with it (Donnelly et al., 1996). A key participant in this process was another former team member and Deputy Director of the Leeds APU team, Richard Gott, by then at Durham University. Gott’s involvement carried through into the first revision of the Statutory Order for science, which was completed in 1991. The versions of AT1 which were promulgated drew heavily on the model of scientific investigation which had underlain the assessment category ‘Performing Investigations’, and particularly on its reliance on the notion of variables and variable manipulation, to provide an organizing structure. The narrowness of this conception of scientific investigation played some, although not the major,

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part in the crisis which this Attainment Target created in the early 1990s. It has also been claimed that APU findings informed the statements of attainment which were employed to specify performance in at least some of the levels on which National Curriculum assessment was based. While the details of this process are difficult to recover, it seems clear that, even after the APU itself had been disbanded, the influence of its assessment framework continued to be felt in the National Curriculum, although in highly mediated ways.

APU AND THE CHILDREN’S LEARNING IN SCIENCE PROJECT The Children’s Learning in Science Project (CLISP) was a further, though sometimes unacknowledged, descendant of APU science. Its Director, the late Rosalind Driver, had moved directly from acting as Deputy Director of the Leeds team to the Project, and the early data on which members of the Project worked were drawn from the APU testing programme. Driver would move in somewhat opposed directions to those promulgated through the APU assessment framework, becoming the leading protagonist in the UK of ‘constructivism’. Indeed, in conjunction with Robin Millar, she wrote an influential demolition of the ‘process’ approach to science (Millar and Driver, 1987). Though the substantive influence on her work of the time spent with APU may be less significant than that of other former team members, Rosalind Driver’s career and influence and that of the CLISP work she instigated undoubtedly furthered by her involvement with APU.

CONCLUSION It is uncertain what aims were originally intended for the Assessment of Performance Unit, but if those aims were concerned with the setting and monitoring of measurable standards of performance at a national level, then the Unit was a failure. Its work was overshadowed to some degree by the GCSE, but much more comprehensively by the National Curriculum. If the Unit is judged to have been part of the process of preparing for large-scale and highly interventionist national assessment procedures, then it might be judged to have served its purpose. But this is a hypothesis on which it is difficult to form a judgement. If the APU did serve some such function it was hardly one which was planned, but rather one which emerged from the flow of events and opinion. In any event, the National Curriculum effectively removed any basis for the Unit’s continued existence as an instrument of evaluation, and its demise followed quickly in 1990. Yet, in science at least, the Unit’s influence was considerable, and a tribute to the unpredictability of policy initiatives. Whether that influence was positive


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is a more difficult judgement to make. Finally, APU illustrated vividly the capacity of what would come, during the Unit’s lifetime, to be called the educational establishment, to turn unpromising instruments to its own purposes, and away from the purposes originally intended for them by others. The influence of APU science took several forms, although these are closely interrelated. The project helped sustain and operationalize the notion of process in the science curriculum, although not necessarily under this name. It helped determine the form, and perhaps the very existence, of practical assessment in the GCSE examination. It was critically influential in the treatment of laboratory work within the National Curriculum for science. As we have stated at intervals, in most of these respects the influence of the project was less through its empirical findings than through the emphases of the assessment framework which it developed. Where the findings were put to use, as in the assessment structure for AT1 in the National Curriculum, the interpretation placed on them was perhaps rather greater than the data themselves would justify. Finally, a fourth, easily overlooked, influence can be identified: APU science supported the careers of, and had an impact on, some of the most influential academic educationists who were active during the 1980s and 1990s. In the chapters which follow, APU science is rarely far from the narrative. So far as school science teachers were concerned, APU was perhaps the most remote, and, initially, even threatening, of all the policy initiatives discussed in this book. On the surface it moved from threat to irrelevance. Other more robust initiatives took its place in the domain of assessment, evaluation and accountability. Yet, through the mechanisms just surveyed, its impact on science teachers’ work was very considerable, although in so highly mediated a form that few can perhaps now remember it. Whether its failure to define standards, understood as benchmarks, encouraged the later, more robust, initiatives, must remain a matter for speculation.

6 THE USES OF EXAMINATION: THE INTRODUCTION OF THE GCSE

The GCSE examination was a policy initiative of a quite different kind to those examined in previous chapters. It was the first of a series of government-sponsored initiatives which came to dominate school education in England and Wales during the 1980s and 1990s. For most of the twentieth century, government had exercised authority over the public examination system in a form strongly mediated by the examination boards and various statutory bodies. With the abolition of the Schools Council, that authority came to be located in the Secondary Examinations Council. During the introduction of the GCSE examination government took a firmer hand in the process of accrediting the assessment system. It might be claimed that the new examination gave the Conservative government a sense of its power over the institutional forms framing teachers’ work. From there, it was only a short step to seeking control over its substance. The GCSE examination can be examined from many different aspects (Gipps, 1986). Our concern here, in conformity with the rest of this book, is with the relationship between the national policy-making process and the professional situation and work of science teachers, in the context of school science. The GCSE was overtaken by the National Curriculum but, despite its lower political profile, the common examination was never overwhelmed by the larger project. On the contrary, it has been claimed that it was the more resilient, in the clash which eventually occurred with the National Curriculum assessment arrangements at Key Stage 4 (Daugherty, 1995). It appears then that the GCSE already included all of the elements which were needed for such control as the government intended to take. The National Curriculum did, however, embody a more robust attitude to change. This is illustrated most visibly by the manner in 80

The uses of examination

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which its apparatus ‘resolved’ almost at a stroke the difficulties which had been experienced on the issue of criteria referencing within the GCSE, although the technical legitimacy of this resolution must remain a matter for debate (Hutchison and Schagen, 1994). In addition, it must be noted that it was not government, but educationists themselves, who promoted the resolution of the issue of criteria referencing. The GCSE can appear paradoxical. The creation and implementation of the examination, as we shall claim, demonstrate how mechanisms of centralized control were used to influence teachers’ work. But the supposedly radical curricular and assessment agenda which the GCSE examination was claimed to promote was only tenuously related to that of the government. The examination was introduced by a government which commonly opposed progressive tendencies in education (although this statement will bear some qualification). Yet, in science at least, the introduction of the GCSE allowed the promulgation of a substantial ‘progressive’ agenda, by which we mean such things as a measure of teacher assessment, a shift towards so-called ‘processes’ in the assessment objectives required of syllabuses, and the imposition of a system for the assessment of pupil laboratory skills. How is this paradox to be explained? A brief answer is that the creation and implementation of the GCSE provided, under the auspices of government control, institutional locations and mechanisms by which the examination, and, through it, the curriculum and teachers’ practice, could be reshaped by groups and individuals outside government, and with an independent agenda. This process of reshaping agendas was to be repeated even more forcibly within the National Curriculum. Although it was a subordinate issue within the examination itself, the GCSE also helped bring into focus perhaps the largest question affecting the work of secondary school science teachers during the 1980s, namely, the tension between specialist sciences and science as an ostensibly unified subject, both intellectually, and institutionally within the school. Politically, it was necessary for the GCSE, like the National Curriculum, to be linked by the government to a claim to be improving educational standards. This, in turn, necessitated a linkage in these ‘standards’ to its predecessor, the O-level examination. The link was to prove problematic during the 1990s, as arguments about the comparability of standards over time were rehearsed annually when examination results were published. The linkage to the O-level examination also reflects the manner in which the issues which the GCSE was intended to address were deeply embedded in the historical development of secondary schooling and its associated examination procedures. We will first outline this background.

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THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: EXAMINATIONS AND SCHOOLS The GCSE took up, and partially resolved, a number of key pressures which had developed during the preceding decades. Some of these were general and some were specific to science. They were identified in Chapters 2 and 3. Foremost among them were: • the disjunction between an examination system which was orientated towards the most able pupils and a system of secondary education increasingly unified around the comprehensive school; • a view, increasingly canvassed, that those who taught pupils were best placed to undertake the assessment of them; • arguments about the aims and objectives of science teaching, and, in particular, the place of practical and investigatory skills, and their representation within the system of assessment. There were commonalties between the O-level examination which was introduced in 1951 and the School Certificate examination, introduced just after the First World War and strongly orientated to the work of the maintained grammar and independent schools (see Chapter 2). The introduction of the single subject GCE examinations had represented a major organizational shift, but the resulting system remained in place, fundamentally unchanged, until 1988. In the grammar schools, curricula and teaching methods were strongly influenced by the requirements of the universities. This influence remained powerful in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly at 18+, within the subjectbased O- and A-levels of the GCE examination. Universities and their staff continued to have a major influence on the schools, mediated through the public examination system. Matters were otherwise in the public elementary schools, and their successors, the secondary modern schools. In these schools, official policy, to the extent that there was one, for much of the twentieth century was against pupils taking external examinations of any sort. The preference was for some kind of ‘school record’, although action on this basis was very limited. Reference to some form of school-based assessment of pupils by their teachers can be found in a range of official and other writing on examinations. A. N. Whitehead, whose ideas on education were much discussed in the inter-war years, claimed in 1917 that: ‘Each school should grant its own leaving certificate, based on its own curriculum. The standards of the schools should be sampled and corrected’ (Whitehead, 1917, p. 47). This stance is also visible in the Norwood Report, published in 1943. It argued that ‘ideally the examination is best conducted by the teachers themselves, as being those who should know their pupils’ work and ought therefore to be best able to form judgements on it’ (Board of Education, 1943, p. 45). Internationally, the notion that a school should assume responsibility for assessment leading to some kind of nationally


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recognized leaving certificate is one that has long been the reality within a number of educational systems, so that it is not quite the novelty which it can be made to appear (Black and Atkin, 1996). In England and Wales, during the mid-twentieth century, the idea of schoolbased assessment had almost the status of an official, if very hesitant, policy for schools supposedly accommodating children without ‘professional’ career aims. The distorting effect of the GCE examinations on the work of secondary modern schools, and their unsuitability for the majority of the school population, were points fully acknowledged, not least by the then Ministry of Education and by the Central Advisory Council for Education. In 1959, the latter advocated the complementary development of a system of leaving certificates organized at a local level (Ministry of Education, 1959, p. 89). A comprehensive review of provision for ‘the examination of secondary school pupils other than by the GCE examination’ formed the basis of the arrangements for the new Certificate of Secondary Education examination, which was available to candidates for the first time in 1965. The target population for the CSE examination in any particular subject was initially drawn from the top 60 per cent of the ability range, although, in the event, very different proportions of the age cohort were to be entered for examination in different subjects. The establishment of the CSE, in conjunction with the continuation of the GCE O-level examination, amounted to the creation of two systems of public examinations. This dichotomized system came under growing strain as the two groups of pupils for whom it was designed were increasingly accommodated within common, comprehensive schools. These two systems differed greatly, not only in their origins, status and control, but also in their ability to respond flexibly to the changing needs of the schools and in the role allowed to teachers in the assessment process. A number of GCE and CSE boards co-operated in feasibility studies of a common system of examining, the so-called ‘16+’, and trial examinations were conducted in 1973/4 in a limited range of subjects (Schools Council, 1974). After some hesitation, the new Conservative government announced early in 1980 that development of a common 16+ examination would go ahead, but that this development would be subject to the specification of a set of National Criteria, under the authority of the Secretaries of State. It seems reasonable to regard the developments of the 1970s and 1980s as an attempt to reconcile the elements of a dichotomized policy on schooling with a strategy for summative assessment derived from the selective system of secondary education established under the 1944 Education Act. The development of a nationally recognized leaving certificate for pupils in secondary modern schools was resisted by central government until, ultimately, the demand from the schools, from parents and from some employers, became too strong. The requirement that syllabuses conformed to National Criteria (at more than one level) indicated that the government intended to keep a firm grip on the new examination, but that grip showed no evidence of being directed towards curricular

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change. The Criteria were to ‘ensure that all syllabuses with the same subject title have sufficient content in common and that all boards apply the same performance standards in the award of grades’ (Hansard, 1979–80, cols 99–100). The existence of Criteria implied that a body would exist to apply them in the licensing process. But what sort of body? Certainly not the Schools Council, which was deeply out of favour and soon to be disbanded. Were the functions of any new body to be limited to ensuring the kind of comparability just identified?

CREATING AND IMPLEMENTING GCSE SCIENCE In the first instance, responsibility for developing the National Criteria was given to the examining boards, who would then deal directly with the DES. The early development work on the GCSE (not yet with this title) was therefore undertaken by an ad hoc Joint Council for 16+ National Criteria, set up in December 1980. This body drew its membership, and by and large the membership of its working groups, from within the GCE and CSE examining boards. To this extent, it looked back towards the older system. There was no national, government-sponsored body. The role of the Schools Council, a body representative of the range of educational interest groups, was described by the Examinations Secretary of the ASE as ‘much less clear’ than that of other elements in the system. He also remarked that what was intended by ‘national criteria’ was still uncertain (Phillips, 1981). The professional significance of the process which was occurring was quite different from what had gone before. Teachers and others awaited, and were then invited to comment on, draft National Criteria which would be universal in their applicability in England and Wales. Although the ostensible focus of attention was establishing a common mechanism by which pupils in the most able 60 per cent were to be examined, the curriculum which they and other pupils were to experience, and ultimately the work of the teachers who taught them, could potentially be heavily influenced by the Criteria. Evidence from an early skirmish reinforces the point. Draft versions of the National Criteria for four subjects were published in 1981. Physics was amongst these. The process of canvassing and political pressure began immediately. Understandably, one of the most influential groupings in this process was the Association for Science Education, and particular attention will be given to its voice in what follows. The physics draft criteria received a very critical response from the Association (Phillips, 1982). The criticism was directed at the inadequacy and speed of the consultation, the excessive physics ‘content’ (i.e. knowledge) specified, the ‘stereotype examination’, the dominance of assessment over curriculum which was said to characterize the entire process, and the corresponding dominance of the examining groups. This last was a key point: ‘One may ask why no one who has taken a leading role in the develop-


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ment of physics education was asked to be a member of the working party; experience or connections with examining seemed to be the only criterion for membership’ (Phillips, 1982, p. 15). The ASE members were encouraged to respond at length to the draft documents being produced (Garforth and Lazonby, 1982). The ‘traditional’ approach said to be present in the physics draft received particular criticism from one correspondent (later a member of the ASE’s research committee), in terms which set the tone for subsequent representations of the criteria: (Physics) courses should be directed towards the development of capability, flexibility and satisfaction, and the ability and desire to learn more, rather than the acquisition of knowledge, and it is essential that we use the opportunity of a new system to establish 13–16 courses in physics from scratch with these aims in mind . . . (Brown, 1982, p. 42)

In contrast, the draft criteria generated little critical response from individual teachers. One commentator has suggested that this was because they contained ‘recognizably the type of physics with which they (i.e. physics teachers) were familiar’ (Woolnough, 1988, pp. 170–1, our addition). But he observed also that a large majority of those involved in curriculum development, or otherwise active in physics education, reacted adversely. A campaign against the document was mounted, particularly involving the Institute of Physics. Ultimately, the draft criteria were modified substantially. This conflict indicates how quickly the issues at stake in the implementation of the GCSE came to extend beyond that of unifying the assessment system. To all appearances, a major process of centralization of authority over key aspects of the education system had begun. But the process was moderated by at least two mechanisms. First, a publicly authorized and authoritative initiative demanded systematic and universal consultation, a process which had been much less visible in the past. Such processes of consultation offered substantial opportunities for mobilizing opinion. Secondly, the centralization ostensibly led to the government, in the form of the Secretaries of State for Education and for Wales and the DES, but such a direct route had not been the norm historically, and was perhaps politically unacceptable. With its abolition of the Schools Council the government was addressing a difficulty which would remain throughout subsequent initiatives: how to create a credible working body with an appearance of independence, and perhaps even some in reality, which was yet willing and able to fulfil its own, i.e., the government’s, agenda. The widely-representative Schools Council was replaced by a body with an appointed membership, the Secondary Examinations Council, with a brief to advise government on assessment issues, and oversee the approval of syllabuses. Authority ran through the Council but was in practice focused on its professional officers and subject committees. The Secretary of State might intervene (a process which was to become more familiar within the development of the National Curriculum) but, with the exception of the well-known example where

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the Secretary of State sought to limit the emphasis on social issues in physics, such intervention was largely absent within science. The shift from a representative body, the Schools Council, to one which was appointed, is usually understood to have supported that attenuation of professional influence which characterized Conservative policy (Plaskow, 1985; Lawton, 1992). But the development of GCSE science suggests that what occurred was more complex than this. Members of the SEC proper may have been appointees rather than representatives of outside groupings, but the working committees which it established included representatives of schools, further and higher education and others. Examining board members were in a minority (SEC, 1987). Beyond this, the internal structure and workings of the SEC are as yet a matter of conjecture. But it seems clear that, perhaps unknowingly, the government had created a new vehicle for curricular debates, in which the stakes were very high and where professional voices could be very audible and, if used skilfully, able to harness the power of government to a professional agenda. During 1983 and 1984, the ASE house journal, Education in Science, offered commentaries on the development of the National Criteria at regular intervals, although the process figured hardly at all in the journal’s correspondence columns. This reflects a more general difficulty in determining teachers’ views on the changes promoted and implemented, sometimes in their name. What were the curricular issues at stake? A subject which generated some interest was the question of assessing pupils’ experimental and laboratory work, and this indeed came to be one of the touchstones of the reform process. An LEA Science Adviser from Wiltshire conducted a survey amongst teachers themselves which was claimed to show ‘overwhelming teacher support’ for the introduction of such assessment, using a system of continuous assessment. The claim was judged by a commentator to be in conflict with the findings of some experiences of the trial 16+ examinations (Biggs, 1982; Hannon, 1982). One possible resolution of the paradox might perhaps be that teachers’ opinions when asked about this topic in principle were different from those they expressed when actually undertaking such assessment under their normal conditions of work. The Examinations Subcommittee of the ASE was particularly critical of the lukewarm attitude to teacher assessment of laboratory work among the Biology group (ASE Examinations Subcommittee, 1982). The general approach of the ASE towards the GCSE examination became clear in two papers published in mid-1983. The Association sought to • ensure that the status of ‘science taught in a collective manner (integrated, combined or unified)’ be equivalent to that of the separate sciences; • promote a compulsory element of practical assessment; and • avoid differentiated papers so far as possible (ASE, 1983a, 1983b). It is difficult to establish, without detailed archival research, how this policy


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agenda was established, but the emphasis reflects that detectable in the policy of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review, discussed in Chapter 4. The Association was also hostile to the Secretaries of State’s desire to omit references to social and economic issues, which, it was pointed out, contradicted official enthusiasm for promoting a greater emphasis on the technological relevance of science. A substantial part of the second ASE statement cited above constituted an attack on the work of the Joint Council, focusing on these issues: ‘We do not believe that this body should have been able to make such decisions without consultation.’ In passing, the Association also advised examining groups to establish stronger links with the LEA advisory services. All of this was stated explicitly to be directed at the newly established Secondary Examinations Council. As ever, it is difficult to know what the views of practising science teachers were, although on the subject of teacher assessment, the ASE was accused of presenting unanimity of view where in fact diversity existed (Chapman, 1983, pp. 37). The advice which the SEC gave to the Secretaries of State in respect of physics strongly resembled the ASE’s recommendations. On the subject of the assessment of laboratory work the advice read: ‘we . . . agree that the criteria should require examining groups to allocate a proportion of the total marks to the assessment of experimental work in the laboratory’ (SEC, 1984a, p. 50). This requirement duly found its way into the published National Criteria, not merely for physics, but for science as a whole. The statement was considerably strengthened from that which had been visible in the original report of the Joint Council (GCE and CSE Boards’ Joint Council for 16+ National Criteria, 1983). Indeed the criteria went further, and defined the boundary of the title ‘science’ as encompassing only those subjects which were ‘based on experimental/practical work by pupils’ (DES/WO, 1985a, our emphasis). The details of these shifts in emphasis are perhaps less significant than the wider political process which they reflected. The entire process had provided an institutional route for the deployment of power. The publication of documents of national significance, followed by consultation, review and public (and private) lobbying, enabled and sharpened, indeed created, forms of intervention in the policy-making process. Much of this was based around Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, the Association for Science Education and the Assessment of Performance Unit. The APU, in particular, was represented on working groups across the sciences in the Secondary Examinations Council. In this last case, the institutional dimension of the process of policy-making fused with the substantive, since the APU was the outstanding vehicle for ‘process’ science, for reasons which, as was seen in Chapter 5, were contingent on the circumstances of the task with which it was charged. The most obviously marginalized group in this process were the examination boards, the bodies which would have ultimate responsibility for implementing the system. The shift in emphasis within the recommendations for physics were seen in these terms by one leader writer from

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the Institute of Physics. While regretting the centralization which enabled the Secretary of State to take a view on how physics should be taught, he hinted at the new possibilities: the working party on physics, set up by the Joint Council, took some persuading that physics at this level should mean anything different from what it meant 50 years ago. However, due to the efforts of the representatives of the Institute of Physics, the Association for Science Education, Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools and others, persuaded they were. (Bausor, 1983, p. 201)

The underlying assumption here was that examination syllabuses would determine the curriculum. This was sometimes judged publicly by bodies such as the ASE as an unfortunate tendency (Phillips, 1982, p. 16), and that judgement remained a commonplace during the creation and implementation of the National Curriculum. However, it did not deter individuals and groups from seeking to use such mechanisms to shift the curriculum, and teachers’ work, in what were judged to be desirable directions. An ASE conference in March 1983 had heard the Permanent Secretary at the DES, Sir James Hamilton, confess that: ‘I am, on the whole, a heretic on the relationship between examinations and general curriculum policy . . . I am wholly prepared to use reforms of the examination system to bring about much-needed changes in national attitude towards curriculum’ (Hamilton, 1983, p. 11). The evidence from subsequent years, in both the GCSE and the National Curriculum, is that this message was taken to heart. Organizations such as the ASE, and the others listed above, showed no compunction in using the mechanism of the National Criteria as a means of insisting that, in future, particular forms of practice should be compulsory for all teachers. Agendas for change could be promoted in very powerful ways by those individuals and institutions that succeeded in influencing the key policy documents governing syllabuses. As a corollary, the freedom of the examination boards and the, arguably somewhat abstract, freedom of teachers to choose between them, were each severely curtailed. The position of teachers themselves was perhaps the most problematic, and the most difficult to determine, in all of this. Only very occasionally were questions raised about the representativeness of the views which were promulgated (Chapman, 1985; James, 1986). It is simply not possible, on the basis of the available evidence, to say what the opinions were of practising science teachers. The National Criteria for science which emerged from the DES in 1985 displayed evidence of the influences listed above. In particular, the emphasis on scientific ‘methods’ and ‘processes’, which was also to be found in HMI and DES literature, was very visible. Thus, for example, while only four of the required assessment objectives for science related to ‘knowledge and understanding’ in its conventional sense, a total of 16 ‘skills and abilities’ were required to be assessed. This met with the approval of the ASE, which took matters further by suggest-


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ing that ‘Syllabuses should make clear that the content specified represents the context within which skills and processes are to be developed’ (ASE, Assessment and Examinations Subcommittee, 1985; pp. 11–12). This statement might be read as a claim that ‘content’ was no more than a ‘context’ for the major target, ‘skills and processes’. The influence of the language of APU science is evident, although the reader might have been forgiven for not realizing that ‘context’ was a third independent dimension (with ‘content’ and ‘process’) of the APU assessment framework. This represents a somewhat ‘liberal’ approach to the assessment of the science curriculum. How was it successfully implanted in the criteria, given a government of resolutely conservative temper such as that which existed at the time? Part of the answer is that science (both in connection with the GCSE examination and, later, the National Curriculum) appears to have attracted relatively little attention from the government and its supporters. A conspicuous, although not particularly significant, exception was the Secretary of State’s resistance to including social and economic issues within the physics curriculum. This objection was relatively easily turned by SEC’s advice: ‘We have concluded that relevant social and economic issues should be discussed in the context of work on technological applications’ (SEC, 1984a, p. 50). There was apparently no major difficulty in persuading the government on the much larger question of requiring school-based assessment of experimental work, despite its (the government’s) growing suspicion of teachers. It can be surmized that these innovations were perhaps thought to be consistent with an emphasis on practical skills and applications of science, while teacher assessment was not quite yet the sensitive issue which it would become during the implementation of the assessment arrangements of the National Curriculum. It has already been observed that there was relatively little public discussion about the substance of the National Criteria for the GCSE, or of the final versions when these were published in March 1985. Yet again, the absence of any significant attention to the opinions of teachers makes it difficult to gauge their views. There was a general acceptance that some aspects of the new examination would be novel to them, and that implementation of the examination would require a substantial investment in the in-service training of teachers. This training, however, became notorious for its use of the so-called cascade system. In a study conducted by the authors, in conjunction with a number of colleagues, it was found that teachers were in general sceptical of the training which they had received (Donnelly et al., 1993, pp. 49–51). The training was provided by examining groups and LEAs, and it is difficult to recover any convincing evidence about the processes which occurred or their outcomes. Yet teachers appeared to take the view that the most problematic area of the science examinations, by some way, was the requirement to assess pupil experimental work. The Criteria stated that: ‘All schemes of assessment must allocate not less than 20 per cent of the total marks to experimental and other practical skills’ (DES/WO, 1985a,

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p. 7). This requirement was distinct from the wider possibility of using teacherassessed coursework. For some, such coursework assessment was seen as a powerful method for the promotion of school-based curriculum development, and not just for ‘operationalizing the curricular intentions of central government’ (Torrance, 1986, p. 39). Yet, almost without exception, the examining groups identified teacher-assessed coursework with laboratory work within the syllabuses they produced. The possibility that teacher assessment in science might involve other parts of the assessment scheme appears to have been given no serious consideration. The possible emphases of the science curriculum, and the possibilities of change within the science curriculum which GCSE might facilitate, were heavily constrained by such assumptions. It is also worth observing that the view, implicit in the quotation from Torrance above, that it was primarily government which had ‘curricular intentions’, if by this is meant intentions to change the curriculum, is questionable. Despite their more or less universal emphasis on experimental work, the published GCSE science syllabuses offered a wide range of methods by which coursework requirements were fulfilled. Some placed considerable emphasis on pupils’ planning, and most allowed written work to be used as a source of information. Some (most notoriously the biology syllabus of the Northern Examinations and Assessment Board) focused heavily on ‘atomistic’ skills. Pupils were to be assessed dichotomously on each of 32 skills. Examining groups were generally cautious in their attitude to the quantitative emphasis given to coursework, and this was the subject of some comment. The ASE Assessment and Examinations Subcommittee ‘regretted that in many cases examining groups have chosen to give the minimum of 20% weighting to practical coursework’ (Bennetts, 1986, p. 16). Why this circumstance should be a cause for a regret was not made clear. There was said to be ‘an interesting variety in the practical skills to be assessed and in the number of occasions on which it is deemed necessary to assess’ (ibid.). It is worth noting here that the flexibility which went with these variations across syllabuses, and the associated choice which was retained by teachers, would be overturned during the establishment of the National Curriculum. The emphasis on practical assessment within the GCSE was sometimes held to reflect the wishes and aspirations of teachers, although, with the exception of the survey cited above, there appear to be little supporting data on teachers’ actual views (Biggs, 1982). The attitudes of many may have crystallized only when confronted by operational demands and responsibilities. Teachers’ requests for training, and the criticisms they made of the training which they received, reflect this, rather than necessarily invalidating the claim that teachers were in favour of the assessment of laboratory work. In any event, when it came to be implemented, there were real difficulties around coursework assessment. In January 1988, the ASE announced that it had set up a working party on practical assessment (Education in Science, January 1988, p. 9). It was indicated that


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this had been as a result of ‘mounting concern from members’, although the eventual report tended to place responsibility for this on to the examining groups (Bossons, 1988, p. 14). The discovery of these difficulties in practical assessment might be judged to have come rather late, given the pressure which had been exerted to introduce it. A few books were published which aimed to prepare teachers for the new examination. These documents provide evidence of how far, under the kinds of pressures identified earlier, the implementation had moved from the notion of a unification of GCSE and CSE towards a projected wholesale revision of the science curriculum, and of the practice of teachers. Thus, for example, one book began as follows: ‘Without significant changes at all levels in both the content of our science courses and the way in which we present them, GCSE will be a non-starter.’ It went on to claim that science curricula were: ‘overburdened with irrelevant content; supporting a method of teaching which is idiosyncratic and which fails to motivate many pupils . . .’ (Dawson, 1987, p. 9). There was much else of this kind. The GCSE examination was, it seemed, to be instrumental in altering this situation. It would influence pupils’ experiences throughout the secondary school. The change would ‘require of every classroom teacher a greater professional involvement in the instigation and running of courses which embody current educational thinking’ (Dawson, 1987, p. 7). The author, perhaps justifiably in a book with the ostensible aim of providing practical help for teachers, did not elaborate on the nature of this ‘current educational thinking’. Yet it is a more problematic notion than the author implied. More significantly, so too was the legitimacy of ‘requiring’ practising teachers, many presumably experienced and skilled, to develop courses in accordance with it. The training which teachers received was also supported by a text prepared by the Open University and published under the auspices of the Secondary Examinations Council. Here again, a major emphasis was on the GCSE examination as a mechanism of curricular change: ‘GCSE syllabuses should therefore provide more opportunities for students to acquire understanding, gain skills and develop a fuller and more rewarding appreciation of ways of working in science. This amounts to a reorientation of the link between processes and the content of science’ (SEC/OU, 1986, p. 13). The GCSE National Criteria were substantially influenced from directions which might support this kind of language (and the underlying argument that science teachers’ practice required modification along these lines). Nevertheless, one will look in vain for explicit statements of this kind within the science National Criteria: indeed the word ‘process’ was not used within them. The SEC training booklet was also heavily influenced by the work of the Assessment of Performance Unit, and drew substantially on APU examples. However, it omitted to mention that such work had been undertaken in quite different circumstances and for quite different purposes, from those

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obtaining in public examinations (Gipps, 1986, p. 17). In most APU assessment categories, scientific knowledge was not so much a ‘context’ for ‘processes’ (as the quotation from the ASE Assessment and Examinations Subcommittee given earlier above would have it) as, by necessity and design, absent. In contrast to these heavily interventionist discussions on curriculum and organization, the booklet’s treatment of matters which might be judged of more direct concern in any revision of a system of assessment, that is, how to ensure the reliability and validity of the assessment undertaken, was minimal. Guidance in the SEC document on the manner of organizing coursework assessment was set in a hypothetical ‘Thomas Kuhn High School’ the relationship of whose practice to that to be found in actual schools was doubtful, but which was nevertheless presented in the document as a paradigm (SEC/OU, 1986, pp. 74–5). Teachers were sceptical of the tone of the guidance they received. In an interview- and questionnaire-based study of practical assessment within the GCSE undertaken by the present authors, teachers did not commonly perceive the GCSE examination as a method by which wholesale revisions of practice were to be promoted. Their concerns focused rather on those areas where the GCSE examination clearly required some innovation: the need to come to terms with a more uniform (although still differentiated) system of assessment, and the need to develop methods for the internal assessment of pupils’ experimental work (Donnelly et al., 1993, chs 6 and 7). The latter, in particular, was the most problematic aspect of the new examination, and teachers were unimpressed with the guidance and training with which they were provided in order to undertake this task. One teacher commented, in relation to video materials which were used during the training process, ‘five bright middle class students . . . (with) more equipment than I’ve ever seen in my life . . . all knew what they were doing and did as they were told . . . no-one running around causing mayhem’ (Donnelly et al., 1993, p. 51). A good deal of the burden of ensuring validity and reliability within coursework assessment was placed on what was usually called ‘professional judgement’. This term helped sustain one of the major claims made for the implementation of coursework assessment: that it increased teachers’ professional authority. However, the claim presents difficulties at two levels. First, it is predicated on teachers’ feeling confident and skilled in the judgements which they are required to make. There is ample evidence that they did not possess such confidence (Donnelly et al., 1993). Secondly, the notion of professional judgement was selectively employed. Liberal use was made of it when discussing teachers’ approach to the detail of assessment, especially when confronted with the manifest variations in individual pupils’ command of supposedly homogeneous ‘skills’. But it was a good deal less evident when teachers’ overall strategic judgement on the curriculum or its mode of assessment was under discussion. As some of the quotations given earlier suggest, in these latter circumstances it was assumed that


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teachers might legitimately be subject to external pressure. Occasionally the comments suggest that teachers were seen as displaying a conservatism which necessitated such external pressure. In short, the notion of professional judgement was deployed selectively and tendentiously.

GRADE-RELATED CRITERIA Although the formation of the ASE working party on coursework assessment suggested that there were substantial concerns about aspects of the examination, the GCSE was implemented without any major difficulty in 1988. Where the examination remained vulnerable was on the question of the standards which it embodied. The standards which were operated within it began to receive critical attention almost routinely as results were announced each year, and as the proportions of pupils obtaining a pass at grade C level steadily increased. Had the proposed linkage to the old O-level grade C pass been sustained? The discussion continued throughout the 1990s, and shows little sign of diminishing. Politicians have shown themselves altogether more sensitive to the issue of ‘standards’ than to curricular or pedagogic content. It may have been in anticipation of the challenge to the proposed linkage that, in January 1984, the Secretary of State announced that systems of criteria referencing were to be developed for the new examination (supporting the assessment of what he called ‘achievement in absolute terms’). However, its implementation was not made conditional on the creation of such systems: fortunately, as it turned out (SEC, 1984b, pp. 60–68). The notion of specifying more exactly the meaning of examination grades was present early in the process by which the GCSE was created, through the requirement to produce limited grade descriptions. The prospect of such specification met with a fairly neutral response in the educational world. Anyone with experience of 16+ assessment knew that individual performance is complex. Although it might be claimed that public examination grades are interpretable, any such interpretation is necessarily founded on judgements based on long experience, rather than the application of explicitly defined systems of criteria. Although they might recognize the benefits of a greater degree of criteria referencing, improved interpretability of grades did not appear to be high on the agenda of many of those working in education. The Secretary of State for Education and Science, Sir Keith Joseph, changed this somewhat relaxed attitude in his speech in January 1984. He argued for greater comparability, within and across, subjects through the development of an increased element of criteria referencing within the examination system, built around the notion of grade-related criteria (GRC). His emphasis was less on interpretability than standards, but the mechanisms suggested to achieve the two aims were broadly similar. The Secondary Examinations Council was given the

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task of developing workable systems of criteria which were interpretable by those responsible for the assessment process and which reflected the patterns of achievement which children actually displayed. Working groups were established and much detailed work was done, some involving post hoc marking of previous candidates’ work. The difficulties of the process (grounded fundamentally on the complexity both of the domains and the patterns of pupil response) became very apparent, and led to many statements that (a) workable GRC were some way off and would require much research and (b) they could not be added post hoc to the existing system of examinations (Murphy, 1986; Kingdon and Stobart, 1988, pp. 148–9). The difficulties which were experienced resulted in the effort shifting eventually to the much less ambitious task of generating what were called performance matrices. However, by this time, the entire exercise had been sidelined as a result of the much more ambitious proposals of the National Curriculum. The shift is reflected in the total absence of any mention of GRC in the 1988 Annual Report from the Secondary Examinations Council, when it had constituted the main GCSE-related topic in that of the previous year (SEC, 1987, pp. 5–6; SEC, 1988). Criteria referencing within the GCSE thus constituted a blind alley, but it is significant for two reasons. First, it highlighted the different concerns and agenda of those in education and their political masters. Secondly, a contrast can be drawn between the cautious and evidence-based approach taken to criteria referencing in the GCSE, and that adopted under the National Curriculum.

THE PURPOSES OF GCSE SCIENCE General Certificate of Secondary Education science as a policy innovation can appear curiously fractured. Viewed from certain perspectives, it appears as a radical, quasi-curricular innovation for all students. Viewed from others, including the policy framework from which it emerged, it can appear as a focused, somewhat technical revision of the assessment system, designed to harmonize that system with the needs of the mainly comprehensive system of secondary education which had grown up. These two perspectives are to some degree reconciled, or at least explained, when the changing institutional and political environment in which the policy was created is examined. It might, for example, be claimed that, given the disparities in attainment and practice between the grammar and secondary modern schools, radical shifts in curriculum were necessary. Yet it is noteworthy that, in the context of the claims and pressures discussed earlier in this chapter, this was not a major issue. According to many of those whom we have quoted, the science curriculum demanded reform, independently of any reform of the examination system. The creation of the GCSE examination provided new routes for the exercise


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of influence. Whatever may have been the government’s intention, the mechanisms by which the National Criteria for the GCSE were established functioned in comparatively independent ways. They shifted influence away from the examination boards (which commonly took the view that their function was to examine) and towards locations and groups (LEA advisers, academic educationists, activists within bodies such as the ASE and the Institute of Physics) with a more radical curricular agenda, and less interest in the technicalities of assessment. There was little concern within this process for the preservation of teacher choice across syllabuses, which would imply diversity of provision. Less understandably, there was also little sign of any concern to acknowledge the legitimacy of teachers’ own judgements on the science curriculum or on their classroom or laboratory practice. Though ‘standards’ have been the subject of ongoing debate, much less attention has been given to the question of whether, outside the very specific demands of school-based assessment, the GCSE examination generated the radical changes of practice which were claimed to be both embedded in it and essential to its success. This must be due, in part, to the introduction of the National Curriculum, which assumed centre stage even before the first GCSE cohort had been examined. So far as coursework assessment is concerned, the available evidence suggests that teachers commonly generated mechanisms to fulfil the assessment requirements imposed upon them to their own agenda, rather than undertaking such thoroughgoing changes in practice as were recommended, for example, in the Secondary Examinations Council/Open University guidance discussed earlier. Claims that such changes can be brought about under the relatively loose and very large-scale regime of GCSE implementation look unconvincing when set against the literature on policy implementation, which suggests that much more tightly focused and supported policy shifts have generated relatively small changes in practice (Waring, 1979; Fullan, 1993), or the more general historical writing of authors such as Cuban (1993) and Tyack (Tyack and Cuban, 1995). The ‘General’ component of the GCSE National Criteria began as follows: ‘For the first time, the partners in the education service have pooled their wisdom and experience in order to produce nationally agreed statements on course objectives, content, and assessment methods for all the subject areas most commonly examined in the final years of compulsory schooling’ (DES/WO, 1985a, Foreword). This was undoubtedly true, so far as it went. But, in science, the process was a good deal less neutral than the statement suggests, and the composition and influence of the ‘partners’ bears close scrutiny. The curricular and authority stakes were high in such a centralized process, and the tendency to push them higher, in pursuit of what was judged desirable change, was great. It can be argued that, whatever the curricular benefits, or otherwise, of this process, the main victims, other perhaps than the independence of the GCE and CSE

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examination boards, were the professional discretion of teachers, and their freedom to choose, indeed create, syllabuses to their own specification. Whatever the outcomes in the sphere of classroom practice, the GCSE became in important respects (procedural, political and in relation to individual teachers’ authority over their work) a rehearsal for the National Curriculum. That is perhaps its greatest significance. It is to the National Curriculum that the next chapter turns.

7 THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM AND SECONDARY SCHOOL SCIENCE

The preceding chapters have examined, in broadly chronological order, a range of interventions in the science curriculum, its assessment and its evaluation. Each of these interventions had a quite distinctive character, and they do not constitute a coherent sequence, still less one which was planned. Nevertheless, at some risk of paradox, it can be argued that the National Curriculum was the culmination of the process. In this chapter, we will be concerned particularly with the procedures by which the substance of the curriculum for science was defined and, within that process, with those aspects which offered most directly to mandate changes in science teachers’ practice. The science element of the National Curriculum did not, of course, stand alone in the educational policy initiatives of its time. It was part of a much wider attempt to address the question of accountability and control within the school curriculum. We will therefore begin this chapter by sketching the political background to the introduction of the Education Reform Act 1988.

TOWARDS A NATIONAL CURRICULUM The notion that all pupils should be entitled to some kind of core curriculum had become an important part of official thinking in relation to schooling in England and Wales during the 1970s. Broad, hortatory signals, such as the HMI Discussion Paper Ten Good Schools (DES/HMI, 1977b) and Prime Minister Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech in October of the previous year, were followed by a more detailed set of working papers, published in December 1977 as Curriculum 11–16. In a section entitled ‘Acceptable and unacceptable variety’, 97

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HMI argued that it was ‘doubtful if the country can afford – educationally as well as financially – the wasted effort, experiments embarked upon and left unfinished or unexamined, unnecessary repetitions, and, most of all, the apparent lack of agreement on fundamental objectives’ (DES, 1977a, p. 3). ‘All this’, claimed Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, was ‘freely acknowledged in discussions all over the country by heads, teachers and administrators’. HMI’s proposal for a core curriculum was centred around so-called ‘areas of experience’, a terminology which looks very dated when compared with the unwavering emphasis on ‘subjects’ under the regime of the National Curriculum. One of the areas identified by HMI was the ‘scientific’. The supposed key characteristics of the ‘scientific’ were expressed in the following terms: The scientific area is concerned especially with observing, predicting, and experimenting. Observing requires direct or indirect evidence from the physical world. Predicting will be based, consciously or unconsciously, on a hypothesis which explains patterns of previous observations. Predicting shows what will be the next most significant observation and its testing may require experimenting, the use of apparatus, physical skills, measurement and calculation. Observing, predicting and experimenting do not merely make up the ‘organized knowledge of the natural world’ which is called science: they constitute a powerful method of problem solving. (Quoted in Fowler, 1988, p. 47)

The central notion here is that the place of science in the curriculum is fundamentally grounded in generic activities and methods, what would come for a time to be called ‘processes’. We saw in Chapter 5 that this emphasis was also influential in the APU science framework, although it has a much longer ancestry (Jenkins, 1988). The views of HMI were not confined to what might be called curriculum content. In 1978, the inspectorate devoted a chapter of another Discussion Paper (number 6) to the curriculum and teaching methods in comprehensive schools (DES/HMI, 1978). Drawing a crucial distinction between mixed ability grouping and mixed ability teaching, HMI listed 19 points, most of which were critical of the consequences of the approach adopted in the schools surveyed. Programmes of work ‘did not provide for differences of ability’, ‘pupils of well above average ability . . . were not adequately catered for’ and, ‘ in most of the schools visited, HM Inspectors felt concern about the pace and level in all of the subjects and year-groups to which mixed-ability organization applied’ (DES/HMI, 1978, ch. 12). This type of comment points towards a growing interest in the methods and approaches employed amongst those with political and professional responsibility for schools. During the early stages of the National Curriculum a distinction was drawn between, on the one hand, the specification of curriculum coverage and learning outcomes, and on the other, teaching methods. It was, however, to be a distinction that proved impossible to maintain.

The National Curriculum and secondary school science

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In the early 1980s, a series of official documents was published which can, with hindsight, be seen as a sustained attempt by the newly elected Conservative administration to persuade schools, local authorities and teachers of the need for a clear curriculum policy that rested on the notion of a core entitlement for all pupils. A Framework for the School Curriculum (DES, 1980) was represented as timely guidance on the place which certain key elements of the curriculum should have in the experience of every pupil. It offered a pointer to the future in the Secretaries of State’s suggestions for the amount of time to be devoted to each of the elements of the common core. In the case of science, this amounted to 10 per cent of timetabled time in the early years of secondary schooling, rising to 20 per cent beyond the age of 13. A View of the Curriculum (DES/HMI, 1980) drew upon the eight ‘areas of experience’ of the earlier HMI document and argued for detailed consultation on how the various curriculum components might be defined and relate to each other. A third document, The School Curriculum (DES/WO, 1981) is of interest because of its assertion that ‘neither the government nor the local authorities should specify in detail what the schools should teach’. The approach remained that of advice and recommendation. By this time, however, the government was becoming increasingly sceptical that such an approach would generate the consensus necessary to achieve its objectives. At a minimum, it would require effective but still voluntary collaboration between the various partners in the education service, especially at the level of curriculum detail, if a common curriculum entitlement were to be implemented in all maintained schools. Despite, or perhaps because of, the curriculum inquiry reported in Curriculum 11–16: Towards a Statement of Entitlement (DES/WO, 1983), central government began, from the mid-1980s, to adopt a much more interventionist stance in the work of the schools. That stance was made clear in Sir Keith Joseph’s speech to the North of England Education Conference in 1984. Joseph announced that the government intended to • define the objectives of the main parts of the 5–16 curriculum so that everyone knows the level of attainment that should be achieved at various stages by pupils of different abilities; • alter the 16+ examinations so that they measure absolute, rather than rela tive, performance; • establish, as a realistic objective, the aim of bringing 80–90 per cent of all pupils at least to the level which is now expected and achieved in the 16+ examinations by pupils of average ability in individual subjects: and to do so over a broad range of skills and competences in a number of subjects (Joseph, 1984). The DES White Paper, Better Schools, saw a further step down the road of regulation of the curriculum (DES, 1985). For the first time, the curriculum through-

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out compulsory schooling, i.e., between the ages of 5 and 16, was addressed as a continuous and coherent whole, underpinned by notions of breadth and balance. In the same year, yet another curriculum document from the inspectorate, The Curriculum from 5 to 16, reinforced the government’s message about continuity and, in an interesting section on assessment, emphasized that ‘learning targets and progress towards achieving them’ needed to be ‘shared between teacher and pupil’ (DES/HMI, 1985). The Education Act 1986 gave head teachers, school governors and local education authorities statutory duties in relation to the curriculum, with the last of these groups required to ‘make and keep up to date a written statement of its policy in relation to the secular curriculum, copies of which will be available for inspection in schools’.

THE EDUCATION REFORM ACT 1988 When Kenneth Baker assumed office in May 1986 as Secretary of State for Education and Science in Margaret Thatcher’s government, he was warned by the Prime Minister that his officials in the DES would try to frustrate any plans he had to reform the education system. None the less, he promised her that, within six months, he would bring forward proposals for fundamental change. Baker announced in December 1986 that he intended to introduce a National Curriculum (Baker, 1993, p. 191). The Secretary of State developed his ideas in a speech to the North of England Education Conference the following month. The way forward lay in ‘establishing a National Curriculum which works through national criteria for each subject area of the curriculum’ (Baker, 1987). This commitment was elaborated in the Conservative Party manifesto for the general election of 1987. Victory in that election was regarded as an endorsement of the government’s policy for educational reform. The wider ideological picture is well known. In a sustained attack during the 1980s, from what came to be called the New Right, those who worked in education were accused of being responsible for many aspects of the alleged decline (moral, intellectual and economic) of England and Wales. The most visible sections of that workforce received a collective title: the ‘educational establishment’ (O’Hear, 1991). Schoolteachers were credited with membership of this establishment, or not, according to political expedience. They, among others, were held to be responsible for the development and teaching of politically tainted and intellectually ungrounded subjects (typically, ‘peace studies’) and for the indiscriminate use of child-centred and progressive methods of teaching. The influence of this ‘establishment’ needed to be curtailed, and the Education Reform Act 1988 was a mechanism for doing so. One of the most important strategic elements of the 1988 Act was the aim of creating a competitive market in educational provision and, in consequence, reducing the influence of education ‘professionals’. The background to this programme has been well docu-


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mented (e.g., Ball, 1990; Brighouse and Moon, 1990; Flude and Hammer, 1990; Knight, 1990; Moon, 1990; Coulby and Bash, 1991; Bowe and Ball, with Gold 1992; Lawton, 1992; Simkins, Ellison and Garrett, 1992; Barber and Graham 1993; Graham with Tytler, 1993; Barber, 1996). A consultation document, The National Curriculum 5–16, soon followed the government’s return to office (DES/WO, 1987). This asserted the right of all pupils in maintained schools to the same educational opportunities, irrespective of where they attended school, and committed the government to raising the standards of attainment throughout the education service. The latter was to be achieved principally by a common core curriculum allied with assessment arrangements which would set clear standards for pupil attainment. During this period, government ministers and others continued to maintain a distinction between curricular entitlement and teaching methods. It was claimed that while the National Curriculum would specify ‘objectives’, it was for schools and teachers to decide ‘the most appropriate teaching methods to use’ (NCC, 1992, p. 7). This distinction between methods and outcomes is both difficult to maintain and subject to different interpretations (Woodhead, 1996, p. 81). In some parts of the science curriculum, most notably the field of pupil investigatory work and so-called ‘process’ outcomes in general, the distinction has always been implausible. But even for other areas, while it has never been formally overthrown, it has been steadily eroded over the subsequent decade. It has become clear that there were important differences of view between the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, about the form which any National Curriculum should take (Baker, 1993, ch. 9). Thatcher was in some respects a minimalist, while Baker was of a more interventionist temper. She became, with hindsight at least, sceptical of the elaborate machinery which was set in motion. Of the curriculum itself she wrote, perhaps disingenuously, It always seemed to me that a small committee of good teachers ought to be able to pool their experience and write down a list of the topics and sources to be covered. There ought to be plenty of scope left for the individual teacher to concentrate with children on the particular aspects of the subject in which he or she felt a special enthusiasm or interest. (Thatcher, 1993, p. 593)

This view highlights an ambiguity about the position of teachers which is of wider relevance. Although, at one level, teachers were the subject of intervention, very often they were conceived as allies in a battle against the decadence of the upper reaches of the so-called ‘educational establishment’. For the Secretary of State, a principal issue was how to effect reform and exercise central control over a system that, from his perspective, was ‘producer-dominated’: ‘We need to inject a new vitality into [the] system. It has become producer-dominated. It has not proved sensitive to the demands for change that have become ever more urgent

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over the past 10 years’ (Hansard, 1987). The necessary vitality could not be injected by ‘voluntary agreement’ among the many interested parties, notably the DES, HMI, schools, teachers, teacher training establishments, and local authorities and their advisers: The education establishment in University Departments of Education were deeply suspicious, some teachers were determined to fight to the death for their own subject specialisms, while others objected to the whole principle of an imposed National Curriculum. It was clear that there would be great difficulty in getting agreement on the content of each subject – even unemotional ones likes maths. (Baker, 1993, pp. 189–90)

The Education Reform Act 1988 can also be seen as a rejection of much of the thinking that had been going on among HMI in the previous decade. The inspectorate’s ‘areas of experience’ were abandoned in favour of ‘subjects’, thus specifying a curriculum which some contemporary commentators judged remarkably similar to that prescribed in the Board of Education Secondary School Regulations issued in 1904 (Aldrich, 1988). The Act also defined the concept of a core curriculum much more rigidly than had been evident in earlier DES publications. It thus swept away the notions of consensus and partnership between central and local government that had underpinned the education service since the Balfour Act of 1902, legislation which, it should be noted, was no less controversial in its day. The 1988 Act transformed institutions, ideology and modes of authority. Terminology ought also to be included. Teachers were henceforth charged with ‘delivering’ a National Curriculum, a formulation barely heard a few years earlier. The industrial/commercial inspiration of the notion of curriculum ‘delivery’ is apparent.

SCIENCE IN THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM Perhaps not surprisingly, it was to prove much easier to establish by legislation the principle of a National Curriculum than to define its substance, implement it in the schools or develop a clear and satisfactory relationship with teachers and their work. The Education Reform Act had established a National Curriculum Council (NCC) and a School Examination and Assessment Council (SEAC), with a differentiation of function reflected in their titles. They were, in due course, to be combined into a single organization. The Act required Parliament to approve secondary legislation, in the form of Statutory Orders defining the various statutory curriculum components. These Orders were to be issued after a cycle of publication, consultation and revision as necessary. Both the cycle, and the bodies eventually charged with managing it, were to prove highly susceptible to influence and manoeuvre by educational interests, similar but in much greater degree to that which had occurred in connection with the National Criteria for the GCSE a few years earlier. The National Curriculum


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5–16 (DES/WO, 1987) introduced the distinction between science, mathematics and English as core, rather than foundation, subjects of the curriculum, and these core subjects were among the first to receive attention.

THE SCIENCE WORKING GROUP The first step towards establishing the Statutory Order for the science component of the National Curriculum was the setting up of a Working Group. The membership of this Group was announced on 10 July 1987, before the Education Reform Bill reached Parliament, and before the key report of a Task Group on Assessment and Testing, which would advise on assessment arrangements, had been written. The Science Working Group was made up largely of academic educationists and science teachers, the latter, with one exception, heads or deputy heads of schools. It was chaired by one of the former, Jeff Thompson, Professor of Education at the University of Bath. This membership sits uneasily alongside the political rhetoric surrounding the introduction of the National Curriculum, exemplified in Kenneth Baker’s speech to Parliament quoted earlier, with its criticism of ‘producer domination’. The same comment could be made about the approach to the assessment arrangements. According to DES News the working groups were required to produce detailed ‘programmes of study’ which made clear ‘the content, skills and processes which all pupils need to be taught so that they can develop the knowledge and understanding they will need to progress through schools and eventually to adult life and employment’ (DES News, 1987). They were also required to produce a statement of ‘attainment targets’ which ‘pupils of different abilities should be able to achieve by the end of the school year in which they reach the key ages’. The precise meaning of these requirements was unclear and the task facing the Science Working Group can properly be described as unprecedented. As events were to develop, attainment targets in particular were to exhibit substantial shifts in meaning. The Bill itself, published some months later, provided little further guidance about how the curriculum was to be specified. It merely defined programmes of study as ‘the matters, skills and processes which are required to be taught’, and attainment targets as ‘the knowledge, skills and understanding which pupils of different abilities and maturities are expected to have by the end of each key stage’ (Education Reform Act 1988). The Science Working Group received both general terms of reference, given to all the subject working groups, and specific guidelines. It was required to take as its starting point Science 5–16: A Statement of Policy (DES/WO, 1985b). In addition to the tasks already identified, it was required to ‘to provide a general account of the contribution of science to the curriculum’ (Science Working Group, 1987: Ann. A). It is perhaps worth noting that this account disappeared from the eventual Statutory Order, and was not to reappear for a decade.

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The Chair of the Group, when interviewed in connection with a research project conducted by the authors, commented: ‘They said to us . . . there’ll be things called programmes of study and attainment targets, and we said to them: “What are they?”, and they said “We don’t know, you’ll invent them” ’ (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 22). The working through of these uncertainties will be a theme of the account which follows. The relationship of the Group’s task to existing practice was unclear. At the time, and arguably ever since, the question has never been brought into sharp focus. The Group’s recommendations were required to ‘reflect current best practice’. Several subissues, close to the central concerns of this book, can be identified. To what extent was the Statutory Order intended to specify the substance of teachers’ practice? Who is competent to judge ‘best practice’, particularly in a contested field such as education, and against the background of the supposed distinction between curricular entitlement and teaching methods? Where in all of this does the authority of individual teachers lie? A further uncertainty related to the question of whether the programmes of study should encompass all that a pupil might be required to learn, or merely specify an element, perhaps a core. We have seen that this ambiguity reflected differences within the government. It was also reflected in the guidance given to the Group. At times, this guidance appeared to favour a limited specification of a core: ‘There must be space to accommodate the enterprise of teachers, offering them sufficient flexibility in the choice of content to adapt what they teach to the needs of individual pupils’ (Science Working Group, 1987, Ann. A). There are echoes here of Margaret Thatcher’s views on the matter. Elsewhere in the guidance, the image of the curriculum is that of a much more detailed and comprehensive map. Kenneth Baker wrote, ‘I am expecting the programme of study to provide a detailed description of the content, skills and processes which all pupils need to be taught . . . The detailed description needs to be set within an outline or overall map of the science curriculum’ (Science Working Group, 1987, Ann. B). In sum, the ambiguities which ran through this experiment in statutory curricular specification cut across such issues as attitudes to teachers, the degree (and, as will be seen, methods) of curricular specification, and the involvement, amidst the hostile rhetoric, of the ‘educational establishment’. All of this left a good deal of space for manoeuvre by both the Science Working Group and other groups which, as we will see, later took responsibility for the process. The notion of an ‘attainment target’ proved to be a key flexible element in this process. The Science Working Group’s initial approach was identified in an Interim Report. This report presented attainment targets as specific areas of knowledge, to be differentiated across pupils of varying abilities by the range of contexts within which ideas were deployed. The following is given as an example of an attainment target at Key Stage 3 in the Group’s Interim Report: ‘In the context of working on food chains pupils should understand that animals ulti-


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mately depend on plants, (Science Working Group, 1987, p. 60, emphasis in the original). This approach may be seen as attempting to fulfil the requirement, given in the guidance, that attainment targets were to be ‘clearly specified objectives’ (Science Working Group, 1987, Ann. B). Such a stance was also visible in the early work of other groups. The Mathematics Group, for example, began originally with 354 attainment targets but these were subsequently ‘whittled down’ to 14 (Graham with Tytler, 1993, p. 31). But such a process could not be merely a quantitative reduction. It implied a radical change in character. This change was also to be visible in the approach of the Science Working Group. In March 1988, between the Science Working Group’s Interim and Final reports, the report of the Task Group on Assessment and Testing was published (TGAT, 1988). The rationale and outcomes of this report have received much attention, not least from Margaret Thatcher. It was written, she suggested, in ‘inpenetrable [sic] educationalist jargon’ (Thatcher, 1993, p. 595; Daugherty, 1995). The report belied the notion that the National Curriculum would involve a retrenchment from ‘progressive’ educational ideas, or a reduction of the influence of their promoters. Its key recommendations, that criteria referencing be made the basis of National Curriculum assessment, that differentiation at, and across, ages be assimilated to a unified ten-level scale and that national assessment could be multifunctional, were striking in their ambition. Beyond these proposals about the assessment structure proper was a raft of recommendations which emphasized the importance of teacher assessment and offered systems for supporting this process. The TGAT recommendations were accepted in full, if somewhat ungraciously, by the government. To judge from the shift between the Interim and Final reports they appeared to require almost a fresh start by the Science Working Group, though there are reported to have been informal contacts between the two Groups. The need to fit performance into a system of ten levels, without gaps in particular areas, and to integrate progression over time with level of performance at any age presented major difficulties. When the Science Working Group published its final report the character of attainment targets had also changed (DES/WO, 1988). Each had become a general title for a broad area of the curriculum. They were no longer ‘clear objectives’ but rather the headings for an organizational structure. This shift is also visible in the relationship with the programmes of study. Whereas in Interim Report the attainment targets developed from non-statutory organizing themes, in the Final Report they constituted the themes out of which the programmes of study were constructed. To fill the gap which the shift had left, the Group invented what were called ‘statements of attainment’. The proposed Statutory Order for science had become a detailed, albeit small-scale, map of the curriculum in which the axes which served to define it were, on the one hand, the list of attainment targets, and, on the other, the ten levels of attainment recommended

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by the Task Group on Assessment and Testing. This account of the structure of the science National Curriculum may appear to be only a footnote to the larger process. But it is, arguably, much more significant than that for one of our key themes, the control of science teachers’ work. It is unclear on what basis the notion of an attainment target was adapted to an organizational function. It can be recalled that attainment targets have a direct statutory character within the Education Reform Act. The shift ensured that the organizational structure was also an assessment structure. The underlying judgement may have been that anything that was not formally and statutorily assessed would be relegated or ignored by teachers and perhaps not taken seriously by government or its advisers. As one Science Working Group member argued: ‘. . . it’s just human nature that if you have got to assess certain things, those will be what they will teach’ (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 27). The use of attainment targets as the organizing structure of the curriculum ensured that no element of the proposed science curriculum could be marginalised, since none could be excluded from the assessment process. But the link to assessment was not without costs. There was ambivalence over the Group’s legitimate role in the promotion of curricular change, arising, in part, from the obligation to ‘reflect current best practice’. Judgements of what constitutes ‘best practice’ are diverse. The Working Group itself seemed somewhat ambivalent about the issue. It claimed that its Report reflected ‘what many teachers . . . are already doing’. Other teachers, it was asserted, ‘will recognize our framework as one within which they are already aspiring to teach, even if they do not yet feel fully confident about dealing with all its aspects’ (DES/WO, 1988, para. 1.23). We interpret the Report as indicating that the Group interpreted its task as being comprehensively to define, and where necessary to alter, science teachers’ practice. The difficulties in identifying the legitimate boundaries of such an undertaking are obvious enough. They were mitigated by presenting any gap between the Group’s proposals and science teachers’ existing practice as no more than a matter of ‘aspiration’. This was a convenient label, but it had very limited empirical support, if any, and, arguably, embodied a degree of condescension. For Paul Black, the chairman of the Task Group on Assessment and Testing, the outcome of the work of the Science Working Group reflected a consensus, but ‘a consensus of the leading edge . . . if you went out into the highways and byways and got everybody’s view, that might be different’ (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 28). The Final Report was expansionist in tone. Science was to occupy 20 per cent of curriculum time in the secondary schools and encompass all that might be thought desirable in science education. For Graham, the Report manifested a tendency to ‘grab every passing kitchen sink’ and to be ‘all things to all men’(Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 28). It ‘covered the three sciences of chemistry,


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physics and biology and . . . poached a good deal of earth science from geography’ (Baker, 1993, p. 204). Such ‘poaching’ did not go unopposed from the geography community. Storm described, in somewhat florid language, the science proposals as ‘intellectually megalomaniacal’ (Storm, 1989a, p. 13) and referred to the ‘gargantuan claim of science to encompass just about everything’ (Storm, 1989b, p. 103). The Group divided the proposed science curriculum into no less than 22 attainment targets, distributed over four ‘Profile Components’ (Knowledge and Understanding, Exploration and Investigation, Communication, and Science in Action). Seeking to avoid some of the difficulties precipitated by the link to the assessment mechanism, the Group did not identify ten levels of performance for some of the more problematic areas. The proposals showed clearly, if it had ever been doubted, that the mechanisms which had been set up to generate the National Curriculum need not necessarily lead to a narrowing of the curriculum, or to a limitation to a traditional content. They were indeed amenable to producing quite the reverse effect.

THE 1989 STATUTORY ORDER FOR SCIENCE The Secretaries of State’s response to the proposals of the Science Working Group were published, along with the Final Report itself, in August 1988 (DES/WO, 1988). Their response was mixed. The idea that science should automatically occupy 20 per cent of curriculum time was rejected outright. The shift in the nature of attainment targets was accepted. But the Secretaries of State rejected important aspects of the assessment structure that the Group had proposed, and particularly its resistance to the strict use of the ten levels recommended by TGAT. This response ensured that a substantial revision was necessary. It was not, however, the original members of the Working Group who were to undertake the revisions required by the Secretaries of State. Rather the work was done by groups whose precise status and institutional location are unclear. It appears that they worked under the authority of civil servants within the DES so that, in the words of a member of the original Science Working Group, the revision was ‘all very secretly done . . . no-one quite knew who was working on it’ (Donnelly et al., 1996a, p. 32). While the invisibility of the process may be seen as a consequence of its speed and novelty, the institutional and political setting had an impact on the substance of the science component of the National Curriculum. Significantly, the revision was also undertaken at the same time as the Group’s proposals, set out in its Final Report, were the subject of public consultation. Most of the work of revision was in fact undertaken by a group consisting mainly of HMI and civil servants. The membership of the group also included Jeff Kirkham, who was seconded from his responsibilities as Director of the

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Secondary Science Curriculum Review. Kirkham, a member of the Steering Group of the Assessment of Performance Unit, played an important role in creating a revised curriculum structure of 17 attainment targets. This first appeared in public in a Consultation Report, issued by the National Curriculum Council in December 1988. A Draft Order, based closely on the Consultation Report, was published for further consultation in late December 1988, with the order itself being laid before Parliament in March 1989, to come into effect on dates between August 1989 and August 1993. Politically, the process through which this version of the National Curriculum for science was created had demonstrated a shift from a publicly constituted and visible body, albeit one whose representativeness of wider teacher opinion was uncertain, to groups whose representativeness was entirely unclear. In substance, the proposed Order was a less radical, but also a less integrated, document than its predecessor. Fifteen of the 17 attainment targets focused on more or less traditional areas of subject knowledge, with the partial exception of information technology. Two, AT1 (Exploration of Science) and AT17 (The Nature of Science), retained something of the thrust of the original proposals. What was called Non-Statutory Guidance relating to the Order was published in June 1989. This document is significant more because of its tone than its content. Although it continued to be suggested in contemporary documents and speeches that the National Curriculum was concerned with outcomes and not with teaching methods, the Non-Statutory Guidance adopted a quite different tone: ‘. . . teachers will need to review their teaching styles to ensure that investigative work uses, reinforces and develops the concepts of science’ (NCC, 1989, p. D1). Within a matter of months, therefore, the change required of science teachers was no longer that of realizing their already existing ‘aspirations’, as it had been construed by the Working Group. Teachers were required to ‘review their teaching styles’ in accordance with the interpretation placed on the Statutory Order by the National Curriculum Council and its officers. Three main strands will run through the remainder of this chapter, which will examine no fewer than three further versions of the Statutory Order. The most prominent theme is concerned with the forms of curriculum development which were promoted within the National Curriculum for science. A second is the growing constraint on teachers’ work, and the corresponding limitation in the discretion of teachers to seek to adjust their teaching to the needs and interests of their pupils. The third is a development of these two points, and a continuation of the major theme running throughout this book: what account was taken, within the process, of the professional authority of science teachers? We will begin by examining the two attainment targets which required a substantial measure of pedagogic and curricular change.


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ATTAINMENT TARGETS 1 AND 17 These two attainment targets together bore the main weight of curriculum development within the 1989 Order. Each addressed generic aspects of science. It was, of course, teachers themselves who were to be required to implement them. The requirement was backed by the force of law, and by the certainty that the attainment targets must be assessed. Each might be construed as offering an account of the nature of science, but they were significantly at odds in the perspective which they took. This tension is a point at which the ad hoc nature of the revision of the Working Group’s report was visible. Although detailed information on the process is not available, so far as can be judged, the difference in emphasis stemmed from the fact that different groups worked on each of the two attainment targets. The construction of AT1 was strongly influenced by the assessment framework associated with the Assessment of Performance Unit. It appears that former APU staff were involved in both the Order and the Non-Statutory Guidance associated with it. Attainment Target 1 can be summed up by quoting from its introductory section: Pupils should develop the intellectual and practical skills that allow them to explore the world of science . . . The activities should encourage the ability to: i. ii. iii. iv. v.

plan, hypothesise and predict design and carry out investigations interpret results and findings draw inferences communicate exploratory tasks and experiments. (DES/WO, 1989, p. 3)

Here, science appeared centrally as a laboratory activity. That view was reinforced in the statements of attainment. When these are explored in greater detail, the notion of variable handling is seen to provide an important unifying theme across several of the levels. Inductive inference was the exemplar (though not the only) form of scientific reasoning represented. Uncertainty within scientific practice and its outcomes was acknowledged, but construed in terms of deficits in approach, expressed in such terms as ‘unreliability’ and ‘invalidity’. At the highest level, Level 10, pupils should be able to ‘evaluate critically (an extended investigation) in terms of sources of unreliability and invalidity’ (DES/WO, 1989, p. 5). In effect, the ten levels of AT1 offered a hierarchy of scientific performance, focused on the laboratory, and with the various other facets of scientific activity standing in a dependent and largely unproblematic relationship to empirical work. It was, within this rather broad sense, an empiricist account of science. The approach which has just been sketched for AT1 stood in profound contrast to AT17, which was explicitly named ‘The Nature of Science’. The preamble to AT17 suggested that pupils should ‘develop their knowledge and

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understanding of the ways in which scientific ideas change through time’ (DES/WO, 1989, p. 36–7). This may appear to be unremarkable, and interpretable in terms of a traditional account of scientific progression. But the sentence went on: ‘and how the nature of these ideas and the uses to which they are put are affected by the social, moral, spiritual and cultural contexts in which they are developed . . .’ Here, a quite different perspective begins to emerge: the idea that scientific ideas are subject, in their substance, to extraneous influences. Nor was this view merely projected on to historical events. At Level 5 (a level meant to be achieved by pupils of average ability at about age 12–13) pupils were expected to ‘be able to demonstrate that different interpretations of the experimental evidence that they have collected are possible’. At Level 10 pupils in AT17 were to ‘relate differences of scientific opinion to the uncertain nature of scientific evidence . . .’. This stood in fairly explicit contrast with the notion in AT1 that difficulties in the interpretation of scientific data derive from ‘sources of invalidity and unreliability’. The account could be developed in greater detail, but it must suffice here to claim that the two versions of the ‘nature of science’ embedded in Attainment Targets 1 and 17 represented distinctive and perhaps mutually inconsistent standpoints on ‘the nature of science’. Attainment Target 1 stressed an unproblematic experimentalism, or at least one within which the problems were concerned with accessing more ‘valid and reliable’ data. By contrast, AT17 placed great stress on the notion of science as a human endeavour, and implied that, as an inescapable consequence, a degree of contingency ran through all scientific interpretations of the world. These two attainment targets reflected two quite different intellectual traditions within the first version of the National Curriculum. Attainment Target 1 spoke, albeit very loosely, with the voice of established science. That of AT17 reflected, again loosely, the emergent field of science studies, and that in its more radical variants. As the editor of the British Journal for the History of Science wrote: ‘The over-riding statement of intent (of AT17) . . . is one that might be welcomed by the most radical exponent of the view that scientific knowledge is shaped by social, economic and political context’ (British Journal for the History of Science, 1990, pp. 1–2). Several points emerge from an examination of these two attainment targets. Again, we can note the potential for curricular radicalism which the National Curriculum appeared to embody. Like the GCSE before it, but to considerably greater effect, it was relatively easy for the policy mechanisms of the National Curriculum to be employed to promote wholesale curricular change, whatever may have been the intentions of their authors. But the contradictory nature of the two elements, particularly when followed through into later revisions, illustrates how sensitive were the outcomes of the process to the vagaries of power and influence. Finally, and by contrast, it is remarkable how little attention was devoted to the means by which these prescriptions might be implemented by


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teachers themselves, or their outcomes assessed. For some, this last was a wholly desirable characteristic. One member of the Science Working Group remarked that the Group set out to create an ‘opportunity’, rather than an ‘outcomes’, orientated curriculum (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 25). Issues of assessment, however, could not be avoided so easily.

THE 1991 REVISION The 1989 Statutory Order for Science was never fully implemented or assessed before it was drastically revised during 1991. This revision became necessary, in part, because of the questionable advice of the School Examination and Assessment Council that it was necessary to assess pupils’ performance on every attainment target. With 17 attainment targets in the 1989 Statutory Order for Science, the procedure promised to become entirely unworkable. Accordingly, the new Secretary of State, Kenneth Clarke, made clear at the North of England Education Conference in January 1991 that the science Order would be reviewed and the number of attainment targets would be reduced. The review took place between January and October of that year and was undertaken, not by the National Curriculum Council, as might perhaps have been expected, but by a small group consisting mainly of HMI. According to Graham, of the National Curriculum Council, the process occurred ‘behind closed doors . . . in inordinate haste, with . . . civil servants, HMI . . . trying to prove to ministers we were good boys after all’. He stressed the involvement of civil servants in substantive educational matters: ‘it is incredible to see people who have never been in a classroom arguing the toss and the points of teaching detail and sometimes winning’ (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 42). Any consultation with science teachers was minimal. It eventually proved necessary to seek advice from Mike Coles, a professional officer for science with the National Curriculum Council and formerly a science adviser when Graham was Chief Education Officer for Suffolk. This, in turn, led to a situation in which decisions were taken about the form and content of the statutory curriculum by groups and individuals drawn into the process, if not by chance, then at least according to very particular orientations. The outcomes of this hasty and private process were published as the proposals of the Secretaries of State in May 1991. The introduction to the document (DES/WO, 1991) stressed that the intention of the revision had been ‘not to alter the curriculum to be covered’ but to ‘simplify the structure’. A glance at the text of the order reveals this to be a surprising claim. The simplified structure now rested upon five, rather than 17, attainment targets and incorporated a new version of AT1, commonly referred to as ‘Sc1’ and entitled ‘Scientific Investigation’. The earlier term ‘Exploration of Science’ had, it seemed, ‘not been well understood by parents or teachers’. Although supposedly incorporating the

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versions of AT1 and AT17 discussed above, the latter (AT17) was more or less entirely discarded. After consultation on the proposals, a further important change was made: the number of attainment targets was reduced from five to four. The new Order was published in December 1991, to come into effect from August 1992. Three of the four attainment targets (entitled respectively ‘Life and Living Processes’, ‘Materials and their Properties’ and ‘Physical Processes’) were open to the charge that they were no more than thinly veiled versions of biology, chemistry and physics, supplemented by Sc1, ‘Scientific Investigation’. This was a sensitive issue for some in science education. We have not so far discussed the fact that the science element of the National Curriculum made no reference to the three disciplines out of which ‘science’ as a curricular component was created. In part, this is because the matter was never a significant issue within the creation of the National Curriculum. In this respect, the National Curriculum helped resolve one of the key themes in the previous chapter – the tension between the three science disciplines and ‘science’. It is in this sense that it can also be seen as deriving even from such an unlikely progenitor as the Secondary Science Curriculum Review. It was after the introduction of the National Curriculum that the major growth of Double Award science began. We will have more to say about this in the following chapter. We will also suggest there that, although in statutory terms there was only the curricular subject ‘science’, matters were altogether more complex in schools. It seems probable that the existence of three attainment targets with such a clear linkage to the three major science disciplines went some way to ensuring, to the disappointment of some in science education, that these disciplines retained a place in the organization of the school science curriculum. In any event, such evidence as is available, also to be discussed in the following chapter, suggests that teachers found incorporating these three attainment targets into the curriculum unproblematic in principle. The focus was mainly on adjusting ‘content’ coverage. It was during this period that schemes of work became a central tool within science departments, although perhaps to a more limited extent in the independent than the maintained sector, and were orientated particularly to ensuring coverage of these statutory requirements. This necessity was also prominent in the growing number of published schemes, which proclaimed their guaranteed coverage of the Order. The major difficulty which teachers experienced was in maintaining such coverage, as the Order changed during the several revisions. Publishers, too, were affected by the revisions which were made, sometimes finding that entire, expensively produced, series were instantly out of date. Matters were otherwise for the first Attainment Target (AT1, or as it now began to be called, Sc1). Here, the attempt to impose radical change not only survived but was arguably reinforced. Influential commentators and supporters, such as the science HMI Neville Evans and Professor Paul Black, demonstrated


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this very explicitly: ‘AT1 represents a noble attempt to break away from the kind of experience that so many adults recall of their school science – practicals of little challenge beyond following quite easy instructions and few demands to think’ (Evans, 1994, p. 10); and ‘To a degree (Sc1) is a distorted view but . . . what we had before this was in some ways worse . . . there was very little practical work in some schools, a lot in other schools but that practical work was in a sense a cookbook . . . practical work was following rules’ (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 72). The generality of these remarks is worth noting. The then Chair of the Association for Science Education set out the agenda for change even more explicitly: ‘. . . not all teachers were doing it, and I think that the way the change has been disseminated has shown how difficult it is to get teachers to change’ (Donnelly et al, 1996. p. 72). These kinds of claim were based on the emphasis which Sc1 placed on individual pupil investigations. The preamble to the statements of attainment in the 1991 version of Sc1 at each level each now began with the phrase ‘[pupils should] plan and carry out investigations’. This was later to be interpreted as meaning that, for the purposes of assessment, pupils should independently originate, plan, carry out and interpret ‘whole investigations’. So far as science teachers were concerned, this requirement was the single most challenging element of the new Order. Between 1991 and 1995, when the National Curriculum was yet again revised, they experienced mounting difficulty and frustration in operating Sc1, thus interpreted, in the schools and in discharging the associated responsibilities for assessment. These difficulties have been fully explored elsewhere (Donnelly et al., 1996). Here our point can be made more briefly. To a significant degree, the difficulties which science teachers faced stemmed from the fact that Sc1 was entirely a creature of the National Curriculum. It had very limited, if any, independent grounding either in the science disciplines or in teachers’ traditions of practice. There is some suggestion that at first teachers saw it as no more than an extension of their existing practices. Referring to surveys conducted in 1989 and 1990 an ASE officer remarked in 1991 that: ‘(AT1) had not been cited as a teaching problem in the earlier survey – “We’ve been doing it for years”, but over half of the respondents to the second survey gave it as the major assessment problem’ (Ramsden, 1991, p. 18). There is ample evidence from the evaluation of the voluntary pilot conducted in 1992 that teachers and LEAs did not see the text of Sc1 as requiring the independent whole investigations which eventually became so problematic (NFER/Brunel University, 1992, p. 6). It required the intervention of the School Examination and Assessment Council and an explicit ‘ruling’, in 1992, that the assessment of Sc1 must be based on whole investigations to establish that this was what the text of Attainment Target 1 meant: ‘The statements at each level are prefaced by the words: “pupils should carry out investigations in which they . . .” All of the abilities that pupils need to demonstrate have therefore to

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be assessed in the context of whole investigations’ (SEAC, 1992, p. 10, our emphasis). It is perhaps worth noting that the authoritative ‘therefore’ in the previous quotation was somewhat premature, since the guidance published by the National Curriculum Council itself recognized that investigations might not involve pupils undertaking the entire process (NCC, 1993, p. 38). Despite the role traditionally claimed for laboratory work in school science education, Sc1 represented, not continuity, but a break with the past. The assessment requirements imposed by SEAC on teachers and examining groups alike constituted the chosen vehicle for imposing a particular vision of the attainment target and of pupil laboratory work. In the absence of any shared tradition of practice, a strict and mechanistic adherence to the statements of attainment came to dominate practice in schools. The eventual form of Sc1, as it appeared in 1991, was therefore underpinned by three key elements: the government’s agenda for change and the power which it mobilized; the effort to undertake a wholesale mapping and regulation of the science curriculum on the part of the Science Working Group; and the demands of assessment, particularly the ten-level, criteria-referenced model. The outcome, for all four attainment targets promulgated in 1991, although arguably for quite different reasons, was similar. It involved a technicalizing and narrowing of science teachers’ work and an over-reliance on the formulations and rhetoric of the Statutory Order, particularly its statements of attainment. The whole was predicated, we suggest, on a barely concealed judgement that science teachers might reasonably be subject to whatever curricular prescriptions appeared important to those writing the Order. The difficulties of implementing Sc1, and especially of accessing the highest levels, precipitated a minor crisis within secondary science education during 1993, and required an almost unprecedented intervention by SEAC, at a time when the GCSE examinations were only a matter of months away (Donnelly et al., 1996). But this crisis was first overshadowed, then resolved, fortuitously, by the larger crisis in the entire National Curriculum and its associated assessment arrangements.

THE 1995 AND 1999 STATUTORY ORDERS We may complete our account of the National Curriculum for science rather more briefly. The detail of particular elements, and the episode of Sc1, were of less significance than the pattern of intervention in teachers’ work. By 1991, that pattern had been established in a form which it retains at the time of writing. Changes in the National Curriculum were introduced in 1995, following a review by Sir Ron Dearing. This review had been prompted by, among much


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else, a teacher boycott of National Curriculum testing in 1993. It must be said that science teachers, despite the depth of their feeling about Sc1, were not prominent in the resistance which was mounted, which was led by teachers of English in particular. In undertaking his review, Dearing consulted widely, his strategy including the invitation of comments through the Times Educational Supplement (TES). The completed review was presented to a new authority, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA), created from the former National Curriculum Council and the School Examination and Assessment Council, and published in January 1994. The review set out principles for ‘slimming down’ the National Curriculum and proposed a more manageable system of assessment. The specification of the assessment arrangements was further distinguished from that of GCSE by the removal of Levels 9 and 10 (Dearing, 1993). New Orders were required. Curriculum proposals for science were published for consultation in May 1994 and a new Statutory Order came into force for the 1995–96 school year. In science, as a result of this review, the structure of Sc1 was made more flexible. The remaining attainment targets remained broadly unchanged, although the detail was altered and the highly constraining statements of attainment were removed. However, the opportunity and agenda for promoting curricular change remained and, in a preamble to the Order which came to be known as Sc0, some further radical requirements were installed in the curriculum. Teachers were, for example, required, at Key Stage 4, to ‘consider ways in which scientific ideas may be affected by the social and historical contexts in which they develop, and how these contexts may affect whether or not the ideas are accepted’ (DfE/WO, 1995, p. 24). This importation of the view that substantive aspects of scientific knowledge are conditioned by social circumstances was effectively a reintroduction of a similar theme which had been very visible in AT17, in the 1989 version of the National Curriculum. It drew, if perhaps in somewhat simplistic form, on claims and arguments from within the field of sociology of science. (Compare with the comment of the editor of the British Journal for the History of Science on AT17 quoted above.) Again, little thought appeared to have been given to the means by which these aims were to be achieved by science teachers. They were not supplied with even the somewhat dubious support of the Non-Statutory Guidance which had been available in 1989. The underlying point is that this curriculum, which statutorily governed the day-to-day work of teachers (and, of course, the curricular experiences of children), could be adjusted and altered in quite radical ways under whatever influences were for the time being significant within the relevant governmental advisory body. Dearing recommended that there should be no more changes to the National Curriculum for a further five years. Teachers adapted to the now more stable pattern in ways to be discussed in the following chapter. A new review was com-

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pleted in 1999. Responsibility for advising the Secretary of State about any further changes, introduced in September 2000, lay with yet another organisation, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), established on 1 October 1997 to promote quality and coherence in education and training, and bring together the work of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ) and the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. In his letter to QCA, asking the Authority to ‘consult widely about changes to the National Curriculum’, the Labour Secretary of State, David Blunkett, drew particular attention to the need to keep ‘National Curriculum science in step with the changing world of the 21st century’(DfEE/QCA, 1999). As with the earlier, 1995, revision, schools, science teachers, the learned scientific societies and the Association for Science Education were widely consulted about their views. In addition, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority undertook its own consultations about, and monitoring of, a range of National Curriculum issues. Beyond this, however, the writing of the revised curriculum was undertaken by the professional officers within QCA. Despite the mechanism of consultations, to a large extent the pattern of the National Curriculum, in its relations with practising teachers, remains what it had become nearly a decade earlier with the 1991 Order: an exhaustive prescription, mixing specification of ‘content’ with attempts at more or less radical innovation, the latter enforced by the mechanisms of assessment. It is, of course, the case that innovations, when compelled by force of law, will be put into operation in some form, as has been the case for Sc1. But the quality and value of the outcome of such an approach is at best questionable. The form in which Sc1 has survived has lent itself to a mechanistic and routinized ‘delivery’. This tendency has been well recorded by the Office for Standards in Education: Much investigatory work remains separate from other activities and is used as a tool for the assessment of practical skills rather than as an integral part of teaching. Most investigatory work is of the ‘fair test’ kind, often guided by planning templates. The range of contexts used is narrow and sometimes repetitive . . . (Ofsted, 1999, n. p.)

This is scarcely a resounding endorsement, after the best part of a decade, of the merits of compulsory curriculum development. Yet the continuing attractions of such an approach for some is illustrated by the decision to take up into the assessed element the material relating to the sociology of scientific knowledge located in the preamble to the 1995 Order, and cited above (DfEE/QCA, 1999, p. 46). How little has been learnt about the relation between statutory specification, the work of teachers and curriculum development, is indicated in the following comment by the then Chair of the Association for Science Education: a ‘simple


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rewording of the [national] curriculum will produce a radical refocusing of [science] teaching’ which will ‘change children’s values, attitudes and their whole way of thinking about science’ (TES, 1999, p. 2).

CONCLUSION For those whose interest lies in the making of national educational policy for England and Wales, the implementation of the National Curriculum offers a rich field of study. The broad outlines of the policy shifts that have taken place are clear enough, as are the motives that lie behind them. What is less clear, and has not had the attention it deserves, is how, within that process, the professional responsibilities and authority of teachers were construed. Early in the process, the predominant approach was to be found in the formulaic claim that the National Curriculum was about learning outcomes rather than teaching methods. This claim was itself contentious on both counts. Do teachers have no legitimate claim on the specification of the outcomes of the curriculum? Do not some of the teaching outcomes specified within the science component of the National Curriculum, and no doubt elsewhere, imply particular teaching methods? Matters are, in any case, more complex, because the science National Curriculum has never been merely a matter of codifying a well-established set of practices, or of specifying some minimalist core, in the manner supposedly favoured by Margaret Thatcher. It was quickly adapted to a much more ambitious agenda. First, the process by which successive revisions of the science National Curriculum took place were increasingly removed, if not from the public domain, then from the immediate control of groups that might have a legitimate claim to represent the science teaching profession. Such removal is consistent with the centralizing tendency evident in other areas of government policy. There are, of course, formal systems of consultation. But the operation of these systems and their effect remain unclear. The institutional arrangements within which the various Statutory Orders for Science were created shifted between 1988 and 1991. The Science Working Group, with a broadly representative membership and formal terms of reference, gave way to increasingly ad hoc and private mechanisms. Associated with this was a process of attenuation of the ambitious structure devised by the Group. While this structure could be criticized from several directions, it at least embodied a sustained effort at coherence. It was replaced by a structure which was the resultant of a range of political and ideological forces. Some of these were contingent, depending on the personnel, institutions and data which happened to be in place and accessible. The major example of this was provided by the role of APU. Here, an organization with quite a different brief, and subject to quite different pressures, came to have a formative role.

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Second, what began, or at least was presented by government, as an attempt to ensure curriculum entitlement, raise standards and make the education service more accountable to parents, pupils and government, soon came, in the case of science, to include a significant element of curriculum development. The process was most evident in the case of the first attainment target of the science component of the National Curriculum which, as noted above, underwent major revisions between 1989 and 2000. It may be claimed with some conviction that where such development was not grounded upon science teachers’ existing expertise and, where necessary, adjusted to accommodate it, severe difficulties ensued. In the case of Sc1, these difficulties were so severe as to raise questions about the survival of the attainment target when the 1991 version of the National Curriculum was subject to the Dearing review. Other curricular initiatives, notably the attempt to introduce philosophical and sociological perspectives, derived from what is broadly called ‘science studies’ in the academic world, have also faced difficulties. These areas have figured only intermittently in the Statutory Order, but in 1999 they were finally installed in the statutorily assessed requirements. How they are to be taught and assessed remains an open question. Yet, ironically, from another perspective, the introduction of a National Curriculum has stifled science curriculum development for pupils below the age of 16. More is involved here than requiring science teachers to discharge their obligations under statute. The institutions, mechanisms and personnel required to encourage and sustain national or local science curriculum development have all been attenuated where they have not been abolished. Teachers have found their task largely reduced to that of ‘delivering’ the National Curriculum and within it, others’ judgements about what change is desirable. Areas of innovation which did not engage with the agendas of, especially, pupil investigatory work have been stifled. To anticipate one of the themes of the next chapter, government’s understandable commitment to a common curriculum entitlement has led to the production of a curriculum which some science teachers find does not allow them to meet the needs of many of their pupils, especially at Key Stage 4. Whether recent revisions will ease this difficulty remains to be seen, although it is clear that there is the potential for an uncomfortable tension between the government’s stance and the flexibility that science teachers judge necessary if they are to meet the needs of all those whom they teach. Finally, in those attainment targets which have not been the subject of enforced curriculum development, that is, those focusing on what is called ‘content’, the effect of the National Curriculum has been symbiotic with the well-established tendency for school science education to become dominated by the coverage of a body of well-defined authoritative knowledge. The growth of prescriptive schemes of work and the purchase of highly structured commercial texts, sometimes ‘endorsed’ or ‘approved’ by examining bodies (Jenkins, 1999, p. 140), may


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both be judged consequences of this tendency. Whether the tendency is beneficial or otherwise is perhaps an open question, though it self-evidently has major implications for science teachers’ professional situation. Writing when the difficulties we have sketched had already become apparent, Paul Black, one of the principal actors in the events with which this chapter has been concerned, wrote: The dilemma of professional educators was that they perceived an opportunity, possibly unique, to ‘get it right’, and were reluctant to warn of the costs and the lengthy time essential to make their recommendations work, lest they be rejected out of hand . . . it might have been better if all parties had been able to admit at the outset that they did not really know how to formulate a national curriculum. (Black, 1995, p. 183)

This provides a beguiling perspective on the implementation of the science element of the National Curriculum, but it raises important questions. In particular, it invites the question of whether practising science teachers, many of whom may have had a different opinion about key aspects of the initiatives from the beginning, are included in the category of ‘professional educators’.

8 SCIENCE TEACHERS’ RESPONSE TO CHANGE

The principal focus of the preceding chapters has been the policy framework, and other major institutional influences, within which science teaching has developed during the last four decades. Except perhaps in the case of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review, and there somewhat ambivalently, teachers have appeared in these chapters on the margins of policy initiatives. That is to say, their views did not have a major influence in the process of policy creation and, in the field of implementation, their role was seen by government and by influential groups, such as LEA advisers and academic educationists, as essentially responsive. In this chapter we turn our attention to science teachers’ response to the events described earlier. We are not able to provide a fully systematic account. Data on how these events were experienced by science teachers are not extensive, while studies of their practice, the largest of which are those of Ofsted, tend to be conducted in evaluative mode. We ourselves have generated a substantial part of the empirical evidence on which we will draw.1 It is partly because of the paucity of evidence that it might be inferred that science teachers’ experiences have not been of interest or concern for policy-makers or researchers. This attitude is perhaps most fully visible in Ofsted documents, in which, no doubt for good reason, science teachers’ views and experiences are more or less invisible, and the focus is entirely on their ability to ‘deliver’, or not, improvements in ‘standards’. Whatever may be the reasons for this lack of attention to teachers’ views, the consequence is that it is difficult to provide a securely grounded account of the changes in either experience or attitude which accompanied the policy shifts on which earlier chapters have focused. The main concern of the present chapter will be with the more recent changes, 120

Science teachers’ response to change

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especially those which have been engendered by governmental initiatives with general applicability to the maintained sector of secondary schooling. The impact of the Nuffield project and the Secondary Science Curriculum Review, which are in any case more marginal to present-day circumstances, has been discussed in the relevant chapters. The present chapter has four main sections. The first focuses on the shift away from disciplinary specialisms which occurred during the 1980s and 1990s. The second is concerned with the introduction of the GCSE examination. The third will examine the implementation of the National Curriculum. These sections will be followed by a short account of more general aspects of science teachers’ work as it appeared at the close of the 1990s.

DISCIPLINARY SPECIALISMS UNDER PRESSURE The view that science teachers could, or should, teach outside their disciplinary specialisms in science has become commonplace only quite recently. In January 1980 a short article appeared in Education in Science written by Jeff Kirkham, then Science Adviser for Leicestershire LEA. It began as follows: ‘WANTED: TEACHER OF PHYSICS, Scale 1. Ability to teach physics to A level would be an advantage but this should not prevent teachers of other specialised sciences from applying.’ Kirkham then supplied the following commentary. It must be regretted that a school should advertise for a physics teacher in this way . . . There has been developing over the last few years a growing pattern in which the science offered at lower school level is being taught more and more by biology trained teachers . . . Clearly this trend could have significant and perhaps unfortunate consequences. (Kirkham, 1980, p. 28)

He went on to regret (citing Aspects of Secondary Education in England and Wales) that, in the late 1970s, only 78 per cent of physics tuition in schools was provided by physicists. These comments are rendered the more notable in the light of Kirkham’s subsequent appointment as Director of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review during its final years. His article stimulated a number of responses from teachers of physics and other disciplines, broadly split between hostility and sympathy towards the dilution of subject specialisms. The movement away from the organization of the science curriculum around subject specialisms represents one of the key underlying shifts during the period with which we are concerned. This statement bears qualification: ‘general science’ had of course a long history in the secondary modern schools and for socalled ‘less able’ pupils in grammar schools. The extension of such an approach to pupils of all abilities has been a recurring theme throughout the preceding chapters, although it was never a formal policy of any government, or any other significant body, and the title ‘general science’ was eventually eschewed because

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of its low status. The movement away from identifiable science disciplines was instead associated with, and to a degree implied by, other policies (notably the demands of ‘balanced science’) and the contingent circumstances of science teaching (notably teacher supply and timetable organization). That it was desirable in itself appears to have been the view of only a small proportion of those involved in policy-making, although for teachers in schools who carried managerial and organizational responsibilities it offered some obvious advantages. Subject specialism is one of the key characteristics which science teachers bring with them on their entry into the profession. Training at first degree level still remains mainly focused on specific sciences, or very specific variations thereon, rather than upon joint honours or ‘general’ science degrees. Other important facets of the teaching of science are closely linked to this issue of subject specialism. The key question which surfaces repeatedly in discussions about the matter is the curricular experiences of pupils, and their diversity, when free choice across the science disciplines is allowed. This is perhaps the most significant issue, rightly motivating the entire question. Other important aspects include the systems of examination and the departmental organization of schools. The change which has occurred since the introduction of the GCSE examination and, more particularly, since the introduction of the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum, is dramatic. A decade or so ago, schools entered pupils for examination mainly in single-discipline GCSE science subjects, and they were themselves commonly organized around single-discipline departments. Table 8.1 shows that the first of these changed markedly during the 1990s. It is worth recalling that the possibility of pupils continuing to be entered for examinations in the science disciplines was retained only as a result of the Secretary of State’s decision, in 1990, to overrule the advice given to him by the School Examinations and Assessment Council. It can be speculated that, in this matter, the Secretary of State, a politician, was more in tune with the views of science teachers, than the science educators and others with a professional background in education who were advising him (MacGregor, 1990; SEAC, 1990). It is much more difficult to obtain data on patterns of departmental organization, but it seems likely that the place of specialisms such as ‘Head of Table 8.1 Subject Biology Chemistry Physics Science

Entries for science subjects in the GCSE examination 1989

1996

217,000 179,000 197,000 142,000

19,000 19,000 18,000 478,000*

Notes: *Including Single and Double Award. All figures rounded to nearest thousand. Sources: DES, 1989, p. 15; DfEE, 1997, p. 46.


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Chemistry’ within the organization of staffing at Key Stages 3 and 4 has diminished. Such positions have been replaced with a range of other responsibilities, with those for particular Key Stages particularly prominent. Overall, curricular aspects of ‘balanced science’ cannot be disentangled from issues of teacher and subject specialism and wider changes in the management of schools, even though the questions are, in principle, distinct. In the absence of research on science teachers’ views of the changes which they were experiencing, data must be sought from such sources as the professional journals for chemists, biologists and physicists (Education in Chemistry, Journal of Biological Education and Physics Education) together with the ‘news’ journal of the Association for Science Education, Education in Science. These provide sources of teacher opinion, particularly through their correspondence columns. They must be treated with some caution, however, since the opinions to be found are not necessarily representative, and may appear more polarized than is perhaps the case among teachers at large. In any event, the question of the balance between the teaching of the specialist science disciplines and ‘science’ figured regularly during the 1980s. It generated substantial differences of opinion. For example, the sequence of letters responding to the article by Kirkham in Education in Science which was cited above, continued until 1982. In January of that year, six Heads of Science from Hampshire wrote attacking the separate science orientation of the 16+ working parties, and argued that the need for a ‘balanced science education’ would best be served by a strategy which took less account of the individual science disciplines. Subsequently, in the following June, ten teachers from a school in the same area wrote a hostile response, and were in their turn criticized. Nickless, writing from the King’s School in Ely, argued that all science syllabuses were mainly concerned with ‘teaching an appreciation of the scientific method’, and that this should limit the need for specialists. At this point, the editor closed the correspondence. Themes which were to be a source of debate for nearly two decades, and perhaps more, were visible.2 Discussion of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review during 1983 again brought the issue to prominence. As we noted in Chapter 4, the possibility of retaining the teaching of the specialist sciences and the consequences of their replacement by ‘science’, was one of the key themes of the Review. The opinions of the Royal Society and the possible interpretations of results published by the Assessment of Performance Unit were drawn into the conflict.3 The issue resurfaced in 1985 and 1986. It was also prominent in Physics Education and Education in Chemistry,4 although rather less noticeable in the Journal of Biological Education. A possible explanation of the latter circumstance is that biology was less well-established as an independent discipline, and teachers of biology were drawn from more diverse backgrounds (e.g., botany, zoology, biochemistry). In addition, biology teachers did not perceive their field as being colonized by non-specialists, since there was no shortage of biology teachers and biology continued to be taught by specialists to a greater extent than the other

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two main disciplines (Donnelly and Jenkins, 1999, pp. 8–9). Interestingly, however, the Institute of Biology, the organization which sponsors the Journal of Biological Education, took a more sceptical stance towards balanced science and the integration of science teaching than that found amongst the other comparable professional organizations.5 It went so far as to have its Education Officer write to the Times Educational Supplement expressing its reservations. These centred on such issues as teacher competence and organizational and resourcing difficulties (Tomlins, 1987, p. 19). The shift from the teaching of the science disciplines towards ‘science’ impinges most obviously on the deployment of teachers, but potentially it also affects their recruitment and training. However, it is almost impossible to form a clear view of teachers’ judgements on the shifts that were in train. In part, this is because the issues were complex, so that commentators tended to focus on specific aspects of the argument. But it also reflected the fact that, as we have indicated, there was little or no effort, or perhaps inclination, to canvass teacher opinion on this issue. One of the few examples of studies of teachers’ views was that conducted by Reid and Ryles in 1989, which was discussed briefly in Chapter 4. The study they reported focused not on questions of deployment and training, but on the general issue of ‘balanced science’. Basing their account on a questionnaire survey of over 300 science teachers in the North-West of England, the authors found a polarized view among teachers, even on matters of broad principle. About one-third of those teachers who expressed a view were supportive of the shift to balanced science and the remaining two-thirds hostile. Perhaps surprisingly, teachers in comprehensive schools were substantially more hostile than those in other types of school, including the independent sector. A possible explanation for this is that it was the former group of teachers which was required to carry the main burden of the changes. As ever, when referring to ‘balanced science’, it is difficult to separate the several issues involved. Reid and Ryles (1989) indicated that the bases of teacher opinion included elements as diverse as the deployment of their own expertise, the varying interests of pupils, the resources which the proposed changes demanded, the challenges of organizing the curriculum and timetable, and the system of examination. A study conducted in Northumberland at about the same time found a similarly divided view (Booth, 1990). In 1999, we conducted a survey and obtained responses from over 300 science teachers to a national questionnaire (Donnelly and Jenkins, 1999). The focus of the questionnaire was the deployment of science teachers’ expertise, yet the teachers themselves were unwilling or unable to separate this from the other aspects listed above. The responses suggested that, in the case of the discipline in which the shortage of qualified teachers is felt most acutely, physics, 80 per cent of those teaching the subject at Key Stage 4 did not possess a degree in physics or a cognate discipline. This situation became progressively less acute in chemistry and biology, but, even in the latter discipline, half of all those teach-


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ing the subject at this level were non-specialists. Despite this, 70 per cent of all respondents indicated that in their schools an effort was made to teach science within subject specialisms at Key Stage 4. It appears reasonable to infer that, in the majority of schools, the teaching of the individual science disciplines by nonspecialists at this level had not been undertaken as a matter of principle, but had been introduced because of the pattern of school organization and/or the pressures in respect of teacher supply. (For data on the position at Key stage 3, and a comment, see CST, 2000, and Cassidy, 2000, respectively). This inference is supported by teachers’ responses to questions about their views on the deployment of their expertise, where comments about such pressures were frequent. There was also a sharp division of opinion within these responses about the desirability of teaching outside subject specialisms. Among those who expressed an explicit positive or negative view, this split was almost even. Some felt that integration of science teaching across staff was desirable on such grounds as: it enabled co-ordination of what was taught; it reflected the claim that science was a unified field; it reflected the fact that the major reason for teaching science in schools was to promote knowledge of ‘scientific method’. Others saw the shift as deskilling, leading to a reduction in enthusiasm and the quality of teaching, and as driven, not by principle, but by the pressures of timetabling and teacher supply, to which reference has already been made. Such teachers often linked their comments to judgements about the interests and enthusiasms of pupils, thus taking the issue back to the more fundamental question of balanced science and whether or not it could adequately meet the educational needs of all pupils. This issue was not, however, the focus of the study from which these data have been drawn. These findings suggest that teacher opinion in this area is both fractured and relatively stable. The tensions which were clearly identifiable in the 1980s have not disappeared, even if most teachers now accept the dominance of Double Award science, particularly given the statutory demands of the National Curriculum. Nevertheless, very few schools (a maximum of 30 per cent, and probably less) appeared to have entered wholeheartedly into the project of demolishing disciplinary boundaries in relation to the deployment of teachers. In this, they reflect a body of opinion and research which suggests that subject knowledge is central to the promotion of teaching quality. Here, for example, is the view of the Office for Standards in Education: When teachers are thoroughly in command of their subject, they are able to adapt their teaching to the responses of the pupils, to use alternative and more imaginative ways of explaining, and to make connections between aspects of their subject and with the pupils’ wider experience, so capturing their attention and interest. The teacher’s ability to answer pupils’ spontaneous questions is an important factor in generating enthusiasm for the subject. (Ofsted, 1998, p. 75)

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Others have come to similar conclusions (Woolnough, 1994; Turner-Bisset, 1997, 1999). Questions of teacher competence are, of course, a primary interest of politicians and their advisers, although perhaps ultimately of less pressing concern to those groups than quantitative teacher supply. Our focus is, by contrast, on the question of teachers’ professional authority, which, of course, ultimately encompasses the issues of competence and quality. At this level, and setting aside arguments about the structure of the curriculum, it seems clear that these shifts in the deployment of teachers, and parallel shifts in perceptions of the boundaries of their scientific expertise, have occurred with, at best, only the passive acquiescence of the majority of practising science teachers. Their effect on teacher competence and the quality of teaching must be to some degree a matter of speculation, since, perhaps surprisingly, this question has never been the subject of serious and systematic attention. It may perhaps be concluded that teacher supply and deployment have indeed been the major concerns of those responsible for policy. (Further data and discussion of these issues can be found in, e.g., ASE, 1987, 1996; Smithers and Robinson, 1994; QCA, 1998; CST, 2000.) The changes to which we have just drawn attention did not gather momentum until after the introduction of the GCSE examination, and the growth of Double Award science. Although the GCSE examination played some role in catalysing a shift away from disciplinary specialisms, the effect was due less to the examination itself than to the opportunities it provided for institutional change. The major organizational and curricular shift took place only after the introduction of the National Curriculum. Teachers experienced both of these policy shifts in ways which accentuated some of their characteristics and attenuated others. Novel assessment practices received the greatest attention and, in some cases, provoked considerable anxiety. Pupil assessment has always been the most visible evaluative mechanism to which teachers have been exposed, though the impact of the Ofsted inspection regime has made some inroads into that situation. A statement by a member of the Science Working Group which was quoted earlier might be recalled here: ‘. . . it’s just human nature that if you have got to assess certain things, those will be what they will teach’ (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 27).

THE GCSE EXAMINATION During the mid-1980s, teachers’ experience of change was dominated by the GCSE examination. Again, there are few systematic studies of science teachers’ views of the introduction of the GCSE examination. The major data source we will use is a study which we ourselves conducted, and which involved detailed interviews with nearly 150 secondary school science teachers in ten schools,


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together with a large national survey. The new examination appeared to be seen by most teachers as requiring only minor modifications of approach, so as to ensure that attention was given to particular topics. Indeed, for some science teachers, the limitations on subject knowledge and the presence of questions which required no more than the manipulation of presented data, or the examination of social issues related to scientific problems, were judged to reduce the demands placed on pupils and on themselves as teachers. The science teachers saw school-based practical assessment of pupil laboratory work as offering the greatest challenge and as requiring the greatest shifts in existing practice (Donnelly et al., 1993). An optional practical element had been included in the O-level science examinations set by a number of GCE examination boards for some years, although few schools had taken advantage of it. There had been growing emphasis on practical assessment in the Certificate of Secondary Education. But, as we indicated in Chapter 6, the National Criteria for the General Certificate of Secondary Education adopted an altogether more forceful approach. This innovation drew on the deep-rooted emphasis on laboratory work within science education in England and Wales. It was reinforced by the National Criteria for the GCSE, which limited the title ‘science’ to subjects ‘based on experimental/practical work by pupils’ (DES/WO, 1985a, para. 6.4, our emphasis). The brief flourishing of ‘science processes’ as a focus of curricular innovation also made a contribution (Wellington, 1989). This perspective was most prominently, not to say notoriously, exemplified within the 1985 DES policy document Science 5–16: ‘(The) essential characteristic of education in science is that it introduces pupils to the methods of science’ (DES/WO, 1985b, para. 11). There was, of course, no necessary link between ‘processes’ and laboratory work. Nevertheless, most practising science teachers would probably have agreed with Smithers and Robinson who, in their study of Double Award science and after a discussion entitled ‘Process or Content’, concluded that ‘the processes of scientific investigation (were) being taught and examined through practical work’ (Smithers and Robinson, 1994, p. 20). They describe the question as an ideological battleground, although, to the extent that this claim has any truth, the field of battle was located mainly in academic circles. In schools, meeting examination board requirements was a more urgent concern. The debate was also somewhat one-sided, intellectually (Millar and Driver, 1987). The picture in respect of school-based practical assessment was very different. The requirement to undertake practical assessment, although the first major example of a policy innovation which impinged directly on practice in the classroom, drew heavily on teachers’ well-established enthusiasm for laboratory work. The science teachers interviewed mainly echoed the language which surrounded the innovation nationally. Their enthusiasm for ‘practical work’ was deep rooted although, as we have written elsewhere: ‘Practical work was taken

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as the essential medium through which science education should be delivered, but attempts to express exactly why this was so were hesitant, conflicting and vaguely expressed’ (Donnelly et al., 1993, p. 129). Questions about the purposes and outcomes of laboratory work were addressed only very occasionally (Donnelly et al. 1993). Many of those interviewed saw the introduction of compulsory practical assessment as a mechanism for increasing the proportion of laboratory work undertaken in schools, although invariably in schools other than their own. Teachers made very little use of the language of ‘process’ or ‘method’, although they made frequent reference to ‘skill’. As the demands of the new syllabuses became clearer, science teachers also encountered the technical demands of school-based practical assessment, with which they considered themselves ill prepared to cope. In Chapter 6, we offered one teacher’s comment on the training. Here is another: ‘We had a couple of afternoons’ training . . . which were more like meetings than training, to suggest the (examining group’s) approach and see how people felt about it and see what problems were arising’ (Donnelly et al., 1993, p. 87). The diversity of examining group requirements, even across syllabuses within a particular group, meant that practice in schools varied considerably. Schools following the same syllabus could develop quite different approaches, which varied along such dimensions as the extent to which examination conditions were employed, the sources and limitations placed on the tasks used, and the methods of moderation which were employed. This was often construed as representing the use of ‘professional judgement’. Some teachers made substantial use of this phrase, but others were sceptical about whether they had the knowledge or information on which to base the judgements they were required to make. In the main, teachers knew that they were creating idiosyncratic practices based on limited guidance and experience. Some perceived themselves to be, in the words of one teacher, ‘pulling (the GCSE) out of the fire’. Overall, while the requirement to undertake practical assessment generated some limited hostility, as teachers came to understand the degree to which they were required to create the necessary practice for themselves, it also offered some possibility of choice and flexibility, and broadly met with their approval. The strongest characteristic of the introduction of practical assessment was the extent to which it involved a general infiltration of the procedural requirements of the examination boards into the practice and language of teachers and school science departments. An exemplification of this was the extent to which teachers’ language, when discussing practical assessment, was dominated by the notion of ‘skill’. The following are representative comments made about the organization of the activity: ‘. . . there is a standard set of practicals . . . and we just document which skills we are going to assess . . .’ and ‘we (had to) assess three hundred students regularly and get them through all of the skills’ (Donnelly et al., 1993, p. 73). Pupils ‘had’ a skill, were ‘given’ a skill, ‘did’ a skill or, in one case, had a skill ‘taken away’, according to circumstances. Teachers referred


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to ‘wanting a skill out of’ an activity or, in one case, to ‘the way the skills have been written’. ‘Skills’ did not appear to be intended here to refer to subtle and complex practices, but rather to whether pupils had satisfied syllabus requirements and procedures. Teachers were aware of this to some degree but their primary concerns were with ensuring that they fulfilled the examination groups’ procedures, and that their pupils obtained the highest possible score. Reflections on the nature of scientific skill were not a luxury they felt they could afford. Moreover, when such language and usage are employed on a day-by-day basis, they enter the fabric of practice, coming ultimately to constitute that practice. Similar patterns of teacher engagement with this issue have been observed in Northern Ireland (Moore, 1989). As we have indicated, beyond the complexities of school-based assessment of laboratory work, the implementation of the GCSE appears to have been judged comparatively unproblematic. It neither involved, nor demanded, the radical changes of practice associated with the rhetoric surrounding its introduction, which was examined in Chapter 6. Indeed, before the GCSE examination had become established, teachers were confronted with the more thoroughgoing challenge offered by the National Curriculum.

THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM We indicated in the previous chapter how the introduction of the National Curriculum for science offered to map both the practice of science teachers and the outcomes of their work. But, for nearly five years, the process was dominated by successive processes of revision. It was not until 1995 that a relatively stable version of the Statutory Order was available. Science teachers’ experience during the period 1988 to 1994 was therefore dominated by the process of adjusting to the revisions. There was little evidence among science teachers of that sustained and principled hostility to the Statutory Order which was displayed by their colleagues teaching English. Science teachers generally appeared to accept what was imposed on them, although the necessity of so much revision and the difficulties with the 1991 version of Sc1 stimulated a significant amount of disaffection. As with the GCSE examination, a large part of teachers’ response to the National Curriculum, at secondary level, was a relatively straightforward restructuring of content. This could even extend to a literal ‘cut and paste’ use of the text of the Order in creating outline schemes of work. There were a few exceptions: earth sciences appeared in the curriculum, and was the subject of some anxiety and irritation among those teachers, often chemists, who were asked to teach it. We have traced in the previous chapter the varying fortunes of ‘the nature of science’ in the successive Statutory Orders. Teachers, of course, had to

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come to terms with the ten (later eight) levels of the National Curriculum, and their claim to represent a criterion-referenced system of assessment. But, again, the political difficulties outlined in the previous chapter, the eventual dominance of externally marked National Curriculum Tests and the removal of the external audit, meant that Key Stage 3 assessment remained, if not marginal, at least an unfocused cause for concern. Yet again, there are few studies of teachers’ views on the National Curriculum or its impact. There are, of course, some evaluation documents, and a sequence of reports by Ofsted and Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools (Ofsted 1993a, 1993b, 1995a, 1995b, 1998; SCAA, 1994). But teachers’ opinions, or even experiences, were not a significant concern for the authors of these documents. One research study, conducted in the mid-1990s, found that teachers’ initially positive view had been replaced by a broad hostility, and placed particular emphasis on the compulsory character of the process (Jones, 1996). A few studies have examined changes in practice, but again the emphasis has been on evaluation against some predetermined model (Hacker and Rowe, 1997; Newton, Driver and Osborne, 1999). The overall thrust of these studies is to suggest that the National Curriculum has increased the emphasis on what are sometimes called transmissive modes of teaching, and undermined shifts towards more active and more demanding approaches. In 1998, after the National Curriculum had been in force for nearly a decade, the present authors undertook a questionnaire survey of the opinions and practices of teachers, supplemented by some use of interviews (Donnelly and Jenkins, 1998; Donnelly, Jenkins and Jenkins, 1999). Science teachers’ views about its impact were, of course, diverse. Perhaps surprisingly, about one-quarter of those who gave some extended account of their views in the questionnaires judged that little had altered as result of the National Curriculum: [There has been] little change in general teaching, but practical work is often focused on the skills required for Sc1. The NC (sic) doesn’t dictate teaching and learning styles . . . The National Curriculum is a body of content and does not as such constrain teaching methodology. Not much [change] – the National Curriculum can be delivered by most methods/activities.

It is significant that here the National Curriculum appears often to be construed as a body of knowledge to be taught, with no implications for teaching methods or activities. For other teachers, science teaching had changed markedly. This divergence is a warning that teachers’ experience, even of the National Curriculum, was heterogeneous, and perhaps sensitive to local circumstances and interpretations of

Science Teacher’s response to change

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the Statutory Order. Within this group, there was a small proportion whose overall judgement was positive: Less dictated notes, more discussion and pupil-based learning, with guidance. Move to pupil-centred learning. Teacher as facilitator of learning. Trying to move away from spoon-feeding.

However, as we will see, the large majority took a different view. Teachers were asked, in a fixed response question, to rate the impact of the National Curriculum on a number of stated aspects of their work. Their judgements are given in Table 8.2. Many of the aspects of practice in Table 8.2 which show an increase in emphasis reflect the growth of systems of inspection, record-keeping and accountability. They suggest that the introduction of the National Curriculum has led science teachers to clarify their lesson objectives, to spend more time in detailed planning of the teaching to be undertaken, to make more use of textbooks, worksheets and ‘bought-in’ courses, and to increase the emphasis placed upon schemes of work. The last of these is particularly marked, and will be examined a little more closely below. The data also suggest that the National Curriculum has led to a greater degree of collaboration within science departments, to significantly increased demands upon technical staff, to closer monitoring of pupil progression, to more homework (for pupils), and to enhanced ‘feedback’ to pupils about the quality of their work. The data also offer some evidence that co-ordination across the science curriculum has been improved. These changes are likely to be judged positively, although it is important to acknowledge that they are mainly means to an end, not ends in themselves. For example, neither more detailed planning of lessons nor closer monitoring of pupils’ progression necessarily leads to improved learning, although it might seem a reasonable assumption that either should do so. Some of the teachers responding to the questionnaire highlighted this distinction. Most of the . . . changes have involved increased administration and pressure to complete [the] curriculum but the record keeping does not necessarily improve science teaching in itself. Inspection has tightened up procedures and paperwork but I’m not sure this increases the quality of education.

These changes, however, were not without costs. The evidence from the survey that science teachers work under a greatly increased administrative and bureaucratic burden was overwhelming. This complaint was commonplace, although no less significant for that, and may be very counter-productive in relation to contemporary government policies on standards and teacher recruitment: ‘It’s not the job I came into. Paper work and accountability have replaced teaching.’

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Science Education: Policy, Professionalism and Change Table 8.2 The effect of the National Curriculum on aspects of secondary school science teachers’ work* Aspect of science teaching

increase Emphasis upon schemes of work

Monitoring of pupil progression Demands placed on technical staff Collaboration with other science staff Clarity of lesson objectives Amount of ‘feedback’ to pupils Use of worksheets Detailed planning of individual lessons Use of differentiated activities Use of ‘bought-in’ courses Emphasis on homework Teaching outside specialist subject Coherence of the science curriculum Range of other teaching strategies Use of textbooks Overall time for teaching science Range of laboratory activities Time spent on laboratory work Enjoyment of science by pupils Freedom in choice of teaching activities decrease

Increase %

No change %

86.8 76.4 73.0

11.8 20.3 24.7

64.2 58.8 59.8 54.7

Decrease %

Mean rating+

Standard deviation

0.0 2.4 1.7

1.12 1.25 1.28

0.32 0.49 0.49

32.1 38.5 30.7 40.9

1.7 2.0 8.4 3.4

1.36 1.43 1.48 1.48

0.52 0.53 0.65 0.56

58.1 50.3 42.2 39.5 38.9

30.4 42.2 50.3 58.1 54.7

10.1 5.1 4.7 1.4 5.4

1.51 1.54 1.61 1.66 1.66

0.68 0.59 0.60 0.51 0.58

44.9

36.5

17.2

1.71

0.74

40.9 33.1 33.4 20.6 16.2 6.4

45.6 52.0 48.0 34.5 40.2 42.2

12.2 13.5 16.6 43.6 41.2 46.6

1.71 1.80 1.83 2.23 2.25 2.42

0.67 0.66 0.69 0.77 0.72 0.61

2.4

15.9

80.7

2.79

0.46

Notes: n = 296. * Percentages may not add to 100 as non-responders and unclassifiable responses are excluded. + On a scale of 1 = increase; 2 = no change; 3 = decrease.

Amongst what might be described as organizational shifts, the aspect of practice which showed the largest increase in emphasis was the scheme of work. Schemes of work are an organizational tool which have slipped almost unremarked into schools over the last two decades. As one teacher in the interview component of the study commented: When I was doing my teaching practice . . . I have to think now . . . was there a scheme? I don’t think there was. It was basically the syllabus . . . as far as I was concerned unless they . . . just hid them and didn’t show me them. I’d to basically sit down and write my own series of lesson plans, which built up to a scheme of work.


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Another teacher recalled the introduction of schemes of work in the following terms: ‘There was a huge amount of resistance, because this impinged on the autonomy of the teacher in the classroom. Now it’s common practice . . . There were aims, there were objectives, there was apparatus, there were AVAs, there were references on each of the sheets.’ How this aspect of the organization of the curriculum has altered teachers’ approach to their work is almost entirely unresearched. Schemes of work are likely to make a major contribution to the co-ordination of teaching within a department. Science teachers were uniformly supportive of a range of possible functions for schemes of work which increased co-ordination and mutual support (Donnelly and Jenkins, 1999). They were also sceptical of any suggestion that schemes of work limited their legitimate professional authority. It is, of course, possible that an over-reliance on schemes of work, including bought-in schemes, might reduce the potential for adjusting the curriculum and teaching methods to the needs and strengths of pupils and teachers. Science teachers themselves appear to have little sympathy with this view, accepting schemes of work as a legitimate manifestation of what might be called a localized collegiality. Teachers seemed to identify a hierarchy of legitimate influences on their work. They appeared to take the view that co-ordination of content and intended learning outcomes ought to be largely, although as we will see, perhaps not entirely, under the collective competence of colleagues within a school, through the vehicle of the scheme of work. It is perhaps worth noting that this approach stands in some contrast to the view taken by teachers of history and of English, where schemes of work appear to provide less detail, and teachers, including student teachers of these subjects, create their own resources and approaches to topics (Donnelly, Jenkins and Jenkins, 1999). The relatively supportive attitude towards schemes of work displayed by science teachers stands in some contrast with the resentment many of them expressed towards large-scale, centralized intervention in their work. This resentment which, it must be said, has found only limited public expression during the time in which the National Curriculum has been in force, is mainly detectable in a significant group of responses to be found in the lower part of Table 8.2. They relate to the freedom to choose teaching activities, pupils’ enjoyment of science, and the amount and range of laboratory work undertaken by pupils. These issues are now discussed further, drawing on the comments which the science teachers themselves provided in the ‘open response’ sections of the questionnaires (Donnelly and Jenkins, 1999).

Reduction in choice and flexibility Many teachers commented on the reduction which had occurred in their freedom

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to choose the scientific content and teaching methods which, in their judgement, were the most appropriate for their pupils. It will be seen from Table 8.2 that over 80 per cent of teachers suggested that such a reduction had occurred. The following quotations, representative of this view, are drawn from replies to the free response questions: [There is] less freedom to adjust the curriculum to suit the needs/abilities of pupils. [There is] no scope for dealing with problems raised by pupils . . . in the old days, local issues were incorporated into the work. . . . the National Curriculum has stifled science teaching . . . there is little room for exploring side issues that can be of great interest to children. [There is] a loss of rural studies/growing things/applied interesting topics such as cosmetics/forensic science. The range of activities and topics of interest has reduced.

Several teachers directed their comments on the impact of the National Curriculum towards their work with less able pupils: I now teach much more ‘academic’ science to lower ability groups. Opportunities for following lines of interest have decreased. I have much less time to show the relevance of science to real life situations for all pupils of all ability.

Assessment pressures were also influential. ‘Teaching to the test’ and the pressure to improve a school’s position in the ‘league tables’ of performance were identified as important constraints: Students are coached towards examination success, rather than ‘educated’ in science [and] students likely to gain a Grade C or better are targeted – often to the detriment of less able students. [The emphasis] is more on improving D to C Grades than on improving the Grades of all pupils, so we tend to do only those things directed to this end. Basically, I feel that I am teaching students to jump through the correct hoops rather than doing the things I think they would benefit from.

Extra-curricular work was also judged to have been diminished, and several teachers regretted the reduction in work previously conducted away from the school: ‘[There is ] less time available for off-site study trips.’

Pupils’ enjoyment of science In answer to the fixed response question, 47 per cent of the teachers had


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indicated that pupils’ enjoyment of science had decreased. About 20 per cent of the teachers explicitly referred in their open-ended responses to a reduction in the sense of enjoyment experienced by pupils during the course of their secondary school science education: (There is) less time for students to enjoy science. We now teach to pass the exam, and not for enjoyment. There seems to be very little time when you can relax with the class and enjoy the teaching.

No teacher volunteered that the National Curriculum had made science more appealing to, or enjoyable for, students, though 6 per cent indicated in their replies to the fixed response question that this had occurred. These findings ought to be one of the most worrying statistics for policy-makers and those who have put so much effort into controlling and, ostensibly, improving the quality of science teaching and the science curriculum.

The amount and range of laboratory work undertaken The evidence from both the fixed and open responses to the questionnaire study suggest that some laboratory work, and related activities of a ‘practical’ kind, have diminished under the National Curriculum. Table 8.2 reports over 40 per cent of teachers indicating that such a reduction had occurred. For some teachers, this was attributable to the amount of science which the National Curriculum required them to cover: More content has led to increased pressure on time for practical work. [The] quantity of work means practical lessons are cut in order to finish [the] module content. Even after [curriculum revision] there is too much content [which has] reduced the time spent on practical work and on studying particular topics. Less practical work [is] used, as [there is] insufficient time to cover all the work in the National Curriculum and do appropriate practicals.

There is likely to be some connection between the narrowing of choice referred to earlier and a reduced range of laboratory activities undertaken by pupils. About 25 per cent of the science teachers referred explicitly to this in their responses to an open-ended question. Many of the comments were, directly or otherwise, a criticism of Attainment Target 1 (commonly known as Sc1) to which we gave some attention in the preceding chapter. Most obviously, practical work has been ‘straitjacketed’ and teachers feel constrained in the variety of approaches they may use.

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[There is] increased use of ‘investigations’ in practical work, but a narrowing of the type of experimental work undertaken. There is less room for ‘exciting’ experiments. Much of the practical work is now geared towards assessment rather than a backup to theoretical work. The teaching and assessment of Sc1 has acted like a straitjacket, so that any investigations which can be used to teach or assess the criteria are done.

This sense of a practice in relation to Sc1 which was constrained and perhaps routinized is also to be found in comments from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted, 1999). These comments stands in an interesting relationship with the findings of a study conducted on behalf of the Council for Science and Technology in 1999. This survey found that, particularly at Key Stage 4, teachers were more confident about teaching Sc1 than the other ‘content-orientated’ attainment targets (CST, 2000, para. 32). In the light of the Ofsted finding, the question which this raises is whether this confidence has its origins in the mastery of a standardized, assessment-orientated practice. Assessment has dominated teachers’ concerns over the Attainment Target, particularly within the GCSE. As we have indicated above, where assessment comes into play, teachers are unwilling to take any risks. The difficulties with Sc1 at the policy level were, of course, driven by the concerns of teachers, even though their views were not well represented in the public domain (Donnelly et al., 1996). This last comment is especially applicable to the Association for Science Education, the professional association for science teachers. Science teachers’ mainly agreed in principle that independent pupil investigatory work was desirable but most were hostile to the framework they were required to implement, and many questioned its workability. The approach embedded in the Order to practical work was driven by the commitments of small working groups. Possible interpretations of the text of the Order were further limited through the rulings imposed by the School Examination and Assessment Council. But there is no evidence that these groups were representative of wider science teacher opinion. Indeed, in 1995, a large majority of science teachers was concerned that the innovation had been driven by groups other than practising teachers: ‘a collection of professors’, ‘these mysterious figures’, ‘nobody will admit they ever did it’ (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 111). For some science teachers, the entire episode was ‘a farce’ (ASE, 1996, p. 31). In 1995, when asked whether they would wish to teach science in the way mandated by Sc1, only around 20 per cent of science teachers gave a positive response (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 111). This broad pattern was also found in interview studies conducted at about the same time, and in a questionnaire study undertaken in 1998, in which, even though Sc1 was not explicitly addressed, it was identified spontaneously by teachers (Donnelly and Jenkins, 1998). Our


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concern here is not with the substantive issue of Sc1 as a curricular component or pedagogic method. Science teachers’ critical views on Attainment Target 1 may or may not have been justified. In our view, they mainly were justified. The innovation was intended to provoke flexibility, innovation and, especially, increased pupil involvement. But (setting aside the difficulties in its conceptualization and realization in the classroom) its promoters appeared to believe that only an imposed and prescriptive system of assessment could ensure that teachers used it. The difficulties stemmed in substantial measure from this combination of circumstances, together with the lack of trialling outside small, highly selected, groups of teachers. If the breakdown of subject specialisms represents the broadest issue on which the question of professional authority came into focus within science education, the events surrounding Sc1 during the early 1990s represent perhaps its sharpest manifestation.

OTHER ASPECTS OF SECONDARY SCIENCE TEACHING IN THE LATE 1990s We will conclude this chapter by providing a brief account, based on the studies identified above, of some other aspects of secondary school science teachers’ practice. We will focus on three areas of teachers’ professional expertise: aims, planning, and the teaching activities used. These areas are by no means exhaustive, and the data presented here were not gathered with the specific intention of identifying the influence of statutory regulation. They are included mainly to give a further sense of the character of science teachers’ practice at the end of the period with which we are concerned in this book.

Science teachers’ aims It is, of course, easy to exaggerate the influence of formally defined aims in practice. In an interview study conducted in 1996–97, science teachers interviewed often showed some hesitation in formulating such aims (a characteristic which distinguished them from the history teachers who also formed part of that study). One possible explanation is that, given the position of science as a core subject in the National Curriculum, science teachers felt little pressure to justify the position of their subject. Table 8.3 shows the aims expressed by a sample of teachers in six different schools, chosen to include a range of types (Donnelly, 1999). The data suggest that science teachers differ widely in the emphasis that they give to different aims. There was no sense of science teachers sharing a common view of their aims, and thus, by implication of the purposes of science in the

138 Table 8.3

Science Educaton: Policy, Professionalism and Change Teachers’ aims expressed during interviews

Aim

Percentage of teachers expressing this aim

Teaching scientific content Making science relevant Success in examinations Teaching scientific skills and processes Promoting pupils’ enjoyment and interest Establishing good relationships in the classroom Other (e.g. promoting skills of communication)

52 52 39 35 17 13 13

Note: n = 31; percentages total more than 100 as teachers usually gave more than one aim.

Table 8.4 planning

Teachers’ ranking of the importance of some elements of lesson Mean rating+

Type of plan A mental plan Requisition lists for technicians Resources (books, etc.) increasing A detailed scheme of work importance A written plan

3.68 3.47 3.22 3.01 2.39

Standard deviation 0.49 0.65 0.60 0.77 0.72

Notes: n = 358 + Scale: 1 = Irrelevant; 2 = Not very important; 3 = Important; 4 = Extremely important.

curriculum. A contrast can again be drawn with history teachers, who demonstrated substantial uniformity around the key theme of enabling pupils to interpret historical sources and handle argumentation and uncertainty. Although we suggested above that this difference may have had its origins in the contingency of science’s position in the National Curriculum, it can be argued that it has deeper roots in the contrasting intellectual character of the two disciplines (Donnelly, 1999).

Planning There is a large literature on ‘teacher planning’ (e.g., Clark and Yinger, 1987). The mechanisms of planning may be expected to have been influenced by the creation of a statutory framework. In a questionnaire study, teachers were simply asked to rate a range of possible elements


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involved in planning a lesson (Donnelly and Jenkins, 1999). The results are shown in Table 8.4. The emphasis on mental rather than written plans is not surprising, despite the traditional stress on the latter within initial teacher training. The prominence of requisition lists for technicians is more unexpected. It reflects again the enduring significance of laboratory work within science teaching in England and Wales. But it might also be argued that it indicates that the laboratory and its resources have an important role in sustaining teachers’ practice. A vivid example of this was given by one teacher who described how he had ‘taught to the tray’: I had to stand in for R. once ’cause he was away and he said: ‘Can you take my class ’cos I have to dash off now’ . . . I just went in there . . . and I saw the tray of apparatus and I gave a lesson on it. Unfortunately it was the wrong tray . . . ’Cause there were two trays in and I’d spotted the wrong one so I gave the wrong lesson . . . so I taught to a tray, that’s it, you know. Walked in, that was the tray so that must be the lesson, so that’s what I taught (Donnelly, 1998, p. 592).

The sense of science teaching as grounded in material activity is vividly rendered by the notion that practice is embodied in the contents of a tray (in suitable hands). It is worth adding, however, that this teacher remarked that the class claimed to have enjoyed both lessons, because the two teachers had in fact taught them completely differently. The responses showed no significant differences in mean scores when disaggregated in terms of teachers’ years of experience, subject specialism, or type of school. The lack of impact of the first of these may reflect the rapidity with which entrants to the secondary science teaching profession fall into a pattern of practice grounded largely on implicit understandings and the management of teaching resources in the laboratory.

Teaching activities Teachers were asked to rate the frequency with which they employed a range of types of teaching activities. The responses are summarized in Table 8.5. These data suggest again that pupil laboratory work in groups remains preeminent as a method of teaching science. There are no pre-National Curriculum data with which to compare the findings in Table 8.5, although an emphasis on laboratory work has characterized secondary school science teaching in England and Wales throughout much of the twentieth century (Jenkins, 1979). In 1982, Beatty and Woolnough suggested that 45 per cent of secondary schools spent 40–60 per cent of their time on practical work and a further 38 per cent spent 60–80 per cent of their time in this way. By any standards, these are very large figures (Beatty and Woolnough, 1982). Teacher demonstration in the laboratory continues to be rated as close to a

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‘Usual’ activity. This complex set of skills has perhaps been downplayed in recent years, and it may be that teacher trainers should take particular note of this finding. The major influence of the National Curriculum which is visible in Table 8.5 again occurs through the statutory requirement to undertake ‘investigations’ in connection with Sc1. Finally, Table 8.5 includes a substantial subset of activities which are employed by most science teachers somewhere between ‘Rarely’ and ‘Almost never’. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this subset is the prominence of applications of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Although other data suggest that teachers are keen to use ICT in their teaching, resources of various kinds (time, equipment, access, knowledge and confidence) are lacking (CST, 2000, Ann. A). Also prominent in the lower part of Table 8.5 are activities

Table 8.5

Teachers’ ratings of the frequency with which activities are employed Activity

Pupil practical work in groups Sc1 investigations for assessment Pupil worksheets Teacher demonstration in the laboratory Video Group discussion work Sc1 investigations for teaching skills/processes Copying from board or text Sc1 investigation for teaching Sc2-4 Pupils reading from books Individual practical work Library research Notes dictated to pupils Computerised data logging Field work Work with newspaper cuttings etc. Role play/drama Computer simulations Use of Internet by teacher Museum visits Industrial visit Visiting speakers increasing Use of Internet by pupils Live broadcast television use

Mean rating+

Standard deviation

3.5 3.1 3.0

0.58 0.63 0.76

2.8 2.8 2.7

0.73 0.66 0.75

2.7 2.6 2.6 2.5 2.2 2.2 1.7 1.7 1.6

0.72 0.75 0.79 0.80 0.83 0.70 0.79 0.68 0.73

1.6 1.6 1.6 1.5 1.4 1.4 1.3 1.1 1.1

0.67 0.70 0.64 0.77 0.56 0.53 0.51 0.51 0.41

Notes: n = 320. Based on: 1 = Almost never; 2 = Rarely; 3 = Usually; 4 = Very often.

+


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such as using newspaper articles, role play and drama. These activities, when judged against laboratory work, appear to evoke little enthusiasm amongst secondary school science teachers, despite a good deal of exhortation (e.g., Osborne, 1997; Wellington, 1998; Parmar and Smith, 1999).

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have presented an account of some of the views and practices of secondary school science teachers, after they had experienced in different degrees the innovations and policies which have dominated the previous chapters. The picture is inevitably sketchy: there are limited data in these areas. As we have noted at intervals, this is of itself significant. In a period during which extensive changes have been canvassed, and even mandated, the opinions of science teachers have merited little study and, some might say, less consideration. It might be argued that the most profound change which we have discussed has no direct statutory basis: that is, the shift from an acknowledgement of the separate science disciplines towards a notion of science as an organizational and intellectual unity. We suggest that, despite the pressures to which schools and teachers have been subjected, there has been an enduring effort to accommodate and retain specialist teaching, and teachers themselves have displayed an apparently stable polarization of view. Policies more directly concerned with the substance of the curriculum (the GCSE examination and the National Curriculum) have been, in the main, perceived as demanding adjustments in content coverage. Beyond this, both of these initiatives have targeted teachers’ use of the laboratory, and employed the assessment mechanisms in a fairly blunt manner to promote change in this area. As with the shift from the teaching of the individual science disciplines, teachers’ responses to these pressures on laboratory work have been, in the main, adaptive. In the case of practical assessment in the GCSE examination, the adaptation was conditioned by the procedures and language of the coursework requirements of the various syllabuses. Within Sc1 in the National Curriculum, the universal statutory system, and the direct intervention in teaching methods, demanded from teachers a more uniform approach. Science teachers displayed, in the main, substantial hostility to this intervention, and commonly identified a narrow range of practical activities which could be adapted to the 1991 statements of attainment. These appear to have largely remained in place after the 1995 revisions, which ostensibly were less rigid in their structure. During this period, examination syllabuses shifted towards a more uniform approach. Finally, there is little to suggest that the play made in the 1995 Order on the notion of evidence has been explicitly addressed by teachers, at least as reflected in their language. One of the changes which has been identified in this chapter as having a sig-

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nificant effect on the nature of science teachers’ work is also one of the least researched or indeed remarked: the increased emphasis on schemes of work. This is only loosely connected with the National Curriculum. Indeed, the growth of schemes of work predates the National Curriculum, although it is reasonable to suggest that the need to meet the detailed prescriptions of the Statutory Order implied some mechanism of this kind, particularly as the requirements of the order are almost always being ‘delivered’ by several teachers. Detailed commentary on how this shift has influenced science teachers’ work is not possible. But a number of points can be made. First, there is some evidence that science teachers are exhibiting greater dependence upon, or at least expectations of, detailed guidance from schemes of work, than teachers of some other subjects. Second, these shifts may be linked with a growing use of commercial texts which provide a detailed route through the science curriculum. An important example is Spotlight Science. Science departments are committing substantial amounts of time and energy to the use of such materials, which, in some cases, are not merely linked to a particular syllabus and examination board but are also officially ‘endorsed’ or ‘approved’ by the board (Jenkins, 1999). Finally, the publication of an advisory national scheme of work for science can also be noted. This follows the successful launch of such a scheme for the primary sector, and is congruent with the increasing specification associated, for example, with the teaching of literacy and numeracy. We cannot claim in this chapter to have presented a systematic account of the changes in science teachers’ practice during the period of the policies and innovations with which we are concerned. Historical data are in any case not available, although Cuban has shown how a detailed historical study might recover them (Cuban, 1993). We do claim, however, to have highlighted some key aspects of the manner in which science teachers experienced and responded to these policies and innovations. At some risk of becoming unduly speculative, we might further claim that the major pedagogic and curricular aspirations embedded within these policies and innovations have rarely been fulfilled, even if their statutory requirements have been met in some form. (We suggest in any case, that some of these ‘aspirations’ are ill founded.) The underlying question is, of course, has the quality of science teaching improved? Several interpretations of this question are possible, and several sources of evidence might be used to answer it. We do not claim to be able to answer it. But such evidence as is available of the views of practising science teachers suggests that their answer would in the main be ‘no’, and that they might even claim that, in some respects, the quality of science teaching has declined. It would require considerable arrogance to dismiss such an answer. Our aim, throughout this book, has been less with providing an answer, or even a judgement on others’ answers, to this question, than with weighing both the initiatives which have been analysed, and the judgements of their impact, against the professional authority and expertise of science teachers. Further consideration of that balance represents a major theme of our concluding chapter.


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NOTES 1 In this chapter we draw on a range of studies which we have conducted, in conjunction with a number of colleagues, especially Anne Buchan, Isobel Jenkins, Peter Laws and Geoff Welford. Further details about these studies can be found in Donnelly et al., 1993; Donelly et al., 1996; Donnelly and Jenkins, 1998, 1999; Donnelly, Jenkins and Jenkins, 1999. The study from which data are drawn are identified at appropriate points in the text. 2 Education in Science (1980), Vol. 89, pp. 25–6; Vol. 90, pp. 37–8; (1981), Vol. 91, pp. 25–6; Vol. 92, p. 43. 3 Education in Science (1983) January, April, letters. 4 Education in Chemistry (1985), Vol. 22, pp. 67, 162–3; (1986) Vol. 23, pp. 6–7, 28, 70, 101; (1988) Vol. 25, pp. 100, 172. 5 Journal of Biological Education Vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 233–4.

9 CONCLUSION

The focus of this book has been on attempts to reform school science education in England and Wales during the past four decades. Attention has also been given to two developments, the Assessment of Performance Unit and the GCSE examination, each of which had a significant impact on science teaching beyond its immediate remit. In this final chapter, we draw upon our account of these initiatives to offer a number of perspectives and comments upon the reform process. Several issues will run through the discussion, among which the most important are: the political emphasis on raising standards and the related pressure to render science teachers accountable for their practices; the agenda of curricular and pedagogic change in science education, and its sources; and the claims of practising teachers to professional independence and authority over their work. Less visible in this study, but perhaps giving the analysis and issues to be presented here some of their particular character, are the intellectual claims and characteristics of science as a domain of human activity.

THE ISSUE OF STANDARDS Revisiting the literature of the science curriculum reform era of the 1960s and 1970s, it is difficult not to be struck by the absence of any explicit reference to the notion of standards. The aims of the reforms were variously described as to modernize school science teaching, to bring it up to date or to make science teaching more exciting or interesting for pupils. The emphasis was on curriculum and on pedagogy, with the implication that if these were reformed, and supported by specially designed equipment, apparatus and appropriate 144

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professional development, the teaching of science would, in some unspecified way, improve. The language used was not that of ‘learning outcomes’ or of ‘raising standards’, although it can legitimately be argued that modernizing school science courses is a necessary condition of improving the quality of the work done when science is taught in classrooms and laboratories. In much the same way, the Secondary Science Curriculum Review was established ‘to consider the implications of providing suitable science courses for all students aged 11–16 years, and to stimulate and support the development work required’ (SSCR, 1983, p. 1). It was not about ‘standards’, in any sense that the term came to be later understood, despite the fact that the publications eventually produced by the Review carried the general title of ‘Better Science’. Without a detailed historical study, it is difficult to identify and locate the shift in emphasis which brought the notion of educational standards to the forefront of educational debate, not simply in England and Wales but throughout the world. The movement, which gathered momentum in the 1970s, from a selective to a largely non-selective system of schooling throughout England and Wales and the need to relate work in the two systems of public examinations at 16+ had an obvious importance. At this level, the issue might be understood as merely technical: how to marry types of school with such disparate backgrounds and, presumably, academic standards. But the matter was always more politically sensitive than this, as Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s carefully targeted, but perhaps ill-judged, notion of ‘a grammar school education for every child’ indicates. A link with the processes of curriculum development can be made, through the move to specify curriculum and assessment aims and objectives in a form that attempted to make clear what teachers were required to teach and their pupils to learn. This development was particularly clear in the Schools Council Science 5–13 Project, which was constructed around eight aims, from which were derived no less than 150 objectives, all of which were assigned to one of three ‘stages’ derived from Piagetian psychology (Jenkins and Swinnerton, 1998). The ‘objectives movement’ was also a pointer towards the future. In 1970, a review by the Schools Council of the changes that had taken placed in school science teaching in the previous decade referred to the ‘pump-priming’ initiative of the Nuffield Foundation. It claimed that the pump was now ‘working fast but . . . leaking at several points’. What was needed were measures to rationalize the ‘existing complex situation’ and ‘prevent wasting energy’. More particularly, it was necessary to ‘attempt to reach agreement on objectives for science teaching, state these more clearly, and try to make them common to all science subjects in courses for pupils up to the age of 16 at least’ (Schools Council, 1970, p. 28). It is ironic that no National Curriculum document until the 1999 revision embodied a statement of the purposes of teaching science as a core subject to all pupils in England and Wales. Government attention to standards was perhaps first made explicit in the work of the Assessment of Performance Unit. As with several other initiatives with

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which we have been concerned, the Assessment of Performance Unit appears in this book in two guises, relating respectively to the policy emphasis under which it was initiated, and the purposes to which it was appropriated. In the examples of this shift discussed in this book, the latter have usually been curricular in orientation. The APU was for a time a major vehicle by which central government hoped to obtain information about the standards that pupils achieved in schools. But the emphasis was subtly altered. The principal policy focus that led to the setting up of the Unit in 1974 was within the context of educational disadvantage and the educational needs of immigrants. The focus of attention quickly became the monitoring of changes in aggregate performance over time, perhaps the most obvious interpretation of ‘standards’. The politicians wanted to know whether standards were rising or falling. As we have seen, the assessment methods and data generated by the APU science project gave limited evidence on this issue. Concomitantly, the APU research teams became involved in a somewhat different set of questions from those to which politicians wished to secure answers: they wanted to find out what it was reasonable to expect, for example, most 11-year-old pupils to know, understand and be able to do, as a result of being taught science at school. Further, by developing test instruments which operationalized some of the rhetoric of ‘scientific method’, and thus providing models of novel curricular outcomes, the teams began to engage in a form of normative evaluation of the curriculum. From here, it was only a short step, if not to curriculum development itself, then at least to providing ammUnition and resources for those who would change the curriculum. Another line of development which the APU indirectly supported was the burgeoning research interest in children’s ‘alternative conceptions’ of natural phenomena, which was to provide some answers to questions of significance to the APU science team. It is thus no accident that the Deputy Director of the APU science team at Leeds, Rosalind Driver, became the Director of the Children’s Learning in Science Project, the early data for which were drawn from the testing programmes conducted by the Unit. In shedding light on how some of these conceptions changed with age and instruction, this research offered useful insights into what became known as ‘progression’, although it is difficult to identify any very specific way in which the research findings may have influenced the notion of progression that came to be embodied in the first Statutory Order for science published in 1989. The origins of that notion are likely to remain unclear until the relevant papers are released for public scrutiny. The work of APU science remains one of the sharpest and enduring reminders of the unpredictability of policy initiatives in science education. The question of standards had, and retains, a strong international dimension. The 1970s saw important shifts in the study of comparative education, away from earlier qualitative studies and towards more quantitative work. This quantitative research sought to correlate ‘outcomes’, notably student achievement,

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with a range of ‘inputs’ such as the form, content and structure of science curricula, and the teaching methods employed. The First International Science Study (FISS) was carried out in the early 1970s, under the aegis of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The results were published (Comber and Keeves, 1973) and, although open to substantial criticism, FISS paved the way for a second and a third international comparative study, SISS and TIMSS, carried out in 1984 and 1995 respectively (Martin and Mullis, 2000; Shorrocks-Taylor and Jenkins, 2000). Each of these studies was larger and more methodologically complex than its predecessor. Despite the enduring difficulties of conducting quantitative comparative research, the political significance of the results of these research studies is now considerable and seems likely to become even more so as further studies, such as the OECD PISA project, are undertaken (Schleicher, 2000). The general conclusion to be drawn from the work of the Assessment of Performance Unit and the various international comparisons of student achievement in science is that the outcomes quickly, and probably inevitably, extend beyond measures of pupil achievement to embrace issues of curriculum and pedagogy. Indeed, it is hardly too strong a claim to suggest that the attention devoted to international comparisons of pupil achievement is now such that both curriculum and pedagogy are shaped by those outcomes, as are perceptions of the merits and failings of national educational systems. For example, when the results of the second IEA study of student achievement became available, they showed that, while Korean primary students excelled in science achievement tests, their secondary counterparts were falling behind their peers in other countries. This finding, according to Han, was ‘immediately used in developing the sixth National Curriculum, in which the content was reduced in order to allow increased emphasis to be placed on the development of students’ basic science process skills’ (Han, 1995, p. 69). Data from the same international study indicated that Japanese students performed less well on tests of practical skills than on paper and pencil tests. The consequence was that courses of study in Japan were revised to ‘emphasise observation and experiments, especially in the lower and upper secondary schools, and to attempt to develop and foster spontaneous inquiry activities and scientific thinking skills’. Likewise, evidence that Japanese students did relatively poorly on science items with direct relevance to everyday life led to the view that practical subjects should be incorporated into the curriculum at national level (Watanabe, 1992, p. 458). These various accounts confirm that the dynamic displayed by APU, from a particular perspective on assessment instruments to the use of that perspective as an evaluative instrument for the curriculum, leading ultimately to attempts at curriculum reform, is of more than national significance. When quantitative international comparisons are the outcome, these processes are likely to be particularly vigorous. We have explored some aspects of the way in which a concern with ‘standards’ metamorphosed into a concern with curriculum in the context, assess-

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ment, within which standards are most obviously in play. So far as politicians were concerned, the two other major governmental initiatives which have been examined in this book (the GCSE examination and the National Curriculum), although they most certainly involved other dimensions, had ‘standards’ at the centre of their concerns. In the late 1990s, the focus of attention was on the two most immediate interpretations of ‘standards’: the comparability, over time, of the scales against which pupil attainment is measured, whether levels or GCSE grades; and the distribution of pupil performance within that scale. It is an overstatement, but not a great one, to suggest that, for politicians, the important question has been less to do with the content or skills upon which standards were measured, than with the ‘standards’ themselves. The aim was to keep these measures rising. By contrast, we began this section by noting that standards figured barely at all in the language of curriculum developers in the 1960s and 1970s. It is, again, hardly an exaggeration to say that matters had not changed by the 1990s. The professional science educators who sought to use governmental initiatives to promote change in the curriculum and in pedagogy were not greatly concerned, at least in their public comments, with the standards of pupil achievement, or scales for its measurement. The appropriation of the GCSE and the National Curriculum as policy initiatives, an appropriation which was a major feature of the relevant chapters in this book, took the form of a shift of emphasis from standards to curriculum. Common entitlement was perhaps an issue for both groups.

PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY? THE NUFFIELD PROJECTS Until the second half of the twentieth century, responsibility for preparing pupils for public examinations in scientific subjects in England and Wales was largely restricted to those teaching in public and grammar schools. Those teaching in elementary and, later, secondary modern schools, were largely free from the constraints imposed by external examinations upon their colleagues working in selective schools. In principle, those constraints were confined to matters of content. The task of the examination boards was to specify a syllabus and to examine candidates submitted for examination upon it. The reality, inevitably, was somewhat different. The nature and form of the questions which were set and the types of task presented in practical examinations exerted a strong influence upon science teachers’ work and the ways in which they taught science to their pupils. By the 1950s, external examinations in science had a recognisable pattern that had been ‘well established’ for at least a quarter of a century (Holmyard, 1925, preface). Questions set in School Certificate Examinations in the 1920s re-appeared in O-level examinations more than 30 years later, and grammar school science teachers had become highly skilled in preparing pupils

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to answer them. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 3, grammar school science teaching by the mid-1960s was described as a ‘straitjacket of chronic success’ (Nuffield Foundation, 1966, p. 4). None the less, it remained an important matter of principle that an examination board was concerned with the examination of candidates and not with how those candidates were taught. Pedagogy was a matter for the teachers themselves. The Nuffield Science Teaching Project offered a challenge to this position since it sought to promote an approach to school science teaching that was investigational and based upon the notion of ‘guided discovery’. The challenge, of course, was one that science teachers could easily avoid, since they were under no obligation to adopt either the curriculum resources or the teaching style encouraged by the Project. Indeed, one of the concerns of the Project leaders was that teachers might use the resources provided in ways that were ‘didactic’ (in the modern sense of excessively teacher and knowledge orientated), and contrary to the commitment to learning through investigation in the laboratory. The work of the Project, however, was ultimately to be of seminal importance for all science teachers. In seeking release from the ‘straitjacket of chronic success’, the Project sought to devise new forms of assessment which would encourage the kind of science teaching it wished to promote. Devising those new forms of assessment made it necessary to specify, in terms other than the long-familiar statements of content, what examinations were meant to assess. Borrowing the language of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom, 1956), so-called Nuffield examinations specified and weighted the skills which candidates would be required to display. It was not long before the examination boards, encouraged by the Schools Council, followed suit with respect to their ‘non-Nuffield’ examinations. A comparison of A- or O-level science syllabuses in 1962 and 1972 shows not only changes in content brought about in response to the Nuffield initiatives but also the inclusion of statements of skills to be assessed. Syllabuses for the new Certificate of Secondary Education followed much the same format, specifying both content and the ‘skills’ candidates were required to display. Typically, statements of such skills were cast in terms of ‘knowledge, comprehension, application and analysis/synthesis’, commonly allocated 40, 30, 20 and 10 per cent respectively of the marks to be awarded. There is here, therefore, more than a hint of science to be taught in ways that differed from those traditionally associated with the work of the grammar schools and which valorized a wider range of skills than the ability to recall scientific knowledge or apply it in the familiar ways associated with routine calculations in physics or chemistry. It can, of course, be argued that these forms of specification by an examination board do not lead directly to any one kind of teaching approach, since skills can often be developed in a variety of different ways. However, others might argue that, while this is true of scientific ‘content’ (i.e., knowledge), skills in their procedural, scientific sense can only be taught by modelling and rehearsing them.

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Pedagogy and outcomes thus merge. It is not coincidental that the areas within the GCSE and the National Curriculum where pedagogy was most strongly regulated were those involving what are commonly called ‘skills’ and ‘processes’. Two broad points can be made about the Nuffield Science Teaching Projects. The first is that, while they had a considerable impact on the practice of science teaching, such evidence as is available suggests that they did not bring about the transformation, particularly in pupil attitudes or take up of the sciences, which some had envisaged. The second is that, despite their centrally devised vision of change, they acknowledged that ultimate authority and control lay with the science teaching profession, although, of course, not necessarily with individual teachers.

TAKING CONTROL There is ample evidence that, by the mid-1970s, central government was concerned about the lack of influence it was able to bring to bear on the work of the schools, and about how it might address the issue of ‘standards’ that formed such an important part of Prime Minister Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech in 1976. Curriculum and assessment issues were the responsibility of the Schools Council, a broadly representative body, whose relationships with the Department of Education and Science were not always harmonious. Attempts to persuade local education authorities to address matters of curriculum policy, including the notion of a common curriculum entitlement, had met with frustratingly little success. In broad terms, from the point of view of central government, power and responsibility over the school curriculum were too widely diffused within the education service to allow for the concerted action judged necessary on the policy agenda established within the Department of Education and Science. However, such a perception does not lead inevitably to a statutory National Curriculum. Even in 1985, the implementation of the official statement of policy for the science curriculum, Science 5–16 (DES/WO, 1985b), was judged to be a matter for science teachers themselves. As noted in Chapter 4, they were urged to look to the highly localized work of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review for advice, assistance and support. It is difficult to recover a sense of the policy environment which preceded the National Curriculum, but it was congruent with the emphases within the Nuffield projects to which we referred in the previous section. Examination boards operated under a relatively relaxed regime of criteria governing their syllabuses. Teacher freedom and discretion were regarded, at least in the abstract, as desirable, reflecting the unique circumstances of schools, teachers and pupils. Even government policy, to the extent that it was reflected in the approach of the Schools Council, involved a prominent place for teachers’ ‘professional judge-

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ment’ in developing an appropriate individual, or school-based, response to the challenges of science in the curriculum. This usage of the term ‘professional judgement’ would come to contrast with the impoverished sense that it was to gain by the late 1980s. Of course, this is not to claim that the independence which teachers possessed was always concretely realized, or that it was directed towards curricular reform. Yet it was given a particular prominence in the work of the Secondary Science Curriculum Review, which benefited from government sponsorship. Although formally constrained by a set of criteria in relation to the funding of science teaching initiatives, the Review rested on the assumption that such initiatives should come from science teachers themselves, rather than from some centrally established ‘expert’ group. This, however, prompts the question of how the Review, like the earlier Nuffield and Schools Council attempts at reform, could have succeeded in effecting that general and national, rather than local, improvement in the standards of school science teaching sought by central government. It also raises questions of how, under such a regime, the better and the worse were to be distinguished, and how the responsibility of the government for public education and public resources was to be exercised. All of this amounts to asking how these earlier approaches were to embody public accountability. This question was never addressed to any significant degree, or, perhaps more accurately, it was carried over into radically new political and institutional relations, in which both science curriculum change and science teachers occupied more marginal positions. Only three years after the publication of Science 5–16, matters looked quite different, following the passage of the Education Reform Act 1988 and the introduction of the National Curriculum. Government assumed wide-ranging powers under the Act. Even the so-called Non-Statutory Guidance (NCC, 1989) which was associated with the Order governing science, despite its title, necessarily carried the authority of official advice. Within a new and dynamic set of relations with government, teachers’ professional relations with the curriculum, and the means of promoting change in the curriculum, were to be transformed, if not necessarily in predictable ways. The National Curriculum for science did not have within it a strong curriculum development orientation, although it has served this purpose to a significant degree. Even though central government in England and Wales took legislative powers over the form and content of what was to be taught and assessed in schools, it did so primarily under the rubrics of standards, accountability and entitlement. But taking such powers was merely the beginning of the story. It was necessary to establish how substance could be given to the legislation and, more particularly, to determine the form in which the science curriculum should be specified in the Statutory Order to be laid before Parliament under the provisions of the Act. The Order might have consisted of a set of bald summative outcomes, leaving science teachers, and those teaching other subjects, freedom to choose how these outcomes could best be realized. Some political rhetoric was expended on this very claim, but the distinction is easier stated than realized,

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and matters turned out very differently. The National Curriculum became a formidable tool for curriculum control and for the promotion of strategic change, employing the new and unstable apparatus of attainment targets, statements of attainment, profile components and programmes of study. Members of the Science Working Group, set up to advise the Secretaries of State, struggled with the task they had been set and, indeed, with the question of whether they ought to co-operate with the government in the way required. We recall the comment quoted earlier, from Paul Black, one of the principal actors in the events which unfolded: ‘The dilemma of professional educators was that they perceived an opportunity, possible unique, to “get it right”, and were reluctant to warn of the costs and the lengthy time essential to make their recommendations work’ (Black, 1995, p. 183). On the basis of what expertise, and authority, was the new curriculum to be created? Black’s statement reflects the fact that, in constructing the National Curriculum for science, government was obliged to rely upon those who might properly be said to belong to the ‘educational establishment’. This elastic, illdefined and derogatory term was used by the Secretary of State for Education and Science, among many others, to refer to those held responsible for many of the shortcomings in the work of the schools that the government was seeking to address. Although the members of the Science Working Group were closer than politicians and civil servants to those teaching science in the schools, they were appointees of the Secretaries of State and, as such, could make only the loosest claim to represent the views of the science teaching profession. However, the semi-public activity of the Group, working within published terms of reference, provided some degree of independence of government. Partly as a consequence, the science educationists in the Group had a substantial degree of control over their own affairs. Influence from the other directions was limited. Pressure might have been exerted, for example, by right wing political groups which, in other aspects of educational policy, had played a considerable role in shaping the views of the Conservative government. These groups appear to have had little impact in the field of school science. This reflected a wider state of affairs. Influence, or even interest, in the science curriculum from outside the worlds of science and science education was uncommon, and when it was detectable, it was limited. For example, Sheila Lawlor, a commentator on social affairs with links to such groups, wrote in a Centre for Policy Studies document that ‘The curriculum for science is necessarily very brief since the number of subjects and their everyday complexity is such that it is only the underlying principles which can be sensibly set out’ (Lawlor, 1988, pp. 38–9). The said curriculum was in fact minimalist to the point of incoherence. This situation may reflect the privileged position of science within political and public life in England and Wales, or it may indicate its marginality. Under these circumstances, the government’s agenda of standards and account-

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ability, and that of others who favoured curricular and pedagogic change, came into contact. Power was distributed somewhat unevenly. As Graham and Tytler (1993) have argued, the capacity to manoeuvre proactively within institutional and procedural options lies with government and civil servants. But the ability to work within the existing language, institutions and practices of science education could also confer power. Science educationists were able to operate on this conceptually familiar terrain to some effect. Informal and historical networks were important, as well as the legitimacy conferred by academic research. A pre-eminent source of such influence was the Assessment of Performance Unit. Such networks remained influential, to a formidable degree, even during the creation of the later versions of the science Order, up to the Dearing review and beyond. It seems that none of the working locations which government might create lay beyond the reach of the thought and influence of those whose field of professional interest was science education. As a result, and despite claims to the contrary (such as the faintly absurd claim that the curriculum for more able pupils contains more content, i.e., scientific knowledge, than in the past) all versions of the science Order included some of the most cherished ‘progressive’ ideas of those who might be regarded as among the opinion leaders within science education. As was discussed in Chapter 7, two major reviews of the National Curriculum were required before it came to be specified in a form that most science teachers found workable. Those difficulties were particularly acute with respect to Attainment Target 1 in the version of the National Curriculum in force until 1995. Indeed, they were so acute that it can be argued, perhaps paradoxically, that policy for this Attainment Target was constructed by, and belonged to, the science teachers themselves, as they struggled to operationalize the demands being made upon them (Jenkins, 1995). As this process occurred, under the difficult circumstances in which science teachers found themselves working, some of those who had promoted such an approach to curriculum development became dissatisfied and began, absurdly, to place responsibility for the difficulties on classroom teachers themselves. For example, Jeff Thompson, Chair of the Science Working Group regretted the manner in which Attainment Target 1 was being routinized by teachers: ‘I go into schools and I see teachers taking children through the hoops of whole investigations . . . they are being done almost in a routine way’ (Donnelly et al., 1996, p. 72). The wider outcomes for science teachers of the introduction of the National Curriculum were indicated in Chapter 8, and can be summarized as a large-scale reduction in professional discretion, and a widespread, although not universal, sense that the standardization of entitlement has resulted in a poorer match between pupils’ curricular needs and their experience of school science education. The underlying and perhaps predictable message here is again that central policy initiatives generate outcomes that are often unforseeable and depend upon a range of interacting and often contingent variables. More controversially, the

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account which has been presented here offers to revise and differentiate the cast of actors involved in creating policy. In much academic writing, this cast is often limited to government and teachers themselves. We have presented a more differentiated picture. Before leaving the question of curriculum specification by central government, it is important to acknowledge that much of the concern that was voiced in England and Wales about establishing an imposed National Curriculum would have attracted little sympathy in a number of other countries in which the specification of what must be taught in schools is an accepted norm and seen as an equitable and desirable measure. The scale of the diversity within the school system of England and Wales in the mid-1970s now seems astonishing. There were 105 local education authorities and 22 GCE/CSE examination boards, and, in the absence of any other guidance or requirement, the curriculum offered to pupils was effectively determined by each of the 33,000 primary and secondary schools. There is perhaps no clearer indication that, in terms of English and Welsh constitutional history, education has traditionally been perceived as a local, rather than a national, responsibility. The contrast in this respect with, for example, France, is striking. The UK government, however, was not alone in seeking to impose a curriculum policy upon schools in England and Wales for which, in law, other elected or appointed agencies, notably local authorities and governing bodies, were formally responsible. In countries across the world, where governments had the authority to do so, they reformed school curricula, including science curricula, and set standards in the interests of equity, national needs and economic competitiveness. As in England and Wales, this was commonly accompanied by a complex system of assessment, the introduction of which often presented problems similar to those associated with the National Curriculum in England and Wales. New Zealand, for example, introduced a New Curriculum Framework in 1993, subsequently supplemented by a National Qualifications Framework in which barriers no longer exist between schools and post-school education and training (Ministry of Education, 1993a, 1993b, 1997). Where, as in the USA, education is a matter for individual states, rather than the Federal government, the response to the pressure to raise standards has necessarily taken a different form. Here, the emphasis has been upon national ‘goals’ or ‘standards’, the achievement of which can be left in local hands, although it is of interest that the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996) include standards for content, teaching and assessment (Collins, 1995). The perspective of those working in the schools within the different education systems is also necessarily different. Reviewing developments in a number of countries, Black has commented as follows: When, as in Korea and Scotland, there has been a tradition of [setting and monitoring clear targets] . . . and no recent panic, the accounts speak of a measured

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process. Where, as in the USA, a similar concern has to be muted, because the central government of a federal nation has no more than the power to persuade in order to achieve consensus, the process is measured in a different way. Where there has been a political will to make a radical change quickly, as in New Zealand or in England and Wales, the process seems more frantic and ragged. (Black, 1995, p. 2)

In this section, we have been concerned especially with the actions and the power of government, although rather less directly with its explicit agenda. Whatever the nature of the government’s intentions, two points are clear. The first is that in seeking to establish a common curriculum entitlement, to raise the quality of science teaching in the schools and to enhance the accountability of the education service, governments inevitably cannot avoid issues that relate to curriculum development and pedagogy. To seek to control the curriculum is almost invariably, given the mechanisms involved, to seek to change it. In the case of the science curriculum in England and Wales, we have argued that aspects of these changes had a substantial progressivist edge. But we suggest that the evidence presented in this book undermines any claim that as a result they sustained science teachers’ claims to professional authority. The second point, which might be judged a corollary of the first, is that unless any statutory curriculum can acknowledge, take account of and build upon science teachers’ existing practice, and the views of its practitioners, there are likely to be severe difficulties in its implementation, and its relationship to teachers’ aspirations is likely to be problematic. This brings us to the question of science teachers’ professionalism.

SCHOOL SCIENCE TEACHING AND PROFESSIONALISM It will be clear from the previous chapters in this book that the role accorded to science teachers in science curriculum reform and the extent to which they are allowed or encouraged to assume responsibility for their own work are historically and politically contingent. As is particularly clear from a comparison with other educational systems, they are also socially contingent, although the differences have rarely been the focus of comparative research in education. The assumptions that underpinned the Nuffield and Schools Council Science Teaching Projects, and the institutions and supporting mechanisms upon which they depended, were no longer sustainable in the changed political climate that made possible the passage of the Education Reform Act 1988. That change had major consequences for the standing and authority of secondary school science teachers. Whereas they had once been bidden to take part in science curriculum renewal or even to initiate it, their responsibility now became that of ‘delivering’ a prescribed curriculum within an assessment framework which tends to frustrate that which it does not require. Another consequence, although casualty

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might be a better word, was some part of the goodwill amongst science teachers, the existence of which it had once been possible to assume. Within this changed climate, the notion of teachers’ professional judgement has also undergone important shifts in meaning. In the 1960s and for much of the 1970s, science teachers’ professional judgement revolved around such matters as devising or selecting curricula, teaching strategies or assessment procedures that they judged best served the needs and interests of their pupils. This element of strategic control was prominent within the Nuffield approach, and it received the support of government. Professional judgement was also invoked when science teachers were asked to interpret the various grading schemes for the award of marks within systems of school-based assessment of practical work, a development strongly promoted by some of the Nuffield and Schools Council science curriculum projects. A descendant of this element of professional judgement was to be found in the processes of school-based assessment within the GCSE examination and, subsequently, within Attainment Target 1 of the National Curriculum: but professional judgement in relation to strategic control of the curriculum had been eliminated. A hostile judgement on this shift might be that in recent years an appeal to ‘professional judgement’ was made at those points when attempts to prescribe pedagogy or assessment failed. Rather more than a decade after the introduction of the statutory curriculum, science teachers’ professional expertise in England and Wales may be said to lie in curriculum ‘delivery’ and in rendering transparent elements of their work for which they are to be held publicly accountable by the Office for Standards in Education, or other agencies such as school governors. The current degree of legislative control over the substance of professional practice enshrined in the National Curriculum in England and Wales is uncommon. Professions other than teaching, even in England and Wales, and to a much greater extent in some other European countries, do, of course, rely on legislative authority (Abbott, 1988; Macdonald, 1995). However, that authority is institutionally, and not substantively, formulated, and it is often devolved to independent professional bodies, statutorily responsible to members of the profession and not, for example, to government. The contrast with the governance of the National Curriculum and, we may note in passing, the governance of teaching as an occupation within the maintained sector, could hardly be clearer. We sketched earlier the shifts away from professional representation in the creation of the National Curriculum. Control over the ongoing process of reform is retained entirely by the government and its appointees. Professionalism is historically associated with independent representative organizations. What part, it might be asked, did the science teachers’ professional association, the Association for Science Education, play in all of this? One of its predecessors, the Science Masters’ Association, sought to modernize grammar school science education in the late 1950s, and the following two decades saw

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leading members of the ASE play major roles in the curriculum initiatives associated with the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council. The rapid growth in size of the Association journal, the School Science Review, the incorporation of a section entitled ‘Curriculum Development’ and the publication of an Association Bulletin (later, Education in Science) were all testament to the burgeoning interest of a growing number of science teachers in curriculum renewal and in the ‘new’ techniques, such as objective testing and the assessment of practical skills, then being tried out in schools. By the end of the 1970s, however, the rapid development of comprehensive schooling, and an acknowledgement that earlier science curriculum reforms had had much less impact on the work of science teachers than had once been hoped, demanded a new sense of direction and purpose for school science teaching. Despite its involvement with the Secondary Science Curriculum Review, the Association for Science Education found it difficult to articulate its own policy and, by the time it did so, the initiative, which was to lead ultimately to the National Curriculum, had come to lie firmly with the government (Jenkins, 1998a). Although the Association responded to the various consultation documents generated by the process of establishing and revising the science component of the National Curriculum, it is difficult to avoid the impression that it struggled during much of the 1990s to determine how best to represent the views of its members. Its stance on the controversial question of Attainment Target 1 generated a degree of conflict between the leadership of the Association and some of its members. We have offered an account of these events, and argued that the Association displayed a distinct ambivalence towards the views of its members (Donnelly et al., 1996). In a series of surveys, it attempted to monitor the ways in which schools were providing a science education that was ‘broad and balanced’. It did not, as far as we are aware, seek to establish in any systematic way the views of members about their experience of teaching the National Curriculum, or its impact on the quality of pupils’ science education. Rather it focused its attention on how members could best be helped to ‘deliver’ what had been prescribed. This, of course, is an important function, although it is perhaps more limited and less critical than at least some members of the Association would have wished. Today, the position of the Association remains much the same, with issues relating to the teaching and assessment of the science component of the National Curriculum featuring prominently in the programme of its Annual Meeting. To some degree, the Association might be judged to be doing no more than acknowledging the realities of power and control in the science curriculum. One important dimension of the work of the ASE, however, must not be overlooked. This stems from the fact that many of those who have played, or continue to play, a significant role in the shaping of the National Curriculum and its assessment have been, or remain, members of the Association. Such members were prominent in, for example, the Science Working Group and among the pro-

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fessional officers of a range of statutory bodies, including the Schools Council and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. As a minimum, this ensures that the views of science teachers, to the extent that these are represented by the ASE, are known to those in a stronger position to influence government policy. The price to be paid, of course, is that influence and the exchange of ideas are in the private rather than the public domain. Where this mechanism was in play, the influence of the ASE was exerted not through structures representative of its membership, however notional that representation may have been, but through the influence of individual members, who were not likely, by their nature, to be ordinary schoolteachers. One of the themes which has emerged from the present study is the differentiated character of the science education ‘community’. As Abbott has indicated in his book, The System of Professions (Abbott, 1988), professional status, and to some degree influence, is often directly related to involvement with the knowledge base of the profession and inversely related to contact with clients. In most writing about the National Curriculum, this differentiation is rarely attended to. The major axis drawn is that between government, and its agents within departments of state or other organizations, on the one hand, and ‘teachers’, on the other. However, the initiatives discussed above demonstrate that matters are a good deal more complex. Particularly in connection with the GCSE examination and the National Curriculum, the process of implementation has exaggerated the distinctions between those who have influence, and who are typically not classroom teachers, and the science teachers whom they, in some weak sense of the word, ‘represent’. These distinctions in occupational position to which we have drawn attention are reflected in the emergence, during the period with which this book is concerned, of a new composite category, ‘science educators’. One of the associated phenomena is an inconsistency in the ways in which talk about teachers is framed. On the one hand, they can figure as committed professionals, experts in their chosen work. On the other, they can be represented as a source of difficulty, particularly in relation to curricular change: over-wedded to the subject knowledge and the disciplines on which their academic studies were based, and resistant to change. In consequence, so the argument goes, if more often in private than in public, many or most practising science teachers may legitimately be compelled, through the mechanisms of legislation and assessment, to change their ways. The situation which we have just sketched within the science education community has important implications at two levels. It can lead to the imposition of change which is, at worst, ill judged in principle and not weighed against wider teacher opinion or, more mildly, implemented without due consideration of the day to day circumstances within which science teachers work. More fundamentally for our argument in this book, it undermines the view that science teachers have professional authority over, and responsibility for, their work, and it

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reinforces the tendency in political circles to ignore teachers’ claims in these areas. It is unsurprising that these aspects of the way in which teachers figure in the policy-making process is not over-represented in academic analyses, though occasionally it is detectable (Hargreaves, 1996). We accept, of course, that the existence of categories of people with a distinctive academic and scholarly interest in the science curriculum is legitimate. However, it seems to us incontrovertible that the voices speaking professionally in relation to science teaching should be predominantly those of practising science teachers, and that in a way which reflects their diversity (Goodson, 1996). We take it as a precondition of progress in science teachers’ professional authority that the tensions which we have identified, abstractly here, and concretely in preceding chapters, be understood and resolved, if the notion of science teaching as a profession is to gain any purchase within the governance of the science curriculum and science teaching. In short, these tensions need to be brought into the light of day and their foundations and consequences examined. In the remaining sections of this book, we will focus on three broad areas – pedagogy, curriculum and change – and we will seek to relate each to the notions of professionalism and accountability, since, in each case, a settlement against these twin pressures is needed. It is perhaps necessary to reaffirm that we do not see the demands of accountability as illegitimate. Further, we do not wish to suggest that curriculum and pedagogy constitute exclusive or exhaustive categories. Evidently they do not, and the linkage between them is particularly strong in some of the more problematic areas we have identified: laboratory work, investigations and the exploration of such other aspects of the nature of science as appear presently to be convened under the title of ‘understanding evidence’. In these areas, curricular change implies pedagogic change. Nevertheless, if we take curriculum to mean a broad strategic account of what shall be taught, and for what broad purposes, then we think a workable distinction can be drawn. We will begin with pedagogy which we take to mean, approximately, teaching methods and their systematic analysis.

PROFESSIONALISM AND PEDAGOGY It is appropriate to offer two brief comments to place any debate about pedagogy within a wider international perspective. The first, as Reynolds and his colleagues have noted, is that there is little international agreement about what constitutes effectiveness, either in terms of schools or of science teachers: many of the basic constructs of the Anglo-Saxon effectiveness movement [are] only in existence in roughly half of the countries under study. In Taiwan and Hong Kong there [is] no discourse about ‘school effectiveness’ or ‘teacher effectiveness’, separate from or distinctive from the general societal commitment to ensuring that all

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children learn. Neither in these societies, nor in Norway, [is] there any understanding of the effectiveness notion of school ‘value-added’, and the effectiveness of institutions [is] seen as related only to the ‘raw scores’ or ‘raw achievements’ of children, not to the relationship between their intake and their outcome scores. (Reynolds et al., 2000, p. 128)

The second is that many of the school systems that are frequently presented as more successful (typically those of Taiwan and Hong Kong) than those of England and Wales or the USA reflect different assumptions, stemming from the wider society, about whether schools are about helping children to ‘move at their own pace’ or about ensuring that every pupil meets some specified standard of achievement. In countries such as Taiwan and Hong Kong it is the latter view which prevails, and it supports a strong and uniform technology of agreed practice in teaching that is not only unfamiliar in most parts of the Anglo-Saxon world but runs counter to many of its deeply held assumptions. It is not possible at the time of writing to be sure about the extent to which the National Curriculum, and its associated ‘guidance’ will extend its influence more directly and overtly into matters of pedagogy. Central government has sought to promote literacy and numeracy by intervening in the work of primary school teachers in a way that, only a few years ago, would have been unthinkable. Primary teachers are also offered ‘guidance’, in the form of exemplar schemes of work, on how to teach science, and more such ‘guidance’ has become available at Key Stage 3 (ages 11 to 14) at secondary level. In relation to science teachers’ practice, the most significant usage is perhaps that of ‘best practice’, and its congener ‘good practice’. The underlying notion here is beguilingly simple. The standards achieved by pupils would rise if only those who taught them followed some standardized practice, specified and laid down in some way, or did what other teachers did with their pupils in other schools. The danger, we believe, lies not so much in the naïveté of this assumption but in what it entails for the public, and governmental, understanding of science teachers’ work. The now somewhat colloquial notion of good practice has been to some degree taken up and academicized in the concept of ‘evidence-based practice’ or, less grandly, finding out ‘what works’ (e.g., Hargreaves, 1997). It is difficult to know exactly what is intended here, but the issue evidently impinges on teachers’ professionalism. Teachers might be understood as identifying, or perhaps being taught, techniques which are based on systematic research studies, focused very tightly on generalizable treatments and measurable outputs, which together identify ‘what works’. What this might mean in practice remains vague. The model, apparently, is medicine. It hardly needs to be pointed out that medicine works, to a significant degree, within a relatively well-defined taxonomy of illness which might be the subject of research and evidence-gathering, and that medical practitioners work within a broadly instrumental model of practice. The extent to

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which these characteristics apply to teaching is, at best, questionable. Setting this objection aside for the moment, the notion of evidence-based practice can be judged, from one perspective, as supporting the notion of professionalism: it speaks directly to the idea of specialist expertise which is so much part of the trait theory of occupations. However, with a slight shift of focus it can be seen as threatening. Standardized techniques eliminate discretion. They open practice to careful specification, and to the monitoring, most notoriously associated, in the engineering industries, with Frederick Taylor’s ‘one best way’, ‘scientific management’ and ‘time and motion studies’. Historically, it has been argued that when the knowledge of a practice can be systematized and optimized it is vulnerable to control, deskilling and, collaterally, to a reduction in status for the occupation. For those who see accountability as a threat, the notion of evidencebased practice could be regarded as a significant aggravation of the situation, requiring science teachers to justify their practices in ways that are very explicit. This type of discussion might be judged premature, to put the point mildly, in the case of secondary school science teaching. A fully evidence-based approach to such teaching may seem so unlikely as to be dismissable as fantasy, although, if optimal techniques could be identified, it might well be argued that resistance to them is no more than self-interested special pleading. In any case, advocates of a greater emphasis on ‘evidence-based practice’ will commonly argue that it is not such an overarching and reductive agenda which is in view, but rather the provision of information which would complement and enhance the professional expertise of teachers. But it is worth recalling, and recent events in primary schools in England and Wales suggest, that, once the notion of a particular ‘best practice’ is established, the conditions for its imposition can easily become less to do with evidence than with getting one’s hands on the levers of power. This is an issue which will receive a great deal of attention in the coming years. For what it is worth, we will state here our view that the prospect of an ‘evidence-based practice’ which is intellectually worth the name making significant and generalized inroads into science teaching seems to us extremely unlikely, despite the large sums of public money being invested in the idea at the present time, particularly through the Economic and Social Research Council. This is not to deny the obvious point that science teachers can, and do, learn from the practice of others, and commonly welcome the opportunity to do so. But this learning must be combined with an understanding of practice that acknowledges the wide diversity that stems from the context of individual teachers working in the particular circumstances of a school, classroom, laboratory or group of pupils. If, as some suggest, evidence-based practice is just old-fashioned ‘processproduct’ research with a new image, we argue that there are just too many processes, and that the products they supposedly lead to are simply too heavily mediated and intangible, to give us any confidence that such a project could generate outcomes of any worth. To put the point in more currently fashionable terms, teachers’ work is too situated and too contingent on the human relation-

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ship between teacher and taught for such a programme to be likely to yield largescale benefits. Science teachers’ accounts of why they do what they do are unlikely to be the subjects of universal generalization, the validity of which can be tested by some quasi-scientific method. Teachers have good reasons for what they do. Their theories of teaching, although theory is perhaps too grand a word, are constantly evolving, and embrace much more than the need to promote pupils’ learning. Like all theories of practical action, they also embrace much more than can be made explicit. Science teaching, like all teaching, accommodates judgements that cannot be supported in abstract and general terms but only in the particularities of the situation in which a teacher is working with pupils, and then frequently only by an appeal to experience (Lave and Chaiklin, 1993). Finally, and perhaps above all, teaching is fundamentally not a form of instrumentality exercised by the teacher over the pupil, but a moral practice and a special kind of human relationship, which flourishes in ways which are likely to escape being caught in the net of ‘best practice’ (van Manen, 1991; Noddings, 1992). To take this argument in a rather different direction, we suggest that it highlights a need to describe the complex nature of science teachers’ work in ways that allow it to be more widely and sympathetically understood by those outside the profession who seek to change it. This will not be easy, partly because everyone has memories of schooling and we each have our own recollections of, and judgements about, those who taught us, in many cases in a world very different from the present. A still greater difficulty is that there seems to be no indigenous pedagogical language and conceptual structure with which to capture what really matters about science teachers’ work. Too often, the language used is simply borrowed from other fields of professional activity, notably management, business, economics and psychology. It is not simply that the existing language fails to capture the essence of what science teachers do when they teach. It also presents a misleading picture of what is involved in science teaching. Curricula and other aspects of pupils’ education are now commonly said to be ‘delivered’. Grotesquely, children themselves are now routinely said to have ‘value’ added. This is a formulation which is only marginally less offensive for being used, in the main, collectively, that is, in respect of cohorts of pupils. Developing a language and conceptual structure to describe secondary school teaching is a significant task for science teachers and researchers, and it is by no means obvious that it can be completed satisfactorily. It will involve recognizing that how science teachers teach is the outcome of a dynamic interaction between a range of structural (including social structures) and personal factors, some of which are more influential than others. The precise, but necessarily shifting, location of each teacher among this dynamic serves to characterize the lesson which is taught. To conclude this discussion by returning to questions of policy: if only some

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part of this account of teaching is true, it means that science teachers’ ownership of their work imposes severe limits on the power of legislation and other forms of authority to effect change. As practitioners, science teachers negotiate with the advice or instruction presented to them about pedagogy (‘best practice’) as they do about the curriculum or assessment. They actively engage in creating policies in these fields as they seek to negotiate with the proposed changes on the basis of their own, not always explicit, understanding of what constitutes their own practice. To accept this role for science teachers is to acknowledge that they retain a fundamental, experience-based ownership of what they do, or can reasonably be asked or required to do. We recognize that there will be those who will not share our views about the notion of ‘good practice’, ‘best practice’ or ‘evidence-based practice’ and the role it has come to play in discussions about how elements of the National Curriculum should be taught. It seems likely that underlying any such difference of view are differences in the perception of what is involved in teaching and, more particularly, in good teaching. The underlying issue for the future of science teaching under the National Curriculum can be baldly stated: to what extent, if at all, should science teachers’ be free to determine their own pedagogy?

PROFESSIONALISM AND CURRICULUM In the context of professionalism, curriculum presents more severe problems than pedagogy. It would be difficult to defend a system in which teachers had unfettered control over what was to be taught, or over the aims of the curriculum. Rather than seeking to analyse the balance abstractly, we will therefore conclude by sketching a model of the organization of a National Curriculum which might offer a compromise between accountability, entitlement and legitimate professional authority. At its core is the view that the model of curricular specification which operates at the time of writing is insufficiently differentiated. The approach has been to create an exhaustive map of the science curriculum, in which all elements have uniform status, together with an implicit judgement that if any element is not assessed, it will not be taught. There is insufficient acknowledgement that different schools and teachers may have different strengths and priorities. Though an emphasis on specialist schools has developed somewhat haphazardly within government policy in recent years, it represents a very broad approach, within the existing constraints of the National Curriculum. It does not operate at the level of individual science departments or at the level of the individual teacher. The operative model is that ‘experts’ specify and teachers comply. Yet more indefensibly, there is no provision for ongoing curriculum development. There is no facility worth the name for trialling suggested innovations in curriculum, pedagogy or assessment for pupils of statutory school age and putting

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these squarely to the test of implementation by teachers. It was under these circumstances, and the parallel (mis)appropriation of work such as that of the APU, that the fiasco, as we judge it to have been, of Attainment Target 1 between 1989 and 1995 was allowed to unfold. We suggest below a model which reverses several of these principles. It is perhaps unlikely that such a model could be accepted in the short term, but a movement towards a National Curriculum framework which accepted some aspects of its approach would, we believe, be beneficial for both science teaching and, what is hardly distinguishable, for the professional situation of science teachers. Above all, we believe that it would be to the advantage of pupils. We suggest three elements in the process of curricular specification, of which only the first would be defined in detail at a statutory level, and have associated assessment outcomes. It might be called the ‘foundation’ or ‘entry’ science curriculum, and would need to be kept to a minimum to allow space for other elements. This is a formidable, but not, in our view, an impossible, task. The second element would, in essence, provide time for schools to follow particular local or teacher-led interests with perhaps some non-statutory suggestions or guidance, made available centrally for schools which chose to use it. This might be called the ‘extension curriculum’. It is probable that, within such time, some schools would encourage pupils to undertake some extended investigatory work, the educational benefits of which have attracted considerable support within sections of the science education community. Work of this kind can be found currently in a small number of schools, even under the present curriculum and assessment regime, and it is undertaken with great enthusiasm, although the activity involved rarely fits the structure of ‘investigations’ as specified in the National Curriculum and associated GCSE syllabuses (Albone, Collins and Hill, 1995). Of course, other teachers might choose a different emphasis for this extension work. This element of the science curriculum could be evaluated by whatever form of Ofsted or other inspection regime was in place, and would be assessed, independently of the entry curriculum, by teachers themselves. We hardly need to point out the tension here with the notion of entitlement, if not accountability: whether such a rebalancing of this tension is appropriate is a political, not a professional, judgement. We wish, however, to point out another entitlement which is easily forgotten: the entitlement of pupils to be taught by competent, engaged and enthusiastic teachers. It is our judgement that a movement towards such professional discretion as we have sketched here is an essential contribution to achieving this. The last element of our suggested system would involve a semi-official means of curriculum development, integrated in part with the extension curriculum. It would draw systematically on work done in schools under this heading, as well as originating work itself, or supporting the work of other bodies (Campbell et al., 1994). It would offer modest financial support and enable the transfer of material, after appropriate trialling, into the officially recognized guidance mate-

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rial. Ultimately, perhaps exceptionally, when curriculum materials had found widespread acceptance among science teachers, and if they were judged to be of central importance, they might be given a statutory character, although we would expect this to be an exceptional measure. Responsibility for overseeing the entry curriculum, supplying extension guidance and operating the curriculum development elements of this system would lie with a single authority, the constitution of which was such that it commanded respect within the science teaching profession, and whose members were in some measure accountable to it. To implement the approach would, of course, raise questions in relation particularly to the system of 16+ assessment, which is increasingly specified and controlled, and hardly susceptible to a reversal of this process. Such an approach would inevitably need to be supplemented by the continuing overall review to which the National Curriculum is already and very properly subject, but would, it is to be hoped, ensure that that revision occurred within a body of evidence and resources which would limit the subjection of the process to contingent influences and ‘intellectual’ fashion. It places a very substantial responsibility for the promotion and evaluation of change on practising science teachers. That comment brings us to our concluding remarks, and the key issue in this book.

PROFESSIONALISM, CHANGE AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN SCIENCE EDUCATION The shifts in science curriculum policy with which this book is concerned are bracketed by two very different types of initiative. The Nuffield Science Teaching Project represented an attempt to change the science curriculum by largely voluntary means. The National Curriculum for science, to the extent that it was an exercise in curriculum development, was of a quite different character. It would be a sanguine commentator who would suggest that either approach has been successful in the promotion of significant and enduring curricular change. The radically different, if somewhat inchoate, initiative represented by the Secondary Science Curriculum Review is difficult to evaluate in terms of impact, but that impact seems equally likely to have been moderate. Of course, some very obvious changes have been achieved at secondary level, notably the requirement that all pupils study balanced science to 16 and the shift towards a common science examination. But these are crude indicators, achieved by a fairly blunt use of legislative power. Their concrete impact on practice, beyond a quantitative increase in scale and a broad balancing across the science disciplines, is uncertain. In particular, their impact on the quality of pupils’ science education is unclear. One cannot repudiate the case for change in the science curriculum. It reflects

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a pressure which stems from wider political, disciplinary and philosophical considerations, and, perhaps less convincingly, from what is known about how pupils learn. We enter the qualification that such change ought not to be at the expense of providing pupils with appropriate insights into the body of scientific knowledge. But the question of what changes might be sought, and how to bring them about, is complex, and unlikely to lead to a consensual answer. We have, throughout this book, eschewed listing, analysing and evaluating the types of change which might be needed. Such material is a glut on the market. To limit consideration only to what might be judged intrinsic to science (that is, excluding, for example, gender considerations or methods of assessment), possible foci for change most obviously include curricular content (extending well beyond variations in scientific knowledge to include studies of the nature of science, the social, political and technological implications of science and investigatory work), teaching methods and, of course, the need to strive to improve the quality of the work done under these headings. However, at the risk of excessive speculation, we might suggest that much of the pressure for change is conditioned by the particular character of science. Science represents our best knowledge of the physical world, if in a form which has a very particular character. The generation of this knowledge is implicated with characteristics of science which are in some sense normative. That is to say, scientific practice involves certain normative decisions, or perhaps assumptions, about the sorts of knowledge which it sets out to create. These include valuing the ability to predict and explain in generalized and abstract terms, in ways which are divorced, at the level of what is acknowledged in the world, from questions of value. Science is also divorced programmatically from the perspective of the individual: above all, it strives to establish a consensual body of knowledge. These suggested characteristics give science its particular character, though we acknowledge that they are, as we have baldly stated them, in places contentious. Again to some degree contentiously, we suggest that they also motivate or condition the pressure for curricular change in science. To justify and explore this claim would require another, very different book. We will say only that these characteristics of science raise questions in relation to pupil motivation and engagement, and to the purposes of science education, particularly in respect of pupils who will not have any professional involvement with science in later life. We suggest that the many attempts at curriculum development in recent years have, in their different ways, set out to address the questions thus raised. These normative characteristics of science condition important aspects of the professionalism of science teachers. This last linkage we believe to be important within the events we have analysed, although not commonly addressed within the governance of science teaching. Arguably the central question in the study, although of course by no means the only one, is the place of science teachers, understood as professional workers, in the promotion of change. This question

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is conditioned by two issues. First, what is the appropriate balance between political and other voices in defining curriculum and pedagogy in schools which are publicly funded and publicly accountable? This question is in large measure a political one. Secondly, what is the nature of science teachers’ professional expertise, including its limits, and the limits of its authority? The central, or at any rate, chronologically prior, claim to professional knowledge which science teachers bring, is derived from that body of scientific knowledge which they gained as students of science. Yet these studies equip them for only one aspect of their professional work, and then, often only partially. The other areas of expertise to which science teachers might lay claim are altogether more problematic to define, and are gained, where they are gained, in the very limited time, and under the many pressures, of initial teacher training and professional practice. Under these circumstances, exacerbated in recent years by growing constraints on initial training and further professional development, teachers barely address strategic or critical questions in relation to science and science education. If, as is sometimes claimed, science teachers are professionally conservative, too focused on questions of scientific content, and unwilling to acknowledge the needs or possibilities of change, this is hardly surprising, particularly if we add to the above list the pressing social situation in which they work in the classroom. It needs to be acknowledged, more openly than has commonly been the case in the past, that all of these circumstances condition and tend to limit science teachers’ professional expertise. It has been the premise of this book that the quality of pupils’ science education is conditioned above all by the quality of the teaching which they experience, and that the single most important influence on this, by some way, is the teacher. We have also taken it as our working assumption that improvement is best served by acknowledging and promoting science teachers’ professionalism, by which we mean their knowledge, responsibility and authority in relation to their work. That professionalism has many components, and is subject to many influences, of which political pressures and the deeply experiential character of teaching as an activity are perhaps the two most obvious. For us, therefore, the central question is how, within these constraints, to enrich and deepen science teachers’ professionalism so that they may collectively identify clearer and more appropriate aims for the science curriculum and improve the quality of the teaching through which those aims are addressed. There is, we suggest, no short cut in this process, and particularly not one in which the majority of science teachers are treated as targets for the attention of politicians or others. The central requirements are the reform of the strategic institutions of governance of the curriculum and assessment to make them more flexible and representative, and the provision of opportunities, including time, resources and career structures, for the individual and collective professional development of science teachers. In both of these areas, an important issue will be how to enable those in the academic and research community to enrich and motivate the process

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without usurping the authority of teachers themselves. Science teachers need to be seen, by politicians, their agents and other ‘science educators’, as part of the solution to, rather than as part of the problem of, raising the quality of pupils’ science education in secondary schools.

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INDEX Abbott, A. 4, 156, 158 Accountability 131, 161, 165 Activity categories 66 Adey, P. 3 Aims of science teaching 137–9 Albone, E. 164 Aldrich, R. 102 A-level 82 APU, see Assessment of Performance Unit Areas of experience 99 Armstrong, H. E. 16, 18 ASE Examinations sub-committee 69, 86 ASE, see Association for Science Education Assessment of Performance Unit 10, 11, 60–79, 108, 117, 144–6, 147 Association for Science Education 9, 18, 25, 42, 48, 49, 51–2, 64, 55, 72, 84, 89, 90, 126, 136, 156, 157 Association of Women Science Teachers 28 AT1, see Attainment Target 1 Atkin, J. M. 2, 10, 83 Atomistic skills 90 Attainment Target 103, 105, 107, 108, 112 Attainment Target 1 71, 77, 108–111, 112, 135, 136, 137, 153, 156, 157, 164 Attainment Target 17 108, 109, 111 BAAS, see British Association for the Advancement of Science Baker, K. 100, 101, 102, 103, 107 Balanced science 45, 49, 55, 102, 122, 123, 165 Balfour Education Act 13, 102 Ball, S. J. 9, 101 Barber, M. 101 Bash, L. 101 Bausor, J. 88 Beatty, J. W. 139 Bell, B. 59

Beloe report 20 Benne, K. D. 4 Bennetts, J. 90 Bennis, W. G. 4 Best practice 104, 161–2 Better Schools 99 Better Science 45, 57 Biggs, P. 49, 65. 86, 90 Biology 49, 65, 86, 90, 123 Black, P. J. 2, 10, 62, 63, 64, 71, 73, 77, 83, 112, 119, 154–5 Blenkin, G. M. 4, 40, 47 Bleyberg, W. 36, 37 Blin-Stoyle, R. 50 Bloom, B. S. 149 Bloom’s Taxonomy 149 Bloomfield, B. 60, 74 Blunkett, D. 116 Board of Education 14, 18, 82 Bonham, H. J. 19 Booth, M. S. 124 Booth, N. 32, 33 Bossons, N. 91 Botany 123 Bowe, R. 9, 101 Boyle, A. 51 Boyle, Sir Edward 23 Brighouse, T. 101 British Association for the Advancement of Science 14, 18 British Gas 48 British Petroleum 48 Brock, W. H. 16 Brown, M. 85 Brunel University 113 Buchan, A. 143 Butler, P. H. 2 Callaghan, J. 53, 61, 97, 150

186

Index Carter, D. S. G. 10 Cascade system 89 Cassidy, S. 125 Central Advisory Council on Education 29, 47, 83 Centre for Policy Studies 152 Centre-periphery reform 40, 46 Certificate of Secondary Education 20, 26. 30, 33, 35, 76, 83, 149 Chaiklin, S. 162 Chapman, B. R. 63, 83, 88 Chapman, C. 56 Chelsea College 62, 64, 71, 72 Chemistry 49, 65, 106 ChemStudy 28 Child, D. 71 Children’s Learning in Science Project 57, 71, 77, 146 Chin, R. 4 Circular 10/65 13, 20, 58 Circular 6/68 44 Clark, C. M. 138 Clarke, K. 111 Clegg, A. 73 Clifton College 15 CLISP, see Children’s Learning in Science Project Coles, M. 111 Collins, A. 154 Collins, N. 164 Comber, L. C. 147 Comprehensive schools 13, 50 Constructivism 57, 71, 77 Coulby, D. 101 Council for Science and Technology 125, 126, 136, 140 Coursework 92 Criteria referencing 71 Crowther Committee 22 Crowther Report 22 CSE, see Certificate of Secondary Education CST, see Council for Science and Technology Cuban, L. 3, 7, 95, 142 Curriculum 11–16 (1977) 63, 97 Curriculum 11–16 (1983) 99 Curriculum entitlement 50, 97 Curriculum objectives 149 Curriculum Study Group 22, 24 Curriculum 5–16 63, 100 Daugherty, R. 80, 105

187

Davidson, I. 8 Dawson, J. 60, 73 Dawson, P. 91 Dearing review 115, 118 Dearing, Sir R. 114 Denley, P. 45, 56 Dent, H. C. 19, 20 Department for Education 115 Department of (for) Education and Science 7, 23, 26, 42, 50, 54, 60, 87, 89, 95, 98, 103, 106, 109, 122, 127, 150 Department of Trade and Industry 48 DES, see Department of (for) Education and Science DFE, see Department for Education DFEE, see Department of Education and Employment Department for Education and Employment 116, 122 Didaktik 10 Disciplinary specialism 121, 123 Ditchfield, C. 49 Donnelly, J. F. 77, 89, 92, 104, 106, 107, 111, 113, 124, 126, 127–8, 133, 137, 139, 157 Double Award 49, 50, 56, 112, 125 Driver, R. 62, 67, 71, 77, 78, 127, 130, 146 Dual Award 44 Dubé, G. E. 40 Eccles, Sir David 22, 27 Economic and Social Research Council 161 Education (Research) Committee 65 Education Act 1902 12, 14 Education Act 1944 13, 24, 41, 83 Education in Chemistry 30, 123, 143 Education in Science 32, 42, 57, 63, 66, 72, 86, 90, 123, 143 Education Reform Act 1988 25, 60, 100, 102, 103, 106, 155 Educational disadvantage 60 Educational establishment 100, 152 Edwards, G. 4, 40, 47 Eggleston, J. F. 38, 40, 61, 73 Elementary education 13 Ellington, K. 59 Ellison, L. 101 Entry curriculum 164 ESRC, see Economic and Social Research Council Evans, M. 45 Evans, N. 112

188


Evidence-based practice 161 Experimental skills 88, 90, 92, 109, 128–9 Exploration of Science 112 Extension curriculum 164 Fairbrother, R. W. 66 Farrer-Brown, L. 27, 38 Fensham, P. J. 10 Fink, D. 3 First International Science Study 147 FISS, see First International Science Study Fitz, J. 8 Flude, M 101 Flynn, H. E. 40 Fowler, W. S. 98 Foxman, D. 60, 74 Free places 13 Fullan, M. 3, 4, 95 Gadd, K. 3 Galton, M. J 38. Garforth, F. 85 Garrett, V. 101 GASP, see Graded Assessment in Science Project GCE examinations 19, 26, 30, 82 GCSE examinations 4, 11, 44, 46, 63, 67, 68, 74, 75, 78, 80, 94, 110, 121, 122, 126–9, 143, 147, 150 GCSE National Criteria 83–4, 87, 88, 89, 91, 95, 102, 127 GEC 48 Geller, H 8. Generalizability theory 69 Giltin, A. D. 8 Gipps, C. 60, 62, 63, 71, 74, 77, 80, 92 Gold, A. 101 Goldstein, H. 60, 64, 71 Good practice 160 Goodson, I. 2, 159 Gott, R. 71, 77 Graded Assessment in Science Project 68, 76 Grade-related criteria 93, 94 Graham, D. 101, 105, 106, 111, 153 Great Debate 53 Gross, P. R. 2 Gulbenkian Report 18 Hacker, R. G. 130 Halliwell, H. F. 28 Halpin, D. 8

Hamilton, Sir J. 24, 53, 54, 88 Hammer, M. 101 Hampshire LEA 45, 123 Han, Jong-Ha 147 Hannon, M. M. 86 Hargreaves, A. 2 Hargreaves, D. 159, 160 Harlen, W. 62, 71, 77 Havelock, R. G. 4, 8, 47–8 Haywood, R. 39 Health and Safety at Work Act 12 Health Education Council 48 Helsby, G. 3 Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector 130 Heurism 16 High adopters 33 Higher School Certificate 17 Hill, T. 164 Hirst, P. 63 HM Inspectorate 7, 32, 63, 66, 87, 97, 98, 99 HMCI, see Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector HMI, see HM Inspectorate Hogg, Quintin 23 Holderness, A. 17 Holmyard, E. J. 17, 18, 148 Holt, M. 60, 61, 71 Hong Kong 159, 160 Hornsby, J. 44 Hoyle, E. 44 Humble, S. 31 Hutchison, D. 60, 74, 81 ICI 48 ICT 140 Immigrants 60 Independent Broadcasting Authority 48 Ingle, R. B. 33 Inservice courses 91 Inservice training 45, 67, 76, 91, 92, 128 INSET, see Inservice training Institute of Biology 124 Institute of Physics 6, 85, 88 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement 147 International Clearing House 2 Islamic countries 10 James, E. 57, 88 Jamous, H. 5 Japan 147 Jenkins, E. W. 15, 19, 33, 38, 50, 63, 98, 119,

Index 124, 130, 133, 136, 139, 147, 153, 157 Jenkins, I. 130, 133, 143 Jennings, A. 23 John, P. D. 4 Johnson, D. 8, 45 Johnson, S. 69 Johnston, A. P. 8 Joint Council for 16+ 84, 87 Jones, A. C. 130 Jones, M. E. 38 Joseph, Sir K. 22, 75, 93, 99 Journal of Biological Education 30, 123, 143 Kay, B. 63 Keeves, J. P. 147 Kelly, A. V. 4, 40, 47 Kempa, R. 40 Kent LEA 44 Kerr, J. F. 35 Key Stage 3 123, 160 Key Stage 4 115, 123, 136 King’s College London 71 Kingdon, M. 94 Kirkham. J. 42, 44, 58, 107, 121, 123 Knight, C. 101 Knight, W. J. 101 Kogan, M. 7 Korea 147 Laboratory manual 15 Laboratory work 114, 127 Lambert, J. 17 LAMP Project 39 Larson, M. S. 5 Larter, A. 43 Lave, J. 162 Lawlor, S. 152 Laws, P. M. 143 Lawton, D. 22, 60, 81, 101 Layton, D. 15, 38, 62, 64 Lazonby, J. 85 LEA advisers 74, 86, 87, 95 LEA, see Local Education Authorities League tables 134 Learning outcomes 146 LEATGS, see Local Authority Training Grant Scheme Lederman, L. 3 Lesson planning 138–9 Lester-Smith, W. O. 23 Levitt, N. 2

189

Levitt, R. 8 Lewis, D. 7 Lewis, J. 41 Lijnse, P. 10 Local Authority Training Grant Scheme 44 Local Education Authorities 13, 32, 43, 55, 113, 154 Lockard, J. D 2, 28 Lockwood Committee 23 Longbottom, J. E. 2 Loo, S. P. 10 Low adopters 33 Low, G. 52 Macdonald, K. M. 5, 156 Macgregor, J. 122 Macmillan Education Lecture 42 Malcolm, C. 10 Mann, J. 24, 25 Martin, M. O. 147 Mathematics Teaching Project 27 Matriculation examination 17, 58 McCulloch, G. 38 McKenzie, A. E. E. 18 Meyer, G. R. 40 Michell, M. 42, 48, 53 Millar, R. 2, 78, 127 Ministry of Education (NZ) 154 Ministry of Education (UK) 20, 22, 38, 83 Misselbrook, H. 38 Mixed ability teaching 98 Mode 1, 2 and 3 examinations 20, 21, 34 Modular science 50 Monro, R. G. 40 Montgomery, R. J. Moon, B. 101 Moore, C. H. 129 Morrell, D. 23 Mullis, I. V. S. 147 Multiple matrix sampling 69 Munday, P. 45 Murphy, R. 94 National Assessment of Educational Progress 65 National Council for Vocational Qualifications 116 National criteria (GCSE) 76 National Curriculum 1, 3, 4, 8, 11, 17, 25, 41, 50, 56, 61, 77–9, 80–96, 97, 119, 121, 129–37, 163, 165

190


National Curriculum Council 71, 101, 102, 108, 114, 151, 156 National Curriculum level 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, National Curriculum revision 111–117 National Curriculum tests 130 National Foundation for Educational Research 64, 69 National Science Education Standards 154 National Science Foundation 3, 2 Nature of science 108. 109 NCC, see National Curriculum Council NCVQ, see National Council for Vocational Qualifications New Zealand 154 Newsom child 29 Newton, P. 13 0 NFER, see National Foundation for Educational Research Nicodemus, R. B. 33, 34 Noddings, N. 162 Non-Statutory guidance 108, 109, 115, 151 North of England Education Conference 75, 99, 100, 111 Northern Examinations and Assessment Board, 90 Northern Examining Association 45 Northern Ireland 129 Northern Ireland Council for Educational Development 48 Norwood report 82 Nuffield A-level chemistry 33, 34 Nuffield Combined Science 32, 38, 40 Nuffield Foundation 1, 7, 11, 18, 26, 27, 29, 149 Nuffield Junior Science Project 29 Nuffield O-level chemistry 33, 34 Nuffield Science Teaching Project 17, 18, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 38, 45, 121, 148–50, 155 Nuffield Secondary Science Project 38 O’Connor, M. 46, 51 O’Hear, A. 100 O’Neill, M. H. 10 Objectives 101 OCEA, see Oxford Certificate of Educational Achievement OECD, see Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Office for Standards in Education 6, 116, 120, 125, 130, 136, 156, 164

Ofsted, see Office for Standards in Education Ogawa, M. 10 O-level examinations 81–2, 93, 148 Oliver, P. M. 40 Open Science 39 Open University 67, 91, 95 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 2, 10, 147 Osborne, J. 2, 130 OU, see Open University Oxford Certificate of Educational Achievement 68, 76 Page-Jones, R. 39 Parliamentary Committee on Education 61, 73 Parmar, N. 141 Pedagogy 6 Peloille, B. 5 Phillips, R. F. 84, 88 Physics 49, 6 5, 84, 86, 87, 121 Physics Education 30, 123 Piagetian theory 2, 145 Pimentel, G. C. 28 PISA 147 Pitt, Sir H. 55 Plaskow, M. 23, 31, 86 Plowden report 47 Policy sociology 9 Policy studies 7 Power, S. 8 Practical assessment 127–9 Practical work 15, 127–8, 135–7 Price, C. 23 Pring, R. 60, 61 Process science 66–7, 76, 87, 91, 98, 127 Professional judgement 128, 150, 156 Professionalism 4, 155–168 Profile component 107 Programmes of Study 103, 104 Project officers 42 Projects 19 Qualifications and Curriculum Authority 6, 51, 116, 126, 158 QCA, see Qualifications and Curriculum Authority R, D and D model 46 Ramsay, M. P. 19 Ramsden, P. 113 Randall, T. 56

Index Rasch modelling 69 Reid, D. J. 55, 124 Rein, M. 8 Reynolds, D. 159 Richmond, W. K. 22 Rintoul, D. 16 Roberts, I. F. 40 Robinson, P. 126, 127 Rowe, M. J. 130 Royal Society 55 Royal Society of Chemistry 6 Ruskin College 53, 97 150 Ryles, A. P. 55, 124 Salt schools 15 Sarason, S. B. 4, 8 SATIS Project 45 Sc 0 115 Sc1 113, 114, 115, 118, 135, 136, 141 Schagen, I. 81 Schemes of work 142 Schleicher, A. 147 Scholarships 13 Schön, D. 4 School Certificate 12, 17, 82, 148 School Curriculum and Assessment Authority 116 School Curriculum Development Committee 48 School effectiveness 159 School Examination and Assessment Council 102, 122, 136 School Science Review 30, 157 Schools Council 3, 4, 11, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 32, 36, 37, 41, 45, 56, 58, 85, 145, 155 Schools Council Industry Project 53 Schools Council Integrated Science Project 23 Schools Council Science Committee 53 Schools Examination Council 67 Science and Technology in Society Project 45 Science 5–13 Project 72, 145 Science 5–16 54, 63, 103, 127, 150 Science at Work 39 Science Masters’ Association 28, 156 Science Teacher Education Project 31 Science Teaching Observation Schedule 40 Science Working Group 44, 48, 56, 103–7, 111, 114, 117, 126, 152, 153, 157 Science, Technology and Society 10 Scientific investigation 112, 113, 164 Scientific management 161

191

Scientific method 125, 146 Scientific processes 66–7, 76, 87, 91, 98 Scientific skills 88, 90, 92, 128–9 SCISP, see Schools Council Integrated Science Project Scotland 154 Scott, L. Scottish Education Department 29 SEAC, see School Examination and Assessment Council SEC, see Secondary Examinations Council Second International Science Study 147 Secondary Examinations Council 75–6, 85–7, 89, 91, 93, 94 Secondary modern schools 32, 94 Secondary School Regulations 1904 102 Secondary Science Curriculum Review 7, 11, 26, 41, 42–59, 87, 107, 112, 120, 145, 150, 157, 165 Shaw, R. E. M. 36 Sherwood-Taylor, F. 18 Shorrocks-Taylor, D. 147 Simkins, T. 101 Sims, H. 31 Single award 56 SISS, see Second International Science Study Skilbeck, M. 4, 24, 28, 60 Skills 88, 90, 92, 128–9 Smith, A. 26 Smithers, A. 126, 127 Soviet Union 41 Specialist teaching 121, 123 Spens Committee 18 Spotlight Science 142 SSCR, see Secondary Science Curriculum Review Standards 60, 81, 144–8 Standing Conference on University Entrance 48 Statements of Attainment 105 Statutory Order 1, 50, 102, 11, 113, 129 Statutory Order for Science 74, 77, 104, 108, 114, 115, 117, 118, 131, 141, 151 Stewart, D. 45, 57 Stobart, G. 94 Stoll, L. 3 Storm, M. STOS, see Science Teaching Observation Schedule STS, see Science, Technology and Society Subject specialism 121, 123 Swinnerton, B. 145

192


Taiwan 159, 160 Taylor, W. 20 Teacher supply 125 Teacher Training Agency 6 Teacher-assessed coursework 92 Teachers’ Centres 29–30 Teachers’ Guide 29 Teaching activities 130–33 Teaching to the test 134 Tebbutt, M. 34 Ten Good Schools 97 Textbooks 17–18 TGAT, see Task Group on Assessment and Testing Thatcher, M. 25, 100, 101, 104, 105, 117 Third International Mathmatics and Science Study 10 Thomas Kuhn High School 92 Thompson, J. 44, 48, 56, 103, 153 Thomson Committee 18 Time and motion studies 161 Times Educational Supplement 25, 115, 117 TIMSS, see Third International Maths. & Science Study Tomlins, B. 124 Tomlinson, J. 25 Torrance, H. 90 TTA, see Teacher Training Agency Turner-Bisset, R. 126 Tyack, D. 8, 95 Tyler, F. 16 Tytler, D. 101, 105, 153 University of Bath 103 University of Birmingham 18 University of Durham 77

University of University of University of University of University of USA 47, 65

Leeds 62 Liverpool 71 London 64 Reading 55 Sussex 51

Value-added 162 van Manen, M. 162 Wallace, H. 7 Waring, M. R. H. 8, 27, 28, 40, 41, 95 Watanabe. R. 147 Watts, M. 59 Welford, A. G 143. Wellington, J. J. 17 Welsh Office 43, 54, 87, 89, 95, 103, 106, 109, 127, 150 West, R. W. 42, 43, 47–8, 49, 50, 51, 58 Whitehead, A. N. 82 Whitfield, R. C. 35, 36 Williams, S. 25, 41, 53 Wilson, C. M. 42, 45, 52, 55 Wilson, H. 145 WO, see Welsh Office Woodhead, C. 101 Woolnough, B. E. 37, 38, 41, 50, 85, 126, 139 Worsley, C. 67 Worthington, A. M. 15, 16 Wrigley, J. 26 Yellow Book 23–25 Yinger, R. J. 138 Young, M. F. D. 38 Younis, T. 8 Zoology 123

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